I left the extension cord plugged in and turned off the light with a knuckle. I pulled the female end of the cord across the threshold and carefully closed the door over it. There was a good-sized gap at the bottom of the door, and I was able to wedge the female end in the crack just under the hinges. I shoved it back an inch or so with the toe of my shoe, then stood examining it for a moment. It was practically invisible, and I didn’t think it would be any more noticeable during the day, either. Who pays any attention to the crack at the bottom of a storage room door, the same door that’s been there day in and day out for years if not decades?
I locked the door, wiped it down with my shirtsleeve, and left the building, repeating the process on the way. I walked quickly back to the station, giddy from adrenaline. I was going to do this. I was going to make it work. I didn’t consider anything more than that, didn’t even pause to consider the potential cost of what I was buying.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I woke up the next morning and the first thing I thought was, Today I’m going to kill a man.
It was a strange thought. Every morning I woke up during the war was a day I might kill someone. But in the war, I had never known whom. And anyway, of course I was supposed to kill someone, even a lot of people — after all, it was a war. As Patton said, the point was to make some other dumb bastard die for his country. This was different. This was specific. And it wasn’t sanctioned. But did that make it worse? Killing someone specific was worse than killing someone generic? Killing someone for my own reasons was worse than killing someone for reasons I was told by some politician?
It might have been another rationalization. But I couldn’t argue with the logic, either. And in the end, I was going to do it anyway.
I bought more locks that day, and killed time practicing on them. Each, I discovered, was a little bit different, varyingly tough or vulnerable, loose or tight, easy to work by feel or unyielding. But there could only be so many types, and I imagined there would be broad principles. With enough practice, I’d learn by feel what type I was up against and defeat it more easily.
The hours ticked by excruciatingly slowly. I saw on the news that President Nixon had announced the last U.S. ground troops had been withdrawn from Vietnam. He didn’t mention Cambodia. Nobody questioned him about it. I supposed they preferred to be lied to. Anyway, it didn’t matter. Any idiot knew the war was lost. I was glad I’d gotten out, that I could accept it was over. Earlier in the year, a Japanese Imperial Army sergeant, Shōichi Yokoi, had been discovered in the jungles of Guam. He thought the war was still on, and that he was still fighting it. Hazukashinagara, kaette mairimashita, he had famously said upon arriving back in Japan. Though ashamed, I have returned. I was glad I wasn’t like him. Any fighting I did from now on would be for myself.
Late in the afternoon, I set out on Thanatos for Kita-Senju. I wore a shirt, pants, and shoes. Nothing else — no socks, not even any underwear. My bag was slung over my shoulder, but I’d stowed my personal effects and the money Miyamoto had left me under the mattress at the hotel. Not the most creative place in the world, but I didn’t have to worry about maid service until the next morning, and I was reasonably confident it would all be safe there. I had already burned the file on Mori. The hotel room key I taped to the back of a toilet in the train station. I was traveling as light and sterile as I could under the circumstances.
I parked two blocks from Daikoku-yu, in the direction of the train station. If I had to tear ass out of there, I wanted a little head start to gain some distance before firing up the bike. I used a coin to unscrew the license plate. I doubted anyone would notice the absence on a parked bike. Anyway, I was less worried about that than about anyone remembering the plate number later.
I meandered the area in a slow loop. By overshooting Ozawa’s house on one end to the limit of my vision and doing the same with Daikoku-yu on the other, I managed to stretch out each lap to a good twenty minutes, giving people fewer opportunities to wonder who was strolling in their neighborhood and why. Now that I knew he limped, I was betting Ozawa would consistently use the shortcut to the sentō rather than the main road, which made anticipating him easier. I hoped I wouldn’t have to do this day in and day out. Even with the various steps to reduce my profile, strolling this way wasn’t exactly inconspicuous, and though I doubted anyone would pay much heed on any given day, over time the behavior would start to attract scrutiny.
After two hours, a dark sedan with curtained windows turned onto Ozawa’s street. It had to be him — I couldn’t imagine another person with a car and driver in this neighborhood. All right, he was home. Now I just had to hope it was his habit to visit the sentō every evening. I used the moment to duck into an alley off the path I’d been following and urinate. I had deliberately dehydrated myself, knowing I wouldn’t have many such opportunities while waiting for him, but now that I’d seen him I was nervous, and I knew from combat experience that dehydration or no, it wouldn’t be long before I would need a toilet.
As it turned out, he kept me waiting only for an hour, probably enough time to eat dinner or at least to exchange pleasantries with his wife, maybe his in-laws. It was just growing dark and I was on the heading-back-toward-Daikoku-yu portion of my loop when I saw him approaching, limping slowly along in a bathrobe and slippers, a small plastic bucket and towel in one hand. I turned into an alley so he wouldn’t have a chance to make out my face, and waited three minutes. Then I headed in, opening up the laces of my shoes wide so I could pull them on in a hurry if necessary, and placing them in a waist-level cubby where I wouldn’t have to stoop to retrieve them.
This time, I had brought my own toiletries and towels from the hotel, and only had to pay the entrance fee. It was the same mama-san, though she didn’t seem to remember me. Of course, if this went well, it wouldn’t matter either way.
I used the toilet, then placed my clothes carefully in a locker, closing it but not engaging the lock. If things went badly but I had any time at all, I would want to pull my clothes on as quickly as possible, probably while trying to talk my way out of whatever had gone wrong. With nothing but pants, a shirt, and a bag, I wouldn’t need much time.
I rolled a towel around the curling iron, leaving the plug accessible at one end of the roll, and another around the toiletries, then went in through the sliding-glass doors. The steam and heat wrapped themselves around me, but I barely noticed. I was intent on Ozawa. He was seated in front of one of the spigots, lathering up with a soapy washcloth. There were ten people in the main bath and another ten soaping up or rinsing off. Both mineral baths were empty. The last spigot in the row, the one next to the mineral baths, was empty. I walked over and sat in front of it. I glanced around. No one was paying me any attention at all. Bathhouse etiquette — with all the naked bodies in a sentō, people tend to be conscientious about not staring, and the habit was working to my advantage now. The head of the extension cord was still barely visible where I had jammed it under the storage room door. Okay.
I put the towel with the curling iron rolled up tightly inside it against the bottom of the storage room door. To anyone who might have glanced over, I would look like someone just trying to keep a towel dry by placing it out of the way while he washed. I attached the plug to the extension cord, sat on the stool, and started soaping up. After a minute, I leaned over and touched the towel, confirming that the iron was beginning to heat. No reason to expect otherwise after the dry run I’d done earlier, but combat teaches you not to assume. I knew from having handled it earlier that if I left it too long, it would start to scorch the towel. But I didn’t think I’d need even that long.