Chapter 5

By ten o'clock that Friday night, Eichiro's living room no longer looked like the quiet den of a lonely bachelor. It looked like a field headquarters.

The old smells of cedar and tatami were still there, but a sharper smell had settled over them: fresh toner. Tomoya had spent the late afternoon at the copier in the Lawson by Kita-Urawa Station, feeding it hundred-yen coins, and the results now lay across the low table. There were A3 enlargements of the Akiyama Press Works floor plan, pencil sketches of counters and sockets, and a stack of glossy catalogues from coffee suppliers and kitchen-equipment dealers that Eichiro had begged from his contacts at the hotel. Two mugs of cold coffee stood on top of the pile, doing duty as paperweights.

In the middle of it all, on its own clean sheet of paper like an offering on an altar, lay the cheque. Arata Real Estate Co., Ltd. Four million yen, with a red company seal pressed across the signature. The banks were shut until Monday, so for two more days it was only a piece of paper. Both men kept glancing at it. Eichiro had already moved it twice, once to the sideboard and once back again, because he didn't trust himself with the sideboard.

Tomoya tapped a ballpoint pen against the catalogue in front of him.

'Hardware gets one and a half million yen, and not a yen more.' He circled a photograph. 'A refurbished three-group La Marzocco Linea, two Mazzer Super Jolly grinders, a water filter so the machine doesn't scale up, and an under-counter fridge for the milk. The dealer in Kappabashi has the Linea listed at nine hundred and eighty thousand. They've had it in the shop for three months and want it gone before the autumn. We'll get it for less.'

Eichiro leaned across the table and pushed his glasses up his nose. 'And the rest? You've spent my mornings telling me what a proper fit-out costs, Tomoya. Four million sounds like a lot, but a decent café that size would normally run to ten.'

'Normally, it would.' Tomoya pulled the floor plan towards him and dragged the pen across the blank space of the old workshop. 'Because normally people put up walls and booths and counters and a ceiling. We're not going to. We leave the concrete floor bare and seal it so it doesn't dust. Walls and ceiling get painted matt black, ducts and all. Then one long counter, and communal tables made from reclaimed timber, with sockets underneath every two feet. No separate little tables for couples to sit and gossip. Nobody comes to us for a chat. They come to refuel.'

He flipped the catalogue shut.

'Raw concrete and black paint cost almost nothing, and it still looks expensive. In ten years' time, everyone will say they invented it.' He looked up. 'And we'll put in a Buffalo wireless router, with the fibre from NTT East running at a hundred megabits. Free, for everyone. In 2006, nobody gives away fast internet. A man who works with computers will walk a kilometre for it.'

Eichiro rubbed his chin. He had spent thirty years running restaurant kitchens, and he could not stop himself from doing the sums as Tomoya talked. 'Go on, then. Give me the figures.'

Tomoya turned over a sheet and read them from a list he had written out in a small, tidy hand. 'Hardware, one million five hundred thousand. Electrics, plumbing, floor sealing and paint, one million three hundred. That includes the hand-washing basin and the extra sink the Midori Ward Health Centre will insist on. Timber tables, four hundred and fifty. Fibre and wireless, two hundred and fifty. The first orders of beans, milk, cups and lids, four hundred. Registration of the new company name at the Legal Affairs Bureau, the licence fees and a plain black sign, two hundred and fifty. Total, four million one hundred and fifty thousand.'

'A hundred and fifty over.'

'A hundred and fifty over. It comes out of your allowance.' Tomoya put down the pen. 'That leaves you one million three hundred and fifty thousand, and that is the rent, and the wages for the two of us who'll work the counter, until we've got customers. We don't touch it.'

'No,' Eichiro said, and sat back. He looked a little ill. 'It's all spoken for, isn't it? Every yen.'

'Every yen.'

'The health centre won't let us open for three weeks, you know. They have to inspect the kitchen, the drains, the floors. Until we've got the licence, we can't sell so much as a cup of tea.'

