Chapter Eleven: The Plaza

The Kyoto Glass money had been in the account for fifteen days, and in that time it had done something to Tomoya that nobody had warned him about. It had made him hungry.

On the last evening of September, the air in Sakura Ward had finally lost its stickiness. The paper doors onto the veranda stood open, and a thin, dry wind carried the smell of woodsmoke in from somewhere beyond the persimmon tree. At the low table, Eichiro's living room had disappeared under a drift of paper: topographical maps, photocopied pages from a directory of Fukuoka office buildings, registry extracts, and sheets of notepaper covered in flowcharts in Tomoya's small, tidy hand. Eichiro had come in at half past nine from a day of two weddings and a pharmaceutical dinner, and he sat on a cushion with his tie pulled loose and his shoes off, watching the boy on the other side of the table pace.

Tomoya had been pacing for an hour. His bare feet slapped softly on the tatami, and his words came out in a rush, the way they did when his mind outran his mouth. In the middle of the table lay a street plan of Fukuoka City, and his finger kept returning to the same two places on it, the office district of Tenjin and the streets around Hakata Station.

'Arata flies south this weekend,' he said. 'He's going to buy five buildings, four in Tenjin and one by Hakata Station, and lease them back to the Americans on ten-year contracts. I don't know which buildings yet, but he'll tell me when he's back. He can't help it. A man who's that pleased with himself needs to say it somewhere. Once I know, we move first. We set up a company down there, we make the owners an offer before he lands, and by the time he gets off the plane the buildings are ours. Then he has no landlord's deal to sign. The Malaysians' door at the ministry closes in his face, and we've taken his best idea and his bank's money with it.' He swung round. 'And then we go on. Saitama in the north, Fukuoka in the south. He can't fight on two fronts. Nobody can.'

Eichiro put his hand flat on the table and brought it down.

It was not a gesture he had ever made in front of Tomoya. The crack of his palm on the lacquer went off like a pistol shot in the quiet room, and the maps jumped. Tomoya stopped dead with one foot raised and stared at him.

'Stop,' Eichiro said. 'Sit down, and listen to what you've just said.'

He got to his feet, stepped over a fan of registry extracts and stood in front of the boy. He was a head taller, and for the first time since the riverbank he looked it. His kind, creased face had gone hard.

'You're nineteen years old. Eight weeks ago, you were carrying cement in the sun and living on rice and soy sauce. And you're standing in my house telling me you're going to wage war on a billionaire for a quarter of the buildings in a city you've never set foot in.' He picked up the notepaper nearest to him and held it up. 'Tell me what's in the account.'

Tomoya hesitated. 'Eleven and a half million.'

'Eleven and a half million. Because I sold the Lumina fit-out on Thursday for four point eight, and you've counted it twice since.' Eichiro dropped the page. 'What does a ten-storey office building cost in Tenjin?'

'Three billion. Perhaps four.'

'Five of them. Fifteen billion yen, give or take. And Arata puts down a tenth, because the bank lends him the rest against a lease from an American company, which is exactly what you told me on Friday night. What do you put down, Tomoya? Eleven and a half million? That's not a deposit. It's a rounding error on a deposit. And what do you say to a bank in Fukuoka when a coffee shop from Saitama walks in and asks them for a billion?' He took a breath. 'They'd ask who your friends were, and the answer is nobody. Arata has a minister's door open. We've got a flask with an O on it.'

Tomoya's jaw tightened. He opened his mouth and closed it again.

'He's a shark,' Eichiro said, more quietly. 'I've watched him in that lounge for a month, remember. I serve his friends their dinners. He'd eat us in a week on his own ground, and he wouldn't even notice he'd done it. You can read what he's thinking. Fine. But a man who knows what the enemy will do still loses if he hasn't got the troops, and we haven't got any troops down there. We haven't got a single person. All we've got is a spreadsheet.' He stopped, and something in his voice cracked slightly. 'I pulled you out of a river, lad. I'm not going to watch you fly into the sun because you've done well for a fortnight.'

The manic energy went out of Tomoya like air out of a tyre.

He hadn't once, in all those weeks, turned his gift on the man in front of him. He didn't now. He had no need to. He could see it in the white knuckles of the hand still pressed to the table, and in the old man's breathing. The anger was only fear. Eichiro was frightened, not for the money, but for him.

Eichiro let out a long breath and sat down on the edge of his cushion. He tapped a finger on the Saitama map, on the plain grey rectangle by the stadium that the two of them had stared at for two months.

'I'll tell you what Arata will do,' he said. 'He'll bring those Americans up here eventually. They'll want to see the research centre. And then they'll want dinner. I spent thirty years feeding delegations, Tomoya. Americans abroad all complain about the same thing. They miss the portions. They miss the steak the size of a hat and the sauce on everything, and a beer that doesn't taste like water. Men who are four thousand miles from their families get homesick through their stomachs first. We don't need to fight Arata for towers in Fukuoka. We need to be the place where his Americans eat.'

Tomoya looked at the map. He looked at the old man. Then, slowly, the tension went out of his shoulders.

