Robert Crais: Stalking the Angel

I took Broadway down to First Street, hung a left, and two blocks later I was in Little Tokyo.

The buildings were old, mostly brick or stone facade, but they had been kept up and the streets were clean. Paper lanterns hung in front of some of the shops, and red and green and yellow and blue wind socks in front of others, and all the signs were in Japanese. The sidewalks were crowded. Summer is tourist season, and most of the white faces and many of the yellow ones had Nikons or Pentaxes slung under them. A knot of sailors in Italian navy uniforms stood at a street corner, grinning at a couple of girls in a Camaro who grinned back at them. One of the sailors carried a Disneyland bag with Mickey Mouse on the side. Souvenirs from distant lands.

Nobu Ishida’s import business was exactly where Malcolm Denning said it would be, in an older building on Ki Street between a fish market and a Japanese-language bookstore, with a yakitori grill across the street.

I rolled past Ishida’s place, found a parking spot in front of one of the souvenir shops they have for people from Cleveland, and walked back. There was a little bell on the door that rang as I went in and three men sitting around two tables at the rear of the place. It looked more like a warehouse than a retail outlet, with boxes stacked floor to ceiling and lots of freestanding metal shelves. A few things were on display, mostly garish lacquered boxes and miniature pagodas and dragons that looked like Barkley from Sesame Street . I smiled at the three men. “Nice stuff.”

One of them said, “What do you want?” He was a lot younger than the other two, maybe in his early twenties. No accent. Born and raised in Southern California with a surfer’s tan to prove it. He was big for someone of Japanese extraction, just over six feet, with muscular arms and lean jaws and the sort of wildly overdeveloped trapezius muscles you get when you spend a lot of time with the weights. He wore a tight knit shirt with a crew neck and three-quarter sleeves even though it was ninety degrees outside. The other two guys were both in their thirties. One of them had a bad left eye as if he had taken a hard one there and it had never healed, and the other had the pinkie missing from his right hand. I made the young one for Ishida’s advertising manager and the other two for buyers from Neiman-Marcus.

“My name’s Elvis Cole,” I said. “Are you Nobu Ishida?” I put one of my cards on the second table.

The one with the missing finger grinned at the big kid and said, “Hey, Eddie, are you Nobu Ishida?”

Eddie said, “You have business with Mr. Ishida?”

“Well, it’s what we might call personal.”

The one with the bad eye said something in Japanese.

“Sorry,” I said. “Japanese is one of the four known languages I don’t speak.”

Eddie said, “Maybe you’ll understand this, dude. Fuck off.”

They probably weren’t from Neiman-Marcus. I said, “You’d better ask Mr. Ishida. Tell him it’s about eighteenth-century Japan.”

Eddie thought about it for a while, then picked up my card, and said, “Wait here.” He disappeared behind stacks of what looked like sushi trays and bamboo steamers.

The guy with the bad eye and the guy with no finger stared at me. I said, “I guess Mr. Ishida keeps you guys around to take inventory.”

The guy with no finger smiled, but I don’t think he was being friendly.

A little bit later Eddie came back without the card and said, “Time for you to go.”

I said, “Ask him again. I won’t take much of his time.”

“You’re leaving.”

I looked from Eddie to the other two and back to Eddie. “Nope. I’m going to stay and I’m going to talk to Ishida or I’m going to tip the cops that you guys deal stolen goods.” Mr. Threat.

The guy with the bad eye mumbled something else and they all laughed. Eddie pulled his sleeves up to his elbows and flexed his arms. Big, all right. Elaborate, multicolored tattoos started about an inch below his elbows and continued up beneath the sleeves. They looked like fish scales. His hands were square and blocky and his knuckles were thick. He said something in Japanese and the guy with the missing finger came around the tables like he was going to show me the door. When he reached to take my arm I pushed his hand away. He stopped smiling and threw a pretty fast backfist. I pushed the fist past me and hit him in the neck with my left hand. He made the sound a drunk in a cheap restaurant makes with a piece of meat caught in his throat and went down. The guy with the bad eye was coming around the tables when an older man came out from behind the bamboo steamers and spoke sharply and the guy with the bad eye stopped.

Nobu Ishida was in his early fifties with short gray hair and hard black eyes and a paunch for a belly. Even with the paunch, the other guys seemed to straighten up and pay attention. Those who could stand.

He looked at me the way you look at a disappearing menu, then shook his head. The guy on the floor was making small coughing noises but Nobu Ishida didn’t look at him and neither did anyone else. Ishida was carrying my card. “What are you, crazy? You know I could have you arrested for this?” Nobu Ishida didn’t have an accent, either.

I gave him a little shrug. “Go ahead.”

He said, “What do you want?”

I told him about the Hagakure.

Nobu Ishida listened without moving and then he tried to give me good-natured confusion. “I don’t get it. Why come to me?”

The guy with the missing finger stopped making noises and pushed himself up to his knees. He was holding his throat. I said, “You’re interested in samurai artifacts. The Hagakure was stolen. You’ve purchased stolen artworks in the past. You see how this works?”

The good-natured confusion went away. Ishida’s mouth tightened and something dark washed his face. Telltale signs of guilt. “Who says I’ve bought stolen art?”

“Akira Kurosawa gave me a call.”

Ishida stared at me a very long time. “Oh, we’ve got a funny one here, Eddie.”

Eddie said, “I don’t like him.” Eddie.

I said, “I think you might have the Hagakure. If you don’t, I think you might know the people who stole it or who have it.”

Ishida gave me the stare a little more, thinking, and then the tension went out of his face and his shoulders relaxed and he smiled. This time the smile was real, as if in all the thinking he had seen something and what he had seen had been funny as hell. He glanced at Eddie and then at the other two guys and then back at me. “You got no idea how stupid you are,” he said.

“People hint.”

He laughed and Eddie laughed, too. Eddie crossed his arms and made the huge trapezius muscles swell like a couple of demented air bladders. You could see that the tattoos climbed over his elbows and up his biceps. Pretty soon, everybody was laughing but me and the guy on the floor.

Ishida held up my card and looked at it, then crumpled it up and tossed it toward an open crate of little plastic pagodas. He said, “Your problem is, you don’t look like a private detective.”

“What’s a private detective look like?”

“Like Mickey Spillane. You see those Lite beer commercials? Mickey Spillane looks tough.”

I hooked a glance at the guy with the crushed neck. “Ask him.”

Nobu Ishida nodded, but it didn’t seem to matter much. The smile went away and the serious eyes came back. Hard. “Don’t come down here anymore, boy. You don’t know what you’re messing with down here.”

I said, “What about the Hagakure?”

Nobu Ishida gave me what I guess was supposed to be an enigmatic look, then he turned and melted away behind the bamboo steamers.

I looked at Eddie. “Is the interview over?”