by Kotaro Isaka
‘Yeah, his organisation was called Maiden. I know. I’ve heard about him.’
The kid’s starting to feel comfortable, giving off a whiff of entitlement. Tangerine doesn’t like it. He could get into a story about a spoiled kid if it was in a novel, but in real life he isn’t interested. All it does is aggravate him.
‘So, Maiden fell apart six, maybe seven years ago,’ continues Lemon. ‘Terahara and his kid both died, and the operation was split up. In the aftermath, your father must have known that things were gonna get ugly, so he just picked up and left town, up north to Morioka. Like I said, smart.’
‘Um. Thank you.’
‘What are you thanking me for? I’m not praising your dad here.’ Lemon keeps his eye on the white body of the departing train as it fades into the distance, apparently sad to see it go.
‘No, I mean thank you for rescuing me. I thought I was a goner. They tied me up, there must have been thirty of them. They had me underground and everything. And I had this feeling that even if my dad paid the ransom they’d kill me anyway. They seemed to really hate my dad. I was like, this is it for me, for sure.’
The rich kid seems to be getting more and more talkative, and Tangerine makes a sour face. ‘You’re pretty sharp. First, basically everyone hates your dad. Not just your friends from last night. I’d say you’re more likely to meet someone who’s, I don’t know, immortal than find someone who doesn’t hate your dad. Second, like you said, they would have killed you the moment they got the money, no doubt about it. When you thought you were a goner, you were right.’
Minegishi had contacted Tangerine and Lemon from Morioka and tasked them with bringing the ransom money to the captors and rescuing his son. Sounded simple enough, but nothing is ever simple.
‘Your pop was very specific,’ Lemon grumbled as he counted off on his fingers. ‘Save my son. Bring back the ransom money. Kill everyone involved. Like he thinks he’s gonna get everything his heart desires.’
Minegishi had prioritised the list. Most important was bringing back his son, then the money, then killing all the perpetrators.
‘But, Donald, you did all of it. You did great.’ The rich kid’s eyes are sparkling.
‘Wait, Lemon, where’s the suitcase?’ Tangerine is suddenly worried. Lemon was supposed to be carrying the suitcase with the ransom money in it. It didn’t feel quite big enough for more than a few days away but it was a decent-sized model with a sturdy handle. At the moment, it’s not on the luggage rack or under the seat or anywhere in sight.
‘Tangerine, you noticed!’ Lemon leans back and props his legs up on the seat in front of him, smiling broadly. Then he starts to fish around in his pocket. ‘Here, check this out.’
‘The suitcase doesn’t fit in your pocket.’
Lemon laughs, though no one else does. ‘Yeah, all I’ve got in my pocket is this little piece of paper.’ He produces something the size of a business card and waves it in the air.
‘What’s that?’ The rich kid leans in for a closer look.
‘It’s an entry for a giveaway from the supermarket we stopped at on the way here. They run it once a month. Check it out – first prize is a paid ticket for a holiday! And they must have messed up because there’s no expiry date, so if you win you can go whenever you want!’
‘Can I have it?’
‘No way. I’m not gonna give it to you. What do you need travel tickets for? Your dad can pay for your holidays. You’ve got dad tickets.’
‘Lemon, forget about the giveaway, tell me where the hell the suitcase is.’ There’s an edge in Tangerine’s voice. A nasty premonition flickers through him.
Lemon looks over at him serenely. ‘You don’t know much about trains so I’ll break it down for you. On current models of the Shinkansen there’s storage space in the gangways between the cars for large luggage. Big suitcases, ski equipment, that kind of thing.’
Tangerine is at a momentary loss for words. To relieve the pressure of the blood boiling in his head he reflexively elbows the rich kid in the arm. The kid yelps, then whines in protest, but Tangerine ignores him. ‘Lemon, didn’t your parents teach you to keep a close eye on your belongings?’ He does his best to keep his voice even.
