Why did I do it? Takeda asked himself, genuinely surprised. Why?
It took months before he dared show his mother the dog-tags. Barbara Gerressen emerged from her attempted suicide as a woman who spread overpowering anger in the air around her, like the smell of burning flesh. All that time, corporal Takeda had been waiting for a knock on the door and the police taking him into custody in handcuffs. But the staff at the home where Masajiro lived had apparently blamed his death on the man’s failing health. And even if they had performed an autopsy, there would have been no traces of the overdose of insulin after twenty-four hours.
Takeda told his mother that he had found the dog-tags when he was tidying her room. He asked in a tone that could be interpreted as accusatory if they belonged to his father. The tags had a strange effect on her. She tore them from his hand and threw them away as if they were poisonous. She clenched her fists, her eyes bulged. Her MS had worsened in recent months and her limbs jerked and shuddered. He finally calmed her down and she told him in a toneless voice, distant, as if she was telling someone else’s story, that most of the camp guards made a habit of picking the prettier women to rape. The man she called “that whore-hopper Masajiro” without paying the least attention to the expression on her son’s face was the first.
After getting her pregnant he had threatened to kill her and when the baby was born they both, father and mother, made sure it drowned in the latrines. Barbara Gerressen wasn’t up to raising a child in the camp. Where would she get the energy? She also hated the baby: it was “brown as a coconut”.
This was the first time Takeda had heard about his dead half-brother. Other whore-hoppers followed, Barbara Gerressen continued, but fortunately none of them got her pregnant.
“Six months before the end of the war I had sex with whore-hopper Genkei Akama, your father,” she concluded. She looked at him as if she wanted to see how deeply her words pained him. “You were destined to meet the same fate as your half-brother, but the war ended and that changed everything.”
He noticed her hands tremble as if she felt sorry she hadn’t been able to toss the second baby into the latrines.
I killed the wrong man, thought Takeda. I took all those risks for the wrong man. He roared with laughter as his mother raised her eyebrows in surprise.
119
He still has hours of driving ahead of him and tiredness is already weighing heavy, but he’s determined to get to the suburbs of Tokyo before nightfall and take the metro the following morning to the offices of the Public Security Commission. After the storm of the night before, his car has been assailed all day long by broad swathes of almost blinding golden sunlight. Takeda pays little attention to the motorway and the landscape around him. There’s something cardboard about it all, neat and soulless, constructed in haste. His mind is a merry-go-round of half-digested impressions and streams of ideas, a psychic no-man’s-land without horizons. Takeda realises that he’s been living for days with the same rattled feeling he had twenty years earlier when he was sitting in that tiny room with the man he thought was his father, waiting for him to breathe his last. Then, as now, his mind zigzagged back and forth trying to come to grips with a reality that seemed so unreal, so unacceptable.
A new thought makes him tug the wheel involuntarily. If Norikazu and his men have Yori under their control, then the mafia boss now knows about the existence of Beate Becht and that means she could be in danger. His jaws tense. He’s botched up big time, one blunder after the other. Becht is unstable, has already attempted suicide before. It won’t take much to get her to talk. The inspector tries to calm down. What happened, happened. He’s determined not to deviate from his plan. It’s not a good plan, but it’s his only plan. In contrast to the traditional detective novels his wife used to read with such pleasure, the events of the last few days had been nothing but chaos. Takeda had been involved in plenty of investigations in his career that were just as chaotic, hanging together by a thread, the work of the inadequate and the confused. Since murdering the man he thought was his father, Takeda has subscribed to the theory that “normal” life is like being under water: everything is blurred; the people and things around you do the same every day, listless, pointless. But serious crimes propel you to the surface where everything is sharp and unexpected. Suddenly you realise that creatures have followed you from the deep. You see predators you didn’t notice before and they scare the shit out of you.
He feels like a tiny cog in a huge machine, turning and churning, stirring the pot.
After the confrontation with his mother and the realisation that he had killed the wrong man, Takeda suffered a nervous breakdown and took sick-leave for four months. It wasn’t appreciated. The force had little sympathy for policemen with mental problems, a reality he had to deal with later when he still struggled to pass the inspector’s exam in spite of being significantly older than the other candidates. When he got back on his feet, he decided it was time for a new Takeda. Prior to his breakdown he had been the model policeman, following orders to the letter wherever possible, a born yes man. But now he seemed to have developed such an instinct for crimes and the motives behind them that his colleagues and superiors started to talk behind his back of his “sixth sense”. Rumours gradually spread about his talents and Takeda was even tempted to believe in them himself. Fortune and accident combined to help him solve a couple of difficult cases. Once he had separated himself from the pack, he inevitably drew attention to himself; not exactly an advantage in Japan. His superiors used him with relish to get results, but they didn’t trust him; not only because he was a half-breed, but now because of what they called his eccentric behaviour. Takeda resigned himself and cultivated his image. It helped him forget the past and come to terms with the fact that he was destined to be an average run-of-the-mill police officer for the rest of his life. He channelled his underlying vengefulness and ambitions into the cases that came his way and gradually developed a sense of pride in being a lone wolf. At the same time he learned to live with the widespread corruption that riddled the force in a country where losing face was the worst thing that could happen to a person and crime figures were kept artificially low. The outside world saw Japan as an anthill society in which everyone played their part to the best of their ability, but Takeda was convinced that the Japanese were the biggest anarchists on the planet, they just managed to keep it under wraps.
Years passed, time flew.
Now he was sitting behind the wheel of a rented car on his way to Tokyo to save his own skin.
But was his skin worth saving, he asked himself. He had treated his wife as an object of little value. He had indulged his hidden desires on whores. The thin line he had walked for so many years reminded him of the months of fear that had followed the death of Masajiro and the slowly evolving conviction after the event that he wasn’t going to be caught.
But I should have been caught. That thought kept him focussed and helped him mask the dark side of his character. It was only in the tiny, tidy, impersonal cubicles of the love hotels that he was able to reveal the true Takeda. But he would drive home afraid after each visit: a police inspector who enjoyed a bit of hard-handed action with prostitutes was exposed to any number of dangers. Sooner or later he was going to rough up a woman who worked for the yakuza and his unusual appearance would make him easy to find. Takeda knew he was playing with fire; perhaps he wanted to be punished. He asked himself time and again if he did what he did because he hated his mother. Then he would try to cultivate feelings for her, but nothing ever came, beyond a slight sense of irritation, as if she hadn’t suckled him enough.