Read Online John Rain 08: Graveyard of Memories by Barry Eisler - Free Book Online Page A

were still a mystery, and trying to navigate the unfamiliar terrain of conversation with an attractive woman made me feel anxious and awkward. But violence…violence I knew. I supposed it stood to reason that I would come across as ungainly in romance, and confident, even imposing, in a confrontation. I could see where the contrast might have confused her. But it wasn’t something I wanted to explain. Instead, I said, “How about you?”
    “What about me?”
    “How old are you?”
    “Twenty-five.”
    “That’s a good age.”
    She frowned. “Good for what?”
    “I don’t know. Just sounds…good.” I imagined a fighter jet burning into the tarmac and exploding in flames.
    She shook her head and laughed again. “Why aren’t you in school?”
    “You mean college?”
    “Assuming you graduated from high school.”
    I hadn’t, in fact, having skipped out during my junior year to lie about my age and join the army. But I didn’t expect she would find any of that particularly impressive.
    “I don’t know. I guess I haven’t gotten around to it.”
    The truth was more complicated than that. At the time, life in Tokyo’s universities was dominated by various radical student factions, some complaining about Japan’s complicity in America’s war in Vietnam; others about how the American military was going to remain on Okinawa even after returning the island to Japan; and still others agitating for socialism, communism, real disarmament, discontinuation of construction at the new airport in Narita, and other such things. Several Tokyo universities had been paralyzed by student occupations and pitched battles with police—armed battles featuring tear gas, rocks, and staves. There had been rampages, bombings, arson, hundreds of arrests. I didn’t see any real difference between the students and the Japanese Red Army, which was busy hijacking airplanes and taking hostages in pursuit of paradise on earth. At best, they all struck me as pampered narcissists and dangerously misguided dreamers. Maybe they meant well, but to me it all felt like the same undifferentiated mob that had meant well during the riots that killed my father. I’d seen how the world really worked, and had paid for the privilege. I had nothing in common with any of them. I would make my own way.
    “How about you?” I said. “Did you…are you in college?”
    She frowned, but with a hint of amusement. “Don’t you have anything better to do than hang around here talking to me?”
    “Not really. I mean, yes, but…”
    She looked at me with an expression that could probably best be described as “charitable.”
    “Do you like jazz?” I asked, flailing.
    “What gave you that idea?”
    “Well, you’re always listening to it on that tape recorder.”
    “I was being sarcastic.”
    I realized I should have quit while I was ahead. “Okay,” I said, “I guess I should go.”
    “Okay.”
    “Maybe I’ll see you later.”
    “Maybe.”
    “Bye.”
    She gave me a tiny wave, half friendly, half dismissal, from behind the glass.
    I headed south on Thanatos for a while, going nowhere in particular, nursing my wounded dignity. Then I shrugged it off and started to focus. I stopped at a payphone and called my answering service, hoping I’d have some word from McGraw. Instead, the woman on the morning shift told me, “You have a message from a Miyamoto-san. He asks that you call him back.”
    Miyamoto? I wondered why he was contacting me. We’d had coffee together a few times—Miyamoto was talkative for a courier, and though I recognized social contact would at best be frowned upon by the people we worked for, I was too green to know I should rebuff him. He was friendly and inquisitive, unabashed about asking questions that were uncharacteristically direct for a Japanese: how was it to grow up in both countries, what was life like in the American army, had it been uncomfortable for me to fight in a western war against Asians, things like that.