The father’s expression turned to a look of guarded relief. The boy, on the other hand, averted his eyes towards a shelf of boxed software.
Not very sociable, that one.
‘My son’s been asking for a computer,’ the father said, a thin smile on his face. ‘But to be honest, I have absolutely no idea what to get.’
‘Do you know how he’ll be using it?’ Tomohiko asked, glancing at the kid.
‘How’re you going to use it?’ the father asked.
‘Word processing, message boards, that kind of stuff,’ the boy replied quietly, still looking down at the floor.
‘Any games?’ Tomohiko asked.
The boy gave an almost imperceptible nod.
‘Well…’ He looked back at the father. ‘What’s your budget?’
‘I was hoping we could get away with something around a hundred thousand yen.’
‘A hundred thousand isn’t going to buy anything, I told you,’ the boy said.
‘Just a moment,’ Tomohiko went back to the computer at his desk and typed something. A list of the store’s inventory came up on the screen. ‘I’ve got an 88 that should work.’
‘Eight-eight?’ The father frowned.
‘An NEC-88 series. It just went on sale in October. The price for the computer body is about a hundred thousand, but I think I can cut it down a bit for you. It’s not a bad system. The CPU clock runs at fourteen megahertz, and it has sixty-four kilobytes of RAM, standard. Add a monitor, and I can probably get that for you at around a hundred and twenty thousand.’
Tomohiko picked a brochure off the shelf behind him and handed it to the father. He took it, leafed through the pages, and passed it to his son.
‘You need a printer?’ Tomohiko asked the son.
‘Yeah, probably,’ he muttered.
Tomohiko went back to their stockroom list.
‘I have a Japanese thermal that runs at about sixty-nine thousand eight hundred.’
‘So a hundred and ninety thousand altogether?’ The man made a sour face. ‘That’s way over budget.’
Tomohiko grinned sheepishly. ‘Actually, you’d also have to get some software to go with that.’
‘Software?’
‘Programs to make the computer run. Without those, it’s just a box. Unless you program?’ He glanced at the boy, who didn’t respond.
‘You mean those don’t come with the computer?’
‘Not usually. You need different programs for different uses, so not everyone wants the same package.’
The man grunted.
‘We can probably throw in a standard word-processing program, though,’ Tomohiko said as he punched some numbers into his calculator. He showed the resulting number to the father: 199,800. ‘How about this for a total? You won’t get a better deal anywhere else, I guarantee it.’
The man frowned, clearly unwilling to part with that kind of cash.
His son, however, was thinking in entirely the opposite direction. ‘How about the NEC-98?’
‘The 98 series runs at at least three hundred thousand yen. With peripherals, you’re looking at a price tag of over four hundred thousand.’
‘Four hundred thousand? For a toy?’ The father shook his head. ‘Even that 88 thing is overpriced.’
‘Well, let me know what you’d like to do. If your budget is fixed at one hundred thousand, I might be able to find something for you, but you’d be losing a lot of functionality. Might have to go with an older model, too.’
The father was clearly struggling, but finally, the pleading look in his son’s eyes won him over. He turned to Tomohiko. ‘We’ll take the 88.’
Leaving Hiroe to handle the payment, Tomohiko left the shop, which was nothing more than a converted apartment. If it hadn’t had a ‘Limitless Computers’ sign on the door, it would have been impossible to distinguish from any of the other units. The unmarked apartment next door served as their stockroom.
The stockroom had a work desk and a simple area for greeting guests with a low table and two sofas. Two men turned to look at Tomohiko when he walked in. One was Ryo, and the other was a man he’d seen a few times named Kaneshiro.
‘Sold the 88,’ Tomohiko said, showing the slip to Ryo. ‘Nineteen ninety-eight with a monitor and printer.’
‘Good,’ Ryo said. ‘More room for the 98s.’
The room behind them was filled with cardboard boxes stacked nearly to the ceiling. Tomohiko checked the numbers printed on the side of the boxes as he walked between the stacks.
‘Nice little operation you got here,’ Kaneshiro said. ‘How many hundred-thousand-yen customers you get a week?’ There was a faint mocking tone to his voice. He had turned away so Tomohiko couldn’t see his face, but he could picture his smile all the same, with those hollow cheeks, and squinting, sunken eyes. He reminded Tomohiko of a skeleton wearing a grey suit two sizes too big.
‘I like keeping things manageable,’ Ryo replied. ‘Low return, low risk.’
