Evil and the Mask (23 page)

“A message.”

The hand holding my wrist was lukewarm.

“In the next two or three days, contact Kaori Kuki.”

I still didn’t look at him, but I couldn’t move my arm.

“If you don’t, his orders are that we do it ourselves. That’d be a pain in the ass. Get it? So do what he says. Get the girl hooked and then take her to him.”

The elevator beside us opened and a woman with dyed brown hair came out, but he still didn’t let go, seeming completely indifferent to her presence.

“You get in touch with her first and show us that you can do it. Before we take over.”

He took a bag from his jacket pocket.

“This stuff is top grade. Don’t waste it. If you want you can use a bit for yourself.”

He stuffed the packet into my pocket, turned and walked away.

I OPENED THE front door, went to the bathroom and flushed the powder in the bag down the toilet. When I went into the living room, Kyoko was watching a movie in the dark again. On the screen a couple was arguing bitterly in the middle of a street. The woman was crying and advancing on the man. Kyoko welcomed me home in a soft voice. I tried to answer her, but my words wouldn’t come out clearly.

“You look exhausted,” she said.

“Yeah.”

I tossed my coat aside and collapsed on the couch.

“Some letters came for you. I put them on that box.”

“Thanks.”

I sipped a glass of stale water that was sitting nearby.

“You get a lot of mail, don’t you? Watch shops, clothes shops, hotels. But the addresses are all in the same handwriting.”

“Did you open them?”

“No. Though I was really tempted.”

I laughed.

“Things might turn a bit dangerous,” I said. “It would be better if you didn’t see me for a while.”

She looked at me open-mouthed. “Really?”

“Really.”

“That’s a bummer. I’ve got nowhere to go.”

On the TV the woman, still shouting, knifed the man at an intersection. His blood formed a pool in the middle of the road. Strangely, the guy who’d been stabbed was watching the scene from the window of an apartment a long way off.

“What about your own place?”

“Well, I’ve got one, but …”

I stood up shakily.

“How much do you owe?”

“It’s okay.”

“No, you can tell me.”

“About eight hundred thousand.”

I opened the white closet and took a million yen from the briefcase inside.

“Here, take this.”

“Huh? No, I couldn’t.”

“Go on, take it.”

“Why are you giving me this?”

She looked at me. And it was actually a bit weird for me to be handing her so much cash.

“It wasn’t my money in the first place, and I don’t need it. I was planning to give it all away in the end anyway.”

“But still …”

She lowered her eyes.

“Plus I had sex with you,” I said.

“You pay this much for sex?”

“Sex is much more valuable than you think.”

I knew that what I was saying was kind of funny.

“All right then. I’ll pay you back one day.”

“That’s okay.”

“I insist. I’ll pay it back.”

On the screen the guy watching himself being stabbed had turned into an old man. Walking with a cane, he made his way slowly towards the intersection where his double had been attacked by the woman all those years ago, but just before he reached it he thrust a knife into his own stomach, as if he’d been possessed by something. As the withered trees lining the road looked on silently, the elderly man in the coat crouched down on the cobbled crossing. He looked resigned. Red blood stained the surface of the street again, like some kind of symbol.

“Anyway, it would be best if we didn’t see each other for a while.”

“Are you in that much shit?”

“Yeah, well, just in case.”

The TV suddenly went dark. Or maybe it had been off for some time.

“I don’t know how to say this, but are you all right?”

“I don’t know.” I grinned briefly. “When I think about my personality, my life so far, my future, somehow I get the feeling there’s only one destination for me.”

“Destination?”

Suddenly I remembered the bottle of cyanide. There was still some left.

“Yeah. In the end I think that getting tangled up in things, that’s what life is all about. Even if you think you’re following your own wishes and desires, those wishes and desires are formed by your entanglements. See what I mean?”

“Maybe.”

“I guess I’ve only worked that out since I got my face changed.”

She moved closer, took the cigarette from between my fingers and took a puff.

“Hey, you want to …?”

“You don’t have to.”

“No, it’s not that. I want to.”

She started undoing her buttons.

“But that too,” I said. “Maybe your DNA and character and environment are just reacting to my randomly altered appearance. You’re getting tangled up.”

She went to stop my mouth with her lips, like they do in the movies, but missed and bumped against my chin. She burst out laughing.

IN THE DARKNESS we walked through the narrow streets and up a gentle slope, ignoring the bright lights of a convenience store. Ryosuke Ito was wearing the same gray knit cap, a white, sleeveless down jacket with a hood, and ripped designer jeans. He walked in front of me, looked back once and then started climbing a rusty staircase outside an apartment block. Two communal washing machines stood in a row. The building was damp from yesterday’s rain. Overall it seemed old, but the intercom looked incongruously new.

The guy who answered the door turned around and retreated back inside without even looking at us. He was still young, in his early twenties. The room was small, with a blue
carpet and a simple loft. Apart from a low table and a TV, there was absolutely no furniture.

“That’s Sato. His real name isn’t important.”

Despite this introduction, the guy just looked at me without responding. He was wearing blue-framed glasses and a blue hoodie, and his brown hair was styled with gel.

“Just the two of you?” I asked.

“Of course not,” said Ito, sitting on the floor. “We’re just one cell. Most of us aren’t in Tokyo.”

When I lit a cigarette the guy calling himself Sato opened his mouth for the first time to tell me I couldn’t. I ignored him and kept smoking. Maybe he was used to it, because he passed a flattened can to Ito to use as an ashtray.

The TV was showing a report about photos of election candidates being replaced with pictures of a porn actress in eighteen places up and down the country. Their electoral offices were furious.

