Chapter
ten
I made my way to Shibuya, and from there to the place McGraw had described. It was at the top of a hill snaking off Dogenzaka, the main artery leading from the station, an incongruous little building with arched doors and windows, a red and blue tiled roof, and a makeshift garden of potted plants lined up at its base. I parked Thanatos, scoped the area on foot, and, finding nothing out of place, went inside.
What I discovered surprised me: a space more akin to a cathedral than to a coffee shop. The ceiling was low in back but open to a soaring second floor at the opposite end; the walls were lined with red velvet booths that might have been pews; and at the front, elevated on a pulpit and rising all the way to the second floor, stood a pair of massive and ancient-looking wooden speakers from which issued an organ piece I recognized from the classical music my father had favored—Bach’s Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor. The sudden organ music would have been unsettling in its own right, but combined with the overall decor, it was downright spooky. I wondered for a moment if fate weren’t having some fun with me just then, first with the reminders of my parents, and then with the graveyards and churchlike buildings—all portents, perhaps, of a direction I was traveling that was less a thoroughfare and more a one-way street.
There were some flyers by the door—a local yakitori place; some sort of live theater; a guy named Terumasa Hino playing trumpet at a jazz club called Taro in Shinjuku. I guessed the various establishments in question paid Lion a fee for the privilege of advertising there, hoping coffee aficionados would also be attuned to yakitori and live theater and jazz.
I stepped inside and looked around. The light was low, mostly what was seeping through the opaque glass along one wall, but also provided by a few dim wall sconces and a glass chandelier up front. The air was redolent of decades of coffee and tobacco. Most strikingly of all, there was no conversation—the dozen or so customers, men and women of varying ages and attire, each sat silently, some reading, some sleeping, some swaying in slow rapture in time with the music. Other than the dramatic notes of Bach’s organ piece, the room was utterly silent. I had the impression that whatever dust had collected here on the curves of the dark wooden pillars and among the stacks of hundreds of albums had lain undisturbed for decades.
I made my way across the back and up a steep, creaky set of wooden stairs, pausing at the top to look around. The atmosphere and decor were much the same on high as they were below, with another half-dozen customers silently enjoying their respite and reverie. Most were occupying the center booths, perhaps because they favored the acoustics in the middle of the room. I realized McGraw must have been aware of this tendency among the clientele, and chosen for the dead drop a booth less likely to be occupied. I didn’t like him, but I had to acknowledge once again that he was a good case officer.
I sat in the booth McGraw had described, and waited a moment. An unsmiling waitress wearing an apron over her jeans came over and silently placed a laminated menu the size of a post card on the small wooden table in front of me. The paper inside the laminate was yellowed and stained, and I realized that Lion’s scant offerings—essentially coffee, tea, and milk, hot and cold—had probably remained unchanged since more or less the beginning of time. I pointed to the entry for coffee. The waitress nodded, collected the menu, and moved off. As she did so, I noticed that the varnish on the table was so worn the wood was practically bare. I looked around and saw a similar effect everywhere else—the floor, the seat backs, even the wood around the window hasps—and I felt a sudden and surprising surge of affection for the place. In a dozen small ways, Lion indicated it didn’t give a damn how or how fast Tokyo might be changing outside. It didn’t give a damn about Tokyo, period. This place had found the right way of doing things, and it would keep on doing them without regard to fad or fashion.
The waitress returned in less than three minutes, carefully arranged before me a small white cup of exceptionally dark coffee, an even smaller bowl of sugar, and cream in a silver cup the size of a thimble. The bill went next to it all, for whenever I was ready, and then the waitress was gone, once again without a word. Her reticence didn’t feel unfriendly, though; it was more like there was an understanding here, a mutual comprehension, alongside which words would be superfluous and perhaps even rude.
I reached under the seat and touched paper taped exactly where McGraw had said it would be. But I felt no particular hurry about retrieving and opening it. Instead, I closed my eyes, listened to the music, and began sipping the coffee. It was ungodly strong but also delicious, and I realized someone had employed a lot of care to impart that much richness without bitterness or anything else creeping in to overpower the flavor. I had been expecting just a routine cup of coffee, and was struck by the notion that even in an everyday thing like coffee preparation, there was a way of doing things right, with care and maybe even devotion. Maybe this was part of what Miyamoto had been trying to describe as we had taken our tea at Nakajima. I wasn’t unfamiliar with what it meant to be ruthlessly squared away—ask any combat veteran about the care that goes into planning, training, weapons maintenance, and everything else on which your life might hang in the balance in the field—but this was different. Lion spoke of devotion brought to bear on small things, everyday things, things that otherwise might have seemed inconsequential or have been overlooked entirely, and like the confidence that characterized the place, I sensed this kind of everyday devotion was also something to which a person might want to aspire.
I pulled loose the envelope, opened it, and removed a file. There was a lot of good information: home and work addresses; known cronies and habits; a half-dozen photos; a brief bio. Married, two grown children. No known vices. He’d been a captain in the Imperial Army. Received a commendation for valor, and a leg wound in Manchuria. But that had been a while back. The man I saw in the photos was now sixty-something, thin and sallow-faced, probably from a lifetime of tobacco. His warrior days were behind him. Along with, soon enough, everything else.
I immediately understood the value of the extra photos McGraw had enclosed. A single shot can be misleading. Seeing the subject from multiple angles, on the other hand, at various times, in different clothes, and in varied surroundings, made a positive ID in person much easier and more certain. You really wouldn’t want to drop some clueless civilian because of an accidental likeness to a single low-resolution surveillance photo.
Looking at the photos was weird. Not because it made me feel queasy. Rather, because it didn’t. I was examining the face of a man I was going to kill, and I was as emotionally involved as if I were doing a crossword puzzle. I wondered about that. Was it because after all that time in the jungle, I had become inured to killing? Was it because no one knew me anymore, no one was watching, I had no one to account to?
What about God?
I laughed at that. My mother had tried to raise me as a Catholic, but war had deracinated whatever meager plantings her efforts had achieved. No God ever would have stood silent spectator to what I saw in Vietnam. To what I did there. Either there was no God, or there was and he didn’t give a damn.
And besides, was the absence of feeling really so strange? Ozawa was part of a corrupt system. You take part in a system like that, you have to realize grievances aren’t going to get aired in court, or worked out in group therapy, or solved with mediation. This guy knew the risks, and he took them. It wasn’t my fault the risk/reward ratio wasn’t going to offer the outcome he’d been hoping for.
It was a rationalization, of course. Even back then, I knew that. Maybe I needed the rationalization, like a shot of booze to get up my courage. The strange thing was, even knowing it was a rationalization didn’t make it less effective.
People talk about morality. Sometimes I think there’s just what you can do, and what you can’t.
Well, I could. And I was going to.