Sins As Scarlet

by Nicolas Obregon

  This left Iwata with revenge. So far, it seemed the least implausible. It could have been rudimentary in nature; Joyce Carbone had mentioned Meredith had been a pickpocket, for instance. Perhaps it was a more intimate reprisal, some kind of deep-rooted bitterness. But then he recalled Joseph Clemente’s words. The killer had said, ‘Sorry.’

  Or, if it didn’t fit in to any of these categories at all, was there a fourth element hiding here?

  It was gone 5 a.m. by the time Iwata had finished eating. He knew it didn’t look good to be ringing doorbells at this hour, but he had little choice – there was a killer out there, and Geneviève was missing.

  Iwata cut through MacArthur Park, seeing the figures sleeping on dead grass, hearing their grumbling dreams. Beyond Wilshire Boulevard, which cut MacArthur Park in two, he could see the lake glittering, as though it weren’t filthy.

  When he reached Bonnie Brae Iwata stood under the fig trees opposite Geneviève’s apartment. In the alley next door the shiny hoods of cockroaches glimmered like lost sapphires. An old man in the empty parking lot was muttering to himself. There was a new moon. Somewhere nearby Iwata could hear a gameshow host asking the audience a question:

  ¿Quién quiere ser millonario?

  Iwata crossed the road, hands in his pockets, and pressed Geneviève’s buzzer once. He scanned the street as he waited. After half a minute he buzzed again. Knowing he should just go home, he went to the side of the building and climbed over the fence. He dragged a large dumpster until it was sitting beneath the fire-escape ladder.

  ‘Forty years old,’ he hissed, then jumped as high as he could.

  He grabbed the lowest rung, dangled awkwardly for a second, then got his knee on to it. From there he was able to heft himself up. He climbed the fire-escape stairs as quietly as possible. Up on the roof he skirted broken satellite dishes and coils of cable. The door into the building was, unsurprisingly, locked.

  Iwata took out his pocket-sized lock-picking set. He had been police long enough to know that with a pinch of determination and a few cheaply acquired tools most doors were nothing more than an illusion of security. Inserting the tension wrench and applying gentle pressure, he pushed the pick in and began to rake it back and forth. The pins lined up in seconds. There was a quiet clunk, then a release.

  Inside, the stairway was dark and echoey. Iwata descended cautiously. Two floors down, he stopped at number 52. The door was ajar. That was never good.

  Instinctively, he reached for a gun he didn’t have. With no choice, he entered.

  The apartment was still and murky in the weak moonlight.

  ‘Geneviève?’

  There was no reply. Holding his breath, Iwata scanned the gloom and took out his canister of tear gas from his pocket. With the other hand he picked up a heavy glass ashtray.

  ‘Geneviève?’ Louder now.

  Still nothing.

  Iwata flipped the light switch but no light came. Just a few soft footsteps.

  Someone filled the bedroom doorway.

  In the dark, it was only a figure.

  Iwata looked at it. ‘Geneviève? Is that you?’

  There was no response.

  They rushed each other.

  Iwata cleaved the ashtray down but it was blocked, thunking away in the darkness. The squirt of tear gas missed completely. And then it was fists. The man hit hard – ribs, solar plexus, anywhere he found meat – his blows voracious. Iwata landed his own, muscle memory kicking in, but there was no light, too many objects in the way. With no space to back into their bodies locked together, all desperate grunts, bunched clothes, skin under nails. Iwata was aware of the pain but felt only the rushing nausea of fear, his blood flooded with adrenaline, his ears pounding with the breathlessness.

  He threw a lead hook, praying for the sweet spot behind the ear, but the man was too fast, too strong, his movements frantic. Iwata reached out; he wanted hair, an eye, an ear. Instead he got a forearm smash flush in the face. There was a pop, like an eardrum on a night-flight landing, then warm blood was gushing out of his nose.

  With that, Iwata’s legs were gone. He fell to the floor and saw the ceiling fan like a wooden flower. Iwata felt him from behind, legs slipping around his ribs. Then the cushion was over his face, the man squeezing ruthlessly. The pressure in Iwata’s head sounded like a train coming, his throat sucking for something, anything.

