A Dog in Water (22 page)

“N-No, Mr. Yano, it’s not—”

“Shut it,” spat Yano.

The knife man’s mouth snapped shut, hands still in the air.

“All right then, Mr. Detective. What do you wanna do with ’em?” Yano used the barrel of the gun to slide the ashtray on the desk closer and ashed his cigarette. “They gotta pay for cuttin’ up your ear and trashin’ your TV set.”

“No need,” I replied. “They were both junk, pretty much.”

Yano exhaled a puff of smoke as he chuckled quietly.

“More importantly, there’s something I want to ask them.” I bent down in front of Kamata, who was still crouched on the floor. A mixture of blood and tears flowed from his left eye, but judging by the volume of fluid it seemed that his eyeball was still intact.

Yano gave Kamata’s waist a small shove with his foot. “Hey, unlike you I don’t repeat myself so listen up. If I don’t like the way you answer him, I’ll blow your head off without so much as a warning.”

“O-Okay …” Kamata’s lips trembled slightly.

I began with my questioning. “Where is Mr. Toshikawa right now?”

“I dunno. I’m tellin’ the truth. Haven’t seen him since I introduced him to the president.”

“By ‘president’ you mean Gunji Kawakubo?”

“Yes. The president said he was gonna test him with a job, see how useful an ex-cop would be. I dunno what happened after that.”

“How does one get in touch with Mr. Toshikawa?”

“I said I don’t know! Only the president does.”

I didn’t think Kamata was lying. “Then bring me to Kawakubo.”

“No! If I do that I’ll get rubbed out. He’s fuckin’ scary. You’ll get killed, too!”

“…”

“Hey, that’s enough, right? Please, let me go to the doctor …” Kamata begged in a weepy voice.

I straightened up. The knife man still stood silently with both hands raised.

Once the DBO men left, I went into the bathroom to check the status of my injured ear. The bleeding had stopped but there was a fairly large gash. It would require a few stitches at a hospital. I didn’t think the wound merited bothering a doctor in the middle of the night, however, so I used three band-aids to hold the cut closed. Then I took a small hit of morphine.

“So what’s the deal with the D-Boys?” came Yano’s voice. “What the hell has your Toshikawa gotten himself into?”

I generally never spoke of the details of a client’s request or the status of an investigation to outsiders, but Yano could hardly be considered a random interloper. It was very probable that the DBO men would make an attempt on Yano’s life. He was already a fully-fledged interested party. He had the right to know the particulars of the situation.

Yet he didn’t seem to be asking out of concern for his own safety. I could only sense pure curiosity regarding my current activities. I walked out of the bathroom.

“First, why did you come here tonight?” I asked Yano, who was sitting on my sofa, munching on the popcorn Kamata had left behind and helping himself to my booze.

“Had a little somethin’ I wanted to discuss.” He poured me my own booze when I sat on the opposite sofa. “The old man’s decided to retire. He’s turning himself in for the Junko Tajima mess.”

According to Yano, the MPD, increasingly desperate to solve the unheard-of killing of a suspect within a precinct, had been moving on Hishiguchi Group’s main family in Kobe.

Having cajoled an afflicted party into filing a complaint several years after the fact over a case of business meddling, the police were hinting at arresting the third-generation leader of the Hishiguchi Group on suspicion of extortion despite his advanced age and heart problems that required recurrent hospitalization. It was blackmail: If the gang didn’t want that, they needed to talk Sasaken into accepting the way of the world and saving the police’s face. Apparently, upon hearing this, Kenzo Sasagawa had chosen to disband his group and retire without a second’s hesitation.

“Well, even without the cops puttin’ pressure on him, I think the old man meant to take responsibility in his own way.”

I, too, had figured that Sasagawa would turn himself in, or even choose death. He didn’t seem like the type to let himself off the hook for an error that resulted in the death of his own grandson.

“So what did you want to discuss?”

Yano gave an awkward smile in response to my question. “I was wondering what I should do from now on.”

“What, you’ll quit being yakuza?”

“I don’t want to stay in it bad enough to go through another initiation ceremony.”

“You want to wash your hands of it all? Or do you mean going freelance?”

