A GAME OF FOUR

Chapter Three — Four Days

I spent the first day being Yuki Vale in small ways.

Not the meeting that was Thursday, two days away still, and walking into Ren Nakamura's world before I was ready was the kind of mistake that looked like confidence and functioned like sabotage. I had not spent three years preparing to sabotage myself in Tokyo on day two.

So I did the small things instead.

Coffee first took place three streets from the apartment that I had identified from the letting agency's neighborhood guide, the kind of café that catered to international business travelers without being designed for them, which meant it felt like a place rather than a service. I ordered in Japanese functional, accent-neutral Japanese from someone who had studied rather than grown up in it, which was accurate for Yuki Vale and therefore useful. The barista answered in English anyway, which happened sometimes and said nothing about either of us except that she had made a reasonable assumption and I had no reason to correct it.

I sat at the window table and watched the street and drank the coffee and was Yuki Vale watching a Tokyo street curious, professional, mildly jet-lagged, entirely unremarkable.

Underneath that I was cataloguing everything.

The rhythm of the street, how people moved, what they noticed, what they ignored. The camera above the convenience store across the road, its angle, what it covered and what it didn't. The man in the grey coat who had been reading the same page of his newspaper for twelve minutes. He was not reading. He was waiting for something or watching something or both, which were not the same activity and had different implications, and I filed him without conclusion the same way I had filed the chair and the window latch insufficient data, sufficient awareness.

Tokyo revealed itself in details London didn't have.

The melody that played before train doors closed four specific notes, the same at every station, the sound of the city keeping its own time. Vending machines on every corner glowing in the grey morning like small warm monuments, selling things that had no vending machine equivalent in London: hot coffee in cans, warm corn soup, umbrellas for the rain that was apparently always either coming or just finished. The precise silence inside crowded spaces trains full of people, all of them quiet, the collective decision of a city that had decided public space was shared space and shared space deserved consideration.

I noticed all of it.

Filed all of it.

Finished the coffee and went back to the apartment to work.

Yuki Vale's professional life required maintenance the way a garden required regular, specific attention to things that would become visible problems if neglected. I spent the morning on emails responses to the correspondence that had been accumulating in her inbox since I had been on the plane, the ongoing threads with the three mid-level record labels whose executives believed they were in a slow professional courtship with an international producer who had interesting taste and frustrating availability.

I had cultivated that reputation deliberately.

Yuki Vale did not respond immediately. She responded thoughtfully, after apparent consideration, in a way that suggested her attention was valuable and she was choosing to give it. This was not difficult to perform because it was functionally true my attention was valuable, I was choosing to give it, and the choosing was simply happening for different reasons than the labels believed.

I wrote four emails. Deleted two. Rewrote one from scratch because the tone had drifted too eager, too available, a version of Yuki Vale that didn't match the eighteen months of correspondence she was supposed to be continuous with. Small inconsistencies were the things that unraveled identities. Not dramatic errors. The accumulated weight of small things that didn't quite match.

I rewrote it until it matched.

Send it.

I opened a new document and began the research I had been delaying since the plane, not the files, I had the files memorized. Something else. Something I had been approaching carefully, from angles, the way you approached things that were too large to look at directly.

Ren Nakamura's music.

I had listened to it before analytically, as research, the way I had consumed everything about all four men. His catalog. His evolution from the early work, produced when he was seventeen and raw and clearly not yet managing what came out of him, through the increasingly controlled middle period, through the three most recent albums that had made him the most streamed artist in the world for three consecutive years running.

I had listened to it as data.

I had not listened to it as music.

I put the first album on now through the apartment's speaker system, which was better than it had any right to be for a serviced rental and went to the window and looked at Tokyo and let it be music rather than research.

It was extraordinary.

This was the problem.

I had prepared for many things. I had prepared for Ren Nakamura to be perceptive, difficult, suspicious, and guarded. I had prepared for the eight-minute email response and whatever it meant about his particular quality of attention. I had prepared for trust Number Four and its implications.

I had not prepared for his music to be the most honest thing I had heard in three years.

Not honest in a simple way. Honest in the way of something that had been made by someone who understood the distance between what people performed and what they actually were, and had decided in the music, if nowhere else not to perform. The lyrics were not confessional in the way that some artists used confession as its own form of performance. They were quieter than that. Observation rather than declaration. The music of someone who watched the world very carefully and found it both beautiful and unbearable and had made peace with holding both simultaneously.

Ren was the only one who apologized when he won.

I stood at the window for a long time.

The third track ended and the fourth began and outside Tokyo continued being Tokyo indifferent, enormous, precise and I thought about a man who had sat in my father's lectures fourteen years ago and learned to look at the world from the wrong angle and had apparently taken that lesson somewhere entirely different from the others.

I thought about eight minutes.

About reviewing your inquiry personally.

About my father's voice, careful and controlled and not quite managing either, saying something isn't right about the timing and don't trust Number Four and come home safe.

I thought about the chair at the wrong angle. The window latch. The one centimeter of November air.

Someone had been in this apartment before I arrived.

Someone had a key to my father's house in London.

Someone had stood outside his study window on three consecutive nights and left without entering until the night I left, when they entered immediately and found the drawer empty and called someone and said don't tell Elijah, Tokyo is where we need her.

I was where they needed me.

Which meant I was not only running a plan.

I was inside someone else's.

The music continued the fourth track building into something that was almost too much and then pulling back, the restraint of someone who understood that what you didn't say was as important as what you did.

I had one day before Thursday.

One day to finish becoming Yuki Vale completely. One day to prepare for a meeting with a man who had responded to my email in eight minutes and whose music was honest in ways I had not expected and who my father had warned me about in a recording made the night before everything fell apart.

One day.

I turned the music off.

Went back to the desk.

I opened the research document and began writing everything I knew about Ren Nakamura. The files hadn't told me the things that only came from listening, from watching, from the accumulated texture of someone's work over twelve years.

The things that would help me understand him.

The things that were going to make Thursday significantly more complicated than I had planned.

I wrote for three hours.

At some point the November rain started quiet and persistent against the window, the same rain that had followed me from London, or a different rain that felt the same, the sound of weather that committed to itself and continued.

My phone lit up on the desk.

An unknown number. Tokyo area code.

I looked at it for the length of three rings.

Did not answer.

The call ended.

No voicemail.

I sat very still in the apartment that someone had been inside before me, in the city where someone was waiting for me to arrive, holding a phone that had just received a call from a number that didn't exist in any directory I had access to.

Thursday felt very close suddenly.

And for the first time since London for the first time since I had turned the brass lamp off and walked out of my father's study and told myself I was ready I was not entirely sure that I was.