Later, when Aomame finally opened up to the dowager, she would also open a new door in her life.
“Hey, what are you drinking?” someone asked near Aomame’s ear. The voice belonged to a woman.
Aomame raised her head and looked at the speaker. A young woman with a fifties-style ponytail was sitting on the neighboring barstool. Her dress had a tiny flower pattern, and a small Gucci bag hung from her shoulder. Her nails were carefully manicured in pale pink. By no means fat, the woman was round everywhere, including her face, which radiated a truly friendly warmth, and she had big breasts.
Aomame was somewhat taken aback. She had not been expecting to be approached by a woman. This was a bar for men to approach women.
“Tom Collins,” Aomame said.
“Is it good?”
“Not especially. But it’s not that strong, and I can sip it.”
“I wonder why they call it ‘Tom Collins.’ ”
“I have no idea,” Aomame said. “Maybe it’s the name of the guy who invented it. Not that it’s such an amazing invention.”
The woman waved to the bartender and said, “I’ll have a Tom Collins too.” A few moments later, she had her drink.
“Mind if I sit here?” she asked.
“Not at all. It’s an empty seat.” And you’re already sitting in it, Aomame thought without speaking the words.
“You don’t have a date to meet anybody here, do you?” the woman asked.
Instead of answering, Aomame studied the woman’s face. She guessed the woman was three or four years younger than herself.
“Don’t worry, I’m not interested in that,” the woman whispered, as if sharing a secret. “If that’s what you’re worried about. I prefer men, too. Like you.”
“Like me?”
“Well, isn’t that why you came here, to find a guy?”
“Do I look like that?”
The woman narrowed her eyes somewhat. “That much is obvious. It’s what this place is for. And I’m guessing that neither of us is a pro.”
“Of course not,” Aomame said.
“Hey, here’s an idea. Why don’t we team up? It’s probably easier for a man to approach two women than one. And we can relax more and sort of feel safer if we’re together instead of alone. We look so different, too—I’m more the womanly type, and you have that trim, boyish style—I’m sure we’re a good match.”
Boyish, Aomame thought. That’s the first time anyone’s ever called me that. “Our taste in men might be different, though,” she said. “How’s that supposed to work if we’re a ‘team’?”
The woman pursed her lips in thought. “True, now that you mention it. Taste in men, huh? Hmm. What kind do you like?”
“Middle-aged if possible,” Aomame said. “I’m not that into young guys. I like ’em when they’re just starting to lose their hair.”
“Wow. I get it. Middle-aged, huh? I like ’em young and lively and good-looking. I’m not much interested in middle-aged guys, but I’m willing to go along with you and give it a try. It’s all experience. Are middle-aged guys good? At sex, I mean.”
“It depends on the guy,” Aomame said.
“Of course,” the woman replied. Then she narrowed her eyes, as if verifying some kind of theory. “You can’t generalize about sex, of course, but if you were to say overall …”
“They’re not bad. They eventually run out of steam, but while they’re at it they take their time. They don’t rush it. When they’re good, they can make you come a lot.”
The woman gave this some thought. “Hmm, I may be getting interested. Maybe I’ll try that out.”
“You should!”
“Say, have you ever tried four-way sex? You switch partners at some point.”
“Never.”
“I haven’t, either. Interested?”
“Probably not,” Aomame said. “Uh, I don’t mind teaming up, but if we’re going to do stuff together, even temporarily, can you tell me a little more about yourself? Because we could be on completely different wavelengths.”
“Good idea,” she said. “So, what do you want to know about me?”
“Well, for one thing, what kind of work do you do?”
The woman took a drink of her Tom Collins and set it down on the coaster. Then she dabbed at her lips with a paper napkin. Then she examined the lipstick stains on the napkin.
“This is a pretty good drink,” she said. “It has a gin base, right?”
“Gin and lemon juice and soda water.”
“True, it’s no great invention, but it tastes pretty good.”
“I’m glad.”
“So, then, what kind of work do I do? That’s kind of tough. Even if I tell you the truth, you might not believe me.”
“So I’ll go first,” Aomame said. “I’m an instructor at a sports club. I mostly teach martial arts. Also muscle stretching.”
“Martial arts!” the woman exclaimed. “Like Bruce Lee kind of stuff?”
“Kind of.”
“Are you good at it?”
“Okay.”
The woman smiled and raised her glass as if in a toast. “So, in a pinch, we might be an unbeatable team. I might not look it, but I’ve been doing aikido for years. To tell you the truth, I’m a policewoman.”
“A policewoman?!” Aomame’s mouth dropped open, but no further words emerged from it.
“Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department. I don’t look the part, do I?”
“Certainly not,” Aomame said.
“It’s true, though. Absolutely. My name is Ayumi.”
“I’m Aomame.”
“Aomame. Is that your real name?”
Aomame gave her a solemn nod. “A policewoman? You mean you wear a uniform and carry a gun and ride in a police car and patrol the streets?”
