I raised my eyebrows at man. “So, what do you think? Off the record, of course.”
“You listen to records? CDs also?”
I guessed that my Western metaphor just didn’t translate. “I’ll keep it a secret.”
“Of course. We’ll keep everything that happens between us very, very private. Let’s go, neh? I’ll pay your drinks bill.”
Things were going from bad to worse much faster than I’d imagined, thanks to my euphemistic language. But I couldn’t stop now. I would have to use euphemism to get me out of a tight situation.
“Ojisan,” I said to him, deliberately using the term that meant “grandfather,” even though he was probably only twenty years older than I, “Please. I come to you only with a question about business, a question to which you may not even have the answer.”
“You want to talk business.” His smile faded. “Ah, that’s why Tanaka-san sent you. You’re trying to get in, aren’t you? I know girls these days are trying all kinds of things.”
“No, I come on my own. I want to know if this symbol is known in your business.”
He laughed gently. “Of course not. We have a symbol that fits our work much better than some planet, or is it a pancake?”
“I’m afraid… I’m afraid I don’t know your symbol.”
“But it’s Tanaka-san’s business. He’s our supervisor.” Finally Gold Tooth looked a little suspicious.
“Why don’t you draw it for me?” I pulled out a pen that I’d stashed in my tight-fitting bikini top.
Gold Tooth goggled at that move, but it must have worked because he set pen to napkin immediately. He made a simple drawing of a cat holding a kitten between her teeth.
“That looks like… the symbol for a well-known package delivery service.”
“That’s right! We deliver packages six days a week. Today is our day off.”
I stared at him. “You mean… package delivery is your line of work?”
“It’s a tough job, eh?” He laughed.
“You work for a regular company, then.”
“Of course! We make good money. In fact, my friend and I have a rental house just down the beach. I’d like to show you.”
“No, thank you. I’m a little bit busy,” I said, giving his hand a little pat before I removed it. Where his hand had gripped me, a thin film of sweat remained. I wanted to cleanse myself.
“Why so cold?” Gold Tooth demanded.
“Um, would you believe me if I confessed this was a case of mistaken identity?”
“Sure. Reiko-san, I will be on the beach all day if you change your mind about taking a little rest with me. You are too confused. You do not know what is good for you.”
“Well, like I said, I’ve got to take a quick dip before leaving. Sayonara!” I went back to my table and placed a thousand-yen note under my empty glass. Then, trying to look casual, I headed straight for the ocean. The sand was hot, so I ran to the water, thinking over and over again what an idiot I was to mistake deliverymen for criminals.
I walked into the water with pleasure; Hayama’s bay was much warmer than the Pacific I’d grown up with, as well as much calmer. There was no lifeguard here, nor were there any buoys marking off a safe swimming area. It was too placid for all that. Wasn’t Lake Hayama the nickname foreigners gave it?
I splashed myself once I reached thigh level and could wash off Gold Tooth’s lascivious handprints. I stretched onto my side and side-stroked into deeper water, then flipped onto my back. From time to time, a wave would come and I would ride it. This was as far as I wanted to go when it came to surfing.
I wondered if Takeo would join me. He had worn swimming trunks. Maybe he was staying back because he didn’t want Gold Tooth and his colleague to know that we were connected. After all, he was not close enough to have heard Gold Tooth confess to being a deliveryman.
Ha. Takeo had talked up the beach as being ridden with gangsters; probably they were all just deliverymen and stereo salesmen, working-class guys trying to look good. I’d been such a fool to descend on those two men. I was only glad that Takeo’s sister hadn’t been around to witness the humiliating scene.
My ankle was tangled in a thick frond of seaweed. When a few kicks didn’t release it, I bobbed up to the surface to tread water and see if I could untangle myself. But my relaxed movement did no good. The hold on my ankle tightened. My body sank under the water.
Chapter Twenty-eight
I blubbered for help, making no sound and taking in a mouthful of water instead. I wasn’t a great swimmer, but I’d thought at least I had enough skill to tread water. Somehow that move had gone wrong; with my panicked kicking, I’d gotten a searing cramp in my foot. This was how people drowned. I opened my eyes in the murky water and couldn’t see anything. My head actually grazed the sandy bed; the water couldn’t be more than six feet deep. What a stupid place to drown.
I no longer thought that I’d been caught by seaweed. What was touching me had a hook, almost like an umbrella handle. Suddenly I flashed back to James Bond movies and criminals who had hooks for arms. Oh, God, I thought. Maybe it was the Sunglass Man, come back.
A human arm grazed my body. Please let it be another swimmer come to my rescue, and not the Sunglass Man shoving me to the bottom of the sea.
Two strong arms hauled me up suddenly, and my face was out of the water, with my feet on the ground. The place where we were was shallow: not six feet, as I’d first thought, but only four-and-a-half feet. At present, my feet were firmly on the sandy bottom and my head was above water. I coughed, not caring that my nose was running in front of a stranger, because I was so glad to be alive.
I wiped my eyes and opened them, looking straight into the face of a middle-aged man I’d never seen before. At least, I thought so. I pulled out the memory of the ephemeral Sunglass Man. He’d seemed younger than this fellow. I wasn’t sure.
