“Great. I’m really glad I hired you. The next thing that’s bothering me is this firm that’s been investigating her.”
The detective bowed slightly and left the hotel room where we always met. After he left the room was still.
I TOOK TWO taxis and got out part-way, in a residential area. The plastic surgeon had an unwritten rule that I couldn’t go straight there by car, because cars were conspicuous and people would notice that he had lots of visitors. Although it was a clinic, from the outside it looked like an ordinary house.
When I pressed the buzzer and gave my name, the door opened silently. A woman of about forty with no make-up ushered me in with a smile. She was the doctor’s assistant, but wasn’t wearing the usual white nurse’s uniform, just an apron over her clothes.
The doctor stood up from a white sofa as I entered the room, giving me a neutral smile. Several plants were arranged in white pots and sunlight seeped through the blinds. The walls were stark white, not a speck or stain on their antiseptic surface. My room had been upstairs, and the operating theater was farther to the back.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
“Not too bad.”
The doctor pushed an ashtray towards me and I lit a cigarette. The clear glass of the ashtray reflected the light. It looked white, as if it was trying to hide something.
“I want you to keep taking the anti-inflammatories for a little while longer. Just to be on the safe side.”
“Okay.”
In his sweater and cotton trousers, he didn’t look like a doctor. For some reason the stickiness of my rubber slippers was bothering me.
“It fits nicely. Your face. Though whether it’s your face that’s adjusting to you or you that’s adjusting to your face, I don’t know.”
“It feels like there isn’t any ‘me’ any more. Like there’s no such thing as me.”
“Are you still getting those flashbacks?”
“I’ve already ceased to exist.”
He passed me some tea. The room was warm, and the clink of cup on saucer rang out in the quietness. The tea was as strong as ever.
“My wife found a dead baby.”
“A baby?”
“Yes. In the toilets in a department store. A corpse.”
He sipped his tea.
“Floating in the bowl with the umbilical cord still attached. Isn’t that cruel?”
“Yeah.”
“They called an ambulance and apparently there was a huge uproar.”
He stared at the gray blinds.
“That baby should have enjoyed life. That’s what my wife said. She said she wanted to wrap him in a towel. Babies come into the world screaming from the pain of being forced out of the womb and the fear of being outside. Being squeezed through that narrow channel. And after all that, to be dumped in a toilet, in cold water so he couldn’t breathe, isn’t that just dreadful? For that baby the world was nothing but an oppressive place.”
The ceiling fan was spinning indecisively.
“Normally when they come out they’re hurting, and their mother or a nurse wraps them in a towel, right? A soft, clean white towel. Of course the baby keeps crying out of fear, but it can feel that it’s wrapped in something soft, can’t it? Then eventually it gazes at things in wonder, someone makes it smile. But this baby, as soon as it was born, its suffering increased. Shuddering at the touch of the cold porcelain, the cold water, unable even to breathe. And then it died. At the last second he must have looked up at the ceiling. That’s what I can’t stop imagining, the look on his face at that moment. What did his life mean? He grew into flesh and blood in his mother’s womb just to experience pain. For him this world existed only to hurt him. And he didn’t know anything. My wife said that even if that baby was going to die almost immediately, she still wanted to cuddle him, to wrap him in a soft blanket for that brief time. She wanted to make him feel that the world contained soft, warm things, things that cared about him and held him gently.”
The doctor was watching me.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I don’t know. Whenever I see you I just want to tell you stuff.”
“Me too. I wonder why. I get this urge to talk to you too. Maybe it’s because you’re the only person who knows the boundaries of my face.”
There was a knock at the door and when the doctor answered the woman who had let me in entered and gave me some pills in a paper bag. Then she left the room silently, smiling the whole time.
“A while ago you said your life was over. Now you seem to have a bit more of a spark.”
“I do?”
“Yes. I could even say you’re excited. Ever since you came in.”
I looked at the clock, unsure how to reply. When I stood up, he did the same.
“This life is a gift. You may as well make the most of it.”
“Don’t worry. I’ve had plenty of happiness in the past.”
With chapped fingers I fastened a coat button that I’d missed. The frayed threads were twisted tightly.
“For example,” I went on, “even if this was some kind of fairy tale with a happy ending, real people’s lives keep on going after the story finishes.”
He turned towards me to show he was listening.
“As a story it ends happily, even if the characters die of something immediately afterwards. In the same way, I suppose you could present my life as a happy tale if you ended it in the right place.”
“I’d rather talk about the future.”
He opened the door, still smiling, and I felt the cold air rush in. He followed me quietly into the hallway.
“Your future. There are many kinds of fortune-tellers who claim to know people’s futures, aren’t there? People who communicate with spirits, people who use statistics based on your date of birth, and so on. But for me the most—what’s the word?—interesting method would be predicting the outcome by looking at a person’s character, heredity and environment, and the character and heredity of everyone around him. I’m interested in people who can plot these variables to find the line that indicates the direction a person is heading.”
I walked down the corridor without answering. When we reached the entrance hall the doctor started talking again.
