by Peter Tasker
“This is going to sound a little strange, I know, but I’m a businessman in the global media industry. We’re thinking of recruiting a senior executive, and I’m running a background check on her personal history.”
“And you think I can help? Are you nuts? I’m just an insurance salesman.”
“Fifteen years ago, I believe you were friendly with a lady named Jenny Leung.”
“With who?”
“Perhaps you’ve forgotten. A lady you met at the Asian-American Friendship Foundation.”
A flicker of recognition passed across Andersen’s face. “You don’t mean Chen Leung, do you?”
Chen Leung—that was the name used in Patel’s file. Mark nodded. “These [206] days she calls herself Jenny. Have you heard from her recently?”
“No, I haven’t heard anything since then. Wait a moment—you’re not telling me Chen Leung’s a high-flying media executive?”
Now there was a huge grin on Andersen’s face.
Mark gazed at him intently. “Does that sound strange to you?”
“Strange? It’s the craziest thing I ever heard! Chen Leung knew nothing about business. She was only interested in literature and writers.”
“Like Scott Fitzgerald?”
“Sure. Fitzgerald was her absolute favorite. She once told me that everything you need to know about America is in The Great Gatsby!”
The robotic politeness had gone, and for the first time Andersen was sounding like a living human being.
“You had some good times together.”
“Yes, we certainly did. Jeez, I was devastated when it ended.”
Andersen raised his hands to shoulder height, then let them fall.
“So why did it end?”
“It was the darndest thing,” sighed Andersen. “One day she just upped and left, cleared her room without a word to anyone.”
Mark pursed his lips. “I see. And what kind of woman was she in those days?”
“Her personality? Kind of quiet, kind of funny. Very intelligent of course. And a great cook.”
Andersen was almost glowing with nostalgia. It was a shame to shake him out of it.
“I believe you two had a sexual relationship?”
“What kind of question is that, for God’s sake? You’ve really got a nerve coming in here, pretending to be interested in my house, and then asking these personal questions. Who the hell do you think you are, you English fuck!”
Mark held up his hands, palms forward. “Actually, I’m Australian,” he said mildly.
“Then go suck a kangaroo dick!”
“Hold on, hold on—it seems we’ve got a misunderstanding here. I’m not just pretending to be interested in this house. I really am interested. In my view, it’s definitely worth two-eighty.”
Mark opened his attaché case, took out five wads of banknotes, and laid them on the table. Andersen stared at them as if hypnotized.
“What do you want to know?” he mumbled.
“It’s a very personal question. You may not want to answer.”
“I’ll answer, goddammit.”
“Good. First of all, did you ever see Chen Leung without her clothes on?”
[207] “Of course I did. We were fucking for a year.” Andersen gave a nervous chuckle.
“Did you ever notice anything unusual on the inside of her left thigh, right at the top?”
“On the inside of the thigh? Like what?”
“Like a birthmark.”
Andersen closed his eyes for a moment, let some happy memories flicker through his mind.
“Chen Leung had no birthmark,” he said finally. “Her thighs were as smooth as satin, every part of them.”
Mark nodded. It was time to go. He had everything he needed. Ricky Patel’s suspicions, unlikely as they had seemed at first, had been totally confirmed.
At the door Andersen’s handshake was twice as strong as it had been when Mark arrived, and the tremble had gone from his voice. The evaporation of his credit card debt had done him a world of good.
“Thank you for your help,” said Mark politely.
“No problem. By the way, Chen Leung’s not in any trouble, is she?”
“Chen Leung? No, she’s doing just fine.”
Mark turned to the car, the smile withering on his face. He hoped Andersen never found out what had really happened to Chen Leung.
“Good result?” asked Ricky Patel as Mark slid into the passenger seat.
“Excellent result,” said Mark grimly. “Now I’ve got another job for you, not a very pleasant one I’m afraid.”
“They rarely are,” sighed Patel, swinging the big car out into the road.
EIGHTEEN
From the outside it looked like any other grimly functional apartment in a grimly functional tower block sprouting out of a grimly functional suburb on the edge of the giant city. There was a small window that had never been opened and never would be, a gray wall webbed with cracks, and a metal door with a heavy lock and a tiny nameplate in the middle. It was just the kind of place you would expect an unemployed cram school teacher to live. On the other side of that door, though, was something else entirely—a shrine to Tsuyoshi Nozawa.
Everywhere you looked in the tiny apartment you saw Nozawa. The walls were covered with Nozawa posters: Nozawa the bodybuilder, Nozawa in kabuki makeup, Nozawa straddling his 850cc Yamada Shogun. The bookcases were filled with Nozawa biographies, essays, memoirs, comic books, photo collections, and post-structuralist critical interpretations. The ashtrays, plates, cushions, towels, and lamp shades all bore his image. There were Nozawa dolls on the shelves, Nozawa shoehorns in the entrance hall, Nozawa wind chimes tinkling in the breeze of the electric fan.
