Remote Control

by Kotaro Isaka

  l‘)7

  REMOTE CONTROL

  ''Oiir numbers?" Haruko echoed.

  "You were his friend in college, and Miss Tsuruta's a friend of Mr. Ono. Aoyagi may try to contact you for some reason. We've learned he communicated with at least one associate just a short time ago." From Kondo's tone, it was clear he had no intention of telling them who the "associate" might be or what sort of "communication" it was. "We feel there is a chance he could try to contact one or both of you. If he calls you, we can use the information in our investigation, provided we have your numbers."

  "You're going to tap our phones?" Haruko said. Kondo's proposal had been more decorous, but it came down to that.

  "The Security Pods can collect various kinds of information. In general, we use it only with prior permission, but in a national emergency like this, we're asking for your cooperation to make the best use of these resources. Think of it as a more sophisticated version of checking a license plate number."

  Haruko remembered that Akira Hirano had said her boyfriend did maintenance work on the pods. "Welcome to the surveillance society," she murmured, the words slipping out almost before she realized it.

  Though he must have heard, Kondo's expression remained unchanged. "As a precaution, we'll be checking the numbers of your incoming calls. We won't be eavesdropping, just trying to identify the callers. If Aoyagi calls, we can react immediately."

  "Tm not comfortable with someone listening to my phone calls," Haruko said.

  "We would appreciate your cooperation." The words were still polite but the tone was chillier.

  "I don't mind," Ami said. "I'll cooperate." Haruko could understand how she felt. Seeing what had happened to Kazu, she must want the whole thing to be over as quickly as possible.

  "I guess I will, too," she said. They could get her number easily enough, so there was little point in resisting.

  "If you receive a suspicious call, we'd like you to try to keep the connection for at least thirty seconds."

  "Thirtv seconds?"

  "We need that much time to trace a call. So please try to prolong the conversation as much as possible. The data may help us with our investigation."

  THE INCIDENT

  "What should I do if Aoyagi calls Kazu's phone?" Ami asked.

  "We'd like you to answer and talk to him. If at all possible, arrange to meet him somewhere." When he had finished writing down their addresses and telephone numbers, he seemed satisfied. He hadn't touched the iced tea he'd ordered. As he was about to get up, Haruko stopped him.

  "Why would he do something like this?" she asked.

  "That's what we intend to ask him, once we've caught him."

  Haruko went back to Kazu's room. He was still unconscious, so she decided to go home for the time being. Ami offered to walk her to the hospital entrance; on the way she asked Haruko where she lived.

  "Oh, 1 know the neighborhood. I've been there once," she said when she heard the address, sounding almost cheerful for the first time. Just by the front entrance, she stopped. "I'll call you if he wakes up," she told Haruko. Then she looked up at the sky outside. The clouds had lifted and a film of pale blue covered the city. The sun was warm. "When it's like this, it's hard to believe there are wars going on somewhere or that people are suffering and dying, isn't it?" She was smiling, but Haruko thought she might easily start crying. "Kazu says that good weather makes him happy, but it also reminds him that not everyone can enjoy it, that somewhere people are miserable."

  "He said that?" Haruko murmured, surprised to hear that Kazu, their resident philistine, had become so sensitive.

  "Actually, he said it was something Aoyagi had told him," Ami said.

  "Aoyagi?"

  "Kazu said Aoyagi used to say that clear days made him think about people elsewhere having a hard time—and that he'd always remembered it."

  "Oddly enough, that sounds just like something he would say."

  The children said their gcjodhyes and Haruko led Nanami down the path toward the street.

  ".Mommy," Nanami said when they'd reached the sidewalk. "Is your friend the had man on T V? Was he your triend?"

  "A long time ago," Haruko said. Did that mean they were no longer triends? She remembered that Akira Hirano hact insisted at one point that there was a big ditterence between an olct trienct and .m okt lover.

  "When you break uj) witb a lover, you don't go back to bc*ing Iriends."

  REMOTE CONTROL

  "Some people do, don't tliey?" Haruko had wanted to hold on to the hope.

