The Moving Blade

Chapter 3

Chapter 3Hiroshi Shimizu leaned back in his office chair and smiled at his computer screen. “Got him!” he said to Akiko, his assistant.

Akiko let out a squeal of delight as she stepped over to read the English email on the other side of the small office. Hiroshi pointed to the email in the center of his desktop. Around the email a profusion of Excel sheets, bank statements, flow charts and contracts overlapped in offset layers.

Hiroshi read the rest of the email, scrolling down past two photos of the scam artist. In one he was bald and dumpy in a wrinkled suit, and in the other, he sported a thick gold chain over a buffed, tanned chest, gripping a drink at a beach bar.

“Is that even the same guy?” Akiko laughed.

“Yes. Wait. Oh, no. They’re going to prosecute him there.”

“At least they got him,” Akiko said. “Let’s go celebrate. Lunch outside someplace?”

“It’s taken us six months to put all this together. The Hawaiian FBI gets all the glory. We do all the work.”

Akiko hummed in quiet consolation.

“Let’s at least celebrate with a couple of espressos!” Akiko said. An espresso machine gleamed from its perch on top of an old metal file cabinet.

The smell of fresh coffee would help cover up the disappointment, and the disinfectant. Hiroshi appreciated the rare privilege of having his own office, but it was converted from a janitor’s supply closet, and still smelled of it. Far from the noisy main building, it was quiet enough to call overseas on international cases. He was the only one in the homicide department where he’d been assigned who could speak English well enough to work with overseas cases and the only one who could make sense of financial forms in either language. He should have had a separate department, but he was assigned to homicide. Money and murder go together, the chief said the one and only time he stopped by.

“I can’t believe they won’t send him back,” Hiroshi said, shaking his head at the screen. “What he stole was from Japanese pensioners here.” Hiroshi pushed back his hair, grown long since his hibernating instincts took over after the case last summer. It hung on both sides of his face like blinders keeping his eyes on the files, flow charts, account graphs, bank transfers, and victims’ statements that filled his days, and since he wasn’t sleeping much, filled his nights.

Hiroshi mumbled, “Those American lawyers are good, but…”

“It’s not fair, but that’s the way it is,” Akiko said, pressing the button for a double espresso.

Unlike Hiroshi, Akiko was the most regular of workers, coming in promptly at the same time every day, usually leaving about the same time, and in between ensuring the office remained in order. Her tight skirts, chic haircut and big eyes drew appreciative stares on Tokyo trains, but went largely unnoticed in the homicide offices. The detectives were too busy and overworked for flirtation or fantasy. Besides, she was strong and forthright, not cute and demure. She looked at faces, not at the floor.

Hiroshi scrolled back to the top of the email and started reading it again, shaking his head, barely noticing the cup Akiko set in front of him as he started writing an email back. “Our prisons have room. Just for once, I want to see them convicted. Face to face.”

Akiko went back to make a second espresso for herself. “Well, at least you can finally get to Boston. I’ll rebook that flight for you.”

“Cancel Boston.”

She inhaled, watching the thick coffee dribble into her cup. Hiroshi knew what she was going to say. She’d canceled and rebooked the flight a dozen times as Hiroshi decided to go, then not go, to meet his girlfriend, friend, lover, whatever she was.

Akiko took a deep, yoga-style breath. “What happened?”

“Everything happened.” Hiroshi sipped his espresso. With a loud series of clicks, he checked the last email from Sanae. He’d met her on the case the summer before, the one where he almost got killed. Since then, he’d been trying to go see her after she moved to Boston to put her daughter in high school. In between white-collar crime cases, he would book the visit. Then, Sanae would ask to reschedule. Then he’d rebook, or Akiko would. He was never sure if she still wanted to meet, was nervous about it, felt bad to ask him to fly there, or didn’t want anything more to do with him. The back-and-forth had exhausted him.

Akiko said, “Why don’t you just get on a plane and talk it out there?”

“Skype’s talking.”

“Not really.”

Akiko took her espresso back to her desk and sat down, sipping it slowly and looking at her screen, purposefully avoiding looking at Hiroshi writing to the Hawaiian detectives.

Hiroshi leaned back from the screen. “I can’t believe they’re not sending him back for trial here.”

“As for Boston, the last-minute cancellation fees you’ve wasted would have bought several tickets. All any woman wants is someone to make an effort.”

“An effort.” Hiroshi sighed. “That’s what I—”

“You can’t do this forever.”

“I know. I can’t send this email either.” He deleted it, as he had so many others recently. He stood up to stretch, noticed the espresso, took a few sips and stretched some more, wincing a bit as he did.

“Still hurts?” Akiko asked.

“Before with the bone bruises, I couldn’t move. Now, I can’t sit in one place for too long.”

“That means they’re healing.”

