Immediately, Aoki knew what was going to happen.
~ * ~
The range was in a closed-off section of the basement. The sergeant-instructor normally put police through the periodic drills required by the regulations, something of a formality for an officer of Aoki’s experience and proven marksmanship. The inspector’s face had turned as hard as stone. Nothing is normal about my life now, he thought. Or this occasion.
“I’ll take the opportunity to fire a bracket,” the superintendent said. He gave a thin smile. “This is a new gun.” He drew out a shiny bluish pistol, put on ear protectors, took up the firing stance, and gazed at the target down the range—a man’s head and torso. “Six rounds each,” he said. “We’ll have a little bet. Ten thousand to the highest score.”
The sergeant stood back watching with a dour expression, a small box of ammunition in hand.
Aoki’s heart was beating faster, but he felt strong and alert, and his fingers around the butt of his own pistol were cool and nimble. How is he going to do it? Or is it “they”? But the sergeant had no weapon.
Rapidly the superintendent fired his bracket. They each removed the ear protectors; the air reverberated in hard waves in the concrete chamber. Two of the shots had hit outside the central zone. “Not bad, but I think my old gun’s better.” He turned to the sergeant. “Go and get my old one, will you? I want to try it again.” He glanced down at the cleaning materials spread out on a bench. “While you’re at it, I’ll clean this one. Leave that box.” He took the box of ammunition and carelessly shook rounds out onto the bench, sending them rolling. “Load up,” he said to Aoki. “Six rounds only, mind you. This is for big money, but I know you are a very trustworthy fellow, and quite happy to lose your dough.“ He grimaced again.
But not my life, Aoki breathed.
When the sergeant had gone back into another room and they could hear the distant clash of unlocking, the superintendent, ignoring the cleaning materials, reloaded his magazine and reinserted it into the pistol. In Aoki’s ears, the click sounded like a thunderclap.
Aoki had also carefully loaded. “Fire when you’re ready,” Watanabe said. Any moment now, Aoki thought. This was the only certain way out for the superintendent. He adjusted the ear protectors. His brain felt absolutely cool, his nerves steady. He adopted the stance and began to fire. “One-two-three-four-five-six!” the superintendent shouted. He peered down the range. “Not bad at all. Better than me.”
Yes, I’m better than you, Aoki thought. He was standing in line with the target on the extreme right, five paces from his boss.
“Well, I owe you ten thousand.” Watanabe raised his pistol and sighted it down the range. “This one is really not up to it, doesn’t feel right in the hand.” He shifted the barrel to sight quickly on a lightbulb, then to a sign on the brick wall prohibiting smoking; then with greatly increased speed he swung it to Aoki.
Aoki was dropping to his knees as Watanabe went into his last pivot, and the bullet passed a fraction above his head. At the same instant, he brought up his weapon and shot the superintendent through the heart with the seventh bullet in the magazine.
The sergeant came running back, horror flooding his face when he saw the debacle. Blood was welling up through the yellow tie. Aoki was getting up. His legs felt unreliable, and now his hands were numb. In a daze, he stared at his dying boss. No one in my situation is totally trustworthy, and he should’ve known that better than most. His daze was giving way to anger and helplessness. He’d taken a one-way road, with no turnoffs. Yet it had solved the problem he’d walked into headquarters with. Now he was in excrement of a different texture. Though it’d been self-defense, if anyone would believe him.
~ * ~
The DG’s face was flushed as though with alcohol, and his hands were shaking. Calmly Aoki had explained what the superintendent had done in the firing range. They’d already found the bullet in the wall that had been behind Aoki’s head. Detectives from the internal affairs department sat on either side of him. Of course, they’d taken away his pistol again.
The sergeant-instructor’s shock had abated. Now he was dour and uneasy. He’d reported that when the last two shots had been fired, he was out of the room, but he knew the superintendent had fired first; he’d recognized his new weapon’s distinct sound. Aoki had glanced at him with gratitude, regretting his earlier doubt.
