The Master Key

by Masako Togawa

  Yoneko got out her own key and looked at it. It seemed to differ in no noticeable way from the master key. If it had a red ribbon and a wooden tag, it would look just like the master key. The red ribbon would present no problem, but forging the wooden tag and the writing on it might prove more hard. It would take some time to age a new piece of wood with sweat and grime. But then she noticed that the keys to the lavatory broom cupboards had an identical wooden tag—and this key was always left in the door of the cupboard where anyone could get at it! So she quietly removed the tag and the ribbon of the second-floor lavatory cupboard one day and soiled the ribbon until it looked just like that on the master key. She then tied the tag to her own room key.

  Her plan was somehow to distract the receptionist’s attention and switch the master key with her own key on the lavatory tag, with the writing face down. If the exchange was not noticed right away by the receptionist, she should be able to effect her purpose. For when the switch finally came to light, even if she was accused of it she could deny all knowledge of the matter. What mattered was to get hold of the key and investigate Chikako Ueda’s room; once that was accomplished, she could pretend that her room key had been swapped at some stage without her knowledge, probably by the very person who had stolen the master key before.

  And now that key lay within her reach. She stealthily moved her hand towards it; suddenly, without warning, Miss Tojo turned around.

  ‘Is it in that drawer, do you think?’ said Yoneko, lifting her hand quickly off the desk and pointing it at the cabinet behind Miss Tojo. Her voice faltered under the stress.

  ‘The receipts should be in the same drawer as the daily reports, but there are so many documents in there…’ Miss Tojo peered confusedly at the open drawer.

  ‘Maybe I could help?’

  ‘Oh, please do. Please come in.’

  That was just the reply Yoneko was hoping for. Now she could get behind the counter, which would considerably increase her chance of making the exchange. She went through the office door for the very first time in her life; the room, she noticed, was very tidy. A book lay opened face down on the swivel chair behind the desk; Miss Tojo had indeed been reading whilst pretending to be busily engaged in her work. Yoneko herself loved reading, and felt a sudden affinity for Miss Tojo. She tried to catch a glance of the book’s title, but it was concealed behind a plain brown wrapper.

  ‘It’s certainly somewhere in this drawer.’ Just at that moment, the office phone rang.

  ‘I’ll just take that call while you have a look.’ Miss Tojo pulled out the drawer and carried it bodily to the office desk and put it down just by the master key. She then went to answer the phone, leaving Yoneko to leaf through the piles of receipts. She soon came upon the receipt she was seeking, but pretended not to have found it.

  ‘Hold on a moment please,’ said Miss Tojo to the caller. ‘I’ll just go and check—you did say Miss Munekata on the second floor, didn’t you?’

  Miss Tojo put down the receiver and, pausing only to glance for a second at the book, the master key and the files, hurried out of the office. What a heaven-sent chance, thought Yoneko, as she fished into her blouse pocket and brought out the tag with her own room key on it. She placed it beside the master key and compared the two carefully. The ribbon was a little fresher-looking, but the keys themselves appeared without close examination to be identical. It didn’t seem as if the exchange would be noticed.

  She was just about to slip the genuine master key into her pocket when it suddenly occurred to her that she might switch the wooden labels. She had no idea if she had time to undo the ribbons and retie them, but if she could succeed in doing so, it would be quite some time before the exchange would be detected.

  She decided to take the risk, and set to work on the ribbon of the real master key. The knot was a little tight, but by using her fingernails she soon had it undone. So far, so good; her hands were hardly even trembling.

  But the knot she had tied on her own room key a day or two before was a different matter. She kept counselling herself not to panic, but it seemed as if the knot could not be undone. Just as she was about to give up and leave the key on the desk as she had originally planned, the knot loosened, and so she decided to carry on after all. She began to attach the tag to her own room key.

  She heard footsteps on the stairs before she was half done; it was bound to be Miss Tojo making her way back. She slipped the key and tag into the drawer and pretended to be riffling through the receipts. Her hands began to shake, but after two or more attempts she managed to thread the ribbon through the head of the key.

  The footsteps stopped outside the door, which then opened, and Miss Tojo came back in. Yoneko felt she could sense the receptionist’s gaze, even though her back was turned to her. She still had to fasten the ribbon; if she could quickly thread it through the key once more, that would do. She held the receipts in her right hand whilst her left hand worked on the key lying in the drawer. Using her thumb and index finger, she got the ribbon through the hole. One knot more, and it could not possibly work loose. Miss Tojo went to the telephone receiver just by Yoneko.

  ‘Hullo! Miss Munekata is a little busy and so cannot take your call. I’m sorry, but she says she’ll call you back.’

  She turned to Yoneko. ‘“Inconvenient”, she says. Everything’s always inconvenient to Miss Munekata. I suppose she doesn’t worry about other people’s convenience.’

  She was obviously annoyed at being put out for nothing. ‘Ah! I’ve found it at last,’ said Yoneko. ‘I’ll just take the drawer back over there.’