Martine knelt at a low table in the center of the room sipping coffee from a Nozawa mug and nibbling at dried squid from a Nozawa bowl. On the other side of the table sat a man who didn’t look like Nozawa at all. Ken Tabuchi was stubby-legged and heavy-hipped, with a broad, shiny face. Apart from being an unemployed teacher, he was the chairman of the unofficial Nozawa fan club, operator of the most popular Nozawa website, and editor of a long-running monthly magazine dedicated to the words and deeds of Tsuyoshi Nozawa. He had attended every Nozawa concert in the past decade, cataloged every song that Nozawa had ever sung, interviewed band members, recording engineers, even women who had slept with him once a quarter of a century ago. He owned tapes of the sixteen-year-old Nozawa strumming a [209] guitar at a school festival. He had copies of his first wife’s divorce filing. If Nozawa fans had the same ranking as judoka, Tabuchi would be a black-belt tenth dan, undefeated for his entire career.
Which was why Martine needed to talk to him. There was no person in the world—no family member, friend, or lover—who knew more about Nozawa than Tabuchi did. And nobody else enjoyed talking about Nozawa so much. You only had to prompt him, and out came a flood of information.
“You ask if Nozawa was sympathetic to student radicals? The answer is yes, of course. At that time nearly all musicians and writers supported them. The thinking was that these people might be extreme, but their hearts were pure. They were staking their lives for a better society, not for their own benefit.”
“Staking their lives? Nozawa uses that phrase a lot. ‘I want to be a burning dharma, I want to stake my life.’ Isn’t that how the song goes?”
Tabuchi’s eyes lit up. “You obviously know his music well. If you like, I can check how many times he’s used that phrase, when and where—whatever you want to know. My database contains all his songs and speeches, plus all the other information I’ve gathered about him too.”
Martine glanced at the personal computer on his desk. The screen-saver was a manga picture of Nozawa in ninja garb riding across the ocean on a giant turtle.
“That’s quite an achievement,” she said gently.
“Thank you, thank you. It’s my lifework, actually. There’s more and more information about Nozawa these days, but I gather up everything I can find and put
it all in there. My goal is to create a complete knowledge base. I want more information to be available about Nozawa than about any other human being who has ever lived.”
“Amazing.”
“You’re in there too, Meyer-san. You’ve had two face-to-face interviews with him and you’ve written about him in five different articles. Don’t think I don’t know! Don’t think you can escape me!”
Martine gave a feeble smile. Not long ago she would have found someone like Tabuchi amusing. Now she saw something frightening in his obsessiveness. He had such a weak attachment to reality, it wouldn’t take much for it to wither away completely.
“Now what were we talking about?” asked Tabuchi.
“We were talking about radical students. Was Nozawa just sympathetic to their cause, or did it go further than that? Did he give them any direct support?”
Tabuchi grinned delightedly. “Yes, yes! He denies it now, but I have the evidence.”
“Go on.”
[210] Tabuchi leaned forward and spoke in a conspiratorial half-whisper. “He participated in two fund-raising concerts in aid of the defense for some radicals who’d been arrested.”
“That’s interesting. And was he close to any of the radical leaders?”
“What leaders?”
“Well, Reiko Matsubara, for example?”
Tabuchi looked genuinely surprised. “Reiko Matsubara? That’s impossible.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course, I’m sure. I have a comprehensive record of Nozawa’s early years. I know the kind of people he met, the places he visited, even what he ate and drank. Friendly relations with a person like Reiko Matsubara certainly wouldn’t slip through my fingers. What a weird idea!”
Tabuchi was not used to having his knowledge questioned, and he didn’t like it. The respect that Martine had won by remembering the words to “Dharma on Fire” had evaporated. She decided to change the subject.
“Would it be possible for me to look at your database?”
“Of course. What would you like to know?”
“Hmmm ... could it tell me how many times Nozawa has played in a particular city?”
“That’s easy. What city do you want to try?”
“How about Nagasaki, for example?”
“No problem,” said Tabuchi, his mood lightening again.
They moved over to the computer, which was perched precariously on a trestle table loaded with bundles of Nozawa magazines and comic books. Tabuchi clicked on the rising sun motif on Nozawa’s headband. The speakers twanged out a familiar riff on the shamisen as the database menu appeared.
“Here we go,” said Tabuchi proudly. “Just type the question, double click here, and there’s the answer straightaway. All the concerts that Nozawa has ever played in Nagasaki, starting with his first national tour.”
Martine examined the list. In the early days Nozawa had played Nagasaki frequently, but over the past two decades hardly at all. That was strange, since it had become more accessible with the opening of the bullet train line. The year after the Atami incident, Nozawa had played there on three successive nights. For some reason, the third concert had a flashing red star next to it.
“What does that mean?” asked Martine, tapping the screen with her finger.
Tabuchi peered at the flashing red star. “I don’t remember exactly.”
“Can we check it?”
“It won’t be anything important.”
“I’d like to see, please.”
Tabuchi gave a grunt of annoyance and clicked on the star. Above it, a box appeared containing a few lines of text.
[211] “The third Nagasaki concert was cancelled at the last minute due to bad health. No further details were ever given. According to rumors, Nozawa was drinking heavily during this tour. Afterward he took a three-month break from professional activities.”
“So what exactly happened?” persisted Martine.
“How do you mean?”
