The undertaking at hand, however, could have a very obvious beneficiary. Matsuo Noda. The only problem was that in order for Noda to win, America had to lose. Massively. The old zero-sum game: for every winner there has to be an equal and opposite sucker.
After that Friday evening with Henderson, I spent the next week mulling over the complexities of the situation. The whole thing boiled down to two very strong presumptions: one, I was indeed being set up, being told one scenario while the truth lay in quite another direction; and two, my employer had something very lethal to America's financial health up his sleeve. Still, these were merely presumptions, nothing more. The only thing I was sure about was that I had a very unpredictable tiger by its posterior handle. Time to find out a little more about my pussycat.
I hadn't actually seen Dai Nippon's midtown office, but I talked to the manager almost every day on the phone, and he occasionally shipped materials down to my place in the Village. I knew they'd taken over the building, installed a new security staff, moved into the vacant floor, and were doing something. However, I hadn't been invited up to see what the something was. I concluded the time was at hand.
As I understood it, Dai Nippon's purpose in life was to oversee the use of investment capital. Fair and good. As it happens, Japanese business tends to be funded a little differently from our own. Instead of selling off stock to the public, Japanese industry relies much more heavily on bank financing. In fact, less than twenty percent of Japan's industrial assets are publicly traded. Consequently the rules of the game are changed. If your company is beholden to a financial institution instead of a lot of nervous stockholders and fund managers, you're in partners with somebody less interested in next quarter's profits than in the larger matter of your still being around ten years hence to pay off its paper. That lender naturally rides herd very closely on your long-term planning.
As best I could tell, DNI was one of the herd-riders, a sort of hired gun that monitored various companies' operations to make sure they were managing their loans prudently. Again, since the prospectus emphasized they were specialists in overseas investment, I assumed that maybe part of the reason they were coming to the U.S. was to oversee the Japanese companies doing business here with money borrowed from back home.
Nobody had actually told me this. In fact nobody had told me anything. That was merely what I considered to be an educated guess. It was the only thing I could think of that made the slightest sense.
The following Monday morning I told myself the guesswork was over. It was high time I went up and saw for myself what they were doing. All I needed was an excuse.
Then the phone rang. I was in the garden out back, skimming the Times and working on a pot of fresh coffee while waiting for the Chicago exchanges to open. Ben was cruising the fence line, sniffing for cats.
When I picked up the receiver, waiting at the other end was Mr. Yasuhiro Tanaka, office manager for the New York operation. He chatted a bit about the weather, how nice it was to be working in the U.S., the usual. Finally he mentioned that he needed to meet with me to discuss, among other matters, certain legal questions concerning one of the other leases in their building. Would it be convenient if he came down to my place and we went over the paperwork?
Not necessary, I replied. I just happened to be headed for midtown in the next few minutes. I'd throw a copy of the leases into my briefcase and drop by to see him. Then before he could protest, I mumbled something about the doorbell and hung up. The phone rang again immediately, but I didn't answer it. I was already putting on my jacket.