  She picked the drawer up, and then let it fall with a crash to the ground. It landed face down, and all the receipts and documents were scattered over the floor. Miss Tojo got on her knees and began to pick them up again. Under cover of this distraction, Yoneko was able to put the key on the desk.

  ‘Oh! I’m so sorry! How silly of me!’ Whilst saying this, Yoneko picked up the book which was lying face down on the chair and glanced at the title. Words from the Spirit World—it meant nothing to her.

  Miss Tojo turned round and saw what Yoneko was doing. Her features clouded with suspicion, and she quickly glanced over to where the master key, or, rather, its substitute, was lying on the desk.

  Yoneko had no idea what the receptionist must be thinking. She felt embarrassed, and after making a few hasty apologies, withdrew without bothering to take that so important gas bill with her.

  It was some days later, when Miss Munekata gassed herself, that the master key was discovered to have been switched. As this was just the latest such event, the receptionists (neither wishing to take any blame) professed total ignorance of how it had come about. Such, at least, was Yoneko’s interpretation of their silence.

  About a week after Yoneko Kimura took the master key, a meeting of the residents’ committee was called. The loss of the key was high on the agenda.

  During those seven days, Yoneko had been awaiting her chance to get into Chikako Ueda’s room but, just as normal, Chikako never seemed to go out at all. It appeared that the one exception to this rule was her weekly expedition to the grocer’s, where she would stock up with tinned foods and other durables. How she passed the remainder of her time alone in her room remained a mystery.

  It had seemed unlikely that there would be any call for the master key to be used in that short period and so its loss would not have been discovered but for the accident on the second floor. A strong smell of gas was detected outside Miss Munekata’s room, and in the ensuing confusion the theft became known. Now Yoneko could only wait and let matters take their own course.

  It appeared that Miss Munekata had gone to sleep leaving the gas stove on, and somehow the flame had been extinguished. One of her neighbours had got up to go to the toilet in the middle of the night, and had noticed the smell of gas exuding from the fanlight window above Toyoko Munekata’s room. It was fortunate that the discovery was made so early, thus avoiding a fatal accident.

>   Miss Kimura was aroused from her bed in the front office and, rubbing the sleep from her eyes, tried repeatedly to open Miss Munekata’s door with the master key. Needless to say, it did not work, but it took some time for Miss Kimura to realise that this was not due to some failure on her own part, and she spent several minutes reinserting the key in the lock and rattling it to and fro. At last she gave up, and the fire brigade was called. An ambulance with two acrobatic firemen on board arrived in a twinkling; one of them climbed onto a chair and squirmed through the fanlight until he could reach and remove the key from the lock inside. They got into Toyoko Munekata’s room and removed her unconscious body into the open air. She was still breathing faintly and so her life was saved.

  If that had been all there was to it, there need have been no further repercussions. However, when they opened the window to air the room, a strong breeze blew in, disturbing the papers on the desk and eventually scattering them all over the place.

  The residents had heard how precious the manuscript was, and so several of them entered the room and hastily retrieved the scattered papers. As they did so, they could not help noticing the peculiar mathematical formulae and symbols—triangles, circles, and childish doodles, and even obscene phrases—which made up the text. Rumours swiftly spread around the apartment block, to the effect that Toyoko’s great work was no more than a sham, and that she was touched in the head.

  When Yoneko heard this, she was horrified to think that her theft of the master key had nearly brought about the death of a fellow resident. Furthermore, her action had indirectly led to Toyoko Munekata becoming a laughing stock, so that her continued occupancy of the apartment block was imperilled. She felt that Toyoko’s daily labours on the manuscripts of her dead husband were similar in many ways to her own daily letters to her former pupils. And so she could not bring herself to join the chorus of scorn directed towards Toyoko.

  ‘Just think of it,’ said her fellow committee member. ‘All circles and triangles and crosses.’ She was a school teacher, and had long been resentful of Toyoko’s superior manner. ‘She told us that unlike us she was engaged on a real work of scholarship! Well, that wind certainly showed her up.’

  ‘But we can’t imagine that her late husband’s research consisted only of such things,’ interrupted Yoneko, springing to Toyoko’s defence. ‘I can’t pretend to be an authority on higher mathematics, but I have heard that once you get to the philosophical level things are not as simple as they appear. I once read somewhere that to a mathematician a circle, or a wheel, say, is not perfectly round at all but is made up of an infinite number of angles.’ She was echoing the thesis she had heard from an enthusiastic young mathematician years ago in the school common room.

  ‘That’s true,’ agreed the first-floor representative, who worked in a museum. ‘My late husband was a professor of classical Greek. He used to write down all sorts of words and compose vocabularies in those funny letters; it looked more like a childish game than the work of a grown man.’

  The committee was assembled for a meeting in the drawing room on the first floor. This room was rarely used and was in consequence dusty and had a mouldy smell. They sat around a large table, on top of which was placed a kettle, teacups and small cakes wrapped in cellophane.

