The room smells like old cigarette smoke and damp concrete and something sweet underneath both of those — hair oil, yes, still, after all these years.
Riku closes the door. The noise of the warehouse dims to a murmur. Iida sits at the folding table with his hands flat on the surface and watches Riku cross the room and take the other chair. Neither of them speaks for a moment. Outside, through the thin partition wall, the crowd reacts to something — a collective sharp sound, half groan and half excitement. Third fight must have started.
Iida says: you look worse than I remember.
Riku says: you look the same.
Iida almost smiles. It doesn't quite arrive. He says: that's not a compliment where I come from. He picks up a cigarette from the edge of the table — already lit, burning down in the ashtray, waiting for him — and takes a slow drag and sets it back down. He says: I'm going to ask you one question before you ask me anything, and I want an honest answer.
Riku says: alright.
Iida says: are you here to burn something down, or are you here to find something out?
Riku looks at him. He says: I'm here to find something out. The burning comes later.
Iida nods. He picks up the cigarette again.
He says: that's honest, at least.
* * *
They talk for twenty minutes.
Iida doesn't volunteer. He responds to specific questions with specific answers, parceling information the way he used to parcel fight slots — giving you what you need for the night, not what you'd need for the week. Riku has done enough of these conversations to know how to work with that. He asks narrow questions. He listens to what's in the gaps.
What he learns:
Kurohana's presence in Yokohama is real but layered. They don't run the circuit directly. What they do is own the debt — the promoters, the venue operators, the bookmakers all owe money to the same upstream source, and that source has a name that Iida won't say out loud in this room but writes on the inside cover of a matchbook and slides across the table. Riku looks at it. He doesn't recognize it. He pockets the matchbook.
Sakamoto, the name Riku had overheard in the district, is a collection agent. Not a fighter, not a promoter — just a man who shows up when payments are late and leaves when they're not late anymore. Iida has dealt with him twice. He describes him the way you describe weather: present, impersonal, capable of damage.
Takeda Sho — and here Iida pauses, takes a long drag, lets the silence do some work — Takeda is in Osaka. This Iida confirms. What he adds is that Takeda's position has grown. He's not just running circuits anymore. He's coordinating between Kurohana's western operations and something that Iida calls, with careful vagueness, the new arrangement. He doesn't explain what the new arrangement is. Riku files it.
He asks about his family.
Iida is quiet for a moment that is slightly too long. He says: I heard things. A year ago, maybe a little more.
Riku says: what things.
Iida says: that they were moved. Not — he stops. He restarts. Not harmed. Moved. Relocated, as a precaution, after it became clear that the frame wasn't going to hold permanently. Kurohana doesn't like loose ends but they also don't like unnecessary noise. A dead family makes noise. A relocated family is quieter.
Riku keeps his face still. He has practice at this.
He says: where.
Iida shakes his head. He says: I don't know where. I know that someone inside Kurohana's eastern logistics handled it. Someone with access to the residential side of their operations. That's not Takeda — Takeda is western, circuits, money. The person who moved your family is someone else. Someone you'd reach through Osaka but who isn't Takeda.
Riku says: a name.
Iida says: I don't have a name. I have a function. If I had a name I'd have given it to you already because having it would be more dangerous than not having it and I've been careful for a long time.
He says this without self-pity, without apology. Just as fact. Riku believes him.
* * *
Iida stubs out the cigarette. He looks at the ashtray for a moment, then back at Riku. He says: there's something else.
Riku waits.
Iida says: you were seen. Not tonight — before tonight. Two days ago, probably. Someone in the district made you and passed it up. I heard about it this afternoon from Sakamoto, which means Sakamoto heard about it from someone above him, which means it's already moving.
Riku says: how much do they know.
Iida says: that you're in Yokohama. That you're asking about the circuit. He pauses. That you're alive, which apparently was not a settled question.
Riku thinks about the man at the ramen shop, the one in the booth who wasn't eating. He thinks about the gray Alphard outside the karaoke bar. He'd noted them both as ambient, as texture. He recalibrates.
