"Does that mean something?” Kenji asked.
"It means that Tetsuo could have had a piece of paper with him—something he couldn't just leave at the scene. He tore a blank piece from it and wrote a note that would make it look like Nakamura had killed himself over his guilt from visiting the Floating World. It means,” I explained, “that if we could find the other half of that piece of paper, we'd know who killed Nakamura."
A low rumble shook the wooden floorboards and paper door, and the rest of the boys in the room got quiet. Slowly the thunder organized itself into an unmistakable cadence: boom-chi-chi-boom, boom-chi-chi-boom.
"The last of the first-year rooms,” Kenji whispered. “They're storming it tonight."
Boom-chi-chi-boom, boom-chi-chi-boom, the stomping and scraping grew louder as the mob reached the top of the steps and made its way down the long hall. A year ago, as new students, it was a sound that had struck fear into our hearts—another of Ichiko's violent rituals the teachers turned a blind eye to. Now a few of our roommates stripped down to their loincloths and took up kendo sticks, dashing into the hall to join the storm.
Kenji and I scrambled to the doorway. I shivered as a herd of wild boys dressed only in headbands and loincloths paraded down the hall, stamping and beating the walls as one. They paused when they reached the first-years’ door, one last delicious torture for the boys inside who trembled under their futons, then crashed through the paper door, whooping and hollering like monkeys. A hundred boys crammed their way into a room built for ten, smashing anything of value and beating senseless the quivering lumps huddled on the floor.
The storm destroyed everything in its path. It was the last rite of passage for first-years, the crucible that turned mama's boys into Ichiko men.
Shaking, I slid the door closed on the screams of the first-years. I had to find out who killed Nakamura, had to draw the line the headmaster refused to draw for us. If Independence Hall was a training ground for statehood, I would be the leader of its rebellion.
* * * *
You could tell which rooms belonged to first-years by their doors. The rice paper panels the administration installed each new school year were destroyed during the storms, and the boys were forced to repair them using the only paper they had left—old homework pages. I passed a first-year in bandages pasting his door back together after last night's storm, and it made me think of Nakamura's torn suicide note. It was ridiculous to think I would find the other half of that paper. In five, now six days, his killer would have had ample opportunity to destroy it.
At breakfast, the first-years sat huddled over their miso soup, praying, if they were anything like me last year, that no senior would suddenly take an interest in them. First-years in the dining hall weren't allowed to talk or look up from their food, and most certainly not allowed to ask for seconds. Nakamura had done all three with regularity.
Tetsuo was holding court at a table of seniors across the room. He caught me staring at him as I took my seat, and finished telling a joke that set his friends to laughing raucously. I bent low over my miso soup like a first-year, shunning the conversation of my roommates.
A bench screeched against the stone floor, and from the sound of his booming voice, I knew Tetsuo had stood up.
"This soup tastes like piss!"
There were happy shouts of encouragement from the senior tables. Everyone was watching Tetsuo now, either openly or surreptitiously, and begrudgingly I glanced over my shoulder to see what he was up to.
"What do you first-years think?” he said, striding over to their tables. He was baiting them, of course. If they spoke, he would punish them; if they didn't speak, he would declare it an insult and punish them anyway.
"I said, this soup tastes like piss,” he said, bending low to a first-year who was trying desperately to become part of the table. “Do you agree?"
There was no right answer, but it would be worse to say nothing. “N-no,” the boy said, almost so quietly we couldn't hear him.
"No? Here—” Tetsuo took the boy's bowl and, to the delight of his audience, pulled down his trousers and urinated in the boy's soup.
"There now,” he said, replacing the bowl. “Drink that and see if you don't agree."
I stood and left so I wouldn't have to see any more. I hoped my departure would be lost in the happy pandemonium of his stunt, but Tetsuo saw me and smiled at me all the way out of the dining hall.
* * * *
Tetsuo wasn't at baseball practice later that day, which was unusual. We had no coach like the American Meiji school did, so our practices were student-run. When Tetsuo was around, that meant they were Tetsuo-run. I regretted not being able to practice, but my arm was still in a sling and my ribs screamed angrily whenever I bent double. The boys looked like they were having the best practice ever, but I left them to their fun and headed back to Independence Hall.