The injury had become an excuse to hole up in front of his computer. He drank too much coffee, ate from the convenience store, and slept in the office on a foldout futon chair. He knew all that was not healthy as his face turned pasty, his eyes puffy and his shoulders stiff. For days at a stretch, he talked only to Akiko or overseas investigators, but consoled himself with having cracked six big cases, about one a month, a record of sorts.

But none of the prosecutions took place in Japan, so everything he did felt done at a distance. He never saw anything more of the criminals than their financial records, just like he never saw anymore of Sanae than her face on the screen. Without Akiko, without her energy and the stream of espresso, he would be totally isolated. He’d even quit going to meetings, always coming up with an excuse to stay in his office.

Akiko got out of her chair, which she did when she could no longer stand either the monotony of work or Hiroshi’s inertia, and went back to the espresso machine. When she got really exasperated, she found some excuse to go gossip with the staff in the main building. Hiroshi heard her shake the bag of coffee beans like a maraca.

“Yes, but just a single,” Hiroshi said. “And I’m still not going to Boston.” He didn’t want to say that the best four years of his life had been spent there studying, and in love. He worried that if he went, he would never leave again, never come back to Tokyo.

Akiko refilled the coffee bean chute and pressed the button for another espresso. After the loud grind and quick brew, she took a cup to Hiroshi and then made another for herself. She took her cup back to her desk and flopped down into her chair, shrugging. She pulled her cellphone from her purse to see if any of her friends had called or texted.

“I need a new keyboard,” Hiroshi said.

Akiko made a note.

“And a new mouse pad.”

Akiko bounced her head sarcastically and wrote that down too.

“And more of that air freshener. The smell of cleaning fluids really lingers.”

Akiko wrote that down.

Without Akiko, Hiroshi also knew he couldn’t have gotten even the simplest of things done. Akiko didn’t seem to mind the chipped veneer desks with stubborn drawers or the rust-edged file cabinets, but she knew just how to use department funds to acquire anything they needed new—ergonomic chair, LED lights, a trashcan. She had told Hiroshi she was relieved to have been transferred from the main detective offices to help Hiroshi with investment scams, embezzlements and accounting fraud cases. It was better than being in the constant chaos of the main office, with all the desks pushed together, heaped with teetering mountains of folders. She spoke English almost as well as he did, which helped with the investigative reports they sent overseas.

When the phone rang, Akiko looked at Hiroshi. He had promised to answer every other phone call, but he ignored the ringing until Akiko gave in—again—and picked up. After a minute, she held the phone up in the air and announced, “It’s Sakaguchi. Important. He says your cellphone is off.”

Hiroshi looked at his cellphone to make sure it was off and plunged back into his screen. “I’m not here,” he said.

“He can hear you,” Akiko wiggled the phone at him.

“I told you no calls.”

Akiko went back to the phone, “As you just heard, he won’t take calls.”

Hiroshi went back to his screen, trying to shut out her continued conversation with Sakaguchi.

Akiko held the phone out. “He says he’ll call the chief if he has to.”

Hiroshi disliked the chief, and avoided him scrupulously, but he liked Sakaguchi. More than that, he trusted him. Sakaguchi had wrestled his way out of a working-class section of Osaka to reach sumo’s makushita ranking, the third highest division, one of the youngest wrestlers to do so ever. When a knee injury wouldn’t heal, he became a policeman in Osaka and started the path to detective, which was as long and steep and grueling as for sumo. When Sakaguchi was promoted—against his will—to Head of Homicide after last summer’s case when Hiroshi got injured and Takamatsu suspended, most of the department felt it was neither entirely deserved nor entirely undeserved.

Akiko hung up after promising Sakaguchi that Hiroshi would call. “Sakaguchi calls. You don’t answer. Takamatsu calls. You don’t answer. Jim Washington at Interpol calls. You answer.”

Jim Washington. He needed to call him about this Hawaii case. After last summer’s near-fatal case, Hiroshi became convinced he would be healthier and happier—and safer—working at Interpol. His contact there, Jim Washington, hinted a permanent office position might be opening. Interpol would have an international mindset, computer support, travel expenses, and an office without the leftover smell of cleaning supplies. The Hawaii scam he just broke up would be the icing on his application.

Akiko continued. “Sakaguchi has always been on your side, and he needs your English.”

“Well, you go then.”

“I’d like to.”

Hiroshi leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on his desk. He turned on his phone to find his inbox jammed with calls from Sakaguchi, and from Takamatsu, who was still on disciplinary leave for misconduct. He pressed Sakaguchi’s number and tried to sip his espresso but the cup was empty.

Akiko kept her head down and pretended not to listen.

“Free sumo tickets?” Hiroshi joked when Sakaguchi answered.

“My old stablemates can get you some,” Sakaguchi said. “But right now, I need you here.”

“Last time I heard that, I almost got killed.”

“I’m not Takamatsu,” Sakaguchi said.

Hiroshi thought that over.

“I really need your English. Nothing more,” Sakaguchi said.

“Where are you exactly?”