Barry Eisler: Hard Rain

“ Tetsudatte kure ,” he grunted. Help. But calmly, expecting my immediate assistance.

The bar continued downward and settled against his chest. “ Oi, tanomu ,” he said again, more sharply this time.

I pushed downward instead.

His eyes popped open, searching for mine.

Between the weight of the bar and plates and the pressure I was delivering, he was now struggling with almost two hundred kilos.

I focused on the bar and his torso, but in my peripheral vision I saw his eyes bulging in confusion, then fear. He made no sound. I continued to concentrate on the clinical downward pressure.

With his teeth clenched shut, his chin almost buried in his neck, he threw everything he had into moving the bar. In extremis he was actually able to get the weight off his chest. I hooked a foot under the horizontal supports at the bottom of the bench and used the leverage to add additional pressure to the bar, and again it settled against his chest.

I felt a tremor in the weights as his arms began to shake with exertion. Again the bar moved slightly north.

Suddenly I was struck by the reek of feces. His sympathetic nervous system, in desperation, was shutting down nonessential bodily activities, including sphincter control, and diverting all available energy to his muscles.

The rally lasted only another moment. Then his arms began to shake more violently, and I felt the bar moving downward, more deeply into his chest. There was a slight hissing as his breath was driven out through his nostrils and pursed lips. I felt his eyes on my face but kept my attention on his torso and the bar. Still he made no sound.

Seconds went by, then more. His position didn’t change. I waited. His skin began to blue. I waited longer.

Finally, I eased off the pressure I had been putting on the bar and released my grip.

His eyes were still on me, but they no longer perceived. I stepped back, out of their sightless ambit, and paused to observe the scene. It looked like what it almost was: a weightlifting addict, alone and late at night, tries to handle more than he can, gets caught under the bar, suffocates and dies there. A bizarre accident.

I changed back into my street clothes. Picked up my bag, moved to the door. A series of cracks rang out behind me, like the snaps of dried tinder. I turned to look one last time, realizing as I did that the sound was of his ribs giving way. No question, he was done. Only his convulsive grip on the bar remained, as though the fingers refused to believe what the body had already accepted.

I stepped into the dark hallway and waited until the street was clear. Then I eased out onto the sidewalk and into the shadows around me.

I SLIPPED AWAY from the area on foot along a series of secondary streets in Roppongi and Akasaka, cutting across narrow alleyways in a manner which, to the uninitiated, would have looked like a series of simple shortcuts to wherever I was going, but which were in fact designed to force a follower or team of followers to reveal themselves in an effort to keep up. With a few deliberate exceptions, all my surveillance detection moves are accomplished under the guise of seemingly normal pedestrian behavior. If I’m being followed because some organization has taken an interest but hasn’t yet managed to confirm who I am, I’m not going to give the game away by acting like anything other than John Q. Citizen.

After about a half-hour I was confident that I wasn’t being tailed, and my pace began to slow in accompaniment to my mood. I found myself moving in a long, counterclockwise semicircle that I only half acknowledged was taking me in the direction of Aoyama Bochi, the enormous cemetery laid out like a triangular green bandage at the center of the city’s fashionable western districts.

On the north side of Roppongi-dori, I passed a small colony of cardboard shelters, the way stations of wandering homeless men whose lives were, in a sense, as detached and anonymous as my own. I set down the gym bag I was carrying, knowing that the bag and its contents of workout clothes and weightlifting gloves would quickly be distributed and assimilated among the gaunt and trackless wraiths nearby. Within days, perhaps hours, the discarded remnants of this last job would have been bleached of any trace of their origins, each just another nameless, colorless item among nameless, colorless souls, the flotsam and jetsam of loneliness and despair that fall from time to time into Tokyo’s collective blind spot and from there into oblivion.

Freed of the burden I had been carrying, I moved on, this time circling east. Under an overpass at Nogizaka, north of Roppongi-dori, I saw a half-dozen chinpira , gaudy in sleek racing leathers, squatting in a tight semicircle, their low-slung metal motorcycles parked on the footpath alongside them. Fragments of their conversation skipped off the side of the concrete wall to my right, the words unintelligible but the notes tuned as tight as the tricked-out exhaust pipes of their machines. They were probably jacked on kakuseizai , the methamphetamine that has been the Japanese drug of choice since the government distributed it to soldiers and workers during World War II, and of which these chinpira were doubtless both purveyors and consumers. They were waiting for the drug-induced hum in their muscles and brains to hit the right pitch, for the hour to grow suitably late and the night more seductively dark, before emerging from their concrete lair and answering the neon call of Roppongi.

I saw them take notice of me, a solitary figure approaching from the southern end of what was in effect a narrow tunnel. I considered crossing the street, but a metal divider made that maneuver unfeasible. I might simply have backed up and taken a different route. My failure to do so made it more difficult for me to deny that I was indeed heading toward the cemetery.

When I was three or four meters away one of them stood up. The others continued to squat, watching, alert for whatever distraction was promised.

I had already noted the absence of any of the security cameras that were growing more pervasive in the streets and subways with every passing year. Sometimes I have to fight the feeling that those cameras are looking specifically for me.

“ Oi ,” the one who had stood called out. Hey.

I stole a quick glance behind me to ensure that we were alone. It wouldn’t pay to have anyone see what I would do if these idiots got in my way.

Without altering my pace or direction, I looked into the chinpira ’s eyes, my expression obsidian flat. I let him know with this look that I was neither afraid nor looking for trouble, that I’d done this kind of thing many times before, that if he was in search of some excitement tonight the smart thing would be to find it elsewhere.

Most people, especially those even loosely acquainted with violence, understand these signals, and can be relied on to respond in ways that increase their survival prospects. But apparently this guy was too stupid, or too jacked on kakuseizai . Or he might have misinterpreted my initial backward glance as a sign of fear. Regardless, he ignored the warning I had given him and started edging into my path.

I recognized the procedure: I was being interviewed for my suitability as a victim. Would I allow myself to be forced out into the street and the oncoming traffic? Would I cringe and flinch in the process? If so, he would know I was a safe target, and he would then escalate, probably to real violence.

But I prefer my violence sudden. Keeping him to my right, I stepped past him with my left leg, shooting my right leg through on the same side immediately afterward and then sweeping it backward to reap his legs out from under him in osoto-gari , one of the most basic and powerful judo throws. Simultaneously I twisted counterclockwise and blasted my right arm into his neck, taking his upper body in the opposite direction of his legs. For a split instant he was suspended horizontally over the spot where he had been standing. Then I drilled him into the sidewalk, jerking upward on his collar at the last instant so the back of his head wouldn’t take excessive impact. I didn’t want a fatality. Too much attention.