The Devouring God (10 page)

 

CHAPTER 19

Saturday Afternoon

“Y
ou'd better tell us everything,” Takuda told Suzuki. “Start at the beginning.”

They sat at the window table of the business hotel next to Able English Institute. Takuda and Suzuki faced each other across the table. Mori turned sideways in his chair with his back to Suzuki. He watched uniformed officers come and go next door. He worked a toothpick in his mouth like an angry street hood.

“Then I should start with my father's disappearance in the Naga River valley,” Suzuki said. “That was eleven years ago. He had stepped down as head priest two years before that.”

“The body never showed up,” Takuda said.

“His robes, yes, but no body.” Suzuki smiled as if he were talking about a favorite old television show. “He was carrying his modern translation of medieval documents about the Kappa. You know.”

“You thought the Kappa murdered him?” Takuda asked.

“I assumed so. Why else would his robe show up in the valley when he was taking the high road to the capital? Now, though, it makes no sense at all.”

“Priest, none of this makes sense. You say this is your father's handwriting. Someone is feeding you documents stolen from your dead father?”

“I'll bet it's Endo,” Mori said. “He's obviously taunting Suzuki. He's trying to break our weakest link.”

Takuda closed his eyes in the silence following Mori's insult.

Suzuki broke the silence. “Taunting is one explanation. That would appeal to Counselor Endo, of course, but he is focused and disciplined. If he is responsible—­and I'm sure your assessment is correct,” he said with a bow to Mori, who ignored him, “then we can be sure he is feeding us information to achieve some greater purpose of his own.”

Takuda shifted in his seat. “We can't ignore the surge, even though we're serving the interests of Endo and Zenkoku. Even though he's using us, we're doing the right thing.”

Mori and Suzuki glanced at each other.

“We have to stop these killings if we can. Maybe we can learn Endo's game in the bargain.”

Mori sucked his toothpick loudly. Takuda had to quell the urge to reach across the table and squeeze the laughter out of him.

Suzuki said, “It's true that I'm an easy target.” He ran a fingernail along a crease in the paper. “I have always been an easy target. That's part of my nature, I suppose. That may be why my father kept me in the valley after he moved the rest of my brothers to safety.”

Takuda sat forward. “You said they went away to school. You never said your father deliberately moved them away from the valley.”

Suzuki smiled sadly. “Oh, yes. I have always been considered the weakest link. If the weakest link is isolated, the chain won't be endangered.” He nodded as if to himself, a half-­smile spreading and slowly disappearing.

Takuda said, “You aren't the weak link. I know this. The second sight is getting stronger in me. I see you as a great and terrible force, and Endo will regret the day he taunted you.”

Mori stared off into the middle distance.

“Anyway, your confidence in me is reassuring,” Suzuki said. “Not much confidence has been shown in me. Ever. My father once tasked me with translating a manuscript written by a foreign visitor to the temple. It was not so old, perhaps from the 1920s, but it was written in old-­fashioned and difficult English. It was a hard job, and I . . . my father seemed to assume I was failing. He gave the work to my next-­oldest brother. Perhaps I was doing a poor job. I don't know. I remember being upset over the whole thing. But I remember the first line best of all.

“After the impossible front matter laid out a ridiculous purpose and an improbable time frame—­not only for the author's life, but for the events in the manuscript itself—­the manuscript proper started like this: 
‘I would wish it upon no man that his father dislike him.'
” Suzuki did not bother to say it in Japanese. “Through no fault of my own, that was my fate as well.”

Takuda searched his memory for any signs of affection from the old head priest toward any of his sons. The elder Suzuki, shorter and rounder than his son, had never been demonstrative toward anyone, at least so far as Takuda could recall.

“When he sent us away for schooling, I began to think he had some confidence in me. But my brothers never came back. My father and my mother fought about whether I should go as well, and he said he needed me to stay behind and help take care of the temple. She was passionate at first, but she became colder and colder, toward me and toward everyone. When she disappeared, everyone assumed she just left.”

“Everyone but you,” Takuda said.

“No, I thought so, too. I thought she had 
abandoned
 us. 
Abandon
 was the first word in my abridged English dictionary. Now, I don't know. Maybe they fed her to the Kappa. But I always thought she got away. I had to believe that.”

“And your brothers?”

“They're alive somewhere. I'm sure of that. They left for school or work or apprenticeships right on schedule. When my father disappeared, the last link was severed. I never heard from them again.”

“These documents showing up in your begging bowl . . . Do you think your father entrusted these documents to your brothers?”

“That's one explanation.” Suzuki spoke carefully, as if avoiding some misinterpretation of Buddhist doctrine rather than weighing the possibility that his hidden family had found him.