There was a minor stir in the hall when I reached my floor. Most of the boys were at athletic practice, but the few who didn't play sports were gathered around one of the first-year rooms a few doors down. It was Nakamura's old room. Looking inside, I saw the place had been turned upside down and inside out. Papers were strewn across the floor, futons were ripped open, floorboards pulled from their nails.
"Another storm?” one of the boys asked me.
"No. The storms only come at night, when everyone is in their rooms.” I stepped inside. It looked like a storm had passed through, all right, but nothing was destroyed. Just tossed about as though someone had been looking for something.
If whatever he was looking for was here, the intruder had surely found it. Still, I poked about to see if I could get some clue to what he was searching for.
"Please tell me you did this,” came a voice from the door. Tetsuo.
I stood and turned. “You know I didn't."
"Do I?"
"I notice you weren't at baseball practice today."
"I was off campus, on official Mainstream Society business. I was investigating the brothel Nakamura visited most. Did you know that Nakamura wasn't going there to have sex? He was visiting his sister! Can you believe it? She wouldn't say much more. Someone's got her pretty scared."
I don't doubt it, I thought. And how convenient that Tetsuo could now claim to know everything from his “official investigation,” not because Nakamura had caught him in the act.
"I thought the matter of Nakamura was closed."
Tetsuo walked in the room and looked around. “Your ... comments made me reopen it."
I watched as he idly searched the room, pushing things around with his feet.
"Someone was looking for something,” Tetsuo said. “Do you think they found it?"
"You tell me."
Tetsuo smiled at me again, raising a spilled box of brushes with the end of his sandal to peek underneath.
"I've had enough of this farce,” I said, turning toward the door. “I know you—"
I stopped short, staring at the door.
"You know I what? Say it. You still think I killed Nakamura."
I bent low, looking at the papers the first-years in the room had used to repair the door after their storm five nights ago—the same night Nakamura was killed. None of the papers matched the torn piece from the suicide note—that one was gone. But here were more like it, no doubt, and all signed with the name of the killer.
* * * *
Kenji walked beside me in silent procession with the other boys as we made our way up the hill toward the baseball field for another clenched-fist ceremony, the second in a week. The lights were off in the faculty dorm, and a sickle moon hung low over the trees.
"Have you proven it was Tetsuo?” Kenji whispered.
I shook my head. “The night of the murder, Nakamura's dorm room was stormed. Tetsuo was there. He led the storm. Two boys have the broken arms and bruised kidneys to prove it."
"But if it wasn't Tetsuo—"
"Something else happened during the storm. When everything was sm
ashed and broken, a stack of letters Nakamura had been hiding were found and scattered all over the floor. No one read them, of course. They were too busy beating first-years with kendo sticks."
Kenji looked to the ground, but I knew he was still listening.
"They were love letters. From an Ichiko boy to Nakamura's sister. She must have given them to her brother. The next morning, when things were put right again, Nakamura's roommates didn't bother to read them either. They just used them like they used all the other papers that had been tossed around the room—to repair the door that had been smashed in the storm."
"On the door,” Kenji marveled.
"Yes. You tore the room apart today, looking for those letters, but the proof that you killed Nakamura has been right in front of everyone for four days."
Kenji glanced around, looking for some avenue of escape in the throng of Ichiko boys.
"There is nowhere to go, Kenji."
He looked at me with pleading eyes, but I spoke first.
"He swapped shifts so he could talk to you that night, didn't he? And he brought one of the letters, to show you he had proof."
"He told me to stop seeing her. But how could I, Haruki? I love her! He attacked me. We fought. There was a knife on the counter, and—it was an accident. You have to understand—"
"But you covered it up. You dragged him out to the edge of the baseball field and made it look like seppuku. It was even easy to clean up, since you were already scrubbing the floors for kitchen duty. But you still needed a suicide note, so you tore a piece off the only paper you had—one of your own love letters. The other half, did I see you burn it? That night I went through the clenched fist?"