I coughed violently, whipping my head around so that I could search for swimmers near enough to call to for help. Ten feet away were a couple of teenagers shooting each other with water guns. They had been having so much fun, they’d missed the fact that I’d almost drowned. I knew now that seaweed had not pulled me down; rather, it had been the curved rubber pipe of a snorkel. Now that the job was done, the man calmly slipped his snorkel in the side of his mouth.
“How are you?” he asked conversationally. It was like hearing someone talk with a cigar in his mouth.
“Fine!” I answered, though it was pretty obvious from my breathing I was not. I looked at him. He had flat, unhandsome features, narrow eyes, a chicken pox scar on his forehead. He was balding. This was no Kunio Takahashi, that was for sure.
He raised a hand over his eyes as a shield against the sun and looked straight at me. His gaze was chilling. “You asked the wrong fellows about business,” he said. “I can tell you what you need to know.”
He really was yakuza. Even though the hand over his eyes had all the fingers intact, I suddenly knew. The fact that he still had his pinky finger meant that he hadn’t been punished for making any mistakes.
I said, still spitting out some water, “I don’t think so. You’re more interested in hurting me than helping me.”
“I was simply trying to get your attention. At the bar you didn’t notice me.” The man spoke politely, with a faint accent from the Kansai region. He sounded very different from the delivery men I’d mistaken for gangsters.
“You almost killed me,” I said.
“No. My superiors have no interest in harming you.”
“Who hit me at the train station?”
“Not us. I repeat that I am here to help.”
I coughed out the last bit of water in my lungs and said, “I think that your help is designed to steer me away from the truth.”
“I give you my word that my organization had nothing to do with the death of Nicky Larsen,” the gangster continued in his unemotional tone. “If such an operation had been ordered, it would have been done correctly. T
he body would not have washed up on the shore of the Sumida River for a fisherman to discover.”
I could not fathom that I was having such a conversation with a balding man in the middle of Hayama Bay. I saw a wave coming—not huge, but big enough to move me away from this creep. As the wave came, I pointed my body in a straight line for the shore. The wave carried me twenty feet closer to shore. I touched ground and saw that the gangster had body-surfed alongside me. There was no escape.
“You were saying,” I said, pretending that I was completely calm and hadn’t tried to run away, “that when your organization works, bodies simply disappear. I wonder if that’s what happened to Nicky’s friend Kunio Takahashi.”
“Takahashi-san is a gifted man,” the gangster said. “In my boss’s opinion, he could someday be regarded as one of the nation’s living treasures. We wouldn’t want to lose him.”
“What do you mean, lose him? Is he …one of you?” I asked.
“No. I was speaking out of respect for his craft. He has many years of great artistic work ahead. But he is a poor young man without connections. We would certainly protect him if we could find him.”
Ah, here was the reason for making contact. Looking straight into his eyes, I said, “I don’t know where he is.”
“I know,” the gangster said, sounding weary. “I was at Bojo the evening you were talking with those college kids about your search to find Kunio Takahashi. I sensed that you were holding something back from them, so I borrowed the little book you were carrying to check your information. Nothing there but addresses of your relatives and friends.” He eyed me, and I got the underlying message: I know whom to hurt if you don’t cooperate.
“I’d appreciate having the address book back,” I said.
“Of course. I’ll return it later. I did not carry it into the water.”
“I want to ask you something. Were you watching me in the anime coffee shop?”
“No. What happened? If someone is bothering you, perhaps I can help.”
“You must be the craziest yakuza on the beach.” There—I’d used the word, and he seemed to smile at it. This man really was getting on my nerves. At times, he was distinctly threatening; at others, almost fatherly. I guess that’s why organized-crime groups were sometimes called families.
“I’m a forty-five-year-old typical Japanese.” The man raised his hands in a feigned gesture of helplessness. “I coach my son’s baseball team, I give money to a home for the aged, and I clean my neighborhood graveyard once a month. I ride in a Cadillac for work, but at home all I have is a Subaru Justy. We don’t all live like the guys in the movies.”
“I’m not interested in your lifestyle,” I said. “I want to know if there’s another organized-crime group that is responsible for Nicky Larsen’s death.”
“No,” he said flatly. “We made inquiries. That was not a professional job. That circle on Larsen’s forehead was the Mars Girl symbol. Nothing more.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see someone tall and slim wading out to us. I thought I recognized the shaggy hair, now wet and flat and plastered over much of his face.
“Your boyfriend’s swimming out here. I hope he’s not the nervous type,” the gangster said to me.
“Not really,” I said, my pulse starting to race.
“Be careful what you say to him about our encounter. I wouldn’t want him to believe that someone who came to help you had harmed you.”
“It’s not what I tell Takeo that you should worry about. It’s what I tell the readers of the Gaijin Times.”
A smile creased the gangster’s face. “We’re expecting some mention. That’s another reason why I’m here. You wanted information. We request that you share our message that we are not responsible for that pathetic little murder. Your magazine is small, but if you report my words, the news will be picked up and carried in all the Japanese papers.”
“How can I report your claim when I don’t know who you are?”