  The man said something, something Iwata couldn’t hear. His hands fumbled for help. He felt a magazine. A broken candle. His canister of tear gas. Clutching it, Iwata pointed it over his head and pulled the trigger. A loud hiss resounded, then a yelp. The pressure vanished.

  Iwata forced himself on to all fours, wheezing hard. The man that had tried to kill him was retching somewhere behind him, stumbling into furniture, clawing at his eyes. Iwata picked up the ashtray. He wouldn’t have long; he had to end this now.

  The man opened the window. Then he was gone.

  Trembling, Iwata crawled to the bathroom, locked the door and closed his eyes. He could hear the breeze outside, the fig branches rasping at the glass. He could hear gameshow applause, as though the audience had appreciated the fight. He could hear his own whistling breath.

  Iwata had not seen the man’s face. He had barely heard his voice. It was as if he had just been attacked by the wind itself. Battered and exhausted, he closed his eyes.

  11. Home

  The smell of warm bread and honey is strong. Iwata is trying to feed his daughter small chunks of carrot but she is shaking her head and screaming. There is a variety show on the TV, the delighted audience applauding. Rain is pounding the windows hard, their little apartment over the café shuddering in the building typhoon.

  Cleo is ironing yen bills to make them crisp for the condolence envelope – a colleague in Chōshi PD has died suddenly.

  She pauses. ‘Kosuke, don’t you think this is a bit –’

  ‘If you’re going to say it’s too much money, don’t bother. He was my superior. I can’t have his family thinking we’re cheap.’

  ‘We’re not cheap, we’re struggling.’

  ‘What do you want me to tell his wife, “Sorry, there’s a recession”?’

  ‘No, it’s just that you barely knew the guy.’

  ‘Clee, just trust me. You don’t understand how things work here.’ Iwata closes his eyes. He lets the plate of carrot clatter on to the table. ‘She won’t have any of this.’

  Nina is still screaming, her face now a deep pink. She smells of almond oils and the scent has always turned Iwata’s stomach. Outside, Toriakeura Bay is churning, a convulsion of verdigris waves and black clouds.

  Cleo looks through the window and knows that beyond Inubōsaki Lighthouse there is only the nothingness of the North Pacific – nothing all the way to San Francisco. She breathes in the warm steam and feels desolate anguish. ‘Kosuke, can we talk for a second?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Okay, don’t worry.’

  ‘Just say it.’

  ‘No, it’s nothing.’

  ‘Cleo. For fuck’s sake.’

  ‘All right. I don’t want this life.’ She bites her lip, then looks at the floor. He hasn’t responded and she can’t tell if he’s heard her. ‘Kosuke, I know you don’t want this life either.’

  Iwata looks up at her for a moment, shakes his head then points at the baby with the pink spoon. ‘How does want come into it?’

  ‘Don’t shout, I’m just telling you what I’m feeling.’

  ‘What you feel?’ He closes his eyes, red splotches teeming over his vision. Voices are ringing in his ears, voices that he has not heard for a long time. He finds himself back in that mountain bus station where his mother left him. Do good things, boy. Good things. He clutches his face and groans. He doesn’t understand how they can still be speaking to him, after all this time.

  Iwata hurls the plastic spoon at the window and it smacks sharply on the glass. Cleo flinches and Nina stops crying for a moment, stunned. A small ch
unk of carrot has stuck to the window. Now the baby is howling. Iwata strides over so close that Cleo is leaning back against the counter. She is confounded. She has never been scared of him before.

  ‘What you feel?’ He grips the iron. The steam drifts between their faces.

  ‘Kosuke? The baby is crying. She’s going to hurt herself.’ Cleo takes the iron from his hand, pushes past him and pulls the plug out.

  ‘The baby the baby the baby.’ He spits the words. ‘Look at her, she’s already hurt. She wasn’t born right. What, you think she’ll grow up normal?’

  ‘And you’d know about that?’

  He hisses insults in Japanese. Cleo knows these words. Something like ‘coward’, ‘clueless’.

  ‘I think you call me those names’ – she is trembling as she picks up Nina, her voice whiffling – ‘because that’s how you feel about yourself.’

  ‘Feel feel feel. All you do is feel and talk.’

