Machine Of Death (22 page)

Tsueno looked at the machine some more.

“It’s a lucky thing I asked,” Yukie said, after a few moments.

“Yes, miss.” Tsueno took a swig of the iced tea, and then held the bottle to his face. The chill moisture on the surface of the bottle moistened his skin, cooled him a little.

“Very hot today,” Yukie said stiffly.

Tsueno didn’t respond except to nod. She didn’t really expect him to. They just sat there in silence awhile, and then Yukie turned and picked up the remote control for the TV on the far counter. She turned the TV on, and laughter filled the room.

It was a sitcom about a salaryman and an alien and a licensed chef and a talking dog. The dog was a real one, a German shepherd with its voice dubbed on; it spoke Japanese with a funny accent that was supposed to be canine but sounded more Chinese than anything. It was fed caramel toffee or chewing gum or something to make it move its mouth like it was talking.

Tsueno had seen the show before and wasn’t really interested, but he found himself watching just the same, counting the passage of time by the explosions of laughter that emerged from the tinny speaker on the front of the old TV. The alien was trying to buy the dog a business suit so it could get a job like the salaryman’s. The dog was complaining that it didn’t want to have to go to an office and work like stupid humans have to do.

Kimu came back, cautiously, the cable coiled in his hand, and shut the door behind himself. A slow snaking trail of smoke rose from the cigarette that was still hanging from his mouth.

“Has he come yet?” he asked.

“No,” Tsueno mumbled, and sipped his iced green tea. “Hurry up and plug it in.”

Kimu hurried around the table, and jammed one end of the cable into the back of the machine. Then he bent down, his cheap black pinstriped slacks wrinkling around the bend in his knees, and he plugged the other end into the wall.

“It’s got an adapter,” he said. “Foreign plug.”

“Mmm. Black market.” Tsueno watched him carefully, and Yukie muted the volume on the TV, suddenly banishing all laughter from the room. The sudden silence drew Tsueno’s attention back to the screen. The dog was wearing a business suit now, and speech bubbles showed it moping and whining about its ill luck in actually getting a job at its first interview ever. The poor animal was being hired straight into middle management, because it couldn’t read or write or do math.

That last bit made Tsueno grin.

Kimu pushed a button on the main display, and lights started flickering on the side of the machine as it came to life. A strange whirring sound filled the room, and then a slow, rhythmic clicking.

“Did you drop that thing on the way up?” Yukie asked, a little leery.

“No,” Kimu said, conspicuously not calling her
ma’am
. “I think this is just how it boots itself up. We’ll see in a bit.”

Tsueno cleared his throat. “Kimu. Maybe we should test it?”

“Do you think so?” Kimu asked. “Elder brother,” he added a moment later, a gesture of respect.

“I don’t see why not,” Yukie said. “I won’t tell him if you won’t,” she smiled. Tsueno could see how a man could get into serious trouble with this woman.

“What if he walks in, right now?”

“He won’t,” she said, and made a pained face, and pointed at her groin. “Pissing,” she whispered. “It’s his prostate…”

Kimu turned to Tsueno and chuckled out loud. Tsueno’s only response was to frown at him and say to Yukie, “I don’t think you ought to tell us that, miss. He’s our
Oyabun
.”

“It’s okay,” she smiled, and her eyes went to Kimu. “Why don’t you try it out?”

Tsueno followed her gaze to Kimu and gave him one of those
don’t do it
looks, but the younger
yakuza
took the bait.
Boldness and intelligence rarely roost together
, Tsueno reflected.

“Okay,” Kimu said loudly, and stuck his finger into a hole in the side of the machine. With his free hand, he searched around the buttons slowly, until he found the one he was looking for. He pronounced the word aloud, a foreign word that Tsueno had never heard before, and then he pushed the button and held it down.

A sudden hiss and a mechanical clanking sound emerged from the machine. Kimu cursed, and his cigarette fell to the floor as he yanked his finger out of the machine’s blood sampler.

“Are you okay?” Yukie asked immediately, moving toward him. Tsueno remained seated, looking annoyed.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m okay, Yukie,” he said, and cursed again. He held up his finger. It was bleeding, more of a small cut than a puncture. “I don’t think it’s supposed to cut me like that.”

