SECRETS OF THE HEART
Mita City, the capital of Ibaraki province.
The man entering the building at 4-4-4 Shirashicho Road on a bright, sunny day in early September was named Binkan Suzuki. He was in his late 30s and had a receding hairline. He wore glasses and a grey suit and carried a briefcase. To the casual eye, he appeared to be a typical Japanese salaryman going about his everyday business.
The entrance to the building at 4-4-4 Shirashicho Road bore a sign in Romanji that said:
ECUADOR AGENCY
Below it were the same words in Katakana.
Just inside the building he was greeted by a young woman who smiled and politely bowed to him.
“Irasshaimase, Mr. Suzuki,” she said. So good to see you again."
“Good afternoon, Reiko,” he said, returning her bow, “I have an appointment with Mr. Ecuador. I believe he’s expecting me.”
“Yes, he is, Mr. Suzuki. He’s very eager to talk with you, in fact,” replied Reiko, the Receptionist. “But he’s in the middle of a very important telephone call at the moment. Would you care to accompany me to the Hospitality Room?”
She led him down a short hallway that led to a partially opened sliding door, which she pushed all the way open.
“Doozo,” she said, beckoning him to enter the room beyond with an outstretched hand.
It was a brightly lit room with tatami mats on the floor. Three sides of the room had walls, but the fourth side was completely open and gave a view of a traditional Japanese rock garden with a small fountain beyond it. Water from the fountain slowly dripped into a bamboo tube which tipped over when it was full, making a “thunk” sound as it drained out into the bottom of the fountain, then snapped back to its former position. In the center of the room there was a low mahogany table with cushions placed around it on the floor.
The only elements of the room that conflicted with the Japanese “wa” of it all were some travel posters on the walls depicting scenes of South America (tropical beaches, bull fighters and smiling senoritas mostly) and the Latin music softly playing from a speaker somewhere.
At the end of the room there was a buffet table piled high with all sorts of Japanese delicacies: nori, sashimi, tacoyaki and gleaming bowls of rice. There were also few South American dishes with which Mr. Suzuki was less familiar.
“Doozo, suwatte kudasai,” Miss Reiko said, indicating that he should sit down, which he did in a rather delicate fashion.
“May I fix you a plate of something?” she asked.
“Just some tea please, Reiko” he replied.
After she had handed him his tea, she withdrew with a polite bow, while he sat and quietly drank.
In Japan, most businesses are seldom all they appear to be.
The Ecuador Agency, for instance, was officially listed as a talent agency for the entertainment industry. But while it did list a few clients (mostly over-the-hill idols and news readers from the outlying provinces who were on their way to either adult movies or daytime television), that was just a front. The real business of the Ecuador Agency was supplying certain illicit services-mainly drugs and sex-to show business personalities and influential politicians. Naturally, for this business model to work, the utmost discretion on the part of all the parties involved was all important. Unfortunately, the company’s customers in the world of entertainment often had a kamikaze-like tendency to make public asses of themselves. Whenever that happened, it was imperative that the Ecuador Agency cover its traces.
This is where this gentleman who was quietly sitting on a cushion sipping tea comes in. Binkan Suzuki was what was known in certain circles as a “cleaner.” On those occasions when a popular singer was sighted coming out of a love hotel with a married politician or a handsome actor got high and beat up his girlfriend, it was Mr. Suzuki’s job to see that it got covered up or, if that wasn’t possible, to at least draw the attention of the authorities and the media away from a small talent agency located in Mita City, Ibraki Prefecture.
This gave Mr. Suzuki a great deal of power in the entertainment world. He knew a great many secrets that the darlings of the media desperately wished to keep under wraps, and you might say he knew where the bodies were buried; in fact, he had helped bury more that a few-literally! A more ruthless or enterprising man than Mr. Suzuki might have done much with his knowledge (blackmail perhaps being just the tip of the iceberg), but to him it was just a job. The misbehavior of strangers only represented to him problems to be solved and paychecks to be cashed. His mother had raised him to be a humble man, so humble he was.
After about twenty minutes, Jose Ecuador, himself, entered the room.
“Binkan! Amigo! How the hell are you?” he said loudly.
Everything about him was loud.
He was dressed in white pants and wore a flowery shirt that barely fit over his kettledrum of a pot belly. His shirt was unbuttoned enough to show the hair on his chest and several gold chains and a silver crucifix hung from his neck.
His real name was Goro Matsuda. He was partly Japanese, but mostly Hispanic. Shortly after World War II, his ancestors had fled Japan to escape being put on trial for war crimes. They resettled in Peru, where the family had prospered in various criminal enterprises ever since. Matsuda renamed himself Jose Ecuador because of a prison sentence in Quito, the capital of Ecuador. To some, prison would have seemed a bad thing, but not to Goro Matsuda, who was naturally given to optimism. In fact, he often looked back on it as one of the happiest periods of his life. The Matsuda fortune and the highly bribable guards at the prison had made his stay there unusually enjoyable.
