Loups-Garous

by Natsuhiko Kyogoku

  Shima’s voice, transformed into a signal and then reconstructed by Shizue’s monitor, lost most of its bite.

  “What are you saying I did? They died anyway.”

  “I’m in the same situation. Don’t lash out at me. But let’s talk about Nakamura.”

  “How can you be so calm at a time like this, Fuwa?” Shima sneered at Shizue.

  Shima wasn’t really sneering at her, she knew, but at the lens.

  “I’m not calm. But—”

  “You’re pissing me off. They’re going to call me in soon, so I’m turning this off now.”

  The image on Shizue’s screen disappeared, and the disconnect signal came up.

  “She’s really been through the ringer,” Kunugi said from behind the screen. “She’s closer in age to me, your cohort.”

  “Is she?”

  “What she feels about what’s happened is more important to her than what’s taking place right now. She basically understands that the world she controls is subjective, but that means she can’t see the other side. We were all like that when we were young.”

  “That’s a sort of truth, isn’t it?” Shizue answered. “I don’t fault it.”

  “Well, it isn’t bad. Just, it makes it impossible to lie. Your judgments are all subjective. To be honest with yourself involves a devotion to what others don’t know. Then the more others don’t know, the more you become indistinguishable from criminals. It’s a given that you can’t know exactly what someone else is thinking, so if you stop pretending to know, there’s no reason to ever lie. Then the foundation of society begins to crumble. You were raised in a world separated from that fundamental behavior.”

  “You make it sound like we’re bad people,” Shizue opined coolly.

  “Are you objecting? Objecting would be about as useful as that dust box on the monitor. It’s just about knowing whether there’s something of use in there. Well, it doesn’t matter,” Kunugi said and added after a thought, “No, I guess it does matter.”

  “It might be a serious problem. I say that, but then again most of the guys at the center of the police department are about my age,” he said. “The guys at the top of the prefectural police are probably about ten years older than me. I’m not saying they’re done for like I am, but it’s a troubled generation. We’re all being moved around to accounting or administration or office direction.

  “They probably decided about ten years ago that that was the way to go. You keep ascending the career ladder and there’s some old man squatting on the top seat, so the organizational flow has been bad. If you look at the numbers, there are a lot more people joining the senior population, so it’s inevitable. When you reach a certain age it only makes sense that you’ll get sent back to the bottom of the ladder, but to change every assignment…The elderly are smarter than that. It’s something to think about, a generation of people with the right to speak. It’s not like these young guys can just go in and take their places.”

  “Ishida’s still young.”

  “No way,” Kunugi said, sincerely doubtful. “Ishida’s about the same age I am. Maybe just a couple years off.”

  Interesting. Shizue thought Kunugi must have been about the age of her father. She didn’t think Ishida could possibly be the same age as Kunugi, but to be even within a handful of years of him was still unbelievable.

  “I thought Ishida was much younger.”

  “It’s because I look old.”

  “You look your age.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “Though I don’t remember ever telling you my actual age, ha!” Kunugi stood up. It was just an observation—couldn’t have been false flattery.

  Kunugi disinfected his hands with a cleaning solution and stood up by the drink dispenser, put down the rental cup he’d been fondling, and hunched over the touch-screen display.

  “I’ll help myself to another cup. That Ishida is one wise fellow. I mean it’s a career that dates back. He doesn’t talk about it that way now, so you wouldn’t know, right?”

  “I do get that sense. I’m not that young either.”

  Kunugi raised one eyebrow toward Shizue. He filled his cup with the flavonoid drink and walked over to the window. “Me and Lieutenant Ishida see, we’re from the same region. The east side, three sections away from here. So we’d never worked face to face, but I knew him by name. We’re both from a bygone generation. Still had schools. I was barely getting by, but he was top of his class. He was a real straight-A student. And it wasn’t just his grades. He was raised in a really cushy environment. From the starting line, there was no comparison.”

  “Cushy?”

  “Rich.” Kunugi savored his tea. “Ri’ichiro Ishida has noble ancestors.”

  He didn’t look like it.

  “He’s a direct descendant of the founder of SVC. He’s the son of the current chief or something. You remember SVC. I was talking about it over dinner that night. The whole bioengineered food industry? SVC is at the center of that whole industry.”

  “You mean that SVC?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know any other companies with the same name, but I’m sure it’s that one. They pioneered the whole man-made alimentation industry. They used to be called Suzuki Food Sciences.”

  She didn’t know about the original company name, but even Shizue had heard of SVC before.

  According to what Kunugi had been saying before, they had a vested interest in the execution of the complete crossover from organic to manmade foodstuffs.

  “Food ingredients were their main product, and they exchanged technology with foreign companies and were the first to come up with a good meat alternative to living animals. They were the first to push the export of food from Asia at the end of the twentieth century. It was established in 1975. It’s a long-established corporation.”

  Shizue didn’t think biotechnology dated back so far. When she voiced her doubt Kunugi shook his empty teacup. No no, it doesn’t.

