The Last Train (Detective Hiroshi Series Book 1)

by Michael Pronko

  Natsumi had just graduated from high school when she moved in, and she knew how to do laundry, shopping, and housework. Michiko’s father said Natsumi was her cousin. But Natsumi was evasive when Michiko asked more about the family connections. It was complicated, the relations from her mother and father’s hometown.

  The workers made another bed frame to hold Natsumi’s futon and another study desk that fit next to Michiko’s and Reiko’s. The three of the girls shared clothes, since Natsumi, older by three years, was not much taller. Michiko went from being alone to having two sisters.

  They suddenly had lots of things to do, eating and talking together, and shopping on the weekends. The two housemates kept Michiko from brooding over her mother’s death. At the home shrine, they rang the bell and lit incense for Michiko’s mother; they had all lost something.

  Michiko’s father came up the stairs from the factory for late dinners, sometimes not until 10:30 or 11:00. He was busier in the factory than ever before. She tried to stay awake long enough to talk with him a little when he looked in to their room late at night after work. Father and daughter whispered about everything while Reiko and Natsumi slept.

  ***

  Michiko toed Shibuya’s leg, but got no response. She kicked his knee and he flipped around to a sitting position, snatching at his leg, looking confused. He gasped seeing her standing above him, but said nothing.

  The girl lying next to Shibuya lifted her head and scrambled back toward the head of the bed, clutching a pillow with her shiny, long fingernails. She blinked at Michiko with huge, long eyelashes that glittered in the dim light. A dark-blue bird tattoo swooped across her right breast. The girl’s body, cooked red-brown at a tanning salon, glowed in the dimness.

  Shibuya rubbed his knee and frowned, breathing out heavily. He pushed back his long, layered hair.

  “Pretty,” Michiko said, nodding toward the girl, her voice loud and husky in the smallness of the room.

  “Yeah, she is,” he answered, fumbling around for his boxer shorts.

  “Tall, too.”

  “About your height.”

  “Coincidence.”

  Shibuya grunted and got out of bed as Michiko and the girl stared at each other.

  Shibuya pulled his shorts over his bony waist. He started to say something to the girl, but then decided not to, and followed Michiko out of the room.

  In the bathroom, he stood on the toilet, pushed up a ceiling panel, and reached inside. He pulled down three packets of ten thousand yen notes stashed inside zip lock bags and handed them to her. She hefted them to feel the weight and tucked them inside her bag. He reached up for three more and stepped back onto the tile floor. He looked older in the bathroom light, his skin wrinkled from tanning, the gold necklaces looped unevenly over the tendons and collarbones around his neck.

  “I thought you left already,” he said. “You didn’t call.”

  “I called. You didn’t answer.” She weighed the additional stacks after he handed them to her and gave him a questioning look.

  “That’s all of it,” he said. “Really.” He pushed his hands through his hair.

  She smiled at him.

  He nodded.

  She slapped him hard, just short of his ear.

  He held his spot, but said nothing.

  “I’m not gone yet.”

  “Check your records,” he said. “You’re always so careful.”

  “I have to be.” She nodded her head toward the bedroom, “Back to videos again?”

  “There’s no money in that anymore.”

  “High school girls?”

  “No, something less complicated.”

  “How long will it take to get that up and running?”

  “It already is.”

  “And the girl there?”

  “Look, I like her, all right?”

  “Films well, does she?”

  “It’s not that.”

  “Settling down?”

  “Maybe. Finally.”

  Michiko slapped him again.

  Holding his cheek, Shibuya held her eyes for a moment, and then looked away.

  Michiko tucked the last packet of bills into her bag, considering whether to slap him one more time. Finally, she said, “Maybe you should go back to work? Just while I’m gone.”

  “I told you, it’s coming.”

  “When?”

  “I just need to collect what people owe me.”

  “You better do that. Or you’ll collect what’s owed you.”

  He nodded, his eyes turned downwards.

  She shook her head, pulling her bag now loaded with the money over her shoulder. “Shibuya-kun, when are you going to grow up?”