“Do you think they may have joined your mother somewhere?”

Suzuki shrugged that off, physically discarding the idea. “Wishful thinking. Adding to the idea that she is alive the idea that she might have gathered together my brothers and my father, all of whom I assumed to be scattered to the winds . . .” He shook his head violently. “It's not a possibility.”

“Do you think Endo might have . . . captured them?”

“The existence of documents in my father's handwriting doesn't indicate that my brothers ever possessed them, nor does it provide any information on whether my brothers are alive or dead.”

Mori wheeled around to the table. “What have they sent you? Everything. Show us everything.”

Suzuki brought out a single sheet of onionskin. “This is it. This and the description of the film. I believe that was among the papers you were throwing on the street a few minutes ago. The rest came from Yumi's basket or the foreigner's notebook.” Suzuki stretched out a drawing on onionskin. It was a curved jewel, a knife shaped like the dark half of a yin-­yang symbol. The flattened disk was its grip, and its long, wickedly curved tail was a blade.

“Stop lying and keeping secrets,” Mori hissed. “Stop acting holy and spill your guts. Now.”

Suzuki turned crimson.

Mori made a disgusted sound. “Look at you two. What a pair.”

“Enough,” Takuda growled.

They both glanced up at him and then returned to their respective miseries.

Takuda pointed to the sketch of the stone knife. “Priest, what do the symbols running along the blade mean?”

“I don't know.” Suzuki traced them with his finger. “These are completely new to me. They look like the markings on oracle bones, but they're more basic. More primitive.”

Mori said, “What markings could be more primitive than those on oracle bones?”

Suzuki looked surprised. “Oracle bone script is hardly primitive. The Chinese were cutting characters into tortoise belly shells and shoulder bones of oxen almost four millennia ago, and there were more than six thousand distinct characters in use for divination, at least a third of which can be identified as precursors to modern characters,” Suzuki said, shifting his attention from Mori to Takuda, as Mori had begun staring out the window again. “The bones had been hollowed out in spots to make them thin enough to crack when heated. A bronze rod from the fire was placed on the bones, one on each hollowed-­out spot, one for each question. The bones would crack in a very specific way—­a long, vertical line with a shorter horizontal line shooting out from its side, a shape which itself forms our character for ‘divination,' you see?”

Mori lit a cigarette. Takuda was too tired to pretend interest. Suzuki sighed and continued: “The really interesting thing is that these bones actually confirmed the existence of the mythical Shang Dynasty, and some of the astronomical events depicted on the bones constitute proof of the chronology.”

Suzuki seemed to hesitate. He wasn't running out of steam. On subjects like this, he never ran out of steam.

“What is it, Priest? What's eating you?” Takuda leaned forward.

Suzuki swallowed audibly. “The characters on this drawing are unknown. They won't be found in any collection of ancient or modern Chinese or Japanese characters.” He looked up and Takuda caught a flash of some hidden fire in the back of the hungry priest's eyes. Gooseflesh played up the back of Takuda's neck.

Suzuki said, “These characters look exactly like the silvery scars all over your body. The ones that glowed when you drowned the fire demon.”

Mori raised his eyebrows. “Maybe you've become the Drowning God now.”

The skin on Takuda's forearm tingled as if in response to the thought.
Yes, that's me, all right.
Takuda crossed his arms to quell the tingling.

Suzuki took a deep breath. “So just as in Bronze Age China, characters are cut into bone. That's where we will see them. When we find the bones of the victims, we will find these characters carved with stone. There will be no metallic residue.”

“Priest, what is the Buddhist teaching on this one? What do the scriptures say?”

“There is no scriptural view on this one.” He scratched at his ear like a dog plagued by fleas. “It all just makes me hungry.”

 

CHAPTER 20

Sunday Evening

C
lub Sexychat was dead. Of course no one was here on the night of the big fireworks show. A lonesome boy sang “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” on the karaoke stage just under the mezzanine where Takuda stood. If the boy would just step to the right, Takuda could spit beer on him.

“Anubis, what would Paul Simon say about what this boy is doing to his song? Hmm?”

The fiberglass Anubis on his right said nothing. The mirror ball lights played over its sleek onyx snout. Takuda turned to the other jackal-­headed statue on his left. “You, too? Cat got your tongue? Perhaps a sexy French cat,
le chat sexy
? Or is that
la chat sexy
?”

