Evil and the Mask (32 page)

The sun had almost set.

“That’s what I think at the moment, anyway. It’s just because my life has been like this that I’m determined to survive. And why shouldn’t I enjoy what the world has to offer until I grow old and die?”

Ito looked away, staring at a patch of dirt. The slanting sunlight cast long shadows.

“You sure do talk a lot.”

“Because with you, it’s like I’m talking to myself.”

Ito may have been exhausted, but he still seemed able to dress with care. Deliberately, he took off his beanie and tossed it to me. The breeze ruffled his medium length hair.

“I’ll leave this with you until next time we meet. In return for your long speech. Until then, I won’t do anything.”

I held his hat in my right hand.

“Next time I’m planning something, I’ll ask your opinion, because we’re both cancers. And I’ll pay you back the money some time too. I want to be even with you.”

I passed him a paper bag full of cash and a page torn from a notebook.

“I’m leaving the country for a while. Use this email address to contact me. And if you need to change your face, I know a good plastic surgeon.”

Ito put the money in his backpack, the paper in his pocket, and got to his feet. He started to walk off, then turned back and hesitated.

“I really never imagined I’d meet you like this.”

“Me neither.”

“Funny, eh.”

With that he walked slowly away. I stayed where I was and lit a cigarette. The wind was growing stronger.

It would have been easier to catch a cab if I went in the same direction as Ito, but I headed the other way instead. I walked towards a main road, through the puddles drying on the pavement. In a small park a little girl was tearing around merrily, her mother watching and laughing. The child was running as hard as she could, but then stopped abruptly as
though she’d found something. She pushed her face close to whatever it was she had discovered, studying it with a big smile.

I couldn’t see what it was, a flower or an insect, but that instant of the child’s rapt attention seemed to hold some special meaning. Though her intellect and reason were still unformed, her eye was drawn to things around her with friendly interest, as though they were drawing her in. Perhaps Kaori would have a baby one day too. That was up to her, of course, but maybe she would. Idly I imagined what her child would be like when it grew up. It would be nice if the world was a bit easier to live in then than it was now. I wasn’t sure if I really hoped that but at any rate, when the idea popped into my head, I couldn’t reject it out of hand.

The sun had almost disappeared below the horizon. Once again, the light began to give everything an orange hue.

YAEKO AND SAE Suzuki’s graves were in a cemetery on a small hill on the outskirts of Tokyo.

Their headstones stood in the clear air and stillness. As I placed my flowers in front of them, I noticed that the ones already there were still fresh. I decided to give them some water. The detective, who had accompanied me, gave me a hand.

“You’re not directly related to them, you know,” he said quietly.

“I know, but I still thought I should come.”

I lit a stick of incense with my cigarette lighter and then stood, looking at the graves in front of me. Silently I informed them that Koichi Shintani was dead too.

• • •

WE RETURNED TO the car without speaking, and the private investigator drove. The road to Narita Airport was fairly quiet, so we were soon on the expressway. A commercial was playing on the radio.

“But still,” he said, hands resting on the steering wheel, “I think you did really well. For example, that JL guy who was on the run, I hear he was spotted near Ms. Kaori’s condo. Maybe he was waiting for her to come home or planning to break in. You were wise to send her to Konishi’s place.”

I started to answer, then stopped, looking out the window. Below the expressway I could see acres and acres of sleeping houses.

“Takayuki Yajima too,” he continued. “I think you had no choice but to do that. Of course, that’s assuming you put more value on Ms. Kaori than on society’s opinion. Even if you’d turned him in for drugs, as a first offender he’d have got probation, not jail time. And if you reported him for fraud it would have been difficult to prove, because the victims are usually reluctant to come forward. He was a textbook example of a marriage fraudster, because even if he was exposed, he could still put on a real performance and ingratiate himself with the ladies. Romantic attraction is a powerful thing, and he was very adept at using it. Plus he used drugs. When I was talking to his victims, I was often surprised that almost all of them still can’t forget about him, even though they know he lied to them. They’d all gone through a stage where they wouldn’t listen to anyone’s advice. Even though they’d been
reluctant to do drugs at first, eventually they became dependent, so they were ashamed and couldn’t accept help from others. Drug addiction’s a nasty business.”

I stared off into the distance.

“And he was persistent. He never gave up, no matter what obstacles were placed in his way. Even if you’d asked the police to protect Ms. Kaori, it would have been difficult for them to do much. He wasn’t stalking her, and basically the police can only act after a crime has been committed. There’ve been lots of women who’ve reported their stalkers to the police and still been murdered. To keep Ms. Kaori completely safe, dealing with him as you did doesn’t seem unreasonable.”

We drove straight as an arrow along the empty highway.

“That’s if you care about what society calls ‘morality.’ Practically, if you consider how dangerous he was, the fact that you didn’t stand to benefit personally, the peculiarity and urgency of the situation, you’d probably get about five years in prison for his murder. Mikihiko Kuki, well, that was his own choice. And as for that earlier event, you can’t be charged with anything, because offenses committed by minors aren’t treated as crimes.”

I wanted to look at him, but just kept staring at the road spreading out before me. At his mention of that “earlier event” an image of my father’s scrawny frame came back to me. I still didn’t know what I should have done. Even if I could have gone back in time to do it over, I’d probably have done the same. But that didn’t mean it could be forgiven, that I could forget about it, that it was a simple matter of black and white. Whatever the reason, I’d never forgotten the feelings
I had when I did it, and I had a responsibility to hold on to them. I pretended to shrug off what he’d said about my father and talked about Yajima instead.

