The Gentleman from Japan Read online

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  This book is dedicated to all who spend their lives pushing the rock uphill, only to find it sent crashing down again by fools and knaves; by those who “know better” and those who know nothing; by morally and ethically bankrupt guardians of the law; by greed, corruption, and malfeasance; and by the evil in all its forms that sleeps in every heart.

  Preface

  This is a complicated tale. What follows is pretty much exactly what I can recall as Inspector O told it to me from start to finish. More than once I tried to interrupt him for a clarification about a squiggly relationship or a jump in the proceedings. My queries were brushed off with a curt “Pay attention!” And so that is the best I can offer to those who read beyond this note. Pay attention; it all comes clear in the end.

  TOKYO—In a brazen gun attack that shocked a country tough on firearms, the head of a nationwide dumpling restaurant chain was shot dead in front of his company’s headquarters on Thursday.… Mr. Ohigashi [the deceased] ran a fast-food chain called Gyoza no Ohsho, or King of Dumplings, started in 1967 by his brother-in-law. The chain has about 660 restaurants across Japan. Mr. Ohigashi took the helm of the company in 2000 and is credited with using aggressive cost-cutting to turn around restaurants struggling to make a profit in Japan’s deflationary economy.

  —The New York Times, December 20, 2013

  PART I

  Chapter One

  By the time the sun had set on Thursday, there were seven corpses in four of the city’s ragged collection of restaurants, cafés, tea shops, “bakeries,” and illegal lunch stands. Four eateries, seven bodies. It goes without saying that couldn’t be good for business. The mayor would be calling, probably after one of his big dinner parties. The police had quietly sent me the guest list. They weren’t supposed to, but they knew I was interested in seeing who kept company with the mayor. None of the names on the list rang bells.

  The sketchy details on the events at the four restaurants were laid out in the field reports appearing on my desk late that evening. As a matter of standard procedure, we didn’t deal with local murders: wife conks husband on head; drunk knifes companion over who gets the next turn at the bottle; burglar panics on being discovered and strangles renter. As the local office of the Ministry of State Security, we routinely got copies of the police reports. On rare occasions one of these incidents had some link to our concerns. Mostly, the reports were filed without a second glance.

  These particular reports did not give me a warm feeling. Initial observations by the local police were often a problem. This time, to make things worse, in the upper right-hand corner of a couple of the reports there were notations indicating that they had been copied—unedited—to the Ministry of State Security in Beijing. Nothing is supposed to go to Beijing right away. Raw reports, especially, should never go to my headquarters in Beijing. The higher-ups don’t know how to read them. Whatever the original problem, it is always compounded by distant superiors who think they understand local events on the basis of barely accurate, and even more likely completely mistaken, first reports. I made a mental note to complain to the local police chief.

  There were four field reports, one for each incident. I read them quickly, and then again more carefully to make sure I hadn’t missed anything remotely important:

  —Working-class neighborhood near edge of town, three elderly males at adjoining tables slumped over bowls of noodles—two daily specials and one of the new Vietnamese-style considered trendy. No one else on premises when patrol showed up. Owner of the noodle shop (identified as “Uighur with a limp and wisp of a mustache” by cashier who appeared out of nowhere a few minutes later) has disappeared.

  FIELD COMMENT: No further information.

  —One otherwise (apparently) healthy middle-aged male—well dressed, no tattoos or scars—leaning back in red leather banquette of upscale restaurant in Yanji’s finest hotel, never having gotten past appetizer from the looks of it. Maybe autopsy? Chef in custody, but not talking.

  FIELD COMMENT: Still working him over.

  —Couple of hookers taking a break before work found dead as doornails behind back alley dim sum joint. Best guess judging from scene: sharing steamed buns and red tea. Shop claims it doesn’t make dim sum on site. Buys off truck every other day. Manager insists “they don’t have phone number” of supplier and (surprise! surprise!) none of staff can remember anything, even color of truck.

  FIELD COMMENT: Asking around.

  —One tourist, blond, female, discovered on washroom floor of new Mongolian tearoom across from train station. When turned over, funny look on face. Passport nowhere to be found. No Yanji hotel has record of anyone with her description checking in. Smaller inns still being canvassed.

  FIELD COMMENT: This may take a while.

  I looked at my watch. The mayor would be calling soon, but even before that, the first message from Beijing would arrive, something along the lines of “From time to time someone dies in a restaurant, but seven in one night?”

  I contemplated eating at home for a few months. The idea survived a nanosecond until it ran into the realization that this would mean spending evenings with Uncle O.

  2

  “Major Bing!” After a halfhearted salute, my new deputy, tall and gaunt, dropped a fresh sheaf of papers on my desk. “The mayor says he wants all leave canceled. Do I type up a memo to that effect? Or do I use my discretion?”

