He's at the parking structure at seven in the morning to check on the bike.
It's untouched. He checks anyway — mirrors, underseat, the small magnetic box he keeps fixed to the inside of the rear mudguard with a spare key and two folded ten-thousand-yen notes. All present. He runs his hand along the frame the way you check something you trust but verify anyway, out of habit, because habit is what keeps you alive when judgment lapses.
He's on the third level. The structure is mostly empty at this hour — a few commuter cars, a delivery van on the second level whose driver is asleep in the front seat with a jacket over his face. Riku stands beside the bike and looks out through the open concrete wall at the harbor. The rain stopped sometime before dawn. The sky is low and white, the water gray under it, the cranes along the waterfront standing still for once.
He hears footsteps on the ramp from the second level. One set. Unhurried.
He doesn't move.
The man who comes up the ramp is not large. This is the first thing Riku notes, because it's unexpected — Iida had described Sakamoto in terms that implied physical weight, and Riku had unconsciously constructed a physical type to match. What arrives instead is a man of average height and average build, somewhere in his mid-forties, wearing a dark coat over a dark suit, carrying nothing. His face is unremarkable in the specific way of faces that have been trained to be unremarkable — no expression that invites a response, no quality that snags the eye. The only notable thing about him is the quality of his stillness as he stops ten feet from Riku and takes in the scene — the bike, the harbor view, Riku himself — with the calm of a man who has already decided how this goes.
He says: Kurosawa Riku.
Not a question. Riku says: Sakamoto.
The man nods once. He says: you know who I am.
Riku says: I know your function.
Something shifts in Sakamoto's expression — not quite amusement, not quite irritation. The territory between them. He says: then you know why I'm here.
Riku says: you're here to tell me something.
Sakamoto says: I'm here to deliver a message, yes. He says it with the slight emphasis of a man correcting a small inaccuracy, fastidious about the distinction. He's not a messenger. He's a delivery mechanism for consequences. The message itself, presumably, is incidental.
* * *
They stand in the parking structure with the harbor behind Riku and the ramp behind Sakamoto and the distance between them unchanged.
Sakamoto says: the people I represent are aware of your presence in Yokohama. They are aware of your activities over the past three days — the district, the ramen shop on Shinko Street, the warehouse on Friday night. They are aware that you spoke with Iida Genzo.
He pauses. Riku says nothing.
Sakamoto says: they are not, at this time, interested in stopping you.
Riku says: that's generous.
Sakamoto says: it's practical. You've been moving for — he tilts his head slightly, calculating — eight months, approximately, since your release. In that time you've caused a moderate amount of disruption in three cities and a significant amount of disruption in one. You've dismantled two collection operations, exposed a circuit operation in Morioka that was running without proper authorization, and put four people in hospital, none of them fatally. He pauses again. You are, by the assessment of the people I represent, a nuisance. Not an existential one.
Riku looks at him. He says: and the message.
Sakamoto says: the message is this. There are things you want. The people I represent are aware of what those things are. They are willing, under certain conditions, to facilitate your access to some of those things in exchange for a period of — he selects the word with care — quiet.
Riku says: they want me to stop.
Sakamoto says: they want you to redirect. There's a distinction.
Riku says: what are the conditions.
Sakamoto reaches into his coat and produces an envelope — white, unsealed — and holds it out. Riku doesn't take it immediately. He looks at it the way you look at something that might be a trap and might just be an envelope, and the only way to know is to open it, which is itself a kind of answer.
He takes it.
Inside is a single card, heavy stock, one line of text: a name and a city. The name is not Takeda. The city is not Osaka. He reads it twice. He puts the card back in the envelope and the envelope in his jacket pocket.
He says: what does this buy them.
Sakamoto says: ninety days. During which you pursue this — he nods at Riku's jacket pocket — and do not pursue other current operations. During which Yokohama remains undisturbed. During which Iida Genzo's arrangements continue without interference.
Riku says: and what does it buy me.
Sakamoto says: the name on that card is the person who managed the relocation of your family. He says it the way you say a fact, without affect, without apology. He has access to information about where they were sent. This is not something you would find on your own in ninety days. It is possibly not something you would find on your own at all.
