“It’s probably sarcasm, but thanks.”
“So then.” I put my glass on the table. “When did you plan all this? Naturally, it must have been after I proposed the game, but it couldn’t have been right then.”
“It wasn’t spontaneous or anything.” She took the wine bottle in hand and tried to fill my glass.
“Hey, pouring wine is the man’s job.” I took it over and did it myself.
“Your game was a hint. ‘He thinks I’m Juri. He wants to act like he kidnapped her.’ I wondered if I could use that somehow. I believed I could. So for the time being I went along with it.”
“And as you heard my plan, that conviction deepened?”
“I was convinced,” Chiharu replied with a grin, “when Papa praised me.”
“Praised you?”
“Right after hearing about the game from you, I decided to go ahead and call Papa. Also, Juri was on my mind.”
“So you were in touch with him from when the game started. Well, why wouldn’t you be. Mr. Katsuragi must have been rattled. I mean, his daughter had been murdered, and the killer was his daughter. He couldn’t go to the police.”
“For his part, Papa was trying to figure out if there was a way to cover it up. That’s when I called. He seems to have been worried that I’d committed suicide. He sounded relieved to hear my voice. He didn’t scold me about killing Juri. He told me to count on him to do something about it and to hurry up and come home. So I told him about you and your game.”
“And he praised you.”
“About intuiting that I could use your plan. According to Papa, it’s having the intuition and decisiveness at clutch moments that divides the winners from the losers.”
Thinking it was something Katsutoshi Katsuragi would say, I nodded. “And what instructions did Mr. Katsuragi give you?”
“First he told me to do as you say. Then he told me to report what that was in detail to him. Once the course of action was decided, he’d contact me.”
“Contact you? How?”
“He’d call me on my cellphone,” she said as though it were nothing.
“Cellphone? But didn’t you not have one?”
“I did. You think I’d ever forget something so important?” Chiharu laughed heartily, mockingly at me. “But I kept it turned off while I was with you.”
“I got played.” I shook my head. “He gave you a whole bunch of instructions through that cellphone then. Going to Yokosuka, too? You don’t have a friend called Yuki. Am I right?”
“I did. We were friends in middle school. Haven’t seen her at all lately.”
“You wanted me to go to Yokosuka because you planned on burying Juri’s remains on a hill there. But making me go wasn’t enough. Thinking ahead, you used all kinds of tricks to make sure I’d leave traces in Yokosuka.”
“Yes. All kinds.” Chiharu crossed her legs and looked at me with upturned eyes. “Can you guess?”
“While I was waiting for you, I was at the restaurant. Someone played a prank on my car while it was in the parking lot. The staff might remember my face. That it was an unusual car like the MR-S probably also left an impression. If the police went asking around with my photo, the staff would provide testimony. Was that prank the work of Mr. Katsuragi?”
“The one who did that was Mama.”
“Your mama? I see, so you had one more accomplice.”
“There are other traces of you, too.”
“I know. But I don’t get it.” I looked her in the eye and proceeded to gaze at her crossed legs. “To obtain traces of me, you slept with me? Because you wanted my semen and pubic hair…I can’t imagine that your parents pushed you to go that far.”
“What Papa told me was to get my hands on your body hair. Do you remember there was a small statue on that hill? He told me to hide it there. But I thought it wouldn’t be enough. Papa must have thought it’d be better with your semen. He couldn’t ask me to do that, so he said your hair. I saw that, so I exercised my own judgment to obtain the absolute physical evidence we needed.”
“Even though it meant having sex with a man you didn’t care for.”
“Are you sulking?”
“Not really.”
“I did care for you. You’re gutsy, and you’ve got brains. I didn’t mind sleeping with you. If you’d been dumber and a lame bastard, I don’t think I’d have been able to go that far.”
“Is that supposed to be a compliment?”
