The fight card runs on Friday nights.
He finds this out on Thursday, from a drunk man at a standing bar near the station who is talking too loudly to a friend about a fight he saw three weeks ago — a good one, apparently, the kind that ends with someone's face against the concrete and the crowd going very quiet before they start screaming. The drunk man uses a name: Pier 10. Riku finishes his beer and leaves.
On Friday he spends the afternoon at the waterfront again, this time closer to Pier 10, walking the perimeter of the block where the warehouse sits. It's a big building — corrugated steel siding, high windows painted over, a loading bay on the south face that's been retrofitted with a reinforced door. Two cameras he can see, mounted at the corners. A man outside the loading bay door at three in the afternoon, doing nothing in particular, which means he's doing something in particular.
Riku counts entry points. Front loading bay — watched. North side has a fire exit, no external handle, alarmed probably. East side faces the water and has no doors at all.
South-facing loading bay — the watched one. He walks around to the west side and finds what he was hoping for: a secondary door, personnel-sized, recessed into the wall, a simple electronic lock. No camera angle that covers it cleanly. The camera on the southwest corner catches the approach but not the door itself.
He notes the time. He walks away.
He comes back at ten o'clock.
* * *
The secondary door is propped open.
Not much — a rubber wedge, the kind used to keep doors from swinging shut when you're carrying something through. Riku looks at it for a moment. Catering, maybe. Or someone who smokes and doesn't want to deal with the lock on the way back in. He steps over the wedge and lets the door rest against it and moves into the corridor beyond.
The inside of the warehouse is divided. The front two-thirds — the part visible from the loading bay — has been cleared and fitted out: a fighting area marked in taped squares on the bare concrete, folding chairs in loose rows, portable lighting on stands that throw hard yellow circles and leave the upper walls in darkness. The back third is partitioned off with temporary walls, plywood and metal stud, the kind of construction that can be put up and taken down in a weekend.
The crowd is maybe eighty people. Mostly men, most of them standing, a few seated in the front rows. There's a bar set up along the left wall — a folding table with a man behind it and a cooler underneath and bottles lined up on a shelf that's been bolted to a support beam. The noise level is moderate. The card hasn't started yet.
Riku moves along the right wall toward the back. He keeps his hands in his jacket pockets and his chin down, not low enough to look evasive, just low enough to make his face harder to read. He's looking for two things: Iida, and Sakamoto. He doesn't know what Sakamoto looks like. He has a rough memory of Iida — small, neat, hair oil — that may or may not still apply after eight years.
He doesn't find either of them in the first pass.
What he finds is the layout of the partition wall and the fact that there's a door in it, and that the door is guarded by a man the size of a refrigerator who is making no effort to appear casual about what he's doing. Which means whatever's behind the partition is worth guarding. Which means that's where the money is counted, or where the promoter sits, or both.
He buys a beer from the bar. He stands near the right wall and watches the room fill up.
* * *
The first fight is short.
Two young men, neither of them very experienced — you can tell by the way they circle, too wide, too much respect for the space between them. The crowd is patient for about ninety seconds and then starts making its feelings known. One of the fighters responds to this by rushing forward without a plan and catching a right hand that puts him on the ground. His corner throws a towel. The crowd is satisfied.
The second fight is better. A heavier man against a leaner one, the heavier man clearly the house favorite — people call his name, a short name, two syllables, Riku doesn't catch it. The lean man is a grappler, trying to close distance and get the bigger man down. The bigger man knows enough to stay away from the walls and keep his hips back. It goes four minutes before the lean man gets a leg and trips the favorite down and gets a choke in, and the favorite taps, and the crowd makes a sound like it personally lost money, which some portion of it probably did.
During the second fight Riku scans the room again.
He finds Iida.
He's standing near the partition door, talking to the refrigerator-sized guard in the easy way of a man who doesn't need to talk to the guard but does anyway because he knows everyone in the room and that's just how he moves through the world. He looks older.
The neat dress is still there — a dark button-down, slacks, shoes that cost more than the rest of the room's footwear combined. The hair oil too, probably, though Riku can't confirm that from fifteen meters. He still has the quality of focused containment that Riku remembers. A man who is always counting something, even when his hands are empty.
Riku watches him for two minutes without moving.
Iida doesn't look his way.
Riku decides he needs to get through the partition door, and that the way to do that is to create a reason.