  ‘At least I’m not running away.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means Solanax. Cipralex. Zoloft. Or did you think I didn’t know?’

  ‘Fuck you.’ He picks up the envelope and rips his keys from the peg. ‘Both of you.’

  ‘Kosuke, one day you’re going to have to accept who you are.’

  The door slams and Cleo is left alone with the screaming child. They are both shaking. She throws away the carrots and calls her mother. Her mother tells her what she always has. He’s bad news. Well, that isn’t news anymore, Cleo thinks. She packs a suitcase and looks up flights. It’s only nine hours from Tokyo to Seattle. Then a drive over the Cascade Mountains, through the Snoqualmie Pass, and on to Kennewick – home.

  She thinks of the smell of the hallways of her high school, the slogan on the walls: BE THE BEST YOU CAN BE. She remembers arguments with her mother, some benignant, others noxious. She remembers Julian bringing her Almond Joys afterwards to cheer her up, his only ally in the world. She remembers hitchhiking with friends to see Yes play Spokane. She remembers walking along the Columbia River with her first boyfriend. She wonders what might have happened if she had stayed with him. Maybe she never would have moved to California. Never met Kosuke. Never come here.

  Beyond the baby and Kosuke, Cleo has nothing in Japan. She misses having friends. She cannot abide the deferential tone she is met with wherever she goes. She has tried to meet people but quickly becomes exasperated by the non-committal doublespeak. Frustrated, she has often retorted: ‘You are as slippery as an eel.’

  If she is not being kept at an amicable distance by the people of Chōshi, then she is being stared at. Kosuke used to glare back at them, ask them what they thought they were looking at. Though Cleo would make a show of being embarrassed, she secretly loved that protective side of him. Now he tells her to ignore them. And it’s easy for him to say that. She’s the one with the blonde hair, the different body, holding the mixed-race baby.

  Cleo has overheard Kosuke and his mother arguing about this, whispered phone calls from the kitchen, pleading with him to come back to the US. Cleo would find work that way. Your father and I could help. We’d find a way to pay for the treatment. If you stay there, Nina will grow up different. Not just her looks but the neurodevelopmental thing. The nail that stands up will be hammered down, Kosuke. Come home.

  And where would ‘home’ be for me, Mother? With you?

  Cleo knows that Nozomi just wants to atone. She just wants the best for her son and his family. But Kosuke lurches between being patient with her and exploding with rage. He’d live in an igloo if his mother told him not to. Cleo wonders how she could have married a man before ever discovering the gorge of anger hidden inside him. She wonders how long it is until she is swallowed by it. And Nina? Would she be sucked into the whirlpool too? Maybe they already had been. Maybe everything inside the smiling, contemplative man that made up Kosuke Iwata was, if you inspected it closely, stitched out of hate.

  Cleo wipes away her tears and opens the front door. A desperate wind buffets her. Lanterns thrash from side to side. The waves smash themselves against the cliffs, foam spraying high up into the air. The hateful storm batters the row of souvenir shops and apartments. Cleo sees the lighthouse, its Fresnel lens piercing the gloom. Like her, it’s from a faraway place, designed by a Scotsman.

  Cleo closes the door, pads into the bedroom and looks down at Nina, sleeping at last, a pained expression on her face. She looks at her small mono-lid eyes, her miniature eyelashes so dark. ‘But you are.’ She kisses Nina’s foot. ‘You are from here.’

  Cleo begins to unpack the bag.

  That night Iwata is back, crying for forgiveness, the gentlest kisses of apology on his daughter’s putty-like crown. That’s not who I am, he murmurs. That’s not who I am.

  Cleo says she knows. She knows. She says this as she kisses Iwata’s head, his scalp smelling of beer and smoke. He is on his knees, his arms wrapped around her stomach. I’ll be the best man I can be. The best father I can be. Cleo says she knows. As she looks out at the rabid Japanese sea she also knows that on this day they have lost something. Something that can never be retrieved.

  Iwata gasped awake, soaked in sweat. He ripped open drawers and cabinets, searching for a gun, searching for a bottle, but this wasn’t his apartment. It took a long time for his breathing to even out. It took a little longer to remember whose bathroom this was. Outside, the dawn light was navy blue. It had rained during the night.

