Tokyo Vice (15 page)

“Why would he do that?”

“Because it’s the way things work. He keeps the cops happy so we don’t have to find an excuse to raid the office to get the intel we need. It works out well.”

“Why don’t you just tap his phones?”

“This isn’t America, and we aren’t the FBI. We couldn’t get permission to run a wiretap. It just doesn’t happen.”

“You don’t think he’s bribing somebody?”

“If he was, he wouldn’t be stupid enough to get caught doing it. He’s the smartest yakuza in the organization. I’ll find out what’s going on and get back to you.”

•    •    •

Two days later, he called me with the goods. The rumor was being spread by one Yoshinori Saito, the number four guy in the Sumiyoshi-kai. Saito had told one of the detectives in Section 1 that Kaneko was bribing a cop. Saito hadn’t named the cop, thus sending the police into a feeding frenzy while they tried to find the mole.

That was on the cop side. On the yakuza side, Kaneko and Saito had long been at odds with each other. Lately, Saito had wanted to sell speed to the convoy of truck drivers who made their way through Saitama, but Kaneko didn’t want any part of it. Kaneko’s boss, Nakamura, had allegedly been a meth head in his youth, and Kaneko didn’t want his boss getting involved in a business that might tempt him to return to bad habits. Saito had deliberately spread the rumor, knowing that it would result, through a certain convoluted logic, in making the organization think The Cat was a police stoolie. Saito didn’t have the guts to challenge The Cat himself. He was going to let the organization take care of it.

“So what do you think I should I do with this information?”

“Tell it to Kaneko. As soon as possible.”

Reluctantly I agreed to communicate the situation to Kaneko. I called his office and scheduled an appointment for that night.

It was freezing cold, which didn’t help because I was already getting the shivers. Besides, yakuza offices are spooky enough in broad daylight. Before I could even knock on the door, Kaneko opened it and gestured me inside. He was wearing jeans and a dark green sweater. He looked like a yachting instructor.

I sat down on the sofa, and this time I drank the tea. I told The Cat everything I knew.

He nodded as I spoke, closing his eyes, fingers spread out on the table. “Thank you. I now understand. I owe you for this,” he said.

“Maybe it’s not my place to say this,” I dared, foolishly, “but rather than having to deal with this crap, why don’t you just leave the organization?”

The Cat opened his eyes and took a deep breath. “Look at me. If I dress like this, I look like any other businessman on the train on his day off. But if I roll up my sleeves”—which he then began to do—“that’s the end of the pretty picture.” From his wrists, extending up his arms as far as I could see, were gaudy, elaborate tattoos. You couldn’t see a vestige of bare skin.

“I’m long past forty, and I’ve branded myself for life. I’ve got no education, no diploma. I don’t have social security or health insurance. I have money in the bank, and I have this organization. Where could I go? If I run, the Sumiyoshi
-
kai will hunt me down and kill me because they’ll think I’ve turned into a dog for the cops. If I stay, I have a chance to survive. It’s not much of a life, but I’m not ready to throw it away. So I’ll deal with this problem.”

I thanked him for the tea and got ready to leave. He put his hand on my shoulder and looked me in the eyes.

“You’ve saved my life. I don’t forget these things. If there’s anything you need—information, women, money—come talk to me. There are some debts that are never repayable. I’ll owe you until I die.”

“I didn’t really do much.”

“It’s not how much you do that counts, it’s what you get done.”

“Then what I’d like is information. I don’t want it if it has strings attached, though. I don’t ever want to owe a yakuza.”

“That’s not a problem. But I’ll tell you now: I will share information with you on what other yakuza groups are up to, but not our own. Our business remains our business. You can ask questions and I won’t lie to you, but if it involves us I’ll tell you I won’t discuss it. Is that understood?”

“Understood.”

“You sure you don’t need any pussy?”

“No, I’m okay.”

“Is it because you like boys?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“Well, then, all right.” He walked me to the door and shook my hand.

