Graveyard of Memories By Barry Eisler
chapter one
If there’s one lesson I learned early on during the decades I’ve spent in this business, it’s that of all the qualities that distinguish a hard target from everyone else, among the most important is self-control. Yes, you have to be able to think like the opposition, which enables you to spot the ambush. And yes, you have to be able to take immediate, violent action in case—oops—your ability to spot the ambush fails. And yes, sentiment is a weakness. But fundamental to the rest is self-control. Because if you’re not in control of yourself, someone else is, most likely an enemy, and in my business, an enemy isn’t someone who wants the promotion you’re after, or who covets your corner office, or who wants to beat you on the tennis court or golf course or display a better car in his driveway. In my business, an enemy is someone determined to end your life, and probably with the means to bring it about.
But there’s another lesson, too, one that took longer to learn and that, in the end, is even more important. You have to live with what you’ve done. Not the killing as such. If you couldn’t do that, you wouldn’t have gotten into the business in the first place. You wouldn’t have been able to. No, I’m talking about the consequences of killing—to your conscience, your relationships, your future, your life. If you knew at the outset what you understood at the end, would you make the same choices, take the same risks, accept the same sacrifices? No. No one would. You can’t appreciate the weight of that burden until after you’ve assumed it. You can’t comprehend what it really means.
But in Tokyo in 1972, I didn’t know any of that. I was going on guts, instinct, and youthful reflexes. The real hard target skills came later. And acquiring them almost killed me.
I was a CIA bagman at the time, part of a cash-for-contracts program that got exposed in 1975. Google “Lockheed bribery scandals” and you can find out all about it. Well, not all about it. A lot more would have come out if I hadn’t been on cleanup detail. You have to remember, the history the powers-that-be feed you always excludes what they managed to bury. Or whom.
My case officer was a guy named Sean McGraw, a cantankerous Korean War vet and old Asia hand. Christians in Action had some Japanese politicians on the payroll, an army acquaintance had told me, handing me McGraw’s number, and they needed someone with an Asian face and local language skills to handle the cash. I had just returned to the States from Vietnam, having left the military under a cloud, the origins of which I was able to understand only years later. My mother, the American half of the marriage, had just died; I had no brothers or sisters; and America felt even less like a home than it had when my mother had taken me there at eight years old, after my father had been killed in the street riots that rocked Tokyo in the summer of 1960. Japan hardly felt like a home, either, but what other prospects did I have? Whether it was fate, or circumstance, or just bad luck, a lead to the secret world represented my path of least resistance.
The mechanics of the job were simple enough. Once a week or so, I would pick up a cheap shoulder bag from McGraw. Sometimes the handoff would be on a train; sometimes at a tachigui—eating while standing—street stall; sometimes, the symbolism not lost even on my younger self, in a public urinal. I would then exchange the full bag I was carrying for an empty one carried by a flunky from the other side, a plump and incongruously garrulous middle-aged Japanese guy named Miyamoto, who fancied floral-patterned ties that were flamboyantly wide and loud even by the tragic sartorial standards of the day. Two cutouts, so a lot of protection for the principals. Initially, I wasn’t even sure who the principals were. I was mildly curious—I was barely twenty years old, after all, and didn’t yet understand that the corollary to the expression “knowledge is power” is “knowledge can be dangerous”—but I had no real way of finding out. I’d looked inside the bag enough times to know it always contained fifty thousand dollars in cash. But the choice of currency offered no clues to the money’s provenance, or to its destination. The yen was laughably weak; the euro had barely been conceived in Brussels, let alone born; and though Nixon had recently taken America off the gold standard, the greenback was still the world’s reserve currency, accepted with no questions asked from New York to Riyadh to Timbuktu.
I was na?ve, but I wasn’t stupid. I knew anyone with working arms and legs could be a bagman. So I understood I wasn’t being paid just to carry a bag. I was being paid to take a fall. If it came to that. The trick for me was to make sure it wouldn’t. And that’s where I screwed up.
