Remote Control

by Kotaro Isaka

  "And you're not planning to turn me in?"

  "Is that what you want me to do?"

  "I'm something of a catch—the king of the 'underworld,' at the moment."

  "For one thing," Hodogaya said, holding up a bony finger. "I'm underworld myself, so I don't feel like it's my 'civic duty' to turn you in. And two." He held up a second finger. "Tm not convinced you did it." Aoyagi felt as though the curtains had just parted and Hodogaya was illuminated in a spotlight. "So," he continued. "They've got just about every cop in Japan after you. Tm not sure why you're here in our little hospital, but you sure seem to be running all over the place."

  "That's about all I can do," said Aoyagi.

  "You're outnumbered, to say the least, so it didn't seem fair for me to pile on, too." Hodogaya produced an ear pick from somewhere and began scratching. Aoyagi thought the pick looked like something that had recently held a skewer of grilled meat. He realized he didn't have time to listen to this strange old man much longer.

  "I appreciate that," was all he said.

  "It's a shame, though."

  THE INCIDENT

  "What is?"

  "That they'll be catching you soon. Even 1 can see you can't keep this up much longer."

  "Maybe. But they haven't got me yet."

  "You're tougher than you seem/' said Hodogaya.

  "Not really," he replied, backing toward one of the beds. "Tve just been running as hard as 1 can since yesterday, and Tve had a few people helping me—I feel like Tm on a mission or something."

  Hodogaya took the pick from his ear and pointed it at him. "How are you getting around?"

  ".Any way I can. At the moment, Tve got a car that Tm hoping will get me out of the city."

  ".And the roadblocks?"

  "Tm not sure, but I used to be a delivery driver, so Tm good behind the wheel." He had no idea how many roadblocks they would have set up around the city, but he thought there was a chance of getting away if he was willing to risk a crash, an injury. He would line up with the other cars, get all the way to the point where he was supposed to show his papers—and then take off. A car driven by a determined driver was a useful weapon.

  "For all the good it'll do you," Hodogaya said. "I'hey've got these big-shit barriers all around the place."

  "It's got to be better than yesterday," said Aoyagi.

  "Still, if you try busting your way out, you're a dead man." Hodogaya was smiling, but his face abruptly turned serious. "You're not planning to get killed in that car, are you?" Aoyagi looked at him and said nothing. "Clet killed rather than get caught?" Still no answer. "1 hat makes no sense," said Hodogaya. "That's no way out of all this."

  "But it would leave a bad taste in their mouths," Aoyagi said at last.

  "In wh(jse mouths?"

  "1 he peoj)le watching 1 V."

  "'1 hat's who you're worried about?" he saitl, waving his pick like a conductor's baton. "Well, don't bother. But il you're out ol ideas, Tve got a suggestion tor you." Aoyagi looked uj) at him, but he had retreated into the shadows. "Why don't you try the sewers?"

  REMOTE CONTROL

  Masaharu Aoyagi

  The tale Hodogaya began telling him was so patently unbelievable that Aoyagi was worried that a whiff of bullshit might somehow leak out of the room and give them away.

  "It was a while back. They had this huge sucker of a jewel at the Sendai museum, and some associates and 1 were planning a heist."

  "Did you pull it off?" He remembered that one of the drivers at work had boasted about being asked to deliver it to the museum.

  "No, no," said Hodogaya, lowering himself onto one of the beds and propping up his casts in a practiced way. "It was just a plan. But somebody said if they put up roadblocks, we could use the sewers."

  "An interesting idea," said Aoyagi, though in his mind he pictured an enormous pipe filled to capacity with filth.

  "1 know what you're thinking," the old man said—apparently he did. "But they're not all the same. Some pipes carry household waste—sinks, toilets, showers—and those are running fast and impossible to walk in. But others were designed to cope with overflow rainwater—storm drains, really, rather than sewers. As long as the weather holds, those are fine to walk through. Some of them are huge. They used to have the same pipes for both systems in Sendai, but a few years ago they divided them up—must have been somebody's pet pork-barrel project."