  “It wasn’t called that,” he said. “But even the development of wheat grains is a sort of biotechnology, no? Humanity has always had a voracious appetite. As you can tell by the old name of the company, SVC has always been interested in producing food products. You know, when the company’s pioneers grew up after the war when food was scarce, food substitutes were really popular. Do you remember food substitutes?”

  Shizue had heard a lifetime’s worth of history of the war growing up, but surprisingly, this was the first she’d heard of substitute food products. There was no mention of the phrase in any of the published information about that period. Shizue’s generation had learned all about the country’s way of life at the time. International ethical issues and conceptual problems were important, so when it came to learning about the two world wars, Shizue had only learned to recognize the numerous examples of man’s inhumanity toward man in the past. These were especially terrible ones that had directly involved her country.

  “Well, there was such a thing,” Kunugi said. “At the time you could eat tuna without a thought. But then you couldn’t, and then we were eating shark the way we used to eat tuna, but if you think about it now it’s all screwy. Well, the idea was to make readily available foods seem like unavailable food. That was the source of this whole idea.”

  “To make sharklike tuna? That’s definitely screwy.”

  “Isn’t it, though?” Kunugi chuckled. “Well, SVC was concentrating on food products and never made a priority of medical products, so they escaped pretty much unscathed by the whole DNA information registry hoopla. And then other similar companies lost out their vested rights to that market. SVC stirred up their fighting spirit and vehemently opposed the regulation, you know. That was how SVC gained the trust of the industry and became the biggest player in the bioengineering game.

  “They got ahead by holding out,” Kunugi said. “At the end of the day it was a fish in troubled waters. I guess we don’t say that anymore though. The nuance is a little off. Anyway, they avoided direct attack, so they saw gre
at returns in the end. Whatever could fuse best with the existing system would win.”

  “You seem to know a lot about this.”

  “The SVC headquarters are right by where I was born. The company’s presence really brought up the standard of living out there. Seventy percent of the residents had been receiving some form of relief. My father worked there. So yeah, I know a lot about them. There was a monument to the founder, Yutaro Suzuki, built in front of the community center. So Ishida is a direct descendant of that guy. His mother was Suzuki’s granddaughter. Quite a little prince he was.”

  “And he became a cop?”

  “Strange, I know.” Kunugi looked out the window. “Well, inherited jobs are sort of rare nowadays, but who would have thought he’d go into the police force? He could just keep playing. Besides, there are so many other more relevant industries he could work in now. The area patrol out here are an enterprise of SVC.”

  “Is that so?” The area patrol was a unit of citizen volunteers that had formed fifteen years ago.

  At the time the area patrol unit was formed, the police force’s administration was undergoing changes, and the ubiquitization of security systems made single-handed police processing even more complicated. Eventually, the traffic, security, patrol, and crime prevention units were separated and turned into citizen initiatives, making them self-managed entities that developed into what they were today.

  The mother organization was still the old police unit that oversaw the breakoff, but they were managed by designated security companies in each area.

  “The company that manages the area patrol in this prefecture is D&S, right? The old company name was Ishida Security.”

  “Ishida?”

  “Exactly. It was founded by Lieutenant Ishida’s grandfather. The son of the founding Ishida got married to the daughter of the second-generation president of Suzuki Food Products. I don’t know which came first, but one of the companies got subsumed in the other and they merged to form D&S. There are other companies like this. Like that company I told you about before, Shikida Enterprises.”

  “Yes, and wasn’t one of the victims of last year’s serial killings employed by them?”

  “Yeah. That’s also a member of the SVC group. SVC has quite a reach here and going west. That’s why I figure it’d be even easier for Ishida to just take on a higher-up position in one of those companies. No need to go into the police force.”

  “But he’s supposed to be the region’s expert on bizarre murder crimes.”

  Shizue had heard that from a questionable source.

  Kunugi made a strange face. “What did you say?”

  “Is that incorrect?”

  “Not that it’s wrong—just who exactly told you that? It couldn’t have been Ishida himself.”

  “I think it was underground information,” Shizue said.

  “Underground, eh? Well, Ishida was definitely working in the bizarre crimes squad when the killing spree occurred last year. Before that…No, I can’t know without looking at my server. It’s unsolved anyway, so for the lead detective on the case to be suddenly replaced…I guess it’s not unheard of. His moves have all been deliberate and upward. He’s advanced very steadily.”

  “Without solving any of the crimes?”

  “If he’s advancing it must be for a reason, sure. It could be just that he’s economically endowed, or that he has some leverage with central administration, or that…If you started conjecturing it would never end, but there’s no doubting he’s a stand-up man with real qualities, and if you skim the cream from the crop, there really is no need for him to stay in the police.”

  This was true. There were plenty of better jobs for him.

  “But still…”

  Shizue understood what he was saying, but Kunugi himself shut his mouth and went quiet, like he’d suddenly run into a system error.

  “What’s the matter?” Shizue asked. Kunugi, this beat-up old failure of a cop, practically the opposite of Ishida, was gnashing his teeth. This is no good.

  “It’s nothing. Just…”

  Kunugi’s face became still and gazed at the empty cup.