Tsueno looked on as Yukie examined the finger, and then stuck it into her mouth. She sucked the blood right off it. Tsueno inhaled sharply, and by reflex glanced over to the door to Ito’s inner sanctum. He could almost
swear
he saw a shadow move across the glass, just for a moment, and his stomach fluttered.

“What does the paper say?” he asked, hoping to break up the scene.

“Paper?” Kimu asked, his eyes still locked with Yukie’s, and then his attention returned to the machine. “Oh. Yes, yes, the paper. It should come out of this slot.”

But nothing did. The machine whined a little, as if some internal feed were broken. It whirred, and whirred, and whirred. A green light was blinking as it whirred.

Kimu bent down to read the label under the button. “I can’t read it,” he said.

Yukie leaned toward the machine, and sounded out the label for the light. “Processing.” She clapped.
So she can speak English
, Tsueno thought.
Maybe she
is
a college girl, after all.
“It works! Now, you, Tsueno. You should try.”

“I don’t think…”

“Try it,” she said, her voice suddenly low.

“But…”

“Ito told me to tell you to try it.”

Shit.
Tsueno’s heart sank, and he wondered what the hell Ito was planning.

Tsueno nodded, and went over to the machine. He stuck his finger into the same hole that Kimu had, and Yukie pushed down on the same button. A nasty little flash of pain stabbed at his finger—worse than a nurse drawing a sample of blood—and he yanked his hand back, squeezing his thumb against the pricked spot.

The machine began whirring louder, and the blinking light kept going, but only for a minute or so. Then the whirring stopped completely, and a humming sound started up. The hum was followed by a kind of mechanical cough, and then silence. Then a red light began blinking.

Yukie leaned toward the display, and sounded out the button. “Paper jam,” she translated it aloud immediately. “The paper is stuck inside.”

“Shit,” Tsueno said. “We broke it.”

“No, no,” Kimu said. “I used to work in an office, when I was a teenager. Machines do this all the time. I just need to clear the jam, and…”

Ito’s door swung open into the room, just then, and he entered. He was an imposing man, though physically small. He was shorter than Kimu, and only a little taller than Tsueno. But he was solid, thick and bull-faced. A scar ran across his face, from one eyebrow down his nose to the corner of his mouth.

The two gangsters bowed deeply to their employer, as Yukie stepped ever so slightly back, away from Kimu.

“Kimu,” Ito said. “Tsueno,” he added. That was out of order. Tsueno’s name always came first, as he was the senior. Both men, still bowing deeply at the waist, tensed slightly because of the change. It
meant
something, and they both sensed it, but neither knew exactly
what
. The air buzzed with their almost-palpable guesses and imaginings.

Ito did not greet Yukie, of course.

“Sir,” the men answered in unison.

“You got the machine, I see,” he said, strolling toward it with his hands behind his back, as an office manager might do.

“Yes, sir,” Tsueno answered. “From a black market dealer’s hideaway. It’s an older model, but that’s all that ever made it to Fukuoka before these things were outlawed altogether. It was functioning, as of a week ago. This was the machine that correctly predicted the death of Watanabe Yoshiro.”

Watanabe had been an enemy of Ito’s, and rumor had it that this machine had told him, months before the fact, that he would get a knife in the windpipe, just as he had done Sunday last. It was whispered that someone—the names given varied in each telling—had been waiting for the local
yakuza
bosses to die of old age, but had lost his patience and had started taking them out, one by one. That was why Watanabe had gone to such great lengths to get his death foretold in the first place.

Not that it had helped.

Perhaps it was because of Watanabe’s fate that Ito had even considered getting a Death Prediction Machine of his own. He was sure that, unlike Watanabe, he could avoid doom if he knew it was coming. It would take a certain kind of rare intelligence, of course, but Ito was used to feeling smarter than everyone around him.

“Very good work. Today we will find out how we are all going to die,” he said, smiling. He did not look at Kimu.

“Thank you, sir.”

Yukie was visibly uncomfortable. She looked, in fact, a lot like the way Tsueno imagined a woman would if she’d been carrying on with one man behind another’s back, and suddenly found herself in the same room with the two men, standing in between them. Ito hadn’t congratulated Kimu on a job well done, though he’d obviously been involved in getting the machine. Yukie frowned. Tsueno wondered where her real sympathies lay at that exact moment.