I had just completed the exchange with Miyamoto in Ueno Park, part of Shitamachi, old Tokyo, the stalwart remnants of the city that had survived both the Great Kantō quake of 1923 and the American firebombs of some twenty years later. Even back then, the city was immense—the population over eleven million at night, with another two million swelling the streets and trains and office buildings during the day; forests of blinking neon in the entertainment quarters of Ikebukuro and Shibuya and Shinjuku; soot-covered, multilevel elevated highways dissecting neighborhoods and darkening sidewalks; everywhere a cacophony of truck engines and commerce and construction work. The war, barely a generation distant, still clung to the country’s consciousness like a nightmare from which its people had only recently awakened, and the city’s energy was not yet so much about pursuing prosperity as it was about putting distance between the hope and progress of today and the horrors and loss of the recent past.
I was wandering among the street stalls along Ameyoko, short for Ameya-Yokochō, Candy Alley, so named because the area’s earliest commercial establishments had been ameya, or candy stores. That the moniker continued to work as shorthand for America Alley after the war, when the street had become an important black market for American goods, was mere serendipity. Either way, its stalls, most of them squeezed between narrow buildings to one side and the monstrous bulk of the elevated JR train tracks to the other, offered everything from spices and dried food and fresh fish, to clothes and hardware and sporting goods, to all manner of electronics—most of it cheap, all of it attracting crowds from morning to night.
It was a typical summer afternoon in Tokyo, which is to say oppressively hot, humid, and polluted, and the air was heavy with the smells of yakitori and takoyaki and the other street delicacies of Ameyoko. Hawkers held their hands to either side of their mouths and cried out, Hai, dozo! Hai, irasshai! this way and that over the sounds of nearby truck traffic and the occasional passing train, gesturing to shoppers being carried along by the slow-moving pedestrian river, entreating prospects, handing out samples, reeling in customers from the endless, shifting flow. I bought a cup of iced watermelon juice from a rheumy-eyed oyaji who looked like he’d been manning his fruit stall from the time the city had been called Edo. He took my ten yen with a wordless, toothless smile, and I moved off, sipping gratefully, sweat trickling down my back under the slight pressure of the empty shoulder bag I’d taken from Miyamoto, the late afternoon heat seemingly magnified rather than alleviated by the awnings draped haphazardly over either side of the alley.
I had no particular purpose in being there that day; I had simply wandered over after the handoff to Miyamoto, and was killing time before heading to the Kodokan to train in judo. I was new to the sport, but I liked it. It built on the wrestling skills I had acquired in high school, adding throws to takedowns, and armlocks and strangles to pins. I trained for several hours every day, the demands of my job being light and the hours flexible, and in only three months I’d gotten as good as any new shodan in the training hall. They wouldn’t let me formally test for black belt until I’d been there for a year, though, and the restriction, which I found stupid and unfair, only spurred me to train harder so I could defeat more of my “superiors” and prove to them just how wrong they really were.
It’s funny to consider how important things like that felt to me then. Proving people wrong. Fighting stupidity. Wanting formal recognition. It took me a long time to learn that proving people wrong is purposeless, fighting stupidity is futile, and formal recognition prevents people from underestimating you—and thereby from ceding to you surprise and other tactical advantages.
I turned left under the elevated tracks just as a JR train went by overhead, its roar rattling shop windows and obliterating the din of the crowd. Seconds later, it was gone. The crowd was thinner here, pachinko parlors and ramen shops and other such indoor attractions more prevalent than stalls. I passed a cutlery shop and slowed to examine the offerings displayed in its window.
Someone slammed into my shoulder hard enough to spill what was left of my watermelon juice. I looked up. A chinpira, low-level yakuza punk or wannabe, was glaring at me, the rolled-up sleeves of his black tee shirt showing off a weightlifter’s muscles. “Oi,” he growled, “koryaa, doko mite aruitonen, kono bokega!” Hey a*shole, watch where you’re going!
