Evil and the Mask (12 page)

ON THE SCREEN Kaori was moving. The projector, the latest model, was showing images of the recording the detective had handed me. It had been taken at night, but was very clear. She was beautiful. She was looking down as she opened the door of a convenience store, holding her plastic bag of purchases and her purse in her left hand and putting the receipt away with her right. I smiled, thinking how like her it was to keep her receipts tidy.

I rewound I don’t know how many times to see what she’d bought, freezing the frame and zooming in. In the white bag I could see a pack of Morinaga 100% apple juice. A small brown box might have been chocolate. A packet that looked
like supplements, I couldn’t tell what kind. Her black hair grew to her shoulders, and under a white half coat I could see a cream sweater and a dark skirt. She climbed into a blue Stepwagon, a courtesy car for the women at the club. The driver was a young man, and the other women in the vehicle were about the same age as Kaori. The vehicle backed up a bit and then turned out of the parking lot. At that moment her profile was visible through the window, head down. The car drove off and the recording ended.

I lit a cigarette and played it again. Kaori opened the door of the shop, put the receipt in her purse. My heart rate quickened. Above her sweater, the skin around her throat was pale. Since she was on her way home from work, she was still heavily made up. I watched it again, lit another cigarette, watched it once more. Without my noticing it, the piano tune flowing over the stereo had finished.

MY LIFE SINCE I separated from Kaori had passed uneventfully. I dropped out of high school, took the university entrance exam and went to a college in Tohoku. Perhaps I realized that I could never get on with my life unless I left the estate. Every day I continued to wound the people I met and to harm myself. When I dated girls, Kaori’s shadow was simply overpowering. Towards my friends, too, I couldn’t keep up the pretence for long. Everything was distorted—those past events, which I had made no effort to come to terms with, and my existence since then. I was trapped in my memories of the time I spent with Kaori. After that my life passed as a series of meaningless images. No matter how much I tried
to like other women, I just couldn’t do it. Twice I made halfhearted suicide attempts. On the third time, when I climbed to the roof of my condo, I realized that I wanted to see her one last time. I knew that Yoshigaki, one of the servants Kaori had been on fairly good terms with, kept in touch with her from time to time. I got her to email me a photo of Kaori at the women’s university she was attending in Tokyo. She was lovely. I made up my mind to become a statistic, one of the thirty thousand suicides in Japan each year. But then I heard from Yoshigaki that Kaori was having trouble with her boyfriend, and my feelings became confused. It was actually a common enough problem—he was two-timing her. My heart was empty enough to be relieved that she had found a new lover. Then when I heard that she’d finally been dumped, I headed for Tokyo, my mind all mixed up.

I hired a private eye out of the phone book and got him to approach the guy who broke up with Kaori. He succeeded in getting friendly with him and found out what sort of person he was—one of those guys you find everywhere, who seduce women and then treat them like dirt. I met him several times, posing as the detective’s friend. He was a coward at heart, but that made no difference to me. I set fire to his apartment. I can clearly remember how quiet it was when I lit the match. He wasn’t killed, but suffered burns to the chest. When I heard that he’d quit university I left Tokyo. It wasn’t revenge. I simply wanted to set him on fire. Air, that was the word that came to mind. I felt as little emotion as air. And maybe I thought I was dead already. I went back up on the roof of my building, but then realized I could jump any time I wanted,
it didn’t have to be then. After I graduated my eldest brother contacted me about finding a job. I ignored him and stayed in my apartment in Tohoku. Occasionally I’d pick up a hooker, get her to put on a white dress and have sex with her. Lust was depressing, but so was its release. Father had intended me to be a cancer, and I’d ended up this melancholy creature who couldn’t make anyone happy.

Several years went by, and finally I started thinking about becoming a different person, not so much to start a new life as to make my old self disappear. To extinguish myself, to vanish, to become a bystander in life. The messages I received at infrequent intervals from Yoshigaki told me that Kaori’s life wasn’t going all that smoothly either. Idly I imagined myself as the air that hung around her.

Everyone plays the lead role in their own life. The world progresses through gathering all these leads, through the jumble of different ideas and values. But I planned to drop out of my own play, to expunge myself, to drift into the cracks between the actors who make the world go round. When stagecraft or dramatic tricks were required, I wanted to work in the background, quietly and unobtrusively. I wondered if there were others besides me who had disappeared while they were still alive. Somewhere there must be, I thought vaguely.

I went and bought a can of coffee from the vending machine out front. A group of children was playing in the park, their mothers watching. The intensity of their happiness was too much for me. The sun was just about to set behind the apartment buildings. A motorbike delivering evening
papers stopped nearby, a truck loaded with boxes swept past, an elderly man out jogging ran by me.

I put my hand in the pocket of my jeans and sipped my coffee, wondering what would happen to me. I thought about that, unable to marshal my thoughts. How would a life like mine turn out? What meaning would my existence have in this world? But even if my new life was full of despair, I reflected quietly, my real life had ended when I leapt to my death several years ago. I made my way slowly back to my room.

