Rainfall

“Without knowing what the thing is, I don’t even know if giving it to me would help. I told you, I’m not here for whatever it is. I just don’t want you to get hurt.”

“Can’t you see what this looks like from my perspective? ‘Just hand it over so I can help you.’ ”

“I understand that.”

“I’m not sure you do.”

“Doesn’t matter. Tell me about your father.”

There was a long pause. I knew what she was going to say, and she said it: “This is why you were asking all those questions before. You came to Alfie and, God, everything . . . You’ve just been using me from the beginning.”

“Some of what you’re saying is true. Not all of it. Now tell me about your father.”

“No.”

I felt a flush of anger in my neck. Easy, John. “The reporter was asking, too, wasn’t he? Bulfinch? What did you tell him?”

She looked at me, trying to gauge just how much I knew. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I looked at the door and thought, Walk away. Just walk away.

But instead: “Listen to me, Midori. All I have to do is walk out that door. You’re the one who won’t be able to sleep in her own apartment, who’s afraid to go to the police, who can’t go back to her life. So you figure out a way to work with me on this, or you can damn well figure it all out on your own.”

A long time, maybe a full minute, passed. Then she said, “Bulfinch told me my father was supposed to deliver something to him on the morning he died, but that Bulfinch never got it. He wanted to know if I had it, or if I knew where it was.”

“What was it?”

“A computer disk. That’s all he would tell me. He told me if he said more it would put me in danger.”

“He had already compromised you just by talking to you. He was being followed outside of Alfie.” I pressed my fingers to my eyes. “Do you know anything about this disk?”

“No.”

I looked at her, trying to judge. “I don’t think I have to tell you, the people who want it aren’t particularly restrained about the methods they’ll use to get it.”

“I understand that.”

“Okay, let’s put together what we have. Everyone thinks your father told you something, or gave you something. Did he? Did he tell you anything, or give you some documents, maybe, anything that he said was important?”

“No. Nothing I remember.”

“Try. A safe-deposit key? A locker key? Did he tell you that he had hidden something, or that he had important papers somewhere? Anything like that?”

“No,” she said, after a moment. “Nothing.”

She might be holding back, I knew. She certainly had reason not to trust me.

“But you know something,” I said. “Otherwise, you’d go to the police.”

She folded her arms across her chest and looked at me.

“For Christ’s sake, Midori, tell me. Let me help you.”

“It’s not what you’re hoping for,” she said.

“I’m not hoping for anything. Just what pieces you can give me.”

There was a long pause. Then she said, “I told you my father and I were . . . estranged for a long time. It started when I was a teenager, when I started to understand Japan’s political system, and my father’s place in it.”

She got up and began to pace around the room, not looking at me. “He was part of the Liberal Democratic Party machine, working his way up the ladder in the old Kensetsusho, the Ministry of Construction. When the Kensetsusho became the Kokudokotsusho, he was made vice minister of land and infrastructure — of public works. Do you know what that means in Japan?”

“I know a little. The public-works program channels money from the politicians and construction firms to the yakuza.”

“And the yakuza provide ‘protection,’ dispute resolution, and lobbying for the construction industry. The construction companies and yakuza are like twins separated at birth. Did you know that construction outfits in Japan are called gumi?”

Gumi means “gang,” or “organization” — the same moniker the yakuza gangs use for themselves. The original gumi were groups of men displaced by World War II who worked for a gang boss doing whatever dirty jobs they could to survive. Eventually these gangs morphed into today’s yakuza and construction outfits.

“I know,” I said.

“Then you know that, after the war, there were battles between construction companies that were so big the police were afraid to intervene. A bid-rigging system was established to stop these fights. The system still exists. My father ran it.”