'I'm sorry you got pulled into it,' Satake said.
'Not to worry. I had a crash course in the judicial system though I guess I'm getting a bit old for school.' While he talked, Kunimatsu's fingers worked the tiles with a hustler's delicate touch, aligning them with a satisfying clatter and then turning them up one by one. Satake lit a cigarette and watched him in silence for a moment. He sucked the smoke deep into his lungs, savouring its effects after a month of forced abstinence. Satake had few vices. This was his great indulgence. 'I have to admit,' said Kunimatsu, glancing at him, 'it was a bit of a shock to hear what happened to Yamamoto.'
'I guess that's how you end up when you go poking your nose where it doesn't belong.'
'Like you said, "the card shark got bitten"/ said Kunimatsu, laughing again.
'And I was right.'
'About Yamamoto?'
'No/ he laughed, 'about me.' Kunimatsu nodded, but it was hard to tell what he was thinking. He probably half-believed that Satake had killed Yamamoto; and if he hadn't gone running for cover, it was only because, unlike the hostesses, he had nowhere else to earn a living.
'It's a shame about Mika, though. There wasn't another club in Kabuki-cho that made money like that.'
'Not much I can do about it now,' said Satake. While he was locked up, he'd told the manager to put everyone on an extended 'summer vacation'; but almost all the employees had been Chinese, with nothing more than student visas, and they'd all gone elsewhere rather than risk getting involved with the police. Reika, the manager who reportedly had ties with the Chinese gangs, was the first to go, heading home to Taiwan at least for the time being. Chin, the floor manager, had apparently moved on to another club, but Satake had no idea where. Anna, who had long been pursued by headhunters from rival clubs, must have found other work as well; and the rest of the girls had either gone home, if they had visa problems, or had signed on at other clubs. What else could you expect in a place like Kabuki-cho? When business was booming, they came buzzing around like bees to a flower, but at the slightest sign of trouble, they were gone. And he could imagine that the news about his past had sent them packing with greater than usual haste.
'Will you be starting over?' Kunimatsu asked. Satake looked up at the ceiling. The chandeliers he had picked out himself were still there, though they were dark now. 'Is there a "New Mika" in our future?' his manager said, staring at his hands which were coated with talc.
'No. I've decided to sell the place, furniture and all.' Kunimatsu looked up at him, clearly surprised.
'That's too bad. Can I ask why?'
'There's something I have to do.'
'What's that?' said Kunimatsu, dusting the powder from his long fingers on to the tiles. 'Whatever it is, I'd like to help.' Without answering, Satake reached back and slowly began to rub his neck. He was having trouble working out the kinks from the sleepless nights in the cell, and if he ignored them they developed into a vicious migraine. 'So what is it?' Kunimatsu sounded impatient.
'I'm going to find out who really killed Yamamoto.'
'Sounds like fun,' Kunimatsu laughed, thinking he was joking. 'Like playing detective.'
'I'm serious,' Satake said, his hands still kneading his neck.
'But what are you going to do if you find him?'
'I'll figure that out when the time comes,' he murmured. He had already given some thought to the question, but he would keep his plans to himself. 'When the time comes,' he repeated.
'You have somebody in mind?' Kunimatsu asked, eyeing Satake nervously.
'At the moment, I'm betting on the wife.'
'The wife?' He looked surprised.
'But you can't tell anyone.'
'Of course.' Kunimatsu looked quickly away, as if he'd just caught a glimpse of the darkness in Satake's heart.
-
Satake left the club and wandered out to the main street. The late summer days were still brutally hot, but the nights had grown cool, and he appreciated the change as he made his way to a nearby building. It was brand new and cheaply built, all glass and steel; and according to the gaudy signs out front, it housed a collection of small clubs. He checked the name of the bar, 'Mato', on the directory and pressed the button in the elevator. As he opened the black door, the manager, dressed in black himself, came hurrying over.
'Good evening,' he said. But when he got closer he stopped, eyes wide. It was Chin.