It was not a comfortable feeling. He had been right about Tanaka and right about Goro, and right about Kyoto Glass, and he had begun, somewhere along the way, to believe that being right was the same as being invulnerable. He had come within one table-slam of making the first real mistake of his life.

'You're right,' he said.

He crossed to the table, bent down and swept the Fukuoka papers to the floor with his forearm. They slid across the tatami in a long white tongue. What was left were the Saitama plans, the Hakusan contracts and a single sheet with the words Marusan Plaza written across the top in his own handwriting.

'We drop the skyscraper war,' he said. 'We consolidate. We finish Hakusan, we open the café, and we get the plaza.'

Eichiro said nothing. But his shoulders sank, and after a while he got up, went into the kitchen and put the kettle on.

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The noise started on the pavement outside, a low roar like surf, and when the automatic doors of Paradise Hall Misono slid open, it hit Tomoya like a wall.

It was ten past ten on Monday morning, ten minutes after opening, and the hall was already half full. Four hundred pachinko machines stood in long, glittering rows under a ceiling the colour of nicotine, and in each of them a river of steel balls fell, clattered and vanished through a thicket of pins. Every machine played its own tune. Hundreds of jingles competed with the roar of the balls and with the cheerful, hysterical voice of the announcer, who shouted a number every few seconds as if someone were winning a prize. The air was blue with smoke and smelled of stale cigarettes, hot metal and men who had not been home. Neon strobed over the aisles in red and green and gold.

Tomoya had found the place in an afternoon. The registry had given him a name: Giza Masao, representative director, Marusan Stores Co., Ltd. A woman in the noodle bar beside the dead Marusan Plaza, hearing that he had a delivery for the old president, had laughed. 'Giza-san? Try Paradise. He's there when it opens and he's there when it closes.' The company had stopped trading in 2003 but had never been wound up, because nobody had paid for the lawyers, which was why it still existed on the register, with the founder's grandson as its president and sole shareholder.

He walked down the aisles in his clean white shirt, a pale flame among the grey and brown backs of the players. Most were men. A few were pensioners, and there was a woman with a baby in a sling, but mostly they were men between thirty and sixty in cheap jackets and slippers, sitting hunched over their machines with their right hands curled around the brass dial, feeding in balls like a sort of slow, mindless prayer. Each had a plastic tray of silver balls beside him. Some had two or three. A man at the end of the row had five.

In the fourth aisle, he found him.

Giza Masao was about fifty, heavy and grey-skinned, with dark crescents under his eyes and sweat stains spreading from the armpits of a polo shirt that had been white once. He sat with his body pitched forward and his thumb working the dial, watching a cartoon sea turtle flash across the screen. His tray held a few dozen balls. The machine beside him had been abandoned with a full box beneath it, and he kept glancing at it, as if calculating how long it would be before he could decently take it.

'Excuse me,' Tomoya said, stopping behind the stool. He bowed slightly and raised his voice over the din. 'Giza-san? My name is Hisa Tomoya. I'd like to speak to you about the Marusan building.'

Giza jerked round, his eyes darting from the boy's face to his clean collar and back. He looked, for an instant, like an animal. Then the sneer settled and he turned back to the machine.

'Get lost, kid. It's not for sale.' He cranked the dial, and a fresh handful of balls fell into the pins. 'My grandfather built that place with his own hands. Sixty-four, the year of the Olympics. It means something to this family. I'm not selling it to some boy in a white shirt.'

His name is Hisa. He's from a bank. He's come from the bank. No. Too young. He's a clerk. He's from the lenders. The thought slid out across the hall like oil, and Tomoya, standing a pace behind the stool, let his attention slip into it. Giza had said his name back, Hisa, as he was thinking. They had spoken. That was enough.

The hall went away. The jingles and the roar thinned into a single dull sound, like water under a door, and out of it rose a flat, exhausted loop of panic.

I'm dead. I'm a dead man. The Yamagumi want five million nine hundred thousand and Tuesday week is the day. It was three when I borrowed it in July, three, and it's been ten per cent every ten days. They'll break my legs. They'll take my fingers. And the bank. The bank's auction in November, and then the bank will come for the guarantee, a hundred and ten million, I haven't got a hundred and ten thousand. The building's worthless. A dead supermarket. No one will touch it. I'm dead.

Tomoya let it go. The jingles and the smoke crashed back over him.

He thought of Kasumi's father, who had borrowed from a man who charged ten per cent every ten days. He thought of how it had ended, in a warehouse beside the river. Something moved in his chest, cold and exact, and he put it where he put everything else.

He bent and put one hand over Giza's, closing it over the dial and holding it still.

'You owe the Yamagumi five million nine hundred thousand yen,' he said, under the noise. 'They collect a week from tomorrow.'

Giza froze. The blood left his face all at once, as if a tap had been turned. Very slowly, he turned his head.

Who is this? How does he know? Nobody knows. Nobody knows the figure but them and me.

'I have six and a half million yen,' Tomoya said. 'It's yours today. In return, you sign over all of the shares of Marusan Stores to my company. Origin Holdings. You pay the Yamagumi on Tuesday week, and you keep six hundred thousand for your machines.'