* * *
He finds the reason twenty minutes later, and it finds him at roughly the same time.
He's working his way toward the partition when a man steps sideways out of the crowd and into his path — not deliberately, just bad timing and too much beer, a big man in a construction jacket who doesn't see Riku until they've already collided, shoulder to shoulder, hard enough that the man's drink sloshes over his hand.
The man looks at his hand. He looks at Riku.
He says: watch where you're going.
Riku says: sorry.
The man looks at him for another second with the particular expression of someone who arrived tonight ready to be angry about something and has just found a candidate. He says: you got something on my jacket.
Riku glances at the jacket. There's nothing on it that wasn't already there. He says: doesn't look like it.
The man's two friends materialize from the crowd. This is the thing about groups of men at underground fights — they move as a unit, even when they don't mean to. The friends are reading the situation in that unconscious way, bodies angling in, not quite committing but present enough to matter.
Riku does a fast count. Three men. Big man in front, construction jacket, right-handed by the way he's holding the drink. Left friend, shorter, shifting his weight forward — the eager one. Right friend, arms crossed, waiting to see which way it goes — the sensible one, which means he'll be last to move and also last to stop.
He thinks: this is not useful. He needs to get to the partition door without drawing attention to himself, not get into a visible altercation with three men in front of eighty witnesses.
He says: let me buy you another drink.
The big man says: I don't want a drink from you.
And then the left friend — the eager one, as predicted — shoves Riku from the side.
Not hard. More of a statement than an attack. But a statement is still a move, and a move requires a response, and Riku has been doing this long enough that the response comes before the thinking does.
He lets the shove carry him a half-step to the right, uses the momentum to turn, and drives his elbow back into the eager one's sternum. Not full force — calibrated. Enough to take the air out of him, enough to put him against the man behind him, not enough to put him on the floor. The eager one folds forward. The right friend catches him by reflex, which takes him out of the equation for the next four seconds.
The big man swings.
It's a wide, committed right — the kind thrown by men who are strong and know it and have won enough fights that way to believe it always works. Riku ducks under it and steps inside and puts his forehead against the big man's jaw. Not a headbutt, exactly. More like a controlled collision, Riku driving up and forward while the big man is still extended and off-balance. The big man's teeth click together. He staggers.
Riku grabs his collar with both hands and redirects the stagger — sideways, into a gap in the crowd, away from the main space, toward the right wall. The big man is heavy and confused and still trying to understand what happened to his swing. Riku walks him backward three steps and puts him against the wall, not violently, just firmly, and holds him there.
He says, quietly: we're done.
The big man breathes. He's looking at Riku with the expression men get when they realize the fight didn't go the way physics should have required. He's not hurt badly. His ego is a different matter.
The right friend has straightened up. The eager one is holding his sternum and breathing carefully. Neither of them is moving.
The crowd nearby has shifted — not dispersed, just rearranged, creating the loose ring that forms instinctively around any conflict. Riku is aware of the attention. Too much of it. He lets go of the big man's collar and steps back and turns toward the partition.
The refrigerator-sized guard is watching him.
So is Iida.
Their eyes meet across the length of the warehouse, through the crowd and the portable lighting and the noise of the room. Iida's expression doesn't change. He just looks at Riku the way a man looks at a problem he thought he'd already solved, appearing again on his desk.
Then he turns and says something to the guard, and the guard opens the partition door, and Iida goes through it without looking back.
The door stays open.
Riku straightens his jacket. He looks at the three men — the big one still against the wall, the other two flanking him, all three of them deciding, correctly, that this is over. He turns and walks toward the partition.
The guard doesn't stop him.
* * *
The room behind the partition is small and lit by a single bulb hanging from a wire. A folding table, two chairs, a lockbox on the floor, a rack of coats along one wall. Iida is standing in the center of the room with his hands in his pockets, looking at Riku the way you look at someone when you've had the last thirty seconds to prepare.
He says: I heard you were dead.
Riku says: I heard that too.
Iida nods slowly. He says: Kurosawa Riku. Walking into my warehouse. After eight years.
Riku says: I need to talk to you about Kurohana.
Something moves behind Iida's eyes — fast, controlled, the way a man controls his face when the name of something dangerous comes up in a room with no exits. He looks at Riku for a long moment. Then he pulls out a chair and sits down and folds his hands on the table.
He says: close the door.