“I’m not planning to reveal everything. Putting aside how many years I’d get, I’m thinking about turning myself in for Yajima. I want to take my time to think it over, decide what to do, the best course of action. I don’t feel much of anything about him, but apparently I’m having nightmares about it. Sometimes I wake up covered in sweat and think, ah, I must’ve had another one. My weird dream with those chairs lined up in front of me, that’s caused by what I did to Yajima, too. My body is blaming me for killing him. It’s a tough burden to carry. If there are other people who are thinking of doing what I’ve done, I want to tell them not to. It ruins your life, and they should think of a better way. The only reason I managed to do it was because back then I felt I was already a dead man walking. If you think about wartime, hundreds of thousands of people end up living with that feeling.”

“Haven’t you worked it out yet?” interrupted the detective. “It may not have been one hundred percent certain, but there was one way you could have protected Ms. Kaori from Yajima that would probably have succeeded. That was if you’d become her boyfriend. All his skill at seduction would have been useless, because con men like that don’t target women who already have a partner. In fact she was single, and even though she’d been warned about dating customers, she quite liked him already. But if you were going out with her, she’d have ignored him, and he could never have gotten close to her in the first place. Right? I guess with Mikihiko Kuki behind
him he might still have tried to muscle in, but he probably wouldn’t have got anywhere. Still, you didn’t do it.”

I said nothing.

“I think you did really well. The only thing that didn’t go smoothly was your love life.”

A truck loaded with timber raced past us. Cars were streaming by on the other side of the median strip, heading towards their various destinations. The radio started playing a gentle guitar melody.

“But you look a bit more solid now than you did before. When I met you earlier I had this rude thought. I imagined you were an old man on the verge of death, mumbling to God that at least you hadn’t killed yourself.”

He grinned. I smiled back faintly.

“You’ve really helped me a lot,” I said. “You don’t know how much.”

“It looks like Azusa has genuinely made friends with Ms. Kaori. I’ll keep an eye on her a bit too, but Azusa being her friend, that’s got to be good for her, doesn’t it?”

He hesitated for a second before continuing.

“The first time I met you, you asked me about the investigations I did for Shozo Kuki, as a test. Of course one reason I didn’t hand them over was my sense of professional ethics, but I also thought about the enormity of the consequences if they came to light, and I couldn’t give them to you. Actually there are still more. But I guess you’ve had enough of the Kukis, haven’t you?”

We left the expressway and came out on a wide road. For some reason the passing cars and the houses, the traffic lights
and the pedestrians, all seemed dazzling. When we reached Narita the detective lifted my suitcase out of the car for me, and I thanked him. Then he looked me in the eye and spoke.

“I saw you once, at the estate.”

We walked past a row of waiting taxis. I noticed for the first time that he was a little taller than me. I looked straight back at him to show that I understood the significance of his words.

“You were about six or seven. I visited the house in Nagoya to report the results of an investigation to Shozo, and I saw you in the corridor, really skinny, with some toy blocks in your hand. I’m sure you don’t remember it, but at that moment our eyes met. Your eyes looked like they were starved of love, like you were longing for some warmth, some affection, from the bottom of your heart. The same eyes I had when I was a child.”

I watched his weary face for a few seconds. It was deeply lined but it was resolute. Several people walked past us on the way to the terminal. I stuck out my right hand and he shook it.

“Thanks for everything,” I said.

“Let’s go for a drink together sometime, nothing to do with work.”

AFTER I’D COMPLETED the ticketing formalities, I buttoned up my coat and walked off, pulling my suitcase behind me. Even though I had plenty of time, I went through the baggage inspection, checked in my luggage, passed through passport control and headed towards Boarding Gate Twelve. The
waiting room was still almost empty. I went to the smoking area, had a cigarette and then returned to the gate, thinking that I should have checked in my carry-on bag as well.

And there was Aida. He rose slowly from his seat, looking at me.

HE WALKED SLOWLY towards me. I ignored him and sat in a nearby chair, but he lowered himself into the seat next to me. We sat there side by side in the departure lounge in front of Gate 12. I stared blankly at the bag in my lap.

“Obviously,” he said softly, “this isn’t a coincidence. I’ve been waiting for you.”

I kept my eyes forward, not looking at him. For some reason he adopted the same pose.

“You know about the cult Rahmla, that took over a nuclear power plant twenty-four years ago.”

His voice was still low, his face averted. The empty, sterile waiting area seemed to spread out before us.

“They’d caused quite a bit of trouble before then. As a detective, I was involved several times when there were problems with people who’d left the group. When they seized the power plant, failed to blow it up, and committed mass suicide, one man left behind a posthumous statement, you could call it a suicide note. ‘The seeds of evil, the mud that never dries, will squirm and grow at every corner of the globe, through humans’ unconscious mind and karmic echoes.’ Judging from the handwriting, it was written by Ryokai Ito, a highly placed member of Rahmla who was enrolled as a grad student at Tokyo University. Of course at the time the media didn’t mention the fact that he was related to the family that controlled the Kuki Group. But those words have always fascinated me, so much so that whenever I caught a criminal I started investigating his links to Rahmla. Why? I don’t understand it myself. I guess I was hoping for something. Naturally it would be terrible if a nuclear plant was really blown up, but still, I wanted something to happen. I wanted to know the answer. Looking at the media frenzy back then, there were probably lots of people who thought the same way. When Rahmla all killed themselves, I felt a bit let down. It’s probably similar to the feeling I get when I arrest someone. Of course I’ve got a strong sense of justice, so I can’t stand criminals, but at the same time I know there’s another side of me that feels most at ease dealing with them, when I’m close to them. Maybe I’ve even hoping for something from them.”