‘Her methods?’
He nodded, and squeezed his nose lightly, as if trying to suppress a sneeze or a memory. ‘Naturally,’ he said, dropping his hand and breathing out, ‘violence is a necessary part of life in the yakuza. Maybe it is not surprising, no, considering her sexual confusion, maybe it’s not altogether surprising the way she seems compelled to…’ his eyes wandered briefly to a point just above my head ‘… to embellish her crimes.’
‘Embellish?’
He didn’t answer. Instead he pursed his mouth and said, conversationally, ‘I haven’t seen her but I understand she is unusually tall?’
‘Some of the people in the club think she’s a man.’
‘Nevertheless she is a woman. A woman with a – I don’t know the word in English – a disorder of the skeleton, maybe. But, enough of that. Let us not speculate our morning away.’ He looked at me very carefully. ‘I need to know. Are you quite sure you want to continue?’
I moved my shoulders, a little shudder going down my back. ‘Well,’ I said eventually, rubbing my arms, ‘well, actually, yes. That’s the thing, you see – this is the most important thing in my life. I’ve been doing it for nine years and eight months and twenty-nine days, and I’ve never even once thought about giving it up. Sometimes I think it annoys people.’ I thought about this for a moment, then looked up at him. ‘Yes. It does. It annoys people.’
He laughed and gathered up the papers. While he was returning them to the portfolio he noticed a photograph that had been hiding at the bottom of the pile. ‘Ah,’ he said casually, pulling it free from the stack. ‘Ah, yes. I wonder if you’d be interested in this.’ He slid it across the table, his long brown hand half covering the image. I could see an official stamp in the top right corner, the kanji for ‘Police Department’, and under his hand a grainy black-and-white image. I saw what I thought looked like police tape, a car with its boot open. There was something in the boot, something I couldn’t recognize, until Shi Chongming lifted his hand and I understood.
‘Oh,’ I said faintly, instinctively covering my mouth with my hand. It felt like having all the blood drained from my head in one sweep. The picture showed an arm – a human arm with an expensive watch on it, hanging lifelessly out of the boot. I’d seen similar pictures of mob victims in the university library, but it was what lay under the exhaust pipe of the car that I couldn’t tear my eyes from. Arranged almost ritualistically, coiled like a boa constrictor, was a pile of… ‘Are they…’ I said faintly ‘… are they what I think they are? Are they human? Are they his?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that what you meant by… embellish?’
‘Yes. It’s one of Ogawa’s crime scenes.’ Calmly he put his finger on the photo and pulled it across the table. ‘One of the crimes attributed to the Beast of Saitama. The rumour is that on first glance at the body, the police could see no clear way that the – the internals had been removed. It is a source of amazement to me, really it is, the level of ingenuity that mankind, or womankind, can reach when dealing in cruelty.’ He pushed the photo back and began tying the portfolio with the battered black ribbon. ‘Oh, and by the way,’ he said, ‘I shouldn’t waste time looking at Shen Nong’s classifications if I were you.’
I looked up, blinking at him, my face numb. ‘I’m – I’m sorry?’
‘I said don’t waste time with Shen Nong’s classifications. It’s not a plant you’re looking for.’
23
I had stopped sleeping. The photograph in Shi Chongming’s portfolio kept waking me, infecting my thoughts, making me wonder how far I was prepared to go to please him. And when it wasn’t the Nurse’s ‘embellishments’, it was Jason who agonized me and kept my skin electric and uncomfortable against the sheets at night. Sometimes, on the occasions when he appeared where I least expected him, in the corridor outside my room, or at the bar when I got up to find a clean glass, watching me in silence with his calm eyes, I told myself he was teasing me – performing an elaborate pas de deux for his own amusement, dancing round me in shadowy places in the house, a harlequin slithering down the corridor in the night. But sometimes, particularly when he watched me as we all walked home from the club at night, I had the sense he was trying to look deeper – trying to see under my clothes. Then I’d get the usual horrible sensation in my stomach, and I’d have to belt my coat tighter, turn up the collar, cross my arms and walk faster, so that he fell away behind me, and all I had to think about were the caustic comments coming from the twins.
The house seemed to get lonelier and lonelier. One morning, a few days after I’d visited Shi Chongming, I woke early and lay on my futon listening to the silence, acutely conscious of the rooms stretching away from me in every direction, the clicking floorboards and unswept corners, full of secrets and maybe unexpected deaths. Locked-off rooms that no one alive had ever been inside. The others were still asleep, and suddenly I couldn’t bear the silence any longer. I got up, had breakfast of Chinese duck-pears and strong coffee, then put on a linen dress, gathered up my notepads, my kanji books, and carried everything down into the garden.
It was an unusually warm, motionless day – almost like summer. One of those mid-autumn mornings when the sky was so clear you almost feared to let go of belongings for the chance that they could be whisked straight up into the blue, disappearing for ever. I’d never imagined Japanese skies to be so clear. The steamer chairs were still there, surrounded by soggy mounds of cigarette ends where the Russians had sat gossiping in the summer. I put all my stuff down on one and turned to look round. Next to the old pond I could see the remains of a path – ornamental stepping-stones winding away into the undergrowth towards the closed-off rooms. I took a few steps along it, my arms out as if I was balancing. I followed it round the pond, past the lantern and the stone bench, into the area that Shi Chongming had found so fascinating. I got to the edge of the undergrowth and stopped, looking down at my feet.
The path continued into the trees, but in the centre of the stepping-stone I’d stopped at was a single white stone, fist-sized and tied like a gift in rotting bamboo. In a Japanese garden everything is coded and arcane – a stone placed on a stepping-stone was a clear signal to guests: Do not go any further. This is private. I stood for a while staring at it, wondering what it was hiding. The sun went behind a cloud and I rubbed my arms, suddenly cold. What happens when you break the rules in a place where you don’t belong? I took a breath and stepped over the stone.
I paused, expecting something to happen. A small bird with long trailing wings lifted off the ground and settled in one of the trees above, but otherwise the garden was silent. The bird sat there, seeming to watch me, and for a while I stared back at it. Then, conscious of its gaze on me, I turned and continued through the roots and shadows to the closed-off wing until I found myself at the wall where I could look along the length of the house at all the firmly barricaded windows twined with creepers. I stepped over a fallen branch and stood close to one of the security grilles, the baked metal making my skin warm. I put my nose up to it and I could smell the dust and mould of the closed-off rooms. The basement was supposed to be flooded and dangerous. Jason had been in there once, months ago, he had told us. There were piles of rubbish and things that he didn’t want to look at too closely. Pipes had cracked in earthquakes and some of the rooms were like underground lakes.
I turned back to the garden, thinking of Shi Chongming’s words: Its future is waiting to be uncovered. Its future is waiting to be uncovered. I had the oddest feeling. The feeling that the future of this garden was focused specifically on the area I was standing in: the area around the stone lantern.