He says: Sakamoto.
Iida says: he'll come to you. That's how he works — he doesn't chase, he arrives. He'll know where you're sleeping by tomorrow morning, or someone who works for him will. He's not going to hurt you, probably — you're more useful as a message back to whoever is looking for you. But useful and safe are different things.
Riku says: what do you want for this.
Iida looks at him steadily. He says: I want you to leave Yokohama by Sunday. I want whatever you're doing to Kurohana to happen somewhere else. I have — he gestures at the partition wall, at the warehouse beyond it, at something larger than both — I have arrangements. I have a life that functions. I'm not asking you to stop. I'm asking you not to stop here.
Riku looks at him for a moment. He says: that's all.
Iida says: that's all.
Riku stands. He picks up the matchbook from where he'd set it on the table edge. He says: the name in Osaka. The one who moved my family. If you hear it —
Iida says: I'll find a way to get it to you. He says it without warmth, but without hesitation. The tone of a man honoring a transaction that has already been agreed to, somewhere above the level of words.
Riku nods. He goes to the door.
Iida says, behind him: Kurosawa.
Riku stops.
Iida says: I'm sorry about your family. For what that's worth, from me.
Riku stands with his hand on the door for one second. Two. He says: it's worth something. He opens the door and goes back out into the noise.
* * *
The warehouse is louder now. The fourth fight is the main card, apparently — the crowd is pressed forward, people standing on chairs, the collective noise of eighty bodies convinced something important is happening in the taped square at the center of the room.
Riku moves through the edge of the crowd toward the west corridor and the propped-open door. No one stops him. No one looks at him except a man near the bar who glances up and then away with the speed of someone who has been told to look and not to be seen looking. Riku files his face.
Unremarkable features, a gray jacket, a hat.
He'll remember it.
He steps out into the night.
The rain has come back — not the drizzle of the morning but a proper rain now, heavy and cold, hammering the corrugated roof of the warehouse and the concrete of the alley and the surface of the harbor three blocks away. Riku pulls his jacket closed and stands for a moment in the doorway, letting his eyes adjust.
The alley is empty. He walks north toward the street.
He thinks about what Iida said. Not harmed. Moved. He turns the words over the way you turn something fragile over, slowly, checking for damage. He's been running on the assumption — not a hope, not a belief, just a working assumption, the kind you need to function — that they were alive. Iida's information doesn't confirm this. What it does is make it slightly less unlikely. A relocated family is quieter. Yes. It is.
He reaches the street. He turns toward the station, toward the capsule hotel, toward the dry jacket on the hook and the six inches of curved ceiling.
He doesn't get there for a while. He walks longer than he needs to.
* * *
Her name was Yui.
He thinks about her the way he always does when he lets himself — in pieces, not in sequence. The way she held her coffee cup with both hands even in summer, for the warmth of it. The particular sound of her laugh at something genuinely funny, different from the polite laugh, bigger and less controlled. The fight they had in Kyoto, the bad one, the one about the thing neither of them said directly — that fight had lasted three days and ended with her leaving a note on the kitchen table that said only: I'm still here, which was either the most reassuring or the most devastating three words he'd ever read and he still wasn't sure which.
Their daughter's name was Hana. She was four when he last saw her. She had Yui's eyes and his stubbornness, which Yui had said was the worst possible combination and had seemed delighted about it.
Their son was eighteen months. He had been eighteen months. He is — Riku does the arithmetic without wanting to — he is almost three now. He was not walking when Riku last saw him. He is walking now, somewhere. He has a voice Riku has never heard.
Riku stops walking.
He's at the waterfront without having decided to go there. The harbor is black and rain-hammered and enormous. He stands at the railing and puts both hands on the wet metal and looks at the water and doesn't move for a long time.
He thinks: still here.
Then he straightens up. He lets go of the railing. He walks back to the capsule hotel in the rain, and he doesn't think about them again until after he's lying down, and by then he's too tired to do anything with it except hold it in the dark until sleep comes.