“Come on—you must have a theory. What happened that night?”
Tabuchi shrugged. “Probably as it says—too much drink. The doctors were telling him to cool down.”
“That’s all?”
“It’s such a long time ago. What does it matter now, anyway?”
Tabuchi closed down the database. Martine sat down and drank the rest of her coffee in silence. It was that last remark, so utterly out of character, that convinced Martine he was lying.
The train back to central Tokyo was jam-packed. Martine had to stand the whole way, unable to move her arms or legs and barely able to breathe. She felt strangely weak, dizzy from the juddering of the train, tingling hot and cold with the blasts from the air-conditioner. Was the stress finally getting to her? Or maybe she was coming down with the mystery bug that was raging through western Japan. Fifty people had already died of it, half of them adults in the prime of life.
Martine closed her eyes and submitted to the rhythms of the train. She switched off her personal force field, merging into the crush of flesh around her. Some of her friends complained about sexual harassment, but at this level of human density how could you tell whether you were being harassed? Several times Martine had felt something hard pressing up against her buttocks, and craned around to see a housewife clutching an umbrella or a shopping bag. Once her own hand had gotten trapped against the groin of a long-haired male student. He’d kept on staring out the window, but the growing pressure against her fingers was unmistakable. In a situation like that, who was harassing who?
Forty minutes later the train pulled into Tokyo Station. Martine called Kyo-san from the platform.
“I won’t be back in the office this afternoon. There’s some research I need to do, and anyway I’m feeling really washed out.”
“Take care of yourself now. No sitting in front of a computer screen all day long. That’s no way to stay young and beautiful.”
Kyo-san sounded concerned, as well she might. Martine had never before taken any sick leave.
“Okay. Were there any important messages?”
“Not really. Though there was one from the complete shit.”
[212] Martine frowned. “James Murphy? What does he want now?”
“He’s coming to Japan in two weeks’ time, and he wants us to arrange interviews with major political figures and business leaders. He says he’s planning a special supplement on ‘the Japanese threat to global stability,’ focusing on the National Regeneration movement.”
“Oh really? And I suppose he wants a list of my contacts too.”
“That’s right. How did you know?”
“It figures,” said Martine grimly.
“So what do you want me to do?”
“Nothing. Just say I’m taking care of it personally.”
“I see,” said Kyo-san dubiously. “And what are you going to do?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
This latest example of Murphy’s deviousness was enough to banish Martine’s torpor. She walked briskly across the station concourse, lips squeezed tight, heels stabbing the concrete.
An hour later she was sitting in the National Library browsing through microfiche files of thirty-year-old regional newspapers. It was a slow, frustrating process. The records were in poor condition and badly cataloged. Not many regional newspapers had survived the crisis and few had survived the past thirty years without mergers, name changes, and long periods in which publication was suspended.
The Nagasaki News was in particularly bad shape. For the dates that interested Martine, half the pages were missing or too spoiled to read. In the case of the West Kyushu Times, the entire month’s worth of issues was missing. The only intact publication was the Nagasaki Weekly, a long-defunct English language paper. It was produced on a tiny print run for the foreign community, and the only space allotted to local news was a couple of paragraphs obviously translated from the local press by someone with a shaky command of English.
Martine glanced through the issue coveri
ng the week of Nozawa’s concerts. There was no mention of them, which was unsurprising. In those days Nozawa would have been an up-and-coming folk-rocker, hardly famous enough to compete with the local production of The Mousetrap or the recipe column.
There was just one item that caught Martine’s attention, no more than a few lines in the local news section.
Police still have no clues regarding the hit-and-run killing of twelve-year-old Junko Kawaguchi. A man was briefly held for questioning but not charged. Anyone in the area shortly after midnight on the 17th is requested to come forward and contact the police.
[213] Nozawa’s concert on the eighteenth was canceled at the last minute. In the early hours of the morning a twelve-year-old girl had died in a hit-and-run accident. Coincidence, or something more? Martine flashed back to Nozawa singing the “Lonesome Death of Mari-chan” in Shinjuku Park, his voice cracking up with the strain. She remembered the head of the unofficial Nozawa fan club, a man who had dedicated his entire life to gathering information about his hero, saying that whatever had happened in Nagasaki was too long ago to matter. Her reporter’s instincts were yelling out “no coincidence,” but her instincts were not enough. She needed a clincher. Where was she going to find it?
Martine called Saya. They arranged to meet in a manga coffee bar not far from the police station. Saya walked in wearing her cop face, tough and unimpressed. With her hair pulled back in a bun, she looked harder and sharper than usual. You wouldn’t want to be handcuffed by this woman. You wouldn’t want to be alone with her in the interrogation room.
“Thanks for coming out. You must be busy.”
Saya sat down at the table. “It’s the end of the month. We always get more customers after pay day.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Especially for robberies and rapes.”
“That’s interesting. Robberies I can understand, but why more rapes?”
“Use your imagination. It’s the time when men get drunk together and go to hostess bars and pink salons. Then maybe they don’t have quite enough money for what they want. So later on they’re walking home and they see some woman on her own and they decide to grab what they couldn’t pay for. It can’t be helped, I suppose.”