“But why?” the DG said harshly. He hissed through his teeth. “What is going on? You’d better come clean, Inspector, and fast.”
Aoki flexed his shoulders and tightened his lips, feeling as though he were about to step off a high building into thin air. “Sir, Superintendent Watanabe was in Governor Tamaki’s pocket—also, I have little doubt, in the pocket of the yakuza. But maybe the last was indirect, the connection through Tamaki.”
The director general fell back in his high-backed chair, incredulous. He was having trouble breathing. He twisted his head from side to side as if to get free of a tight collar. Aoki went on, respectful yet forceful: Revealing Watanabe’s membership in the Fatman’s Club and how he’d long concealed his classmate relationship with the politician; Tamaki’s and the superintendent’s fears that, despite the official abandonment of the investigation into the Fatman’s corrupt activities, at some point, Aoki might take it up again—that, in his nerve-damaged state after his wife’s suicide, he was unpredictable and might even come after the Fatman.
He lowered his eyes as he said the last. It was strange hearing his voice stating what was now rock-hard in his mind.
“The hell you would!” The DG’s voice shook like his hands. “What evidence have you got—and why were you at that damned ryokan? Why didn’t I know about that?” He was shouting, half up from his chair.
Aoki played his high card. “Because the superintendent insisted I go there. His story was that it was for my further rehabilitation. He made the reservation, got the train tickets.” He brought out the piece of paper with Watanabe’s handwritten travel details. The DG snatched it and scanned it. Again he sat back heavily, making his chair creak. His eyes turned thoughtful. Aoki surmised that he might be now considering the ryokan’s link with the seven-year-old case of Madam Ito. Finally, he’d decided that his lips were sealed on that. He said, “Last spring Governor Tamaki and the superintendent visited the ryokan together—with the other classmate members of the Fatman’s Club. There’s proof of that.”
The director general grimaced. He was studying Aoki’s broad, balding forehead with its short, spiky hair, the nasty wound. What he was thinking was that despite his breakdown this fellow was a tough and competent officer. That had come to his notice during the Tamaki investigation. The superintendent had been playing with fire.
The senior police flanking Aoki sat stolid and silent, waiting for orders.
Aoki said, driving home a nail, “I was added to the yakuza death list. Tamaki, through his connections with them, and via the superintendent, had attached me to the gangsters’ agenda for Ito and Yamazaki.” He added, deadpan, “I imagine the yakuza are always happy to accommodate the ex-governor.” The DG continued to gaze at him, then shook his head—whether in doubt at all or some of this, or in despair at the horrendous public relations implications, Aoki couldn’t tell. He said, “When I turned up alive, Superintendent Watanabe had to do the job himself. He did try to kill me downstairs. “
“Ito and Yamazaki,” the DG said, twisting his neck afresh. “For those two, shit’s going to come down on us from all quarters. All quarters. What about their killer—or killers? This Saito, this Hatano?” He already had his own ideas about Saito. A file on the man’s identity had arrived on his desk within the last hour. Twelve possible names had been put before him, and this Saito under whatever name might not be among them.
Aoki hesitated. “He’s a big fish in that pool. Obviously he’s been around, but not out in the open. He might even be a daimyo who likes to keep his hand in at killing, to exact retribution.” Yes, he thought, that’s part
of the weirdness. “The prominence of those two gentlemen might’ve been a magnet to him. I haven’t got a line on his connection with Hatano.” He shrugged. At this point, he didn’t go into the weirdness—the tricky ingredients such as Zen mottoes and missing body parts, the setting and the drama of Kabuki. Maybe that would come out, maybe it wouldn’t, when he wrote his report—none of it was straight in his head yet—or when the prefecture police wrote theirs, though the Hokkaido cops wouldn’t find it an easy task extracting information from Kazu Hatano.