Giza's lips were trembling. 'The shares. All of them.'

'All of them. And there's something else.' He let go of the dial and stepped back, so that the man could look at him. 'The court auction closes in November. The plaza will sell for fifty million, perhaps a little more, because it's a dead building and nobody wants it. The bank gets that and not a yen more. The rest, a hundred and ten million, they'll try to take from the guarantor. That's you. You'll never pay it, so they'll put you into bankruptcy and the Yamagumi will take what's left before the court does.' He kept his voice level. 'If I own the company, then I'm the one who sits down with the bank. I settle the loan, in full, for what it's worth. When the loan is settled, the guarantee goes with it. You walk out of this with nothing owing to anyone.'

Giza stared at him. It was the look of a man who has been offered a rope while standing on a trapdoor.

'And if I say no?'

'Then you say no.' Tomoya shrugged. 'A week from Tuesday, the Yamagumi come. In November, the bank sells the plaza at the court, and if I want it, I buy it at the minimum bid, and not a yen of it is yours.' He looked down at the tray. 'I'd rather not. It'll cost me more, and take longer. But I'll do it.'

Giza stood up so fast that the stool went over behind him. He caught the tray with his elbow, and four hundred steel balls went off across the sticky floor in a long, silver, thundering wave. Heads turned along the aisle. Nobody got up. A man two machines down took a drag on his cigarette and looked back at his screen. Giza ignored them all. He was bowing, again and again, from the waist, with his hands pressed against his thighs.

'Yes. Yes, I'll sign. I'll sign now, I'll sign anything. Please.'

On Thursday afternoon, in the front office of a judicial scrivener behind Urawa Station, he signed it.

Eichiro had taken the afternoon off, with a story about his father's memorial. He signed as representative director of Origin Holdings and pressed his red hanko beside Giza's signature, and Tomoya, who could not sign anything, sat in the corner and watched. The share transfer ran to one page. A bank transfer of six million five hundred thousand yen had left Origin's account that morning. Giza held the receipt in both hands, as though the paper might blow away. He cleared his throat several times before he spoke.

'You ought to know something, kid.'

Tomoya looked up.

'That block belongs to somebody. The whole strip, from the station down to the stadium. Every shop on it pays the Yamagumi every month, the noodle bar, the pharmacy, the key-cutter. They call it a cleaning fee. They don't ask. They send a boy round on the first.' He swallowed. 'The plaza's empty, so they've left it alone. The day somebody opens something in it, they'll come. You're the owner now. That's your problem.'

Tomoya filed it away. He had read about the Organised Crime Countermeasures Law in a newspaper once. Its effect on the Yamagumi was, he suspected, about the same as the effect of a speed limit on a lorry driver late for a delivery. He thanked Giza politely, and made a note in his head to speak to Ryuhei.

It was the bank that took the rest of the week.

The Marusan loan was a hundred and sixty million yen, and the bank had begun auction proceedings on it in August. Tomoya had read the court's valuation on the internet. The base price was sixty million, which meant the lowest bid the court would accept was forty-eight. After the court's fees and the time it would take, the bank could expect to collect forty million and perhaps a little more. It would then write off the remaining hundred and twenty and chase the guarantor for years in the hope of squeezing something out of him. He sent Eichiro in alone, in his best navy suit, with a script on a single sheet of paper, to see a deputy manager at the head office of the regional bank in Urawa.

'Offer him sixty-two million,' he had said. 'Say it's more than the auction will bring, and it comes without any waiting, any court costs or any risk that nobody bids. Say the loan goes off the bank's books before the year end, and the guarantor goes with it, so they don't have to chase him. Say you'll pay five per cent now and the rest by the twenty-eighth of December.'

'The twenty-eighth,' Eichiro had said. 'Why the twenty-eighth?'

'It's their last working day of the year. A bank hates to take its bad debts into a new year. They'll want it finished.' He paused. 'And it's the date by which I'll have the money.'

'Will you?'

'I'll have it.'

Eichiro came out of the bank at four o'clock with the face of a man who has been to the dentist. The deputy manager had treated him, he said, like a salesman for life insurance until he put the figure on the table. After that, there had been a long silence, and a call to somebody on another floor. The bank would withdraw the auction petition on signing of a settlement agreement and payment of three point one million. The balance of fifty-eight point nine was due by the twenty-eighth of December. And if it was not paid, the deposit would be forfeit, and the auction would restart from the beginning.

Origin Holdings now owned a dead supermarket's company and the debt that came with it, and had twelve weeks to find fifty-nine million yen. Its bank balance was just under two million. It was as poor as it had been since the bridge.

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Ryuhei had come back from Ishikawa on the Tuesday night with grey skin and a crumpled suit, and with something else about him that Tomoya had not seen before. He stood in the doorway of the back office with his canvas bag over his shoulder like a man who had been to a war and won it.

