Shuhei Handa
Soon after the autumn equinox, there was an unusual drop in the incidence of violent crime, and Shuhei Handa took this opportunity to start seeing a dentist he knew near Kamata Station, making the excuse to those around him, “This is the only chance I have to get my teeth fixed.” Since his police department was being renovated and he was working out of a temporary office building in Hon-Haneda, his visits to the dentist became a good pretext for him to sneak off further afield. Handa also scrounged time from his comings and goings to make gradual contact with his conspirators.
At the end of September, just as their plan had started to take shape, on his usual way to the dentist Handa met up with Katsumi Koh. Whenever Koh was out making daytime rounds on sales calls, he always appeared in the three-piece ensemble of a modern Japanese banker-man: black briefcase, motorcycle, and helmet. He thought these made him conspicuous, so Koh made sure to leave his bike a little distance away.
When Handa met up with Koh at a coffee shop in a crowded shopping district on the west side of Kamata Station, the conversation bluntly got down to the question of how much money they would take from their target. As he ate his curry rice garnished with bright red pickled relish, Koh replied, “As much as we want.” Then he added, “Hinode’s got money to burn. They can get it from anywhere.”
“You don’t say. But how do you know?”
“It’s obvious. Look at this.” Koh thrust toward Handa the publicly listed company asset securities report that had been tucked inside the weekly magazine he was carrying. It was a slim, orange pamphlet titled Hinode Beer Company.
“Take a look at the category ‘Cash and Deposits’ at the very top of the assets section on the balance sheet.”
“163.2 billion yen . . .”
“The number from the previous term is next to it. Compare the two, and you’ll see there’s about a thirty-billion increase. That means money is going in and out by the tens of billions. That cash-and-deposits category lists the instantaneous number at the end of the term on December thirty-first, which doesn’t mean that same exact amount will be sitting in their bank account come January first. For a corporation with as many assets as Hinode, the sums of money they’re moving around is on a whole different scale—that much becomes clear just by looking at their financial statements.”
“So because they’re moving around huge amounts of money, we can take as much as we want?”
“Basically. For instance, below that same category do you see where it says ‘Other Current Assets’? It says ‘other’ because they’ve thrown various types of accounting in there. Short-term loans and reimbursements, temporary advances for travel and business trip expenses, unpaid bills, down payments, and so on. I can’t tell what type of money it is unless I see the actual ledger, but you can bet that there’s money caught up in there whose actual purpose is impossible for anyone on the outside to know. The fact that they have seventeen billion yen worth of it there—well, they’re in a league of their own.”
“You said they can get money from anywhere, but where, for instance, would it come from?”
“That’s Hinode’s problem.”
“But say you were in charge of finance at Hinode, how and from where would you get the money? If word got out to the public and to the police that Hinode had caved to criminal demands and coughed up the money, they’d lose their credibility—so they’d need to raise a slush fund without anyone on the outside being the wiser. Now, how would you do that?”
“It depends on the amount, but if it’s a matter of two or three hundred million, I would create a random expense item and charge it as a temporary advance, like the one I just mentioned. As for adjusting the account afterward, I would wait until things calm down and then chalk it up little by little as a deductible expense.”
Koh talked as if this were the easiest thing in the world. “Let’s see, what else . . .” He drew the pamphlet back toward himself. “A common nest for a slush fund is ‘Construction Suspense Account’ under fixed assets. Hinode’s got fifty billion in there this period. Huge, right? When they construct factories or other buildings, they make deals with contractors so that, for example, they can write up the price they’ve padded with an extra billion yen as a construction startup fee under this heading, and that’ll be the end of story. What else . . .”
