by Unknown
“Sorry,” he said as he reached for the duffel bag. “But it’s back in the bag for a while.”
Spencer opened the door about two inches and peered into the gloomy hallway. Marks noted the fourth floor smelled like cabbage and cumin too. The door opened wider.
“Phil?”
Marks shifted the weight of the duffel bag on his shoulder. “Got a moment?”
Spencer glanced at the duffel, then stepped back, pulling the door open with him. “Sure, Phil, sure.”
Marks walked into the kitchen. The apartment, directly below Aoki’s, had the same layout—the big, empty kitchen and the tight corridor of rooms heading back into orange lamplight. He set the duffel on the floor and knelt, knees cracking. Spencer watched silently as Marks pulled the doll from the bag and set it on one of the old wooden chairs. He breathed heavily as he crouched, arranging her: feet on the floor, arms on the table, hands folded, face relaxed and with the hint of a smile. When Marks stood up, he was flushed and sweating. “Spense, there’s no murder here.”
“All right, Phil,” Spencer said. “What’s this?”
Marks pulled the folded file from his jacket and handed it to Spencer. “Your friend, Aoki, left you the doll in his will.”
“That fucking thing—”
“Did not kill Mr. Aoki,” Marks said.
Spencer flipped the file shut and stared down at it for a moment. He swallowed and looked up at the doll, sharply. “Me and Dek,” he said, then stopped and looked down at the floor. “You get older, Phil, you don’t have friends like you used to. People fade away.”
Marks nodded, leaning back against the front door. “I’m fading away myself.”
Spencer kept talking as if Marks hadn’t responded. “I can’t explain what … I just … miss the guy. In a way, you know, I ain’t never missed anyone.” He snorted. “And we never spoke one word to each other we understood.”
Marks nodded. “You meant a lot to each other,” he said slowly. Then he shrugged. “That’s why he wanted this.”
Spencer frowned and flipped open the file. The photo of the will was on top. His frown deepened. “Shit, Phil, there’s procedures—”
“Spense, no one’s gonna follow up on this one. Your pal didn’t have family, you were his only friend. Even if PD notices this shit missing, none of them are going to blow a weak fart in the effort to track it down.” He took a deep, unsteady breath, feeling old. “Your friend wanted this. He went through some trouble to make this happen. He’s yours.”
Spencer stared at the doll. Marks waited a moment, and then gathered himself, standing up and shrugging his jacket into better position. “All right. I’ll leave you alone.” He turned for the door.
“Jesus, Phil,” Spencer said. “What am I supposed to do here?”
Marks turned halfway and looked at the doll and then back to Spense. “I don’t know. Make him a cup of tea, huh?”
Out on the street, Marks paused and stood on the sidewalk, feeling the chill in the air through his jacket. He considered his options, which were simultaneously infinite and desolate, and clutched the lapels of his jacket close together to protect his chest. He considered having no place to go and no one to go to. He started walking.
Toshiro Takeda sighed and took another bite of his ham and egg donut, washing it down with coffee far better than that in the hot cans of Boss Coffee in the vending machine outside his front door. The Mister Donut coffee was more expensive, 250 yen, but you got all the refills you wanted, and Takeda could easily afford it, regardless of how he lived. He signaled the young man in the Mister Donut uniform, who placed an automatic smile on his face, brought the carafe of black coffee and filled the cup once more as Takeda tightly nodded his thanks.
When the young man went away, Takeda popped the last bite of donut into his mouth and washed it down with the hot coffee, then looked out the second floor window of the shop at the large utility pole, a pole girded with so many cable brackets that its wood was nearly invisible. Over thirty separate lines gripped the pole: electricity, telephone, television, all the wire-transmitted units of energy and data that kept Jujo and Tokyo and Japan connected.
For many years, from the day he started school until the day he walked away from his salaryman job, his wife, and his children, Toshiro Takeda had been as connected to life as the cables on that pole. But on his thirty-fifth birthday he had broken that connection, and for the last fifteen years he had lived in the shadows of Japan’s cities, making his living by making others die.
Today would be, like so many days following a job, one of leisure. He had made one and a half million yen plus expenses from the killing in Fukuoka, which had taken him three weeks to plan and carry out—one or two weeks longer than usual, so he was behind for the year.
He tried to schedule a minimum of six jobs annually, and no more than nine, charging between one and a half and two and a half million yen for each—the billing dependent upon the financial status of the client, but averaging two million yen per hit. Six jobs gave him an average annual income of twelve million yen, while the maximum of nine provided eighteen million. It was not a huge sum, but even the minimum was far more than he had made at his previous work.
For the first three years after leaving his wife, he had sent her biannual payments of 200,000 yen in cash, with no message or return address. When she divorced him and remarried, he ceased the payments, not from spite but from the practical consideration that she would no longer need them. He had not felt any emotion toward her for a long time. The money had been for his children.
When he dreamed at night, he often dreamed of the family he had left behind. His wife and his son and his daughter never aged in the dreams. They were always as they were when he had left.
