Rainfall

done reading, he pushed it across the table to me and nodded.

I folded the note up and put it back in my jacket pocket, followed by the pen. Then I placed a thousand-yen note on the table to cover the coffee I had been drinking and motioned him to leave.

We got up and walked outside. I patted him down and was unsurprised to find that he was clean. As we moved down the street I was careful to keep him slightly in front of me and to the side, a human shield if it came to that. I knew every good spot in the area for surveillance or an ambush, and my head swept back and forth, looking for someone out of place, someone who might have followed Bulfinch to the restaurant and then set up to wait outside it.

As we walked I called out “left” or “right” from behind him by way of directions, and we made our way to the Spiral Building. We walked through the glass doors and into the music section, where Midori was waiting.

“Kawamura-san,” he said, bowing, when he saw her. “Thank you for your call.”

“Thank you for coming to meet me,” Midori replied. “I’m afraid I wasn’t completely candid with you when we met for coffee. I’m not as ignorant of my father’s affiliations as I led you to believe. But I don’t know anything about the disk you mentioned. No more than you told me, anyway.”

“I’m not sure what I can do for you, then,” he said.

“Tell us what’s on the disk,” I replied.

“I don’t see how that would help you.”

“I don’t see how it could hurt us,” I answered. “Right now we’re running blind. If we put our heads together, we’ve got a much better chance of retrieving the disk than we do if we work separately.”

“Please, Mr. Bulfinch,” Midori said. “I barely escaped being killed a few days ago by whoever is trying to find that disk. I need your help.”

Bulfinch grimaced and looked at Midori and then at me, his eyes sweeping back and forth several times. “All right,” he said after a moment. “Two months ago your father contacted me. He told me he read my column for Forbes. He told me who he was and said he wanted to help. A classic whistle- blower.”

Midori turned to me. “That was about the time he was diagnosed.”

“I’m sorry?” Bulfinch asked.

“Lung cancer. He had just learned that he had little time to live,” Midori said.

Bulfinch nodded, understanding. “I see. I didn’t know that. I’m sorry.”

Midori bowed her head briefly, accepting his solicitude. “Please, go on.”

“Over the course of the next month I had several clandestine meetings with your father, during which he briefed me extensively on corruption in the Construction Ministry and its role as broker between the Liberal Democratic Party and the yakuza. These briefings provided me with invaluable insight into the nature and extent of corruption in Japanese society. But I needed corroboration.”

“What corroboration?” I asked. “Can’t you just print it and attribute it to ‘a senior source in the Construction Ministry’?”

“Ordinarily, yes,” Bulfinch replied. “But there were two problems here. First, Kawamura’s position in the Ministry gave him unique access to the information he was providing me. If we had published the information, we might as well have used his name in the by-line.”

“And the second problem?” Midori asked.

“Impact,” Bulfinch answered. “We’ve already run a half dozen exposes on the kind of corruption Kawamura was involved in. The Japanese press resolutely refuses to pick them up. Why? Because the politicians and bureaucrats pass and interpret laws that can make or break domestic corporations. And the corporations provide over half the media’s advertising revenues. So if, for example, a newspaper runs an article that offends a politician, the politician calls his contacts at the relevant corporations, who pull their advertising from the newspaper and transfer it to a rival publication, and the offending paper goes bankrupt. You see?

“If you have a reporter investigate a story from outside the government-sponsored kisha news clubs, you get shut down. If you play ball, the money keeps rolling in, licit and illicit. No one here takes chances; everyone treats the truth like a contagious disease. Christ, Japan’s press is the most docile in the world.”

“But with proof . . . ?” I asked.

“Hard proof would change everything. The papers would be forced to cover the story or else reveal that they are nothing but tools of the government. And flushing the corrupt kingpins out into the open would weaken them and embolden the press. We could start a virtuous cycle that would lead to a change in Japanese politics the likes of which the country hasn’t seen since the Meiji restoration.”

“I think you may be overestimating the zeal of domestic media,” Midori said.

Bulfinch shook his head. “Not at all. I know some of these people well. They’re good reporters, they want to publish. But they’re realists, too.”

“The proof,” I said. “What was it?”

Bulfinch looked at me over the tops of his wireless glasses. “I don’t know exactly. Only that it’s hard evidence. Incontrovertible.”

“It sounds like that disk should go to the Keisatsucho, not the press,” Midori said, referring to Tatsu’s investigative organization.

“Your father wouldn’t have lasted a day if he’d handed that information over to the feds,” I said, saving Bulfinch the trouble.

“That’s right,” Bulfinch said. “Your father wasn’t the first person to try to blow the whistle on corruption. Ever hear of Honma Tadayo?”