  "That's the way the game's rigged," Aoyagi said, quoting Miura.

  "Exactly. Textbook case."

  "Are you saying 1 should use the pipes to get away? How would 1 get in? And where would they take me? How far do they go?"

  "They're usually about two meters in diameter, but the ones that big, that you can get through, don't go everywhere. The storm drains end up at the river, or a pumping station. They won't take you out of the city, or to another prefecture."

  "So what's the point if 1 can't get out of here?" he said.

  "Fair enough," said Hodogaya, "but they might come in handy at some

  THE INCIDENT

  point. You could do some flimflam—distract tliem over here while the real deal's over there. It's not a bad strategy. Duck down a manhole somewhere and pop up somewhere else. There are plenty of good routes here in town— I've figured them all out."

  "Do manholes open that easily?"

  "They're heaw, but if you can lift them, you can usually get in. It helps if you've got the special hook they use." Hodogaya flipped his hands to demonstrate using one of these openers. "The bigger trick is getting out—lifting a sixty-kilo weight, standing in a vertical shaft."

  Aoyagi tried to picture himself stopping on some street, producing the tool, and uncorking a manhole cover. "No, 1 don't think it would work," he said. "Too conspicuous."

  Hodogaya smiled, and there was something in the mischievous look that reminded him of Morita. "When we were making our plans, we got the idea of using fakes," he said.

  "Fake whats?"

  "Manhole covers," Hodogaya said. For a moment, Aoyagi had an image of tiny plastic manholes in a scale-model city. "They'd look just like the real thing, but much lighter. You could pop them right off. We thought we'd replace all the covers around the museum with fakes. That way, we could dive right in if we needed to."

  "You were going to switch them before you did the job?"

  "It would have attracted too much attention to spend time fooling with them in the middle of the getaway. It pays to do a little legwork beforehand, when no one would notice."

  "But I'm afraid 1 don't see how any of this is going to helj) with my situation."

  "Just, if you think you might want to go underground for a while, you could give me a call." He might have been inviting him to go tlrinking. From somewhere, he produced the paper in which the grilled meat had been wrapped, turned it (jver, and wrote down his j)hone number. Fhen he lokied it and handed it to Aoyagi. "Unless it's raining. You don't want to be down there when a storm comes through. . . . So, what are you going to do now?" he said alter a moment.

  "The First thing is to get out ol here. I've got the Ciir I came in." T hen lu* remembered the scene he'd lelt a short while ago in room S()2: .1 liteless iiKin

  REMOTE CONTROL

  in a pool of blood on the bed and Miura, eyes half open, slumped by the window. He considered telling Hodogaya about the bodies, but decided it might hold him up.

  "C^kay, then," said Hodogaya, dropping his cast-encased legs to the floor. "I'll see you as far as the parking lot."

  "Broken legs and all?" said Aoyagi.

  "Hurts like hell." He made a mock grimace. Outside the door, he stopped. "I'll show you the route 1 use when I need to get out for a breather." He set off, and Aoyagi saw little choice but to follow him. They took a freight elevator to the ground floor and made their way down a narrow service corridor. There was no sign of the people who had been after him before he ran into Hodogaya—maybe they'd given up and moved on.

  The sleepy-looking woman behind the securit
y desk peered at them as they passed, but when Hodogaya nodded politely, she waved them on like a health-room nurse indulging two naughty boys. As they emerged from the building, Aoyagi realized it was already evening.

  "Listen," said Hodogaya, his tone serious for almost the first time since they'd met. "If you're going to get yourself arrested, make sure it happens with lots of TV cameras and witnesses around."

  "So you can watch?"

  "So the police can't shoot you while nobody's looking." There was something unreal about the idea—even though they had tried more than once already. "I believe you when you say you didn't do it, but they're after you and they'd like to nail you for the assassination. And the easiest way to do that is to have you gunned down in the confusion of an arrest." He held out one of his crutches and pretended to fire it. "Dead men don't testify. Case closed. So when you show yourself, do it in front of the whole country—they can't start shooting on live TV without some sort of consequences."

