different girl at almost the same time, was the mother lode: a gap in the wall, or rather a panel that looked like a wall but was actually a door, open just wide enough for the woman in white to slip through.
15
“So what now?” asked Han.
“Now I go kick the door down and get some answers.”
Han winced. They’d hardly gotten out of earshot of those high school girls. Mariko managed two steps toward the secret door before Han clapped a hand on her shoulder and spun her back around. “Come on, Mariko. Anyone paranoid enough to create this Blind Spot of yours has got to be paranoid enough to monitor their own front door, neh? Don’t you think there’s going to be a security camera somewhere?”
“Fine by me,” Mariko said with a shrug. “Let them come out and try to stop me. These people pissed me off, Han. Let one of them throw a punch and see what happens.”
He steepled his hands plaintively in front of his chest, as if he were praying to her. “A quick reconnaissance run first, okay? Just for me? We’ll pretend we’re a couple shopping for sex toys.”
“You’re gross.”
“Okay, chastity belts, then. Just walk with me, nice and slow like we’re window-shopping. We’ll get a good look at the door before you tear off and boot it down.”
Mariko closed her eyes and sighed. It wasn’t a bad idea. She wanted it to be, but it wasn’t. “Fine. One pass. Then I’m going in there, and goddamn it, I’m going to find someone to interrogate.”
She offered her elbow to Han and he took it gently. Together they took a casual stroll, stopping occasionally to study the lewd posters plastered here and there. They pointedly took no interest in the secret door they’d discovered. The side streets of Kabuki-cho were so narrow that even though Mariko and Han tried to keep their distance, they still passed close enough to their target that she could see where the paint was peeling on the doorframe.
Smack in the middle of the Blind Spot was a strip club—one of dozens in this district. Strictly speaking, it only needed one sign out front, but it had fifteen or twenty instead, all of them in bright primary colors. Crammed amid all the Japanese were the few inevitable phrases of mangled English. WELCOME FOREIGNER BEST COMFORT CORNER was Mariko’s favorite. Anywhere else in the city, this place would have stuck out like a mouse turd in a rice bowl, but in Kabuki-cho it was just another peacock displaying its plumage.
“Where is it?” Han whispered.
Mariko couldn’t spot the secret door either. Or rather, she knew she was looking at it; she just couldn’t see how it could be a door.
The front wall of the strip club was a series of painted white panels, each one the width of an average door but half again as tall. Photos of the club’s dancers clung to the panels like wet leaves on a car hood. In most of the pictures the women wore little more than they wore on stage. In a few, the dancer wore nothing but little pink hearts digitally imposed over her bits. The middle panel, indistinguishable from the others, was the one that had swiveled open to admit the woman in white.
“No handle,” Han said, just loud enough to be heard over the metallic clamor of the pachinko parlor across the road from their target.
“No hinges,” said Mariko, and just like that they were past the target and continuing down the narrow street.
“I don’t get it,” Han said. “She must have hit that door at a pretty good clip. How did she open it?”
“Maybe an electronic key? Something that works automatically on proximity?”
“Yeah, maybe,” said Han, “but you have to wonder where she’s keeping it.”
“Good point.” Mariko had forgotten: the woman in white was wearing mostly stolen clothing when she’d fled. The only thing she was wearing that really seemed to belong to her was the see-through mini-dress. “So what, then? How did she open the door?”
“The bouncer, maybe? He could have a hidden switch.”
Mariko risked one last glance at the undetectable door, and at the ordinary door a few meters away, where the club’s bouncer would sit. Today it was closed; no one went to a strip club at eight thirty on a Saturday morning.
“I don’t know,” she said. “One thing is for sure: this is where you get off the bus.”
“What? Why?”
“Because you’re on duty and I’m not, and what I’m going