'Then we don't sell it.' Tomoya shrugged. 'Not yet. We host it. A private function, by invitation, no money changing hands. There's no licence required for giving your friends a drink in your own building.'

Eichiro opened his mouth, closed it again and let out a short, helpless laugh. 'You'd have made a very good hotel manager.'

'I'm only a waiter, Mr Eichiro.'

'Of course you are.' Eichiro chuckled and polished his glasses on his sleeve. Then his smile faded, and he looked at the empty floor plan. 'But who's going to come? That's what keeps me awake. The tech park doesn't exist yet. Sixty thousand people turn up when the Reds play at Saitama Stadium, and they all walk straight past on their way to the station, and none of them will pay five hundred yen for a latte. We've got a lovely café in a ghost town. How do we get customers next month?'

'We don't wait for the engineers.' A thin, calculating smile crossed Tomoya's face. 'We go after the people who'll be there first. Next week, Arata Real Estate's surveyors and architects will be out in that mud with their clipboards, in the heat, on a site with no vending machine for a kilometre. We walk across with flasks of Ethiopian filter coffee in paper cups and hand them out for nothing. Every site manager. Every foreman. Every man who signs for a delivery. A cup of coffee, freshly made, on a hot morning, from a man who smiles and asks nothing. By the time the first brick's laid, Origin Coffee will be the only place in the district people have heard of.'

Eichiro stared at him. 'You've worked out the free cups, haven't you? What they'll cost?'

'Eleven yen each. I've done it.'

'Of course you have.'

Eichiro laughed again, more softly this time. Then his eyes drifted back to the cheque, and the laughter went out of him.

'The four million builds the café,' he said, in a lower voice. 'And what's left keeps the lights on. But it leaves us with nothing at all to spare. I know what you want to do, Tomoya. The shares. I saw how you looked at those stock tables in the café. There's nothing for it.'

Tomoya looked at the cheque. The sums were merciless. They had a business now, and not a spare yen with which to fight a bigger war. Beyond the paper, behind the lamplight, the garden stood dark and quiet, and the persimmon tree stirred in the heat.

'I'll find another source,' he said.

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The Executive Lounge was nearly full on Saturday afternoon, because the weekend brought a different crowd to the fiftieth floor. The Tokyo bankers in dark suits had gone to their golf courses, and in their place were foreign visitors, with their jackets over their chairs and their maps spread out on the tables, and a handful of Japanese guests who had found some reason not to go home.

Tomoya had read the reservation sheet in the corridor behind the service lift, running his eye down the names the way he had once run it down the share tables in the Lawson, at three in the morning, with no one to see him. Most of the names meant nothing. One of them stopped him cold.

Yamashita Hakiro. Kyoto Glass & Sensor Co., Ltd. Executive Director, New Business Development. Room 3812, three nights. No window seat. Quiet table. Black coffee only.

He knew the company. He had seen it in the small print of the stock tables for years, always in the same place, unmoved: a minor firm on the Second Section of the Osaka Securities Exchange that made sensors for car dashboards and had never once produced a headline. When he checked the price on Yahoo! Finance Japan on the staff computer during his break, it had closed at 214 yen. The chart was a flat grey line.

A man booked into a Marunouchi hotel for three nights, wanting a quiet table. That was all.

The man arrived at ten to three, and Tomoya understood at once that he was the one.

He was about thirty-five, thin, with an unhealthy greyness under his eyes. He carried a Panasonic Let's Note laptop in a bag he held tight against his body, like a man carrying a child out of a burning building. Miss Ishida offered him a seat by the window with the whole of Tokyo spread beneath it, and he shook his head as if the view had insulted him. He took the darkest, most cramped booth in the room, a high-backed corner behind the bar that most guests left empty for exactly that reason. He sat with his back to the wall and angled the screen towards the panelling, hunching his shoulders over it. Every time a waiter came within three metres, his hand twitched towards the lid.