"Yes,” Kenji said quietly.
"You were the one who told the Mainstream Society I sneaked out to see a girl, weren't you? You were the reason I went through the clenched fist."
"Oh, Haruki. I'm so sorry. You were getting so close. I thought it would make you stop asking questions, but I never expected—” Kenji turned away at the sight of my black and blue face.
"In the end, Kenji, there is only the proof that you were having an affair. I cannot prove that you killed anyone. But I know. And so do all the other students."
Kenji glanced about madly, but his classmates’ faces betrayed no emotion. He clung to me again.
"I love her, Haruki. I would go through a hundred clenched fists for her. A thousand!"
"You will only have to go through one,” I told him. We reached the baseball field, and a path opened for us to step inside the circle. Six hundred boys stood around the infield, staring at Kenji. All bravado aside, he clutched at my Ichiko jacket.
"For Gods’ sakes, Haruki! Tell them it was all a mistake! Tell them it was Tetsuo, or Moriyama—anybody! We've been best friends since middle school!"
I pushed him away.
"Why!?” he pleaded. “Why work so hard for Nakamura? He was a baka. He beat her, Haruki. He fought with everyone!"
How could I explain? How could I tell Kenji that Nakamura, for all his faults, was the only one to stand up to the insanity of Independence Hall? How could he understand that Nakamura was the only one with any courage, the only one who had given me hope? In his death, I had hoped to find Nakamura's ultimate revenge—an end to the system he had fought against so hard in the short time he had been here. Instead, he was killed for love, for passion—for the very things the Mainstream Society beat out of Ichiko boys.
Tetsuo was right. Girls were nothing but trouble.
"Kenji Takahashi, step forward!” Tetsuo cried.
"Why, Haruki? Why?” Kenji begged me one last time.
"To honor Ichiko and defend Japan,” I told him, and I turned away as arms and hands dragged him into the circle.
Copyright © 2007 Alan Gratz
[Back to Table of Contents]
TRUST ME by LOREN D. ESTLEMAN
"Every cockfight looks pretty much like all the rest, until you get to know it for the sport it is,” Jackie Brill said.
"Football's a sport,” I said, “and you don't have to watch a guy mop up blood and feathers at halftime."
"No, football's a game. Sport is life and death and taking risks."
"The roosters take the risks. I like my chickens flame broiled."
"Trust me on this. I've traveled enough in it to write a book on the subject, like that Irish guy that invented bullfighting. Hennessey."
I lost a beat, and two or three sentences of Jackie's high-octane pitch, before I realized he'd meant Hemingway. He was a drawn strip of forty-year-old jerky with shoulder-length dirty blond hair, a weatherstock mustache, and blue eyes pickled in scotch—the pizza delivery man in 1970s stag films—whose daily uniform only varied by which color of plaid flannel he wore over his jeans and black Surfaris T-shirt. He belonged to the fifth generation of a family whose fortune had built the Detroit Opera House, the public library on Woodward, and Joe Louis Arena.
His approaching me at Ford Field didn't increase my chances of making the Social Register that season; his relatives paid him to travel in circles other than theirs. I was only giving him time because I was stuck there until the parking lot cleared, and he'd come over to wait with me in the vacant seat next to mine.
When I'd heard enough about beaks dipped in poison and feed laced with antifreeze—the tricks of the cockfighting trade—I asked what he wanted. With the elaborate care of a proud father, he unshipped a crocodile wallet, stripped off the rubber band that kept it from falling apart, and handed me a Polaroid of the biggest, ugliest rooster this side of Lyle Lovett.
The bird stood straight as a reinforcing rod, glaring through chicken wire at the camera, with its head tilted like a boxer's and a blood-red comb that flopped to one side like Hitler's lock. It had a gorilla chest and railroad spikes for spurs.
I gave back the picture. “That's not a chicken. It's the love child of my ex-wife and a California condor. Just out of curiosity, who was on your lunchbox as a kid, Strangler Lewis?"
