clam.
I asked him some more qustions about the Yakuza, without finding out much that I didn’t know or suspect already. It was reputed to have a bunch of politicians in its pocket, not all of them in Japan. It was also reputed to be making a concerted effort to dominate the lucrative Japanese tourist business in San Francisco and Los Angeles by either taking over restaurants, bars, gift shops, and entertainment facilities, or controlling them through extortion. For these reasons, it preferred to keep a low profile in this country and stay out of trouble with law enforcement agencies. Which meant, Kanaya said reassuringly, that it resorted to violence against gaijin only in extreme cases.
I also asked him about Simon Tamura’s personal life, but there was nothing there for me either. Tamura had been a family man, had lived quietly and traditionally, hadn’t gone in for the usual vices. The names Sanjiro Masaoka and Kazuo Hama meant nothing to Kanaya. Nor did he know anything about the old photograph in Tamura’s office; he had never seen it.
By this time we were almost finished eating. My last piece of sushi was a plump gray-white thing; I hoisted it up, eyed it some more, and ate it. Not too great, but then not too bad either. Chewy. Like a chunk of fish-flavored rubber.
Kanaya asked, “Have I been of any help to you?”
“Some, yes. I appreciate your candor, Mr. Kanaya.”
“It was my pleasure. Perhaps there will be a story for me to write, eventually.”
“If there is,” I said, “you’ll be the first person I tell it to.”
“Ah.”
“Meanwhile, lunch is on me.”
He made a slight bow with his head. “Arigato gozaimas’. You enjoyed the sushi, then?”
“It was fine. Except for that last piece. Grayish thing, sort of chewy?”
“Tako,” he said. “Octopus.”
I was sorry I’d asked.
When I got outside, the rain and the white Ford were both there waiting for me-another pair of joyless certainties, like death and taxes, that I seemed to be cursed with these days. One of the kobun, the putty-nosed guy, had followed me inside the Japan Center and hung around out in the mall somewhere while I had my meeting with Mike Kanaya; he was behind me again now, and when I crossed to where my car was parked on Post Street he went and rejoined his friend in the Ford, half a block away.
I was still fed up with having them around all the time, but what Kanaya had told me about Yakuza policy toward non-Japanese had taken some of the edge off my anxiety. And the thought of the two of them sitting a cold, cramped watch all night in the rain, as they had probably done, made me feel there might be some justice in this world after all.
The rain slackened to a fine mist as I drove back up the hill to Pacific Heights. I took the only legal parking space on my block, so that the Ford had to pull over and stop in somebody’s driveway. They were still parked there, watching, as I entered my building.
I had tried calling the Hama Egg Ranch again this morning, just before I left for Japantown, and that time I’d got a busy signal; so somebody was home up there today. I intended to give it one more shot, and if I still couldn’t get through, then maybe it was time to pay my first and no doubt last visit to the Kara Maru restaurant. Maybe I couldn’t beard Hisayuki Okubo without an invitation, but there was no harm in trying. I hoped.
So I dialed the 707 area code for Petaluma, then the Hama number, and the thing rang six times before I finally heard an answering click, just as I was getting ready to hang up. A woman’s voice, hoarse and a little on the quavery side, said, “Hello? Yes, please?”
I gave my name and where I was calling from. Then I said, “I’d like to speak to Mr. Hama, Mr. Kazuo Hama.”
Silence.
“Ma’am? Hello?”
“No,” she said. “No, no.”
“You mean Mr. Hama isn’t there?”
“Not here,” she said, “Kazuo is dead!” and I heard her begin to weep just before she broke the connection.
Chapter Fourteen
I got up to Petaluma a little before three-thirty. The rain didn’t follow me all the way; it quit just north of San Rafael, and there were thin blue veins in the cloud pattern when I took the first Petaluma exit off Highway 101.
The white Ford didn’t follow me at all. But that was my choice, not theirs. When I’d left my flat I had driven down to Fisherman’s Wharf, where the traffic is always congested and the tourists are out even in wet weather, and did some tricky maneuvers involving other cars and stop signals; the last I’d seen of the Ford had been at an intersection near The Cannery, tangled up behind a smoke-belching Muni bus. It’s not all that difficult to shake a tail if you set your mind to it and expend some effort. And I just did not feel like going all the way to Petaluma with those two dragging after me like a couple of loose anchors.
The main street used to be called that, Main Street. Now it was called Petaluma Boulevard South and Petaluma Boulevard North, with the dividing line being the middle of town. The place used to be a small agricultural community with a population of around ten thousand, built mostly on the west side of Petaluma Creek-a narrow salt-water estuary that wound down through fourteen miles of tule marshes to San Pablo Bay. Now it was a place where San Francisco office workers lived and commuted from, a bedroom community with a population of over forty thousand, most of whom lived on the east side of the Petaluma River-creek becoming river by act of the state legislature. Once it had been famous as “The Egg Basket of the World” because it was the world’s leading producer of chickens and chicken fruit in the early years of the century, shipping millions of eggs annually from dozens of surrounding ranches. Now it was famous as the “Hell no, we won’t grow” city, the place that in 1972 had passed a limited-growth ordinance hailed by environmentalists and traditionalists, fought bitterly by developers who had gobbled up most of the land in and out of the city limits. In the old days, riverboats and barges and cargo schooners used to make regular runs up and down the creek, carrying hay, alfalfa, eggs, livestock, and passengers. In the new days, speedboats and small yachts traveled the river and tied up in the basin behind the old brick complex of restaurants and shops that had once been a feed mill.
Progress. Changing times. Some liked the idea, some didn’t. I didn’t, but then I had no stake in the town’s past or in its future. Why should I cry for Petaluma? Petaluma wasn’t going to cry for me.
I stopped at a service station and got directions to Rainsville Road. Following them, I drove out Petaluma Boulevard North to Stony Point Road, turned west on Stony Point, and came to Rainsville after less than half a mile. Another half-mile brought me to a rain-puddled gravel driveway and a sign that said: HAMA EGG RANCH. Below that, in smaller letters, were the words: ONE OF PETALUMA’S LARGEST.
And in still smaller letters: EGGS, FRYERS, ROASTING HENS, BABY CHICKS FOR SALE.
One of Petaluma’s largest, I thought as I swung into the driveway. But that didn’t mean much these days. The egg industry up here was only a gaunt shadow of what it once had been. One conglomerate outfit owned most of the ranches; there were only a few independents like Hama left. And all the hatcheries and feed companies that had once flourished were long gone. Now Kazuo Hama was gone too. How? And why?
The drive was lined on one side by eucalyptus trees planted as windbreaks. The ranch began its outward sprawl just beyond the trees-a familiar layout that gave me a vague, fleeting nostalgia because I had worked on a chicken ranch one summer in my teens, so long ago that the memory of it was faded and distorted, like a very old daguerrotype. The nearest buildings were a large white clapboard house, a tankhouse, and a garage with a wing tacked onto it that was probably a workshop. Opposite and beyond that little cluster was a small barnlike structure that was probably the grainery, where feed and supplies were kept and eggs were packed for shipment. The chicken houses came next, half a dozen of them, each one seventy-five-feet long-large enough for maybe a thousand laying hens-made of wood and built up off the ground, with a V-shaped roof and screened windows to let
