Evil and the Mask (16 page)

“And you’re paying us accordingly. Anyway, we don’t like doing a half-assed job.”

“Thank you. I’m worried about Aida, so we won’t meet as often. Call my cell phone and put any recordings from Konishi in the post. Just to be on the safe side. Email leaves a trail.”

“Understood. We’ll use a different sender’s name every time, so please check all your mail.”

I realized that even though his clothes and belongings were scruffy, they were all cleaner than they appeared. His carelessly tousled hair was always messy in the same way and the wrinkles in his suit were always in the same places. I saw that his unremarkable black bag was perfectly polished. Such
excessive cleanliness struck me as kind of lonely. I finished my coffee and used the room phone to call a cab.

WE DROVE FOR a while and I got out when I saw Ueno Park. Konishi called and told me that she’d mailed a photo of Kaori and her. She said jokingly that usually she was cool towards people she was checking up on, but that she’d come to like Kaori, perhaps because they were about the same age, and it was quite difficult.

“And another thing,” she continued in a low voice. “I can’t work out what she wants from life. It feels like she doesn’t really have any big dreams. She said when she was younger she wanted to be a nurse, but …”

I thought about that. She’d probably have made a good nurse.

“Thank you. Please keep going.”

I hung up and looked around me. I couldn’t exactly remember why I’d gotten out in such a crowded place. From a vending machine I bought a coffee and drank it as I walked. An elderly couple was out for a stroll, a mother pushing a baby buggy. A child holding a balloon was smiling proudly. A gang of guys, probably university students, was joking around in loud voices. A beautiful woman was walking along, ignoring her surroundings, eyes fixed on her cell phone. A group of kids with schoolbags. An old man chatting cheerfully on his phone. Surprisingly, he was holding the latest model.

Happiness is a fortress.

That’s what my father had said before I locked him up, before I killed him. A young couple, junior high school
students, came walking towards me. The boy was striding earnestly and the girl was pretty. When she teased him about something he blushed and got angry. Maybe she didn’t know how seriously teenage boys take themselves, how important they think they are. I grinned.

Father hadn’t been begging for his life. He didn’t blame me, saying I was murdering him to preserve my self-contained life with Kaori. He knew exactly what would happen to me after I killed him. But I had no desire to destroy this happy scene around me now. Having said that, faced with this mass of other people’s happiness, I didn’t feel like giving them my blessing either. I was just walking. Wondering if in this huge park there were any other murderers. And if there were, did it bother them?

When I looked back at the high school couple they were holding hands. I watched them expressionlessly. I started having impure thoughts, and left the park and hailed a taxi. Maybe my sudden arousal was their fault? Probably not, I decided. It made no difference if I kept on walking or went home to bed alone. It made no difference if I threw the can of coffee I was holding at someone or if I didn’t. It didn’t matter if I was horny or if I wasn’t. Nothing mattered.

I WENT INTO d’Alfaro, where I’d met Yajima. I didn’t have any particular reason for choosing that place, but if Aida learned that I hadn’t been back there since Yajima’s death he might get suspicious. I sat at the battered counter and ordered a gin and tonic. As before, the bar was noisy and full of foreigners.

A small hole had been punched in the wall, and I felt like it was watching me. It seemed to be imploring me to peer though it, so I turned away and looked at a woman approaching my seat. Something stirred inside me. I watched her casually. She glanced at me briefly and then sat down next to me. There was a half-finished cocktail of some kind on the bar in front of her. I figured she must have been sitting there before I arrived and had just got up to go to the toilet.

“Excuse me,” I said, looking at her face.

Her eyes were large, with dark rings underneath, and her full lips were curled up slightly.

“I’ve got a hundred thousand yen here. Let’s get a room.”

“Huh?” She stared at me, the smile frozen on her face. She was wearing a short denim skirt and a black, long-sleeved T-shirt that showed the lines of her body.

“Are you some kind of freak?” she asked.

“Are you on your own?”

“Yes, but … What the hell?”

“So I’m saying I’ve got a hundred thousand yen, let’s find a hotel. If that’s not enough, let’s make it two hundred.”

After gazing at me for a bit longer, she burst out laughing.

“Seriously? Wow! That’s the first time anyone’s said anything like that to me. What are you up to? Are you crazy?”

“No?”

“Hold on a sec. Let me get this straight.”

Still laughing, she finished her drink and ordered another in a loud voice. She was probably only a bit younger than I was. Suddenly I realized that I’d seen her in here before.

“Hey, the other day you were passed out at that table over there, and a black guy was trying to put his arms around you.”

She looked me in the face.

“Yeah, that’s right. That was a close call. I was sound asleep. He almost dragged me to that back room. I don’t like foreigners. They’re big.”

“Big?”

“Their dicks. And they’re bent.”

She was watching me seriously.

“Really bent! Like they’re alive. As bent as Kuwata’s curve ball.”

“Kuwata?”

“Used to play for the Giants. You must know him.”

I nodded.

“Me, I’m a Hanshin Tigers fan,” she continued. “My ex-ex-boyfriend was a Tigers fan and I ended up becoming one too. Now if you were a Hanshin fan as well, I wouldn’t mind getting a room.”

“You don’t go off with a stranger for a stupid reason like that!”

“Hey, you invited me, remember?”

She laughed again. The people at the table behind us laughed too, but obviously not at the same thing.

“So you come to bars like this, hunt out girls who look like they might let you into their pants and start hitting on them? Do you do this often?”

“Not regularly. And I don’t just talk to girls who look like they might let me into their pants. It’s because you’re kind of pretty.”

“Nice of you to say so. Though I don’t like that ‘kind of’ so much. But it was quite a good comeback. And the timing
is perfect. I need money desperately right now. I need it but I’m flat broke, so I’ve been sulking and spending money on drinks. Seriously, I thought they’d kill me.”

