The section chief’s third rule of drinking was that the junior man never pays. His fourth was that the junior man watches.
Hayashi had been watching since six o’clock. He had watched the chief order for the table, and send back a bottle, and explain the Osaka accounts to a waiter. It was after one now. The trains had stopped, the rest of the section had gone home in taxis, and the chief was walking the two of them through Kabukicho with the calm of a man who has decided where the night is going.
“You’ll like this,” Kuroki said. “No. You won’t like it. You’ll learn from it.”
A man in a grey kimono stood at the head of a stairway. He bowed to the chief, not deeply, the way a head waiter bows to a customer whose table is always ready.
“Kuroki-san. And you have brought a young man.”
“He’s here to watch,” said the chief.
“Of course,” the man in grey said, and he looked at Hayashi for a moment longer than was comfortable. “The first drop costs nothing.”
Twenty-six steps down. A curtain with one drop on it. Benches, a lamp, a rack of black paddles. The chief took one without looking, the way he took a menu.
“This is the tasting. Lot nine. An usukuchi, from Tatsuno. Paler than the others and saltier, made for the cooks of Kyoto, who want a turnip to stay white in the pot. One winter in the vat and no more. It does not improve with waiting.”
One drop on each white dish. It was the colour of weak tea.
“That’s nothing,” Hayashi said, before he could stop himself.
“Exactly,” said the chief, pleased. “The amateur wants the dark one. Now look into it. Properly. He’ll tell you what’s there.”
The man in grey bent toward the chief and said something that Hayashi did not catch. The chief looked into his dish for a long time. When he looked up he had the face he wore at the New Year, when the president shook hands with the general managers and he stood one row behind them.
Hayashi looked into his own dish. He saw a drop of shoyu.
“Nobody is poured a second drop. Five thousand yen.”
Night 4 · Bid!
¥5,000Section Chief Kuroki
¥12,000a man near the lamp
“Now,” the chief said quietly, not turning his head, “the mistake would be to creep. You creep, they follow. You jump.”
¥50,000Kuroki
¥80,000near the lamp
“He’s testing me. Fine. It’s the same in a meeting, Hayashi. The secret is knowing when to stop.”
¥300,000Kuroki
Hayashi did the sum without meaning to. It was his rent, for some months.
¥320,000near the lamp
“There,” said the chief. “You see that? Twenty. He’s finished. He’s crawling. One more and he folds, and then we stop, and that is the lesson.”
¥1,000,000Kuroki
The man near the lamp put his paddle down. The room was very quiet. The man in grey lifted the mallet and held it there, politely.
“A general manager,” he remarked, to nobody, “would not leave it at a round number.”
That was the moment to stop. Even Hayashi could see it. But the junior man was watching, and a lesson has to have an ending, and the chief had never yet closed a meeting on someone else’s figure.
“And to close,” Kuroki said, to the room, in his presentation voice.
¥1,950,000Kuroki
The mallet came down. Shoyuken, the benches said.
Everyone in sales section two knew what the chief’s wife gave him to spend each month, because he complained of it at lunch. Hayashi worked it out on the stairs. It came to four years.
“On the book,” the chief told the man in grey, and the man in grey wrote it in the book.
The chief let him carry it. A man does not carry his own purchases. In the taxi he explained what had happened, and by Shinagawa it had become a story about nerve.
On Monday the chief was at his desk at eight, as always, and said nothing, and Hayashi said nothing.
But on Thursday, a little after one, Hayashi found that he was standing at the head of a certain stairway, alone, only to see whether it was really there.
It was there. So was the man in grey.
“For you,” he said, “I have something darker.”