Two weeks later the Saitama police were once again drinking green tea at The Cat’s office. I never asked what had happened to Saito; Kaneko and I never discussed the incident again.

From that point, Kaneko and I carried on a very businesslike relationship. I’d drop by for tea every couple of weeks, and I’d always call in advance. He’d give me some leads on a few stories, we’d chat about the predations of yakuza life versus that of reporter life, and then we’d go our separate ways. He’d always try to fix me up with a hot Japanese woman, and I’d always decline.

Having The Cat on my side was a huge plus as a reporter. Of course, I had reservations about taking his information. I was sure that sooner or later he would lean on me for a favor; but he never did. I also wondered if taking information from a man who was, by his own admission, an antisocial lawbreaker was morally defensible. I suppose that’s all part of Informant 101, but still I had qualms. Eventually, I came to understand the lesson that had been taught to me from the beginning: information is neither good nor evil; information is what information is. The people providing the information have their reasons and motives, many of them impure. What matters is the purity of the information, not the person.

Thanks to The Cat, at one point in time, I knew when a gang war was breaking out between yakuza factions before the police did. It helped me stay on the ball. He was the best source a crime reporter could ask for, since it’s always better to have one great source than a hundred lousy ones.

My focus now was on organized crime, theft, and public security. In other words, the yakuza 24/7.

Yamamoto had moved up and was running the show, which made Nakajima number two in the office. Nakajima and I weren’t really getting along, and everyone had started to refer to us as “the Cobra and the Mongoose.” I got the mongoose moniker because, one, I had more hair, and, two, I was more squirrely, running around manically all the time. Nakajima, on the other hand, had what the Japanese call “a poison tongue”
(dokuzetsu)
, meaning that he was very critical, sarcastic, and good at putting people down. He also had less hair, and he moved with precision. He was orderly, precise, and organized, and I was none of those things. I could see why I annoyed the hell out of him.

Yomawari
, the night visits reporters made to cops at their homes, had become a daily part of my life. If I was lucky, after I bid my cop good night, I could go straight home; my report could wait to be written up in the morning. But most of the time, I’d have to go back to the Urawa office or the press club and type up sports records or other crap before going home to catch a few hours of sleep.

It was on one such night in January that Yamamoto and I found ourselves sitting around the office, eating leftover pizza, when The Cobra walked in; he was his usual subdued self but with an undercurrent of excitement. He would lay out the case for us but not before announcing, “Adelstein, this is supersecret stuff, so keep your big mouth shut.”

•    •    •

According to Cobra’s cop source, a dog breeder near Kumagaya by the name of Gen Sekine was under suspicion of being a serial killer. Sekine was a yakuza, an ex-yakuza, or a yakuza affiliate. In the previous ten years, several people associated with him had seemed just to disappear. There had been a Saitama police investigation when the first three people vanished, but all leads had dried up and nothing came of it. In fact, everyone had forgotten about the original case.

That all changed when Akio Kawasaki, the president of a waste management company, failed to come home. After several days, his wife went to the police. The police showed little interest and asked perfunctory questions: Has your husband exhibited any strange behavior lately? Were there problems at home? Has he ever gone away for a few days without notice? Does he have any enemies?

Mrs. Kawasaki’s replies were negative, but in the course of the questioning, she mentioned her husband having had a disagreement with a dog breeder. Suddenly the officer in charge grew serious, even grave. “If your husband was involved with Sekine,” he said, lowering his voice, “you should brace yourself for the worst.”

Mrs. Kawasaki went home in shock. The police pulled a very cold case out of the morgue.

Two months later, Kawasaki was still missing, and the Saitama police homicide division officially set up a special task force to look into his disappearance. By the time Nakajima’s source brought him into the loop, ten detectives were working on the case. Importantly, the source assured Nakajima that there was no rush to get the story into print. If the
Yomiuri
would wait patiently, we’d get the exclusive. Even the top brass at the Saitama police didn’t know the details of the case yet, so there was little chance of the story leaking to other papers.