“I normally prescribe two months’ worth of pills, but I’ve only given you one, because I’d like to see you again. There aren’t many cases where I’ve altered someone’s face to look like someone else. You interest me.”
“Professionally?”
“As a person. If I can still call myself human, that is. Because I’m the same as you. This isn’t my original face.”
I looked at him. It was a soft, forgettable face with narrow eyes.
“I’ll be back,” I said.
“I know.”
When I went outside the sun was already setting.
I WENT HOME and took a nap. For some reason I was exhausted. My hands and feet wouldn’t move properly, as though they were refusing to do what I told them. As I was mulling over what the doctor had said, the doorbell rang. I ignored it, thinking they’d go away, but it went on ringing. I got out of bed, the noise hurting my ears, and walked across the hard floor. When I looked at the screen on the intercom, a man I didn’t know was standing there.
HE WAS QUITE short, broad-shouldered and wearing a dark gray suit. His left leg jiggled as he stood there, giving him the air of an unpleasant insect. After staring at the screen for a moment, I lifted the receiver. His shadow stretched along the corridor. My heart started to beat faster. As soon as I picked up I wondered why I’d done so, why I hadn’t just pretended to be out. But it was too late—he was reacting to the noise coming from the speaker. I inhaled, feeling faintly uneasy.
“Yes?”
“Ah. Were you asleep? It’s been a long time. It’s Aida.”
The name didn’t ring a bell.
“Yeah, well, I knew you’d be surprised. Hey, that’s just how I am. Would you believe me if I said I just happened to be i
n the neighborhood?”
My pulse quickened even more. I was certain I didn’t know him, but his tone suggested ominously, powerfully, that he was someone I couldn’t just turn away. After a brief hesitation I flung on a tracksuit and opened the door, which seemed to have grown heavier.
The man stared sideways at me through narrow eyes. His hair was short, going gray in places. Suppressing a rising sense of panic, I forced my face into a surprised expression.
“Long time, no see,” he said. “Have you got a cold?”
“Yeah, I was asleep.”
“With gel in your hair?”
He eyed me doubtfully.
“I had to meet someone, but I’d had enough so I came home.”
“Yeah?”
Even though he was right in front of me, he kept stealing sidelong glances at me out of the corner of his eye. The soles of his shoes were paper-thin. Suddenly it struck me that he might be a cop.
“Don’t you have better things to do than coming all this way?” I grumbled, trying to work out what was going on.
It was clear that he knew he was unwelcome. A grin crept across his swarthy face.
“Got a short fuse, haven’t you? Well, I don’t blame you. It must be at least eight years since we last met. I bet you thought it was over.”
The cut of his suit was really old-fashioned.
“It’s a bit public out here. Can I come in?”
“I’ve got a temperature. Can’t we do this another time?”
For the past several days the news had been full of reports of an influenza outbreak.
“Me, I don’t care if I catch it. It would give me a break from chasing crooks. Anyway, I think you’re faking it. You’ve changed. Age, perhaps? Looks like you’ve gotten more cunning.”
So he was a cop after all, I thought, struggling to control my breathing.
“But I’m surprised to see you living in a fancy building like this. When did you come back to Japan? I’d begun to suspect that you’d run away.”
“I do what I want.”
“You really have changed. That blunt way of talking.”
I kept telling myself not to reveal my discomposure. He obviously knew Shintani, my face’s original owner, whose past was littered with dead people. Maybe he was under suspicion over one of them. If this guy hadn’t seen Shintani for eight years, he must have had a pretty good reason for coming to his condo. I tried to stay calm, thinking furiously.
“Can’t I come in? It’s cold.”
“Some other time.”
“You look terrible. Is it such a big shock, me turning up again? Or are you really sick?”
“I told you I was in bed, didn’t I?”
“But you’re not even coughing. Well, you can’t help that, I guess. Nothing sounds more artificial than a forced cough.”
He continued to stare at me, smirking. There was something really irritating about him.
“After eight years it’s not surprising that you’ve changed. You look pretty haggard, like a completely different person. I guess you’ve been through the wringer too. It’s odd for me to say this, but that case is never going to turn into a murder inquiry, not after all these years. Of course I knew Sae since she was little. I know her mom too. And you had a perfect alibi when it happened, but Yaeko was adamant that you were behind it. She got kind of strange—she’s still saying it, and she’s never stopped hating you. Her and me, we’ve known each other a long time, so I think it’s the least I can do to work on the case whenever I can find the time, at least until the statute of limitations runs out. Hey, your neighbors will be watching. Won’t you at least let me into the hallway?”
I hesitated, then gave up and let him in. He started to take off his shoes, but I stopped him with a gesture. Sae had been Shintani’s girlfriend at university, who died in a traffic accident after they broke up. I figured that Yaeko was probably her mother.
“Why are you here?” I asked, looking him in the face.
“You really don’t get it, do you? Because the statute’s about to run out on what you did. The time limit is different for different crimes, and the years you spent overseas don’t count. But then I felt the hand of fate, so strong it was spooky.”