“That’s what I’d like to be doing. It’s what I joined the police force to do. But they won’t let me,” Ayumi said. She took a handful of pretzels from a nearby bowl and started munching them noisily. “I wear a ridiculous uniform, ride around in one of those mini patrol cars—basically, a motor scooter—and give parking tickets all day. They won’t let me carry a pistol, of course. There’s no need to fire warning shots at a local citizen who’s parked his Toyota Corolla in front of a fire hydrant. I got great marks at shooting practice, but nobody gives a damn about that. Just because I’m a woman, they’ve got me going around with a piece of chalk on a stick, writing the time and license plate numbers on the asphalt day after day”
“Speaking of pistols, do you fire a Beretta semiautomatic?”
“Sure. They’re all Berettas now. They’re a little too heavy for me. Fully loaded, they probably weigh close to a kilogram.”
“The body of a Beretta alone weighs 850 grams,” Aomame said.
Ayumi looked at Aomame like a pawnbroker assessing a wristwatch. “How do you know something like that?” she asked.
“I’ve always had an interest in guns,” Aomame said. “Of course, I’ve never actually fired one.”
“Oh, really?” Ayumi seemed convinced. “I’m really into shooting pistols. True, a Beretta is heavy, but it has less of a recoil than the older guns, so even a small woman can handle one with enough practice. The top guys don’t believe it, though. They’re convinced that a woman can’t handle a pistol. All the higher-ups in the department are male chauvinist fascists. I had super grades in nightstick techniques, too, at least as good as most of the men, but I got no recognition at all. The only thing I ever heard from them was filthy double entendres. ‘Say, you really know how to grab that nightstick. Let me know any time you want some extra practice.’ Stuff like that. Their brains are like a century and a half behind the times.”
Ayumi took a pack of Virginia Slims from her shoulder bag, and with practiced movements eased a cigarette from the pack, put it between her lips, lit it with a slim gold lighter, and slowly exhaled the smoke toward the ceiling.
“Whatever gave you the idea of becoming a police officer?” A
omame asked.
“I never intended to,” Ayumi replied. “But I didn’t want to do ordinary office work, and I didn’t have any professional skills. That really limited my options. So in my senior year of college I took the Metropolitan Police employment exam. A lot of my relatives were cops—my father, my brother, one of my uncles. The police are a kind of nepotistic society, so it’s easier to get hired if you’re related to a policeman.”
“The police family”
“Exactly. Until I actually got into it, though, I had no idea how rife the place was with gender discrimination. Female officers are more or less second-class citizens in the police world. The only jobs they give you to do are handling traffic violations, shuffling papers at a desk, teaching safety education at elementary schools, or patting down female suspects: boooring! Meanwhile, guys who clearly have less ability than me are sent out to one interesting crime scene after another. The higher-ups talk about ‘equal opportunity for the sexes,’ but it’s all a front, it just doesn’t work that way. It kills your desire to do a good job. You know what I mean?”
Aomame said she understood.
“It makes me so mad!”
“Don’t you have a boyfriend or something?” Aomame asked.
Ayumi frowned. For a while, she glared at the slim cigarette between her fingers. “It’s nearly impossible for a policewoman to have a boyfriend. You work irregular hours, so it’s hard to coordinate times with anyone who works a normal business week. And even if things do start to work out, the minute an ordinary guy hears you’re a cop, he just scoots away like a crab running from the surf. It’s awful, don’t you think?”
Aomame said that she did think it was awful.
“Which leaves a workplace romance as the only possibility—except there aren’t any decent men there. They’re all brain-dead jerks who can only tell dirty jokes. They’re either born stupid or they think of nothing else but their advancement. And these are the guys responsible for the safety of society! Japan does not have a bright future.”
“Somebody as cute as you should be popular with the men, I would think,” Aomame said.
“Well, I’m not exactly unpopular—as long as I don’t reveal my profession. So in places like this I just tell them I work for an insurance company.”
“Do you come here often?”
“Not ‘often.’ Once in a while,” Ayumi said. After a moment’s reflection, she said, as if revealing a secret, “Every now and then, I start craving sex. To put it bluntly, I want a man. You know, more or less periodically. So then I get all dolled up, put on fancy underwear, and come here. I find a suitable guy and we do it all night. That calms me down for a while. I’ve just got a healthy sex drive—I’m not a nympho or sex addict or anything, I’m okay once I work off the desire. It doesn’t last. The next day I’m hard at work again, handing out parking tickets. How about you?”
Aomame picked up her Tom Collins glass and took a sip. “About the same, I guess.”
“No boyfriend?”
“I made up my mind not to have a boyfriend. I don’t want the bother.”
“Having one man is a bother?”
“Pretty much.”
“But sometimes I want to do it so bad I can’t stand it,” Ayumi said.
“That expression you used a minute ago, ‘Work off the desire,’ is more my speed.”
“How about ‘Have an opulent evening’?”
“That’s not bad, either,” Aomame said.
“In any case, it should be a one-night stand, without any follow-up.”
Aomame nodded.
Elbow on the bar, Ayumi propped her chin on her hand and thought about this for a while. “We might have a lot in common,” she said.
“Maybe so,” Aomame agreed. Except you’re a female cop and I kill people. We’re inside and outside the law. I bet that counts as one big difference.
