Japantown Page 7

  “Should I have coffee brought or . . . ?” She left the sentence unfinished, the implication being that she would have no qualms about ringing the local constable.

  Which was when Lawrence Casey, the younger Asian, appeared behind her without warning. Slinging one arm across her chest, he locked her in a hold while his free hand curled around from the other side and pressed a handkerchief to her face. As she struggled, Mrs. Spengler found herself mystified.

  When had he moved?

  Twisting her matronly body in protest, she resisted for another second or two before her eyes drooped and the drug lulled her into a peaceful sleep. Casey dragged the wife to the settee and laid her across the cushions, the older Asian vacating his seat with a mock bow.

  “So,” said Keiji Ogi, whom Spengler knew as Kevin Sheng, “as I explained last week, I need you to hand over the wine.”

  The sixth-generation banker was rosy-cheeked and sated after a late-night feast and ample drink with friends at Haus zum Muden, a restaurant that had served Swiss noblemen since the fourteenth century.

  “The issue is closed, sir,” the banker said, blinking his eyes to stop the room from spinning.

  “Consider it reopened.” Ogi tossed a stack of bills on a side table. “I’ll still pay for a single bottle. The other two I’m confiscating as a penalty.”

  Spengler caught a flash in Sheng’s eyes that seemed as dark and peculiar as the fellow’s clothing. The two uninvited guests wore clinging black suits. Underneath their jackets were black turtlenecks made of the same curious material. But even distinctive haberdashery did not give them the right to manhandle his family.

  “Mr. Sheng,” the financier said, “I hope you will not take offense when I say I cannot, at present, bring my full attention to bear on your request.” Spengler fidgeted with the left cuff of his heavily starched shirt until his monogrammed cufflink reflected shafts of light into Sheng’s eyes, a ploy the banker occasionally used to remind those of a lower station whom they were dealing with. “Perhaps if you could call at my office during regular business hours?”

  At which time I shall have the security guards throw you out bodily.

  Ogi turned away from the glare. “This is the last time you will be able to comply without consequences.”

  “I really must insist you withdraw, Mr. Sheng,” the moneylender replied in turn, in his disdain finding a reckless courage. “Do so immediately and I’ll welcome you tomorrow.”

  Before last week, Christoph Spengler had known nothing of this uncouth Asian philistine. Their paths crossed over three double magnums of 1900 Château Margaux from the long-forgotten cellar of an Austrian prince who had fled with his family from advancing Nazi troops. The prince possessed the foresight to brick up his wine cellar but not the perspicacity to survive the war himself. Four owners of the house came and went before the outstanding crop of wine, closeted all these years in perfect condition, was rediscovered in renovation work by the present owner and sent to auction, drawing connoisseurs from around the globe.

  Nine contenders participated in the initial phase. Bidding opened at $40,000 for the trio; at $60,000, only five men remained. By the time the figure soared to $90,000, all but Sheng and Spengler had dropped out. When the price leapt another $30,000, Sheng had had the effrontery to approach him directly.

  “Rather than compete against each other,” Ogi-Sheng had said, “why don’t we stop the bidding here and split the bottles?”

  “I do wish I could accommodate you, but unfortunately I’ve already promised to unveil the wine at my fifty-fifth birthday party. People will be flying in from around the world and I couldn’t disappoint them.”

  “A compromise then? Two bottles for you, one for me? At seventy-two, this may be my last chance to sample this vintage in such superb condition.”

  “Sadly, I require three. So if you are unwilling to bid, sir, please retire. I think the next lot is nearly as suitable.” The banker showed Sheng his back, repressing an inexplicable shiver he felt building at the base of his neck.

  Now the financier said, “The answer I gave you at the auction stands. For the same reasons I mentioned.”

  “Take the money.”

  “Don’t be crude.”

  “Then I’ll need the combination to your cellar door.”

  “I think not.”

  “Casey. Persuade the man.”

  Without warning, Casey jammed a fist into the obstinate financier’s stomach. Spengler crumpled into a chair with an omphf.