Koh let his fingers trail lightly over the balance sheet and, mumbling, “This is good too,” paused in the middle of the section on liabilities. “This category called ‘Deposits Payable’ is also useful. See, a beer company pays taxes based on shipments. To insure against the possibility of a client going bankrupt before they can settle their account, they always take a deposit, and this is the category where they record such deposits. For example, Hinode deals with some sixty subsidiaries and affiliated companies, right? Under the guise of a joint marketing fund, they could make each company contribute fifty million, which comes out to three billion. If each paid a hundred million it would be six billion. That money could then be sorted under this ‘Deposits Payable.’ On the books, you’d see no problem whatsoever. Combine all these methods I’ve just mentioned, and coming up with ten billion or so is a breeze.”
As Handa listened, he was once again impressed by the finance man’s accounting savvy. Though perhaps he was more impressed with the sloppy accounting of large corporations.
“So, Handa-san. How much do you want to take? We should discuss that first.”
“That’s a tough question . . . How about two billion to start?”
“That’s all?” Koh looked up with dismay.
“Listen, Koh-san. We’re talking about a crime. The money we get will be paid in cash or gold. That’s the iron rule for not getting caught.”
“What century do you think this is?” Koh said, looking dumbfounded again. “Transferring money is no big deal if they use one of their overseas subsidiaries and pay in dollars. Nowadays, everyone dealing in illegal transfers uses that trick.”
“No—it’s gotta be cash. Think of Monoi-san, and Nunokawa, and Yo-chan. How are they supposed to use dollars deposited in some offshore bank account?”
Hearing this, Koh deferred immediately, as if his practicality had been called into question. “You’re right.”
“Now, if it’s cash, there is a physical limit to how much we can carry. Those things you guys use—duralumin cases. How many stacks of ten million can one of those hold?” Handa asked.
“Twenty-one. You’re right, it’ll weigh quite a bit.”
“Then why don’t we say two billion for now?” Handa threw out the same number.
Koh replied, “Sure,” but he seemed to have little interest in the actual amount, instead moving on to the next subject. “More importantly, what’s the bargaining chip we’ll use to make them pay?”
“Bargaining chip? Of course we’ll go right for the jugular. We’ll take their beer sales hostage.”
“That sounds good.” A smile flickered over Koh’s face for the first time and, without looking up, he continued to spoon up the curry rice he had sloshed around on the plate. “If we can reduce their sales, Hinode won’t stand a chance—they’ll pony up two billion without any questions. In fact, I’d bet on it,” Koh said with his mouth full of rice.
“Lowering beer sales is a piece of cake. Isn’t that right, Koh-san?”
“There are vending machines all over Japan where anyone can buy beer. Add a little cyanide and that’s it—they’re finished.”
“Idiot. Who’s gonna use poison? I’m still a cop, you know?”
Koh guffawed, with grains of rice shooting out of his mouth. “Well then, doesn’t matter if it’s salt or sugar—the result will be the same.” He pushed aside his messy plate.
“That’s disgusting, wipe it off,” Handa said and threw a paper napkin at Koh, whose shoulders shook as he laughed, wiping away the bits of rice spilled on the table. “That pretty much suits your needs, right?”
Koh glanced up at him briefly, then immediately looked away as he replied brusquely, “Sure.” If their beer were to be contaminated with a foreign substance, Hinode’s stock price would plummet without a doubt, and the profit from margin trading would be all but guaranteed. But something in Koh’s eyes implied that this—a mere bonus to their main plan—should be something they agreed not to discuss.
Handa ordered two coffees from the waitress and brought the conversation back to its original topic. “Incidentally, with regard to the right moment to strike, you still think spring to summer is the window that’ll affect their sales the most?”
“I think so. The sales campaign will heat up in April. Hinode hasn’t released any new products this year, so they definitely will next spring. They’ll have an enormous budget to launch their advertising strategy, so it’s best for us to start when their shipments are in full swing. That should be late March.”
“All right. Then we’ll start at the end of March. Say, in terms of sales, how much would Hinode have to lose before they gave in?”
“If you mean how much loss they can withstand—even if an entire year’s worth of sales evaporated, with all their assets they still wouldn’t go under. But for senior management it’s a matter of responsibility, so I’m sure they’ll crack at a much lower number.”
