Hidden Nexus (4 page)

There had only been the bed to sit on and she'd eased herself awkwardly onto it feeling deeply uncomfortable.
It had been a self-conscious position to be in and thinking back she realised that her skirt had had a tendency to ride up when she’d moved giving an impression that was wholly contrary to what she'd been feeling.

She'd secretly known why she’d been chosen for that particular job, perhaps for all the jobs. 'Wear a low cut top' had been the order. It had hardly been a victory for women’s lib and she'd had no wish to tempt seduction, particularly in a building like that.
Consequently
she'd tried her best to look as business-like as possible but none-the-less she'd felt his watery eyes slither all over her body. It was perhaps only too clear to her, after all, that he had not only a business proposition in mind.

Despite this she’d launched in.

‘
Sokaiya
!’ she’d said firmly.

‘
Sokaiya?
’ Fujiwara had looked up in some surprise and leant back against the wall.
She'd been able to tell that he was unused to being involved in such activity. She'd also been able to tell that he was unused to being told so severely what to do by one so young and one so female.

‘
Sokaiya
!’ she'd repeated.

‘You want me
sell ‘protection’ services? To which company?’

‘Yokohama Black Panther.’

‘The logistics people? Why? Are you involved with them?’

‘We’re not directly, but well… You don’t need to know the reasons.’

‘And?’

‘And… we want you to do what you can to
assist
them in making the right sort of decisions.’

‘By threatening disruption at their shareholder meetings?’

‘Exactly. You’re not so stupid as you look, are you?’

Fujiwara had bristled once more. Too late she'd realized that she'd over-
cooked
it. He'd marched menacingly towards the bed and before she'd been able to prevent him he had pinned her against the headboard with his knee pushed hard against her chest and his huge hands grasping her throat.

She recalled with a shudder his spitting tongue and rank bad breath. She could remember every single word he’d said.

‘Listen! I think you're out of your league,' he'd hissed. 'You're playing with the big boys now, or should I say the rough boys - the vermin! You should stick to making tea with the tarts and the Office Ladies. Now listen up! It wouldn't take much for me to push so hard that your nice little titties would be popping out your back and as for my hands... Well... at the moment they're around your throat but who knows where they might begin to wander. So be careful what you say, little lady or I might just begin to get angry and you wouldn’t really want that, would you? Now let’s continue our little conversation, but with fewer insults and a little more respect. You treat me fair and I’ll do the same for you. Got it?’

He'd released her from his grip and returned to his position by the door. It had been just as threatening. There had been no escape.

‘So
Sokaiya?
’ He'd picked up the conversation as if nothing had happened.
‘I thought the government had cracked down on
Sokaiya
activity.’

‘That’s what they thought,’ she'd croaked, allowing her hand to gently massage her neck. She'd experienced not just the shock of aggression but also a great deal of pain. 'The only real change is that more and more top companies have resorted to holding their annual shareholders’ meetings all on the same day in order to make it impossible for people like you to attend. But we know you can get around that.’ She’d quoted verbatim what her boss had told her to say.

‘We’re still skilled intimidators though, aren’t we? If that’s what you mean.’

‘Yes, well..
. So we need you to create as much panic as you can so the value of Yokohama Black Panther stock will plummet, costing them millions, allowing my boss to move in for a take-over. Either that or they comply and give us what we want.’

‘And when exactly do you want us to act.’

‘
The 3rd January - Monday.
T
heir meeting starts at 4:00pm. Here’s the address.’ She'd passed him over a slip of paper.

‘I can see why you convened this hasty little meeting, then. Okay – so we create trouble for Yokohama Black Panther. I can see how that helps you, but what do I gain? I mean why should I be so generous to Niigata Kyubin?’

‘Did you ever wonder who guaranteed the loan when you started your ‘massage’ salon? It was the director of Niigata Kyubin.
You’ve also found it
expedient to hide your profits by trading through dummy entities that ostensibly ‘supply’ Niigata Kyubin. Did you know that?’

‘No I didn’t.'

She refrained from a further insult. That little strategy had been completely ill-conceived.

There had been however, one more request that she'd been told to make – and she hadn't been entirely certain how to make it, but make it she did, unaware at the time of the real consequence of her actions.

‘It’ll be done – as we agreed,’ he’d said before leaving and it was only some fifteen minutes later that she’d had the horrific thought that what he had in mind was far from what she herself had wanted.

Admittedly she hadn’t been able to sufficiently define what actions were needed – her brief had been suitably vague and given that she wasn’t a particularly scheming, double-dealing individual, come to that matter neither violent nor aggressive, she’d failed to adequately express herself. She was actually a virgin at top-end machination.

But the evidence of what they had ‘agreed’ was now playing out in front of her on the morning news.

She sat up in utter disbelief at what she was seeing and was in a state of complete horror at her conspiratorial involvement in the whole affair.
A gas explosion and Nakasone's death! Had that really been part of the plan? A frantic fear at what the consequences might be was also rapidly beginning to crawl all over her. She’d heard too many stories about the brutal behaviour of the police and the ruthlessness of the legal system. She sat at the breakfast table in solemn silence and internally wept.

‘I’ve done something terribly, terribly wrong,’
she thought to herself.

The events on the news forced her to churn over all the events of the past couple of months - and she had many things to consider regarding her behaviour, not just recently but ever since those first fateful merger meetings between her boss Kenji Ozawa and Noboru Nakasone and the sum total of all these thoughts was that rather than experiencing the energy, pride and zest that came with mixing it with the strategy makers she had suddenly found herself in an altogether different place. She now struggled to recognise what had become of herself.