The roaster had been running test batches for six days. The whole warehouse smelled of it, a thick, sweet, nutty smell like toast and caramel, and the wind had been blowing from the west every morning, carrying it across the fence and over Arata's site. A foreman had mentioned the smell to Tomoya on Monday, with the faintly aggrieved air of a man whose stomach had started to rumble at ten o'clock without asking his permission.

Ryuhei dropped the bag, took out a thick folder and laid it on the timber table.

'The application went in on Monday morning,' he said. 'Tsuji filed it at the Hakusan City office himself. I held his hand. Twenty-six conditional contracts, all signed, all stamped. The Agricultural Committee meets on the twenty-fifth. Its secretary says the committee will approve because the buyer is a farmer, he's buying to expand his holdings, and he's paying off the sellers' co-operative debts at completion. It's the neatest application he's seen in years.' He tapped the folder. 'It is, because I wrote it.'

'Good,' said Tomoya.

'There's one more thing.' Ryuhei hesitated, and for the first time since Tomoya had met him, he seemed to be choosing his words. 'I put a clause in. Clause eleven. I didn't ask first, because you weren't there and I had to decide on the spot.' He turned the folder to the right page and pushed it across. 'If any part of the land is later acquired by a public body at a price above the contract price, ten per cent of the difference is paid to the original seller.'

Tomoya read it. Then he looked up.

'You gave away money.'

'I gave away ten per cent of something we haven't got.' Ryuhei held his gaze. 'Twenty-six families. Every one of them has a debt at the co-operative and a roof that leaks. They're selling at a thousand yen a square metre, and I know, because you told me in this room, that in November the figure will be four times that, or more. If I had put nothing in the contract, I'd have been the man who bought a farmer's land for a quarter of its worth and let him sign. I did my last job for a man who made me do something like that. I won't do it again.' He folded his hands. 'You said you'd never ask me to sign for a figure that wasn't true. It would have been a lie by omission, Boss. I don't tell those.'

Eichiro, who had been reading over Tomoya's shoulder, put a finger on the paragraph and kept it there.

'I'd have asked for it myself,' he said.

Tomoya looked at the two of them for a moment. It was exactly the sort of thing that cost money, and exactly the sort that, in a month's time, Eichiro would have been unable to forgive him for leaving out. A thin, wry feeling went through him. He had told himself that clean hands were a luxury, and he had found them cheaper than he'd thought.

'Leave it in,' he said.

Then he told them about the plaza. He put the share transfer and a certified copy of the Marusan register on the table, and Ryuhei read the company's history and the bank's claim with his lips moving slightly, as he read everything. When he had finished, he looked up and did something Tomoya had not seen him do before. He smiled.

'The Americans,' he said. 'Eichiro's right. They want excess. Forget the coffee. In the plaza, we build a smokehouse. Dark wood, leather booths, local craft beer, and something so large on the plate that a man needs two hands. Texas brisket, if we can get it.'

'Can we?' Eichiro asked.

'Not easily.' Ryuhei pulled a notepad towards him. 'Japan shut its doors to American beef in December 2003, after mad cow disease turned up in Washington State. It reopened for a few weeks last winter. Then a veal shipment arrived with a piece of spine in it, and they shut it again. It came back at the end of July, but only for cattle under twenty months, from approved plants, with the risky parts cut out. Brisket qualifies, in principle. Supply is thin and slow, and nobody trusts it yet.' He tapped the page. 'So we smoke Australian for the weekdays and keep a few kilos of American for the people who ask. A Texan smokehouse in Saitama that can hardly get Texan beef is a story in itself. We'll put it on the menu.'

'And the rest of the plaza?' said Tomoya.

'You said it, Boss. Six thousand flats next door, give or take.' Ryuhei's pencil moved. 'Two thousand people in the first year. They get up at six, they come home at ten, and not one of them is going to cook. A proper convenience shop. Good bento made in a kitchen we control, beer, wine, a few shelves of the things a man forgets on his way home. We separate it entirely from the café and the smokehouse. Different vendors, different contracts, different managers.' He looked up. 'Which brings me to the second thing. I'm dangerously thin. I can run the roastery, the flasks and the café. I can't run a smokehouse and a shop and payroll for eighty people next summer on a spreadsheet. I need an HR manager, two accountants and a couple of people for administration.'

Tomoya looked at him for a long moment.

'You're the general manager of Origin Holdings,' he said. 'That's your decision. Hire whoever you need. I'll bring the capital, you build the machine.' He paused. 'One more thing. The strip behind the plaza pays protection to a gang called the Yamagumi. Giza told me, and I believe him. Find out what we're dealing with before anyone knocks.'

Ryuhei's face did not change. 'A protection fee is only a supplier you didn't choose,' he said. 'We'll find out who he is and what he costs.'

He straightened, and a little colour came back into his grey face.

'I won't let you down, Boss.'

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Origin Coffee opened at seven o'clock on the morning of Monday the sixteenth of October.

There had been a week of rain between the cheque and the doors, and the lane had turned to a long brown puddle, but that Monday dawned dry and cool, the first real autumn morning of the year. Inside the old press works, the matt-black walls swallowed the light. Quiet jazz came out of speakers hidden in the ceiling, and acoustic panels covered the girders so thickly that a man could talk at a normal speed without hearing his own echo. The oak counter shone. A cooling tray of fresh beans steamed by the roaster in the corner, and the smell of them filled the whole building.