Lemon is obviously offended. ‘What does that even mean?’ he sputters. ‘Do you see anywhere I could have put the suitcase? There are three people sitting here, how exactly was I supposed to fit the suitcase?’ Gobs of spit rain down on the rich kid. ‘I had to store it somewhere!’
‘Could have used the overhead rack.’
‘You weren’t carrying it so you don’t know, but that thing’s heavy!’
‘I did carry it for a bit, and it isn’t that heavy.’
‘And don’t you think that if anyone noticed a couple of shady-looking dudes like us with a suitcase they’d figure Oh there must be something valuable inside, and then the jig would be up. I’m trying to be careful here!’
‘The jig would not be up.’
‘It would. And anyway, Tangerine, you know that both my parents died in an accident when I was in kindergarten. They didn’t teach me much of anything. I guess if they taught me one thing it was not to keep suitcases nearby.’
‘You’re so full of shit.’
The mobile phone in Tangerine’s pocket vibrates, making his skin buzz. He takes out the phone, checks the caller ID and grimaces. ‘It’s your father,’ he says to the rich kid. As he stands and heads towards the gangway, the Shinkansen starts to pull away.
The automatic door opens and Tangerine accepts the call as he steps into the gangway. He puts the phone up to his ear and hears Minegishi. ‘Well?’ The voice is quiet but penetrating. Tangerine draws up next to the window and follows the passing city scene with his eyes.
‘The train just left.’
‘Is my son safe?’
‘If he weren’t, I wouldn’t be on the train.’
Then Minegishi asks if they have the money, and what happened to the kidnappers. The noise of the train running gets louder and it becomes harder to hear. Tangerine makes his report.
‘Once you’ve brought my son back to me, your work is done.’
You’re just up there relaxing in your villa, how much do you really care about your boy?
Tangerine bites his tongue.
The line goes dead. Tangerine turns to go back but stops short: Lemon is standing right in front of him. It’s a strange feeling, facing someone exactly his height, like looking into a mirror. But the person he sees is more careless, more badly behaved than he is, giving Tangerine the peculiar sensation that his own negative traits have taken human form and are staring back at him.
Lemon’s natural jumpiness is on full display. ‘Tangerine, this is bad.’
‘Bad? What’s bad. Blame me for your problems.’
‘It’s your problem too.’
‘What happened?’
‘You said that I should put the suitcase with the money on the overhead rack, right?’
‘I did.’
‘Well, it started to worry me too, so I went to get it. To the storage space in the gangway, on the other side of our car.’
‘Good thinking. And?’
‘It’s gone.’
The two of them fly through car number three to the gangway on the other side. The storage space is next to the bathrooms and sink area. Two racks, one large suitcase on the top. Not the one with Minegishi’s money inside. Next to them is a small empty shelf that looks like a payphone used to live there.
‘You put it here?’ Tangerine points at the empty rack below the large suitcase.
‘Yeah.’
‘And where’d it go?’
‘The toilet?’
‘The suitcase?’
‘Yeah.’ It’s not clear whether Lemon’s playing or serious as he steps over to the men’s room door and yanks it open. But when he shouts, ‘Where are you? Where’d you piss off to? Come back!’ his voice sounds frantic.
Maybe someone took it by mistake, thinks T
angerine, but he knows that’s not true. His heart rate rises. The fact that he’s shaken up shakes him up.
‘Hey, Tangerine, what three words describe our situation right now?’ A twitchy muscle in Lemon’s face keeps firing.
Just then the snack trolley enters the gangway. The young attendant stops to see if they’d like anything but they don’t want her to hear their conversation and they wave her on.
Tangerine waits until she and the cart disappear through the door. ‘Three words? “We are screwed”?’
‘We are fucked.’
Tangerine suggests that they return to their seats to calm down and think. He starts off and Lemon follows. ‘But hey, I’m not done. Any other three-word combinations?’ It may be that he’s confused, or that he’s just simple-minded, but there’s not a shred of gravity in his voice.