“That’s what I wanted to discuss.” Yano drained his glass in one gulp and tossed some popcorn into his mouth. “I think it’s too late for me to start over as an upstanding citizen, but I can’t stomach the idea of becoming a lowlife like those D-Boys. So I thought I’d get your opinion on it.”

“Why mine?” I refreshed Yano’s glass and poured more into my own as well.

“You’re about the only one who wouldn’t tell me not to quit.”

“You want me to tell you to quit?”

“I dunno.” Yano knocked back his drink.

“You sound like you want to quit being a yakuza but are afraid of becoming a civilian.”

“Maybe that’s it.”

“You’re being rather frank today.”

“Shuddup, who fuckin’ gives a shit about that? Just tell me what you think!”

Despite his words, he didn’t seem angry. He poured himself another drink and finished off the bottle by refilling my glass. I opened a locker and retrieved a fresh bottle and a can of oil-packed sardines and placed them in front of Yano.

“The hell, man. You should’ve brought these out earlier,” Yano said, returning a handful of popcorn he’d almost placed in his mouth back into the bag and opening the can of sardines.

“You want to become a detective, don’t you,” I hazarded. “You’re waiting for my invitation.”

“The fuck I am. As if I’d be a Dick.” Yano popped a whole greasy sardine into his mouth.

“Sorry if I was wrong. I just had a hunch.”

“Why did you think that? Why the hell would I wanna be a detective?”

“No, just forget it.”

“Besides, you really think a guy like me could handle that kinda work?”

“No. Impossible.”

“What? R-Really?”

“You’re not cut out for detective work.”

“Uh … How am I not?”

“Well, I say that, but my informant had told me that I was the type least suited for detective work.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t get it when he told me, but now I think I understand perfectly.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I don’t care.” Yano uncapped the new bottle. “The night’s young, and we’ve got liquor.”

Yano listened with a solemn expression on his face from beginning to end. He stopped reaching for sardines partway through, instead sipping from his glass and smoking cigarettes without a word.

I told him about the incident eight years ago that led to my resignation from the police force, how my memories of the event were rewritten and how the true memories had come back to me just the other day, and segued into my current case and the search for Johannes.

“And that’s why they sliced up my ear and told me to forget about Toshikawa.”

“I see …” Yano said, breaking his silence. “Whatta mess. Your story, and that Johannes business, all of it.”

“Yeah, a real mess.”

The bottle was nearly empty, but I didn’t feel drunk. Yano didn’t seem affected, either. Time quietly slipped by.

“This Toshikawa guy …” Yano said. “Sounds to me like you and he are two of a kind.”

“Because we’re both ex-cops and murderers?” I asked, a grin creeping up my face as I spoke.

“No, that’s not all. You’ve both killed people to save total strangers. And your lives were ruined ’cause of it.”

“No one’s life gets better for killing someone.”

I understood what Yano was trying to say. Ever since starting to
search for Toshikawa, I’d occasionally been seized with the sense that I was searching for another me who had taken a separate path somewhere along the line.

Both Toshikawa and I had become murderers trying to save someone. Toshikawa had saved Yuko Kuroki. At that point at least, Yuko was definitely saved. It was only afterwards that things took a turn for the worse, both for the savior and the saved. I’d failed to save anyone. My murder was too late, which is why I still struggled.

“But where you and Toshikawa differ is that no matter how unsatisfying the consequence, you’d never so much as let out a grumble,” remarked Yano.

I don’t know about that
. If I had been imprisoned for murder and learned that the person I held most dear had been killed, I couldn’t even imagine how I would change or what part of me would come to dominate my personality.

But something still felt out of place. Had I been in Toshikawa’s shoes, pain and despair may have made me want to have Yuko Kuroki pay for my son’s life with her own, but I would never wish to see her daughter Shiori dead. Even if I had read “Faithful Johannes.”

Why Shiori?

“Even if you went to prison,” Yano continued, “you’d never take up with assholes like those D-Boys. Right?”

“…”

“The way I see it, your client’s story has been too prettied up. The real Toshikawa is probably nothin’ like you at all. A totally different kind of man.”

That was definitely a possibility. Still other possibilities existed.

“So what are you gonna do now? Keep lookin’ for Toshikawa?”

