The waitress brought two demitasses of the Nire Blend and set them down with exquisite care, as though they were priceless artifacts. She bowed and moved away.

We drank the coffee. Harry said positive things about his, but there was some obvious effort behind this. It used to be that he would delight in mocking my gustatory recommendations. I couldn’t help noticing the contrast, and I didn’t care for it.

We made small talk. When the coffee was done, we said good night, and I left him to make my circuitous way back to the hotel.

I wondered if I really believed that the Agency posed little danger to Harry. I supposed that mostly I did. Whether they posed a danger to me was another story. They might have wanted me for help, as Kanezaki had said. Or they might have been looking for payback for Holtzer. I had no way to be sure. Regardless, eliminating Kanezaki’s escort earlier wasn’t exactly going to engender endearment.

And there was Yukiko. She still didn’t feel right to me, and I had no way of knowing whether she was hooked up with the Agency or with someone else.

Back at the hotel, I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, again unable to sleep.

So it wasn’t Midori, after all, I thought.

The Agency instead of Midori. Talk about a fucking consolation prize.

Enough. Let it go.

I was suddenly less certain than I had been the night before that this would be my last in Tokyo. I stared at the ceiling for a long time before descending into sleep.

THE NEXT MORNING I took the bullet train back to Osaka. Arriving early in the afternoon at bustling Shin-Osaka station, I was surprised to find that it felt good to be back. Maybe I’d gotten tired of living in hotels. Or maybe it was something about knowing that I was going to have to leave again, this time permanently.

I knew I’d been clean when I left Tokyo, but the two-and-a-half-hour train ride had afforded me no new opportunities to check my back. That’s a long time for me, especially given my recent run-in with Kanezaki and company, and to ease my discomfort I took an appropriately circuitous route before catching a Tanimachi line train to Miyakojima, where I took the stairs of the A4 exit to the street.

For no particular reason I made a left around the police box at the Miyakojima Hon-dori intersection, maneuvering around the hundreds of commuter bicycles jammed in all directions around the exit. I could as easily have made a right, past the local high school and toward the Okawa River. One of the things that had attracted me to the high-rise in Belfa is that the complex is approachable from all directions.

I took a left at Miyakojima Kita-dori, then a right against traffic down a one-way street, then another left. The move against traffic would impede anyone’s attempts at vehicular surveillance. And each turn gave me an opportunity to unobtrusively glance behind me while putting me on a narrower, quieter road than the last. Anyone hoping to follow me on foot would have to stay close or lose me. There were dozens of high-rises in the area, too, and the fact that I might have been going to any one of them was another factor that would have rendered ineffective anything other than close-range surveillance.

In some ways the neighborhood was the poster child for bad zoning. There were shiny glass-and-steel condominiums across from corrugated and I-beam parking garages. Single-family homes perched alongside recycling plants and foundries. A new multistory school turned its proud granite façade away from its neighbor, a dilapidated relic of a car repair shop, like an ungrateful child ashamed of an ailing parent.

On the other hand, the residents didn’t seem to mind the shambles. On the contrary: everywhere were small signs of the pride the locals took in their dwellings. The monotonous macadam and corrugated metal were relieved by small riots of potted bamboo, lavender, and sunflowers. Here was a carefully arranged cairn of volcanic rocks, there, a display of dried coral. One house had concealed what would have been an ugly ferroconcrete wall with a lovingly tended garden of angel’s trumpet, sage, and lavender.

I lived on the thirty-sixth floor of one of the twin high-rises in the Belfa complex, in a three-bedroom corner apartment. The place was larger than I needed and most of the rooms went unused, but I liked living on the top floor, with a view of the city, above it all. Also, at the time I’d rented it, I thought it would be to my advantage to take a place that didn’t fit the profile of what a lone man, recently disappeared and with minimal needs, would take for an apartment. In the end, of course, it hadn’t mattered.

I tell myself that I like to live in places like Belfa because parents are inherently watchful of strangers, and once they decide you belong they can form an unconscious but effective obstacle to an ambush. But I know there’s more to it than that. I don’t have a family and never will, and I’m probably drawn to such environments not just for operational security but for some other, more vicarious form of security, as well. There was a time when I didn’t seem to need such things, when I would have been amused and perhaps even vaguely disgusted at the notion of living like some sort of psychic vampire, a lingering revenant pressed up against one-way glass, looking with forlorn and futile eyes at the ordinary life that fate had denied him.

It changes your priorities. Hell, it changes your damn values.

I used a pay phone to access a voice-mail account attached to a special phone in my apartment, a sound-activated unit with a sensitive speakerphone that functions like a transmitter. The unit silently dials a voice-mail account if someone enters the apartment without knowing the code that disengages the phone, letting me know in advance and from a safe distance whether I’ve had any unexpected visitors. An identical setup had saved me in Tokyo from a Holtzer-inspired ambush, and I tend to stick with what works. I’d been checking the account daily from Tokyo without incident, and the mailbox was empty this time as well, so I knew my apartment had gone unmolested during my absence.

From the pay phone, I walked the short distance to the Belfa complex. A softball game was under way on the field to my right. Some children were playing kickball by a granite sculpture garden in front of the building. An old man swerved past me on a bicycle, a laughing grandchild perched on the handles.

I used the front entrance, taking care as always to approach in such a way that the security camera facing the building would get a picture only of my back. Such precautions are part of my routine, but, as Tatsu had pointed out, the cameras are everywhere and you can’t hope to spot them all.

I took the elevator to the thirty-sixth floor and walked down the corridor to my apartment. I checked the small piece of translucent tape I had left at the bottom of the door and found it intact, still attached to the jamb. As I’d told Harry so many times, a good defense has to be layered.

I unlocked the door and went inside. Everything was as I’d left it. Which wasn’t saying much. Beyond the futon and nightstand in one of the bedrooms, there was an olive leather couch, new but not new-looking, set against the wall facing the west of the city, where I sometimes sat to watch the sun set. A sprawling Gabeh rug covering an expanse of polished wooden floor, its strata of greens and blues interspersed with a dozen whimsical splotches of cream that were probably intended to denote goats in a pastoral setting, its weave dense and soft enough to have once served as a mattress for the nomads who made it. A massive double-bank writing desk that had made its way to Japan from England, its surface dominated by a black leather insert appropriately worn by more than a century of pressure from the pen points that moved over its surface to transact business across the oceans, conveying news that might be weeks old by the time it reached relatives abroad, announcing births and deaths, offering congratulations, felicitations, condolences, and regrets. One of those fantastically complicated but astonishingly comfortable Herman Miller Aeron desk chairs that I’d picked up on a whim from a recently demised technology start-up in Shibuya’s Bit Valley. Atop the desk, a Macintosh G4 computer and a gorgeous, 23-inch flat panel monitor, about which I’d said nothing to Harry because he was under the impression that I was a computer primitive and I saw no advantage in letting him know that I have my own knack for getting behind the odd firewall when the need arises.