“I can give this machine a blood sample, now?” Ito asked.

“Yes, sir,” Kimu replied, and he began to explain it, hurriedly: “There’s some kind of internal sterilizer. It’s totally safe. Why don’t you give it a blood sample, and while it’s processing that, we can clear the paper jam?”

“Hmmmm,” Ito said, and nodded. He stuck his middle finger into the opening. “Now what?”

“Allow me, sir,” Tsueno said. He rose and went over to the machine, and pushed the same button he’d seen Kimu push earlier.

Again, the hiss, the clanking, and then a new sound: a slow, steady humming that got louder with each passing moment.

“It stings,” Ito said, withdrawing his finger from the machine and looking at it. Yukie held out a pale blue handkerchief, patterned with images of children at play. Ito looked at the handkerchief, and shook his head. “What a waste that would be,” he muttered. Then he stuck the bleeding finger into his mouth and sucked off his own blood, his eyes still locked with hers, and asked, “How long will it take?”

“We’re not sure,” Tsueno said. “For some people, it only takes a few seconds. For others, longer. Maybe twenty minutes, even.”

“In that case, I have other things to attend to. Cleaning house, for example. Mr. Kimu,” Boss Ito turned his attention to the younger thug. “I know that you’ve been working hard…working overtime, on projects I haven’t even assigned you. I fear you’ve been working way too hard, lately. Too much overtime.” Ito put one arm around Kimu’s shoulder, and the other around Yukie’s waist. “I would like to discuss this problem with both of you.”

He led them towards the exit, leaving Tsueno standing by the machine. When they reached the door, Ito turned and said to Tsueno, “Get that machine working, will you? Fix the paper problem, or whatever it is. We’re going for a drive in my car.”

“Yes, sir,” Tsueno said, and bowed as he flooded with relief. In a few minutes, it would all be over, he thought, holding the deep bow as long as he could. As he finally straightened up again, he saw Kimu looking back over his shoulder, a grin on his face. Gallows humor?

Or did that idiot Kimu have something planned?
Tsueno wondered, and shook his head.
He’s going to screw up everything.

He focused on opening the lid of the machine. At least, at first it had seemed like a simple lid. He discovered that it was more complicated than the hood of a car, or the latch on a suitcase, however. He fiddled and jiggered with knobs and levels until, finally, he got something right and a crack above the feed slot opened enough for him to see the slips inside.

Outside, it was still quiet.

The papers were jammed in deep, and a little ripped up, but he tried his best to extract the two little cream-colored strips without damaging them further. The problem was, his fingers were too big to reach all the way in. For a moment, he wished that Yukie had been left behind. She could have reached them, easily, with her long, slender fingers.

He pushed and shoved until his fingers were touching the papers, but by then they were so tightly wedged that he couldn’t actually grasp the little sheets, much less pull them free. Just then, the machine stopped humming, and after a mechanical cough, a third slip of paper slid into the jammed slot.

Yanking his hand out, he cursed mildly to himself. He could rob rival gangsters, misdirect cops, talk a board of shareholders into paying him protection money, and assassinate enemies without getting caught. Would he let a mere
paper jam
hold him back? Ridiculous. Especially now that his plan was about to bear fruit.

But try as he might, nothing helped. Digging at the slips with a pen just ripped one of them in half. Turning the machine on its side had no effect. Shaking it didn’t do anything at all. He was staring at the damned thing, thinking hateful thoughts of broken plastic and metal, when something caught his eye. It was a button with a blinking light underneath.

It was labeled, he discerned with some difficulty, “Form Feed.” A half-formed memory from high school, of a dodgy dot-matrix printer (and a caning delivered unto him by the middle-aged computer lab supervisor) bubbled to the surface. He realized this was the very thing he needed. Tsueno jabbed at the button with his thumb.

A soft whirring sound started up again. Moments later, three slips of paper were spat out of the front slot, like a trio of tongues sliding out of a single expressionless mouth. They dropped to the ground.

Tsueno reached out to catch them, but they slipped past his fingers to the floor. As he bent to pick them up, he looked carefully at them.