Less Than Human (17 page)

“Ellie, over here.” Masao was waiting for her at the exit. He peered at her face in concern mixed with exasperation. “You
haven’t slept, have you.” He took her arm and steered her past waiting taxis and the blaring music and lights of a pachinko
parlor, away from the station and through the ill-lit streets. The heat sink of concrete and asphalt swallowed them.

“What’s wrong?” she said, as soon as the pachinko music was behind them.

“It’s Mari-chan. They can’t find her.”

“Has she gone off somewhere with her friends?”

“Not with any of the friends we can find.”

Eleanor forced her aching head to think back to Sunday. “She got a phone call on Sunday afternoon. I had the impression it
was from a boyfriend. Could she have gone away with him?”

“It’s not that simple.” Masao stopped in the white streetlight near the old milk factory, where Kazu had failed in his bid
to escape Grandpa’s control.

“The police called. They think she might be part of a religious group.”

“What kind of a religious group?”

“Some postmillennial cult called the Silver Angels. I looked it up in the university database while I was waiting for you.
All the database says is ‘possibly apocryphal group classified in the neo-Buddhist area.’”

“Surely Mari’s not that stupid.”

He shook his head. “Kazu said two girls from Mari’s school have been killed. The police think it might be something to do
with the group.”

“Killed? How?” Sharp pangs of worry began to penetrate the fatigue-sodden sponge of her mind. Over the past couple of decades,
ever since the Soum cases of the nineties and early twenty-first century and the Happy Universe disaster of 2004, everyone
in Japan knew what happened to people who ran afoul of the cults.

“The police won’t tell exactly, although they did say it was probably an accident. I’ll look up more information on these
people,” he continued. “It’s possible they’re not a real cult. Sometimes the police get the wrong idea. Or they want the group
to be a cult so they can quote the Religious Protection laws against them.”

“What does that mean?”

“If the courts recognize the group as a cult, the police can use a much wider range of search and interrogation powers than
if it was, say, a group of kids getting together to play weird games.”

Eleanor hoped it was the latter. “Let’s go. Mari might be home already.”

They hurried on through the hot streets.

Mari was not home.

“Her phone is disconnected, she’s not answering mail.” Yoshiko twisted her plump hands around a wiping cloth. Her eyes were
red and swollen. “Kazu went to her apartment. The landlady told him Mari moved out months ago. Why didn’t she
tell
us if she was in trouble?”

“Yoshiko-san, calm down.” Grandpa folded his arms magisterially on the other side of the kitchen table. “I’m sure it’s all
a mistake.”

He didn’t explain how it could be a mistake, not if Mari had moved out long ago. Eleanor hoped Mari had merely moved into
a boyfriend’s flat and wanted some time free of her family.

“Eleanor-san, Kazu-san. Your tea.” Grandma somehow found places to put two full cups in the mess on the kitchen table. Kazu
and Masao stood by the doorway to the living room, muttering together.

Eleanor sipped the bitter green brew and hoped it would clear her head. There didn’t seem to be anything she could do at the
moment, which made it harder to stay awake.

“Mari is a good girl. She wouldn’t do anything stupid,” declared Grandpa, as though that made it so. But his stubborn mouth
was unsteady, and his tufted eyebrows twitched as he blinked.

“Did you say anything to her about those implants?” Yoshiko suddenly turned to Eleanor.

“What implants?”

“On Saturday, she said she wanted to get one of those phone implants. You know, the ones you put under your skin.”

Grandma looked puzzled. “How would you get a phone under your skin?”

Hastily, Eleanor explained. “It’s a tiny receiver that a doctor attaches to your aural nerve. So you can hear messages without
having to hold up a phone to your ear.”

“They cost millions of yen,” went on Yoshiko. “So of course I said we couldn’t afford it. She didn’t make a fuss. But maybe
she was upset.”

