Masquerade and the Nameless Women

by Eiji Mikage

  The call he’d just received from a payphone had been her actual voice, not that of an imposter or illusion.

  She looked at him affectionately, stroking his chin as she would a pet.

  Shota’s heart filled with love for her, and as he cried, he began to lick her red high heels as though it were the most natural thing in the world. Seeing this, Reina took her stockings in her hands and slowly rolled them down. The sight of her legs being bared alone was enough to make Shota hard. She balled up the stockings and threw them aside.

  “Woof, woof!” Shota barked and rushed over to the stockings on all fours. Without using his hands, he took the stockings in his mouth and crawled back to Reina.

  “Good boy,” she said.

  She took the stockings from him and petted him on the head. Shota’s face erupted into a rapturous smile.

  For a moment Shota remained pressed against the floor with Reina stroking his hair, but eventually he recovered enough to be able to speak. He stood, embraced her, and said, “You’re alive. So whose body was that?”

  Though he hadn’t mentioned anything to Yamaji and the others, he’d been struck by a strange sensation when he saw “Reina’s” corpse.

  Reina laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous. Does it really matter? All that matters is that I’m here now, and this is reality.”

  But that wasn’t the case at all. Shota had heard the police saying the body was definitely Reina’s. Even if she had had a duplicate, surely that wouldn’t have fooled them.

  And it didn’t change the fact that someone had died.

  But since Reina had dodged the question, Shota couldn’t ask her anything else.

  That was how absolute their relationship was.

  “Shota, I have a favor to ask,” Reina whispered.

  He looked into her eyes.

  Just as always, he thought, her eyes are so deep they reveal nothing.

  “Let’s tell the cops about the revenge we wanted,” she suggested. “Let’s confess. They’ll help us. If we tell them everything, they have the power to protect us from the syndicate.”

  “Sure. I’ll go tell them.”

  It was decided.

  With Reina, Shota didn’t even have to think.

  He took off his wig.

  “Oh yeah.” She handed him an energy drink. “You look tired. After the investigation, drink this…all of it.”

  “Thank you, Reina. Can I have it now?”

  “No. After.”

  Shota nodded. If that’s what Reina wanted, that’s what he’d do. That’s all he could do.

  “What should I do after I confess?” he asked.

  “Hmm,” she mused, and pressed a finger to her lips, as though considering. “There’s someone I want you to kill. Will you do it for me?”

  “Of course.” He didn’t even hesitate.

  He’d do anything for Reina.

  Shota Akiyama had been turned into that kind of creature.

  12

  Dr. Higano and I stepped into an empty conference room to watch the video recording of Shota’s questioning in Interrogation Room Six:

  * * *

  —

  It’s already past one? Wow, it’s late. I know you’re all busy, so I appreciate you making arrangements for this. I’ll cut to the chase.

  I know who the killer is.

  No, it isn’t Ken. Ahh, yeah…Well, I know what I said. I did it to buy some time…but don’t get ahead of yourself. Please, just listen for a minute.

  I’ll tell you everything, just as it happened. You probably wouldn’t believe me if I just blurted it out.

  I met Reina around the time I was involved in the bank transfer scam. Yeah, I’m guilty. I was twenty, Reina was nineteen, I guess?

  She was friends with the girl I was dating at the time. To be honest, I was only interested in this girl for her money. Her name?…I can’t remember. No, I’m serious. That shows you how little I cared.

  I think Reina was trying to break us up out of genuine concern for her friend. I didn’t care much for Reina in the beginning, but my feelings quickly changed. I started looking forward to seeing her.

  Why? Well, she was super hot, so there was that, of course. But her looks were actually unrelated. It was her…being, if you could call it that. She had an attraction so strong I couldn’t escape it.

  But before I could win her over, I got arrested for fraud. The person who accused me was none other than Reina herself. No, I wasn’t mad at her. I was well aware of the risks that came with the dumb shit I was doing. And this was part of the package that came with getting closer to Reina. Just talking with her sharpened my intellect—she had that in her…So why didn’t I stop the bank transfer scam? Those guys were my friends…and we just kind of kept going on.

  But I mean, I really regret not cutting that shit out. Not because I got arrested. But because I thought that Reina reporting me meant she was rejecting me.

  But I was wrong. She came to see me in jail. During visiting hours, she proposed a little game.

  No, you heard me right. A game.

  She challenged me to get my sentence suspended by improving the judge and public prosecutor’s opinion of me.

  The prize was Reina herself.

  I was eager to play.

  After I was released on bail, Reina told me exactly what to do. She said it would be better in court if it really looked like I was reflecting on what I’d done and showed the potential of being rehabilitated. I knew if I were on my own, they’d see right through me. So Reina changed my fundamental values.

  What awaited me was a complete correction of my character. It was like Reina was heating me up in a burner and flattening me over and over so I’d fit into a completely different mold. An example? One week she made me fast. And if I ever challenged her, she’d make me strip naked for three days or pull out my fingernails.

  What’dya mean I was pretty obedient? Look, Reina really cared for me. I could tell. When she pulled out my nails, she was crying as much as though she were experiencing it herself.