“They call me the Fish. I don’t have time to tell you more, and as you said, you aren’t interested in my lifestyle. Ask your police lieutenant about The Fish, if you like. I’m well known.” The man gave me a slight bow. Then he pulled his snorkel mask over his eyes and paddled off.
There was a slight stinging feeling on my upper thigh—a jellyfish sting, maybe. I ignored it and stared after the Fish, who was calmly moving through the waters, attracting no attention, a shark in the midst of unknowing bathers.
There was a great splashing sound as Takeo reached me.
“You’re okay!” he said, breathing hard. “I saw through my binoculars that you were struggling for a bit, but fortunately someone was out there to help you. Who was that good Samaritan?”
“I never learned his actual name.” What else could I say?
“Frankly, I’m surprised you went in that deep. You told me last time that you aren’t a strong swimmer.”
I looked at Takeo. He hadn’t realized that the man who’d saved me was the one who’d jerked me under the water. Something about the memory of the Fish’s cold eyes told me not to tell him, at least not yet. I smiled faintly and said, “I was only in four and a half feet of water. My problem was a cramped foot. I’m afraid it made me panic.”
“I see. Let’s walk in, then, quite slowly. Whatever made you run into the water like that, anyway? I thought you would tell me what your plans were after the interview.”
“I got a little overheated. And I didn’t want the guys in the bar to see me go straight to you—they were a little suspicious that we might be together,” I said.
“Oh, really! I can see why you did that. I would have come out after you immediately, but my sister showed up. When I saw that you were in jeopardy, I had to throw her off with an excuse about needing to cool off.”
We walked out onto the sand, and Takeo picked up his binoculars, safely wrapped in a towel on the sand. He put them to his eyes and scanned the beach.
“Those thugs you were talking to earlier are still at the bar. We should go straight back to the house, but let’s walk some distance apart, so they don’t know we’re together. When we’re home, I’d like to hear what they said.”
“Okay,” I agreed. I did want to walk alone, so I could go over in my mind how much I could tell him. I wanted to be honest, but there was no use in giving him more information than he needed. After having met the Fish, I was fairly certain that yakuza had not killed Nicky. That still didn’t explain the Fish’s interest in Kunio Takahashi. There was something there, some connection.
Chapter Twenty-nine
An hour later, I had washed off the salt water and changed into a favorite sundress, long and fairly modest except for the side slits. I sipped a glass of chilled barley tea, thinking I should be mellow, but I was still trying to decide how much to tell Takeo.
My first and most natural inclination was to tell him everything: to tell him that the two men I’d spoken to in bar were just deliverymen, but my conversation with them had been overheard by a gangster who pulled me underwater and then brought me to the surface, stating for the record that organized crime had had nothing to do with Nicky Larsen’s death.
The second idea was to let Takeo think that the two men I’d talked to in the bar had told me the same thing. I could communicate the truth while not mentioning the Fish, per his instructions.
I’d had a strange encounter, which I’d survived. I didn’t think I’d see the Fish again. I doubted I’d ever be able to recognize him with dry hair and a business suit. As far as I was concerned, the Fish was a shark who had circled me briefly and then departed forever.
The Fish was gone, and I was safely recuperating in the Kayamas’ beautiful garden of moss and stones. The house was high enough that one could see the water. The sides of the garden that edged other people’s property were guarded by ancient, sculptured bushes. The fact that one could sit here and see and hear nothing of others seemed like the ultimate luxury.
My meditation in
the silent garden was jarred by the sound of Natsumi Kayama’s voice. I turned to look through the window and saw her, rail-thin in a green one-piece suit, standing in front of her brother and demanding something. Money. She wanted to borrow fifteen thousand yen because the Korean barbecue restaurant where she was taking her friends did not accept credit cards.
“Remember, you still owe me forty thousand,” Takeo said. “From two weekends ago. You said it was a Russian restaurant that didn’t accept credit cards.”
“I’ll pay you back when I get to the cash machine and… oh, and I’ll pick up some of those croissants you like to have for breakfast tomorrow.”
“At a Korean barbecue restaurant?”
“No! I’ll make a side trip to that silly place you like.”
“Thanks.” Takeo sounded surprised. “Come back early tonight, okay?”
“Don’t tell me what to do. I’m two minutes older.” Natsumi laughed cheerfully as she left.
When Takeo came out, carrying his own glass of tea, he smiled at me.
“We have a nice, long evening ahead of us,” he murmured.
“But you told her to come home early.”
“I said it to make her annoyed enough to stay out really late. That’s how my sister reacts.”
“Ah. Reverse psychology, my father would say.”
Takeo pulled a teak chair next to the rock where I was sitting. He straddled it and leaned forward. “You haven’t told me much about your father.”
“He’s a psychiatrist with academic appointments and a busy side practice. I was lucky to see him one or two hours a day while I was growing up. Those hours were precious to me. I love him very much.”
“We don’t say love in my family.”
“That’s a shame.” I reached out and squeezed his hand. “I think that your father nevertheless has shown his respect and affection for you by giving you carte blanche with this house.”
The Floating Girl: A Rei Shimura Mystery (Rei Shimura Mystery #4) Page 21