“Papa also has a high opinion of you. It was crucial for our plan that you weren’t stupid. If you were the type to come up with a sloppy kidnapping game, that would spoil everything. Papa suddenly went to your company, right?”
“Now that you mention it…” He had come asking to see games birthed by Cyberplan.
“His aim was to see a game you’d produced. The Mask of Youth, right? It seems after seeing it, Papa felt that you could be trusted.”
I sighed and shook my head. I couldn’t but let out a weak laugh. “So that’s when he buys me?”
“When you had me call from the love hotel, you beautifully worked in the sound of the whistle, remember? He said that was astute, too.”
“And it was another trace.” I had happily run along the rails that Katsutoshi Katsuragi had set for me.
“But the real match was from there. Papa really wanted to know how you were going to get your hands on the ransom. But you wouldn’t even tell me. I almost couldn’t resist telling you that no one had gone to the police.”
“Mr. Katsuragi must have been so irritated by my Hakozaki feint.”
“He was hoping you’d just take the money. But in the end he was impressed. He admitted that checking if there was a police tail was necessary.”
“Did he say anything about the real ransom exchange?”
“Of course he said it was splendid. That way, there’d be almost no evidence to specify the culprit, and he thinks it would’ve gone well even if there had been a police tail or stakeout.”
I nodded. I could hardly be pleased about it now, but at least it hadn’t been a plan that earned Katsutoshi Katsuragi’s derision. “We went to Yokosuka again with your two hundred seventy million yen. To hide the money in Yuki’s room, which doesn’t exist. What did you really do with the money?”
“I hid it in what looked like a storage room in that building. Then, I called Papa asap. After we left, he recovered it right away.”
“I see. With that, Juri Katsuragi had been safely kidnapped and the ransom was paid. But there’s one big problem. Well, I have a guess about the answer, though.”
“What is it?”
“What were you planning on doing with me?”
Chiharu shrugged her shoulders. “That’s a hard question for me to answer.”
“It would be.”
“You said you can guess? Well, let me hear it.”
“You won’t just tell me, even at this late date? Fine, fine. So, you’ve safely concealed Juri’s murder, the staged kidnapping’s been successful. But you have a small problem. Or should I call it a point of concern. It’s that you probably can’t keep me deceived. As the case gets reported, I sense the truth of the matter. In the worst case, I rush to the police, but you probably don’t need to worry about that. As the principle offender in the staged kidnapping, I don’t dare to. Yet you doubt that I’ll keep mum. Moreover, if I come to the police’s attention by some chance, I might confess. They might not believe me at first, but they’ll investigate to see if there’s any substance to it. The press will get in on the action. Nothing about that situation is welcome to the Katsuragis. There’s pretty much only one way to solve it.”
An alarm went off inside of me when I got that far.
Because there indeed was a stabbing pain in my head all of a sudden. It was spreading to my whole cranium. The pain actually began to subside, but I realized my senses were dulling at the same time. My consciousness was getting sucked into something.
I glared at Chiharu. Then I looked at th
e wine bottle.
“Thanks for that.”
“Is it working?” She peered into my face.
“What did you put in the wine?”
“I don’t know. Some drug that Papa gave me. I injected it into the bottle with a syringe beforehand.”
Some kind of anesthetic, I thought with my groggy head.
“Did you mean to kill me from the start?”
“I don’t know. I just do what Papa tells me to do.”
“He’s been meaning to kill me. Otherwise, this plan falls apart. That man wouldn’t devise an incomplete plan.”
I tried standing up, but my body wouldn’t obey me. I stumbled and slid off the sofa. The table corner struck my side, but it didn’t hurt.
“I just did as I was told. I don’t know what happens afterwards. Because Papa will take care of everything.”
Chiharu stood up. It seemed she’d just been pretending to drink the wine.
I was starting to lose consciousness. Everything before me was growing hazy.