Behind the counter stood eight staff in black aprons, two of them lent for the week by the hotel's training department and not yet aware that they would not be going back. Ryuhei had written a manual of nineteen pages, and every one of them had learnt it by heart. The tamp, the pull, the steam and the wipe of the wand were choreographed to the second. A man who walked in at ten past seven could expect a double espresso within a minute and a half, and Ryuhei, who had timed it in rehearsal with a stopwatch, intended to make sure he got it.

By eight, the queue ran out of the door and along the front of the building. It was the foremen first, then the crane drivers, the surveyors and the men from the Mitronix site, where the first of the forty containers had arrived the previous Friday and a few young engineers had started to turn up in hard hats and polo shirts. They stood in line with their flasks, and they stared at the high black ceiling and the long wooden tables, and one of them said, loudly enough for the whole queue to hear, that it looked like something out of Tokyo. Out at the loading dock, three of the matt-black delivery vans were already pulling away, loaded with flasks for the scaffolding.

At two o'clock, the crowd changed.

The foremen vanished. In their place came a younger and noisier crowd, and Tomoya, watching from behind the roaster in a black apron and a cap, saw that they had come from somewhere else. Some had come from the Veeroc and Mitronix offices. Some were students from Saitama University, ten minutes away by bus, who had found the place on mixi, where somebody had posted photographs of the ceiling and a long, delighted review of the wireless. A few were young women from the flats along the Musashino Line, who had read about it in a free magazine at the station. They ignored the plain menu. They went straight to the board that Ryuhei had hung beside the till, on which the Origin Blend and the Single Origin were in small print and the drinks were in large. They ordered caramel and hazelnut and mocha, over ice, whipped, with a spiral of chocolate on top. A tall plastic cup slid across the pickup counter every forty seconds.

Behind the register, Eichiro, who had taken the day off from the hotel for the first time in six years, was ringing up sale after sale with a look of quiet astonishment.

'It costs us forty yen,' Tomoya said into his ear, passing with a tray. 'We sell it for six hundred.'

'I know,' Eichiro said faintly. 'I keep doing the sum.'

A little after half past two, a man in a suit came up to the counter. He was perhaps forty, in a rumpled grey jacket, with the grey, creased face of someone who had not slept properly since the summer. He put an envelope on the counter. 'Five hundred thousand,' he said. 'I'm with the general contractor next door. I want it on a prepaid card, for my crew. They flash it, you take it off. Is that possible?'

Eichiro looked at the envelope. He gripped the edge of the till with one hand and breathed carefully through his nose.

It was at a quarter to three, at the pickup counter, that the front door chimed and the first black car pulled into the lot.

Tomoya was standing near the roaster with his back half turned. He did not see the car, but he heard the engine as it came over the gravel, a smooth, low, expensive sound, and he felt something in his body go quiet. When he looked, it was a black Mercedes-Benz S-Class. The paint was polished like a dark mirror.

He did not move. Behind the hood of the Probat, in a cap and apron, with the afternoon crowd between him and the door, he was invisible. He watched the car door open.

Kasumi stepped out first. She wore a white dress, a little too thin for the day, and a cream cardigan over it. Her hair had been done at a salon again, in soft waves. The man who came round the car to join her wore a linen shirt, pale trousers and a heavy gold watch. He looked a little younger than Tomoya remembered, and a great deal more bored. He took her arm in the way of someone who owned it. They crossed the gravel, he pushed open the door, and they joined the back of the queue.

Takeshi. It was the only name Tomoya had. He had heard it once, in a courtyard, three months and a lifetime ago. The man had never heard Tomoya's name, and the two of them had never spoken a word, and for a moment Tomoya turned his full attention on the back of the man's head, out of nothing but old reflex. It was like pressing against a wall. There was no hum, no echo, no voice. He had known there would not be. He was almost glad. He did not want to know what was in it.

A flicker of the old anger rose in him, hot and quick. He breathed in slowly and let it go.

He stayed where he was. The queue crept forward, and he could hear them over the jazz.

'It's a long way out,' Kasumi was saying. 'I thought you said Saitama was a hole.'

'This isn't Saitama. It's a place somebody at the office told me about.' Takeshi looked at the ceiling and the wooden tables, and his mouth turned down at the corners. 'It looks like a warehouse. Which, I suppose, it is.'

At the counter, a girl in a black apron asked what they would like. Takeshi ordered two house blends, black. 'And she'll have one of those sweet things. The vanilla.' He glanced at Kasumi, as if checking a parcel. 'You like sweet.'

'I can order for myself,' Kasumi said, quietly.

'Of course you can.'

They moved aside to wait. She had been staring at the floor, and now she lifted her eyes and said, in the cautious voice of someone testing ice, 'Takeshi. Can we go via Kita Ward on the way back? It's been three weeks. I only want to see her for half an hour. She's got a new nurse, and I haven't even met—'

'Not tonight.'

'It's only half an hour.'

