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I said after a moment. “This is an unusual case.” I saw no harm in telling him about the stranger on the train, and did so.
    “If we were in New York, I’d tell you it was a pickpocket,” he said when I was done.
    “I thought the same thing when I first saw it. But pickpocket would be a piss-poor career choice for a white boy in Tokyo. You have to blend.”
    “Target of opportunity?”
    I shook my head. “Not too many people are that shameless and cold-blooded. I doubt one of them just happened to be standing next to Kawamura that morning. I think the guy was a Kawamura contact, there for some kind of exchange.
    “Why do you suppose the
Keisatsucho
is investigating a simple break-in in a Tokyo apartment?” he asked.
    “I don’t know,” I said, though Tatsu’s involvement made me wonder. “Maybe Kawamura’s position in the government, the recency of his death, something like that. That’s the theory I’d go on.”
    He looked at me. “Are you asking me to dig?”
    I should have let it go. But I’d been used before. The feeling that it had happened again would keep me awake at night. Had Benny put a B-team on Kawamura? I figured I might as well let Harry provide some clues.
    “You will anyway, right?” I asked.
    He blinked. “Can’t help myself, I guess.”
    “Dig away then. Let me know what else you find. And watch your back, hotshot. Don’t get sloppy.”
    The warning was for both of us.

CHAPTER 3
    T elling Harry to watch his back made me think of Jimmy Calhoun, my best friend in high school, of who Jimmy was before he became Crazy Jake.
    Jimmy and I joined the Army together when we were barely seventeen. I remember the recruiter telling us we would need parental permission to join. “See that woman outside?” he had asked us. “Give her this twenty, ask her if she’ll sign as your mother.” She did. Later, I realized this woman was making her living this way.
    Jimmy and I had met, in a sense, through his younger sister, Deirdre. She was a beautiful, black-haired girl, and one of the few people who was nice to the awkward, out-of-place kid I was in Dryden. Some idiot told Jimmy I liked her, which was true, of course, and Jimmy decided he didn’t like a guy with slanty eyes hitting on his sister. He was bigger than I was, but I fought him to a standstill. After that, he respected me, and became my ally against the Dryden bullies, my first real friend. Deirdre and I started dating, and woe to anyone who gave Jimmy a hard time about it.
    I told Deirdre before we left that I was going to marry her when I got back. She told me she’d be waiting. “Watch out for Jimmy, okay?” she asked me. “He’s got too much to prove.”
    Jimmy and I had told the recruiter we wanted to serve together, and the guy said he would make it happen. I don’t know if he had anything to do with it, in fact he was probably lying, but it worked out the way we’d asked. Jimmy and I did Special Forces training together at Fort Bragg, then wound up in a joint military-CIA program called the Studies and Observation Group, or SOG. The Studies and Observation moniker was a joke, some idiot bureaucrat’s attempt to give the organization a low profile. You might as well name a pit bull Pansy.
    SOG’s mission was clandestine reconnaissance and sabotage missions into Cambodia and Laos, sometimes even into North Vietnam. The teams were comprised of LRRPs—an acronym for men specializing in long-range reconnaissance patrols. Three Americans and nine Civilian Irregular Defense Group personnel, or CIDGs. The CIDGs were usually Khmer mercenaries recruited by the CIA, sometimes Montagnards. Three men would go into the bush for one, two, three weeks at a time, living off the land, no contact with MACV, the U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam.
    We were the elite of the elite, small and mobile, slipping like silent ghosts through the jungle. All the moving parts on the weapons were taped down for noise suppression. We operated