Munroe flicked the blade closed and dropped both of them into Bradford’s bag. She couldn’t take them with her, anyway. In the genkan she put her boots back on, then stood and smelled the air and breathed in the last of this place that had been home. The memories burned at her, the happiness, the laughter—a fraud, a fake, all of it, none of it real because the man she’d shared it with wasn’t real.
In the airport arrivals parking garage, between a concrete pillar and a stairwell, Munroe strapped the helmet and Bradford’s backpack to the Ninja’s seat and abandoned them there. Eventually the bike would be towed—probably with the backpack and helmet still strapped to it, such was the level of honesty in everyday life here—and she would count the loss of the machine and the money she’d put into it as the price of a hard lesson learned.
She carried her own bag into the departures terminal, where wide de facto corridors were governed by ticket and check-in counters, and lines of passengers and luggage carts snaked between corded, winding pathways. A dozen airline logos lined up on either side like running lights on a bowling lane, and Munroe scanned signage, searching for a carrier that would get her direct to—
She paused and turned a full circle.
Dallas wasn’t an option, not like this, with the wounds so fresh and raw; neither was a return to Africa, the continent of her birth, where the comfortable familiarity of living and working in despot-run dens of corruption would only loop her into a repeat of past mistakes.
Beneath the blue and red of Malaysia Airlines, the line had already begun to lengthen, which meant a pending departure. Munroe stepped in behind a luggage cart and followed the wheels, moving brain-numb and rote from ticket counter, to ticket in hand, through security, to the gate for a flight to Kuala Lumpur.
In the departure lounge she sat on the floor by the window, the afternoon sun casting shadows on her arms. Ear buds piped music in from her phone, drowning out the world enough that if she closed her eyes, she wasn’t there at all, but still Bradford was inside her head, an innocent man with his calendar pages and notes and, most of all, the lies.
She shut off the madness, disgusted by her own hypocrisy.
His few lies, the little he may have used her, didn’t even cover the entry fee into the games of deception and betrayal that she’d played. She’d told thousands and been told thousands—even by those she loved and trusted. Had filled years with manipulating others to achieve her goals, and sometimes been knowingly manipulated in turn so that others could achieve theirs. She’d allowed that. Had gone into the jaws of death as a tool for those she loved, knowing that they used her—and never cared.
And that was the point then, wasn’t it? That she cared.
Bradford, in lying to her, in taking choice away from her, had done the one thing that no one else had yet managed.
Across from her a young couple, deep in conversation, leaned into each other over the armrest. Happiness was etched across their faces and oozed out of their pores so thick it created an aura.
Munroe blocked them out.
She’d been there; she’d had that. One minute to the next, it had been ripped away. She would have paid any price to keep it.
Could still pay that price.
In self-righteous fury she readied to throw everything away, to throw him away, to make the pain of love’s betrayal stop.
Munroe tapped the boarding pass against her fingertips and weighed the ticket against never knowing what had happened in that facility, weighed killing her soul against abandoning the person she claimed to love most in the world, weighed a chance of having what might have been against allowing him to rot.
She stood. Picked the backpack off the floor, shut off the music, and began the long stroll out of the airport. Victimhood was unbecoming. Bradford’s actions didn’t control hers. She wasn’t finished here until she chose to be finished.
The entrance to the manga café wound up narrow stairs to the second floor of a four-story building, to a single room that took up the entire floor, where the lighting was dim, the ambience subdued, and two clerks in their late teens or early twenties manned the front counter. Beyond the entry, half the room was row upon row of head-height cubicles, the other half shelving that held magazines, books, and DVDs—enough manga and anime to satisfy every cartoon fetish known to man. At the back were smaller rooms with proper walls and doors, snacks and drinks, and showers and laundry facilities.
Munroe paid in advance for a twenty-four-hour stay and one of the clerks showed her to a numbered booth. She left her shoes in the hall, slid the door open to a tatami floor, and stepped inside a cubicle just large enough that she could lie down flat. It had been over thirty-six hours since she’d slept.
Manga cafés, not really cafés, were twenty-four/seven businesses, renting out space in expensive quarter-hour increments, providing solitude away from heat and cold and rain; places where those who’d missed the last train after a night out drinking could catch a few hours’ sleep and clean up before the next daily grind, where students who lived at home with three generations of family could luxuriate in an escape from human contact for an hour or two, and where the creepy manga fetishist could get his freak on in private.
Munroe slid the door closed, sat on the futon, leaned her head back, and closed her eyes. Here, without the need to supply an ID, where there were no cameras, no security to speak of, and where she had unlimited access to the Internet without attaching her name to searches and queries, she could rest and figure out the next step. Here, for a time, a tall white foreigner could disappear.
She woke with a start, eyes burning, dazed for a heartbeat before she caught her bearings. She blinked back against the dryness, the reawakened nightmare, and checked the time on her phone: four hours of sleep.