'I see you landed on your feet,' Satake said. Chin smiled respectfully, but his expression was less obsequious now.
'Satake-san, it's a pleasure to see you. Are you here as a guest?'
'What else?' he said, smiling bitterly.
'And did you have a particular girl in mind?'
'I heard that Anna ended up here as well.' Chin glanced toward the back of the room and Satake's eyes followed. The place was smaller than Mika, but the Chinese decor and rosewood furniture were nice enough.
'I'll call her for you,' said Chin. 'But she's changed her name.'
'To what?'
'She's "Meiran" now.' The name sounded flat and ordinary to Satake's ears. The lady in charge, a Japanese woman in a kimono who knew Satake, looked up in surprise as he was led through the club.
'Satake-san,' she said. 'What a pleasure. Have things settled down at your place?'
'You might say that,' he told her.
'I understand Reika-san is still in Taiwan.'
'Could be. I haven't heard from her.'
'I suppose there could be some unpleasantness if she came back,' the woman said. Satake sensed she was referring to his own supposed connections with the Chinese mafia, but he decided to ignore the remark.
'I wouldn't know,' he said.
'Well, it's all been a terrible shame,' she said, looking uneasy, as if she'd realised she had offended him. He smiled vaguely, beginning to weary of the constant suspicions. A good-looking woman who might have been Anna was seated toward the back of the club, but from behind he couldn't be sure.
The table that Chin led him to was poorly situated, in the middle of the place, even though the preferred seats at the rear were mostly empty. The customers were taking turns at the karaoke machine, and after each performance, the hostesses would automatically applaud, like a troop of trained animals. Recoiling from the noise, Satake worked his way further along the couch. A young woman, whose only qualification seemed to be her youth, appeared at the table and began to chatter at him in broken Japanese, an artificial smile plastered on her face. Satake sat quietly downing glasses of cold oolong tea.
'When is Anna .. . I mean Meiran . . . going to be free?' he asked after a while, at which the girl abruptly stood up and moved to another table. From then on, he sat by himself, eventually nodding off in the comfort of a familiar environment. He was probably asleep for no more than a few minutes, but to-Satake it felt like hours. There was no chance of his finding any real peace now, but these moments of rest were an escape, a chance for his body to relax.
He caught a whiff of perfume and opened his eyes to find Anna seated across from him. Her deeply tanned skin was set off by a white silk pants suit.
'Good evening, Satake-san,' she said. It had always been 'honey' before.
'How are you?' he asked.
'Quite well, thanks.' She smiled as she answered, but Satake could feel the wall that had gone up between them.
'That's some tan,' he said.
'I was at the pool every day.' She was quiet for a moment, perhaps remembering that it had all begun with their trip to the pool. Her hands seemed to move automatically, making two weak drinks from the bottle of Scotch they had brought without a word from him. She set one in front of him, though she knew he didn't drink.
'How are they treating you here?' he asked, studying her face.
'Well enough. I was top girl this week; the Customers at Mika have all been coming around.'
'I'm glad to hear it.'
'And I've moved.'
'Where?'
'To Ikebukuro.' She didn't
offer the address, and an awkward silence fell between them.
'Why did you kill that woman?' she asked suddenly. Taken by surprise, he stared into her brilliant eyes.
'I don't really know myself,' he said.
'Did you hate her?'
'No, it wasn't that.' In point of fact, she'd been an intelligent, rather impressive woman. But he felt it was useless trying to explain to someone as young as Anna that usually hatred was an emotion arising out of the desire to be accepted by another person, and it didn't apply in this case.
'How old was she?' Anna said.
'I'm not sure. In her mid-thirties, probably.'
'What was her name?'
'I don't remember any more.' He'd often heard it mentioned at the trial, but it was an ordinary one that had long since slipped his mind. He had no need for a symbol like a name when the woman's face and voice were sealed inside him.
'Didn't you care for her? Were you her lover?'
'No, I met her for the first time that night.'