'We have the Shimada dinner at eight, and I'm not turning up smelling of a care home.' He did not raise his voice. He didn't need to. 'I pay for the place, Kasumi. Every month. I don't ask for much, do I? I ask you to be ready when I say I'm coming, and to be pleasant to the people I introduce you to. Is that unreasonable?'

She said nothing. Her fingers had found the hem of the cardigan and twisted it into a rope.

'Don't make me think about the fees,' Takeshi said lightly, as the barista put the cups on the counter. He picked up the two coffees and held one out to her. 'It's depressing, and you know how I feel about being depressed.'

Kasumi took the cup. She smiled. It was a quick, bright, practised smile, and it went nowhere near her eyes.

Tomoya watched her from behind the roaster. He didn't need telepathy. The make-up could not hide the shadows at the corners of her eyes, and the smile could not hide whatever was behind it. He had stood behind a cherry tree three months ago and watched that girl give herself to a man in a grey suit for a dress and a dinner, and he had lain awake over it since. He had waited for this moment more than he had waited for anything.

He waited for the triumph. He waited for the hot, bright, satisfying feeling of having outgrown her.

It didn't come. What came was a cold, flat, empty quiet, as if a room had been cleared and the door left open.

He controlled a company, and a lease, and a plot of land in Ishikawa that was about to become something else. He had made nearly forty million yen in a fortnight and was now worth, on paper, a good deal more. And she was standing at a counter holding a cup of sweet coffee she had not asked for, in a dress she had not chosen, with a man who owned her. Somebody had to pay her mother's fees, and the man in the linen shirt had been quick to see who.

He turned away from the glass and picked up a delivery sheet from the table.

The past, he thought, was dead. She was only a customer.

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The rest of October passed in a blur of ledgers.

On the twenty-fifth, the Hakusan Agricultural Committee met in a long, cold room above the city office and approved twenty-six transfers of farmland to a sixty-eight-year-old rice farmer called Tsuji Gen'ichi in a little under eleven minutes. Ryuhei, who had come up on the sleeper the night before to sit at the back, told Tomoya afterwards that it had been the quickest meeting he'd ever attended. Nobody asked a question. The chairman, an old man with a hearing aid, had said only that it was good to see a young farmer expanding.

In November, the weather turned. The first frost came on the ninth, and the red spider lilies had long since rotted in the ditches. Ryuhei hired a head of personnel, two accountants and an administrator who had spent eleven years in the head office of a dairy company. He found out, through a man he knew from his Ginza days, that the Yamagumi's boy came round on the first of every month to the strip's shopkeepers and left with an envelope. He found out who the boy's superior was. He made a note of it and said nothing.

And on Friday the twenty-fourth of November, at twenty past four in the afternoon, the three of them stood shoulder to shoulder in the cramped back office of Origin Coffee, in front of a small boxy television on top of a grey filing cabinet.

On the screen was a briefing room in Kasumigaseki. A row of cameras flashed. At a polished podium, in a tailored dark suit, stood a man whom Tomoya had last seen in the Executive Lounge of the Grand Imperial, taking a sip of Hibiki with a dry, composed smile. Nakano Daiki looked into the cameras with the faint smugness of a man who has been waiting a long time for a particular moment.

'In order to secure the early completion of the Hokuriku Shinkansen between Kanazawa and Tsuruga,' he read, 'the Ministry, in cooperation with the Railway Agency, has decided to establish a rolling-stock depot in the Hakusan area of Ishikawa Prefecture. The necessary land will be acquired by agreement with the owners, and where agreement is not possible, by the procedures provided under the Land Expropriation Act.'

The picture cut to a news anchor at a glossy desk.

'The Agency has confirmed that landowners will be offered a purchase price of seven thousand yen per square metre, including an allowance for loss of farming income. Local officials say the offer is substantially higher than the current agricultural price.'

The set crackled with static. A man in a green overcoat came on, waving an umbrella, outside the Hakusan city office.

Nobody in the little room spoke.

The figure was higher than the one Tomoya had seen in Nakano's head. That had been four thousand, calculated against neighbouring housing land with a deduction for development costs. Someone in the prefecture had pushed. It was seven thousand, with an allowance for lost farming income, and it was real, and it was on the national news.

Tomoya turned to Ryuhei. Ryuhei looked back at him. Neither said a word.

Two hundred and eighty thousand square metres. Seven thousand yen each.

'One point nine six billion yen,' Eichiro said, in a voice that cracked in the middle. He put out a hand and grabbed the edge of the filing cabinet. The colour had drained from his face. 'Tomoya. One point nine six billion. What do we even do with that?'

'We pay the twenty-six first,' Tomoya said.

He did not know why he said it. But Ryuhei's head turned, and for a moment something moved in the older man's tired eyes.

'Clause eleven,' Ryuhei said quietly. 'Ten per cent of the difference. A hundred and sixty-eight million yen, to be divided among twenty-six families.'

'And the bridge loan?' said Eichiro.

