Rainfall

pears, then the tangerines. Nothing.

    Damn it. It had felt right. I had been so sure.

    I was going to have to buy something to complete the charade. I was obviously a discriminating buyer, looking for something special.

    “Could you put together a small selection as a gift?” I asked the owner. “Maybe a half dozen pieces of fruit, including a small musk melon.”

    “Kashikomarimashita,”
he answered with a wan attempt at a smile. Right away.

    As he went about carefully assembling the gift, I continued my search. In the five minutes during which the proprietor was preoccupied with my request, I was able to check every place to which Kawamura would have had access that morning. It was useless.

    The proprietor was just about finished. He pulled out a green moiré ribbon and wrapped it twice around the box he had used, finishing it in a simple bow. It was actually a nice gift. Maybe Midori would enjoy it.

    I took out some bills and handed them over.
What were you hoping for, anyway
? I thought.
Kawamura wouldn’t have had time to hide it well. Even if he tried to ditch it in here, someone would have found it by now
.

    Someone would have found it.

    He was counting out my change with the same slow approach that he had employed in creating the fruit basket. Definitely a careful man. Methodical.

    I waited for him to finish, then said in Japanese, “Excuse me. I know it’s not likely, but a friend of mine lost a CD in here a week or so ago and asked me to check to see if anyone had found it. It’s so unlikely that I hesitated to bring it up, but . . .”

    “Un,”
he grunted, kneeling down behind the counter. He stood up a moment later, a generic plastic jewel box in his hand. “I wondered whether anyone would claim this.” He wiped it off with a few listless strokes of his apron and handed it to me.

    “Thank you,” I said, not a little bit surprised. “My friend will be happy.”

    “Good for him,” he said, and his eyes filmed over again.

15

    AT FIRST LIGHT the whole of Shibuya feels like a giant sleeping off a hangover. You can still sense the merriment, the heedless laughter of the night before, you can hear it echoed in the strange silences and deserted spaces of the area’s twisting backstreets. The drunken voices of karaoke revelers, the unctuous pitches of the club touts, the secret whispers of lovers walking arm in arm, all are departed, but somehow, for just a few evanescent hours in the quiet of early morning, their shadows linger, like ghosts who refuse to believe that the night has ended, that there are no more parties to attend.

    I walked, in the company of those ghosts, following a series of alleys that more or less paralleled Meiji-dori, the main artery connecting Shibuya and Aoyama. I had gotten up early, easing out of the bed as quietly as I could to let Midori sleep. She had awakened anyway.

    I had taken the disk to Akihabara, Tokyo’s electronics Mecca, where I tried to play it on a PC in one of the enormous, anonymous computer stores. No dice. It was encrypted.

    Which meant that I needed Harry’s help. The realization wasn’t comfortable: given Bulfinch’s description of the disk’s contents — that it contained evidence of an assassin or assassins specializing in natural causes — I knew that what was on the disk could implicate me.

    I called Harry from a pay phone in Nogizaka. He sounded groggy and I figured he’d been sleeping, but I could feel him become alert when I mentioned the construction work going on in Kokaigijidomae — our signal for an immediate, emergency meeting. I used our usual code to tell him that I wanted to meet at the Doutor coffee shop on Imoarai-zaka in Roppongi. It was near his apartment, so he would be able to get there fast.

    He was already waiting when I arrived twenty minutes later, sitting at a table in back, reading a paper. His hair was matted down on one side of his head and he looked pale. “Sorry to get you up,” I said, sitting across from him.

    He shook his head. “What happened to your face?”

    “Hey, you should see the other guy. Let’s order some breakfast.”

    “I think I’ll just have coffee.”

    “You don’t want eggs or something?”

    “No, just coffee is good.”

    “Sounds like it was a rough night,” I said, imagining what that would consist of for Harry.

    He looked at me. “You’re scaring me with the small talk. I know you wouldn’t have used the code unless it was something