  The man had arrived by train Tuesday afternoon straight from his previous assignment in the city of Tianjin, which sits close enough to Beijing so that anyone posted there feels superior to all of us in the northeast sector. They feel that way even though Tianjin is widely considered in the Ministry a poor sister, badly run. A few of the more suspicious also think it is a city marked for doom—one year a huge earthquake, another year an unbelievably destructive explosion.

  Still fresh from Tianjin and with an air of superiority trailing him as if he were Ying Zheng in the flesh, the new man had spent his entire first day wandering through the office asking a lot of questions. Whether he should use his discretion was the caboose on most of them. His height, which went beyond what most people would consider reasonable, only drew attention to his shoes, which were brown, thick soled, and badly scuffed.

  “This isn’t our affair,” I said, contemplating the shoes. They had started life as patrol boots, but it looked as if halfway through they changed their minds and made a stab at being fashionable. If Ministry of State Security officers in Tianjin dressed like this, no wonder—disasters aside—it was a city near the bottom of most people’s list for transfer assignments. Only my sector and the two others near mine in the northeast ranked lower in the Ministry’s beauty contest. Almost no one wanted to be assigned way up here. The general impression was that this was a place filled with country bumpkins with nothing to do during the long winters but drink.

  “Let the local police here in the wilds of Y
anji do some work once in a while.” I looked up from the shoes. “Besides, it’s almost midnight. We only type memos in the morning.” I paused before giving him a tight smile. “It’s a Manchu tradition.”

  The man was too tall for sarcasm to go over his head, but there was no sign anything had registered.

  “When I was in Tianjin,” he said solemnly, “the mayor had a lot of clout. He could have canceled leave anytime he’d wanted. He never did, of course, but he could have.” A pompous fog enveloped this pronouncement. While it dissipated, I sat back and pondered. If the mayor of Tianjin had so much clout, why didn’t he order people to polish their shoes? I wasn’t a martinet, but I insisted my officers show a little pride in how they looked. It was not just fussiness. Suspects react badly when interrogated by trouser legs that drag on the floor, or get slapped around by frayed shirt collars.

  I pushed my mind back to the problem at hand. “That may be, ah…” For some reason I couldn’t place the new man’s name. “But our mayor can’t cancel leave, not for anyone in this office, anyway.”

  I did not normally lecture new arrivals on their second day. It was always better to let them get comfortable for a week or two. In this case, however, it seemed crucial to set a few guidelines before the scuffed shoes went over a cliff, dragging along a few of the impressionable members of my staff.

  “You might as well file this away for future reference: We don’t take orders from the locals. That includes the mayor.” I said this evenly enough, as if I wasn’t constantly locked in combat with the mayor, who was crooked, and lecherous, and beyond my reach because he was so well connected in ways that, even after trying for several years, I couldn’t trace.

  I indicated to the new man that he should stand against the wall rather than take a seat. It wouldn’t be smart to let him feel too cozy in my office. If we were in for an ugly period of house-to-house fighting—and I already knew that was where things were headed—I wanted him off balance every time he walked through the door.

  “You may have to adjust a little to the way things work here on the ragged edge of civilization, Tang.”

  His name had popped back into my head. It was Tang Xin-ho, or at least that was what had been stamped on the front of his personnel file, which I’d received and skimmed without much interest weeks ago. The file itself was an odd color, not the normal light green, and it was stuffed with commendations. That had instantly sent up warning flares. It meant every office he’d ever worked in couldn’t wait to get rid of him. The first page in the file made clear that he was a direct assignment to me from the Ministry personnel office. That was stapled to a second page with red stripes along the top meant to carry the unmistakable if unspoken message that it didn’t matter what I thought of him or his file—he was mine, and there was nothing I could do about it.

  Tang’s shoulders stiffened at my warning. He flushed to an ugly shade of red but quickly regained his composure. I could tell that he had almost clicked to attention but then, in a fit of anger or stubbornness, decided instead to test me.

  Just try it, I thought. Nothing he could do would match what I faced every day at home. I sat back, making sure to look relaxed but mentally girding for a long campaign. I’d break his bureaucratic neck in the end, but it had to be done slowly, imperceptibly, by degrees, until one day he’d walk out of my office with his head at an odd angle, not quite realizing what had happened.

  “Normally,” I said quietly, forcing him to lean toward me, “we don’t even get the full police reports on this sort of thing. Bicycle thefts, bad checks, and murder—none of them our business. We keep our eyes focused on the border, record what comes over, and spend the rest of our time tracking all of the foreign ducks and geese that make their way up here under one sort of cover or another in order to watch each other watch the border. A lot of them spend their time in the South Korean coffee shops that keep popping up, or hanging around the North Korean restaurant here. The food there is all right, and you’re allowed to accept one meal a week. Understood?”

  This was met with sullen silence.

  “If North Korean soldiers cross the river and kill a few of our people during a robbery, we listen, we observe, we gather information, we look for patterns, and then we put the whole thing in a file and forget about it. Understood?”

