Rainfall

Korea. To clean up the mess, a consortium of rescuers hired Honma Tadayo, the respected former director of the Bank of Japan. Honma-san became president of NCB in early September and started working through the bank’s books, trying to bring to light the full extent of its bad debts and understand where and why they had been extended in the first place.

    “Honma lasted two weeks. He was found hanged in an Osaka hotel room, with notes addressed to his family, company, and others nearby. His body was quickly cremated, without an autopsy, and the Osaka police ruled the death a suicide without even conducting an investigation.

    “And Honma wasn’t an isolated event. His death was the seventh ‘suicide’ among ranking Japanese either investigating financial irregularities or due to testify about irregularities since 1997, when the depth of bad loans affecting banks like Nippon Credit first started coming to light. There was also a member of parliament who was about to talk about irregular fund-raising activities, another Bank of Japan director who oversaw small financial institutions, an investigator at the Financial Supervision Agency, and the head of the small and medium financial institutions division at the Ministry of Finance. Not one of these seven cases resulted in so much as a homicide investigation. The powers that be in this country don’t allow it.”

    I thought of Tatsu and his conspiracy theories, my eyes unblinking behind my shades.

    “There are rumors of a special outfit within the
yakuza
,” Bulfinch said, taking off his glasses and wiping the lenses on his shirt, “specialists in ‘natural causes,’ who visit victims at night in hotel rooms, force them to write wills at gunpoint, inject them with sedatives, then strangle them in a way that makes it appear that the victim committed suicide by hanging.”

    “Have you found any substance to the rumors?” I asked.

    “Not yet. But where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

    He held his glasses up above his head and examined them, then returned them to his face. “And I’ll tell you something else. As bad as the problems are in the banks, the Construction Ministry is worse. Construction is the biggest employer in Japan — it puts the rice on one out of every six Japanese tables. The industry is by far the biggest contributor to the LDP. If you want to dig this country’s corruption out by the roots, construction is the place to start. Your father was a brave man, Midori.”

    “I know,” she said.

    I wondered if she still assumed the heart attack had been from natural causes. The building was starting to feel warm.

    “I’ve told you what I know,” Bulfinch said. “Now it’s your turn.”

    I looked at him through the shades. “Can you think of any reason that Kawamura would have gone to meet you that morning but not brought the disk?”

    Bulfinch paused before saying “No.”

    “The plan that morning was definitely to do the handoff?”

    “Yes. As I said, we’d had a number of previous deep background meetings. This was the morning Kawamura was going to deliver the goods.”

    “Maybe he couldn’t get access to the disk, couldn’t download whatever he was going to download that day, and that’s why he was coming up empty-handed.”

    “No. He told me over the phone the day before that he had it. All he had to do was hand it over.”

    I felt a flash of insight. I turned to Midori. “Midori, where did your father live?” Of course I already knew, but couldn’t let her know that.

    “Shibuya.”

    “Which
chome
?”
Chome
are small subdivisions within Tokyo’s various wards.

    “San-chome.”

    “Top of Dogenzaka, then? Above the station?”

    “Yes.”

    I turned to Bulfinch. “Where was Kawamura getting on the train that morning?”

    “Shibuya JR Station.”

    “I’ve got a hunch I’m going to follow up on. I’ll call you if it pans out.”

    “Wait just a minute . . . ,” he started to say.

    “I know this isn’t comfortable for you,” I said, “but you’re going to have to trust me. I think I can find that disk.”

    “How?”

    “As I said, I’ve got a hunch.” I started to move toward the door.

    “Wait,” he said again. “I’ll go with you.”

    I shook my head. “I work alone.”

    He took me by the arm and said again, “I’ll go with you.”

    I looked at his hand on my arm. After a moment it drifted back to his side.

    “I want you to walk out of here,” I told him.