Munroe pulled herself off the floor and angled for the low table, where a computer monitor, TV, DVD player, and game consoles all competed for precious tabletop real estate. She tapped the monitor to life and stumbled through nearly indecipherable clicks and links and succeeded in changing the settings to English. She needed to know, to understand.
She’d caught a glimpse two nights back, when she’d learned that Bradford had been arrested and had killed the battery on her phone waiting for Okada, of what it might mean if a murder charge was the enemy; knew that the investigators could detain Bradford for twenty-three days for each charge—longer if the prosecutor convinced the judge that there was good reason; knew that until formal charges came, Bradford had no right to legal counsel and even his own lawyer, once he had one, wouldn’t be allowed access unless the investigators allowed it, and all the while he would be isolated and interrogated, and anything he said under those circumstances would be summarized and opined upon by the investigator whose words, however inaccurate or conflated due to language misunderstandings, would be treated by the court as if Bradford had said them himself.
The culture’s shame-sensitive tendency to admit to wrongdoing made confessions an integral part of the process, but there were no laws to protect against coercion, nothing to regulate how long the interrogations could last or the methods used to elicit the confession. Torture and cruel treatment were common enough that human rights organizations decried the violations.
Munroe searched through papers written by foreign sociology professors, and found blogs and forums and firsthand accounts of foreigners who’d been through the Japanese legal system.
If Bradford was formally charged, and if he went to trial, the odds of winning were slight. Japanese prosecutors averaged a ninety-nine percent conviction rate. If it was presented as a capital case, he would face life in prison with relatively little chance of parole. A lesser murder charge might see him out in fifteen years, but Japanese prisons were not like American prisons where a man like Bradford, the Great White among a school of smaller sharks, could easily fend for himself. Incarceration in Japan, especially if attached to hard labor, was but a few rungs up from the prisoner-of-war camps of World War II.
Footsteps and whispers, rustled curtains and sliding doors, marked the passing of time as the day crowd shifted into night, and the voices beyond the thin divider grew drunker. Head pounding, Munroe slid back, away from the table, leaned into the futon, and allowed the thoughts to churn.
If she planned to save Bradford, hope lay with the prosecutor. The prosecutor’s office ran on a tight budget and tended to only bring the most obviously guilty to trial. That’s what they had now: obvious guilt. But throw the evidence into question, muddy the waters of inevitability, or find new evidence to make a conviction less certain, and perhaps Bradford could escape indictment. If she was to do this, she had twenty-three days to accomplish the impossible task of proving a negative. Twenty-three days to end this nightmare before it pushed forward to a trial and the best of Bradford’s years were lost to the echoing halls of the forgotten.
Two days had already come and gone.
Bradford had been cut off from the world, and she needed to see him.
Family members could make visiting arrangements, and possibly a representative from the U.S. embassy. No friends, no acquaintances, certainly no girlfriend, but there were things to be said before she could shed the role of pissed-off lover and become his pissed-off avenger.
To advance irresistibly, push through their gaps. To retreat elusively, outspeed them.
—MASTER SUN TZU
Nonomi Sato passed through the stiles and walked, head down, toward the elevator, listening to the furtive hushed movement within the company’s morning song. Death—murder—had so quickly deepened the timbre.
The cowboy had been framed, fingered as the guilty party, and his threat had been removed, all of these actions adding instruments to the haunting melody of deception. But beneath the suspicion and dread—she could hear it now—flowed running notes of doubt.
Not everyone believed in the cowboy’s guilt.
The beauty of fear, the beauty of social control through judgment, was that that thought would never be voiced. To rise above the collective soul, to raise an opinion that contradicted the accepted sequence of events, was to commit an honorless career suicide. No, the truth had died when the cowboy was led in handcuffs out the front doors.
The police had come, asking questions, bringing intense scrutiny that Sato would have much preferred to avoid, but the deed was done and she couldn’t change that. The only thing left to her now was to contain the fallout.
She wasn’t concerned. Not yet.
She continued to remain above suspicion, but like the running notes in the air around her, she, too, had her doubts. Doubts that the cowboy’s departure was truly the end of the threat. Those who were skilled at the unorthodox, men who were worthy, men like the cowboy, were inexhaustible like great rivers. When they came to an end, they began again, and when they died, they were reborn.
And so it had been.
Another foreigner had shown up in the cowboy’s absence, hunting, sniffing, and scouting. He’d arrived at odd hours, conspiring with Tai Okada, the cowboy’s former accomplice. Sato hadn’t seen this newcomer, but the rumors had reached her by the morning after the murder.
She suspected the man on the motorcycle, the faceless man behind the visor. The rumor said that the newcomer, unlike his predecessor, was not a man of strength or war but was long and thin, likely weak and easily intimidated.
There was no thrill to be found among the weak.
Only time would tell what this strange turn would bring.
Sato reached the elevator and handed the guard her badge.
A new guard, recently hired to replace Haruto Itou, the groper, the stalker, who had written to say he was sick and then skipped the next day and then another. His employer had never looked for him. By now his family would have begun to wonder.