'Tomorrow.' Ryuhei collected himself. 'The bank in Kanazawa has agreed to lend Tsuji's company two hundred and sixty-six million against the Agency's purchase offer. The announcement was the last condition. The bank can't lose, because the buyer is the government.' He looked at the television. 'That's the balance due to the sellers. We can pay it before Christmas.'

Eichiro let go of the cabinet. A grin broke across his creased face, slowly, as if it were being pulled from somewhere far down. He threw both hands into the air.

Ryuhei, after a moment's hesitation, did the same.

'Banzai!' they shouted together, and the sound bounced off the concrete walls and rolled out through the open door into the café, where a barista dropped a milk jug and a table of students looked up in alarm.

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The money arrived on the morning of Wednesday the twentieth of December.

It came through the Ishikawa farming company's account at the bank in Kanazawa, and from there along the assignment that Ryuhei had registered in October, across to a single line in the ledger of a regional bank in Urawa. It had come in at five minutes past eight. At half past nine, the deputy manager, who had refused to meet Eichiro without an appointment in October, came out of his own office to greet him, bowed so low that his forehead nearly touched the wood and offered tea.

He was sweating. The room smelled of leather and lemon polish, and the man's hands trembled as he adjusted his tie. In his own mind, Tomoya noted, the man had already begun to revise the past. The boy in the corner chair had never been the boy. He had been a promising young associate of the company.

The deputy manager slid a leather-bound statement across the desk. Eichiro leaned forward and looked at the printed balance of the account for Origin Holdings Y.K.

¥1,960,000,000.

He stared at it. He opened his mouth, closed it, and without a word bent forward until his head was between his knees. Tomoya heard him take long, ragged breaths, and thought, with the detached part of his mind, that the man was trying very hard not to faint in a velvet chair.

Tomoya looked at the line of zeroes. He felt nothing at all. He had thought that he would, and there was nothing. It was a figure on a page.

'It isn't all ours,' he said to the deputy manager, quite pleasantly. 'A hundred and sixty-eight million goes to the farmers, and two hundred and eighty to the bank in Kanazawa, with interest. The tax office will take about six hundred. We'll settle those today.' He put the statement down. 'Call it nine hundred million, when everyone's been paid. And I'd like to arrange tomorrow's transfer to your head office. Fifty-eight million nine hundred thousand, to close out the Marusan loan.'

The deputy manager bowed again. 'Of course, sir. At once.'

On the way home, in the back of a taxi that Eichiro had insisted on, the old man sat rigid with his mouth slightly open, staring out of the window at the dark, wet streets of Urawa. He could not speak. The scale of what had happened sat on his chest like a physical weight. Once, at a red light, he turned to Tomoya as if to say something, and then turned away again.

That night, the house in Sakura Ward was very quiet.

Tomoya sat alone in his room with the old ThinkPad open in front of him and the screen throwing a pale square onto the tatami. He had no intention of working. He had been staring at the same line of figures for twenty minutes when the room tilted.

The wooden walls dissolved. The tatami fell away. Cold, damp wind took its place, smelling of rust and river water.

The sky above the Arakawa was a deep, burning gold.

The creature was standing on the guardrail with its arms spread against the light. It had changed. Its left wing no longer looked dull and papery; it gleamed with a clean, cold white light. And on the right, where the black and smoking stump had been, a half-formed wing had begun to take shape, translucent and golden, fanning out in thin ribs like the skeleton of something not yet born. In one hand it held a sliver of crystal glass the size of a dinner plate. It put the edge between its teeth, and bit.

'Hello, kiddo!' The grating, metallic voice rolled across the bridge. 'You did well! This is you, you know.' It waved the glass. 'Your one point nine six billion. A government's worth of money changing hands, and every bit of it with your fingerprints on it. I've been gorging for days. It tastes good.'

Tomoya walked towards it, brushing a strip of ticker tape off his sleeve. 'You look better. Do you have a name? If we're going to keep doing this, we might as well know what to call each other.'

The thing threw back its head and laughed, and the sound was grinding plates.

'A friend?' It spat a splinter of glass over the rail. 'If I had a stomach, I'd be sick on your shoes, brat. Go and buy a dog. I haven't got a name. You people hang a label on everything you can't understand, and then you think you've understood it.' It waved a hand. 'Enough of this nonsense. You want to know about the next door, don't you?'

Tomoya crossed his arms. 'Tell me the rules.'

'It's called Influence.' The creature pointed a pale finger at his forehead. 'You put an idea into a man's head. He thinks it's his own.'

It began to count on its fingers.

'One. You know his name. Two. He knows yours. Three. You say the subject aloud first. You can't put an idea in a man's head that you haven't spoken, and he has to hear it. Four. Men only. My power doesn't cross that line.' It held up a fifth finger and leaned down until its eyes, two slow nebulae, were level with Tomoya's. 'And five. It isn't a leash. It's a nudge. If the man in front of you really doesn't want what you're pushing, if the idea runs against something he believes in his gut, it breaks. You aren't a puppet master, boy. You point a man in a direction he might have gone anyway.' It grinned. 'You lean.'

Tomoya nodded slowly. 'I understand. I can use that.'

