Life for Sale, page 17
It wasn’t all bad. Street lamps dotted the whole town, and crowds of people gathered before brightly lit shops selling fresh vegetables and fish.
Hanio heard a familiar old humming: it sounded like a honeybee. It was musical, it had warmth, and it conveyed an indescribable hint of nostalgia. The sound was emanating from a small sawmill workshop. Through the half-open door, he could see brightly colored wood shavings and the faint gleam of a round electric saw. On the wooden door was a sign:
From small boxes to bookshelves
Woodwork products made to order on the spot
He gave it a brief thought, then moved on to a watch shop. There was absolutely nothing chic or modern about this place—it was the sort of shop that belonged to a completely bygone age. Hanio entered without hesitating.
“I’m looking for a watch.”
“Of course. We’re a watch shop after all. What kind are you looking for?” A woman, evidently the owner, had come out. She had a white, puffy face.
“I’d like to buy a stopwatch. The loudest one you have.”
“Let me check our stock…”
Hanio purchased a traditional old stopwatch: it would not have been out of place at a Meiji-era sporting event. He did not recognize the manufacturer. When he pressed the button on top, the second hand gave off a steady, jarringly assertive sound.
With his newly acquired purchase, he went back to the sawmill he had seen earlier.
“Would you be able to make a small box? I need it right away.”
“No problem. You’ve caught me at a good moment,” replied the thin, rather age-worn man, the very image of a carpenter, without even looking up.
“Please make me a box for this stopwatch. It’s extremely urgent.”
“Wait. Is it a gift box you’re thinking of? They ought to have had one of those at the watch shop.”
“No, I want a special kind of box. One that doesn’t give any indication of what’s inside. A big one, please, in as simple a style as you can make it. I don’t want it to reveal any part of the watch face or anything else that might give it away.”
“So you’re not actually interested in it as a watch?”
“Please, no questions. Just follow my instructions. I want you to leave only the button on top of the watch sticking out through a hole. Everything else should be covered. Then paint the whole box with black lacquer.”
“So the watch itself doesn’t have to be visible?”
“That’s right. I’m interested only in the sound,” Hanio explained patiently.
The man proceeded to knock up a rough and ready box, into which the stopwatch was fitted, the button sticking out through a small hole. Black lacquer was then slapped over the coarse-grained wood. It was impossible to tell what it held, but when you pushed the button a distinct tick-tock could be felt vibrating against the sides.
“At last. A defensive weapon,” Hanio whispered to himself.
It was rather bulky to insert into his jacket pocket, but Hanio put it there nevertheless, feeling a little easier now that he had it. Whenever he pressed the button, he would feel the second hand start to make that emphatic ticking sound in his pocket.
“Even if I come to a place like this, in the back of beyond, they’ll sniff me out. There’s no getting away from them.”
Hanio had determined it was time to stop running. It was not that he had lost all sense of fear, but the days passed without incident. Every morning when he awoke, it felt wonderful to still be alive. And he was relieved that those spider fantasies never reappeared.
Now, hikers often passed in front of Hannō Station, but it was rare to see one from overseas. One day when Hanio went to the station to buy some cigarettes, a refined, white-haired foreigner in his forties politely removed his green Tyrolean hat and asked him for directions. He was dressed in plaid knickerbockers.
“Could you possibly tell me where Mount Rakan is?”
“Mount Rakan? Go past the Chamber of Commerce and turn right. When you get to the police station, take a left. Once you’ve passed the town hall, Mount Rakan should come into view.” He was already giving directions like a local.
“I see. Thank you. Look, I’m terribly sorry, but I’d be so grateful if you could accompany me, at least till I get my bearings. I’m hopeless with directions. I’d really appreciate it.”
With nothing else to occupy him, Hanio decided to act as guide to this affable-looking gentleman.
The foreigner looked up at the sky: “Good feather, isn’t it?”
“I think you mean ‘weather.’ ” Hanio’s bonhomie even extended to correcting his words.
The side of the Chamber of Commerce was in shade at this time of day, and two or three cars were parked by it. One of them was black, clearly a foreign car, and beautifully polished.
“What a great car!” The foreigner seemed at first just to caress it as he passed by, but then, casually, he opened one of the back doors. Hanio couldn’t believe his eyes.
“Get in,” the foreigner ordered in a low, rough voice. He held a pistol in his hand.
52
As the car sped off, Hanio was still having his hands cuffed and a pair of sunglasses thrust over his eyes.
The sunglasses were stylish. They were fitted with small, triangular lenses on either side which should have meant that even when you looked sideways you still saw through darkened glass. But Hanio could see nothing. Despite their ordinary appearance, these sunglasses were painted with mercury on the inside. In effect, Hanio had been blindfolded. No doubt this was to keep him ignorant of the destination.
The man in the Alpine hat was at the steering wheel. But he and Hanio were not alone. As soon as Hanio was bundled into the back, another man had sat up abruptly and stuck the glasses on him. The man now held the muzzle of a gun pressed into his side. Hanio hadn’t had time to take in his facial features.
There was silence as the car drove along. Where will I be killed? Hanio wondered. Some light jazz on the car radio was all he could hear. He found it very difficult to gather together any real thoughts.