  Silence, even more sullen than before. I let that hang around the room for a few seconds before continuing. “But according to this note”—I picked up a piece of paper and let it float back down to my desk—“the chief of detectives seems to think in this case there is something odd going on.”

  “And you don’t?” Tang raised an eyebrow. Apparently, that was how they communicated doubt in Tianjin.

  “As I said, we have plenty to do”—my voice dropped to a near whisper—“without worrying about food poisoning.”

  I leafed through the papers he’d delivered, letting him stand there like a slightly bent potted tree. The new reports contained more preliminary speculation on several key issues for which the local coroner still had no good answers. First and most obvious among the questions was what had caused seven people to abandon all signs of life more or less at the same time, assuming the coroner’s thermometer could be trusted. Someone had written “ptomaine?” in the margin of one of the pages.

  “I admit,” I said at last, “the hookers have me a little worried.”

  “I was thinking of the dim sum.” Tang looked thoughtful.

  “How do you know it wasn’t the red tea?”

  “There’s that, too.”

  3

  No sooner had Tang edged out of my office than the special phone in the top drawer of my desk buzzed. Only a few people had the number, and no one except me had physical access to the phone. The drawer was secured with a special lock, and I was the only one who was supposed to know how to get it open.

  I let the phone buzz twice as I searched for the key, then opened the drawer and lifted the receiver. When it was first installed, I had tried to make the phone actually ring instead of buzz, because the buzz was annoying, as if an insect were trapped in the drawer. Beijing sent instructions that I was not to fiddle with the phone. It buzzed, I was informed, because that was what the regulation said it was supposed to do. Calls on that phone were strictly official; they might as well have been from poisonous bugs.

  The voice on the other end was a bug, a mosquito at midnight.

  “Qin here.”

  More bad news. It was the mayor, and the lack of even a minimally polite greeting was meant to suggest that I should leap to my feet and salute.

  “Qin?” I pretended to be searching my memory.

  “Listen closely, Bing. I’ve just been in touch with Beijing, and your superiors at the Ministry agree that for the next month, maybe more, your resources are to be fully at my disposal.” He paused. “Cancel all leave.”

  I closed my eyes. “What is this about, Qin?”

  “You know what it’s about, Bing. It’s about a lot of bodies showing up where they don’t belong.”

  “What about your police, Qin? Am I misinformed, or isn’t this what they get paid for, investigating mysterious events? Everyone knows this dysfunctional city has more than its share of them.” I sensed the mosquito revving up again, so I kept talking. “The issue here, as far as I can tell, is unexplained deaths, several more than normal, one supposes, but numbers by themselves do not make them my concern. My concern is with matters of state security—spies, terrorists, smuggling across that damned river. You know, the sort of things that are probably minor in your constellation of corruption. Feel free to send over the results of the police investigation about the murders, if that’s what they were, when you have something. I have work to do. Ciao, as they say in Milan.” I paused for two beats. “That’s Italy.”

  “I know where the fuck Milan is, Bing. We have a new Italian restaurant in town, or haven’t you noticed? No, forget it, you’re not slipping away so easily. What we have here is not just the normal triad stiffs
laid out in a pizza parlor.”

  The sound of papers being shuffled came across the line. I knew he was trying to figure out where the bodies had actually been found, and whether he was in danger of losing the new restaurant, which he thought added class to the city. No doubt it added to his personal revenue as well. The mayor skimmed from the tax receipts, I was sure of that, but being sure and finding evidence was not the same thing.

  The mosquito came back on the line. “Murder? What we have here is terrorism. I don’t doubt it’s your cousins from across the river. Maybe even friends of your uncle. If you can’t stop these people, Bing, we’ll build a wall. That’s what I just told them in Beijing, build a fucking wall and be done with it!”

  The mayor pointed to my Korean blood at every opportunity. This was, he whispered into a thousand ears, a source of dangerous pollution. It was true, he would say, his city was filled with Koreans whose families had been here for decades, centuries in many cases. “I’m friends with them all”—he would always say that as if wounded by the thought he might not be their friend and benefactor. They belong here, he would exclaim, which was another way of saying he could squeeze money from them and they would not complain. The point, he would say gravely, was that he knew to the marrow of his pure Chinese bones that it was a travesty, in fact a mortal danger, that someone charged with security in this sensitive part of the country was not pure-blooded.

  And now he thought he had finally found a perfect way to get rid of me.

  “Do I make myself clear, Bing? Terrorism! Not just your murderous thugs from across the river, but terrorism!” The word shot across the phone line like a piglet running from a carving knife. “And this terrorism is a big fat concern of the state, as you so rightly point out. Not only that, it’s going to ruin the livelihood of the citizens of my city, citizens that the authorities in Beijing want to protect and see prosper. With terrorism here, tourists won’t come. Businesses will go elsewhere. We’re supposed to get a new dumpling restaurant later this year. I signed the papers the other day. It’s Japanese. Big name, big revenues. Nothing like those trash heaps we have now. It will drive that North Korean eatery with its flashy girls out of the city.”