I couldn’t blank out. If I did, they’d continue with their plan. In other words, they’d kill me and make it look like a suicide. Would the motive be that I couldn’t endure the weight of my crime? Or maybe I’d seen the writing on the wall and thought that my arrest was a matter of time.
“…Wait,” I squeezed out. “Listen to me. It’s best…if you listen.”
I couldn’t tell where Chiharu was. I wasn’t even sure if she’d heard me. Even so, I focused all my nerves into my throat.
“The computer. My automobile park…file…”
I tried moving my mouth, but the commands from my brain didn’t reach it. I realized that my voice was failing me. Perhaps it was my sense of hearing. But really, it made no difference. It was as though darkness were enfolding my brain. I tasted what it was like to hurtle down an incredibly deep hole. This might be my last sensation ever, I thought.
—
I felt suffocated as though something were sitting on my chest. I wondered if I’d had a terrible nightmare. My face was hot. Yet I felt chilly below my neck. No, “cold” was more like it. I realized I’d broken out into an intense cold sweat.
I had my eyes closed. I was relieved that I could still sense that. I’d somehow not been killed yet. I opened my eyes. It was blurry, but I could see something. It was extremely dim.
Slowly, my vision came back. It was my room as I remembered it. It seemed I was lying on the sofa. I tried moving my body and winced. A terrible urge to vomit and a headache descended upon me. It had such an impact that I nearly passed out again.
But after exhaling and inhaling repeatedly, the nausea and headache subsided a bit. I slowly raised myself halfway up. The vessels behind my ears were throbbing.
“It seems you’re conscious,” a voice came. A man’s voice.
I tried looking around with just my eyes. I was feeling too sluggish even to move my neck.
Soon, the silhouette of a person appeared in the corner of my vision. The person sat down on a chair across from me. It was Katsutoshi Katsuragi.
I fixed myself into a sitting position on the sofa. My body was still unsteady. If he tried to attack me, I didn’t think I could defend myself adequately. But Katsutoshi Katsuragi didn’t seem to care as he leisurely crossed his legs and lit a cigarette.
He was wearing a double-breasted suit. That gave me more peace of mind. If he intended to kill me, he would have dressed down in order to keep a low profile.
“The main actor finally makes his appearance,” I said, my own voice sounding muffled to me. “Or should I say the mastermind in the shadows.”
“Thanks for looking after my daughter,” Katsutoshi Katsuragi said. His tone was calm.
I looked around. “Did your dear girl go home?”
“I sent her on ahead so my better half wouldn’t get worried.”
“It seems your wife is also an accomplice.”
Without responding to that, Katsutoshi Katsuragi stared at me. “I believe you’ve heard the gist of it from my daughter. I intended to explain it to you myself, but she said she had to see you one last time.”
“I’m glad I got to see her, too. I don’t know if it will be the last time, though.”
“I should first thank you for your trouble. I’m not being sarcastic. I believe you’ve already heard it from my daughter, but you did extremely well. I could even say perfectly. Was that method for obtaining the ransom your original idea? Or did you borrow a page from some piece of detective fiction?”
“I thought of it.”
“I see. It was impressive.” He slowly breathed out cigarette smoke. He looked at me from behind the drifting screen. “However, it’s not as though there aren’t parts that I must find fault with. Partway through, you started instructing me in English, but a policeman or two might have been quite fluent in it. I can’t give you a perfect score on that.”
“I knew that you’re also conversant in French, and I can speak a bit of it. But I decided against it because it would narrow down the criminal profile. In today’s Japan, millions speak English, but not so for French. It was a conclusion I came to after weighing their respective risks.”
“Ah, then let’s agree to disagree.” Katsutoshi Katsuragi didn’t seem to my mind my objection.
“Your own plan was impressive, too. It relied on your daughter’s star turn, but I admire how you buried and planted so many things in advance amidst all the constraints.”