The moment he’d put out that “Life for Sale” ad, he had already sealed his own fate: a violent death. No getting away from it. This unadulterated, raw realization cut through him like searing heartburn. And yet, to his surprise, the fear he’d felt while on the run had suddenly receded.
What exactly was the fear of death? All the time Hanio had felt pursued by death, his eyes were etched with nothing but fear, no matter how many times he’d tried to look away. Fear had been like a strange black chimney rising high up on the horizon. But now, that chimney had disappeared from sight.
Once he’d had his stitches removed at a surgery in Hannō, the pain in his thigh had completely disappeared, but he still remembered what a source of worry that pain had been. People tend to be most terrified by the inexplicable. Fear seems to fade when a possible solution arises.
The man checked Hanio’s hands several times over, as if he were nervous about whether they were securely handcuffed. Hanio could tell from the hairy knuckles that the man was a foreigner. He was also aware of the body odor emanating through his clothes. A gaseous smell, redolent of chives, but somehow powerfully sweet. It could only belong to a Westerner.
At first Hanio intended to calculate calmly the number of times the car turned left, the point at which it emerged onto asphalt-covered roads, and the number of level crossings it passed, but he soon realized that such an exercise was futile. If the drive had been short he could have mustered a guess, but the car kept going for more than two hours. Considering how many paved roads they took during that period, it did not seem particularly likely that they were planning to take him deep into the mountains, shoot him dead, and dispose of his body at the bottom of a ravine. They might well be on their way to Tokyo.
After some time, the car ran along a bumpy road, making it roll badly from side to side, and then went up a rather steep incline. He could feel that the wind had picked up. It was growing dark.
When the car finally came to a halt, he became aware that the anxiety he felt was less about being killed and more about how long they would keep him waiting before they did so.
Hanio was made to get out of the car, walk along a graveled path, and enter a house. He felt carpet under his feet: a sure sign that the house was a Western one.
53
Hanio seemed to be in a basement room. The room had a cold, bare, concrete floor, and they made him sit down on a chair, hands bound in front of him. The chair was one of several that were placed in a row in front of a simple table. His dark glasses were removed.
Six men were in the room with him, counting the two who had ridden with him in the car. The other four were all people he recognized. Three were the Westerners present at the drug experiment using beetle extract—today, the elderly Henry was without his dachshund. The fourth was that middle-aged, shady Asian man, Ruriko’s patron, wearing that unforgettable beret. He looked just like he did before, even to the point of carrying a large sketchbook.
The man, complete with comical beret, offered Hanio a cigarette and then was good enough to light it for him. He sat himself down in the next chair. The other men, some sitting on chairs, some standing, all looked hard at Hanio. The two who had been his companions in the car had guns pointed toward him as if ready to fire at a moment’s notice.
“Right, let’s start the interrogation.” The Asian spoke in a strangely warm drawl, which reverberated deeply. “First, I would appreciate it if you were to confess here and now that you are a police officer.”
Hanio was dumbfounded. This was the last thing he expected. “How can I be a police officer?”
“Look, you can use all the fancy words you like. One way or another, you’ll end up confessing it. Do you get me? OK, I think the quickest way is probably for me to explain why we haven’t disposed of you until now but left you to your own devices. So that’s where I’ll begin. I prefer persuasive, peaceful methods. I leave the killing to others.
“When your ‘Life for Sale’ advertisement first came out in the newspaper, I thought it was fishy, so I got an old man, one of our stooges, to go to your place. I should introduce him to you. He’s been dying to meet you too.” He clapped his hands, creating a sound that made the whole room resound like thunder. “Come on, where are you?”
An old man came into the room through a second door. He acknowledged Hanio with a silent nod from a distance, making a hissing sound through his teeth.
“My apologies,” he said.
This polite tone seemed to irritate the Asian. “That’s enough of that. Still, tonight I’m looking forward to sketching our young Hanio as he meets his end. That’s why I’ve brought my sketchbook with me. I want to draw you in various positions, so I’m hoping you’ll adopt all sorts of poses as you die, writhing about in excruciating pain. I’m sure you can understand where I’m coming from.
“The ad that you posted came to our attention because we had become aware that our organization was the object of a secret police investigation—even though we knew very little beyond that basic fact. We were naturally drawn to you because we thought we might have a chance of getting to the bottom of it all if we used someone like you: working undercover, and apparently with so little regard for yourself that you were willing to put out a weird ad like that.
“So we first put you together with Ruriko. Ruriko already knew too much about the organization. The way things were, we couldn’t be sure how much she might spill the beans to other people about the ACS. That’s why we intended to bump her off at the earliest opportunity. So once we’d introduced her to you, we got rid of her. We thought that would definitely get you to make contact with your colleagues in the police.
“But you didn’t fall for it! We couldn’t believe how smart you were! You were too cautious for our liking. By allowing you to return home alive after your visit to her, our intention was to get a sense of how you gathered information and made your reports. We had of course taken a secret photograph of your face. Here. This sketchbook doubles as a camera. Take a look.”