After he was released, he decided to reinvent himself. So, he changed his name to Jose Ecuador to honor the country that had been so hospitable to him and decided to expand the family operations overseas by returning to the old homeland.
Suzuki came to his feet and bowed respectfully.
Ecuador laughed and stuck one huge hand.
Suzuki took it and shook hands with him weakly. When it was over, he withdrew his hand with considerable relief.
“Come, amigo. Let’s talk in my office,” Ecuador said.
He put a huge arm around the smaller man’s shoulder and led him out of the room.
“Reiko!” he yelled. “Hold all my calls!”
“Sorry to keep you waiting, amigo,” he said, addressing Suzuki. “But I was on the phone. Making arrangements for a big event at the Chateau this weekend.”
Suzuki had heard of the Chateau. It was another part of the Ecuador Agency’s many services, but one that Suzuki knew very little about and wished to know even less. The Chateau was located somewhere up in the mountains north of Ibaraki Prefecture, and even though it was called a chateau, it was more of a mansion than that and more of fortress than a mansion. It was often the venue for a certain type of entertainment that appealed to very rich and very twisted people. The kind of people that his mother had taught him were no good, rich people whose morals were even worse that the ones he dealt with on a day to day basis. He couldn’t imagine what could be worse, but he had heard that the Chateau wasn’t a very safe place for women to be.
“Now, tell me, amigo, how has this business with Miss Noriko turned out?” Ecuador asked, after they had become settled in his office.
It was a rather plain office for such a flashy individual as Jose Ecuador. The only items of note in it was a large oil on velvet painting of the Crucifixion hanging on the wall behind his desk and a couple of framed photographs on it. One showed Ecuador, himself, alongside a round, apple-cheeked woman who was probably his wife, and the other was of a surly-looking youth in a school uniform. He was short and fat and bore an undeniable resemblance to Ecuador, himself.
“For I am dying to find out,” he continued.
Noriko was the name of a popular actress who had recently been found in possession of narcotics that could possibly be traced back to Ecuador during a routine baggage inspection at Haneda airport. She had been arrested and held for questioning, but promptly escaped-probably by bribing one of her guards. After that, she had simply disappeared, leaving a media sensation in her wake that went on for days. Worrisome questions had been raised by the media about where the drugs had come from, so naturally Mr. Suzuki had been called in.
“Things went very well, Ecuador-san,” he replied. “She was easy to find; just hiding out with some relatives, that’s all. I was lucky to find her first, because it wouldn’t have taken much time for the Authorities to find her-as they will shortly.”
“Did you kill her?”
“Oh, no! Of course not. I would never do that to Noriko. I admire her work greatly. She’s such a marvelous actress with so much more to give to the world. Killing her would be so unnecessary, so I found a better way.”
“And what was that, amigo?”
“I simply advised her to turn herself in and say that she got the drugs from a foreigner.”
“Madre de Dios!” Ecuador exclaimed, crossing himself. “But won’t that lead the cops right to me?”
Suzuki smiled.
“All the years you’ve been in this country, Ecuador-san, and you still don’t understand the Japanese? Let me explain. Nobody wants to see Noriko get into trouble, not even the police. All anyone wants from her is a sincere apology and all will be forgiven. Blaming her downfall on a foreigner will do two things: First, it will confirm what people already believe about how it’s the foreigners who are corrupting Japanese society; secondly, it will give the police an excuse to drop the investigation.”
“Oh, yes?” Ecuador asked.
“Yes, by claiming she got the drugs from a foreigner, she’s implying that she actually got them from the Yakusa, but is afraid to admit it. Likewise, the police in Tokyo will be too afraid to bother the Yakusa, with whom they have a live and let live policy, so the whole investigation will be quietly dropped. Oh, they may rough up a few gaijan in Shibuya just for show, but the Tokyo police are not going to come all the way out to Ibaraki looking for clues.”
“Ha, ha! Wonderful, wonderful,” Ecuador said. “We gaijin are pretty useful to you Japanese sometimes, aren’t we?” he replied (apparently not taking in the sense of Suzuki’s comment about foreigners corrupting Japanese society).
“I guess so¬Öwhen you put it that way,” Suzuki replied. “In any event, there’s no harm done. Noriko will play her part like the great actress that she is. Freeze her account for now, of course. Destroy any old records. And in a few months-when all this has all blown over-you will be able to start supplying her with product again.”
“Good, good! What would I do without you, Binkan?” Ecuador replied. “But you know, I sometimes get so tired of dealing with these show business people. They’re troublesome; you always have to cover your ass when you’re dealing with them.”