“Come on, it’s nothing compared to operating a business. This time I just needed to fool you, but leading a company requires fooling countless people—employees, consumers,” the executive vice president averred with a straight face. He took a drag from his cigarette. “By the way, it seems you asked my daughter a question.”
“Yes, about what you plan to do with me.”
Katsutoshi Katsuragi grinned and dropped his cigarette ash into the ashtray. He uncrossed his legs and nodded, pleased.
“Even if the whole plan went well, our family couldn’t have peace of mind. Because there is one person who knows our whole secret. Shunsuke Sakuma—what to do about him. We could make it seem like he’d committed suicide and have the police believe that he’d kidnapped Juri Katsuragi. The final polish. You inferred that my blueprints involved your demise.”
“Was I wrong?”
“I won’t say you were. It would be a lie to say that I never considered it. But dear Sakuma. I’m not that simplistic. I’m a little miffed that you thought so. Not that I don’t understand your point of view. Your perfect plan ends up being your trap; anybody would feel insecure. That’s why you thought to arrange a means to protect yourself. Well, you really were the man I hoped you were.” Katsutoshi Katsuragi cast his eyes behind me. My computer sat there. I could hear the fan, so it seemed to be on.
“Did you see the file?”
“I did, of course.”
The words I’d spoken to Chiharu the moment before I lost consciousness hadn’t been uttered in vain.
“When I heard from Chiharu that there was some kind of file, I made light of it, thinking it couldn’t be anything serious. I assumed what would be in there was a text document describing the truth of the incident along with a warning that the data would make its way to the police in the event of your death.”
“Wouldn’t even that give you pause?”
“Why? All I’d need to do is deny it. If we intended to kill you, we wouldn’t be hindered by such a trifle. I would simply assert that the kidnapper had made up a story before committing suicide. Whom do you think the police would believe?”
I didn’t answer, to indicate that I had no desire to refute him. With a satisfied smile, Katsutoshi Katsuragi took his time putting out his cigarette in the ashtray.
“But you weren’t that incompetent. There was a letter about the truth of the incident just as I had predicted, but also another file. Even I was amazed by that. Or maybe I should say I was floored.”
“To confess, it was a fluke,” I
came clear. “I didn’t think at the time that it would serve such a purpose.”
“Brilliant people are like that. Without even meaning to, they gather materials to reinforce their position. You can’t teach that sensibility.”
I flashed a wry smile. I hadn’t foreseen being praised by this man in such a manner.
“I didn’t intend to kill you,” Katsutoshi Katsuragi said. “Because there is no need to kill you. You wouldn’t tell anyone what really happened as long as the police don’t catch you. And I have no worries about you getting caught. Because we’ll cover for you. As the victims, we will be able to produce as much evidence as needed that you couldn’t have been the culprit. Of course, that was contingent on having you complete the game perfectly. It goes without saying that you did.”
“If there was no need to make it seem like I was the culprit, why did you need to make sure that I left traces in Yokosuka?”
“For one thing, I needed you to be vulnerable. Evidence that I could always use to finger you as the culprit would place you in such a predicament. But what I really needed were traces of a culprit. That the kidnapping had been staged absolutely must not come to light. To indicate that a culprit did exist for sure, I needed a real culprit acting.”
“Then, why did you put me to sleep just now?”
Katsutoshi Katsuragi grinned. His expression said he’d been waiting for the question. “Did you think you’d be put to death if you fell asleep?”
“If I’m truthful.”
“Right. So you marshaled the last ounce of your strength to pull out your trump card. What I wanted to see was exactly that. The last card you would flash.”
I grunted. “You wanted me to show you my hand?”
“The game is over. But we didn’t have a winner yet. I showed you my whole hand. What remained was what cards you had.”
Katsutoshi Katsuragi glanced at the computer again. At his lead, I also turned around. I looked at the monitor.
It displayed a photo. It was clear to anyone that it was a photo of this room.
Chiharu from when she had been calling herself Juri was carrying a tray with a meal she had made for me.