'Then how could you have killed her like that?' she pressed. 'Reika-san told me what you did, how you tortured her beforehand. If you didn't love her - or hate her - how could you have done something like that?' Hearing the intensity in her voice, the people at neighbouring tables turned to look, then quickly looked away again, unnerved perhaps by what they'd heard of her question.
'I don't know,' he murmured. 'I really don't.'
'You were always so nice to me. Was Anna just taking her place?'
'No,' Satake said.
'But honey,' she said, 'how can there be two of you? The one who killed that woman, and the other one who's so good to me.' In her agitation, she'd reverted to calling him 'honey'. He opened his mouth to answer but she interrupted: 'I was just a pet to you, something to spoil. You had me dolled up, like a fancy poodle, so that you could sell me to your customers. That's how you got your kicks, turning me into your best product. If I hadn't let you, would you have killed me like you did that woman?'
'Of course not,' Satake said, taking out another cigarette and lighting it himself, which she would never have let him do before. 'You're beautiful. She was . . .' At a loss for the right word, he fell silent. She waited, watching him, but he couldn't go on.
'You say I'm beautiful, but the truth is, that's all I am to you. When I first heard what you'd done to that woman, I felt sorry for her. But I think maybe I'm just as sad. Do you know why, honey? Because you can't even hate me enough to do what you did to her. If you cared enough to do that, at least I'd know you felt something. But you don't, you can't. If you could, I don't think I'd mind dying. Once you killed her, you had nothing left for me but making me look nice. But nice is dull, and Anna's been unhappy. Anna's the really sad one, did you know that, honey?' Tears had welled up in her eyes, and as she finished speaking they ran down past her pretty nose and dropped on to the table. The people around them were staring now, and the lady in charge was watching with a worried expression.
'I won't bother you again,' Satake said. 'You get back to work and forget about all this.' Anna said nothing as he rose and paid the bill. Chin followed him to the door with a polite smile, but no one else came to see him off. Fair enough, he thought. This was no longer his world.
The day that detective had first questioned him, he'd realised that the woman who'd died was still clinging to him, despite the seventeen years that had passed. And now he was resigned to facing her, to exposing the memories he'd kept tightly sealed away, like prying loose the soft meat inside a cracked shell.
-
It had been a long time since he'd been alone in his own apartment; nearly four weeks, to be precise. As he opened the door, he was greeted by the musty smell of a room shut up too long in the summer heat. He also heard voices, and he hurried inside after slipping out of his shoes. A pale light was flickering in the darkness - the television had been left on. He had apparently forgotten to turn it off as he'd wandered out into that miserable, scorching day to meet Anna. And whoever had come to search the place later hadn't bothered to turn it off for him. He smiled bitterly, settling down in front of the set. The news was just ending.
Now that the summer was winding down, the buzzing in his head had begun to subside. He rose and went to open the window. The noise and fumes from Yamate Avenue rose to meet him, but the cool night air flowed in, replacing the stale air in the apartment. The lights of the skyscrapers shone starkly against the black sky. He was all right now, he told himself, filling his lungs with the dirty city air. There was just one more thing he had to do.
He opened the closet where he stuffed old newspapers before throwing them out. The newsprint was damp with humidity and beginning to yellow, but he flipped through the pages in search of articles about the Koganei Park murder. When he found something, he laid the paper out on the floor and took notes on a small pad. Once he was done, he sat back and smoked a cigarette as he went over what he'd written.
Then he got up off the floor and turned off the TV. He was ready to go out, go wandering through the back streets of the city. There was nothing to hang on to now, nothing to lose. He had crossed a deep river and the bridge had collapsed behind him. There was no way back. He felt an exhilaration that he hadn't known for years, not since his twenties when he'd been a gang boss's gofer. There was something oddly similar about this feeling of wandering without a destination and the realisation that there was no going back. Both promised a kind of liberation, he thought, smiling to himself.