The parking structure is very quiet.
Somewhere below, the delivery driver shifts in his seat.
Riku says: why.
Sakamoto tilts his head.
Riku says: why offer this. Why not just remove me.
Sakamoto considers this for a moment with the air of a man deciding how honest to be. He says: because removing you has costs that the people I represent currently consider disproportionate to the problem you represent. And because — he pauses — there are elements within the organization that your activities have been, inadvertently, useful to. I won't elaborate on that.
Riku says: internal politics.
Sakamoto says: I won't elaborate on that.
* * *
Riku looks at the harbor for a moment. The cranes have started moving — one of them, slowly, swinging a container out over the water. He watches it.
He says: I'm not making an agreement with Kurohana.
Sakamoto says: I didn't ask you to make an agreement. I asked you to receive a message. What you do with it is your own concern.
Riku looks at him. There is something in Sakamoto's delivery that is either very stupid or very precise — a refusal to own the transaction he is conducting, a technical distance from the thing he is facilitating.
Riku decides it is precise. Sakamoto is careful. He says things in ways that can be walked back. That is either the trait of a man who survives by not committing, or the trait of a man who is doing two jobs at once and keeping them separated.
He files this.
He says: the name on the card. How current is it.
Sakamoto says: as of three weeks ago.
Riku says: and if the information turns out to be wrong.
Sakamoto says: then I would suggest that's a matter to take up with the person who gave it to you. He says this without irony that Riku can detect. He means it literally. He is telling Riku, in the language of careful men, that he is not the source of the information, only its carrier.
Riku puts his hand on the bike. He says: I'm leaving Yokohama today.
Sakamoto says: I know.
Riku says: tell whoever sent you that I received the message. Don't tell them what I'm going to do with it, because I haven't decided.
Sakamoto says: that's all I can report accurately in any case.
They look at each other for a moment. There is no hostility in it. There is very little of anything in it — two men who have conducted a transaction and are now on either side of it, with nothing left to exchange.
Sakamoto turns and walks back down the ramp. His footsteps are as unhurried as they were coming up. Riku listens to them fade down to the second level and then to the first and then to nothing.
He stands alone on the third level with the harbor and the moving cranes and the envelope in his pocket.
He gets on the bike.
* * *
He takes the expressway south out of the city.
The traffic is light at this hour, heading away from Yokohama against the inbound morning flow. He rides in the fast lane and keeps the speed steady and doesn't think about the envelope. He'll think about the envelope when he stops. Right now he thinks about the road and the white sky and the way the city thins out behind him — the dense towers of the port district giving way to residential blocks, then industrial zones, then the guardrails and green embankments of the expressway proper.
He rides for an hour before he pulls into a service area.
He buys coffee from a vending machine and sits on a bench outside the building and takes the envelope out of his jacket. He reads the card again. The name means nothing to him yet. The city is not Osaka, not on the way to Osaka, not near it — it pulls him in a different direction entirely, west and then south, toward the coast. He turns the card over. The back is blank.
He thinks about what Sakamoto said. Not an agreement. A message. What you do with it is your own concern.
He thinks about ninety days.
He thinks about a name and a city and the phrase: access to information about where they were sent.
He finishes the coffee. He puts the card back in the envelope and the envelope back in his jacket. He goes back to the bike.
He doesn't notice the black sedan parked at the far end of the service area lot until he's already on the expressway, and by then it's a shape in his mirror, getting smaller. It had been there when he arrived. It might have been there when he arrived. He runs back through his memory of the lot — yes. Same position. Engine off. Someone in the driver's seat.
Sakamoto's man, maybe. Or someone else's.
He watches the mirror until the service area disappears behind a curve, and then he watches the road ahead, and he rides.
Behind him, in the service area lot, the black sedan sits for another four minutes. Then the engine starts. It pulls out — not onto the expressway south, the direction Riku went. It takes the onramp going north, back toward the city, back toward whatever it reports to.
It moves quickly. Like something that has already gotten what it came for.