The dreams were peaceful, of family life. He would be sitting in a chair in the center room, after the evening meal was finished. The television might be on, the children in front of it. His wife was in the kitchen, washing the dishes and putting things away. He would be watching the television or reading a magazine or newspaper. When he awoke, he could remember the scene and the sense of calm, but never what he had been reading or what had been on the television.
After such dreams, he felt sad but also grateful at being given the opportunity to return to those days, just as he felt grateful when he dreamed of his father, who had died several years before Takeda had left his family. Takeda had never hated his family. He had merely found himself unable to continue being a part of it. He could not remember loving his wife, or even his children, though he dimly recalled feeling affection, and a father’s pride in the children’s successes, as well as concern for their health and their own feelings.
Shortly after he had left them, however, he began to realize that this pride was not in his offspring but in himself, since he had created these children, and that their triumphs were due to his own influences. His efforts to keep them healthy and contented had also been born of self-interest, since their ill health and discontent would have negatively affected the quality of his own life. It had taken Takeda thirty-five years to know that his life was better led without responsibility. Man was ego, which was poorly served by serving others.
He firmly believed the persistent demands of ego to be the source of all evil, for he had been taught as much since childhood, but he also believed that his own ego was his master, and that he had done what he had because of it. Still, the dreams were pleasant, giving him the sense of family life without the responsibilities that accompanied it, the very things from which he had fled.
When Takeda had come to Tokyo from Kobe, he had no idea what it was he wanted to do or how to go about doing it. He had taken enough of his savings to see him through for several months, but when that time was up he would have to find employment somewhere, and when he did he would have to give his employer information. If that information were truthful, his wife could trace him. So Takeda had gone into the floati
ng world, the nightless castle, the substratum in which one could be free of the restraints found in the rest of Japanese society.
For several days he had wandered the city, until his senses drew him to Ikebukuro, with its rough, working-class spirit. On its edges he found that for which he had been seeking, a place in which he could find outlawry if he looked carefully—and the more carefully he looked, the more he saw. He was a man who had stumbled into a new world filled with monsters, but who was happy to have found them, for their existence implied that he could become one himself, and that was what he most desired. He wished for freedom, and at that point in his life freedom was most easily equated with anarchy and lawlessness.
He had already stepped outside of the law and reneged on its debts when he left his family, and to cross the border into criminality seemed the next logical step. Besides, from a purely practical standpoint, it was the only way he could see to make any money. His steps to becoming a professional killer had been nearly accidental: a favor done for a new friend, the realization that he could kill without compunction, the acceptance that he was deadly. It helped that Takeda did not believe in ghosts, nor did he believe in any aura of death about him through which people could sense his occupation. Within him, however, he carried something that he did not think would allow him to relate to those outside his extremely limited sphere. Even if he wanted to, the dead would not permit it.
They were with him in some way, all of those whom he had killed, not as ghosts nor even as clinging spirits of his own imagination, but as past realities and present memories. Sometimes he would recall the expressions on their faces in the moment of knowing, as he came up to them, and they realized that the flat-faced, seemingly emotionless man before them was ending for them all that they had ever known and would ever be, and those moments were as close as Takeda had ever come to true understanding.
It is always this way, their faces seemed to say, even in the midst of their terror and fear. And when his hands moved and their bodies fell, the knowledge also flowed through him: It is always this way. He would not have known had it not been for them, and he was grateful, and carried them with him to show his thankfulness. It was not knowledge that could be shared by the living.
After a day of idle strolling, Takeda went back to his room, where he soaked in the tub for twenty minutes. Afterward, he tried to listen to some music, but he found his attention wavering, so he turned it off and picked up his novel. Words could not be read without concentration. After several chapters he grew tired, turned off the light, and lay back to sleep.
Even the night after a job, Takeda never had any trouble getting to sleep. Tonight, however, he lay awake in the dark, his eyes open, noticing the texture of the blackness, and how there was enough light outside, even though his window looked out on nothing but the space of a meter and a wall beyond, to allow thin strands to edge his curtain.
He watched the dim lines of light, and made himself think about a beautiful but sad-faced woman he had seen on the train that day. Sometimes when he thought about something before he went to sleep, he would dream about it, and he thought that a dream of her would be interesting. At last he slept, but the only dream that he remembered was one that he had just before awakening.
He was sitting at the kitchen table of his old house. His wife was working at the sink, and the children were playing on the floor of the next room. Before him on the table was a plate. On the plate, partly wrapped in a black casing, was a partially eaten block of cheese, perhaps cheddar, its color a vivid orange-yellow. Takeda was holding a knife, and he raised the knife to cut off a portion of the cheese, but as he started to do so, he noticed that the surface of the cheese was discolored in various places by black specks.
