RainStorm

otherwise couldn't prevent, and I would wonder
    foolishly if she might ever play in one of Rio's jazz clubs. And
    I would look back on my new city and see it as an island, not unlike
    the one from which I viewed it; a beautiful place, to be sure,
    but still one of exile, sometimes of regret, ultimately of loneliness.
    I kept the apartment in Sao Paulo. I took care to travel there
    from time to time to maintain appearances, and managed Yamada's
    new export operation remotely, mostly by e-mail. Some simple
    commercial software turned the lights on and off at random intervals
    during preset hours so that it looked as though someone was
    living there, and so that the electric bills would be consistent with
    full-time residency. A faucet opened to a continual slow drip accomplished
    the same end with regard to water bills. In addition, I
    stayed from time to time in various short-term hotel/apartments
    elsewhere in Rio, adding a certain shell game dynamic to the other
    challenges a pursuer might face in attempting to locate me.
    But all this security cost money, and, although I had saved a
    good deal over the years, my means were not unlimited, and what
    I did have was kept in a variety of anonymous offshore accounts that effectively paid no interest. Dividend-paying stocks and IRAs
    and 401 (k)s weren't part of the plan. I told myself that after a couple
    of years, or a few, when the trail someone might try to follow
    had grown cold, and their potential motivations sufficiently remote,
    I might be able to scale back on some of the precautions that
    posed such a burden to my finances.
    Time passed. And, much as I enjoyed it, Rio came to feel like a
    way station, not a destination; a breather, not the end of the march.
    There was an aimlessness to my days there, an aimlessness that my
    focus on jujitsu alleviated but didn't dispel. From time to time I
    would remember Tatsu telling me you can't retire, spoken with equal
    parts confidence and sadness, and those words, which I had first
    taken to be a threat and then understood to be merely a prediction,
    came in my memory to bear the weight of something else, something
    more akin to prophecy.
    I grew restless, and my restlessness proved fertile ground for
    memories of Naomi. The way she had whispered come inside in my
    ear on that first long night together. The way she would slip into
    Portuguese when we made love. The way she had offered to try to
    help Harry, who had been not just an asset of mine, but a rare
    friend, an offer that had been as sincere as it was ultimately useless.
    And the way I had promised her the last time I saw her that I would
    find her in Brazil, that I wouldn't leave her waiting and wondering
    what had ever happened to me.
    The way you did Midori.
    I've paid for that one, thank you.
    It had been good with Naomi, that was the thing. Warm and
    sweet and emotionally uncomplicated. It wasn't what I had with
    Midori, or almost had, but I was never going to have that again and
    preferred to spend as little time as possible flagellating myself over
    it. Going to her would be selfish, I knew, because in Tokyo our involvement
    had almost gotten her killed, and, despite the change of
    venue and all my new precautions, it was far from impossible that
    something like that could happen again. But I found myself thinking
    of her all the time, wondering if somehow it could work. Japan
    was far away. I was Yamada now, wasn't I? And Naomi was whoever
    she was in Brazil. We could start over, start afresh.
    I should have known better. But we all have stupid moments,
    rationalization, even blindness, born of weakness and human need.
    Naomi's Japanese mother had died many years earlier, but she
    had told me her father's name, David Leonardo Nascimento, and
    had let me know that I could find him in Salvador. Nascimento is
    a common name in Brazil, but there was no Leonardo, David, in
    the Salvador white pages, to which I had access via a Rio public library.
    An Internet search proved more productive: David Leonardo
    Nascimento, it seemed, was the president of a Salvador-based company
    with real estate, construction, and manufacturing interests.
    I could have simply called and asked how I might get in touch
    with Naomi, but I didn't want too long a gap between the time
    when I contacted her and the time when we might actually meet.
    I told myself that this preference was logical, the outgrowth of my
    usual security concerns, but I knew at some level that it was