The guy was big for a Japanese man, taller even than me. Like most Japanese men, he still had plenty of hair, swept high off his forehead and shot with silver. And he definitely had his own sense of style. He wore a cream-colored silk suit over a collarless pink shirt, a black bolo tie and retro Ray-Bans on a gold chain. I could see pale flesh through black silk socks.
I had time to take in the details, because he didn’t say a word. He just stared at the gaijin with soup spots on his shirt and his hand on Akiko’s wrist. Then he took the sunglasses off. Nobody had done any surgery on this guy’s eyes. They were like slits. I wondered how he could see at all. But it was his protruding lower lip that worried me most. If the three of us were fish, Akiko and I would be sardines. He would be a barracuda.
“This is my father.” Akiko stood up. She said something in Japanese. I heard piano and teacher and my name. The emotion that Akiko was having trouble channeling into music seemed to be coming out fine now. The man made a deep grunting noise, put down the crocodile-skin briefcase he was carrying and stuck out a hand.
Jeweled rings dug into my palm. I wondered which one of them had caught Akiko on the eyeball. He didn’t have a ring on his little finger because his little finger was missing.
“Hajimemashite,” I said, which I was pretty sure meant “nice to meet you.”
Then he and Akiko had a little chat. I looked around. The walls were framed into panels using a warm blond wood that I figured for cypress. The surfaces were covered in some kind of subtly pebbled paper in a washed-out moss green. The room went with Akiko, not with the guy barking at her. The only family resemblance I could see was in how vigorously they argued. Finally Akiko turned to me.
“He says, if you’re my teacher, play something.” She half smiled. “I suggest something calm.”
I sat down and played the Chopin piece we’d been working on. It wasn’t long, but it felt like forever with Barracuda-san behind my back. Akiko settled into the leather chair as though this kind of thing happened every day. I finished the prelude and waited for knuckles to connect with my ear.
“Unh.” It was a deep, punched-in-the-gut kind of sound, one of the bewildering variations on groans and grunts that Japanese people make. I had no idea what it meant. He followed up with a volley of Japanese.
“He doesn’t like classical music,” Akiko said. “He prefers jazz.”
“Me too.”
Akiko looked at me. “You never told me that, Frank.”
“You never asked.”
She said something to the man. He made that sucker-punched grunt again, then approached the piano. In English, he said slowly, “You know ‘My Funny Valentine’?”
Here was one argument for his being her father—they both seemed to go for the tearjerker tunes. “You got it,” I said. I let both of them have it, the first jazz I’d played since arriving in Japan. And it came in a torrent. I gave the tune its full measure of gift-wrapped misery. It was like being back in Kaz’s little bar in Nanaimo again, the whiskey taking the edges off a long day and Kaz’s sax dipping and swooping beside me.
When I’d finished, the man cleared his throat and set off on another long back-and-forth with Akiko. He sounded slightly less murderous now.
“He has a job for you,” Akiko said.
“I already have a job. I was trying to do it when your—this person showed up.”
“I won’t translate that,” Akiko said.
“What kind of job?”
“One of the bars he owns. In Kichijoji.”
“I live in Kichijoji.”
“That’s why he found you a place there. He has a vacancy for a late-night jazz pianist.”
“How many bars does he own?”
“No idea.”
“But the one in my neighborhood just happens to need a new piano player? Come on.”
“Take it,” Akiko said.
He did look like the sort of person who could make things happen quickly. And I wanted to do it. Playing a single sappy tune on a good piano had been like a jolt of twelve-year-old whiskey after a long dry spell.
“I’ll think about it,” I said. Akiko looked at me the way the way you’d look at a not-too-bright six-year-old.
“I’ll tell him you’re very grateful, and ask when you can start.”
I still had to know one thing. “What happened to the other piano player?”
Akiko laughed and said something to the man. He grunted. They conferred. She turned back to me.
“A problem with one of his fingers.” Then the Ray-Bans were back on and the crocodile briefcase back in his hand. I decided to change the subject.
“It’s beautiful.” I pointed to the briefcase. Barracuda-san grinned.
“You like? I kill him. In Brazil.” He ran his hand over the pebbled surface, and Akiko rolled her reconstructed eyes.
“On safari with his friends,” she said. “Watch out he doesn’t skin you too.” Then he was gone. There was a lingering smell of expensive cologne. I slumped into the leather chair.
“Father, my ass,” I said under my breath. But Akiko had good ears.
“I know what that means,” she said. “I did a whole year of English idioms when I was abroad. Now I’ll give you one.”
“And that is?”
“Never look a gift horse in the mouth.”
I was impressed. I told her so. “You’ve seen The Godfather, I’m guessing.”
“More than once.”
“Then you know the scene where the don says, I’m gonna make you an offer you can’t refuse. Another interesting idiom, don’t you think?”
Akiko touched the bruise around her eye. “Tell me about it,” she said. She went to another room and returned with payment for her lesson. Cash, like Mrs. Ogawa, like all my students. But I suspected Akiko’s private bank was bigger than all of the others put together.