  "No, never. Or maybe in rare cases. But the principle holds: an ex-hoy-friend should be out of your life for good. Still, it does seem strange," she'd mused. "For the time you're together, you see each other every day, but once you split up, you never see him again."

  "He didn't look like a bad man," Nanami said, pulling Haruko back to the present. "He's handsome."

  "He certainly is," she agreed before she was quite sure what to say.

  It was noon, and the sun was directly overhead. A light breeze tugged at her hair as they walked along. It seemed impossible that Aoyagi was somewhere nearby, under this same perfect sky, a fugitive, his life on the line.

  Nanami was complaining that she was hungry, so Haruko took her to a restaurant near Kita Yonban Street. As they sat down at a table by the window, she remembered that Kondo had said Aoyagi fired a gun in a restaurant . . . probably much like this one. Aoyagi with a gun? The whole thing seemed more and more absurd, as though she were watching a bad student play in which he had been forced to act.

  The TV on the wall would normally have been showing a baseball game, but today, naturally enough, it was tuned to a special about the assassina-tiori. Nanami suddenly pointed at the screen.

  "Mommy, look! It's him!" She had released the straw she was sucking to make this announcement. It was footage of an interview during his previous brush with fame, and his quiet, almost hesitant manner was that of the man she had known.

  T here were several calls to her phone while they were eating. First from her husband, Nobuyuki. Haruko had left the phone on the table, and Nanami noticed his name on the display when it began to vibrate.

  "Daddy!" she chirped.

  Nobuyuki was not the most forthcoming man in the world, but his instincts were good, and when he got an idea in his head, he tended to act on it right away. This could be annoying, but at least he was consistent. So she was hardly surprised at the first words she heard: "I just saw it on the news. Isn't he an old friend of yours?"

  "I'm amazed you remembered."

  THE INCIDENT

  "I make it my business to know about my wife's deep dark past," he said. "You told me about him when he was on TV a few years back. So you can imagine my surprise when the deliveryman who rescued the starlet turned out to be the guy who killed the prime minister."

  "1 was just as surprised."

  "Are you okay?" he asked, and though he no doubt meant it in a general sense, Haruko felt as though he had thrown her a lifeline.

  "If 1 said 'No,' would vou come home?"

  He laughed. "I'm on my way."

  "No, Tm kidding. Everything's fine. But the police did interview me."

  "The police?"

  "They thought he might get in touch, since we were friends. They want me to let them know if he calls. But it looks like they're snooping on every phone in Sendai already; if he calls me, Tm sure they'll know."

  "Do you think they're listening to us now?" he asked. "Not a very pleasant thought."

  "They're very busy people," Haruko laughed. "Once they find out it's just you, Tm sure they'll hang up." But she, too, found it disturbing that someone could be listening. Outside the window, the domed head of a Security Tod was peeking from the bushes, its tiny lights flashing on and off. "T he officer who came to talk to me said it didn't work on calls that lasted less than thirtv seconds," she added.

  "That's probably right. It takes a certain amount of time to get things up and running, lon
ger than you'd think."

  "(jood, then we'll keep the next one under thirty," Haruko said, laughing again.

  "(jot it. Anyway, Til l)e home as soon as 1 can," he promised, and abruptly hung up.

  "What did Daddy say?" Nanami drained her juice, then poked her fingers into the mound of j)ilat on her plate.

  "He's worried about us," she told her.

  "That's easy for him to say," she said, her tone very solemn. Haruko trieil hard to keej) a straight lace.

  1 he display on the phone lit uj): Nobuyuki again. She hit the tedk button. "Hi. What's up?"

  REMOTE CONTROL

  ''In thirty seconds or less, did he really do it? Did you really go out with a guy who could do something like that?"

  Haruko felt as though someone had punched her in the gut. She searched her memory, but she was sure she had never told him that she and Aoyagi were involved. "How did you get the idea we 'went out'?" she said.

  "Oh, a little bird told me. See you." And the line went dead again.