He's afraid of being read, Tomoya thought. He almost smiled.

The lounge kept a three-panel mahogany screen folded against the wall by the bar, for guests who wanted privacy. It was heavy, and the hotel's rule was that a guest had to ask for it. Tomoya waited until Kaito's back was turned and caught Miss Ishida's eye across the room. She looked at the corner, then at him, and gave the smallest nod.

He carried the screen over, unfolded it and set it in the gap between the booth and the room. The brass hinges made no sound. Then he came round the side with a tray and a fresh glass of iced water.

'Excuse me, Mr Yamashita.' He kept his voice low and level. 'The chandelier was throwing a glare on your screen. I hope this helps, and gives you a little more privacy. My name is Hisa Tomoya.'

Hakiro's head came up fast. He looked at the screen, then at the thin young waiter who had put it there, and for a moment his whole face changed. What came over it was not suspicion but relief, the quick, shaky relief of a man who has been carrying something heavy and is surprised to find it noticed.

'Ah,' he said. His shoulders dropped an inch. 'Thank you, Hisa-kun. That's very considerate.'

He had said the name. They had spoken.

Tomoya bowed, stepped into the shadow of the screen and turned his full attention on the grey-faced man.

The lounge went away. The hum rose, thin and electric, and then a voice came up out of it, close and clear and edged with panic.

Fifty million. Fifty million units of touch glass in the first twelve months. Kameoka does four hundred thousand panels a month on a good month. They want ten times that, and they want every one perfect.

Tomoya stood absolutely still.

Cupertino's lawyers gave me until Friday. Sign the supply agreement by the first of September, or the Americans take it to Taiwan and we don't hear from them again. We would be the sole supplier. The whole of our Kameoka line locked up for one customer, for one secret product, and no one is to be told what it is. I don't even know what it is. The board knows there's a "large overseas customer" and that is all it knows. If I sign, we go from a dashboard-sensor firm with fourteen billion yen in sales to something nobody would recognise. The shares would quadruple. If I don't, it all goes to Taiwan and I'm the grandson who lost it.

And no more hotels. The security man has been very clear. No ryokan, no offices, nowhere with a staff list or a camera in the lobby. Last week a man from the Nikkei bought one of my engineers three beers and asked about a "big American customer". If the shares move before we sign, they walk. I need a room nobody has ever heard of, in a place nobody would look, and I have six days. I could cry.

Tomoya let the connection slide away. The lounge came back: the clink of ice, the murmur of a Dutch banker at table 3, the soft hiss of the air conditioning. His mouth had gone dry.

He didn't know what touch glass was. He didn't need to. He had been reading the news for two years. A company in Cupertino, California. In all the world there was only one company in Cupertino that mattered to a Japanese teenager. It was the one whose white earphones he saw in the ears of every commuter on the Yamanote Line. And if they wanted fifty million of something, for a product they would not name, then it was a bet on the scale of the one they had made on the music player. If the news ever got out, the shares of the only company that could build it would not rise a little. They would go through the roof.

He had found his ticket.

He went to the bar and came back with a fresh pot of coffee. He refilled Hakiro's cup, and then, instead of retreating, he stayed where he was, with the pot in his hand. His voice dropped. The waiter went out of it, and what was left was quieter and more direct.

'Mr Yamashita. Forgive the intrusion. You seem concerned about privacy.'

Hakiro's fingers froze above the keyboard. He looked up.

'If you ever need somewhere completely private to meet someone,' Tomoya said, pouring the last of the coffee, 'a friend of mine is opening a new place in Saitama, in the Misono district. No sign, no staff list, nobody from Tokyo anywhere near it.'

For a long moment, Hakiro stared at him. A waiter in a waistcoat had just made a pitch no waiter should make. It should have sounded absurd. Instead, Tomoya saw it arrive at the exact place where the man's desperation was sitting, and fit.

Hakiro reached into his jacket and drew out a card case. He took out a matt black business card and held it out, in the proper way, with both hands.