  Aoyagi recalled the moment at the apartment complex with Iwasaki as his bogus hostage. The police had hesitated to open fire—perhaps because of the crowd gathered on the balconies. If they hadn't been there, Aoyagi thought, they would have shot him, even if it had meant killing Iwasaki, too.

  T he car came into sight. "I'm fucked, aren't I?" he said.

  "Looks that way," said Hodogaya, leaning on his crutches and scratching his head.

  THE INCIDENT

  h

  Haruko Higuchi

  Haruko decided to walk home from the cafe where she had met Akira and Masakado—and Mamoru Kondo and company. The shopping arcades in the center of town were crowded, as though no one remembered what had happened in Sendai the day before; but the crime scene had been cordoned off and stern-faced policemen were standing guard. A closer look at the crowd revealed a number of men hurrying here and there—reporters and cameramen who had been hastily dispatched by the national media—and quite a few shops were shuttered, perhaps to avoid the confusion.

  She made her way north, keeping off the biggest streets. When she came to a pedestrian underpass, she would have gone down if she hadn't noticed a crowd of kids hanging out on the stairs. They had on gaudy jackets or baggy suits with shiny shirts open at the chest, and they seemed to be leering at her.

  Telling herself she was imagining things, she forced herself to walk past the group and down the stairs, but as she went through the tunnel, the sound of her own footsteps seemed to follow her and she quickened her pace until she was almost running. She hew up the stairs on the other side and then stopped for a moment, hands on her hips, to catch her breath. It was getting dark, and she had the strange feeling the sky was growing blacker with every breath she took.

  "What? T he police just came to get her." Her neiglil)or, Yaeko Mocliizuki, was uncharacteristically agitated when Haruko arrived to retrieve Nanami. As she stood in the doorway, she could feel the color draining from her face, and in resp(Hise, Yaeko, too, went pale, |)erhaj)s realizing she'd made a mistake. "They showed their badges. Surely . . . ," her voice trailed off.

  "I'm sure it was the j)olice," Haruko said, casting a glance down the passage. That was the pro[)lem. "How long ago did they leave?"

  "Just a minute ag(x You might have |)assed them."

  "1 didn't see anyone."

  "hut they just IcTt. T here were two ol them, they said you'd been injured." Yaeko was dearly mortilied, and was making no e.xt uses lor hersell.

  REMOTE CONTROL

  Haruko turned without another word and ran back down the way she'd come. She could see that the elevator was on the ground floor, so she sprinted down the spiral staircase that served as a fire escape. It was only two flights, but she nearly fell several times as she charged down, hands clutching the railing. If anything happens to Nanami . . . , she repeated to herself—not sure what came next. She missed the edge of a stair and slipped, landing on her bottom. Her hip hurt and her head was spinning. When she reached the ground floor, she ran out to the building entrance and there in front was the black-and-white shape of a police cruiser and several officers in uniform. A telephone pole and a fence obstructed her view as she looked frantically for Nanami.

  She ran out to the car and found two officers facing a woman with short hair in a ratty pink jacket—Kazu's girlfriend. Ami Tsuruta, she realized after a moment. Hiding behind her legs was her little boy, Tatsumi. Nanami was standing next to him.

  She called her daughter's name and ran to her. The policemen turned to look at her, and Ami's expression relaxed visibly. "Mrs. Higuchi!"

  "Haruko Higuchi?" one of the officers said.

  "Who gave you permission to take my daughter?" Her breath was ragged and the question came out louder than she'd intended. "How dare you tell her I was injured! Who do you think you are?"

  "We never said you were injured," she was told. Liar! Haruko thought to herself. "But we believe there is a good possibility that Aoyagi will try to contact you."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "And we were concerned for your daughter's safety if he did show up here."

  "How can you stand there and just lie through your teeth?" she hissed. Her back and ankles throbbed from the fall on the stairs. "I don't know where Aoyagi is or what he's doing, but I'm more afraid of you than I am of him." The policemen stared, their faces expressionless, as Nanami slipped over and stood next to her.

