Of the time they spent together Asami retained, primarily, a quality of silence: it descended for hours at a time on the sitting room they shared from opposite ends, taking him uncharacteristically off guard. He would look up from his gun or his newspaper and realise that although he was aware of how much time had passed since the last meal or phone call, he had no idea how long it had been since either he or Feilong had spoken a word.
(Had Asami found it necessary to articulate the memory he would have done so differently. Mood had no solidity for him. He was attuned to his environment, but as a soldier might be: seeing only irregularities of terrain and behaviour, blind spots, lines of fire.
He might have said that Feilong liked to read, and that this was provocation, an excess of pride. Once he had glanced up after a long silence to find Feilong engrossed in one of his old Chinese books - entire bookshelves in that room were filled with the thin stitched folios, blockprint letters smeary and black on still-pliant paper - he had watched for some minutes, and in that time Feilong did not move except to turn the page. It was the behaviour of a man who could afford to be unaware of his surroundings.
In hand-to-hand combat he could have wound Feilong's hair around his hand and pulled his head back to expose his throat. The weaknesses were analogous.
When Feilong had left the room he had turned the book over and made a mental note of the author's name.)
Asami's character was free of the sentimentality common to the criminal and the successful capitalist. The images he secreted about his person were not trinkets or good-luck charms like those of other men; instead they were maps, business cards, at best scraps of paper conveying security codes and passwords.
In very rare instances he held the key but no longer remembered the location of the lock.