'You're remarkably observant, Hisa-kun,' he said softly. Tomoya took it with both hands and bowed over it. 'I'm afraid I haven't a card of my own.' 'No matter.' Hakiro's voice dropped to a near-whisper. 'Call my private number tonight. Late is fine. I'll be awake. I should like to hear about this fortress of yours.'

Tomoya bowed again and stepped back into the shadow of the screen. Across the room, Kaito's eyes rested on him for a moment, expressionless as ever. Then the head waiter turned away, and Tomoya let out a very small breath.

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On the Saikyō Line home, the carriage was almost empty. Tomoya sat with his hands between his knees and watched the lights of Akabane and Kawaguchi slide past the black window, and for the whole of the journey he said nothing at all. When he walked into the house in Sakura Ward at a quarter past ten and kicked off his shoes in the hall, Eichiro was in the living room with his glasses on the end of his nose and a thick Italian instruction manual open across his knees.

'We've got a signing,' Tomoya said, peeling off his jacket. 'Next Friday. A private one. Top secret.'

The manual slid off Eichiro's lap and landed on the tatami with a soft slap. 'Friday?' He scrambled to his feet. 'Tomoya, we've got a concrete box with a rusty shutter. We haven't a front door. We haven't a floor. How in heaven's name do we host a corporate signing in a week?'

'We sell them exclusivity.' Tomoya crossed to the table, picked up the pen and turned a floor plan over to its blank side. 'We can't build a boardroom in five days. So we build a room inside the room.'

He drew a square in the middle of the page.

'Black theatre velvet. Heavy, floor-length. We bolt an aluminium truss to the ceiling, drape the velvet down on all four sides, and there's our private room in the middle of the bare workshop. Instant, and it costs next to nothing.'

Eichiro bent over the sketch. The panic in his face had begun to ease into something more cautious. 'Curtains. In a public building, they have to be flame-retardant, you know. It's in the Fire Service Act. They need the label, and the inspector checks it.'

'Theatre velvet already has it. The label's sewn in. I've checked.'

'Of course you have.' Eichiro rubbed the back of his neck. 'The echo, then. That workshop rings like a church. Anyone outside will hear every word, and everyone inside will hear every footstep.'

'Acoustic masking.' Tomoya didn't slow. 'First thing in the morning, I go to Yahoo! Auctions. There are always Persian rugs for sale, secondhand, cheap. We lay them thick over the concrete inside the box. That kills the echo from below. Outside the curtains, we run two industrial fans and put a pair of cheap speakers on the floor playing quiet piano jazz. The moving air and the music make a wall of sound. A man standing two metres away would hear nothing but the fans.'

Eichiro bent closer to the drawing, picturing it. 'Black velvet,' he said slowly. 'Persian rugs, jazz and bare concrete. It's cheap.'

'Cheap, fast, and it looks like a fortune.' Tomoya tapped the middle of the square. 'You know the banquet hire firm the hotel uses for its overflow events. In Kōtō Ward. We rent one mahogany conference table and eight leather chairs for a day. They walk in through a rough, unfinished warehouse in the dark, push through a curtain, and on the other side there's a table, lamps, silence, and nobody who knows who they are.'

Eichiro said nothing for a moment. Then he laughed, short and breathless. 'Everyone who goes through that curtain will think we spent a million yen.'

'Fifty thousand, if we're careful.'

Eichiro dropped back into his seat. Tomoya went to his bag, took out the second-hand ThinkPad and opened it. The screen whirred to life. He found the chart on Yahoo! Finance Japan and turned the laptop round on the table.

'Look at this.'

Eichiro leaned in. The company's name sat at the top: Kyoto Glass & Sensor. Below it, the chart ran across the screen in a dull, level line, a stock that had drifted between 190 and 240 yen for three years. It looked like the electrocardiogram of a man who had died some time ago.