Takuda hadn't even finished his first beer, but it had gone straight to his head. Perhaps the drugs Ogawa had pumped into his system were still affecting him, even though he thought he had slept it off. He wadded up the flyer that had been dropped in Yumi's bicycle basket. No one he had spoken to at Club Sexychat seemed to know anything about Thomas Fletcher, about the missing girls, about the jellyfish killings, about the murder at Able English Institute, and certainly nothing about the curved jewel. Takuda, Mori, and Suzuki had cooled their heels for an entire day, watching the newspapers for details of the killing. So far, it was listed as an accidental death, and the name of the victim had not been released.

That news, along with the rumors of the jellyfish killings, would drive most cities to the edge of panic, but this was Fukuoka, and this was the night of the annual Ohori Park fireworks display. As Takuda had expected, a little flaying and mayhem wouldn't keep Fukuoka folks at home.

But it wouldn't bring them here. The streets were bustling with boys showing off for the girls in their summer kimonos, and Club Sexychat was grimly deserted. Takuda stood sullen and forlorn, flanked by decorative fiberglass gods of death.

Club Sexychat was just off Oyafuko-­dori, the Street of Disobedient Children. It had apparently been Excite Disco Pharakos, a clone of a moderately successful club in Kurume, but the model hadn't worked in Fukuoka. Now the dance floor was mostly taken up with twin banks of translucent sarcophagi, actually phone booths in a closed system. There were tokens and numbers and a system Takuda couldn't be bothered to understand that would allow boys to chat with girls anonymously from booth to booth. It was sexy. It was chat. It was sexychat. It was all a bit pathetic.

Two drunken foreign girls screeched off-­key and started pulling the microphone away from each other before Takuda could recognize the song. They collapsed into laughter and slipped from the stage onto the dance floor. The Japanese patrons moved back, and an older man watched the foreigners sadly. It was time to go back to his office and do nothing. At his signal, black-­clad boys wearing huge silver ankhs moved in and solemnly wheeled away the karaoke machine, an antiquated and monstrous rig more the size of a vending machine than a musical component. They had to stop when one boy's ankh got tangled in the wiring.

Takuda wandered the upstairs, just in case he had missed something. The boilerplate mezzanine led past the old Sphinx Ballroom, an empty space with a free wall dominated by a bandage-­wrapped rhino head crashing through a blow-­up of Boris Karloff in full mummy regalia. The room was roped off and piled high with funerary jars, hinged sarcophagi, and a stack of bug-­eyed papier-­mâché cat mummies. The Anubis twins themselves would have been stored there as well, had they not been built into the railing.

The least-­used washroom was right beside the Sphinx Ballroom. It was mirrored floor to ceiling, and all the mirrors were etched with Old Dynasty hieroglyphics and scenes from the story of Isis and Osiris. Isis and Osiris were twins who fell in love in the womb, who loved as brother and sister, as king and queen, as god and goddess, with a deep, unconscious love that overcame death, interment, dismemberment, and reconstitution, transcending mortality and cult to become a binding force of the Egyptian cosmos, binding night to day, life to death, man to woman. The best love story of the past five millennia was right in front of him as he weaved gently at the urinal in the best foreigner pickup bar in town. The irony was killing him, and he said so to the mirrors.

On the glass wall beside the urinal, Osiris lay supine with the infant Horus standing on his belly and Isis at his feet with her arms raised in blessing. Takuda aimed high to spatter them, growling deep in his throat. He saw his face change in the mirror. It was not dramatic, just a subtle shift, a deadening of the eyes, a sagging of the cheeks. He gave himself a heavy, loose-­lipped grin from the mirror, as if some dangerous thing inside him knew it was free to do some property damage.

Takuda zipped his fly and turned the sink on full. He doused his head with cold water. He had seen the glowing scars, and he had seen the fire behind Suzuki's eyes, but he had never seen himself become a beast. When he looked up into the mirror, the beast was gone. It was just Takuda, red-­faced and frightened. He grinned in the mirror, just to see what would happen. It was the solid grin of his police academy days, but with an overlay of scarring and a hint of fear at the corners of his eyes.

Maybe the fight to remain human isn't about horns and scars after all.

At the bottom of the stairs, a girl in a summer kimono was climbing onto the lap of a seated statue of Seth. “Hello,” she said, wiggling her hips at her friends. “Are you happy to see me?” She turned around and straddled Seth's knees, slipping, looking at her friends with lowered eyelids. They shrieked with laughter and fought over the camera to take her picture.

He turned right toward the bar. Ramses II stood before him, black as the Anubis twins upstairs, probably from the same fiberglass workshop. The pharaoh's belly was broken out in sharp chunks to reveal glowing innards made up of translucent circuit boards and pulsing fiber-­optic strands. Above the mugs and glasses, a zoetropic scarab pushed a glass globe of flaring plasma with its rear legs. The stools were thin, inverted pyramids, chic and thematic and extremely uncomfortable. Trying to ignore the girls frolicking on Seth's lap, he turned toward the dance floor, looking for a habitué, someone who might know something about Thomas Fletcher or his friends.