“Well then, first I want you to evaluate Hinode’s break-even point.”
“It’s impossible to calculate accurately with just the numbers listed on the balance sheet. I can give you a rough estimate, though.”
“That’s fine. Next, you can get your hands on data that shows their average monthly shipping volume, right? From there, figure out where they break even for each month. How much loss would they suffer depending on how much shipping decreases, and at what point would Hinode’s management start to panic? I want you to create a simulation for those scenarios.”
“No sweat,” Koh replied succinctly.
The coffee that was brought over tasted awful as usual, as if it had been boiled down. Handa drank this same coffee practically every other day, paying 350 yen each time and sitting in the same slightly dirty chair. As he sipped the coffee, another self-deprecating thought started to spin inside his mind.
He had made a ritual of drinking every last drop of this incredibly nasty stuff. At some point, this very ritual had created the mentality of a hardened cop who no longer even recognized this coffee as awful. And here he was drinking it again today. Maybe I don’t hate the taste of it after all, he thought to himself. His thirteen years on the police force, where he had been able to nurture his fantasies over a single cup of coffee per day—maybe they hadn’t been so bad. And yet, his masochistic tendency had reached the point where he was now trying to destroy all of that by his own hand, and the truth was that he could no longer control it.
Handa contemplated this calmly. He was like an octopus devouring its own leg. If he allowed himself to demolish his career at the police department—a hotbed for his fantasies and pleasures for so many years—where would he go from there? Most likely, he would just set out again in search of even more terrible coffee. Realizing this, Handa’s spirit nearly drained out of him.
The point was, something was still missing. For this octopus to consume its own leg, there had better be a cause worth dying for. Kidnapping or tainting beer with a foreign substance was all well and good, but it wasn’t enough. Handa lost himself in this burning question, in the urgent but directionless search for that something.
The best place to meet up with Jun’ichi Nunokawa was at the wild bird sanctuary in Yashio, where Nippo Transport’s truck terminal was located, after he had finished the Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe route. Every evening, Nunokawa left the terminal before eight and drove the six-hour Keihanshin route, as it was called, to Osaka, where he took an hour break during reshipment before heading back. Then, returning to Tokyo shortly after ten in the morning, he would soon take his minivan back to the company housing in Kachidoki. But if he saw Handa waiting for him in front of the main gate of the wild bird park, Nunokawa would circle halfway around the park to the parking lot on the south side, where he would pick Handa up.
Handa always tried to tailor the conversation to fit within the time it took to drive northward along the waterfront to where Nunokawa lived. It was obvious that the truck driver was exhausted after the Keihanshin round-trip, which was 550 kilometers each way. Nunokawa barely seemed to have the energy to open his mouth, and as if this were his last task before he could get to sleep, he forced his heavy-lidded eyes open and merely listened to Handa. Even when Handa had exclaimed, “We’re talking two billion!” Nunokawa had only looked at him drowsily without uttering a word.
When they had seen each other in mid-October, however, Nunokawa had handed Handa the thing he had asked for and said, “Will these do?”
Handa opened the manila envelope and took out three standard-size snapshots and checked their subject matter. “Perfect,” he replied
The daughter of Takeo Sugihara, one of the executives at Hinode, was living in a luxury apartment in the hills of Takanawa. Yoshiko was married now and had taken her husband’s name, Itoi. Her address was listed in her alumni association’s directory; once Handa knew her address he had been able to figure out her husband’s name, and after making up a reasonable excuse and inquiring at the precinct’s local police box, he had learned that her husband was a physician. Handa had stopped by the address several times, whenever he happened to be nearby, and from what he had observed Yoshiko was now the mother of an infant still in diapers. In the mornings she would leave her apartment with her stroller to go shopping at the Peacock Supermarket at the bottom of Gyoranzaka Hill. Sometimes, she would take the baby to Takanawa Park. On three separate days, Nunokawa had taken snapshots of this same mother and child with a compact camera as he drove a rented van along Gyoranzaka Hill. On one thirty-six-exposure roll of film, Nunokawa had mixed in random other shots whose locations were impossible to identify and taken it to a photo shop far from Minato Ward, where he had had them developed and printed as fast as possible.