  Iwata forced himself up, pain filling his face. He stood, doubled over, the blood from his nose painting little patterns on the tiles. Head pounding, he blinked away tears and stuffed cotton balls into his nostrils. Then, at a slow pace, he searched the apartment.

  In the living room he found only evidence of a struggle. In the kitchen he learned nothing beyond the fact that someone had eaten a reduced-guilt mac n’ cheese from Trader Joe’s recently. In the bathroom he found toiletries, oestrogen pills, anti-androgens; nothing unexpected.

  The bedroom was small, the futon taking up most of it. Iwata searched through Geneviève’s clothes but found nothing remarkable. The bedside table contained nothing significant either: some pills, books, condoms, family photographs. They were old and it took a moment for Iwata to realize that Geneviève appeared in them. There she was, an unsmiling young boy, not yet twelve he guessed. Iwata tried not to think about the phone call he’d had with Mr Domínguez. That there were no recent photos did not surprise him.

  Iwata sat at the small desk by the window. There was a pile of books, mostly plane-crash thrillers, and Portuguese language texts. In the drawers Iwata found only natural clutter: airline earphones, a manual for a rice cooker, hair bands, Wite-Out correction fluid. The bottom drawer contained the important stuff: social security, medical papers, tax returns, bank statements going back roughly twelve months. Most of the payments seemed regular but there were a few outliers.

  Geneviève had received large sums of money from an unknown source twice in the last year. She had also paid a plastic-surgery centre several times – Fox Hills Feminization. Iwata took pictures with his phone, then returned the papers. It was time to go.

  At the front door he paused. There was something sticking out from under the sofa – a strap. Iwata pulled it and out came a grubby sports bag. Inside it there was money, there were dirty clothes and, at the bottom, a California driver’s licence. Iwata turned it over and recognized the name: Zambrano, Mara.

  Her hair was the wrong colour in the photograph and she looked different – softer, somehow – but it was her. Iwata hoped there was an innocent reason for her things to be here. Maybe she had lied to him last night and had been staying in Geneviève’s apartment. Maybe Geneviève was just holding on to some stuff for her. But then he thought back to what she had said.

  Looks like I’ve been stood up.

  Iwata’s stomach dropped. What if it was John Smith who had arranged to meet her at Club Noir and, for whatever reason, hadn’t shown up? And if John Smith was the ma
n who attacked him last night, what if he had his eyes on Mara?

  Pocketing the driver’s licence, Iwata was out the door before he could consider a single alternative.

  12. The Real You

  Having tried in vain all morning to find Mara Zambrano, Iwata managed to secure an appointment with a facial-trauma specialist in Little Tokyo. It was almost midday and he was in the waiting room looking at the framed watercolour Kyoto landscapes on the walls. There was also a map of California. It was a similar shape to Japan – only inverted. Maybe I am too.

  The receptionist offered Iwata tea, which he accepted. It arrived on a saucer loaded with butter biscuits. ‘Looks like you could do with something sweet,’ she said to his injuries.

  Iwata smiled, though he felt a hollow loss. They were Noriko Sakai’s favourite – his old partner. They had not had long together but she had been one of the few people he had ever really known. It was not so much that they understood each other; they were from very different rat’s nests after all. But they had respected each other’s silences. Strengths. Weaknesses. They had accepted one another. Cherished one another. Someone equally fucked up to cling to out of the blue.

  Four years after her murder Iwata now understood that what they had shared had been true, had been real. He wished he could have known her in other circumstances, in another time. Instead, he found her at his nethermost, lost in the labyrinth of grief, surrounded on all sides by enemies. But just as gold is known in fire, she had given him her friendship – Iwata would never forget it.

  The specialist turned out to be of Japanese heritage, though she did not speak the language. It occurred to him that, except for that detail, his mother would have approved of her. As she worked she asked Iwata questions about Japan, speaking of it with the dreamy reverence of a little girl bound for Disneyland. His answers were short and vague. Being from two places meant he had languages, perception, experience. Being from two places also meant he was from nowhere. The differences and similarities of shared homelands couldn’t be addressed with words. Especially not with a numb mouth.