  Ogi-Sheng swept an arm across the room. “We cannot be intimidated like common bank clerks, monsieur. Without the combination, things will only get worse.”

  “No one does this for three bottles of wine,” Spengler managed to squeeze out through teeth clenched in pain.

  Ogi looked bored. “Last week it was a request. Now it is a demand. That is all.”

  There is the maid, the banker thought. She must have noticed the altercation and had surely called the police. But come to think of it, Serena had not emerged from the back rooms to take drink orders from the visitors, and with that omission he understood that their live-in servant had been disposed of earlier, probably in the same manner as his wife.

  Casey’s cell phone rang. He stepped away from the dazed banker to answer the call. “Speak,” he said in Japanese. Only top government agencies in South Korea, the United States, and Israel had the same encoded communications gear.

  Spengler saw his chance. He leapt from the chair and ran. Without taking his ear from the phone, Casey whirled and his heel caught the banker in the back of the head, sending the moneyman sliding unsteadily across the carpet on his rotund stomach. Despite himself, Casey chuckled. Ridiculous

  “No, nothing important,” Casey said into the phone, still in Japanese. “Go on.”

  He strolled over and planted a foot firmly on Spengler’s spine. “Yes, I got it,” Casey said. He turned to Ogi. “Sir, it’s Dermott.”

  Dermott was leading the Japantown follow-up team in San Francisco.

  “I’ll take it.” Ogi snatched the lobbed phone from the air with the ease of a man decades younger. “Yes?”

  “The civilian at the kill site could be a problem, sir.”

  “The art dealer who sells knickknacks? I think not.”

  “Remember, he’s Jake Brodie’s son.”

  “Yes, and he sells hand-painted crockery to white-haired old ladies. Forget him.”

  “The lieutenant heading the case just met with Brodie across town, and Hara came to see him.”

  “Hara?”

  “Yes.”

  Ogi grew thoughtful. “All right. The art dealer is the only direct channel to Japan. Watch him a little longer. Just him. The police are no threat.”

  The operation had been sanitized. Casey and his team had vacated the area within minutes of the kill while Dermott’s crew swooped in, their task to monitor the local investigation and guarantee nothing went wrong after. The rest was covered, including any official inquiries the SFPD might send to Tokyo.

  Ogi asked, “Why are you bothering me about such minor matters?”

  Ogi’s eyes narrowed as he listened to the answer. Defying orders, Dermott had attacked Brodie, which meant the art dealer was already dead and Dermott was calling for permission after the fact. Their best hand-to-hand man had a short fuse. Patience, patience. Always patience. Ogi cut him off. “I told you no more bodies in San Francisco. The job’s too important.”

  “Brodie’s not dead.”

  After Dermott finished his description of the encounter, Ogi said, “You were right to retreat. When’s the last time someone deflected your advance?”

  “Never, sir.”

  “I didn’t think so. Now, that could be a problem.”

  “That’s what I was thinking, sir. I want a ‘priority clear.’ ”

  Priority clear was their code for immediate extermination by any means possible.

  “I’m sure you do, but the answer is no. The kill was per
fect. The police know nothing and they’ll find nothing. Their investigation will die if no new developments draw their attention. Make sure there are no new developments. No more contact and no more bodies for the moment or I shall be extremely displeased.”

  “Yes, sir.” Dermott hesitated. “Did you say ‘for the moment’?”

  Ogi knew when to dangle a carrot. Dermott and Casey were his finest field agents and required special maintenance. For Dermott, that meant feeding his bloodlust from time to time, and Ogi sensed he would have to allow him the art dealer once the Japantown affair cooled down.

  “You heard me,” Ogi said, and hung up, returning his attention to the financier. “Have you reconsidered?”

  Casey removed his foot from the banker’s back.

  Spengler rolled over, tears leaking from his eyes. “Yes.”

  “Excellent. Now, the combination, please.”

  “Then you will leave us in peace?”

  “You will have no complaints once I am done here.”