Kaneshiro gave a low, rolling laugh. ‘You did well enough for yourself last year, and I didn’t hear you complaining then. You wouldn’t have got this place open if it wasn’t for that job I gave you.’
‘Look,’ Ryo said, ‘I told you I’m not interested in crossing that bridge blindfolded again, now that I know how narrow it is. One misstep, and I lose everything.’
‘You’re exaggerating. Besides, we’re not stupid. Things are under control this time, nothing to worry about.’
‘Regardless, I’m not interested. You’re going to have to take your business elsewhere.’
Tomohiko wondered what Kaneshiro’s business was. A few possibilities occurred to him, none of them particularly legal.
It took him a while to track down all the boxes: a computer, monitor, and printer. Tomohiko carried them to the door one at a time. Ryo and Kaneshiro had fallen to silently staring at each other, so he didn’t get to hear any more of their conversation.
‘Ryo,’ Tomohiko called as he was about to leave. ‘Think I can close up shop?’
‘Go ahead. Doubt we’ll get any more tonight.’
Tomohiko nodded and left. Kaneshiro hadn’t looked at his face once during this exchange.
Tomohiko handed the packages to the father and son and started to close the store.
‘Want to go get dinner?’ he asked Hiroe.
‘That guy’s here, isn’t he,’ Hiroe said with a frown. ‘The one that looks like a corpse.’
Tomohiko grinned.
‘Who is he, anyway?’ she asked, frowning. ‘What’s his connection to Ryo?’
‘That’s a better topic for somewhere else,’ Tomohiko said, putting on his coat.
Outside the shop, Tomohiko and Hiroe ambled down the pavement. December was just getting started, and there were Christmas decorations here and there. Tomohiko wondered what they would do for a Christmas Eve date this year. It was a tradition. Last year, he’d made reservations at a French restaurant in a big hotel, but so far he hadn’t had any good ideas. Either way, he’d definitely be spending it with Hiroe – their third Christmas Eve together.
Tomohiko had met Hiroe back in sophomore year in college. He’d had a part-time job at one of the big electronics stores, where he was in charge of microcomputer and word processor sales. At the time, there were very few people with any knowledge of those things whatsoever, so Tomohiko was highly valued. It was supposed to be a behind-the-counter position, but he often did service calls, too, since there was no one else to do them.
He’d picked up the job when Unlimited Designs went on hiatus after their initial success. Companies selling software had sprung up like mushrooms after the rain, trying to jump on the computer game boom, and crapware was ubiquitous. Most of the places had shut down after a wave of customer complaints, and Unlimited Designs had been caught in the backlash.
Tomohiko had been grateful for the break – and the chance to expand his social life. Hiroe worked on the same floor as Tomohiko, selling phones and fax machines. They ran
into each other a lot, and began chatting during their breaks. Their first date came about a month later, and before long they were going steady.
Hiroe was not what you would call a beauty. She was short, with a round face, and moved less like a girl and more like a skinny boy. But she had a softness to her manner that put people at ease, and just seeing her made Tomohiko’s worries go away.
Their relationship hadn’t been all smooth sailing. Two years ago they’d slipped up and Hiroe ended up pregnant. She decided to get an abortion. They lay in bed the night after the operation and he held her body close as tears rolled down her face. But she never once cried about it after that night.
Tomohiko still carried the pregnancy test she’d used in his wallet, a clear tube about the size of a cigarette cut in half. When you looked at it end-on, you could see two concentric red rings on the bottom, which meant positive. Tomohiko carried it with him right next to a pack of condoms as a reminder. He would never put Hiroe through that again.
He’d shown it once to Ryo and much to his surprise, Ryo asked to borrow it ‘to show to someone’. He returned it to him a couple of days later without offering any further explanation.
‘Men are weak,’ Ryo had said off-handedly. ‘A woman just has to whisper the word “pregnant” and they’ll do anything.’
To this day, Tomohiko had no idea what Ryo had used it for.
Tomohiko and Hiroe went into a tiny bar, already mostly filled with salarymen. The only open table was at the very front. Tomohiko sat across from Hiroe and they draped their coats across the chair next to them. There was a television above his head; he could hear the sounds of a talk show.
A middle-aged woman wearing an apron came to wait on them and Tomohiko ordered two beers and a few dishes. The sashimi at this place was solid and the appetisers were pretty good too.
‘I met Kaneshiro last spring,’ Tomohiko said, taking a sip of beer to wash down some squid. ‘Ryo introduced me to him. He looked a lot healthier back then.’