  "Went out with who?" Nanami wanted to know. Haruko smiled as the phone began to vibrate again. She checked the screen, expecting yet another call from Nobuyuki, but this time it read "Akira Hirano." With a quick, exasperated glance at Nanami, she punched the talk button.

  "Haruko?" Akira said, her voice as bright as it had been the day before when they'd met for lunch. "How'd you make out getting home? The whole city was a mess!"

  "It wasn't easy. How about you?"

  "1 was stuck forever. The prime minister of the whole damn country gets killed, but there's still a ton of boring work to do. The world could be coming to an end, but they wouldn't let us call in sick." Haruko relaxed as she listened to her reassuringly familiar complaints. She was apparently on her lunch break, which had gone into "extra innings," as she put it. "But they're keeping that boyfriend of mine busy," she added.

  "Pod maintenance?"

  "None other. Apparently the peace and prosperity of our fair city depends on those little robots. And the robots depend on my Masakado to keep them bright and shiny—so you could say he has our fate in his hot little hands."

  "Even though he's not a face card?" Haruko said, remembering her description.

  "Maybe a jack," Akira laughed. "But who'd have thought it would turn out to be that deliveryman? Weird we were just talking about him."

  "Scary," she agreed.

  "Actually," her friend said, giggling softly, "I feel like going out for a drink tonight. Want to come?"

  "Sounds like fun. . . ," she said hesitantly, but she knew there was no way she could leave Nanami for the evening. Feeling the gulf between her own world and Akira's, she said goodbye and pushed "end."

  THE INCIDENT

  Nanami was quietly eating her lunch. Haruko busied herself picking grains of rice off her daughter's lips and popping them into the little open mouth. Then she worked on her own plate of pasta for a while. As she was finishing, she looked up at the TV again. The scene was vaguely familiar. But where had she seen this place, and when? A crowd of men with cameras and microphones had gathered. Their faces looked serious, yet they seemed relaxed, as though they were putting on a show they'd done any number of times before.

  A moment later it came to her: it was Rocky's place—the fireworks factory north of the city where she and her friends had hung out during their student days. And then she understood what was happening: the media had heard that Aoyagi had worked at the factory and had jumped to the conclusion that he had learned to make a bomb there—further proof that he was guilty. It was ridiculously oversimple—and just the sort of logic the press seemed to prefer. As if on cue, a reporter appeared on camera. "We now know that Masaharu Aoyagi became acquainted with the use of gunpowder during his time here at this factory," he said. Haruko sat staring at the screen, blinking with amazement.

  "Idiots!" she whispered.

  She and Aoyagi and the others had spent a good deal of time at T'odoroki Pyrotechnics during their college years, but for the most part they had done little more than shovel snow in the parking lot, sweep uj) the factory, and move boxes. Todoroki, the boss, was a straightforward, generous type not too concerned about extraneous details, but he was a complete professional when it came to gunpowder and the fireworks themselves. So it would never have occurred to him to teach a bunch of college kids how to make a bomb. If Aoyagi had learned something at Todoroki's factory, he had absorbed the knowledge directly trom the air and not the owner.

  Haruko couldn't stop herself shaking as she stared at the I'V. 'Hie more she heard—the reporter's pompous j)r()n()uncements, the idiotic nodtling ot the experts in the studio—the more convinced she Wiis that their version ol events was just another made-tor-television latitasy.

  "Lies," she whis|)ered.

  "Mommy? Are you okay?"

  REMOTE CONTROL

  "I'm fine. It's just that I always thought that what they told us on TV was the truth, but now I see it isn't."

  "1 already knew that," the little girl announced, clearly pleased with herself. "I know they're telling lies, because they're always saying they're sorry on the TV." Even at four, she had apparently seeri too many press conferences by disgraced officials or company presidents.

  Haruko picked up the phone and checked the list of contacts. She had changed phones since her student days, but most of the old numbers had migrated over. "I'm going to make a quick call," she told Nanami as she put the phone to her ear. Staring at the shot of Todoroki's factory on the screen, she imagined the connection making its way into the building.