The director general’s eyes clouded with doubt at the daimyo proposition. In his experience, a top-level yakuza, once he’d achieved that status, didn’t step into a danger zone. He dropped his hands on the desk. Abruptly he raised them again and stared at the palms. Frowning heavily, he studied them, as though trying to read something there. They no longer shook. Aoki and the others watched him. The sweep hand on the wall clock completed a circuit and a half. The DG raised his eyes and put his hands flat on the desk.
“All right, Inspector, you’re suspended from duty until our colleagues here complete an investigation into this accident.” He looked hard at the two officers. “Two days, at most.”
Aoki’s face was expressionless. “Accident while cleaning his weapon” was probably how Watanabe would have played his demise; now, apparently, the superintendent was to be slotted into the victim role.
The DG waved them out. “Go home and write up a report on this debacle, and one on the events at this ryokan. Get them to me by noon tomorrow. I want you back on the case, Inspector Aoki. So stay available.”
Aoki walked out of headquarters into cold air. The sweat in his armpits was beginning to dry. Two and a half hours ago, when he’d entered the building, he had no idea of what would happen. Now that tenuous future was the ironclad past. He paused to light a cigarette, setting down his suitcase and the cardboard carton. Traffic clogged the streets; a galaxy of lights blazed at his eyes, and music blasted his eardrums. Standing there, his eyes dull, he marveled at how Watanabe had established his “insanity,” waiting for an opportunity to sink him. But the superintendent was the one who’d been sunk. It made him feel a little better about the world.
Aoki drew on the cigarette and remembered that he had an apartment to go to in Kamakura, which was a long way from the Kamakura Inn. “Okay. Let’s go home,” he said to Tokie’s orphans.
~ * ~
Chapter Twenty-Three
THE NEXT DAY, AOKI SLOTTED himself back into the coffee shop-park-bar circuit. Had he ever left it? The ryokan and the events there had taken on the character of a dream, as he’d anticipated they might. Even Watanabe’s crumpled body on the firing range floor was unreal to him. The pragmatic, competent cop he’d been for so many years seemed to have stepped off the edge of the planet.
Last night he’d fallen into a sleep of exhaustion. This morning he’d done a report on the superintendent’s “accident” and sent it by messenger to the DG. He’d told it the way it was, so he didn’t know what the internal affairs guys could do with it. The other report could wait.
A newspaper was tucked under his arm as he walked to the park. He’d glanced at the front page. BANK CHAIRMAN AND MOF OFFICIAL FOUND MURDERED. Old news.
It was too cold to sit in the park, so he went to the coffee shop and drank two cups of the Colombian blend. On his skin, the Tokyo air felt moist and gritty; even amid Kamakura’s low hills and trees, the city’s concrete-cladness encased his flesh and blood. Brazen. Unbeatable. Aoki gave the scene a jaundiced eye and turned his mind away.
The first thing he’d done when he got home last night was open a beer. Dizzy with fatigue, in his overcoat, he’d sat in the freezing kitchen drinking from the can and thinking everything over. Violent death had been a constant in his working life. When you put on your coat and went home at night, you didn’t leave it behind; he never had. The recent mayhem was like a block of granite in his mind, yet he felt the ex-personalities of the dead, floating by as free as air currents.
Sipping coffee, he read the paper. The headline was predictable, the story short on detail; the police hadn’t released much. His name wasn’t mentioned—doubtless, the prefecture cops had received instructions, though it would come out in the end—but down a column his eye caught Tamaki’s.
The Diet banking committee chairman, Yukio Tamaki, expressed regret at the “tragic deaths of Mr. Ito and Mr. Yamazaki, two men who had figured large in the financial world.” The Diet member said the preliminary investigation into the affairs of the Tokyo Citizens Bank was completed, and his committee’s report had been submitted to the government. He said the reports of the bank’s yakuza connections had been exaggerated.
Aoki shook his head in mock wonder. Chairman Ito had been right: Tamaki was getting his spin onto the situation. He could see the Fatman’s adept liar’s face mouthing those phrases. Well, Ito wasn’t worrying about it anymore.