The faces of Yoshiko and her child were clearly visible in all three photos, which Nunokawa had taken from the driver’s seat of the van. The young mother, doing her morning shopping and pushing her baby in the stroller, had the peaceful visage of one who was never far from affluence, and the baby was plump and healthy—the snapshots conveyed nothing significant aside from these plain facts. Nunokawa did not divulge anything about his own impressions of the fortunate mother and child he had observed with his own eyes, and Handa also refrained from asking anything further.
“By the way, Nunokawa-san. Can you steal a car?”
“Stealing it is easy, but if you want to drive it around, you need a key.”
“Yo-chan can cut a key. Once the new year starts, in or out of the city, it doesn’t matter where, I want you to mark ten or so vans that are sitting in parking lots collecting dust. The darker the color the better. Once you’ve found them, give me the makes and models for all of them. I’ll give you prototypes for the keys to those models, and I want you to insert them into the keyholes, turn them around a few times, and bring them back to me. Then Yo-chan will cut the teeth of the keys.”
“So they get nicks where the teeth should be, right? Got it.”
A quick learner who did exactly as he was told and said nothing redundant—Nunokawa was indeed useful. The special skills and athletic ability he had developed in the military seemed wasted in the driver’s seat of a truck; it would be a shame not to put them to use now in various ways.
“After you pick the cars, we’ll choose which roads. You ever heard of the N system?”
“You mean those things that look like rapid surveillance cameras above major intersections?”
“Yes, exactly. Do you know the intersections and expressway toll booths where those things are found?”
“Yeah.”
“I want you to investigate various getaway routes from the Tokyo metropolitan area that avoid them completely. It doesn’t matter where—the destination could be Tanzawa, Okuchichibu, Fuji, Okunikko—the deeper into the mountains the better. We don’t need a hideout, either, but if there’s a place where we can spend two or three nights on the mountain, that would be great.”
“Driving during the day or at night?”
“Late at night.”
“What season?”
“Next year, late March.”
“Better find roads that won’t be icy.”
Nunokawa replied in a clipped monotone that made it seem as if this were no different from his daily work. Nunokawa had decided to join them of his own volition, but he seemed to still be thinking about splitting, and Handa found his detachment both manageable and disconcerting.
“Hey . . . Why’d you join the military anyway?”
“I saw a recruitment poster on the wall at the post office, and somehow I just applied. If I hadn’t joined the military, I’m sure I’d be drying daikon radishes at my parents’ farm back home.”
“Your whole life—everything happens ‘somehow’ doesn’t it? You somehow joined the army, somehow got married, somehow had a kid, somehow raised her, and before you knew it you found yourself in over your head, and the first time you use your own head the answer you come up with is to split. Am I wrong?”
It didn’t matter what he said, Handa knew that Nunokawa barely listened when the conversation turned abstract. Sure enough, Nunokawa only mumbled, “I guess you’re right.”
“Anyway, enough of this ‘somehow,’ all right?” Handa persisted, hoping to put some fire into his spirit for once.
“And how’s your wife doing?”
“She sleeps, she gets up, sleeps again.”
“If you need some help, just say the word. I can do anything.”
When Handa said this, Nunokawa moved his head vaguely in response.
As they approached the Shioji-bashi intersection, Handa decided to get out of Nunokawa’s minivan. As he disembarked, he reached into his bag and shoved a mamushi snake extract energy drink in Nunokawa’s lap. For the first time Nunokawa turned to look at him, smiling faintly with eyes that seemed to yearn to say something.
Handa still had the feeling that “something” was missing, though. And yet, his physical and psychological engines, which were developing the plan, continued to spin at a nearly steady pace, so that on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of November, Handa found himself at Tokyo Racecourse in Fuchu to catch up with his conspirators.