'Not yet, you can't.' The laugh rasped again. 'It's a crack in the door, not an opening. You couldn't push a thought across a table at the moment, let alone a room. You haven't fed me enough.' It straightened, and its half-grown wing shivered in the golden light. 'More weight, brat. A bigger meal. Bring me a rich man's ruin and I'll open it all the way.'

The bridge began to fracture, cracks running across the gold.

Tomoya woke on his futon in the dark, staring at the ceiling.

Nearly two billion yen had been a feast, and it had not been enough. But something hot and quick was already running under his skin, the thing he had felt on the bridge the night he decided to live. A man who could put an idea into another man's head was no longer a man who listened. He was a man who steered.

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The Executive Lounge on the fiftieth floor smelled of beeswax, leather and old malt whisky, and for the first time that winter the windows were streaming with rain. Beyond them, Tokyo had dissolved into a smear of red tail lights and the amber glow of the Imperial Palace moat. Someone had hung a small fir tree by the piano. At table 3, two bankers were arguing about whether the Urawa Reds, who had won the first league title in their history on the second of December, would keep their best players.

At twenty past six on Thursday evening, the mahogany doors opened and Arata Kensuke came in.

He had come straight from Haneda. His tie hung loose, his collar was open, and the skin under his eyes was dark and loose with fatigue. But he walked as he always did, with a loose, easy swagger, and his grin hadn't lost an inch. He dropped into the leather seat of table 12 and flicked two fingers at the air.

Tomoya crossed the carpet with a silver tray and poured the Yamazaki without a word. He said only 'Welcome back, sir,' and Arata, who had heard it a hundred times, grunted. They had spoken. That was enough.

Arata drank, and he talked, apparently unbothered by a waiter who stood a pace behind his chair and said nothing.

'The red tape down there is a nightmare,' he said, to nobody, swirling the glass. 'Every ward office wants a stamp from every other ward office. But the Americans are throwing money at us. The preliminary agreements are signed. All five buildings.' He laughed. 'And they're children, Hisa. Do you know what they did in Hakata? They sat in a ten-million-yen sushi restaurant, three of them, and pushed their plates away. They hate the fish. They hate the noodles. They miss steaks and beer that tastes of something. Grown men, with billion-yen contracts, whining about their dinner.'

Tomoya bowed, with his face neutral. Inside, something clicked into place with a small, clean sound.

Not a rival. A parasite. He wants a gate. I'll be the toll-keeper.

'How fortunate for them, Mr Arata,' he said, in his low, respectful voice. 'My employer is planning to open in Fukuoka. An American smokehouse. If the guests are fed properly, I imagine they stay longer. And the longer they stay, the longer your leases run.'

Arata looked up. Tomoya saw the thought arrive on his face. Keep the Americans happy, and they keep signing.

'You move quickly, boy,' Arata said. He took another sip. 'I like that. Clear your diary. Friday, at your warehouse. The joint venture.'

'I look forward to it, sir.'

Tomoya bowed and withdrew to the bar, where he took a crystal glass and began to polish it with a linen cloth. Across the room, Kaito was standing at the service station with a decanter, saying nothing. He had not said anything for a very long time.

The doors opened again.

Matsumoto, the development manager from the site next door, came in shaking the rain from his coat. He looked as though he'd had his hair cut. He was almost bouncing on the balls of his feet, and he nodded to the lounge hostess with a broad, dazzling, slightly drunk smile.

Tomoya took a glass of iced water across to the table and set it down. 'You seem in good spirits this evening, Mr Matsumoto.'

'A very good evening, Hisa-kun.' Matsumoto beamed at him. 'A very good one indeed.'

Tomoya let his attention drift to the broad, weathered face. He had said his name in the yard, back in September, and Matsumoto had said his. The hum rose, and under it a single clear thought came up, as bright as a lit window.

Tomorrow morning, ten o'clock, the Misono Garden Residence goes on sale. Six hundred and twelve flats. Forty thousand brochures out of the printers' vans tonight. By Sunday, there'll be a queue round the block, and every shopfront within three hundred metres will be worth double. And the plaza. Damn it, the plaza. Someone cancelled the auction in November and sat on it. Three letters, no answer. A new director I've never heard of, some hotel manager, at the registry. If he won't sell, the whole retail plan comes apart.

Tomoya let the thought go. He bowed to Matsumoto and retreated into the shadows by the bar.

He stood there for a long time, polishing the same glass.

Somewhere behind the lights of the lounge, in a drawer in Urawa, sat three unopened letters addressed to the representative director of Marusan Stores. They were marked Urgent. Eichiro had put them in the drawer himself, on Tomoya's advice, and Tomoya had told him to leave them there.

Tomorrow morning, forty thousand brochures would land on forty thousand doormats. By Sunday, the best frontage in Misono would belong to whoever held the plaza. And the only man in Japan who was fretting about who that was stood twenty feet away, drinking whisky and smiling.

Tomoya put the glass down. In the dark, his own reflection looked back at him from the polished bar, thin and neat and empty-faced, and for the first time in a long while, he was almost smiling.

The next move had revealed itself.