On the screen Kaori was moving. Looking down, she was opening the door of the convenience store, holding her plastic bag and purse in her left hand and putting the receipt away with her right. I thought again how typical it was for her to store her receipt carefully. She was still moving. I was smiling.

“THERE’S A MAN who often comes to Ms. Kaori’s club. He might be a bit of a problem. A con man. It looks like he’s after her bank account, which has about thirty million yen in it. The Kuki family gave it to her as her share of the inheritance after Shozo Kuki was declared missing, presumed dead, but it appears that she’s just left it there, never even touched it.”

The detective handed me a single photo. It showed a man in a suit with longish hair and narrow eyes.

“He calls himself Takayuki Yajima, but his real name is Masayuki Nishida. He’s thirty-four, and of course he’s single.”

“You mean this is the guy who was checking up on Kaori?”

“No, that was someone else. I’m still not sure who. My
guess is that it’s some kind of shadowy company, the kind that avoids publicity. I don’t know why an outfit like that would be investigating Ms. Kaori, but if I look into her past I might find the reason.”

“No, don’t do that yet. For the time being I just want to wait and see what happens.”

Sitting next to the detective was his assistant, Azusa Konishi, who had started working at Je le Répète and become Kaori’s friend. She was studying me with interest.

“But what puzzles me more than why he’s doing it is how he knew about Kaori’s bank balance in the first place.”

“Did you know that one of the clerks at the Kuki family’s law firm was accused of embezzlement?”

“Yeah.”

“The lawyer filed a complaint against him, the police issued an arrest warrant and he killed himself in Wakayama. But at university he was in the same year as Yajima, and apparently they were friends.”

“You mean it’s connected to the Kukis?”

“Yes. Fraudsters like Yajima gather information from a wide variety of sources. Most likely he heard that Ms. Kaori had a large sum of money in the bank from this ex-employee.”

“Is it possible that other people could have the same information?”

“I don’t think so. Con men usually keep their information pretty close to their chest, and it was leaked to him privately in the first place, by a friend.”

I leaned back on the sofa and took another mouthful of lukewarm coffee. The hotel windows were covered with
raindrops. The TV had been left on, and a reporter was running somewhere with a microphone in hand. There had been another series of explosions. I could tell that Konishi was eager to say something, but was holding back out of politeness. With her dyed brown curls, her shorts and the white, long-sleeved T-shirt that accentuated her breasts, she was one of those striking women you see all over the place.

“Ms. Kaori,” she began, her voice lower than I expected. “My impression is that she’s very good-natured. She’s cheerful and considerate, so she’s popular with customers, but I still get the feeling that she’s putting it on. Of course it’s a service industry, so everyone fakes it to some extent, but it seems to me that she always has to force herself to be cheerful. Even her thoughtfulness is kind of painful to watch. She’s pretty but, how can I put it, it’s like she’s afraid of living.”

She looked at me searchingly.

“It looks like she’s got a bit of a soft spot for this guy Yajima. She still thinks of him as a customer, but I don’t know how things will pan out. Even if she finds out he’s a con man, she might end up feeling sorry for him. She’s got that side to her. Some women let themselves be fooled, even knowing the guy is a cheat. With his previous victims, Yajima was quite capable of continuing to work on them even after he was exposed, telling them that he needed the money, this time he really meant it. I can’t say for sure that would happen with Kaori, but he’s a nuisance.”

She straightened up.

“I think she brings out the worst in people. It’s like the part of her that’s afraid, the part of her that’s insecure, can’t
help accepting other people’s weaknesses. It worries me to see that.”

The man turned to look at her and she fell silent.

“It’s okay. Please say anything that’s on your mind. It’ll be useful.”

The detective took up the conversation.

“As well as that, Yajima’s into drugs. It sounds like he makes the women take them as well, whether they want to or not, sometimes even injecting them by force. When you see a beautiful woman and think, what on earth’s she doing with a guy like that, nine times out of ten there are drugs involved. It goes without saying.”

“He injects them?”

He looked at me strangely for a second.

“So I hear. I got that from a woman he mistreated before.”

“I see.”

I picked up the photo of the man calling himself Yajima and stared at it again. I didn’t feel the least bit disturbed, and my heart rate didn’t alter. I was aware of the stillness in the room and I thought I could hear faint noises somewhere in the distance. When I glanced at the clock, it was almost time for Azusa to go to work.

“What should we do?” the detective asked.

I stubbed out my cigarette.

“Look for any obvious patterns in this guy’s behavior. His regular hangouts, days and times he goes there. And then after a week I want you to stop watching him. One thing I need to ask you, though. How far are you prepared to go?”

The man’s expression didn’t change.

“As far as it takes.”

“Okay. But it would still definitely be better if you stopped watching him. Ms. Konishi, for the time being, if he comes to the club, please do your best to keep him away from her. Right, I’ll be waiting for a report a week from today.”

“Will do.”

The rain was still beating against the hotel windows. I’d planned to walk part of the way home but decided against it.