Sometimes I would spy on the crew of his boat, watching him and the other men unload the goods. He was pale, almost as white as a doll, his limbs long and bony, and a film of sweat made his skin look translucent in the sun. Gradually, as the months went by, I felt myself blossoming. We talked about things I hadn’t even known were on my mind, such as love and death. Eventually, I talked about sex. He told me without hesitation that he’d hired a baita with his first wages as a gambling runner. He was only fifteen at the time. “It wasn’t what I’d hoped it would be,” he concluded with a shrug.
“What had you hoped for?”
We were sitting close to the observation post that we’d started calling “our spot”. From here, the highest point of the island, we could easily see anyone approaching. Though my father must have seen me with Crow when he came to find me after the Yuzonsha meeting, he hadn’t said anything about it. Nor about the incident with the camera.
Crow turned his face to the sun. His skin looked translucent again. “I’m not sure. Perhaps that she’d like me. But she seemed… wary.” He looked at me. “I forgot to caress her. That’s what I’d meant to do. But maybe she wouldn’t have liked it.”
He sat in silence. “At least you’re not a virgin anymore,” I said. Sitting next to me, he pulled up his right knee, rested his arms on it and peered at me over his shoulder. “And you?”
I felt a lump in my throat and couldn’t do anything but nod. I realised at that moment I was hoping he would ask if I would allow him to caress me. Instead, he put his arm around my shoulders and said: “Someone will come, I’m sure of it – a sweet woman like you.”
I clenched my teeth.
My thigh muscles tensed.
28
Surprise. A childless woman reading late at night, in a chair, by lamplight. She’s reading one or another rag, doesn’t lay a finger on inspector Takeda’s books. Or perhaps? He actually knows little about her. She can be a bitch at times. Mostly she’s respectful. Takeda looks at her bowed head. She’s greying, like him; with her it’s much more visible. Her body is wrapped in a nightgown. He knows her body, although it’s been a long time since they shared a bed. Wiry in recent years, a little withered at the edges, creases behind the knees, between the breasts (small, once pert), her broad pelvis now bony, her legs too short. It wasn’t so obvious before, when her proportions were pleasantly rounded, agreeable, a little flirtatious. Does Takeda still love her? He wouldn’t know. He values her coldblooded obstinacy and her stubborn attitude to fate. She treats him with respect, as a man should be treated. What’s he doing with his hand? He’s holding it over her head, to caress her hair, in a sudden surge of… of what? She looks up, her eyes calm and placid in the lamplight, a tad reserved, verging on distant. Takeda withdraws his hand.
“What are you reading?”
She smiles almost imperceptibly: “The usual news.”
He takes a quick look at the article. Photos of a scorched facade. A smouldering corpse being carried out by rescue workers. Fifteen people dead in a “video box” in Osaka. Video boxes are porn shops where customers can rent tiny coffin-like rooms, relax in an armchair and watch porn undisturbed. It was three in the morning when the place burned down, but it was almost full at the time. Labourers who’ve missed their train or don’t want to go home often spend the night in a video box. It’s cheaper than a capsule hotel. Takeda knows all about them, has used them more than once.
“Men are strange creatures, don’t you think?” says his wife. “They’ll do anything for a woman’s body.” Is he mistaken, or is there a hint of meaning in her eyes? He takes the magazine from her. Shukan Gendai. The crumpled face of the “atom baby with the blind stare of silent suffering,” as the headline had tagged the discovery, gapes at him from the front page.
He holds the photo out to his wife. “Do you think a man did this?”
Her expression remains calm and her voice is steady when she replies: “No. When a man kills or mutilates his child, he leaves it behind at the side of the road, in a gutter, on a rubbish tip. You don’t expect paper cranes, let alone symbols like the Peace Memorial.”
Is this a concealed insult? Takeda reproaches himself for harbouring feelings of guilt. Suspicion has become second nature to him.
She bows to him, wishes him goodnight and withdraws to the bedroom. The apartment is small, but Takeda had a bed installed two years earlier in the room where he keeps his desk and computer. The computer is one of his passions. Takeda would like to wire the apartment for internet, but it’s still too expensive. In Newsweek, which he buys on a regular basis to keep up his English, he read predictions about the future potential of the net: buying books online, airline reservations, you name it. If the weekly was to be believed, the internet was set to take over the world in a decade. In a decade he would be closing in on sixty-one. Would he still be able to walk the streets, calm, conscious of his experience and inner strength, surrounded by hordes of young people who seem to be losing more and more control by the day? He was a law-abiding young man in his day, he’s sure of it. It had to do with a sense of inadequacy, of not coming up to the mark. He has clear memories of a house surrounded by trees, damp and humid – Indonesia? – and his mother pulling down his short trousers (he figures himself to be about four at the time), her hands feverishly warm, and snarling: “I should have drowned you in the shit too!” Takeda doesn’t trust the memory, although it forms the basis of the vague fear that constantly haunts him. When he was fifteen he started to blame his mother for it, albeit guardedly, and before long the distance between them was complete. Now he’s stuck with a suppressed authority problem. He not only thinks his boss is a pompous asshole, he also has uncomfortable daydreams in which he sees himself with his hands closing around commissioner Takamatsu’s windpipe. He often wonders what the buried anger towards everyone, especially his mother, is all about. When he was a teenager he saw her as closed, obstinate, but she didn’t really get in his way. In Japan she worked at first for the Dutch consulate and later for Philips Electronics. There was money enough for whatever he wanted and she was usually away most of the day, allowing him to indulge his freedom. Takeda’s Japanese friends had mothers who adored them, but tried to keep an eye on them every minute of the day. They were mummy’s boys as far as Takeda was concerned. He strutted his self-assurance for all to see, but in reality he was jealous: my son’s going to be a professor, mine an engineer.
Takeda forces himself to concentrate. Don’t lose sight of the goal. Think logically. Follow the clues. He’s expecting chief commissioner Takamatsu to hound him and his team until they produce results. The commissioner wants arrests, now not later. The identity of the suspects involved in the bank holdup isn’t his priority. The press release is what counts. Takeda gets to his feet, explores the cheap bookshelves against the wall. He would like to have more books, more space. Why has he never managed to sort them into alphabetical order? It takes a while before he finds what he looking for: Unit 731 Testimony, subtitled: Japan’s Wartime Human Experimentation Program. The book caught his attention in the American Bookshop a couple of months earlier. The English wasn’t too difficult. He’s looking for something near the front: the incident at the Teikoku Bank in 1948. Takeda reads the account carefully. The expression on his face changes from concentration to concern.