  Spengler relayed a string of numbers.

  In English, for the moneyman’s benefit, Ogi said, “Casey, bring the wine. Only those three bottles. Leave Mr. Spengler’s other valuables alone.”

  Then in Japanese, he added, “Moyase.”

  Burn the rest.

  In two minutes, Casey returned with three double magnums.

  “Excellent,” Ogi said again, his eyes glowing.

  “You have your prize,” Spengler said, his shoulders hunched in defeat. “Now go.”

  The first wisps of smoke wafted up from the lower floors.

  Spengler jumped up. “Idiot! My cellar’s on fire!”

  He heard the soft whir of metal against fine cloth and could have sworn a wire loop passed before his eyes. He felt Sheng’s hot, moist breath at the back of his neck.

  The ends of Ogi’s garrote were coiled around two small wooden pegs that functioned as handles. Ogi’s fingers were curled around the pegs. Behind the banker’s neck, Ogi crossed his wrists, closing the loop, and pulled.

  Spengler clawed at his neck, his eyes wild in shock, not quite comprehending what was happening but understanding all too well the spurt of red liquid cascading over his hands and down his chest.

  One by one, Ogi felt the vital structures of the neck collapse. The trachea, the carotid arteries, the jugular veins, the vagus nerves—the wire sliced through all of them like a butcher’s knife through suet. When the wire hit the spinal column, Ogi uncrossed his wrists to open the loop, and with a practiced flick of his raised hand, whipped the garrote free of the victim’s throat.

  Eyes bulging, Spengler flailed about as crimson arcs of blood shot across the room. He attempted to stem the flow, but his fingers slipped and slithered around his neck. Gurgling sounds percolated from the throat area. Red air bubbles formed and burst. Then his arms went limp, his eyes rolled up into his head, and what was left of the sixth-generation financier flopped to the floor.

  Ogi wiped the wire with a handkerchief, rolled it up, and stowed it in his jacket pocket.

  Casey contemplated the blood-spattered floor. “That was not in the plan.”

  “I know,” Ogi said. “I didn’t care for his attitude.” Smoke billowed from the basement door. “We haven’t much time.”

  With practiced hands, they carried the bodies into the master bedroom, laid them out on the bed, and swiftly dressed them in their nightclothes. The fire would erase all evidence of their visit. “Accidental deaths” made up the bulk of their business. Direct assaults like Japantown were increasingly rare. Most jobs called for subtler forms of extermination—a drowning, a suicide, a high-speed collision. The list was long and inventive.

  “We’ve overstayed our welcome, Casey. Bring the money. I believe our dimwitted friend no longer has any use for it.”

  CHAPTER 14

  I TOLD Renna what he wanted to know.

  “Kanji are the characters that form the bulk of the Japanese writing system. The language also has two alphabets, each with about fifty characters, but kanji number in the thousands. They evolved from primitive symbols and ideographs. Eye, for example, was originally written more realistically, but over time became a vertical rectangle divided horizontally. You have a pen?”

  Renna produced a ballpoint. I peeled a napkin from the steel dispenser on our table and drew the character for eye:

  became

  Renna studied it. “Interesting. It still resembles the original.”

  “Yes, just formalized. Mountain went from a lumpy triangular shape to a simple abstract.” I added a second line of figures to the napkin:

  became

  “I’m liking this,” Renna said. “There’s an internal logic.”

  “True. As people assimilated these early symbols, they began to combine them. A field was set on top of the symbol for strength or power to make , or man, who they saw as the ‘power in the field.’ This happened over centuries, much of it in China, some later in Japan.”

  Our waitress glided up with Renna’s burger and a lot of hip movement. She craned her neck at the Japanese on the napkin. “You moving up to secret agent, Frank?”

  Renna raised his eyes. The waitress was around thirty-five, with abundant honey-blond hair piled on top of a shapely head. A loose strand dangled artfully to one side of a determined chin like a trawl line. I wondered if she ever caught anything with it.

  “Night school, Karen. I’m studying to be a linguist in case the city decides to sack me.”