Suzuki shrugged.
“I suppose you just have to put up with it to make money,” he said.
“I suppose so,” Ecuador replied with a sign. “But, do you know how I started out in this country a few years ago. By selling my product to school kids. What a great business that was! So secure. If a kid messes up, who cares? It doesn’t make the evening news.”
Suzuki nodded in agreement.
“It sounds so attractive. Why did you get out of that business?”
“It’s a saturated market,” Ecuador replied. “When something’s too good a deal, everybody wants to get into it. The local Yaks have got the school market all tied up these days. At least the hassle of dealing with show business people levels the playing field a little. Besides, I can’t find the kind of people any more like the ones I had working for me back then. Ah, there was this one senorita! I only met her once, and I never knew her name. So I just called her the Snow Queen. But she was a genius! A school nurse, can you believe that? Talk about the fox guarding the hen house! But then she lost her nerve. Some kid she’d juiced up for a sporting event died on the field-bad heart, I guess. She had some kind of a sick thing for this kid and it messed her all up.”
“What happened to her?” Suzuki asked.
“Ah, she just disappeared,” Ecuador replied. “Owed me a lot of money, too.”
The conversation momentarily ground to a halt at this point, as conversations sometimes do. Suzuki took a tissue from his breast pocket and started polishing his glasses, while Ecuador picked up the picture of the surly youth and gazed at it absently.
What went unsaid was that there was another reason why Ecuador had stopped selling drugs to kids-his son.
Ramon Ecuador, Jose’s only son, had died when the school he was attending, Cromartie, had mysteriously been blown up. The case was never solved, although witnesses had sworn a strange, catlike figure had been seen running out of the building seconds before the explosion occurred. Jose had been grief-stricken-- it’s hard when a parent has to bury his son-- but he had learned to live with his loss. Still, ever since that tragedy, Jose Ecuador wouldn’t have a thing to do with schools or students. Even driving by a school building made his chest hurt.
His wife, on the other hand, had gone completely loco, at least as far as her husband was concerned. She had consulted a medium, trying to contact Ramon in Heaven, but was told that her son had come back to Earth, but in another form. Just what kind of form, the medium couldn’t say, but now Mrs. Ecuador was determined to search all of Japan until she found him.
“Nonsense!” Ecuador said out loud.
“Eh?” Suzuki said, looking up.
“Sorry, Amigo,” Ecuador replied, “I was thinking about something else. But what is this I hear about you getting married? If you don’t mind me saying so, I always thought you were too much of an herbivore for that.”
“Well, that¬Ö” Suzuki replied without enthusiasm," it’s a little bit of a mistake."
“Isn’t it always, ha ha!”
“It was arraigned,”
“Oh?”
"Yes, Suzuki said. “Between my mother and a friend of hers who has this unmarried daughter. The two of them got together and decided that the two of us should meet. I tried to get out of it, you know, but couldn’t. So I agreed, but thought nothing would come of it. I was sure that she would find me unsuitable (you know how women are these days), and I endeavored to be my boring best, and it looked like it was working, too. Because all through the interview, she didn’t seem to listen to me at all and hardly made any conversation back. Her mind seemed to be miles away the whole time. But in the end, she accepted me. She actually accepted me! I couldn’t believe it. Right in front of my mother, too. Well, after that, I was stuck.”
“Ha ha,” Ecuador replied. “I can just see it. And there’s no way you can get out of it?”
“No, my mother would kill me!”
Ecuador continued to laugh, and Suzuki was starting to feel offended.
“Look, we Japanese take these things seriously,” he said.
“Seriously?” Ecuador replied. “Amigo, we have arranged marriages in Peru, too. Though there’s usually a bit more passion involved. My marriage to my dear Maria was arranged, you know.”
“Well, it can’t be helped now,” Suzuki replied. “Mother is going full steam ahead with the preparations.”
“Sorry to hear that, my friend. Well¬Ödo you have a picture of this wonder woman, who’s landed the Great Suzuki?” Ecuador asked.
“Yes, here in my cell,” Suzuki replied, passing his cell phone over to Ecuador. “Her name is Kokoro, and she’s the school nurse. She works at a small academy south of here called JAST.”
Ecuador looked at the picture, and he looked like he’d seen a ghost. Suzuki, in turn, regarded his friend with increasing bewilderment.
"This is the woman you're going to marry," Ecuador asked in a hoarse voice. "Is this right. And you say she's a nurse? At a school? Talk about hiding out in plain sight. Ha ha! For this, amigo, is the very woman I was talking about. The Snow Queen herself. And you're going to marry her? Now I truly do believe there is a God! Blessings on you both, my friend. Do marry her. And when you do, bring her up to the Chateau."