As the time neared for the final race of the day, the passageway to the betting windows became crowded with people—some leaving, some storming the automatic payout machines, and some just loitering around before making their final bet. Handa sat waiting in his usual spot by the pillar, and soon enough Yo-chan’s sneakers appeared out of nowhere. One sneaker kicked the pillar, and then Yo-chan took a seat next to him.
“How much did you lose?” Handa asked.
“Five thousand yen.”
“You betting next?”
“No. That’s enough for me.”
Yo-chan had recently stopped shaving his head and begun to grow out his hair, which made him more and more indistinguishable from the throngs at the racecourse. Though when he planted himself right on the floor by the betting windows and buried his nose into the newspaper spread before him, he was still the same Yo-chan. Nevertheless, he was one of the men who was in on the plan, for reasons known only to himself. The only explanation he gave was “because everyone else is,” and there was no point pushing him any further for an answer—like Nunokawa, he had done everything he had been instructed to do well enough, and Handa could find no particular reason to be worried.
Handa placed in Yo-chan’s palm the tissue-wrapped item he had brought with him. Unwrapping it, with his fingertips Yo-chan picked up a thin steel sheet about the size of a pinkie and brought it closer to his eyes. A few days ago, Yo-chan had cut the notches and the ridges into both sides of the sheet based on the key to Nunokawa’s minivan. Handa had then inserted it into the minivan’s keyhole and turned it around a few times so that the steel would be imprinted with nicks from the grooves in the cylinder lock.
“You see the nicks?”
“I do.”
“Try cutting the teeth out of them.”
“That’s easy. All I need’s like half an hour,” Yo-chan replied and slid the piece of steel into his pocket. For Yo-chan, who shaped metal molds everyday with a margin of error of 0.001 millimeter, cutting a car key should be easy as pie.
“After the key, there’s this.” Handa grabbed the can of beer he had purchased at a vending machine outside the racecourse and held it upside down, then quickly inserted a pushpin into the bottom of the can. Liquid instantly spouted from the puncture, and Handa held his finger over it.
“When you showed Monoi-san before, it was just a can of juice, right? This is what happens when the liquid is carbonated. Can you plug this hole neatly?”
Yo-chan took the can with the hole that measured no more than a millimeter in diameter and from which foam oozed nonstop. He turned his machinist’s eye on it and after examining it for about a minute, he said, “It’d be tough. An aluminum can is only point two millimeters thick, at most. With the pressure from the carbonation, I don’t think whatever plugs it will stay put.”
“So a can would be difficult.”
“I could do it with a bottle. The cap of a beer bottle, I mean,” Yo-chan said and tossed the can into the trashcan.
“Fine, let’s go with a bottle then. And finally, there’s this.”
Handa placed a paperback book he had purchased at a bookstore he had happened to pass by in Yo-chan’s hands, then got to his feet. Yo-chan looked up and down the spine of the book and—muttering “You’re shitting me” to himself—leafed through the pages, no longer paying any attention to Handa. The book had the dubious title, Horseracing Newspapers: How to Read to Win.
The weak rays of the late autumn sun had started to fade by the paddock, where the horses set to appear in the last race of the day were being led by the reins. The wind streaming through the horses’ manes had turned increasingly cold, and the remaining crowd of onlookers had formed a dark gray mass, hushed and still. Seizo Monoi sat on a bench beneath a cluster of a trees overlooking this view, hunched idly over the horseracing paper on his lap. Handa walked halfway around the paddock to reach the bench and sat down next to him.
“Getting cold,” Monoi said to him.
“It’s almost December, after all.”
Handa slipped one of the snapshots that had been tucked into the notebook in his breast pocket into Monoi’s hand. Monoi held the photo fifty centimeters away from his right eye and stared at the image of his late grandson’s girlfriend and her newborn child. His only comment was, “She reminds me of Princess Michiko when she was young.” Their features were different, but in terms of their refined, well-bred manner and calm expression, they could be said to resemble each other.