When she’d set off, quite deliberately, to pursue her career rather than to slip into the second, more leisurely, lane of housewife domesticity the plan had been quite clear – to put herself in front of the decision makers, to rattle a few cages, to progress up the ladder and break through the glass ceiling, and yes, deep down, somewhere in her subdued erogenous zones
she would have quite liked to have had a bit of harmless fun along the way. What she had found, albeit just fairly recently, was unemotional exploitation, manipulation and unexpected collusion with ne’er do wells and thugs. Initially she’d enjoyed her part in the hard-nosed merger negotiations and understood that, at least in terms of straight-forward business, she was quite good at it. She’d enjoyed the pure, incisive application of her knowledge and quietly rejoiced in the recognition that she’d been receiving. The patronage from her boss had been particularly welcoming, the flirting, too. She’d enjoyed that. She’d undoubtedly been experiencing a ‘buzz’. Life was suddenly full of possibility. She’d suddenly become a mover and a shaker.

But not now!

The link-up with Fujiwara had been a shock. As she sat blinking at the news in front of her, the reality of what she had done was slowly beginning to hit home. She struggled to believe that she had been so completely blinded by ambition that her sense of morality had avoided confronting what it really meant to conspire with such a man. But the evidence was staring at her straight in the eye. Had she been so completely naive? Did she really think that her ‘cosy chat’ with him would have no violent consequences what-so-ever?

What a terrible mess her life had suddenly become.

For now though there was not much that she could do. She could only grasp the day and see what would unfold. For a brief moment she considered confiding in her husband. She glanced over to him and for a minute or two watched him finishing off his toast.

‘What?’ he said, noticing that she’d been staring at him. Eri looked down and studied her empty plate.

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘It’s nothing.’

Instead of confiding in him she raised herself up and prepared to face the day switching her mind quickly to more mundane and practical matters - thinking about what to wear or more particularly what coat to wear. It was to be one of those fateful decisions, one of many minor decisions that taken on their own didn’t add up to much. Deciding which coat to wear in the whole scheme of things would appear to be a relatively minor decision, however it was one that would have gruesome consequences.

Before she left she hesitated in the
genkan
(porch)
.
‘What’s the forecast for today? Is it cold again?’ she shouted into the main room.

‘Cold again!’ confirmed her husband.

‘Is it cold again?’ – ‘Cold again’ Perhaps it summed up their relationship.

Eri looked at the various coats hanging on their hooks. After a moment of indecision she selected a long brown, fairly heavy looking coat and then to top off the ensemble took a dark brown woolly hat from the draw to the side, again hesitating before she did so - decisions, decisions. She opted not to take a scarf. Her more decretive silk ones were hanging in the closet upstairs and she couldn't be bothered to trail up there again. The woolly ones tended to tickle her neck. She gathered the collar of her coat around her, looked at herself in the mirror, re-applied her bright, red lipstick, pursing her lips as she did so and then opened the door. She stepped out into the biting cold, into the grip of a Kanagawa winter doing its best to be as full as it possibly could. There could be snow later and in the meantime the freezing grey sky did its best to impose itself on the hapless citizens below.

Worse than that – she had about fourteen hours to live.

Thursday 30th December 10:30pm

Of course he’d had no plan, no handy, pre-conceived, trail of bread crumbs through the labyrinth. He was making this up as he went along, driven by a need to satisfy an urgent, impulse. She had to die. On that score there really had been no other option. A quick, frantic decision had been taken from which there was no going back, but he was concerned that it was getting him into even deeper waters. He'd already made one crucial error! There was no room to make any more.

For a brief, crazy, irrational moment he had considered keeping her alive, keeping her imprisoned, trussed-up in bondage - maintaining her as his own personal sex-slave. It was true to say that he was now operating on a completely alternative plane of morality. It had been a quite delicious idea, for to say that he had enjoyed the sex with her would have been an understatement. He had experienced not only just the purest of physical sensations, not only just the joy of blood rising but more than that, he had experienced a steady onslaught of endorphins on his brain. He’d experienced a high – as high as any that he’d known, creating inexplicable feelings of euphoria and happiness. It had been an exercise in the execution of unadulterated power.

However, in equal and opposite strength to the ecstasy, grew a wretched and inconsolable torment. He had stared, wordlessly, upon the sullied, raped, woman sprawled upon the floor. He had wanted so much to take her again, and again and again, but then again he had so desperately hadn’t.

The only plan,
post-coitus
, had been to silence her.

The only plan, pre-coitus, had been to silence her!

A variety of thoughts criss-crossed through his mind and his brain was laughing at him once more - a ceaseless chattering, a mocking and taunting that had begun just a few hours previously.

He'd already made that one crucial error!

It tormented him, so much so that these ceaseless thoughts had taken over every facet of his being. It was mentally, but also physically painful.

She was a dirty slut and she needed to die – she deserved to die. It was the only way.

As he’d stood up, with her finally lying dead at his feet, he’d found that the execution of the ultimate power had not been as satisfying as the rape. There had been no transference of life-force from her to him – no epiphany or discovery of nirvana. Her searching, pleading eyes had seen to that. Her eyes had been the hardest to deal with. Had those eyes known what was about to come? He hadn’t thought so. Somehow he’d suspected that she’d been hoping for a reprieve – that a modern-day samurai would come to her rescue or that he would have a last minute change of heart…

That had made him laugh – a heart! He’d lost his heart many years ago.

As he’d suffocated the life out of her, those eyes
had lost their fight and ultimately lost their light – their final
imprint, the final negative had recorded a mix of horror and surprise, pain and disappointment. Her body had eventually lain still, the whole world had become quiet, although in his mind he could still hear the beating of her feet.

Thump, thump… thump, thump, thump...

That particular noise hadn’t stopped - would probably never stop.

Once away from her body however, he’d felt much better. Perhaps it had never happened. Perhaps the whole of this night had never happened. Perhaps those initial errors had never happened.