Chapter
nine
I left Miyamoto at Hamarikyu and walked back to Shinbashi to pick up Thanatos. I wondered if I’d been crazy to offer to introduce him to someone who could help him with his “embarrassing situation.” But I sensed it was the right way to go about it. At least in general—the details still eluded me. I had to figure them out, and I knew I’d better get it right the first time. I doubted there would be any second chances.
I stopped at a payphone and checked with the answering service. McGraw had left a message: he wanted to meet at Zōshigaya Cemetery that afternoon. The message left me feeling equal parts relief and trepidation. I hoped there was no hidden message involved with his choice of venue. Maybe he was just being funny.
I ate a lunch of ramen near the station, then rode Thanatos northwest toward Zōshigaya. I knew the cemetery well—a serene stretch of green in Tōshima Ward, it had been a favorite of my mother’s, especially during cherry blossom season when, lovely as it was, it was less popular than some of the city’s other premier hanami locations, and therefore less crowded. She had taken me there many times when I was small, usually on the Arakawa-sen, which today is the city’s sole surviving public tram line. Even back then, the trams were dying out, being buried by train tracks as fast as the city’s wooden houses were being torn down and replaced by ferroconcrete.
I was still early for the meeting, so on a whim I parked Thanatos outside Waseda Station and boarded the Arakawa line, which would take me to Zōshigaya. A pastel-yellow train was already waiting at the terminal—a pretty fancy description for an open-air, street-level platform adjacent to the sidewalk—so I walked on, paid the fare, and moved past a dozen other passengers toward the back of the single-car carrier, really no larger than a bus. A young mother was holding her small son’s hand by one of the windows. The child was asking, Why aren’t we going? and the woman was smiling and explaining that of course we had to wait for the other passengers but that soon we would be off. I looked away, surprised by a feeling of overwhelming sadness. Some of my earliest memories were of my own mother taking me for a ride on the chin-chin densha, the ding-ding train, so named for the distinct double bell the driver sounds when pulling out of a station, and when the train started forward and the bell rang, I felt my eyes grow moist. My mother had succumbed to cancer just over a year earlier, while I was away at war. Her absence was still an acute ache in my life, and being back here on the train sharpened it. It wasn’t just the sound of the bell—everything around me suddenly reminded me of what now was lost. The serene and sedate neighborhoods rolling slowly by; the tracks half overgrown with grass; the gentle swaying of the train and the chunk-chunk, chunk-chunk of the wheels passing over the ties. The chin-chin densha was still here, steady and stalwart, and I was glad for that. But I was riding it alone now, a rōnin, a revenant returned from some faraway place, my past and everyone part of it sundered, irretrievable, accessible to me now only as painful and haunted memories, some still sharp, some increasingly indistinct.
The train continued along at its leisurely pace, chunk-chunk, chunk-chunk, settling into stations along the way, waiting for passengers to board and depart, easing forward again with its musical chin-chin. I was the only passenger to get off at Zōshigaya. I waited until the train had pulled away, then walked across the tracks. Across from me, on the other side of a sleepy, narrow street, was the cemetery. But for a profusion of markers sprouting up from the moss-covered earth, it might have been a small forest planted in the midst of the city around it.
I entered along the northwest path, then stopped. Insects buzzed around me and there was a slight rustling of tree leaves. Other than that, everything was completely still. And yet, something didn’t feel right. This was where McGraw had told me to meet him, but I realized there was no reason I had to approach from this angle, which is what he would have been expecting. I could as easily have approached through the cemetery from the opposite direction, or from any direction at all.
I shook off the feeling, thinking it must have been the sudden splash of green, the sound of unseen insects, that was triggering combat reflexes shaped in the jungle. McGraw had no reason to set me up. I was just being paranoid. Still, no downside to coming in along a less obvious route. I started to back up, but then saw McGraw, strolling along one of the east–west paths to my right, a map in one hand and a camera in the other. He looked like nothing more than a foreign tourist on an outing. Which I supposed was exactly the point. He nodded his head at me and walked over. Yeah, I was being paranoid. All right.
I had to admit, I was impressed by the choice of venue. I didn’t think many foreigners living in Tokyo even knew about Zōshigaya. It was about as off the beaten track as you could reasonably get inside the Yamanote.
“You know your way around Tokyo pretty well,” I said, as he approached.
He stopped in front of me and mopped his ruddy brow with a handkerchief. “Son, I’d have to be a piss-poor case officer not to know the local terrain well enough to exploit it.”
Christ, he was an ornery prick. “I just meant you’re not from around here. I don’t think many foreigners know Zōshigaya.”
He glanced at the bag I was carrying. “And you do?”
I thought of my mother. “I grew up here, remember?” I didn’t see the need to share any details beyond that.
“Yeah, I guess you did.”
I looked at the camera. “So if someone stops you, you’re, what, taking pictures?”
“Are you going to teach me about cover for action now, son? You think the map and the camera are all I’ve got? I’ve been using the camera, it’s not just a prop. So yes, if anyone asks, I’m making a pilgrimage to the graves of some of the famous people buried here. Lafcadio Hearn in particular. I’ve got the photos to back it up. From here and from some of the other cemeteries in Tokyo—Aoyama, Yanaka, you name it. The cemeteries of Tokyo are a hobby of mine, in fact, you get it? You want a cover to work, you have to live it.”
I didn’t respond. I couldn’t deny, he was good at what he did.
“You satisfied?” he said. “You want me to run the same kind of test on you? Let me guess, you just came out here for the fresh air, is that it? You better hope that’s enough on the day someone really probes your cover. Christ, I wish you’d shape up. I don’t think you know what tradecraft even is.”
I felt my anger kicking in. “Yeah? Why don’t you teach me?”
“What do you call what I just did?”
I stood there, stung and smoldering. He was right. What I would have called it was an insult, but it was also, undeniably, a lesson. It was up to me which part to focus on.
I shrugged it off. “Where’s the information?”
“Not here. I’m not giving it to you directly.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not going to get caught handing over classified U.S. government information that could be used to prove I conspired to commit a murder. Call it my ‘don’t spend your retirement in jail’ plan.”
“I guess that’s a good reason.”
“It is. I’m glad one of us knows what tradecraft is.”
I shrugged that one off, too. “Where do I retrieve it?”
“You know Shibuya Lion?”
“I know Shibuya, but I don’t know a lion.”
“It’s a coffee shop to the right of Dogenzaka as you walk up from the JR station. Been there for about twenty years. Longer, if you include the previous incarnation, which was destroyed during the war but rebuilt to the same design. You can find it in the yellow pages. Go to the second floor, and sit in the fourth booth from the front alongside the windows.”
“What if that booth is taken?”
“Then you’ll sit somewhere else and wait until it’s open. But it probably won’t be taken.”
“Okay.”
“You’ll find an envelope taped to the bottom of the seat. Do I need to tell you to read it, memorize it, and then f*cking burn it?”
“I guess you just did.”
“I’ll say this for you, son. You may not be fast, but you’re not ineducable, either.”
“I’m glad to know there’s hope.”
He laughed. “I wouldn’t go that far. Let’s see how things turn out with Ozawa.”