“How did it go?” Sato asked, pulling the cord hanging from the fan.

Ito opened his bottle of mineral water.

“I forget her name but apparently the posters are done well, so they look just like the real thing. She’s smiling and saying ‘Full penetration!’ out of the corner of her mouth.”

“Ah, that’s pretty funny. It’s borderline, though. Well, I guess it’s okay.”

“Yeah. I’ll email them, then. And I heard they found a heap of dead pigeons in a park.”

“That’s no good.”

The news program continued. There was a follow-up
story on a third politician, who had been found dead in a love hotel. The prime minister appeared, surrounded by reporters, and the announcer read that the police had further increased the number of detectives on the case. There was a big fire at the office of a car manufacturer that had laid off lots of contract workers. A foul smell had caused a disturbance on the subway. On their blog, JL had written that they were fighting back against the corrupt government. They had covered the house of a TV commentator who had publicly declared himself a friend to young people with vivid graffiti. There’d been numerous arsons targeting rich people’s mansions. Two popular TV personalities had recently gotten married live on TV, and the husband had received threatening letters, which stated in childlike printing that they weren’t going to kill him but that in the next five years they would definitely cut his balls off. Photos of a famous newscaster taking part in a bondage game at an S&M parlor were released. While the culprits were still unknown, enough palytoxin to kill several thousand people had been stolen from three different medical universities.

“You guys are pathetic.”

Sato laughed briefly.

“Of course we are. Because we’re just messing around.”

“It’s a waste of time and effort,” I said.

He laughed again.

“You’re right.”

He turned back to the TV. A reporter was walking towards a university where the poison was stolen, a stern expression on his face.

“If it’s just a joke,” I went on, “then it’s not too serious. But if you use it to start killing people it gets complicated.”

“Yeah, well, that wasn’t us,” interrupted Ito. “Sure, whoever did it was a member, but we only heard about it after. It certainly wasn’t approved beforehand. It’s still a bit too soon. The police and Public Security taking us seriously at this early stage, that’s a nuisance.”

“Don’t you guys have a leader or anything?”

“We don’t need one. We’re not even a proper group.”

Laughing, Sato picked up the story.

“Recently there’ve been lots of copycat crimes, but if any of them take our fancy we issue a statement saying that it was us, attaching a code that’s only known to us and the press. Of course the copycat puts out a statement of their own, but then everyone assumes that that’s just to confuse the cops, or that they’re a JL associate of some kind. Sometimes even the copycats themselves get the wrong end of the stick and think that we’re accepting them as members. We send our communiqués directly to the media. That’s something we learned from Al Qaida.”

“Then …”

“Yeah, there are still real members. I guess you could say that anyone who knows that code, they’re real members. By the way, killing those politicians, that was done by JL. Apparently they called for volunteers. We’re only loosely affiliated—we don’t all get together to discuss our plans. Our only rule is to keep the code secret. Because if newcomers muscle in, that’s a pain.”

“Okay, what things have you two actually planned?”

“I don’t have to tell you. But me and Ito, we still haven’t got mixed up in any killings, because we’re not ready for it.”

He laughed.

“We plan to do it eventually. What I mean is, it’s best to leave the killing to others for now. To the extremists. Actually, JL’s gotten lots of publicity since the murders started. Hey, Ito, is this guy okay? He’s got no intention of joining us, has he?”

“He’s fine. He’s here, isn’t he? That shows he’s interested. And we need cash.”

“That’s true, we need cash. That’s our biggest problem right now.”

Sato stood up.

“Okay, so now you’ve got to convince him. I don’t mind teaming up with him. He’s kind of annoying, but he looks smart.”

Glancing at the clock, Sato picked up his backpack.

“Where are you off to?”

“You don’t need to know. See you.”

He left the room. Ito started flicking through the TV channels with the remote.

“Where did he take off to in such a hurry?” I asked.

“We also have an unspoken rule not to pry into each other’s business. Probably a part-time job. A while ago I spotted him from a distance handing out packets of tissues advertising a bar.”

He drank some more water. The two rings in his ear glinted white under the lights.

“Before you get the wrong idea, we’re not really social reformers. We’re not even trying to change our own lives.”

He began turning the band on his left wrist with his right hand.

“We’re just having fun. We’ve only got one thing in common. We want to drag everything down as far as we can. We want to pull down all human achievements, all human successes, all authority. For example, this is a really small thing, but you know how a few years ago dozens of websites sprang up where you could download vast quantities of music, movies or whatever for free as compressed files? At the time, everyone was talking about how easy and fast the download software was, right? And they were getting millions of hits? The guy who did that is one of us, back before JL was formed.

“Apparently maintaining those sites was really expensive, but he got so much money from the ads for porn sites he linked to that he even made a small profit. He kept them updated from a PC registered to someone who was already dead, using a provider in Southeast Asia, and he had the money he got from ads remitted to a bank account in Shanghai. Someone he knew there paid homeless people to withdraw the cash, then his friend would wire it back to the guy’s own bank account in Japan, so it was almost impossible to trace it back to him. That money was what got JL started.

“What he did was a felony, infringement of copyright. If everyone can get their hands on whatever they want for nothing, the people who provide the culture will lose their source of income and the culture will decline. But that’s exactly what he wanted. He wanted everything to go down the tubes. Doesn’t the word ‘professional’ make your flesh crawl? Traditional culture, underground culture, he wanted it all to collapse, everything to be done by amateurs. Enjoying
things that non-professionals had created themselves in their spare time, enjoying them for free on the net, that would be cool. You see?