'I don't know what this firm does with its glass, Mr Eichiro,' Tomoya said. 'But a large American company wants to lock up its whole factory for fifty million units. You don't do that for a small bet. You do that when you're staking the company on a new product.'

Eichiro looked from the screen to Tomoya, and the colour went out of his face. 'Tomoya. You're not telling me you've been listening in the lounge again. Kaito said—'

'I haven't said a word about what I heard, and I won't. You're safer not knowing.' Tomoya's voice was quiet and level. 'But look at the figures. The shares closed yesterday at two hundred and fourteen yen. They trade in units of a thousand, so the smallest purchase you can make is two hundred and fourteen thousand yen. About forty thousand shares change hands on an ordinary day. Eight million yen's worth. There are barely any buyers, so the price barely moves. Now suppose the news comes out. Everyone wants in, and nobody wants to sell.'

He opened a new window and typed in some numbers.

'There's a limit to how far a share can move in a day. For a stock priced between two hundred and three hundred yen, the exchange allows eighty yen. So it goes from two hundred and fourteen to two ninety-four on day one, and stops. A queue of buyers, no sellers. Day two, three seventy-four. Day three, four seventy-four, because the limit rises to a hundred. Then five seventy-four. Then seven twenty-four. Then nine twenty-four. If the order is real, it could go up six days in a row, and at the end of it the price is more than four times where it started.' He looked up. 'If you know a week in advance, and you can get in for even a few units, you don't have to be clever. You only have to be early.'

Eichiro rubbed his face with both hands. 'Tomoya. The last time we talked, you said renting a warehouse wasn't breaking the law. Shares are different. They arrested Murakami in June for exactly this. For buying shares because he knew what somebody else was about to do. And from the end of the month there's a new law, the Financial Instruments and Exchange Law, with an enforcement office that's looking for people like him. You'll be walking into a minefield.'

'I know.' Tomoya shut the lid halfway. 'That's why it stays mine. Your money doesn't touch it. Not a yen. The café's yours, and the lease, and the company. The shares are my own business, and I'll take the risk myself.'

'With what? You've got nothing.'

'I'll find it.' He said it quietly, and Eichiro saw that he meant it. 'I'll open an account tonight. Matsui Securities has the cheapest dealing costs, and with a margin account you can trade up to about three times what you put in. I need three hundred thousand to start it. I haven't got that yet. But I will.'

He closed the lid the rest of the way. For a long moment he looked at the closed laptop, and when he spoke again his voice had gone as flat and cold as it had been on the bridge.

'I'm going to stand in that velvet room and pour them coffee, Mr Eichiro. I'm going to listen to every word those two men say to each other. I'll find out the day the contract goes public. And the day before it does, I'm going to put every yen I can raise into that stock.'

The living room fell quiet. The weight of the plan settled into the old wooden walls, and a moth knocked once against the paper lampshade.

'And if you're wrong?' Eichiro said at last, almost in a whisper.

'Then I'll have lost money I didn't have,' said Tomoya. 'It won't be the first time.'

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At two in the morning, the summer air cooled over the sleeping streets of Sakura Ward.

Tomoya sat alone on the narrow veranda at the side of the house, in an old T-shirt of Eichiro's, looking out over the little gravel garden beneath the persimmon tree. The crickets had gone quiet. Somewhere beyond the trees, a lorry hummed along the bypass. The moon had set, and the garden was only a pale rectangle in the dark.

He turned the black business card over in his fingers. Yamashita Hakiro. Kyoto Glass & Sensor Co., Ltd. A mobile number was handwritten on the back, in a small, cramped, nervous hand.

Eichiro had gone to bed an hour ago, and Tomoya had listened to him turning over in the dark through the thin wall. In three days he would have to ask for Friday off. He had no idea what he would say to Kaito.

He took the prepaid phone out of his pocket, flipped it open, and the pale green light of the little screen lit his face. He thumbed in the number, one digit at a time. His hand didn't shake. He was a little surprised by that.

He pressed the button and raised the phone to his ear.

It began to ring.