Every time Reizo realised what he had done, a fear took hold of him that thrust him upwards into a rage, a rage that would allow him to do something he had dreamt about for so long without daring to admit it to himself.
78
“800 yen for the first drink,” says the barman at Splash. Takeda only has to look at him to make him change his mind. “On the house, this time.” Takeda orders a beer. His body feels dehydrated. A memory is haunting him, throbbing with the intensity of a wound. Years ago he had staggered drunk one night into his wife’s bedroom. He can’t remember whether he wanted to have sex with her or ask for indigestion tablets. His wife was on her knees beside the bed, her eyes closed. When he asked what she was doing on her knees in the middle of the night, she said: “I’m talking with my heart, Akio.” It sounded so infantile that Takeda answered condescendingly: “And does your heart have anything interesting to say?” His wife tilted her head and looked at him, one of her usual understated if slightly accusatory looks. He’d seen it a thousand times. He often compared her expression with that of a cart horse: nervous, gentle, ready to run. He couldn’t have been more mistaken. Now, Takeda sees her eyes again and remembers with astonishment how they ploughed their way through the mud and mire of his embitterment and buried sadness. The inspector rubs his temples and shakes his head.
The other people in the bar – a chubby type with a girlish haircut and a skinny young man with slick, combed back hair – had been keeping a furtive eye on him since he arrived in the place, but now they turn their surprised attention to a trio of new arrivals: Dr Adachi and two women. Adachi gives Takeda a hug, completely out of character. Takeda is frozen to the spot. He catches sight of Beate Becht over Adachi’s shoulder. The German photographer reacts to his gaze as if she’s just been caught taking a picture of the embracing pair without permission.
“Akio,” Adachi whispers in the inspector’s ear. “I’m bitterly sorry. Why do I have to bring you such news?”
Takeda wriggles out of Adachi’s embrace without a word. His wife’s voice resounds in his ears as if the words she said that night are only now hitting home: “You should listen to your heart, Akio. Don’t let it turn to stone.”
79
Reizo Shiga tilts his head as if he’s listening to something. He looks around the poorly lit room. The third futon on the floor belonged to him and Yori. He treated Yori like a pin-up, but deep in his heart he always feared the day she would see through his disguise. He leaves the main room, descends the stairs to the cellar, heads for his improvised office and sits in front of his computer. He opens the file with the text of his novel, rereads the final paragraph and starts to type. A few sentences later he shifts to a new document. He sits for a while, motionless, his fingers resting impotent on the keyboard. When the undersecretary of Aum Shinrikyo told him in exchange for drugs that the woman the sect members were looking for was the daughter of a shadowy kumicho by the name of Rokurobei, a plan started to mature spontaneously in his head. Convinced that fate had led the daughter of a powerful organised crime leader into his group, he wasn’t about to just hand her over to the sect’s leader Shoko Asahara without something in return. As always, the plan to exchange Mitsuko for power and influence started as a vivid daydream. And as always, he had been unable to make a distinction between his own dream world and that strange, confusing, frightening thing other people call reality. He hadn’t dared imagine that Mitsuko would put up such a fight. He had wanted to play with her, like he liked to do with people, but the game had gotten out of hand. To his great surprise, he realised that his life had always been like that, wild, out of control. The anxiety that accompanied this conclusion grabbed him by the throat. He had to go back to the metro tunnel, immediately, set Mitsuko free, offer her his apologies, convince her that he didn’t know what he was doing most of the time, and hope for the best.
He remains at his computer, waiting for the moment to get up and carry out his plan. But it doesn’t come. Past and present mingle anew in his head to create a new story. As an adolescent he had poured over hundreds of photos of the young David Bowie. When he was fifteen he bought a jack-knife. He had always been terrified of being mugged, but he also secretly hoped that someone would try just to see if he would have the guts to use it. In those days he wrote jisei no ku, death poems in which he tried to get “drunk on death”.
He waits for a long time, then starts to type. Instead of a new scene in his novel he writes:
I never wanted to be born. I never wanted to be so lonely and so venomous.
80
Takeda, Adachi, Yori and Becht are huddled together in an alcove in the gay bar. Yori has the least to say of all four, but she’s listening carefully to the others. Beate Becht tells Takeda how sorry she feels for him, then tells him again. Adachi repeats what Yori told him about her friend Mitsuko. He insists that fate brought them together. He hands Takeda the documents Yori gave him, Mitsuko’s documents. The inspector has a quick look at them and they put his head in a spin. He now understands why Adachi arranged to meet him at a bar where no one would expect to find them and not at the inspector’s home.
As they try to unravel the puzzle, it becomes clear that each of them has a unique perspective that can help clarify the situation. They’re all agreed that Takeda has to go into hiding. The police statement Adachi picked up on the radio at his apartment was crystal clear: Takeda is suspected of killing his wife in a domestic quarrel and every unit in the Hiroshima prefecture is looking for him. Every cop in the city knows the score and they’re all on the lookout for the inspector. Takeda’s wife died at home from multiple stab wounds. The knife was from the kitchen in their apartment. There were no signs of a break-in. Chief commissioner Takamatsu issued the arrest warrant in person. The magistrate who signed it has been a close friend of Takamatsu for decades. Everything is pointing towards a set-up, but they have no evidence. How do they prove it?
Yori explains in detail what Mitsuko told her before she disappeared: about her father – the mafia boss known as Rokurobei –, his Yuzonsha group, and the abandoned island of Hashima he uses as his operations base. She adds that, according to Mitsuko, the murdered ceo of the Dai-Ichi-Kangyo Bank was one of the members of Rokurobei’s criminal fraternity. Adachi and Takeda are forced to conclude that Takamatsu must also be a member of the Yuzonsha, or at least in their pay.
“What’s the next step?” Adachi asks. In spite of the tricky situation, there’s a sort of familiarity in the group, as if they’ve known each other for years.