  No one had ever cared for me so seriously before, and no one has since. Not even my own family took me this seriously. I was over the moon that she was even considering dating me.

  Then I became her possession.

  Her special training worked, I won over the court, and they suspended my sentence. I won the game.

  That’s when Reina and I started seeing each other.

  I know what you’re thinking. You think it’s weird, or perverted, or that we weren’t really dating, right? Well, you can think whatever you want. Reina and I were dating. We were happy. Does anything else matter?

  You wanna know why Reina was dating me? Whether it could’ve been some reason other than love?

  Well, I guess she could’ve been looking for a pawn. The game could’ve been a test to see if I could be her chess piece.

  A pawn for what? It’s obvious—revenge.

  Right, I haven’t told you her goal.

  Reina wanted revenge.

  Even while I was working through the court system, Reina was diligently planning her revenge. She reached out to the entertainment industry, to people in finance, to politicians—she started making connections with influential people all over. And she used that political strength and her charisma to continue making connections.

  That’s how Reina discovered the existence of a certain secret club.

  The club met under the guise of a special association at a restaurant in Nishiazabu. The only members were people contracted with entertainment agencies or VIPS who paid tens of thousands in donations each month. The VIPs had access to the list of the celebrities who were members of the club. The system allowed the VIPs to select a celeb for an introduction. After they met, the restaurant had no involvement in their negotiations, and each party was free to d
o as they pleased. Models who weren’t doing well would sometimes set up sugar daddy arrangements with them.

  Reina? Ha, as if. You do realize Reina would never concern herself with something so trivial?

  Reina was figuring out how she could break into the management side of the club. Finally, she decided to act as a go-between. She rounded up some of the talent that was part of the club and started trying to find them clients.

  And she knew where there’d be people with money. Think about where Reina used to work. Ring a bell?

  Exactly, the casinos. The big winners at casinos had the cash and wouldn’t be stingy because they made easy money. Reina got a job with a casino management company working as a promotional model and quietly reached out to gamblers who’d won big, so that the casino wouldn’t know. Supposedly a lot of the winners were interested. And you can understand why, right? They’d finally won big, so they wanted to know what luxury felt like. And it’s pretty easy to understand how sleeping with a well-known celebrity would feel like the highest sort of luxury, even if it was a kind of commonplace thing to want.

  I helped her, too. With negotiating between the customers and the celebs. As a driver. As a bodyguard. Responding to trouble whenever it happened. I did whatever Reina ordered me to do. Several times it was so dangerous I really thought I might die.

  These guys were paying ten, sometimes even a hundred times what the VIPs in the club were paying, and they did it with a smile on their faces. The gamblers had lost all sense of the value of money. Gamblers win or lose money in the range of hundreds of millions each day. A couple million was pocket change for them. You remember that case a while back when the son of the owners of Empress Paper Corporation4 embezzled 18 billion in company funds and blew it all gambling in Macao and Singapore? That guy was pretty famous as a high roller among gamblers. And that was just the society we were working with. We took kickbacks, and sometimes from the kickback alone we ended up taking in 100 million. The customers had their wildest fantasies fulfilled. A mountain of cash came in through the Nishiazabu restaurant. The celebs also ended up with a ton of cash and occasionally connections or patrons, depending on the circumstances. It was a win-win situation. Obviously, Reina came to be considered pretty valuable. She gradually worked her way into the core of the operation.

  Because she’d earned their trust, Reina was allowed to look at the list of VIP members. As she anticipated, the list included the names of major players in every industry you could imagine.

  The preliminary work for her revenge was complete.

  Right, you want to know why she was after revenge…

  You already know that Reina’s father’s company went bankrupt, right? I think his name was Koichiro? The company didn’t go under because of his incompetence. Politicians and rival companies joined forces and monopolized the market he was in.

  Reina looked into the names of the people involved in stealing her dad’s business: Taichi Asagaya, a Diet member from the National Party; Tatsuo Yamashita, a councilman from Minato; Daigo Oshitari of Oshitari Construction; and Heiji Nakahigashi of Central Construction.

  Heiji Nakahigashi is Ken’s dad.

  Oh, so you’ve heard about his financial support when Koichiro was running for Metropolitan assembly? Yeah, he did. From Reina’s point of view, what Heiji did was like paying for the funeral of a guy he’d stabbed to death. I don’t know what he was thinking. Maybe he did it out of guilt, maybe because he just wanted to, or maybe he wanted to make sure Koichiro wouldn’t hold a grudge. He probably thought getting involved made the most sense. Getting Ken engaged to Reina had to be part of that plan, too.

  So that’s where we were. It was pure coincidence, but Reina found Heiji Nakahigashi and Tatsuo Yamashita on the list of VIP members in the secret club. And that wasn’t all: She also learned they both had sugar baby relationships with teen idols who were still in high school.

  So she decided to take the fate of her targets into her own hands.

  It was impossible for her to pass up such a perfect opportunity. She set up an appointment with a newspaper reporter to expose the scandals to the world—or was about to when all this happened.