  The busy signal buzzed dismally in her ear. Everyone in Japan must be trying to get through to Todoroki Pyrotechnics.

  Next, she thought of calling Morita, but she remembered that the number she had didn't work. She realized she wanted to ask him directly if he was really dead. Knowing him, he would probably tell her quite cheerfully that he'd heard the "voice of the forest" calling to him.

  Aoyagi on the run, accused of killing the prime minister; Morita dead in an explosion; and Kazu unconscious in the hospital. She reviewed the list again, wanting to find someone to question, to grab by the throat and shake until they told her why. Putting the phone back on the table, she looked up at the TV.

  The shot showed a burst of flames, but just as she'd started to wonder what was burning in Sendai now, the camera pulled back and she realized the fire was on top of a stove. A bearded man with an affected voice was asking her to try his "special bechamel sauce." She recognized him—a famous chef who had opened a restaurant in Sendai, the place she and Aoyagi had once planned to go to. The place that had been rude about their cancellation when they were caught in a downpour. In the end, they had actually made it there a month later, just to prove to themselves they could, but the staff had been snooty and the food somehow unexciting. They had left feeling disappointed and a little self-righteous. Perhaps it was her imagination, but it had seemed that she and Aoyagi often ended up in places that weren't much fun—as though the two of them weren't being made welcome. Surrendering herself to the flow of memories, she stared out the window. The sky was still cloudless.

  THE INCIDENT

  She remembered something that Todoroki had said to them long ago at one of the fireworks displays. 'Thousands of people watch the same fireworks at the same time; and who knows, maybe an old friend you haven't seen in years could be among them." Could Aoyagi be watching this same commercial somewhere in Sendai? Could he be remembering that same night, feeling the same emotions? The thought was disconcerting, and sad.

  Dili he really do it? Her husband's question echoed in her head. Everything they had said on TV was preposterous. The man at the tonkatsu shop, the charge of molesting, the attempt to connect the bomb to Rocky's factory— and the idea that he had killed Morita . . . that was most absurd of all. But if he didn't do it, why were they chasing an innocent man all over Sendai?

  Did you really go out with a guy who could do something like that?

  She had never th
ought of herself as a particularly good judge of men—or of people in general—but she thought she knew what Aoyagi was capable of . . . and what he would never do as well. At the verv least, she knew a hell of a lot more about him than those fools on the TV. She grabbed the check off the table and stood up to go.

  Masaharu Aoyagi

  He had hardly needed the drug Miura had slipped him; he would have collapsed under the weight of his exhaustion with or without its help. It was already eight the next morning when he opened his eyes. He had slept in his clothes, rolled up like a chrysalis fallen from its branch. T he curtains were pulled back, but the room was deep in shadow, as though the whole building were hidden from sunlight. Miura had vanished, leaving behind nothing hut the key on the low tal)le. Apparently to lock up when he lelt.

  He turned (jn the T V—and at the sight ot his own lace, he lelt the lloor give way and his body Ireelall. A shiver raced up his spine, his neck Iroze . . . as thcjugh he was jumj)ing oh the britlge onto Mae/ono's truck all over again.

  "Did you know the a|)artment belonged to Rinka?" a reporter Wiis asking him.

  REMOTE CONTROL

  ''I had no idea," liis former self answered.

  When the tape had hnished, the announcer came on. "We believe this man is the suspect in the current incident."

  He told himself to stay calm. It had happened now: they had named him. But he had known it was inevitable. No reason to panic—or so he tried to convince himself. He had to convince himself or he would go crazy with fear. He hit a button on the remote and the TV went dark.

  Jumping up, he lurched toward the door and began to push his feet into his shoes. But then he remembered his bag and stumbled back into the room. He shouldered the pack and was about to open the door when he was suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling that a row of men with guns was waiting for him just outside. He went back into the room and peered through the window. The narrow alley below was empty. Above, a single crow spread its wings and left its perch on the telephone wires.