Tangerine pretends not to hear him and enters car three, makes his way down the aisle. The train isn’t crowded, only maybe forty per cent full on a weekday morning. Tangerine doesn’t know how many people are usually on the Shinkansen, but this feels quiet.
Since they’re walking towards the back of the train, the passengers are facing them. People with arms folded, people with eyes closed, people reading the newspaper, business people. Tangerine scans the overhead racks and the footrests. Looking for a mid-size black suitcase.
Little Minegishi is still in his seat, halfway down the car. He has the seat leaned back and his eyes closed, his mouth gaping, his body lolling towards the window. He must be tired after all – two days ago he was kidnapped, held and tortured, then busted out in the middle of the night and hustled to the train without a wink of sleep.
But none of these thoughts cross Tangerine’s mind. Instead his heart goes full jackhammer. And now this. He flounders for a moment but reins himself in, swiftly sits next to the kid and feels his neck.
Lemon steps closer.
‘Sleeping in a time of crisis, young master?’
‘Lemon, our crisis just got worse.’
‘How?’
‘The young master’s dead.’
‘No way.’ Several seconds pass before Lemon adds, ‘We are royally fucked.’ Then he counts on his fingers and mutters, ‘Guess that’s four words.’
Nanao
NANAO CAN’T ESCAPE THIS THOUGHT: if it happened once it can happen again, and if it happened twice it can happen three times, and if three times then four, so we might as well say that if something happens once it’ll keep happening forever. Like a domino effect. Five years ago, on his first job, things got way hairier than he expected, and he had mused to himself, If this happened once, it could happen again. There must have been some kind of binding power in his idle thought, because his second job was a disaster too, and his third. Always a total mess.
‘You’re overthinking it,’ Maria had said on multiple occasions. Nanao gets his jobs from Maria. She describes herself as basically just an agent, but Nanao doesn’t think that’s all there is to Maria. Words floated through his mind like epigrams, I prepare the food and you eat of it, You command and I obey. Once he asked, ‘Maria, why don’t you do any jobs?’
‘I’ve got a job.’
‘I mean a job. You know, like in the field. That kind of job.’
Nanao tried to put it in terms of a genius football player standing on the sidelines shouting orders to their amateurish teammates stumbling around on the field, chewing them out for their blunders. ‘And you’re the genius football player, which makes me the amateur. Wouldn’t things go smoother if the genius got in the game? Less stress for everyone, and better results.’
‘Come on. I’m a woman.’
‘Yeah, but you’re really good at kenpo. I’ve seen you take out three men at once. And I’m sure you’re more reliable than I am.’
‘That’s not what I mean. I’m a woman, what if my face gets messed up?’
‘What year are you from? Ever heard of gender equality?’
‘This conversation is sexual harassment.’
He couldn’t get anywhere with her on the subject, and Nanao had given up. It seemed there would be no altering the situation: Maria calling the shots and Nanao following orders, the genius coach and the amateur player.
Maria said the same thing about this job that she said about all of them: ‘Simple. You’ll be in and out, easy-peasy.’ Nanao had heard these promises before, but he almost couldn’t bring himself to protest.
‘I’m guessing something’ll go wrong.’
‘So pessimistic. You’re like a hermit crab who won’t leave its shell because it’s worried about earthquakes.’
‘Is that what hermit crabs worry about?’
‘If they weren’t worried about earthquakes, they wouldn’t have portable houses, would they?’
‘Maybe they just don’t want to pay property taxes.’
She ignored his desperate attempt at a punchline. ‘Listen, the kind of job we do is basically all rough stuff, dangerous work, so it shouldn’t surprise you if there’s some trouble every time. You could say that trouble is our job.’
‘Not some trouble,’ Nanao said emphatically. ‘It’s never just some trouble.’ He wanted to be one hundred per cent clear on this point. ‘I’ve never only just had some trouble. Take that job in the hotel, when I was supposed to get photos of that politician having an affair. You said that one would be simple, in and out.’
