"The records are clean." He said. "Too clean." A brief pause. "What do you mean?"
"People who grew up the way this document indicates carry a particular kind of paper trail. Small things, applications, program enrollments, community records, school reports, layered, textured." He paused. "This is smooth." Claire was quiet for a moment.
"You think it's been managed?" "I think someone knew we would look." He set the phone down against his shoulder and scrolled again. "There are also gaps. A 14-month window six years ago where employment records don't connect to residence records.
A name attached to a language program in Osaka that was administratively closed. He paused. Uh the program was closed 4 years ago. Claire said nothing for a moment. Then, Osaka?
Yes. The silence between them was the kind that happened when two people arrived at the edge of the same thought at the same time. What do you want me to do? Claire asked. Takahashi looked at the document.
He thought about a restaurant in Osaka almost a decade ago. He thought about a man he had not spoken to in 4 years and the last conversation they'd had and the shape of a phrase that a waitress in Chicago had used tonight that had no business being that specific from someone who respected the language. Dig deeper, he said. Don't use the standard team, use Mercer. He paused.
And find out everything you can about Keisuke Mori's last known associates. He ended the call. He sat for a long time in the dark room. 9 years ago, the Osaka was different from the city it had become. Or perhaps it was only that Amara had been different, 17 years old and arriving with nothing except a scholarship from an international cultural exchange foundation that barely covered her housing, a second-hand Japanese dictionary with half the pages annotated by whoever had owned it before, and the particular reckless focus that sometimes lived in young people who had decided, without anyone's permission, to become someone specific.
She had come to study. The official designation was a language immersion program. But the real education had started 3 weeks in but when she had wandered into the wrong building on a Tuesday afternoon, a converted office near the Shinsaibashi district, and found herself in a room where a man was giving a talk to about 12 people about the way dominant corporate structures absorbed smaller competitors by making them feel grateful for the absorption. His name was Daisuke Mori. He was 61 at the time, lean with a precise way of speaking and an unhurried quality that made everything he said feel considered rather than spontaneous.
He ran a small investment advisory firm, genuinely small, not the kind of small that was actually large and wanted to seem approachable. He operated in the space between mid-size enterprises and the institutional capital that was slowly learning how to swallow them. He helped the former understand the latter before it was too late to make a choice. He was not famous. He did not appear in the financial press.