They were not the blue-green threads found in aged cheeses like Roquefort, but seemed instead to be areas of black rot, and he picked at several with the tip of the knife, carefully excising them and wiping them on the edge of the plate. After doing this several times, he realized that the cheese was so filled with these black spots that removing them all would be impossible. He looked more closely to determine what they were, and saw that the large black spots and smaller flecks moved, not falling off the surface, but traveling upwards as well, and when he carefully examined one particular speck, he saw that it was in the shape of a thin, segmented worm with millipede-like legs.
The cheese is bad, he said to his wife, and then he observed that the aluminum foil on which the block of cheese sat was not large enough to wrap it fully, and he felt annoyance at his wife that she had been so careless as to let these insects get into the cheese. If it had been tightly wrapped, it would not have happened.
With that thought he awoke, and when he realized that it had been a dream, he closed his eyes again, impressed as always by the sense of reality it had carried, and the absurd, illogical novelty that only dreams gave to life. He frequently did this upon awakening from a dream, and was often able to fall asleep again and reenter the same one. Now, however, he was awake, and though he lay there and remembered the color and texture of the cheese, and the tactile sensation of his knife picking away the black specks, he did not fall asleep again. It was not a dream he wished to resume. The light around the edges of the curtain had brightened, and when he looked at the clock it read 7:43.
He lay there for a few more minutes, thinking of how odd the dream had been, how unlike the others that he had had of his previous home life. Before, they had always been sedate, with nothing to mar the tranquil surface, and now there had come this dream of a cheese teeming with black bugs, and the thought made the night-taste in his mouth all the worse, until he got up and brushed his teeth.
Takeda made a small breakfast of cereal and milk, then sat and listened to a number of jazz CDs he had bought the previous week. At noon, he dressed in his suit and went out. He took the train to Shibuya, where he had lunch, and then browsed Tower Records again.
He was in the book department, looking for new volumes on jazz, when he saw a salaryman in his early forties in the next aisle. The man was looking at him intently, and when Takeda returned his gaze, the man bowed quickly, as though apologizing for his close scrutiny. Then the man licked his lips quickly and said, as lightly as a breath, Takeda-san?
Takeda had not heard anyone speak his true name for fifteen years, and it seemed as though the floor had dropped from beneath him. Suddenly he felt the truth of the old saying that naming something gave one power over it. Despite his shock, he managed a quizzical look and shook his head in denial. As he did so, he recognized the man. His name was Suyama, and he had come to work for Takeda’s company a month before Takeda had disappeared from Kobe. By that time, Takeda had been uncommunicative, barely speaking to anyone, but he had spoken once to Suyama over drinks after work.
After-work drinking was more ceremonial than an actual release. It gave people the chance to behave more drunkenly than they really were, and express some opinions that they might otherwise keep to themselves. The next day they could always apologize and say that they didn’t remember a thing when they truly did. By that last month, Takeda had nearly given up drinking, feeling that his problems were too serious to be further muddled with alcohol. He nursed a drink for an hour or more, observing the others, speaking only when spoken to, allowing his bitterness and disgust for his colleagues to grow.
Suyama, however, he had pitied rather than despised. In the young man he had seen himself ten years earlier. The others were already lost, but there still might be hope for Suyama.
Takeda always remained late on drinking nights, since it was easier to remain in a place that only repulsed him rather than to go home to a place that was such a major part of an intolerable life. It was nothing that his wife or children said or did to make it so. It was what he had become that did that.
So it was that one night, two weeks before he changed his life, Takeda found himself alone in a bar with Suyama. The others had gone home, la
ughing with drunkenness, some of it real, some a pretense, and Takeda, his second glass of Kirin still half full, sat across from the young man. Suyama had not yet learned the tricks, and his face was reddened with too many drinks, most of which had been bought for him by his elders, and which he had not yet learned to gracefully evade.
You are drunk, Takeda had said to him, trying to keep judgment out of his voice.
I am. Suyama giggled. He sounded, Takeda thought, like a girl.
And how drunk are you?
I am … very drunk, I believe.
Takeda watched him for a minute. Suyama wore an empty smile, his lips pulled over his slightly crooked teeth as though he was not too drunk to be self-conscious about them. Not all that drunk, Takeda said. He leaned forward over the table that was damp with spilled beer and rank with filled ashtrays. The stench from it made Takeda take shallow breaths. Are you too drunk to learn something?
Suyama looked at him, his eyes blinking, then snorted a laugh, as though the concept of learning something in his condition was so absurd as to be funny. Takeda sat back and sighed in disgust, looking at the ceiling.
No, no! Suyama said. I can … I can learn, really. I am sorry, I’m just so drunk …
Takeda looked at Suyama without moving his head, then said something so quietly that Suyama frowned and leaned forward.
What? What did you say?
Takeda repeated himself. I said get out now.
Get out? Of here?
Takeda looked around the bar, then back at Suyama, and made a broad, all-encompassing gesture. Of here, he said, heavily stressing the last word.
I don’t … understand. I am so drunk …
I mean get out of here. Get out of all of it. Don’t do this. Don’t make my mistake. You still have time.
Suyama’s expression changed in a way that told Takeda that he was sober enough to understand. Why? The young man said.