‘It was simple – all you had to do was get some photos.’
‘Sure, simple, as long as there isn’t a mass shooting in the hotel.’
A man in a suit had suddenly opened fire in the lobby, spraying bullets all around. He was later identified as a prominent bureaucrat who had been suffering from depression, leading him to kill several guests and end up in a stand-off with police. It had no connection whatsoever to Nanao’s job, just a total coincidence.
‘But you did great. How many people did you end up saving? And you broke the shooter’s neck!’
‘It was him or me. And then what about that job where I was supposed to go to a fast-food restaurant and try the new thing on the menu and make a big showy deal about how it’s so delicious, it’s an explosion of taste, I was supposed to say?
‘You’re saying it wasn’t delicious?’
‘It was delicious. But then there really was an explosion in the restaurant!’
A recently fired employee had set off the bomb. Although there weren’t many casualties from the blast, the interior quickly filled with smoke and flames, and Nanao had done everything he could to get the customers outside. But a famous criminal happened to have been in the restaurant at the same time, and an expert marksman contract killer was targeting him from outside with a high-powered rifle, plunging the scene into even more chaos.
‘But you handled that too – you found out where the sniper was hiding and beat him to a pulp. Another one of your great successes!’
‘You told me that job would be simple too.’
‘Well, what’s hard about eating a hamburger?’
‘And it was the same with that last job. Hide some money in a restaurant toilet, that’s all, you said. But my socks got soaked and I almost ended up eating a hamburger drowning in mustard. There’s no such thing as a simple job. It’s dangerous to be so optimistic. Anyway, you still haven’t told me anything about this job you want me to do now.’
‘I did tell you. Steal someone’s suitcase and get off the train. That’s it.’
‘You didn’t tell me where the bag is, or whose it is. You just want me to get on the Shinkansen and you’ll contact me with more details later? Doesn’t sound to me like it’s going to be so simple. And you want me to get off the train with the bag at Ueno? That’s only a couple minutes after it leaves Tokyo. I won’t have enough time.’
‘Think of it this way. The more complicated a job is, the more you need to know ahead of time. Special considerations, trial runs, contingency plans. On the other hand, not getting any details beforehand means the job’ll be simple. Like what if you h
ad a job that was breathe in and out three times? Would you need details beforehand?’
‘That’s some sideways logic. No thanks. No way this job’ll be simple like you say. There’s no such thing as a simple job.’
‘Sure there is. There are plenty of simple jobs.’
‘Name one.’
‘Mine. Being the go-between is the easiest thing in the world.’
‘Well, that’s just great for you.’
Nanao stands waiting on the platform. His phone vibrates and he brings it up to his ear, just as a station announcement comes in over the loudspeaker: ‘The Morioka-bound Hayate–Komachi train will arrive momentarily on track 20.’ The male voice reverberates across the platform, making it difficult for Nanao to hear what Maria is saying.
‘Hey, are you listening? Can you hear me?’
‘The train’s coming.’
The announcement causes a buzz of movement on the platform. Nanao feels like he’s suddenly enveloped in an invisible membrane, blocking off the sounds around him. The autumn wind blows crisply. Wisps of cloud dot the sky, making the clear blue seem to shine.
‘I’ll get in touch with you as soon as the info on the suitcase comes in, which I guess will be just after the train leaves.’
‘Will you call or message?’
‘I’ll call. Keep your phone handy. You can do that, right?’
The slender beak of the Shinkansen glides into view, leading the white length of the train into the station. It slows to a stop at the platform. Doors open, passengers exit. The platform overflows with people, filling up empty spaces like flowing water covering dry land. The orderly lines of people waiting to board are scattered. Waves of humans pour down the stairs. Everyone left on the platform re-forms their lines, no one speaking, no one looking at anyone else. There is no signal, everyone just falls into place automatically. So bizarre, thinks Nanao. And I’m doing it too.