PIECE WORK
1
Flat broke. No matter how much she tore up the apartment, all she could find was some loose change and a few thousand-yen bills in her purse. Kuniko had been staring at the wallet-sized calendar she'd got at Mister Minute for some time, but the longer she stared, the more unavoidable it looked: the due date on her loan from Jumonji. Masako had made a big show of telling him they'd get another loan to pay him, but since then it seemed she'd forgotten all about Kuniko's problems. And what had come of Yayoi's promise to pay her? So far, not one yen. The two of them had forced her to do that horrible thing, had dragged her into their crime, and then left her high and dry. Suddenly furious, she raked the pile of thick fashion magazines off the table in a flurry of glossy print. Then she sat for a while, turning the pages with her toes, lost in the dreamy ads for all her favourite luxury items, Chanel, Gucci, Prada .. . shoes, bags, the new fall fashions.
The magazines had been retrieved from the recycling bin. They had food stains here and there, but she didn't mind: at least they were free. Her newspaper subscription had lapsed, and she didn't go out in the car much any more because she couldn't afford gas. About the only amusements she had left were the soaps and talk shows on TV; so who was she to sniff at someone else's discarded magazines? Not knowing where Tetsuya had gone off to was one thing, but she'd missed a lot of shifts at the factory in August, so her pay cheque had been smaller than usual. No wonder she had no savings. Poverty just wasn't her thing, and the longer it went on, the louder she wanted to scream.
She'd looked through the want-ads with the idea of finding steady daytime work, but she knew those jobs didn't pay enough for her to keep up with her loan payments. Something in the night life, something maybe a little sleazy, would pay much better, yet having no confidence in her own appearance kept her from even considering this. So she had little choice but to stay at the factory, where she could earn a decent hourly wage on the night shift. She seemed to contain two contradictory impulses, like two sides of a coin: a longing to be rich, to dress up and flaunt herself; and a feeling of worthlessness that made her want to curl up in the dark where no one could see her.
Maybe she should just declare bankruptcy. She had toyed with the idea, but if she went ahead with it, she might be cut off from her precious credit cards for life. There was always the old solution of trying to live within her means - but she'd rather die than do that! She had never been much good at delaying gratification of any kind, so what hope did she have now, when the
prospect of a big pay-off from Yayoi was dangling there in front of her?
She decided to call Yayoi right away. She'd been wanting to for some time, but the fear that the police might be hanging around had stopped her. Now, she was beyond caring.
'It's me, Kuniko.'
'Oh,' Yayoi murmured. It was clear her call wasn't welcome, but
Kuniko forged ahead.
'The newspapers make it sound like you're in the clear.'
'About what?' Yayoi said. So she was still pretending. Kuniko could hear a cartoon blaring in the background and children's voices. They sounded pretty cheery for kids whose daddy had ended up like Kenji, she thought, her surliness extending even to two little boys.
'Don't play dumb with me,' she said. 'I saw where they arrested that guy who owns the casino.'
'Yes, I guess they did.'
'You guess they did? You don't deserve such dumb luck.'
'But I'm not the only one. I know I shouldn't say this, but if you hadn't left the bags in the park, none of this would ever have come out. Masako was pretty mad.' Yayoi was usually so docile, so easily cowed by bluster, that Kuniko was thrown off balance.
'Well ..., ' she sputtered, 'you're a fine one to talk. I'm not the murderer around here.'
Muffling the receiver, Yayoi said, 'What is it you want? Has something happened?'
'Yes, it has. I'm broke! I need money. You said you'd pay me, but when? Could you at least give me some idea of a date?'
'Oh yes. I'm sorry, but I still can't say exactly. It should be in September, if you can wait that long.'
'September. . . ?' Kuniko gulped. 'You're getting it from your parents, aren't you? Why can't you just tell them you need it now?'
'I suppose I could,' she said, still sounding non-committal.
'And can you really give me ¥500,000?'
'That's what I promised.'
'Good,' she said, relieved on that score at least. 'But I'm still in a pinch. Could you let me have ¥50,000 right away?'
'If you can just wait a bit longer ... ' Her voice trailed off.