  Shizue became aware of the fact that she was getting used to an existence divorced from normality. Perhaps she’d come across so many situations that ran counter to the law that she couldn’t help say things that she’d normally reject.

  No.

  This was all one big evasion of reality. She’d just completely stopped thinking about anything related to Yuji Nakamura or Yuko Yabe. That was why she was entertaining this useless conversation. She hated wasting her time, but every time she thought about doing anything related to the case, she’d make that horrible face she saw in the mirror that morning.

  “I can’t stay here forever.”

  Kunugi popped up and placed the used cup back in the holder.

  “If I get caught here it’s your job on the line too. I’m sure you’re in no state of mind to be making idle chitchat.”

  He wasn’t wrong, but…

  “You’re right, but you’re in the best place possible for hiding. The rooms can’t be viewed from the halls for the sake of the children’s privacy, and the sound protection is complete. The courtyard beyond the window is, as you know, off-limits. As long as there are no children in the room nothing will be recorded, and unless myself or a child inside the room makes an emergency call no one can open the door from the outside. The only drawback is how we’re going to get you out of here when I leave the office.”

  “The sensors turn on when the room is vacant. Then…”

  Kunugi looked at the ceiling. There were five cameras.

  “I should leave as soon as I can to avoid causing any more problems for you.”

  Kunugi took deliberate steps toward the door. “But I can’t check the area. I can’t see or hear what’s going on out there.”

  “That’s true. You could open the door into the hall and find people walking there…That would be bad.”

  “Yes, it would.” Kunugi stood motionless at the door.

  “You couldn’t just say I came in disguised as a cop and threatened you, could you?”

  “I couldn’t lie like that. Besides if I said that you’d be…”

  It wouldn’t just be that he’d be suspended. They’d send him to trial.

  “It’s not a lie, though.” Kunugi furrowed his brow. “It’s half true.”

  “I don’t remember being threatened.”

  “Even if you didn’t feel it, this is plenty threatening. I snuck into a no-entry area and illegally came in through your window. Besides, you shouldn’t worry about what happens to me. If I get caught anywhere in this neighborhood they’ll take my badge for good.”

  Kunugi extended his arm toward the door shield.

  “Wait. Even if you get into the hall, how do you plan on getting out of the building?”

  “I guess I can’t just go out.”

  No, you can’t. You can’t go out if there’s no record of you having gone in.

  “These past few days there have been several police officers and area patrols coming in and out, but even they have had to pass their IDs through.”

  “Of course. Even zero-year-old infants have to have ID. The only way to go in and out without an ID is to break your way through the glass doors. However, the glass is reinforced, so it’d be difficult to break with your bare hands.”

  “Yeah. Even if it weren’t reinforced, I couldn’t break it. Even if I broke it I doubt I’d get through it. I should just get caught.”

  “Get caught…”

  “On purpose,” Kunugi said. “I’m just going to cause you more trouble if I stay here.”

  “It won’t matter where you are. Be it at the front of the building or in my office, wherever you get caught they’ll ask how you got in. If you refuse to answer they’ll figure it out when they find that the only place where security was compromised was my office. They’ll suspect me of helping you anyway.”

  “In that c
ase, I’ll just go out through the yard. That’s where I was to begin with.”

  Kunugi went toward the window. “If I leave through here, it’ll be as if I was never here. I mean, unless you count the two cups of tea I had, but you could say you drank them.”

  “What about the sensor?”

  “Sensor? Well, there’s no limit to barriers on my way to freedom. I’m sure they’ll send someone to find me eventually, but out through the courtyard will be better than busting through a glass door. I don’t have any upper body strength, but I can run fast. Because I’m a coward.”

  “If you run at full speed at your age, you’ll get hurt.”

  “That’s age discrimination if I ever heard it,” Kunugi said. “Eh, I guess it’s okay because we’re talking privately.”

  “It’s also the truth. I’m just telling you as a cautionary measure. Even if you run, where would you run to?”

  “Where…”

  “You aren’t possibly thinking of going home and playing your old role-playing games, are you?”

  “Actually, that’s not a bad idea, but my server has been totally inactive for the past few days, so it’s highly likely someone’s there surveilling my house. With my monitor in the house but the house itself showing total vacancy, they’d know there’s trouble. Police officers are required to keep their monitors on them, even when on leave. Not that they’d be contacting me or anything. I’m not going to find a way out by being buttered up by your hospitality, and besides, I won’t get anything done just sitting around here.”

  “Does that mean you had something you wanted to do in the first place?”

  “I didn’t have a concrete mission or anything, but with Yuji Nakamura dead now too…I’m not satisfied just sitting around anymore,” Kunugi said in a low voice.

  “As if you were ever just sitting around,” Shizue said, as if she had been either.

  “This latest theory that the undocumented resident is the culprit doesn’t sit well with me.”

  “It might have some validity though. It’s questionable where the police got their information, but if the lieutenant is spouting it, it’s possible it’s true. However, if this girl and this undocumented pharmacy her family runs are the supposed criminals, the police can’t say Rey Mao did everything herself. If there were an unknown partner…”