Hiroshima


With the taste of sweet young juices still hot on my lips and the authorities hot on my heels I left the apartment lobby; a shadowy figure into the night.

A small restaurant’s sushi bar gave me cover for a few hours, getting me drunk on saki. I learned new insults in Japanese from the chef who shared them with me in a quiet, enthusiastic tone.

I slipped out from the bathroom to the back door to the alley and onward until I found valet parking. The attendant distracted, I made off at incredible speed.

An old friend lived just outside the city that month. He was an excellent source of information, electronics, and protein were I to eat him – a thought I’d often had.

I needed money. To obtain money in any useful quantities I needed a computer, 50 metres of fibre, and a great deal of luck. My friend provided me with all three, I providing my word that half the take would be his.

The communications tunnel running under Street Denako contained no feces. It was a great stretch of aluminum pipes containing thousands of cables purveying every kind of information. I knew out of the thousands which ones I required and their exact location – the Japanese have a great affinity for order.

An hour later I was nursing a beer in the suite of a recently deceased Mariott Hiroshima guest. Information flowed across my screen; decrypted transmissions between two Bank of Japan downtown locations. Pretending to be a computer I wasn’t, I transferred 300 million yen from an inordinately large and desperately rich company to my own depleted Caribbean holdings.

My friend’s software earned him 150 million plus some choice Polaroids from the day before. He wished me well as he handed me a manila envelope on the way out.


SMR 99.11.01