  “You, sweetie? They’d never dare.”

  The eyes behind the banter were far less cheerful.

  I watched her walk away, hips swinging gently. “She casting a line your way?”

  Renna nodded. “Just broke up with hubby. She brings me home, she’d be delirious because she’d know I could beat hubby to a pulp when she let it slip and he came after me.”

  “And she’d let it slip?”

  “Count on it.”

  Renna drenched his half-pounder with ketchup, plopped the upper half of the toasted bun on top, then bit into the burger, clutching it in his right hand while holding the napkin with my scrawl aloft in his left.

  Renna waved the napkin at me. “Okay, so if we’re talking building blocks, why can’t you take this one apart?”

  “Two reasons. First, abstraction. As more and more elements were added, combinations divorced themselves from their simple base meanings. Combine mountain with the character for high, , and you get , the foundation for more abstract words like kasaru, which means to swell or increase in volume. Then you have the historical filter: wood from a mountain treated with fire under a roof gives you , or charcoal. The roof represents the kiln used in the old days to make charcoal.”

  “So it’s messy.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  “Guess simple was too much to hope for.” Renna snagged another chunk of his half-pounder. It was maybe his third bite and the burger was about gone. “How much time do you need to check with your people in Japan?”

  I considered the time lag. “Their workday started an hour ago. I put an ‘urgent’ tag on it, they’ll send me preliminary findings by the end of the shift, but don’t expect miracles.”

  “I’m counting on it.”

  I eyed my coffee sourly. “Be warned. Most things Japanese are vague to begin with, even to the Japanese.”

  The sentiment sat at the core of my being. Though I was an American born of Caucasian parents, my history, my work, and my personal life were partially bound to Japan. I’d passed much of my childhood playing in the back streets of Tokyo. My wife had been Japanese and my daughter shared her mother’s birthright. My father had spent most of his adult life in Tokyo building up Brodie Security. Japan held a special place in my heart, lending a richness to my days I’d always be grateful for.

  Yet, like an aloof friend or lover whose guard never comes down, Japan keeps her distance. For years I believed my status as a gaijin—the eternal outsider in an exclusive so
ciety—accounted for her fabled elusiveness. But that was only part of it. Over a few bottles of junmai saké with some Japanese buddies in Shinjuku, I discovered they suffered the same slights. With my language ability and my knowledge of the people and the country’s traditions, I was enough of an insider to penetrate the surface, they told me. It was simply that every quarter was guarded. Layers upon layers of secrets had piled up over the centuries. Those inside the circle knew; those outside were excluded. And there were circles within circles. That’s when I fully understood Jake’s job, and the one I’d inherited: the calls for help came when the secrets impinged on those outside the circle.

  Renna looked disgusted. “I don’t have weeks, so you’ll have to hustle. How many kanji are we talking about?”

  “Let’s put it this way. The average person can read about three thousand, and college-educated adults know between four and ten. A typical dictionary holds ten to fifteen thousand characters, but the thirteen-volume Dai Kanwa Jiten, which holds all of the historical characters, lists fifty thousand.”

  “Fifty thousand? Jesus. This thing could turn into a black hole. How many characters do you know?”

  “Including the historical ones, maybe six, seven thousand.”

  Renna clenched his fists. “And you still can’t read this one? I don’t need this. I really don’t.”

  “Welcome to the Orient.”

  “It’ll keep for another couple of days but not much longer. Light a fire under your people. Swing by the station tomorrow morning around ten with what you got.”

  “Sure,” I said with a neutral expression, knowing that only disappointment came down the pike when you expected too much too soon.

  Renna stood. “Good. Got to go. And thanks.”

  “For what?”

  “If nothing else, you’ve established that the kanji’s not ordinary.”

  “So?”

  “Neither was the shoot.”

  We stared at each other for a long moment.

  A shade of concern flickered across the lieutenant’s face. “One other thing. While you’re looking, watch your back, Brodie. Someone’s out there and we want to find him before he finds us.”