  He nodded, looking away, tight-jawed.

  “When are you leaving?” he asked.

  “Just a couple of loose ends to tie up.”

  “I’ll drive you to the airport.”

  “Did you get your license back?”

  “No, but I got my car back.”

  “I can get there on my own.” She nodded, as if having come to some new decision. “But, you know, let’s go out one more time, for old time’s sake. Tomorrow night? The David?”

  He nodded OK. His eyes searched back and forth over the tile floor for something that was not there.

  Outside the door to the bedroom, she paused to look down at the girl in the bed. Their eyes met for a moment, until the younger girl turned away, blinking her absurdly long eyelashes.

  When the young girl finally mustered the courage to say something, Michiko was gone, leaving behind only the scent of lotus perfume.

  ***

  After Natsumi found a boyfriend, she started taking Reiko and Michiko with her to Shibuya, Harajuku and Shinjuku, the very places her father did not want the girls to go. Natsumi started spending more time with her boyfriend, leaving Reiko and Michiko to walk around on their own.

  Sometimes, they sang karaoke with boys they met, or talked over green tea and red adzuki bean desserts. They ate crepes filled with ice cream, strawberry sauce and whipped cream until they felt sick. They went with the boys to small restaurants where they ate okonomiyaki pizza-pancakes filled with shrimp, pork, and cabbage, and slathered with sweet sauce, mayonnaise, and crinkly, curling bonito fish flakes.

  After they ate, they went to karaoke parlors in Shibuya’s tall buildings, which were so thin the girls could barely fit in the elevators. Michiko was good at winning prizes in the game centers, and she and Reiko made a good team, manipulating the mechanical arm of the glassed-in, UFO-catcher machine that dropped cute stuffed animals through the prize hole.

  It was in one of those game centers that Reiko met Shibuya. Reiko met him alone several times. They had done it, Reiko whispered one night, and she and Natsumi giggled. Shibuya was older and knew how to talk to girls, but Reiko soon lost interest. Michiko started to meet Shibuya, occasionally, and then more and more often. It was the first time Michiko ever felt more attracted to a live person than the boys in the posters on her bedroom wall.

  At first, Shibuya always had lots of money and he told Michiko and Reiko how they could make lots of money themselves. Pretty soon, Shibuya was arranging dates for them and Michiko and Reiko had more money than she could hide. When her father discovered the money, it took him a couple of weeks to find Shibuya in the confusing teen world he hung out in. But when he did, he and two other workers beat Shibuya to a pulp.

  After that, Uncle Ono started coming up from the factory floor all the time to check on all three girls. Michiko’s father watched her more closely than ever.

  A couple years later, when Michiko was kicked out of school and decided to run away, Shibuya didn’t want to get beat up again. But eventually, he reluctantly took her in.

  In time, she took him in.

  Chapter 13

  The phone rang and Hiroshi clawed in the direction of the sound, pulling himself off the sofa where he landed a few hours before. The rough weave of the fabric had imprinted itself on his ch
eek, making it feel raw. His head felt bloated with unmetabolized whiskey.

  “Moshi moshi. Hello?”

  “This is Sakaguchi.”

  “Sakaguchi?”

  “We met on the tracks the other day.”

  “The sumo wrestler.”

  “Former sumo wrestler.”

  “What…?” Hiroshi’s hangover made it hard to hear.

  “I hate to ask, but we need your English. Takamatsu said I should call.”

  “He’s quick to volunteer my services.”

  “There’re two English speakers we need help with. Could you come down?”

  “It’ll be an hour.”

  “Aren’t you in your office?”

  “No, at home. I was out with Takamatsu last night.”

  “You must be hungover.”

  “Badly. Where are you exactly?”

  “Interrogation rooms near the chikan section. Main building. Take your time. I’ll get them something to eat.”

  Hiroshi had nothing to do with the recently formed chikan office that dealt with train gropers, molesters, window peepers, exhibitionists, and underwear thieves, but the stories circulated like jokes without a punch line.