“I think my only option is to go directly to Gunji Kawakubo.”

“That dude Kawakubo’s seriously crazy. What I’ve heard is that at the meeting of the top brass of the Kinsei Group where they excommunicated Kawakubo, one of the executives told Kawakubo as he was leaving, ‘Better watch your back on the streets at night.’ That night, the house to the right of the executive’s went up in flames. The next
day, the housewife in the house to his left was found hanged. While the area was still crawlin’ with firefighters and cops, a ten-ton truck slammed into the house right across the street. The day after, the executive turned in his resignation. They say he fled with his family to Thailand or Indonesia.”

“…”

“You still wanna try your luck?”

“Can’t see why not.”

Yano snorted with laughter. “Then take this.” He placed the stainless steel revolver he’d taken from Kamata on the table in front of me.

“No, I don’t need it,” I said.

“Why not?” Yano asked sternly. “You could get killed.”

“I don’t want to kill anymore.”

“Oh …” Yano sighed quietly.

My earlobe needed three stitches. My entire left ear was swaddled in gauze and tape. On my way back from the hospital, I decided on a whim to pop into the salon.

“Oh, welcome!” I was greeted with a dazzling smile. A cloud soon passed over her expression, though. “Now it’s your ear.” She hung up my jacket for me. “Why can’t you take better care of yourself?”

“Sorry.”

“No need to apologize to me. So just another shampoo for today?”

“No, I’d like a haircut too, please.”

A fraction of her smile was restored. “Leave it to me.”

The girl adeptly worked the scissors as my hair grew shorter before my eyes. Her hands never stopped even when she spoke.

“So is your ear injury related to whatever it is you have to do?”

“I’m not sure yet,” I answered.

“Isn’t there someone who gets sad every time you get hurt?”

“No, no one, as far as I know.”

“I’m sad.”

The scissors stopped moving. For a moment, my heart swelled.

“It’s depressing to give you such a great cut only to have the bandage on your ear spoil everything.”

Oh. So that’s it
.

“At least use a band-aid or something instead,” she said with her unflaggingly charming smile.

I laughed a little too. “Okay, I’ll be more careful.”

My hair turned out much shorter than I had expected. I could feel air moving across my scalp. I guess you could call it a messy crew cut. Not that I was much of a judge, but I thought it suited me.

“See? Now you look totally cool!” The girl smiled with satisfaction. I knew she was just giving me lip service, but I felt good. “You have to get it cut once every two weeks to maintain it,” she said, standing by the register and looking at a small calendar. “Today’s the eleventh, so the next cut will be—oh! Right on Christmas! So you’d better come back then, don’t forget.”

“I’ll do my best,” I replied and left the salon.

I glanced back to see the girl give me a small wave through the glass door. Her smile was more subdued than usual. Suddenly feeling shy, I gave a short bow and started walking.

If I do show up on Christmas
, I wondered,
do I need to bring her a small gift? But then I don’t want her to think that her simple display of professional kindness gave me the wrong idea. Putting aside whether or not she’d be right
.

Back at the office, I checked the edge of the doorframe. The strand of hair I’d left as a marker was still there, undisturbed. No one had opened the door in my absence. I couldn’t afford getting my ear sliced up every day; it was just a minor precaution. But now that my hair was so short, I wondered what I should use as a marker going forward. I unlocked the door and stepped inside. No one was waiting to ambush me.

I made several calls then tested the broken TV. As expected, it didn’t even turn on. I put the set away and dug out an old radio from
the back corner of a metal locker.

I placed it on the desk, plugged it into the outlet, tuned it to FM and switched it on. Music burst forth. “Sherry” by the Four Seasons. Half-humming, half-singing along to vaguely remembered lyrics, I wiped up droplets of blood from the floor and cleared the bottles, glasses and garbage off of the lounge table.

My cell phone rang. It was my informant.

“Where are you?”

“My office. Good timing—I have a favor to ask.”

“Okay. It’s a little early but let’s discuss it over dinner.”

As usual, he stated the place where we would meet and hung up.

I arrived at the Turkish restaurant in West Shinjuku first. My informant showed up just as the waiter brought my chai to the table.