The bar’s air conditioning was still bad and the room was thick with cigarette smoke. At a table in the distance a woman was crying hysterically and a man was laughing as he comforted her.

“Kill you?”

“For real. I really thought they would. And even if they didn’t, I’d definitely have to work as a pro to pay it off, because I didn’t borrow it from a regular bank. I’d rather have sex with you than a whole bunch of other guys.”

She pushed her face close to mine.

“But you’re weird. You’re pretty good-looking, so if you’d chatted me up in the normal way you might have got it for nothing.”

“That’s okay. Let’s go.”

She continued to stare at my remodeled face, at Shintani’s face.

WHEN WE GOT to the hotel room she started kissing my ears and neck, saying that she couldn’t possibly ask for two hundred thousand, that my first offer of one hundred would do. I wanted to ask her to put on a white dress, but I missed my chance so I kept my mouth shut. When she asked my name I told her it was Shintani. For some reason she chuckled slightly and said it was funny. I pushed her onto the bed, taking off her clothes. I could smell alcohol on her breath. I put my tongue in her mouth, and accepted her tongue into mine.

While we were having sex, she kept looking at the big mirror next to the bed. She lowered her hips like a crawling dog, with me lying on top of her. As her cries grew louder, she whispered to me to push her head down.

“What?”

“It’s okay, do it.”

I forced her head down and she began to shriek, still watching the mirror.

“It feels like I’m being raped. I love it. You can be rougher if you like.”

I pushed her head into the bed and gripped her neck.

“Yeah, like that. Hey,” she said breathlessly, raising her voice. “Don’t you get the feeling that all the people in the world are inside that mirror?”

She continued to stare at the glass as she gyrated her hips.

“Everyone’s watching. Watching me now, being fucked like this by a guy I hardly know who gave me money. There’ll be some men who are turned on, some women who are disgusted. So I want to show more of myself.”

She started shouting, a smile on her face.

“While they’re watching me … I reach a place no one can understand … I want to come over and over. With everyone watching me, and, and, I wish they’d all just die. Yeah, they can all die. All fucking die!”

She changed position and wound her arms tightly around my neck. For some reason her expression was full of sorrow.

IT WAS ONE o’clock in the morning. I realized that I must have fallen asleep for a while, so I got up and took a bottle of
mineral water from the hotel room fridge. She was sitting up in bed, her breasts exposed, lazily reaching for the remote. The lighting had a bluish tinge and the room was quiet. When she turned on the TV, a photo of a missing boy appeared on the screen. She lit one of my cigarettes, blew out a plume of smoke. I missed my mouth and a trickle of water ran down my neck. The picture changed, and the Prime Minster was surrounded by reporters.

“Do you know about this?” she asked. “It’s funny.”

“What is?”

“This terrorist group.”

The PM frowned in response to a question.

“There’s this group doing strange things recently, isn’t there? Like simultaneous explosions in different places. The ones calling themselves JL? They’re on the news all the time. The media are condemning them, calling them ‘The Invisible Terrorists,’ but that’s just spurring them on. It looks like there have already been copycats as well.”

On the TV the interview was still going on.

“And now they’ve made a threat. ‘We’re going to assassinate all the politicians, starting with the baldest. If you want to stop us, the Prime Minister has to hold a press conference and do a perfect impression of the singer Hiromi Go.’ Wouldn’t that be hysterical?”

She laughed out loud.

“Really? That’s crazy.”

“Yeah. It’d be a riot.”

She laughed again.

“I wonder if he’ll do it?”

“I bet he won’t. But it would be amazing if he did.”

My cell phone rang and I reached for my jacket, still lying where I’d dropped it. I looked at the screen. The only people who knew this number were the detective and Azusa Konishi, but I didn’t recognize the caller. When I pressed the button, I could hear a crowd of people, and for a few seconds there was just the sound of someone breathing on the other end.

“Fumihiro Kuki?”

A man’s voice, someone I didn’t know.

“Sorry?”

“Ha, good reaction. Well, talk to you later.”

He hung up.

I REALIZED THAT I was still just standing there, so I sat on the bed. Out of the corner of my eye I could see my damp glass. I took a deep breath and reached for it. My heart was racing.

I picked up my cell phone again, hesitated for a second and then punched in the detective’s number on the room phone instead. He answered in a low voice just before it switched to the recorded message. The music I could hear in the background stopped abruptly in mid-tune.

“Shintani here. Sorry to call so late.”

“No problem. I was still up.”

At that point it occurred to me that I’d never told him that
I was Fumihiro Kuki. Even if he was pretty sure that I wasn’t Shintani, he’d never heard from me who I actually was.

“Someone called me on my cell phone just now. He obviously knew it was my number. The only people who know it are you and Azusa Konishi. Is there any way anyone else could have got hold of it, like you losing your phone or something?”

“Not from me, that’s for sure. I’ll check with Konishi. Anyway, I didn’t enter your number under Shintani. And Konishi probably stored it in her address book under the name of a bar or something. I have no idea.”

Without speaking, the woman got out of bed and went into the bathroom. I sat there, racking my brains. It was hard to believe that either of them had passed my number to anyone else. There was no benefit for them, and even if there were, they weren’t stupid enough to do something that would be discovered straight away. I tried to relax.

“Well, please get in touch with Konishi right away, just in case. And I’ll check if the number could have leaked at my end. I bought the phone from a job-hopping part-timer in town, so the contract isn’t in my name. I bought his bank account as well. He has no idea who I am, of course.”

“I’ll contact Konishi. Have you got the man’s number?”

“It wasn’t blocked, so I still have it.”