“She didn’t say anything to me,” said Eleanor. “I don’t think that’s why she left.” She was remembering how urgently Mari
had responded to the phone call on Sunday. Something important.

“How would you know?” said Yoshiko. “You hadn’t seen her for six months.”

“Yoshiko,” said Grandma reprovingly.

“Well, it’s true.” Yoshiko set her jaw stubbornly, looking exactly like Grandpa. “She always pokes her long nose in things.”

“She’s part of the family, so that’s all right,” said Grandma soothingly.

Eleanor decided she didn’t want to argue with Yoshiko at the moment. “When did the … accident with the other girls happen?”
she asked Kazu.

“The policeman said last Friday.” Kazu sat down at the table with a sigh. He was still wearing his grimy factory overalls.
“We should have insisted Mari stay on Sunday night.”

“I don’t see that matters,” said Grandma. She began to fold little boxes using junk mail from the local supermarkets, patiently
pressing each fold and making sure all edges were even. “The child would have gone anyway.”

“The policeman …” began Yoshiko.

“Detective. From the Religious Affairs Department,” interrupted Grandpa.

“He said we should tell him if we hear anything from Mari, or if any of her friends call her,” said Yoshiko.

Religious Affairs. Eleanor had a faint memory of a grating voice saying,
Assistant Inspector Ishihara, West Station Police, Religious Affairs.

“That detective—he wasn’t a tall, skinny man with a sour expression, was he?”

Yoshiko shook her head. “He was very nice. A solid man, mature.”

Still, she would call Ishihara the next morning and ask him what they should do. She’d helped the police with Nakamura’s murder,
now they could help her.

“Mother, will you stop doing that!” Yoshiko snatched the junk mail pages away from Grandma. “It gets on my nerves.”

“It steadies my nerves.” Grandma stood up with dignity and went into the bathroom. “I’m having my bath.” Her voice sounded
muffled from behind the sliding door.

Eleanor stood up a little unsteadily and beckoned Masao into the living room. Threads of incense smoke curled white against
the dark wood of the family altar. Three boxes of cakes and a basket of enormous, perfectly shaped strawberries crowded the
offerings ledge. Any gifts received by the household were automatically left on the altar first.

Eleanor kept her voice low. “Are we staying all night?”

“They’re worried,” said Masao. “They need my support.”

“I know. But I’m really tired.”

“If you didn’t work such ridiculous hours, you might be more use when you’re home,” he snapped.

“Last night wasn’t my fault. There was an accident …”

“Can’t you ask them to call someone else? I never see you.” He took a deep breath, then swallowed whatever he had been going
to say. His hand traced the outline of her face, around her jaw, across her cheekbone. “I don’t like to see you wearing yourself
out for a job. That’s all it is, you know. It’s not the most important thing in the world.”

“I know, but …” She had no idea how to finish the sentence. But it’s important to me? But it’s all I’ve got? The calm face
of the little Kannon statue in the altar offered no help.

“I wouldn’t mind, you know.” He dropped his voice further. “If you decided to leave Tomita. We’d manage somehow.”

She blinked at him, astonished. “I never knew …” I never knew you felt like that. How could she know? They rarely talked about
Important Things, as opposed to the comfortable minutiae of daily living. You were supposed to understand how your spouse
felt by emotional osmosis, or something.

“We’d have to move out of the Betta.” The idea horrified her.

He shrugged. “People live outside the Bettas still.”

“I couldn’t leave Tomita,” she said firmly. “It would be madness.”

He sighed and hugged her to him. She relaxed into the hot, sweaty circle of his arms. She didn’t want to think about the future
right now. All she wanted was a nice sleep.

“Just take it easy,” he mumbled, his breath warm in her hair.

I
shihara took the outside route from the subway entrance to West Station on Wednesday morning. There was an underground connection,
but he preferred the heat.

Living in the Betta, commuting in the train, working in the station—sometimes it seemed unreal. Too clean and two-dimensional.

