Once outside, I got a cab and rode across town, looking out at the passing faces. With the shadows lengthening into night, I once again had a strange feeling of detachment, of being a stranger in my own land. I knew if a person kept travelling down that road they ended up dying to the world – you see them sitting on park benches, in reading rooms at public libraries, alone at railroad stations. Some future, I thought. But there was nothing I could do: the caravan rolls on, the dogs keep barking and it was imperative that I buried my past.
The cab stopped in front of Walgreens; I walked the length of the building and found a doorway tucked into the wall. There was only one intercom and the few words next to it were in Japanese. Great.
Wondering if somehow I had misunderstood the FBI guy, I pressed it anyway.
Chapter Thirteen
A MAN’S GRUFF voice answered in English. I told him a mutual friend who worked on the twenty-third floor of a nearby building had suggested I call around. He buzzed me in and I climbed a flight of stairs, noting that someone had worked hard to conceal four closed-circuit cameras monitoring the stairway. Worried about the Russian mafia, I guessed.
I turned into a corridor, and it was only after my eyes had adjusted to the gloom that I saw him: Battleboi was standing straight ahead, just inside the type of steel door which would have made a crack house proud. The most surprising thing about him wasn’t his size – though he weighed in at around four hundred pounds – the shocking thing was that he was dressed like a medieval Japanese daimyo. A samurai cracker of the first order, I realized.
He was wearing a shockingly expensive silk kimono and traditional Japanese white socks notched for the big toe, his black hair oiled and swept back tight into a topknot. If anybody ever needs a Hispanic sumo wrestler, I know just the guy. He bowed slightly, the minimum of good manners – I guessed he didn’t like our friend from the twenty-third floor very much – and stood aside to let me enter.
Admittedly, his feudal lands only extended to four rooms on a side street, but beautiful tatami mats covered the floors, shoji screens separated the spaces and on one wall was an antique painted screen of Mount Fuji which I bet would have cost at least twenty thousand of his most expensive files.
Once across the threshold, I only just avoided a social disaster – at the last moment I realized I was supposed to swap my shoes for a pair of guest sandals. While I undid my barbarian boots I asked what I should call him.
He looked blank. ‘What do you mean – they didn’t tell you?’
‘Well, yeah, they told me,’ I replied. ‘It just doesn’t seem right calling somebody Battleboi to their face.’
He shrugged. ‘Doesn’t worry me, dickhead,’ he said, and led the way to a pair of cushions on the floor.
‘The deputy director says you’re cooperating with him,’ I said, as if I were there with The Man’s complete authority.
He looked at me with disgust but didn’t deny it. ‘What do you want?’
As we sat cross-legged I explained about deleting every reference to Scott Murdoch from the databases held by the alumni associations of my former schools. I figured that was as good a place as any to start.
He asked who Murdoch was and I told him I didn’t know. ‘It’s been decided to deep-six his past – that’s all we’ve got to worry about.’
He asked for Murdoch’s date of birth, details of the alumni associations and a host of other questions to make sure that he got the right person. After I answered, he adjusted his kimono and said we’d start in a few minutes.
‘Cha, neh?’ he said casually, but I got the subtext: I was supposed to look blank and feel inferior but, honestly, I wasn’t in the mood.
I reached into memory, to a summer long ago. I was on a blood-soaked beach, surrounded by a rash of beheadings and scores of samurai committing ritual suicide. In other words, I had spent my vacation reading Shōgun. Out of all those epic pages I remembered a few key phrases – cha was tea.
‘Hai, domo,’ I said, hoping my memory hadn’t failed me and I was saying ‘Yes, thank you’ and not ‘Go fuck yourself.’
I must have got it right. ‘You speak Japanese?’ he said, with a mixture of astonishment and respect.
‘Oh, just a little,’ I said modestly.
He clapped his hands, and one of the screens slid open. A slim Hispanic chick dressed in a red silk kimono entered and bowed, prompting in me a question which has occupied the minds of great philosophers since time immemorial. How come unattractive guys nearly always get the hot women?
She was a couple of years younger than him, with large eyes and a sensuous mouth. On closer inspection, it was clear she had freely adapted the traditional kimono – it was much tighter across her hips and boobs than you would ever see in Tokyo. To facilitate movement, she had slashed it at the back from the hem up to her thigh and as she moved across the room it was obvious from the way the silk rippled and clung to her she didn’t have to worry about panty-lines and bra-straps. She wasn’t wearing either. The overall effect was both alluring and crazy.