Sato had driven him to the forest and seduced him up a path. Had settled him naked on a blanket, drunk and overdosing on a cocktail of pain medication and muscle relaxants, with pornographic magazines clenched in his hand. She’d stayed long enough to ensure that he’d stopped breathing.
Japanese culture, without a Judeo-Christian morality, held few sexual taboos. Uncommon fetishes, yes: sex with young girls, sex with animals, sex with inanimate objects, sex with animate objects. Yet, somehow, strangely, homosexual sex was the unacceptable shame.
The Japanese had over a dozen words for suicide.
She’d seen to it that Haruto Itou had experienced one of them.
Sato passed beyond the elevator security for the cubicles. The new guard didn’t grope her. With any luck he wouldn’t try to follow her home, either.
Bradford had been married and divorced twice, though he claimed the second marriage, for only eight months, didn’t count. Munroe followed the digital trail of that short-lived marriage through public records. She filled out online forms for a certified copy of his marriage certificate and hunted through searches until she found a specimen of what the real thing would look like, courtesy of an abandoned blog.
She tracked down a custom office-supply business in Thailand, her way to a forged county seal, and, on the chance that she’d be running multiple identities on multiple passports, included a scan of her passport’s entry stamp so that she would have the means to create her own. The manga café became her residence for express shipping, her credit cards an unfortunate trail for expedited processing.
Five hours of hyperfocus and untold broken laws had laid down those first steps, and now with nothing but time and questions, she straightened out body kinks and turned to the external drive Bradford had left in the drawer.
The café’s computers had allowed her anonymity; her laptop, disconnected from the Internet, gave her privacy. Munroe rolled up the futon and stretched out on the floor. Head propped up on the cushion, she plugged in the drive and, with the computer balanced on her stomach, began the slow quest of perusing folders: personnel files, financial records—documents that Bradford likely had legitimate access to but didn’t want anyone knowing he was scrutinizing, nothing personal or illegal.
Three sets of folders, titled 1one, 2two, and 3three stood out from the rest. Each contained five to twenty subfolders beneath, and each of those bore a name, two of which Munroe recognized from promotional material as C-level employees. The subfolders themselves contained material that had been downloaded and assembled from company files, presumably by Okada.
She sat up and scooted across the tatami for the desk. With her laptop on one side, and the café’s computer on the other, she cross-referenced the folders’ names with public information. Extrapolating from those that turned up hits, as best as she could tell, one set of the folders was comprised of members of upper-level management, the second most of the members of the security departments, and the third a selection of employees who worked in the lower-level labs.
By the time midnight rolled around and the subdued noises of the café had grown slightly louder, Munroe had found nothing to explain those nights when Bradford’s words had said he was at the office and his calendar notes said he wasn’t. She lay down and draped an arm over her eyes to block the room’s low light.
The lies returned, and the months of conversations and interactions, prodding and searing like hot branding irons, casting doubt on every kiss and every promise. She knocked her head back against the futon in a physical attempt to make the roller coaster stop, yet couldn’t sever the personal obsession from cold investigation.
Munroe pulled out the calendar sheets and went over them again, measuring every entry, every day, against the days she’d lived, the experiences they’d shared, the stories he’d told, the touches, the words of affection; judging and questioning, attempting to divine truth from obfuscation and growing angry in the process. Wary and guarded was who she was to the world, but not with him, and she hated him for having stolen from her that one small shred of trust.
With a list of phone numbers in hand, Munroe left her temporary haven for the outside, where the day had already long begun and the remnants of
rain that had fallen in the night had thickened into weighted humidity.
Here, the streets were wider than where the apartment stood, and the sidewalks were actual sidewalks. Tucked out of the way of foot traffic, she dialed the first of the numbers that, for the sake of privacy and her desire to be able to speak freely, she couldn’t dial from within the café.
An hour of calls and many lies led her to the facility in which Bradford was held, and the confirmation that he was there and he was alive, such a small connection to him, brought both agony and relief.
—
The marriage certificate was the first package to arrive. Clock ticking on a booth that she kept paying for, Munroe left for the train station and found an electronics store nearby, where three tightly packed floors of cameras, TVs, computers, and gadgets put American big-box retailers to shame in the way a Swiss village cheese shop trumped a Walmart deli counter.
In the camera section a question she posed to the first employee seemed to transfer of its own accord through tiny huddles of conspiracy and finally netted her a phone number for a photography studio. A call provided walking directions and Munroe found the place just down the road, four floors up a narrow stairwell, with a coffee shop, hair salon, and restaurant stacked like LEGO blocks beneath it.
The door led into a single room, the entry separated from the studio by a long, tall glass-topped counter that held a display of urban photography. At the far end of the room, a woman glanced up. In flawless English, she said, “Can I help you?”
Munroe pulled Bradford’s marriage certificate from the envelope. “I need a document photographed,” she said. “We spoke about thirty minutes ago.”
“Oh,” the woman said, and then, as if the surprise had escaped her lips before she’d had a chance to censor, she smiled slightly and said, “Your Japanese is very good. I didn’t realize you were a foreigner.”
The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel Page 8