And as he faced the dance floor, one of the sarcophagi lit up. Club Sexychat was open for business.

A plywood sign stood beside the sarcophagus:
English Corner
, with a picture of a cat, a sexy cat,
la chat sexy
, with a phone to her ear and an ankh dangling on her suggestively full bosom.

There was someone in the sarcophagus. Takuda sighed and knocked on Tutankhamen's translucent face. The lid swung open immediately to reveal a girl, a foreign girl, frowning at him from her plush stool. “Buy a token,” she said, pointing toward the bar. Takuda nodded and turned away immediately.

He bought three tokens at the bar, enough for about ten minutes of chat. Each was emblazoned with the same four-­digit code. He met the gaze of the smirking bartender with equanimity, but he avoided looking at the broken statue of Ramses II. At that moment, he was slightly embarrassed on behalf of Japan as a whole.

And he was very nervous about engaging in sexy chat with a pretty young foreigner, even for all the right reasons. At least she had brown eyes. Green eyes were a little unnerving, and blue eyes were worse. He had drowned a demon, cut a monster's head to pieces, and he was on the hunt for a weapon that forced schoolgirls to kill, but foreigners still made him skittish. He had just decided to live with it.

He dropped onto the stool in the sarcophagus beside the foreign girl's and faced the obviously recycled office phone. There was no place to put the tokens. He picked it up: a dull dial tone. He punched in the numbers from the token.

She picked up the phone immediately. “You give the tokens to me,” she said.

He left the phone off the hook. Her lid was open a crack, so he handed in the tokens and went back to his sarcophagus.

“I don't want sexy chat,” he said. “Do you speak Japanese?”

“A little,” she said. “I'm really supposed to speak English, though.”

Her accent was understandable. Takuda heaved a sigh of relief. “My name is Takuda,” he said. “Ta-­ku-­da. The characters are ‘high' and ‘field.' I want to ask you about Thomas Fletcher. Do you know him?”

Static crackled to the slow disco beat outside their sarcophagi.

“I am not Fukuoka police,” he said. “Do you understand? Not police. I am higher than police. Bigger than police. Ah . . . higher cause . . . you don't understand me?”

“I understand,” she said. “What's the question?”

“First, what is your name?”

“You don't know? How did you find me without my name?”

Takuda couldn't say he had been guided by a flier in his wife's bicycle basket. “Let's start with your name, please.”

“Tracy,” she said. “Tracy Jenkins.”

“Miss Tracy,” he said, “how do you know Thomas Fletcher?”

“We work together at ActiveUs. We teach English in the offices of big companies. They send us there like sushi delivery.”

Takuda tried not to laugh. She spoke more than a little Japanese. “You knew he was mentally unwell, didn't you?”

“I knew,” she whispered.

“You liked him, and you tried to help him.”

“I tried,” she said. Her voice was breaking. “He wouldn't take his medicine. It hurt him sexually. And in other ways, not just sexually. He said he became . . . ah, sleepy all over.”

“Excuse the . . . I'm going to ask a personal question. Do you understand?”

“We are not lovers,” she said. “He thinks we are, I think. He doesn't understand reality sometimes.” She was truly distraught.

Takuda said, “He's a good boy. I told him so last time I saw him.”

She inhaled sharply. “You met him? Is he okay? Is he going home?”

“I believe he is probably home already,” Takuda said. The plastic handset cracked slightly in his grip. He eased up so he wouldn't crush it. “He was resting comfortably last time I saw him. There is no pain.”

He swallowed his shame about lies and half-­truths to a grief-­stricken foreign girl and ticked off his questions about the missing girls, about the jellyfish killings, about the murder at Able English Institute, and about the curved jewel.

She sounded stunned. “He is a crazy boy. He chased his old girlfriend. You think he killed lots of girls? Maybe you are the crazy boy.”

“Did he know lots of girls?”

She snorted, like a pig. “He was a foreign boy in Japan. ‘Did he know lots of girls?' That's a stupid ­question.”

Takuda persisted: “Where did he meet girls? Active­Us? Able English Institute?”

“Oh, Able, for sure. He met private students there, girls who wanted to be stewardesses or tour guides, wanted to use their English, and one gay boy who wanted to be a hotel clerk or something.”

“Where did he teach them?”

“An old, stinky restaurant that used to be a cafeteria for a big company. The company gave him the space for free.”

Takuda closed his eyes. “Zenkoku General?”

“Zenkoku General? I don't know. Just Zenkoku,” she answered. “I won't work there. Not again. I'll never go down into that horrible basement.”