The next thing Handa handed him was a clipping from a magazine. Monoi once again held it in front of his right eye and squinted. The article was from a financial magazine, a short, serialized column called Managers Up Close, cut out from this month’s issue and featuring Kyosuke Shiroyama, the president of Hinode Beer. Handa had been collecting as many articles on Shiroyama as he could find, but the subject was apparently a simple man both at work and at home, for his name appeared mostly in hard financial articles, making it difficult to deduce anything about his private life. This article, however, was a rare find that offered a glimpse into Shiroyama’s personal life.
“Huh. In order to sustain long, hard workdays he takes great care of his health above all . . . After a simple dinner, he enjoys a bit of beer or whisky . . . Attends social events one night a week at most. Makes sure to be in bed by midnight and rises early to do his reading . . .”
“If he’s in bed by midnight, that must mean he gets home no later than 11 every night. Of the ten times I’ve trailed him now, he’s returned home roughly around ten each time. In a black Nissan President driven by his chauffeur.”
“So you think this is our man?”
“Looks that way.”
Handa put the photo and clipping back inside his notebook and added, “So far, so good.”
Monoi had no further questions. “I’m sure you all could use some money. One of the old man’s time deposits has reached maturity, so split this among everyone as you see fit.” Monoi handed Handa a manila envelope he had taken from his jacket pocket.
Handa tucked the package in his own pocket. From the feel of it, he guessed it was around five hundred thousand yen. “The return on it will be eight-hundred-fold, just you wait. For now, I’ll use this to pay Nunokawa back for the car rental. Then, little by little, I’ll start buying the props we need.”
“You and Nunokawa should be careful around your wives. Women have sharp instincts.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that. Not one of us—Yo-chan and Koh included—are the type to get excited. We sure are a motley crew.”
The horses were already leaving the paddock for the racetrack, and the spectators had dispersed as well. The sunlight had waned, deepening the gray scene.
“I myself feel a little excited, to be honest . . . Sure, my life hasn’t changed, but little by little I can feel my spirits swelling. Well, I knew all along I’d be bidding farewell to my peaceful life when I decided to do this, so I suppose it’s all going as I expected.”
Monoi’s voice, almost more of an interior monologue, reached Handa like a distant echo, its source buried under a thick layer of dust that had accumulated over sixty-nine years. His profile, as he gazed down at the paddock, appeared leathery, hardened and worn-out from a life that had lasted roughly twice as long as Handa’s own.
“By the way, Handa-san. Let’s give our group a name,” Monoi said. “What do you think of ‘Lady Joker’?”
“What is that? English?”
“The other day, Nunokawa called his daughter the joker that he had drawn. That’s when it occurred to me. If a joker is something that nobody wants, then what better name to describe the lot of us?”
“So Hinode Beer is the one that draws the joker?”
“That’s right. Besides, if it weren’t for Lady, we’d never have had the chance to know one another like this.”
Hearing Monoi put it that way, Handa felt deeply moved. Recalling the image of Lady, who very recently had been wobbling her head joyfully in the grandstand on Sundays, Handa nodded. “All right. I like it. Lady Joker it is.”
After parting with Monoi, Handa took the train, transferring from the Keio Line to the JR Line, arriving at Kamata Station a little before six. His wife had the early shift that day at the Ito-Yokado supermarket where she worked, so for the first time in a while they had agreed to meet up at the pachinko parlor in front of the west exit of the station. As he left the station building and stepped into the pedestrian crossing at the traffic circle, a bicycle burst out from the side alley beside the pachinko parlor directly in front of him.
Handa stopped in his tracks, as did the sneakers pedaling the bicycle. The truth was, it was those sneakers more than anything else that caught his eye. He stared at them, then took in the faded jeans, dark sweater, and finally the face that appeared above all these.
The man was also regarding Handa, staring at him in a similar manner, but in the next instant, both sides of his mouth spread wide, like the surface of frozen water cleaving apart, and he flashed his white teeth.