The man showed Hanio. The cover had a stylish design with the two O’s in the word SKETCHBOOK as two eyes, one wide open, the other shut. In the center of the open eye was a lens. The cover was awfully thick, it had to be said.
“But you played dumb and made no contact at all with the police. We began to wonder what you were up to that time you had dinner with the stuffed mouse. But we checked it out later, and failed to find any transmitter inside it. The skill with which you avoided giving yourself away was quite masterful. Amazing.
“We then decided to use a second woman—another one of our stooges. We’d pinned our hopes on her, expecting her to use all her wiles to extract the truth out of you. But then the old bag managed to fall head over heels in love with you instead, and got herself wasted instead of you.
“It’s always a bit of a problem, how to dispose of the corpses, but with suicides it can be a little easier. After consultation with Henry here and the other guys, we decided to let you go once more and give you a bit more space to play around in. Sooner or later, we knew we’d have to bump you off, but for now we wanted you to act as a decoy to lure some more police spies into our trap. But you were ever the clever guy. You never let down your guard.
“And then you went and hitched up with that vampire woman. At that point, we were on the verge of deciding that you must just be a complete wacko, with some kind of a death wish, and that we’d obviously been mistaken. The whole thing had become so absurd, we could only hope that the vampire woman would suck you dry of blood as soon as possible and finish you off that way. That would have suited us down to a tee.
“But that’s not what happened, is it? You really put your life on the line going under cover as deeply as that. What a stellar spy you are!
“And then, what did you do? We know exactly, don’t we? You made a brilliant show of suffering from dizzy fits due to anemia so you could get yourself admitted to the hospital. And while you were in there, we relaxed and slackened our surveillance, and all the time you got on with your main job.”
“No, that’s total and utter—” Hanio tried to remonstrate.
“Don’t try to deny it. You see, the ACS works closely with Country B. Ever since that code-breaking incident with the carrots, Country B has kept your name on their list as a Japanese police spy. You did some good work in that department, but that was your downfall. You ended up exposing yourself for what you really were. Everything was revealed. Everything. You stupid piece of shit!”
Smiling gently, the Asian pushed the sharpened tip of his pencil against Hanio’s throat. “After that, we decided we wanted to investigate what your colleagues were up to. The best option would be to kidnap you immediately, extract your confession, and kill you. But by then we’d taken our eyes off the ball, and lost track of you. We were in big trouble. We couldn’t leave things like that—we’d be compromised. At least, that’s the way we saw it.
“Incidentally, that photo I took of you was invaluable. We made a huge number of duplicates from it. We had a good idea you’d start visiting your old haunts again in Shinjuku. So we got an LSD dealer, who works on the fringes of the organization, to distribute your picture and see if he came up with anything.
“He did the rounds asking all the bad girls to see if they knew the odd man in the photo who’d put a ‘Life for Sale’ ad in the newspaper. But he didn’t find one who could tell him. You’ve slept with quite a few of the girls, but you’re careful. Even those you have slept with had no idea of your present whereabouts. You’d moved out of your apartment.
“With a population of ten million, searching for a person in Tokyo is enough to make you throw your hands up in despair. There you were, someone who knew all about the ACS, hopping about like a flea somewhere in the city. And we had no idea how to catch you.
“But, my dear Hanio, it turns out that there are gods in the world. And the gods never abandon us. These gods love it when people create secret organizations. And in their infinite mercy they apply themselves in various ways on our behalf.
“The ACS has its roots in Hongbang, in China, and it was the local god of that district who helped us now. The name of this god is Great Ancestor Hongjun. Perhaps you’ve heard of him?
“During the Taiping Rebellion, a man called Lin was a commander in the army of General Zeng Guofan, which had gone to Yangzhou in order to quell the rebels. Lin was not very good in the ways of war: every time he led an army of thousands into battle, he lost. General Zeng was so enraged that Lin ended up being sentenced to death.
“Terrified for his life, Lin absconded with eighteen men under his command. They ran and ran. Eventually, they found an old mausoleum, where they settled down for the night. After a while they heard sounds outside: a large group of people seemed to be closing in. Thinking the end was near, they took up their weapons and stood at the ready, but then it turned out the crowd was not after their blood—they were just local villagers.
“These villagers told them: ‘Just now, there was a big noise in the village. When we came out to look, a huge fire dragon was rolling about in the sky with its red flame lighting up the whole area as if it were daytime. Suddenly, it dived into the mausoleum. Convinced that some venerable personage must be staying here, we came to see.’
“Lin was relieved and asked the name of the village. He was astonished to hear it was a humble hamlet some fifteen or sixteen hundred miles away from the encampment that they had deserted earlier. In the space of a few hours, they had managed to escape this far.
“It was entirely thanks to divine assistance. In a framed picture hanging from the gate he saw the inscription ‘Hongjun Mausoleum.’ It would appear that their savior was Great Ancestor Hongjun. The following day they put together three gifts of fragrant candles, paper, and cloth respectively, along with water mixed with wine, and made an offering before the god. After that they all became virtuous bandits, robbing the rich and passing their wealth on to the poor. This is how it all started in Hongbang. I’ve digressed a bit, but I wanted to show how we came to worship that deity.