"I went to Grosse Pointe schools. My lunch was catered.” He admired the snapshot, then tucked it away carefully and returned it to his hip. “He's Prince Cortez, out of Montezuma III by Queen Isabella, whose father took top money at the world tournament in Tijuana three years ago. He's just a year old and undefeated in three matches. Think Mike Tyson at eighteen."
"How much you got down on him?"
"Betting's for rubes. I'm buying him outright: two thousand cash."
"He must be a hundred percent white meat."
"I told you, you don't understand the sport. One more win and the price goes to five."
"If he's that good, why's he for sale?"
"His owner's got INS on his neck; something about lying on his visa app about his connections with those Zapatistas a dozen or fifteen years back. He needs juice wherever he can squeeze it. He's overextended."
"So buy the bird. You make that much a week just by staying away from Symphony Hall."
"See, that's why I'm glad I bumped into you. He wouldn't sell Prince Cortez to me for ten grand. I need somebody to carry the pony down to Mexicantown and pick up the goods by proxy."
"What'd you do, sleep with his wife?"
"His daughter.” He broke eye contact. “Carmelita's a ripe little peach. I wasn't the first to pick her, but I was the one she expected to stick. When that didn't happen she went to the old man. So now Zorboron's prejudiced against my case."
"Tiger Zorboron?"
"El Tigredel Norte, they call him down in DelRay. His right name's Emiliano. That's like Mac in Mexican."
Jackie's local roots were showing. The old Hungarian section of town, once called DelRay, had been Mexicantown for years, attracting immigrants from south of the border to lay brick and pour mortar so their children could practice medicine and law. There was a gang element among them, of course, promising Old Country justice to new Americans and extracting tribute for the service. Emiliano Zorboron kept the tally.
I stood. The stands were still a quar
ter full, and the exits from the lot would be jammed tighter than Calcutta, but just then my car seemed a safer place to be. “Forget the prince, Jackie. You can mail order baby chicks by the crate for a lot less than two thousand. Try raising your own champ."
He slouched in his seat, thin as the slats but loose as the peanut sacks blowing about the field. “I heard you had cojones."
"If I didn't, I wouldn't worry so much about machetes."
"I'll pay two thousand to deliver two thousand. You went worse places for less for my uncle's law firm. I was brought up soft, but I've been down there a hundred times."
"It's the hundred and first I'm worried about.” I left.
* * * *
He was found in an alley behind a restaurant off West Vernor, the Mexicantown main drag. The cheap trash bag fell apart when a sanitation worker lifted it and Jackie Brill's head rolled out. They'd cut him in six pieces, tucked them together as neatly as Legos, and if they'd used a Hefty Steelsack Jackie might have been buried in a landfill and forgotten, which is the fate of heirs who fall out of favor and vanish.
As it was, he fell back in when his remains were identified. The Grosse Pointe Brills turned the screws on the mayor, the mayor put the squeeze on the chief of police, and the chief cracked the whip on the precinct commanders, who set loose the dogs. The restaurant belonged to a cousin of Emiliano Zorboron's, and even though the cousin lost his English under interrogation, and forgot his Spanish when a Hispanic detective clocked in, street informants were helpful; the story of the Tiger's strained relations with Jackie was known from one end of Vernor to the other. Within twenty-four hours of the discovery of the corpse, Zorboron was under arrest for murder.
Run-of-the-mill homicides don't make the local columns or see airtime. This space-saving policy pays off whenever a Jackie Brill dies under grisly circumstances. He was still on page one and ahead of the first commercial days later, when Mexicantown paid a call to my office.
I leave the door to the reception room unlocked during the day. You never know when loose money might blow in from the street while you're at lunch. The doorknob turned while I was reaching for it, and an Aztec idol invited me inside. He was three hundred fifty pounds stretched out six and a half feet in a Hawaiian print shirt, cargo pants, and what looked like blue fur on his arms but which on closer inspection turned out to be tribal tattoos. His feet were disproportionately small—about size fourteen—in shining loafers, but his head was the size of a temple bell and looked larger still with a bushy mane of black hair combed up and over and down to his collar.
AHMM, June 2007 Page 5