At noon, Inspector Aoki left the coffee shop and went along the street to the bar, ate a bowl of nuts, drank a bottle of Heineken, and thought about what to do. He lit up a cigarette. Saito had read in him the paranoia about Tamaki. Apart from studying the news clippings on him, the Go-playing bastard had been peering into his brain like a neurosurgeon. Or was it his soul?
Aoki studied his left hand. He’d removed the soiled dressing. The cut was red but healing. No stitches . . . The DG needed time to deal with Watanabe’s demise, and Aoki calculated he had a day or two of freedom, though what did that mean in his twisted life?
The bar was deserted. He glanced around, then out through the plate-glass window to the street, looking for watchers. No one in view. That was one thing that’d changed. His eyes hardened. When queried by the press on whether there was a connection between the murders and the bank’s disaster, Tamaki had said, “That is a question for the police.” Aoki drew the paper to him again and stared at these words. But the print faded, to be replaced in his mind’s eye by Saito’s sardonic face at the Go board, cold, obsessive, and bent on a massacre. The mocking voice . . . Despite what had passed between them, the man’s convoluted makeup and motives remained as obscure to Aoki as Mount Fuji on a pollution-saturated day.
Aoki gazed across the park. He looked over at the underemployed bartender. He stood up, shrugged himself into his overcoat, paid the bill, and left, walking fast.
His father had kept his small room immaculate. Aoki had only been in it once, when he looked through his father’s things after he died, but he remembered the filed and annotated records.
He found the card quickly, a calendar for the previous year’s schedule of major Go competitions. October 26-30, Osaka. The competitions must be held at a similar time each year. He slipped the card back into its file.
In the room’s tiny alcove was a scroll of calligraphy. Aoki hadn’t taken any notice of it before, but now such things had entered his life. Laboriously, he read:
I wondered and wondered when she would come.
And now we are together.
What thoughts need I have?
—RYOKAN
Aoki nodded his head slowly. He inspected his father’s small family shrine mounted on the wall, looked at the photographs of his grandfather and great-grandfather, and went out to the living room and sat down.
Tokie and his father had followed him back from the ryokan. He felt them close. He glanced up at a scroll of his wife’s calligraphy. Had she completed that early one morning, the sun warm on her face, while he was in the train going to the CIB in Tokyo?
Aoki gasped and broke into a flood of tears. After a while, he dried off his face with a handkerchief. “Ridiculous!“ he told himself.
It’s all right, Tokie said.
Of course it is, added his father.
They were back!
Aoki washed his face and ran his fingers through his sparse hair to neaten it. He stood there watching himself in the mirror, regaining control. He must get moving. Another idea had come to him. He fetched his overcoat, picked
up his cell phone, which he’d recharged overnight—a further step back into the real world—let himself out of the flat, and took the train into the Ginza.
On the train his phone rang. He frowned with surprise and got it out. The director general said in his ear, “As of now, you’re back on duty. Report to Superintendent Motono. He’s heading up the team on the ryokan murders. And Inspector, keep your mouth shut about the shooting range. We’re still working on that.” The terse call terminated as abruptly as it had begun. Aoki slipped the phone into his pocket. Who would he tell?
From the station he made a call standing in a doorway in the concourse. He waited while they looked for the man and got him on the line.
An hour later Aoki arrived at the Marunouchi coffee shop and ordered a hamburger with french fries. He wolfed it down and was wiping his mouth with a paper napkin when a lanky, bespectacled man in a rumpled suit entered and looked around. Aoki stood up and beckoned. The man came over. They bowed to each other. It had been a couple of years since the journalist had interviewed Aoki about the big arson fraud. Since then Aoki’s personal disasters had been in public view. Recognition of that was on the Tokyo Shimbun crime reporter’s face as he sat down opposite the detective. Aoki thought he also read poor Kimura in his eyes. An ex-colleague. And: How have you survived? His name was Minami.
Kamakura Inn Page 21