  "We were coming to see you," said Ami, speaking more quickly than usual. "And then these men came out with Nanami. I asked them what they were doing, but they wouldn't tell me."

  THE INCIDENT

  ''Scary men!" said Tatsumi, pointing at them. He seemed frightened but angry at the same time. Nanami was clutching Haruko's belt.

  "Were you just planning to walk off with her?" she said.

  "We were protecting her from Aoyagi," one of them informed her, completely unperturbed.

  "Taking her into protective custody," said the other. "Which we would like to do for you, too."

  Haruko could feel a sick rage welling up inside her, but she knew it wasn't wise to take on the police.

  "No thank you," she said, as calmly as she could.

  "You don't seem to understand. We're not asking you."

  "1 haven't seen Aoyagi in years," Haruko said. "This has nothing to do with me."

  "You say that now, but if he comes to find you and you've rejected our offer, there would be nothing we could do for you." This sounded like a veiled threat.

  "I'll call if 1 need you," she told them.

  "1 want to go," said Tatsumi, tugging at his mother's skirt. "Scary men!"

  "1 agree," said Ami. "Let's go." Haruko nodded.

  "Hold on," said one of the policemen. His tone was sharp, more "You're under arrest" than "We serve and protect."

  "Why were they trying to take her?" Ami's eyes met Haruko's in the rearview mirror as she gripped the wheel of her station wagon. T he hack seat was roomy, even with Tatsumi in his car seat and Nanami next to him. T he children were already playing quietly, as though the exchange with the [policemen had never hajPjpened.

  "They seem to think I'm going to do something stujpid, so they want to lock me away where they can keej) an eye on me." If they could get Nanami, they knew her mcpther would he close behind.

  "Scjmething stu|)id?"

  "Try t(p help Aoyagi."

  "Hut how would y(pu do that?"

  "I've been trying any way I can." Ami laughed as she drove on dowti the street. Kach time they turned a corner, H.nuko looked hack to see whether

  REMOTE CONTROL

  anyone was following. "Thanks for stopping them from taking Nanami/' she said. It must have cost Ami some effort to stand up to the police, a source of authority she would have accepted unquestioningly under normal circumstances.

  "He said you can't trust them," Ami said.

  "Who did?"

  "Kazu."

  "Really?" It was only then she thought of asking where they were going.

  "To the
hospital. He woke up a little while ago. That's why 1 came to get you."

  The hospital was quieter than it had been in the morning, with fewer outpatients wandering about, like a school after it had let out for the day. They used the rear door and got on the elevator. "They called to tell me he'd come to, so I came right over," said Ami. "1 think his parents should be getting here soon."

  When they reached Kazu's floor, they got off and went straight to his room. As Ami was about to open the door, a doctor appeared from inside. His hair was gray and thinning, and for some reason he had almost no eyebrows at all. His nose was delicate, with lines around his mouth. Haruko couldn't tell whether he struck her as competent or not.

  "How is he?" Ami asked him.

  "Stable," the doctor answered. His tone wasn't exactly warm, but compared to Kondo or the two men back at her apartment, he seemed at least to have blood flowing in his veins. "He's still weak, so you shouldn't tire him. We'll do more tests tomorrow." Haruko was standing behind Ami. She wanted to warn them that the police would show up to question Kazu as soon as they knew he was conscious.

  His head was still bandaged, and the swelling around his eyes had not gone down, but as soon as he caught sight of Haruko, he murmured her name.

  "It's good to see you," she said.

  "Good to see you," Nanami echoed.

  "L)o you remember me?" he asked her.

  "No," said Nanami cheerfully.

  Haruko bent over the bed and brought her face close to Kazu's. She had to

  THE INCIDENT

  keep herself from gasping at the cuts and bruises. "What did they do to you?" she whispered.

  "Don't worry about me. What are they doing to Aoyagi?"

  "They told me he did this to you."

  "That's what they're saying? It's scary how they can lie about things," he said. "Ami told me they haven't caught him yet."