All this was pretty heady stuff. Dog breeders, yakuza, missing persons. It was right out of a bad Japanese TV movie. So, relying on our TV detective instincts, we knew why the investigation was focusing not on missing persons or suspicion of murder or anything big-time like that but on the minor charge of fraud. The hurdle for getting a warrant for nonviolent crime was a lot lower than for homicide; once you had a suspect in custody you could interrogate him (or her) for any old thing, including murder. This was standard operating procedure for the homicide guys.

My assignment was to check the newspaper files for anything on the dog breeder or his pet shop, which had the catchy name of African
Kennel. This was before the
Yomiuri
kept an electronic file of its past editions, so this meant going through scrapbooks the old-fashioned, easy-to-get-bored way. Finally, after two days of my eyes bugging out, I found a July 14, 1992, article with a headline that read, “Good-bye Dangerous Animal: Cute Lion Baby to Be Sent to Gunma Prefecture Zoo. Kumagaya Pet Breeder Caught Raising Lion on His Balcony.”

Apparently, Sekine had been raising a lion cub on the balcony of his home when nervous neighbors called animal control. Raising wild animals at home was in violation of several city ordinances, so the cub was shipped to a zoo and Sekine was fined a pittance.

Finding this article was a breakthrough because, among other things, it confirmed the Chinese ideographs for Sekine’s name. In Japanese, the pronunciation of a name alone doesn’t necessarily help much. I once had to look for a Japanese woman whose name we had from her attendance at New York University; we knew the romanized spelling of her name and we knew her age, but there were several kanji variations of her last name and at least twenty kanji combinations for her first. If her romanized name was a misspelling foisted on her by an ignorant American or if the name was spelled in some esoteric way, you can imagine how helpful a database would be. You have to have the kanji to tell who’s who. We could now look Sekine up in available databases using the ideographs.

Sekine, it turned out, was a pretty famous guy—in fact, he was one of the most successful dog breeders in the country. Featured in magazines and television shows, he had single-handedly made the Alaskan malamute one of the most prestigious show dogs in Japan. He claimed in interviews to have lived in Africa, hunted animals in the bush, and stared down threatening tigers. Sekine was losing his hair, and what hair he still had was sprinkled with gray. His little beady eyes gave him a permanent squint, and the furrows in his forehead suggested deep contemplation. His raspy voice sounded as if he’d been smoking Golden Bats (the worst, sometimes best cigarette in Japan) since birth. He owned three shops and had announced plans to create a miniature safari park. In a news program he’d been on recently, he’d told the awestruck interviewer about jumping out of helicopters and wrestling lions to the ground. This is a guy, I thought, who could kill and not flinch.

•    •    •

By the end of January, due mostly to Nakajima’s work and leadership, we had gotten a handle on the cases of four people who were missing and believed to have been offed by Gen Sekine: Kawasaki, a housewife, a yakuza boss, and his driver. But we couldn’t finger the motives.

Our
Yomiuri
team was conducting top secret research. Our plan was to hold off publishing anything until right before the arrest of the dog breeder. That plan fell apart on February 17.

I was at the Saitama police press club typing up some notes when Yamamoto returned from lunch and breathed into my face, reeking of kimchi. “I just had some delicious Korean barbecue,” he said. “Adelstein, do you think I need a breath mint?” he asked.

“Yes, I think a breath mint might be advisable, Yamamoto-san.”

“Okay, go buy me some,” he said, handing me 200 yen.

I took the elevator to the basement convenience store, which was stocked with essentials for emergency situations exactly like this. I picked up a pack of Black-Black, the black supermint chewing gum that turns your tongue and teeth black as well (I’ve never figured out the market for this), and as I was making my way back upstairs, my beeper went off. I dashed back to the press club, and Yamamoto, taking the Black-Black from me, stuck a copy of the sports newspaper
Asuka
in my face.