Hard Rain

“Harry, you ‘configured her whole system’?” I asked, my eyes mock-wide.

He looked down, but I saw the smile. “You know what I mean.”

“You’re not going to… penetrate her security, are you?” I asked, unable to resist.

“No, I wouldn’t do that to her. She’s nice.”

Christ, he was so smitten that he couldn’t even spot the sophomoric double entendre. “I’ll be damned,” I said again. “I’m happy for you, Harry.”

He looked at me, saw that my expression was genuine. “Thanks,” he said.

I raised my glass to my nose, took a deep breath, held it for a moment, and let it go. “So she’s got you keeping odd hours?” I asked.

“Well, the club is open until three A.M. and she works every day. So, by the time she gets home…”

“I get the picture,” I said. Although in fact, it was a little hard to imagine Harry with an attachment that didn’t have an Ethernet cable and a mouse. He was an introverted, socially stunted guy, with no contacts that I knew of outside of his day job, which he kept at arm’s length in any event, and me. Conditions that had always made him useful.

I tried to picture him with a high-end hostess, and couldn’t see it. It didn’t feel right.

Don’t be a prick, I thought. Just because you can’t have someone in your life, don’t begrudge Harry.

“What’s her name?” I asked.

He smiled. “Yukiko.”

“Yukiko” means “snow child.” “Pretty name,” I said.

He nodded, his expression slightly dopey. “I like it.”

“How much does she know about you?” I asked, taking a sip of the Lagavulin. My tone was i

“Well, she knows about the consultant work, of course. But not about the… hobbies.”

About his extreme proclivity for hacking, he meant. A hobby that could land him in jail if the authorities caught wind of it. In the ground, if someone else did.

“Hard to keep that sort of thing secret,” I opined, testing.

“I don’t see why it would have to come up,” he said, looking at me.

A waitress appeared from behind a curtain and set Harry’s order on the bar in front of him. He thanked her, showing a deep appreciation for this newly wonderful class of being, women who work in restaurants and bars, and I smiled.

I realized at some level that if Harry was going to start living more like a civilian, he would be less useful, and possibly even dangerous, to me. His increasing transparency to the wider world might offer an enemy a window into my otherwise hidden existence. Of course, if someone co

“Is she your first girlfriend?” I asked, my tone gentle.

“I told you, she’s not really my girlfriend,” he answered, ducking the question.

“If she’s occupying enough of your attention to keep you in bed until the sun sets, I feel safe using the word as shorthand.”

He looked at me, cornered.

“Is she?” I asked again.

He looked away. “I guess so.”

I hadn’t meant to embarrass him. “Harry, I only ask because, when you’re young, you sometimes think you can have it both ways. If you’re just having fun, you don’t need to tell her anything. You shouldn’t tell her anything. But if the attachment gets deeper, you’ll need to do some hard thinking. About how close you want to get with her, about how important your hobbies are. Because you can’t live with one foot in daylight and the other in shadows. Believe me on this. It can’t be done. Not long-term.”

“You don’t have to worry,” he said. “I’m not stupid, you know.”

“Everybody in love is stupid,” I told him. “It’s part of the condition.”

I saw him blush again, at my use of the word and the assumption behind it. But I didn’t care how he referred to these new feelings in his own mind. I know what it’s like to live walled off, isolated, and then suddenly, unbelievably, to have that pretty girl you’d longed for returning the feeling. It changes your priorities. Hell, it changes your damn values.

I smiled bitterly, thinking of Midori.

Then, as if reading my mind, he said, “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. But I wanted to do it in person.”

“Sounds serious.”

“A few months ago I got a letter. From Midori.”

I finished off the Lagavulin before answering. If the letter had arrived that long ago, a few moments more for me to figure out how I wanted to respond weren’t going to make a difference.

“She knew where to reach you…,” I started, although I had already figured it out.

He shrugged. “She knew because we brought her over to my apartment to handle the musical aspects of that lattice encryption.”

I noticed that, even now, Harry felt compelled to carve out Midori’s precise role in that operation to clarify that he had been fully capable of handling the encryption itself. He was sensitive about these things. “Right,” I said.

“She didn’t know my last name. The envelope was only addressed to Haruyoshi. Thank God, otherwise I would have had to move, and what a pain in the ass that would have been.”

Harry, like anyone else who values privacy, takes extreme pains to ensure that there is no co

If what was sent to you was just an ordinary letter, of course, the only person who might make the co

“Where was the letter from?” I asked him.

“New York. She’s living there, I guess.”

New York. Where Tatsu had sent her, after telling her I was dead, to protect her from suspicion that she might still have the computer disk her father had stolen from Yamaoto, a disk containing enough evidence of Japan’s vast network of corruption to bring down the government. The move made sense for her, I supposed. Her career in America was taking off. I knew because I was watching.

He reached into a back pants pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. “Here,” he said, handing it to me.

I took it and paused for a moment before unfolding it, not caring what he would make of my hesitation. When I looked, I saw that it was written in confident, graceful longhand Japanese, an echo, perhaps, of girlhood calligraphy lessons, and a reflection of the personality behind the pen.

Haruyoshi-san,

It is still cold in New York, and I am counting the days to Spring. I imagine that soon enough, the cherry blossoms will be blooming in Tokyo and I am sure they will be beautiful.

I trust that you, too, have heard the sad news that our mutual friend Fujiwara-san has passed away. I have been given to understand that Fujiwara-san’s body had been returned to the United States for burial. I have hoped to visit the gravesite to present an offering for his spirit, but, regrettably, I have been unable to discover where he has been laid to rest. If you have any information that would be helpful to me in this matter, I would sincerely appreciate your assistance. You can reach me at the above address.