‘A little meat on his bones?’
Tomohiko chuckled. ‘Something like that. He was dressing up a little more back then, too. Came on strong, wanting us to write a program for a game.’
‘What kind of game?’
‘Golf.’
‘You mean you wrote a whole game, from the ground up?’
Tomohiko drank down the rest of his beer. ‘It was a little more complicated than that.’
His mind wandered back. The whole project had smelled fishy from the get-go. The first thing Tomohiko had seen was the specs for the game and a partially completed program. Kaneshiro wanted them to take what they already had and polish it into working shape within two months.
‘Why make it this far and have someone else do the rest?’ Tomohiko had asked.
‘Because the programmer working on it died. Heart attack. The company didn’t have any other good programmers on staff. They got afraid they were going to slip even further behind schedule, and so they brought it to me,’ Kaneshiro had told him. Tomohiko remembered how he used to talk: calm, professional. That hadn’t lasted very long.
‘Well?’ Ryo had asked Tomohiko. ‘It’s unfinished, but the basic system is there. Filling in the missing pieces shouldn’t be too hard.’
Tomohiko wasn’t as confident. ‘What about debugging? We might be able to get the thing working in a month or so, but getting it to run smoothly? That’s at least another couple of months.’
‘Please, see what you can do,’ Kaneshiro had pleaded with them. ‘There’s no one else I can go to.’ It was the only time Tomohiko ever saw him ask nicely.
They took the job. The pay was good, maybe good enough that they could start up Unlimited Designs again.
The game was an ambitious attempt to make the most realistic golf game possible. Players chose clubs and swings based on their position, and checked the lie of the green for putting. In order to get all the nuances rights, Tomohiko and Ryo had to give themselves a crash course in golf. Neither of them had known much about the game to start with.
The story was that the game they made would be available in arcades and cafés. Kaneshiro promised them that if things went well, it could be the next Space Invaders.
Tomohiko knew very little about Kaneshiro, mostly because Ryo had neglected to tell him anything about the man. However, after several discussions, it came out that Kaneshiro had some connection to Hiroshi Enomoto – the yakuza who had been dating their old accountant, Namie Nishiguchi, before he was hunting her down.
Namie’s murder in a Nagoya hotel had never been solved. The paper trail of illegal transfers had led the police to suspect Enomoto, but there was never any conclusive evidence of murder, or even embezzlement. With Namie dead, it was difficult for the police to make any progress.
Tomohiko was reasonably certain that Enomoto had killed Namie. The lingering question was who had told him she was in Nagoya. Tomohiko had a theory for that one too, but not one he’d ever say out loud.
Tomohiko kept his discussion with Hiroe to the details of the golf game job. While they talked, a sashimi plate and some fried aubergine had arrived at their table.
‘So you finished the golf game?’ Hiroe asked, cutting into the aubergine with her chopsticks.
‘In two months’ time, as promised. A month later it was being shipped throughout the country.’
‘It sold pretty well, right?’
‘How did you know?’
‘Because I’d heard of the game. I even played it a few times. I remember the approaches and putting being pretty difficult.’
It was strange to hear Hiroe using golf lingo.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’d like to take credit for that, but I’m not sure that the game you played was the one we made.’
‘Why not?’
‘The golf game sold about ten thousand units across Japan. Except we only made about half of those. The rest were sold by a different company.’
‘You mean someone copied you, like with Space Invaders?’
‘Not quite. With Invaders, the copies only came out after the original game was a big hit. But with our golf game, the pirated version came out at almost exactly the same time as the official release from Megahit Enterprises.’
‘What?’ Hiroe stopped, a piece of aubergine centimetres away from her mouth. ‘I’m guessing that wasn’t a coincidence?’
‘Hardly. Somebody got hold of the program before it was finished and started working on a copy before it was even released.’
‘Wait, so which version were you working on? The original, or the copy?’ Hiroe said, casting him a dubious look.
Tomohiko sighed. ‘Do I even have to say?’
She shook her head. ‘No, not really.’
‘I still don’t know how Kaneshiro got his hands on the program and design docs.’
‘I’m surprised there wasn’t any backlash.’
‘Oh, there was. Megahit scoured the countryside looking for the source of the pirate edition – in vain, ultimately. Whoever was in charge of distribution used some pretty convoluted sales routes.’
Gang channels, he thought to himself. He didn’t feel the need to explain that.