If the same thing were to happen today, I would apologize regardless of who was at fault, while taking a step back, blading my body slightly to offer a reduced target profile, and raising my hands palms-forward in a gesture ostensibly placating, but in fact tactically sound. I would convey with my tone, my posture, and my attitude that the aggressor was in fact fortunate I was being reasonable, while at the same time offering him no challenge, no insult, and no hostility, nothing but apparent respect and an opportunity to move on with no loss of face. I would do all this while simultaneously being intensely aware of what was happening at the periphery of the action, and never assuming the aggressor was alone. If he turned out to be too stupid to take the hint, I would act suddenly and decisively—no warnings, no posturing, no gradual escalation. And I would leave the scene the moment the threat was neutralized, keeping my head down and avoiding the eyes of potential witnesses.
But that would be today. Back then, I was fresh from combat, poisoned by testosterone, and filled with inchoate resentment at the world. After what I’d seen and done and survived, I didn’t have to take shit from anyone, least of all some street punk who thought he could woof me into submission.
So rather than doing anything sensible, I took a step toward him and said, “Urusei na, omae koso kiotsukero yo!” Loosely translated, Go f*ck yourself, a*shole!
The chinpira’s eyes narrowed and his nostrils flared. “Oi!” he bellowed. I thought he was yelling at me, but then I saw movement beyond him at the entrance to the pachinko parlor—two buddies, similarly attired, similarly bulky, and now looking at me with malevolent intent.
Three against one, and each of them bigger than I was. The first guy raised his right arm and began to jab a finger in my chest. Apparently thinking this was going to be just a fight, or better yet, a simple beat-down. But I had already clicked into combat mode.
My muscle memory was built on wrestling then, not yet judo. I parried the incoming right arm with my left, caught him under the triceps with my right hand, swept his arm through and past, and simultaneously scooted behind him—a circle drag, a setup I had favored on the mat in high school. He tried to spin, but I trapped his right arm against his side, my hands circling his waist, following his movement so that we were facing his buddies, who were now moving in from only a few meters away.
What I did next was all stupid reflex. I dropped my hips, got my weight under him, and exploded up and arched back in a suplay, another wrestling move that had served me well in teenage competition. The chinpira’s body rocketed over me like the last car on an off-the-tracks roller coaster, one arm still secured to his side, the other flailing crazily. I saw the world sail past in my peripheral vision, the ground looming, and then there was a shock up my arms as the back of the chinpira’s head smashed into the pavement. I heard his skull split from the impact, followed an instant later by another crack—his knees hitting the ground as his legs continued to accelerate over and past his ruined cranium.
I rolled to my side and scrambled to my feet just as the other two reached me. I might have been able to escape, but stun-and-run wasn’t yet part of my close-combat toolkit. My default was continuous offense. So I closed with the guy to my right, a tough-looking punk as ugly as a gargoyle, absorbing a punch to the cheek on the way in and going for his eyes. The other guy grabbed at me, got ahold of the shoulder bag, and hauled me back with it. I turned toward him, slipped an arm between the strap and my body, and bent forward. The bag came free and he stumbled away. The gargoyle jumped on my back. I tried to roll him but lost my balance. We both went down, but I twisted en route and managed to plant an elbow in his side so he took most of the impact. I scrambled on top of him, not yet experienced enough to know the importance of getting clear when there are or could be multiple attackers, grabbed his head, and sank my thumbs into his eye sockets. He screamed and thrashed and I bellowed back, an engine of destruction, gripping tighter, trying to force my thumbs through his eyes and into his brain. Then his buddy was back, throwing punches—I was lucky he didn’t have a knife, or even a pipe—and I released the gargoyle and trained my attention on the more immediate problem. Whatever he saw in my expression, he decided he wanted no part of it. He turned and sprinted away. I almost went after him, the combat switch much easier to flick on than off, but somehow got hold of myself. I glanced around. A cluster of people had gathered in a circle around us, ominously quiet amid the background noise of Ueno. The first chinpira was lying still; the second was writhing on the ground, clutching his face and screaming. Shit. Instinctively I looked down and shouldered through the onlookers.
I circled back to the crowds of Ameyoko, drifted along for a few minutes while discreetly checking my back, then made my way to Okachimachi Station, where I caught a JR train. My heart was racing and my hands were shaking and I felt like I must look guilty of something. But none of the afternoon train riders, mostly uniformed schoolchildren and a few pensioners sweating in their shirtsleeves, seemed to take any particular notice of me.