He held out a photograph.
“This man, his name’s Takayuki Yajima. Do you know him? He’s a drug user and a dealer and some kind of con man, a marriage swindler.”
I felt a dull pain in my heart. I tried to look bored but I couldn’t speak. Inside my head I sorted through various reactions, but couldn’t decide which was best.
“When we were looking into his activities before he died, we found that he’d been to a bar called d’Alfaro. If he didn’t kill himself, maybe the person who gave him the poison went to the same bar. He had a lot of enemies. If one of them was there that day, maybe he’s the culprit. It would also make it less likely that he committed suicide. A shitty bar like that doesn’t have security cameras, but the sex shop next door has one at the entrance. They put it in so that they can check people’s faces when there’s trouble with customers. And sure enough, there was a picture of Yajima walking past. And then I saw a familiar face. Yours. I was flabbergasted. I felt like you’d come back into my clutches, and before the time expired. That’s when I decided to pay you another visit.”
My head was aching slightly. I was finding it hard to keep up with the pace of events.
“Am I under suspicion?” I said without thinking.
I could feel beads of sweat on my forehead, but couldn’t do anything about them. He was staring at me intently.
“Why? Should you be?”
“No …”
He burst out laughing.
“Come on! Why would you kill Yajima? There’s nothing tying you to him. There’s absolutely no link between your life and his. No matter what I think of you, I’m not going to set you up for that. He was either tricked by some woman and murdered, or he topped himself. Anyway, his body was already falling apart. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m saying I felt the hand of destiny. It’s a hunch I’ve had for a long time. And my hunches, they’ve been a friend to me my whole life, they’re always right on the money. When I meet someone again out of the blue like that, something is definitely going to happen. I started to think that maybe you really had killed Sae after all. Sorry, but you know I’m stubborn. In fact I don’t have that much time right now because of other cases, but I decided to have another look anyway.”
He continued to watch me.
“Yaeko’s health isn’t very good.”
“Huh?”
“Finally I get a reaction. That’s right. She might not have much longer. That’s another reason I’m here. Don’t you think that everything fits together, like cogs? Hell, you look really bad. Okay, we’ll leave it there for today. But before I leave, can I take a quick look at your room?”
“You really are obsessed with my room, aren’t you?”
“Haven’t I told you before? If you see a person’s room you can pretty much understand them. Fyodor Dostoevsky said that. I’m putting all my cards on the table here, but I want to get a feel for what you’re like now. After all, it’s been eight years. My instincts about you aren’t as sharp as they used to be. You seem really different from before, somehow. You even look different.”
“Okay.”
Casually he slipped off his shoes and opened the living room door.
“That’s far enough. You can see from there, can’t you?”
“Kind of a lonely room, isn’t it?” he said, gazing around.
“None of your business.”
“That reminds me. You liked movies, didn’t you?”
The projector screen was still down, and the shelves were overflowing with DVDs, mostly French and Italian. Shintani’s taste in movies.
“With a place like this, I bet you don’t get many visitors. No girlfriend either. This is definitely a one-person room.”
“I said, it’s none of your business.”
&
nbsp; “People often die around you. Your family, Masao Yaeda at high school, then Takayuki Isoi, Mikio Suzuki.”
“Give me a break. They got sick and died. Well, Yaeda was an accident.”
“I know. But I always thought you were weird. It suddenly occurred to me that if I got mixed up with you I might drop dead too.”
“Maybe you’ll catch my flu and die. Apparently this year’s virus is really dangerous for diabetics.”
He laughed.
“I’ll come back another day. Actually, I don’t have much time, because I’ve got to follow up on those terrorist attacks. But shall I tell you my impression, seeing you after all these years? I get the feeling you’re a bit more upset than I expected. I wonder why? But don’t disappear overseas again.”
He opened the door carelessly and left. The smell of his old-fashioned hair oil lingered behind him.
I SAT ON my bed and lit a cigarette. Then a second, and a third. Breathing quietly, I considered my situation. As I stared at the gently dissolving trail of smoke, I felt sharp, stabbing pains in my head.
Shintani’s girlfriend at university, Sae Suzuki, had died in a traffic accident. Her mother, Yaeko, and that detective, Aida, had always harbored suspicions against him. From my conversation with Aida, I gathered that these suspicions were solely his and the mother’s, not shared by the police force as a whole. Yajima’s death was also tricky. Aida had claimed that there was no connection between Yajima and Shintani, but was that what he really thought? I had to be careful. I wondered how I’d gotten into this mess. But it goes without saying that taking on another person’s identity involves a degree of risk. I drank a glass of stale water that had been left on the table since I don’t know when, and finally stubbed out my cigarette.
After transferring the picture of Aida from the intercom camera to my computer, I lifted the receiver of my phone. Then I stopped and grabbed my cell phone instead. I’d bought it from a professional part-timer in Tokyo, so there was no tie to me or Shintani. The bills were paid through his bank account, so I’d bought that as well.
The phone rang three times and the private investigator answered in a quiet voice. I could hear a buzzing sound.