“Let’s play it this way,” Ayumi said. “We both work for the same casualty insurance company, but the name of the company is a secret. You’re a couple years ahead of me. There was some unpleasantness in the office today, so we came here to drown our sorrows, and now we’re feeling pretty good. How’s that for our ‘situation’?”
“Fine, except I don’t know a thing about casualty insurance.”
“Leave that to me. I’m good at making up stories.”
“It’s all yours, then,” Aomame said.
“Now, it just so happens that two sort-of-middle-aged guys are sitting at the table right behind us, and they’ve been looking around with hungry eyes. Can you check ’em out without being obvious about it?”
Aomame glanced back casually as instructed. A table’s width away from the bar stood a table with two middle-aged men. Both wore a suit and tie, and both looked like typical company employees out for a drink after a hard day’s work. Their suits were not rumpled, and their ties were not in bad taste. Neither man appeared unclean, at least. One was probably just around forty, and the other not yet forty. The older one was thin with an oval face and a receding hairline. The younger one had the look of a former college rugby player who had recently started to put on weight from lack of exercise. His face still retained a certain youthfulness, but he was beginning to grow thick around the chin. They were chatting pleasantly over whiskey-and-waters, but their eyes were very definitely searching the room.
Ayumi began to analyze them. “I’d say they’re not used to places like this. They’re here looking for a good time, but they don’t know how to approach girls. They’re probably both married. They have a kind of guilty look about them.”
Aomame was impressed with Ayumi’s precise powers of observation. She must have taken all this in quite unnoticed while chatting away with Aomame. Maybe it was worth being a member of the police family.
“The one with the thinning hair is more to your taste, isn’t he?” Ayumi asked. “I’ll take the stocky one, okay?”
Aomame glanced backward again. The head shape of the thin-haired one was more or less acceptable—light-years away from Sean Connery, but worth a passing grade. She couldn’t ask too much on a night like this, with nothing but Queen and ABBA to listen to all evening.
“That’s fine with me,” Aomame said, “but how are you going to get them to invite us to join them?”
“Not by waiting for the sun to come up, that’s for sure! We crash their party, all smiles.”
“Are you serious?”
“Of course I am! Just leave it to me—I’ll go over and start up a conversation. You wait here.” Ayumi took a healthy swig of her Tom Collins and rubbed her palms together. Then she slung her Gucci bag over her shoulder and put on a brilliant smile.
“Okay, time for a little nightstick practice.”
CHAPTER 12
Tengo
THY KINGDOM COME
The Professor turned to Fuka-Eri and said, “Sorry to bother you, Eri, but could you make us some tea?”
The girl stood up and left the reception room. The door closed quietly behind her. The Professor waited, saying nothing, while Tengo, seated on the sofa, brought his breathing under control and regained a normal state of consciousness. The Professor removed his black-framed glasses and, after wiping them with a not-very-clean-looking handkerchief, put them back on. Beyond the window, some kind of small, black thing shot across the sky. A bird, possibly. Or it might have been someone’s soul being blown to the far side of the world.
“I’m sorry,” Tengo said. “I’m all right now. Just fine. Please go on with what you were saying.”
The Professor nodded and began to speak. “There was nothing left of Akebono after that violent gun battle. That happened in 1981, three years ago—four years after Eri came here to live. But the Akebono problem has nothing to do with what I’m telling you now.
“Eri was ten years old when she started living with us. She just showed up on our doorstep one day without warning, utterly changed from the Eri I had known until then. True, she had never been very talkative, and she would not
open up to strangers, but she had always been fond of me and talked freely with me even as a toddler. When she first showed up here, though, she was in no condition to talk to anybody. She seemed to have lost the power to speak at all. The most she could do was nod or shake her head when we asked her questions.”
The Professor was speaking more clearly and rapidly now. Tengo sensed that he was trying to move his story ahead while Fuka-Eri was out of the room.
“We could see that Eri had had a terrible time finding her way to us up here in the mountains. She was carrying some cash and a sheet of paper with our address written on it, but she had grown up in those isolated surroundings and she couldn’t really speak. Even so, she had managed, with the memo in hand, to make all the necessary transfers and find her way to our doorstep.
“We could see immediately that something awful had happened to her. Azami and the woman who helps me out here took care of her. After Eri had been with us a few days and calmed down somewhat, I called the Sakigake commune and asked to speak with Fukada, but I was told that he was ‘unable to come to the phone.’ I asked what the reason for that might be, but couldn’t get them to tell me. So then I asked to speak to Mrs. Fukada and was told that she couldn’t come to the phone either. I couldn’t speak with either of them.”
“Did you tell the person on the phone that you had Eri with you?”
The Professor shook his head. “No, I had a feeling I’d better keep quiet about that as long as I couldn’t tell Fukada directly. Of course after that I tried to get in touch with him any number of times, using every means at my disposal, but nothing worked.”
Tengo knit his brow. “You mean to say you haven’t been able to contact her parents even once in seven years?”
The Professor nodded. “Not once. Seven years without a word.”
“And her parents never once tried to find their daughter’s whereabouts in seven years?”