  Hiroshi started piecing together his return home—noodles at a yattai night street stall, a taxi driver who spoke phrases in a hundred languages, stumbling over the unsent boxes, collapsing onto the sofa. He looked around anxiously for his wallet and cell phone. Reassured he hadn’t lost them, he kicked into hangover autopilot, doing simple, concrete things in order.

  ***

  From the main building’s pale, tiled corridor, the door of the interrogation room opened to reveal a large foreign man sitting at a table with his arms crossed. His barrel chest and large belly terraced up to a thick jaw, red face and bald head.

  Across the table Sakaguchi seemed even bigger in the low-ceilinged room, his tree-trunk limbs and kettledrum belly hanging easily on his two-meter frame. He leaned back when Hiroshi arrived and nodded him back into the hall with a thrust of his full-moon face.

  “My English is all textbook stuff and this guy has a thick accent. The girl speaks too fast.”

  “She’s a foreigner?” Hiroshi asked.

  “Half, I guess. She won’t say a word in Japanese, but her mother’s Japanese.”

  “So what’s the deal?”

  “The high school girl dragged this Russian off the train shouting, ‘Chikan.’ The Russian didn’t even know the word meant train groper. He claims he did nothing. The girl quit talking. They’ve been here since rush hour.”

  Hiroshi thought for a minute. “Let me talk to Mikhail Gorbachev first.”

  The large Russian-looking man acknowledged him with a sullen nod.

  “My name is Hiroshi Shimizu. Did you get some coffee?”

  “I have coffee at my office.”

  “And where is your office?”

  “I explained it several times. He is not speak English.”

  “Could you start once again? I need to hear it directly.”

  “Are you in charge here?”

  “I am now.”

  “What is your rank?”

  “Look, whatever my rank is, I have to translate for you. So, I need to hear it all again.”

  The Russian man took a big breath and exhaled loudly. “I am riding to my office on train. That little monster/schoolgirl grab me and start shouting, ‘Chikan, chikan.’ I do not know this word and think she need help. That’s why I am getting off train. To help. Then, I am trying helping her and she is saying, ‘Money, money,’ in English. She say, if I give money, she forget. I refuse to give. We have serious criminal in Russia, so I not afraid of little girl.”

  “Did you explain that?”

  “Station attendants grab me. She try run away.” He leaned back and folded his arms across his chest.

  “And you didn’t bump her or touch her in any way?”

  “Everyone bumping and touching in rush hour. Same in Moscow.”

  “And you say she asked you in English?”

  “Yes, English. What country have schoolgirl like this? I ask you.”

  “OK, if you would please drink your coffee and calm down, I’ll see what she has to say.”

  Hiroshi stepped outside with Sakaguchi. Switching to Japanese, Hiroshi asked Sakaguchi which story he believed.

  “I believe the man. The real chikan enjoy being caught. The more perverted they are, the more they love the whole drama. After being sent over here, I listened to a lot of these little creeps. This Russian seems all right.”

  “Did you call his office?”

  “It all checked out. He works for an import-export firm, like he said, a Russian outfit that’s completely aboveboard.”

  “And what about the girl?”

  “Her mother is very upset. The girl seems to understand Japanese, but refuses to speak anything but English. Pulled in before, let go without a record. None of the juvenile people remember anything, so it couldn’t have been too serious.”

  “Let me talk to her,” Hiroshi said.

  In the other interrogation room, a woman in a designer trench coat was leaning over a girl in a high school sailor-girl uniform. Two bowls of just-eaten noodles were neatly stacked at the edge of the table.

  Hiroshi paused at the doorway.

  The mother looked up with eyes as glassy and wild as a horse. She wiped the tears from her dainty face with her palms. Hiroshi fumbled in his pocket for a packet of tissues. The mother wiped her eyes and handed the handkerchief to her daughter, who wiped hers without looking up. Hiroshi could barely see her face inside the wall of long hair. The daughter had the same elegant, aquiline nose and curving lips as her mother, but she had a fuller nose, bigger eyes and almost-plump cheeks. Her shoulders were too big for her school uniform.