I got off at Tokyo Station and made my way to the street. It didn’t even occur to me that someone might be trying to follow me and I was lucky no one was; I was just putting distance between myself and the incident. Once outside, I started to think.
How badly had I screwed up? I wasn’t sure. I realized I hadn’t handled the whole thing well. I wasn’t a civilian; I couldn’t afford to take civilian risks or indulge civilian impulses. I’d already done the exchange when the whole thing happened, yes, but I was still part of something covert, and I had to accept the discipline that came with that. I couldn’t be discreet “when it counted.” I had to remember, I had to know, that it always counted.
All right, a good lesson. But what had it cost me to learn it? Maybe…not too much. With luck, the one I took down with the suplay would be all right. But even if I’d killed him—and I knew from the sound his skull had made when it smashed into the pavement that I might have—how could anyone connect it with me? It was a random encounter in a random place. Even if the police were interested in investigating the death of some street hood, and they probably wouldn’t be, witnesses wouldn’t be much help. The only thing they got from me was the bag, which was presumably as anonymous and widespread a model as the Agency had been able to procure. Maybe my fingerprints were on it. But would the punk who fled with it share it with the police? More likely he had already ditched it. And even if he did share it with the police, and even if they could get a print, would they be able to match the print to me? No. They wouldn’t. I was all right.
But the bag. Something about it was nagging at me. And then I realized.
There were three bags, all identical. The procedure was, I would pick up a full bag from McGraw and hand him an empty. I would then repeat the operation in reverse with Miyamoto. Someone always had an empty bag to exchange for a full one. So I had to have a bag for my next exchange with McGraw.
All right. Not such a big deal. I could just tell McGraw I had lost the empty bag.
But no, that wouldn’t work. If I’d been careless enough to lose the bag while it was empty, I might be careless enough to lose it when it was full. I didn’t want to seem like a screw-up, even though—or actually, because—right then the description felt pretty damn accurate. I liked the job and I needed the money. What else was I going to do? In those days, there was no contractor industry for spec op veterans. I’d just been run out of the military and knew there was some kind of cloud hanging over my head. By luck, I’d landed a plum job, one of the few of them, and I didn’t want to risk it.
All right, then, I could just buy a new bag. No one would know the difference.
I suddenly realized I couldn’t recall quite what the bag looked like. It was black, and made of leather…or was it vinyl? I hadn’t really taken that close a look. It was about two inches wide, it had a zipper top…a brass zipper. Or brass color, anyway.
Shit. I headed back into the station and checked in several stores. There were numerous models like the one we used for the exchange, but I didn’t see one I was sure was an exact fit.
I went out again, frustrated and angry at myself. I’d learned in the jungle to pay obsessive attention to my environment. Sounds and smells. Shapes and shadows. A broken branch, a displacement in the elephant grass. Birdsong, or its absence. It all meant something, and often what it meant was the difference between living and dying. And you had to learn to see the patterns in advance because when a silent foe is trying to kill you, you don’t ordinarily get a second chance.
I suddenly understood this was all equally true in urban environments, and that I’d just been too stupid to realize it. Cities had their own rhythms, their own patterns, their own details that counted. I had to learn to pay attention. I had to educate myself.
All right, another good lesson. But what to do about the situation at hand?
I saw only two choices. I could buy a bag and, if McGraw noticed a discrepancy, just tell him it was the bag Miyamoto gave me—and then hope he didn’t have a good way to check with Miyamoto. I could even buy three bags and swap them in one at a time until all the bags we were using were once again identical.
But if McGraw noticed anything amiss, I’d look like worse than a screw-up. I’d look dishonest, too. They might cut me loose for screwing up. But if they caught me lying to try to conceal it, I didn’t know what would happen. What I did know was, getting cut loose might be the least of it.
That left only one real choice. Get in touch with McGraw and come clean. It wasn’t such a big deal, was it? I hadn’t really done anything wrong. At least, nothing I’d have to own up to. I mean, what were they going to do, kill me?