“Handa-san, right?” The quality of the man’s voice was as stiff as ever, but unlike the last time Handa had heard it, there was a bracing and clear ring to it. No, it was more of an artificial sound, as if his voice had been carved out with a high-performance lathe.
“Oh, Inspector Goda . . .”
“Just Goda. I haven’t seen you since we were on that case in Shinagawa. Which department are you working from now, Handa-san?”
“Kamata.”
“I see. I was transferred to Omori in February. We’re neighbors.”
As he said the word “neighbors,” his lips drew a fine arc once more.
Handa remembered him clearly now. He was that assistant police inspector with the Third Violent Crime Investigation Team from MPD. He had been assigned to Special Investigation Headquarters that had been set up in Shinagawa Police Department to handle a murder case. But unlike the icy, reptilian face in Handa’s memory, the face of the man in front of him was calm and luminous, projecting a vibrant, otherworldly smile, and his closely shaven head—so bracingly handsome—made him look completely different, like a clone. As if in a trance, Handa continued to stare at him, for the moment disbelieving his own eyes.
Upon closer inspection, Goda appeared to be sitting astride his own bicycle, and the contents of the front basket were a basin with shampoo, a soap dish and other toiletries, and a violin case. When Handa’s eyes glanced at the basket, Goda immediately donned a shy smile and said, “It’s my day off today, so I went to the batting cages, the public bath, and now I’m on my way to a local gathering.”
“That’s very health-conscious of you. On my day off I usually go the racetrack or play pachinko—oh, and that Theater Palace over there is great, too. In the middle of the day, it’s housewives of all stripes . . .”
Handa laughed, blathering on about things he had had no intention of mentioning, and though he tried to scrutinize the façade of the man before him, his opponent put up an impenetrable defense.
“I’d much rather enjoy a triple-feature of adult films instead of arguing with geezers with athlete’s foot at the public bath. Anyway, are you off-duty today too, Handa-san?”
It was as if each word that escaped from Goda’s bracingly fresh mouth self-destructed before it reached Handa. Such crude and insubstantial remarks rang hollow, coming from Goda, and if they were meant as jokes, they sailed past Handa’s comprehension.
“Goda-san, do you play the violin?”
“I’ve got a rehearsal right now with an ensemble for a Christmas concert over there at Kamata Church. I only dabbled when I was a child, so I’m way out of my depth,” Goda said breezily, then peeked at his wristwatch. “Oh, sorry to take so much of your time. Excuse me, I have to go now,” he said, bowing his head slightly. Out of habit, Handa’s head also lowered automatically as he responded, “Oh, not at all.”
Handa, staring at the receding figure as he peddled away on the sidewalk, remained rooted to the spot for a few long minutes. Time seemed to have stopped as everything he had felt back when they had encountered each other on the staircase at the Shinagawa Police Department—the physiological mass of emotion that had erupted within him, the mood and circumstances surrounding him at the time—came rushing back all at once. Handa stood there bewildered, suddenly forgetting where he was.
With the rush of emotion constricting his throat, Handa asked himself, Did he say Omori Department? If Goda had been transferred to a local department from MPD, did that mean he had been promoted? No, the director of CID and the acting deputy chief were both someone else. If he was still an assistant police inspector after being transferred, then the simple fact was that he had been demoted. The hotshot from MPD who had walked with a swagger four years ago had been demoted. Handa experienced the pleasure of this realization only fleetingly, for now he couldn’t help but wonder what it was about that face, which had been as sleek as glass. Though this was something that—once again—remained beyond Handa’s imagination.
Handa tortured himself endlessly, caught up in the illusion as if he were still standing there on the staircase of the Shinagawa Police Department. Who was that guy? Who was he to have materialized out of nowhere, carrying a set of toiletries and a violin case in the basket of his bicycle and saying he was on his way to a rehearsal for a Christmas concert before disappearing before his eyes? The guy who had practically cut him off in the crosswalk—as if to taunt him, as if to suddenly slap him across the face, as if to gloat for a brief moment? When his thoughts reached this point, Handa had completely forgotten what time he was supposed to meet his wife, and instead began running toward Kanpachi, in the direction the guy had disappeared.