Like one of those manga that Junta had always been watching when Ishihara got home from work. His mother thought he was studying,
but as far as Ishihara could tell, all he did was watch discs, the VR mask covering his eyes and ears so that the only Junta-like
part of his face was the small, half-open mouth.

The manga all featured superhuman heroes, often cyber-enhanced with ninjalike powers, who battled shadowy forces with lasers.
The setting was usually a futuristic Tokyo, metal towers and streamlined traffic systems. Very similar, in fact, to post-Quake
Tokyo. But the manga artists hadn’t thought about what it might be like down in the streets.

Last time he went to Tokyo, he’d felt lost. It wasn’t the high-rise canyons that disoriented him—Osaka had those, too—but
the archaic, angular kanji on shop fronts and awnings. He felt like he was on the set of an old Hong Kong movie. And down
in the sludge and among the street stalls, he heard more Chinese than Japanese. After the Quake it seemed Japan was less interested
in the world than ever. And yet more people from all over came there, to get their piece of the Seikai boom.

In any case, sometimes he needed to make sure that the real world still existed, outside the Betta and the underground. He
needed to confirm that the strange new ideas of reality could not invade his own and change what he knew to be true. The gritty
asphalt under his shoes, the stink of exhaust fumes and urine in the airless canyons between tall buildings, the pinched faces
of people living in cardboard boxes; these things were real and comforting in their solidity.

Not like the manga. Or cyberspace. Or cultish metaphysics. That’s what you get from a generation who grew up with plenty of
everything. Everything material, he reminded himself. They certainly didn’t get enough of the things he and his parents had
taken for granted—time to talk to friends, a family to come home to, parents who might be overbearing but who were always
there when needed.

Like he’d been there for Junta?

The memory of his son jumped at him, catching him unawares as it always did. He hadn’t been there for Junta. At least, that’s
what his wife said. She was right; no policeman could ever give enough time to both job and family. And Junta looked elsewhere
for what he needed.

He blew a drop of sweat off the end of his nose. Bloody ironic, wasn’t it. He was still chasing cult masters, and his own
son’s disappearance proved the job’s futility.

The dilapidated front of West Station was sandwiched between a business hotel and a banking office block. Its cracked, stained
concrete oozed in the humid air, and the air-conditioning in the lobby was always at half strength. The young female constable
on front desk tried not to wrinkle her nose as Ishihara walked past in his sweat-gray shirt.

Beppu was waiting at Ishihara’s desk to go over the Silver Angels case, the fluorescent light reflecting off his bald patch.

He pointed at the screen. “Here’s what came in last night. Basically what we heard at the briefing yesterday afternoon.”

Interviews with the parents of the dead, interviews with other students. Their own evidence that the dead Angels had known
the apartment would be empty before the owner left. No evidence as to how they got past Betta security. No further information
about the group as a whole.

“Don’t take this the wrong way …” began Beppu, cutting into his thoughts.

“That means you’re going to insult me.”

Beppu nodded. “What’s new? No, seriously, Ishihara, if you feel this case is not … I mean, if you think you might find it
hard to stay objective with this one …”

It hit Ishihara that Beppu was talking about Junta. His immediate reaction was to say mind your own business. But he had been
thinking about Junta more than usual. It might be a good excuse to get out of this case, which looked like going nowhere fast.

Yeah, and how many times in your life have you ducked out of a case because you didn’t like it?

“I’m fine,” he said gruffly.

“Okay. I gotta ask, you know.”

“Yeah, once is enough.” Ishihara looked back at the screen.

Beppu leaned back in his chair, giving Ishihara some space. “Have you thought about the house?”

“House?”

“By the sea. There’s only one more in the complex. If you don’t put down a deposit, someone else will.” After years of poring
over catalogues and attending information sessions, Beppu had finally decided where he was going to retire. Now he considered
it his duty to make sure Ishihara did the same.