Barry Eisler - Rain Storm aka Choke Point

People don’t know. They don’t know the way the jaw goes slack, how the skin turns instantly waxy and yellow, how readily the eyelids close when you ease them shut. They don’t know the awful smell of blood and entrails, or how, even if you can wash the stench from your skin, nothing can ever cleanse it from your memory. They don’t know a hundred other things. You might as well ask them about the mechanics of butchering the animals that become the meat on their supper tables. They don’t want to see any of that, either. And things are set up so they don’t have to.

Sometimes I can forget the divide this knowledge produces, the way it separates me from those unburdened by its weight. Mostly, though, I can’t. Midori sensed it even from the beginning, I think, although it wasn’t until later that she fully grasped its essence.

Yeah, sometimes I can forget, but never for very long. Mostly I look at the innocents around me with disdain. Or resentment. Or envy, when I’m being honest with myself. Always with alienation. Always from a distance that has nothing to do with geography.

I walked over to the door and looked through the peephole. There was nothing out there.

I let myself out, checking to ensure that the door had locked behind me. I left through the front entrance, just another resident, heading out for the evening. Someone new was at the front desk. Even if the college girl had still been there, she wouldn’t have recognized me. The light disguise I had been wearing earlier was gone, of course; but more than that, I was a different person now. Then, I had been a timid immigrant in a cheap, ill-fitting windbreaker, a visitor to the building. Now I walked as though I owned the place, a resident in a professional-looking overcoat, on his way out to a foreign car and thence to an important job at the office, a responsible position that no doubt occasionally required evening hours.

I left the building and crossed the street. I took off the galoshes, put them in the briefcase, and got in the car. I drove a few miles to another strip mall, where I changed into some of the clothes I was traveling with: gray worsted pants and an olive, lightweight merino wool crewneck sweater. I slipped the overcoat back on and was glad for its warmth.

For the next hour or so I drove around suburban Virginia, stopping at gas stations and convenience stores and fast food places, depositing a relic or two from the Crawley job at each of them until the briefcase was empty and it, too, had been discarded, in a Dumpster at a Roy Rogers. I pitched it in with the other refuse and watched a small avalanche of fast food wrappers cascade down and bury it.

I walked back to the car. The leafless trees along the road looked skeletal against the night sky beyond. I paused and stared for a long moment at that sky, at whatever might lie beyond it.

Oh, did I offend you ? I thought. Go ahead, then. Take your best shot. I’m right here .

Nothing happened.

A minute passed. I started to shiver.

Suddenly I was exhausted. And hungry. I needed to get something to eat, and find a hotel.

I got in the car and pulled out onto the road again. I felt alone, and very far from home.

Wherever that might be.

She gives when our attention is distracted

And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions

That the giving famishes the craving…

T. S. ELIOT, Gerontion

THE TICKET I had bought to get from Osaka to Washington was a round-trip. One-ways attract unnecessary attention, especially post-September 11. When I’d left I wasn’t sure that I’d be using the return, but I certainly had a reason now, and the morning after my chat with Crawley I caught a return flight from Dulles.

I slept well over the Pacific, all the way to the pre-landing announcements, the flight attendants having kindly respected my wish not to be wakened, even for champagne and caviar service. Ah, first class.

I took the rapito , the Rapid Transport train, from Kansai International Airport to Namba’s Nankai station in south Osaka. My ticket was for a window seat, and during the thirty-minute journey from airport to terminal station I sat and stared past my reflection in the glass. A sliver of sun had broken through the clouds at the edge of the horizon, shining like a sepia spotlight through an otherwise gray and undifferentiated firmament, and in the fading moments of the day I looked on at the scenes without, scenes that passed before me as disconnected and mute as images in a silent film. A rice paddy in the distance, tended by a lone woman who seemed lost in its sodden expanse. A man tiredly pedaling a bicycle, his dark suit seeming almost to sag from his frame as though wanting nothing more than to cease this purposeless forward momentum and succumb to gravity’s heavy embrace. A child with a yellow knapsack paused before the lowered gate of the rapito railroad crossing, perhaps on his way to a juku , or cram school, which would stuff his head with facts for the next dozen years until it was time for them to be disgorged for college entrance exams, watching the passing train with an odd stoicism, as though aware of what the future held for him and already resigned to its weight.

I called Kanezaki from a pay phone in Namba. I told him to meet me that night, that he could find details on the bulletin board. I uploaded the necessary information from an Internet café. The Nozomi bullet train would take him about two and a half hours, and I expected he would leave quickly after getting my message.

I checked the bulletin board I had set up for Delilah, and was mildly surprised to find a message from her: Call me . There was a phone number.

I used it. The call might be traced back to Osaka, but I wasn’t going to be in town long enough for it to matter.

“ Allo ,” I heard her say.

“Hey,” I answered.

“Hey. Thanks for calling.”

“Sure.”

“I wanted to tell you that it’s almost done. To ask you to be patient for just a little while longer.”

That was smart. She must have been concerned that, if I didn’t hear from her, I might get frustrated. That I might decide she was playing me and go after Belghazi unilaterally again. And better to hear my voice, and let me hear hers, rather than a dry text message left floating in cyberspace.

“How much longer?”

“A day. Maybe two. It’ll be worth it, you’ll see.”

I wondered for a moment, again, about the elevator at the Macau Mandarin Oriental. After what had happened subsequently, and after what I’d learned, my gut said that she hadn’t been part of that attempt on me, that in fact she had tried to warn me, as she had claimed. What I couldn’t understand was why. From her perspective, operationally, a warning would have been counterproductive.

I hated a loose end like that. But I couldn’t make sense of it. I’d chew it over another time.

“Okay,” I said.

“Thank you.”

“Can I reach you at this number?”

“No. Not after this.”

I paused, then said, “All right, then. Good luck.”

“And you.” She clicked off.

A LITTLE UNDER four hours later Kanezaki and I were sitting in Ashoka, a chain Indian restaurant in the Umeda underground mall that I had come to like during my time in Osaka. I had employed the usual security procedures beforehand and there had been no problems.

“You were right,” I told him over Tandoor Murgh and Keema Naan and Panjabi Lassis. “There was a leak on your side. Crawley.”

“How do you know?”

The question was straightforward and I detected no sign of suspicion behind it. Apparently he hadn’t yet learned of Crawley’s recent demise. When he did, he would come to his own conclusions. I saw no advantage in having him hear it from me.