Kamata Church was located about three hundred meters past the Kamata Overpass, and then down a side street on the left. Following his vague recollection of where it was, Handa dashed into a narrow alley at the corner of a parking lot and, still running, he found the open gates of the church on his right.
Beyond the front garden stood a simple wooden chapel. To the left of the chapel, there was a single-story wooden shack that appeared to be a meetinghouse—parked in front of it was the bicycle he had seen earlier, and he could hear strains of string instruments coming from within.
Without even thinking about it, Handa approached the building and peered inside through the window. Inside the humble, wood-paneled room illuminated by a single light bulb, eight men and women holding violins and cellos were seated in a semicircle around a music stand, and in one corner he saw Goda’s face. Had Goda’s story about arguing with geezers with athlete’s foot at the public bath been a lie, or was it that this man’s world was so extraordinarily different from his own? Goda’s right hand and elbow, which controlled his bow, and his left hand, which slid along the neck of the instrument, moved with such mysterious dexterity. And his profile, turned toward the sheet music, was focused so intently on the musical notes that the rest of the world seemed to have completely disappeared for him. His face bore no trace of disappointment at having been transferred to a local police department. No, not only the world of the police force but also the grimy public bath, the geezers with athlete’s foot, the detective from another department whom he had run into just a few minutes earlier, the smoke and soot from the nearby factory—all of it had been erased from this face. Handa could only stare, deeply wounded by the sight of a face like this, and in that moment, his ears barely registered any sound. He recognized the music as something-or-other by Mozart, which he had heard from time to time at the coffee shop near his department, but whether the music was performed well or whether the players were in sync didn’t even reach his consciousness.
Handa was simply aware of the crucial distance between these two worlds separated by a single pane of glass, and for no reason at all he felt his skin prickle as he stood there stuporously. What he saw here was a spectacular absurdity, or perhaps the design of this world was fundamentally flawed. He considered this, but the truth was before he could give it any thought his knees began to buckle and, as if he were about to tumble into a fissure in the ground split by his own two feet, he walked away, reeling in despondency.
He passed back through the alley, and once he had reached Kanpachi, at last he felt the blood rushing back to his brain, which had started to work again dully. If their plan were to proceed as it now stood, a Special Investigation headquarters would be set up not in Shinagawa where Hinode Beer was located, but in the Omori Police Department, the precinct that covered the home of Hinode’s president in Sanno Ni-chome within its jurisdiction. Handa pondered the fact that if Goda were working in Omori now, it was inevitable that sooner or later they would meet again.
So, I will soon force a bitter medicine down that man’s throat. I will see that man turn blue in the face.
Handa thought—Yes, I’ve finally found that “something.” He never would have expected that “something”—so much bigger than the fantasies he had nurtured in the police force—to have arisen from a police inspector he had not seen for four years, but such was fate. As the vast haze of hatred and gloom—neither of which still held any meaning for him—suddenly started to coalesce around the man who had crossed his path, Handa tasted a fresh, hitherto unknown emotion. When it was the police force or a corporation, and there was no individual face to witness in agony, he might only attain an abstract sense of self-satisfaction, but now he knew that, more than anything, he would enjoy the sight of someone suffering right before his eyes. It wouldn’t be long until, inside the small office of the local police department where he had been demoted, that goody-two-shoes with his clear-eyed face would be sobbing, mired in defeat, frustration, and humiliation.
Upon each brick of the plan of attack that he had been constructing up to now, he applied the flesh and blood of this man named Goda, and feeling the plan beginning to pulse with a vivacity as real as something touching his own skin, Handa became euphoric. This is it, he thought. The reason I will commit this crime is because I yearn for this sensation.