  Nobody knew what she was up to. At least that’s what we thought, but we must’ve been wrong. They acted so quickly. They’d probably had an eye on us for a while.

  I don’t know who the killer was. Heiji Nakahigashi wasn’t the only one afraid that the club’s awful crimes would become public. There were a number of people who would’ve done anything to stop her and some who would’ve even killed to do so.

  Don’t you get it?

  The killer was someone from that syndicate.

  You’d never’ve believed me if I had said someone from “the syndicate” did it up front, right?

  You still don’t believe me?

  Well, okay, but if you do a little digging you’ll find that this secret club really does exist. Then you’ll realize what I’m telling you is the truth.

  I felt like I had to tell you guys this. Like I said, the syndicate is still after us. I’m probably the next target. They left Reina’s foot in her apartment as a threat to me.

  My only option was to escape the reach of the organization. So I made it seem like there was some love triangle with Ken and Reina and me to mess up their search. I was planning to leave the country and escape while they were confused. I mean, even if I told the police, this is the kind of thing they’d want to hush up, right?

  But I changed my mind. Circumstances changed. And everything I’ve told you is the truth. You’ve gotta protect us.

  That’s all I’ve got. Now I’ve got something to do.

  Oh, just gonna step out and drink this. Later.

  * * *

  —

  “Then we found Shota dead in the bathroom,” Yamaji reported.

  He stood with a hand on his forehead, frowning in front of Shota’s corpse in one of the men’s toilet stalls.

  He’d died sitting on the toilet. His eyes were rolled back, and postmortem bruising was starting to appear on his neck. His slick-backed haircut was disheveled, like he’d pulled at it in pain, and the empty energy drink can had fallen from his outstretched hand. The almond aroma characteristic of cyanide wafted through the bathroom.

  As one might imagine, it’s not easy to see the dead body of a person who’d been alive just moments ago. I hadn’t been involved in his death, but I was struck by a strange sense of guilt. It was all I could do to fight that feeling off. So I decided to leave the body to the forensics team; I didn’t have the strength to look closely at the corpse myself.

  The men’s bathroom was shrill with the shutters of flashing cameras, but even after I stepped out, a brutal air seemed to fill the police station. A dead body inside a station was unheard of. It raised the specter of management, and someone would have to answer for it.

  Yamaji was first on that list. He leaned against the wall in the hallway with a lollipop in his mouth.

  “It was suicide,” he said. “Had to be. That drink had cyanide in it. Shota left the interrogation room, took one sip of that drink he’d had on his chair, and ran into the bathroom where he must’ve finished the rest of the poison off. Marks show he pressed his mouth into his arm, apparently to choke off any screaming.”

  Dr. Higano was sitting in a chair nearby. He tilted his head. “He ran into the bathroom after just a sip?”

  “Yeah. I thought he was acting a little strange and secretly followed him up to the stall. So there’s no way anyone else could’ve been involved.”

  “Why didn’t he just wait and drink it all in the stall?” Dr. Higano said. “What did Shota look like when he took the sip of the drink?”

  “He coughed and turned pale. And he was mumbling something. ‘Oh, so that’s what,’ or something, I think.”

  “That sounds like he didn’t know the drink was poisoned.”
>
  “Even if that’s true, doesn’t change the fact that he killed himself. He chugged the whole thing even after he realized it was poison.”

  “Yes, that is the case.”

  “Dammit, he died right in front of me,” Yamaji said. “It’s a fucking disgrace! I’m never getting promoted now.”

  He gnawed on his lollipop. His frustration likely was a product of his sense of justice and the fact that he hadn’t prevented the suicide, rather than any real concern over his position. That’s the kind of person Yamaji was.

  I was suddenly overcome with exhaustion and plopped down onto the ground. My thoughts were hazy, but I managed to ask, “So…What was his motive for killing himself?”

  “He was scared of the syndicate,” Yamaji said. “They brutally murdered his girlfriend. Maybe he thought it’d be better to go out less painfully? That’s probably also the reason he confessed everything—he was getting ready to die.”

  “Hmph.” Dr. Higano grunted and put a hand to his mouth. He was clearly unconvinced.

  “He said, ‘The syndicate is still after us,’” Dr. Higano repeated Shota’s words, and then looked at Yamaji and me. “Us. Who was he talking about? I thought it was just Shota and Reina, the two of them taking revenge.”

  “Maybe…he just misspoke?” Yamaji guessed.

  “Could be. But what if he didn’t? It would suggest that Reina is still alive.“

  He had to be joking.

  But the look on Dr. Higano’s face was not one that had just rattled off a silly joke.

  Yamaji wasn’t looking at Dr. Higano so he didn’t notice the face he was making and just itched at his head.

  “But the syndicate they formed,” Yamaji said and laughed. “Ha! This shit is too heavy for a couple of cops to go after. Someone like me gets too deep, they get wiped out. But we also can’t back down from something this awful.”

  Yamaji might’ve been a little rash with how he worded things, but his resolve was genuine. Indeed, there was a fire burning in his glare, as though he was squaring off against a massive opponent.