  Hiroshi dug into his pocket for his name card. The mother bowed gently and reached to take it from him, her eyes averted down, toward the card. After reading it, she placed it on the table in front of her, and squared her shoulders to speak.

  “My name is Sanae Atsuki, and this is my daughter Yukari,” she said in a soft, cracking voice with another slight bow forward. “I am so very sorry for this disturbance. Yukari has something she would like to say.”

  Yukari brushed back her hair and in flawless English said, “I’m not sorry really. I just have to say so.”

  Her mother growled, “Speak Japanese.”

  Hiroshi intervened in English. “That’s wonderful English. Perfect pronunciation. How did your English become so good?”

  “How did yours?” said Yukari, tilting her head to stare at him with wet, wide eyes.

  “Well, I went to school in New York when I was very young and I went to college in Boston,” said Hiroshi, in a matter-of-fact tone.

  Sakaguchi came into the room quietly as an overfed cat, but as conspicuous as a sumo wrestler.

  “That’s what I wanted to do, stay in America, but my mom made me come back here.”

  Sanae leaned forward to speak in Japanese. “Her father and I felt it was best for her to not forget being Japanese. Now she refuses to speak anything but English.”

  Yukari said, “The real reason we came back was them. I loved my high school there.”

  Sanae frowned, and said, “We had trouble in our marriage. The only person that adapted well to America was Yukari. Too well, perhaps. My husband is, was, American.”

  “He died?”

  “Divorced.”

  Hiroshi leaned back in his chair. “So, this is not the first time to get in trouble.”

  “It’s that guy she got caught up with. This punk kid. He’s the one that should be arrested, not Yukari. I’ve tried to keep them apart, but I can’t watch her every minute. He took money from Yukari. He tried to get money from me.”

  Hiroshi put on his soothing voice, “Can you tell me about this guy?”

  Yukari started to tear up, but stopped herself. “He was nice to me at first. We hung out. School in Japan is so boring, and stu
pid. The teachers hated me because I was good at English. I skipped class because I did no work and still got perfect marks.”

  “So, what did you do when you skipped class?”

  Yukari dropped her head and breathed in. Her mother looked away. She spoke slowly. “I hooked up with foreigners. You know, enjo kosai, paid dates. Foreigners paid more. I didn’t do it many times, but I got caught,” she said shrugging her shoulders. “Anyway, it’s no different from my mom. She used to work as a hostess. That’s how she met my dad.”

  Sanae blushed crimson and covered her mouth.

  Hiroshi nodded, his eyes downcast politely.

  “Anyway, I stopped that. The train thing seemed easier, and a lot less yucky.”

  Sanae let out an exasperated breath.

  Hiroshi interrupted. “Have you reported this guy?”

  “I have and no one did anything,” said Sanae.

  “Well, maybe, Yukari, you won’t mind telling us where we can find him?”

  Yukari silently stared at the table.

  “Where can we find this guy?” Sakaguchi asked, stepping closer to the table.

  Yukari sat silently.

  “Tell them, Yukari. We’ll see about going back to the States, I promise you. Just tell them where he is. We just talked about this.”

  Yukari looked down, her hair over her face.

  Finally, shifting in her chair, she said in a soft voice, “He’s at the game center every day.”

  “Which game center?” asked Hiroshi.

  “In Shibuya, near the 109 building, up that side street to the left from Hachiko Square.”

  “And what’s his family name?”

  “Shibuya.”

  “First name.”

  “Takayuki.”

  “Easy to remember. Shibuya in Shibuya,” Sakaguchi growled.

  “Do you have a photo of him in your cell phone?” Hiroshi asked.

  Yukari spun through the photos on her phone until she found one. Hiroshi and Sakaguchi leaned down to look and memorize the face.

  “So, that guy on the train didn’t really do anything?” Hiroshi asked.

  Yukari shook her head, no, side-to-side American style.