  The meeting had been called for six. It was now ten past, but the chairman had not yet arrived. She was a highly skilled and very experienced shorthand secretary who worked at the local council, taking the minutes, and was one of the most highly paid residents in the building. She was very public-spirited, and had served as chairman of the residents’ representative committee without a break for the last five years. The system was that one representative was elected for each floor for a full term of one year, and a further representative was elected for a term of three months. The chairman was also specially elected once a year, making a total of eleven members on the committee. However, at most meetings four or five members would be absent on other business, so the average attendance was about five or six plus the chairman.

  The agenda for this specially called meeting consisted of two items, one of them being the perennial problem of cat messes. But the second topic was of much greater interest, and so there was an unusually high attendance, only two of the members being unable to come.

  The item of particular concern was the planned movement of the whole building, which had been announced some six months before. Work was due to begin in just one more week.

  The door swung open with a crash and a stout female figure came in cautiously as if expecting to find the space too narrow to squeeze through. It was the chairman, Miss Yoko Tanikawa; she was wearing a jacket of masculine cut and had a briefcase under her arm.

  ‘Sorry to keep you waiting! I had to clarify a few lastminute points about the move, which is on the agenda.’

  She sat down at the head of the table and opened her case, producing various documents which she placed in orderly piles on the table.

  ‘Well, as you all know, they’ll get started on the move from next week. However, there are just one or two problems which need to be kept in mind. For instance, there’s the noise, which will be pretty troublesome. Then there’ll be all the dust—they’re digging out all the foundations, you see. However, taking the broad view, let us not forget that this is being done for the public good. It’s all part of the overall city plan for road-widening, and it is incumbent on all of us to cooperate and to put up with the inconvenience. However, there are limits—just because it is necessary to move the building does not in my view mean that we have to put up with workmen wandering in and out and disturbing our privacy. I would remind you all of how insecure we feel now that the master key has once more vanished. These apartments were founded with the intention of preserving the modesty and so enhancing the status of working women. That one little key was the guarantor of these aims, but in the wrong hands it becomes a threat. In such circumstances, locked doors lose their meaning!’

  She sighed deeply, and then went on to say that the loss of the master key would be discussed in greater detail later on in the meeting. Before that, it would be necessary to determine what conditions should be applied to the construction workers during the course of the work. When she had finished talking, she passed the cakes and tea around the table.

  ‘Well, surely if it’s to do with the construction, we will just have to put up with people coming in and out, won’t we?’ The speaker was the representative of the third floor, who had recently received a commendation for her long services at the tourist company where she worked.

  ‘I couldn’t disagree more! That way, we’ll have every Tom, Dick and Harry coming and going as they please. If you ask me, everything’s getting too lax, and we should take a firm stand somewhere, and the sooner the better. Nowadays, we’re too soft on a lot of things, from the upbringing of the young to such matters as letting people keep cats, which leave insanitary droppings all over the corridors. That’s one thing I don’t intend to put up with any more round here. And if that wasn’t enough, we now have a peculiar man being allowed to come and go at will on the pretext that he is a missionary for one of these new-fangled religions!’

  This angry outburst came from the full representative of the second floor, who had lately been promoted to section chief, the first woman in the history of her company to achieve such a rank. The alternate member for the first floor, Tomiko Iyoda, who was sitting on Yoneko Kimura’s right, bridled visibly during this speech and sprang to her feet when it was over. Not only was it her cat to which reference had been made, but she was also the recruiting member for the Three Spirit Faith which had been obliquely criticised.

  ‘Take that back at once! How dare you refer to His Reverence in that way—a peculiar man indeed! And as if that wasn’t enough, you attack me through my little cat as well! I’ll have you know that I always clear up any mess he makes.’ She then lowered her voice a key and went on: ‘I will ignore your lies about my cat, but let me warn you that divine re
tribution invariably awaits those who slander His Reverence!’ She wanted to go on, but her neighbour, the full representative for the first floor, tugged her by the sleeve. Tomiko Iyoda was thus forced to sit down, but for a while she continued to glare angrily at her opponent, mouthing voiceless imprecations the while.

  Miss Tanikawa, the chairman, behaved as if nothing had happened, calling on the next speaker, the member of the fifth floor, who was an employee of the local welfare office.

  ‘While the move is being effected, it will be necessary to disconnect such public utilities as the gas, the electricity and the water. Also, the whole programme will only take a relatively short time. I therefore think it both pointless and impossible absolutely to forbid the workmen to come and go as necessary. In any case, there are no grounds for classifying all the workmen as criminals or in any other way bad. If, when the time comes, anyone is worried they can go straight to the ladies at the reception desk and report any suspicious circumstances.’

  ‘That’s all very well,’ said someone else, ‘but you know what men are like. Before you know what’s happening, they’ll be forcing their way into our rooms asking for a cup of tea or something!’

  After some further debate, it seemed to be the general consensus that the workmen should be trusted and not all regarded as potential thieves or worse. However, each member of the committee would take it in turn to patrol the building during the period of the work. Miss Tanikawa summed up with a humorous suggestion. ‘We’ll have an armband made with “Security Patrol” in big bright letters. It will serve as a kind of PR, and it mightn’t be a bad idea if the duty member carries a night-stick as well.’

  The harmonious atmosphere thus created was soon destroyed by the member for the second floor, who returned to her earlier topic.