A Knife Edge

by David Rollins

  “So his head was like the pit?” I asked, motioning at the thing on the tray.

  “What?”

  “Like the pit in a piece of fruit—the bit you don't eat.” Durban still didn't get it. “Did the shark spit the head out or something?” I asked.

  Durban wasn't sure whether I was being serious. I was. Not knowing anything about shark attacks, I was interested to know why there was anything left of the man at all. She frowned, then put the question to the coroner. The man laughed like he'd just heard an extremely funny joke and then proceeded to play a little impromptu charade for my benefit. Durban interpreted as the coroner acted out. “He thinks the shark came up beneath the doctor and took his whole body in its mouth.” Just as well Durban was on my team. I was still stuck on the coroner miming what appeared to be “three words, first word rhymes with night.” To assist my understanding, the Japanese man traced his hand across his own shoulder and neck. And then what he was acting out clicked: bite. Just as I caught on, Durban said, “He believes the shark bit clean through Tanaka's neck and shoulder. The tooth was found embedded in the collarbone.”

  I had an image of the shark using the doctor's collarbone as a toothpick and then licking its lips. “Have toxicology tests been done?” I asked.

  Durban passed the question along and then handed back the translation. “Yeah. Seems he was smashed. Blood-alcohol content up over zero point one.”

  “How does he know that?” I asked. As far as I was aware, alcohol didn't hang around in the blood indefinitely, and I knew the head had been found almost a week after it had been parted from its body.

  Durban asked Hashimura, and then said, “The human body processes around an ounce of alcohol every hour. But once you're dead, those processes stop. Also, the head's been kept chilled in near-freezing water a couple of days. That preserves the blood and tissue.”

  I nodded. The unusual circumstances surrounding the recovery of the doctor's head came to mind. They'd been elaborated upon in my briefing notes. One of the engines on the Natusima, Tanaka's expedition ship, overheated and had to be shut down. A storm and dangerously high seas meant the ship, reduced to one engine, had to be towed to Yokohama. It was dry-docked and the problem was traced to a blocked seawater intake essential to the engine's cooling system. Inside the pipe, wedged there like a cork in a bottle they found Tanaka's head, which I now knew everyone thought at first was a coconut.

  “Have the local police followed up?”

  Durban repeated the question for the coroner, who nodded and then spoke.

  “They have and they're satisfied,” Durban translated. “Every one's calling it accidental death.”

  “Yeah. I guess it'd be tricky murdering someone with a great white shark.”

  “I don't know… Several years ago, a guy dressed in a panda costume murdered a woman in a Tokyo park. He caught the train home afterward. True story,” Durban added, just in case I was waiting for the punch line. I imagined a panda with bloodstained fur sitting cross-legged in the train, surrounded by Japanese workers heading home, everyone reading their newspapers. I said, “Do you think that's relevant to what we've got here?”

  “No. What you said about someone using the shark as a murder weapon just reminded me.”

  Whether the shark had anyone inside it before it struck its victim, who knew? But it certainly had someone inside it now—Dr. Tanaka, or at least most of him.

  FOUR

  The Tokyo uniform gave us a lift to the Roppongi area in his patrol car. It was 1430 hours and already dark. The falling snow was light and dry. The wipers pushed the snowflakes around the windscreen like shredded paper and they swirled in bright spirals in our headlight beams. I looked into the swirls and felt like I was falling. It was hypnotic. I broke the spell by checking out the side window. There was enough neon bouncing around from all the signage to fry insects. “I'd like to talk to Tanaka's partner—the other scientist—and also to the ship's master,” I said, picking up the thread where I'd left it.

  “I'll arrange it.” The look on Durban's face said, You got suspicions?

  I elaborated. “It was at least twelve hours before anyone realized Tanaka was missing. I'd like to have that time accounted for.” I didn't say that I'd come all this way and I needed to return home with something more substantial than a receipt for my minibar bill at the Hilton and a shark's tooth on a chain around my neck. Remembering the tooth, a present from the coroner, I pulled it from my jacket pocket. It was basically a blue-white equilateral triangle, each side over an inch in length. Serrations dimpled two of those sides and it came to a wicked point. I pictured a mouth full of these little steak knives attached to a fish that hit with the force of a runaway Cadillac. It wouldn't have been a very nice way for Dr. Tanaka to leave the party.

  “You been to Tokyo before?” Durban asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “What are your first impressions?” She took her hat off and tamed her straw-colored hair, running her fingers through it. I smelled lavender.

  “It reminds me of a pinball machine I used to play, lit up for five times bonus and extra ball.”

  Durban smiled. “You want to grab something to eat?”

  I didn't need to give the invitation too much thought. The alternative was heading back to the Hilton and reading the hotel's brochure on its extensive range of gym equipment. “Sure. What you got in mind?”

  A short while later we were sitting on high stools eating raw fish, delivered by a stream of robots. A glorified cigarette machine with red lips and bumps on its chest area crafted to resemble breasts on a cold day delivered something to us that jiggled on the plate. The machine said something in Japanese in a breathy voice that sounded like it wanted to exchange brake fluids with me. Before I could say “Domo arigato,” the only words I'd managed to learn from the Lonely Planet phrase book, the machine did a one-eighty and rolled off into the crowd.

  To kick the evening off, I said, “So, what do you call a woman with one leg?”

  “What?”

  “Eileen. What do you call a Japanese woman with one leg?”

  Durban shrugged.

  “Irene.”

  She laughed. “That's not funny.”

  “Hmm,” I said. “Maybe I need to work on my delivery.” An awful sound coming through the ceiling speakers distracted me. There was a karaoke stage. A businessman sweating sake was tonguing the microphone, his tie loosened and his belly hanging over his belt like he was six months pregnant. The song was vaguely familiar but at the same time not. And then I recognized it, The Beatles' “Hard Day's Night”—in Japanese. If I were one of the Fab Four, I'd be suing him for damages. Several women who were far too young and pretty to be accompanying him clapped excitedly, adoringly. This had to be the sort of behavior men paid for. Escorts, obviously.

  “Those women—they're not what you think they are,” said Durban, doing a little mind reading.

  “No?” I said. “What do I think they are?”

  “I saw the way you looked at them.”

  I wondered how I looked at them and decided not to respond with another question, in case Durban mistook me for a shrink.

  “Japanese women handle things differently from Western women.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, they missed the whole feminist thing here. In fact, this place is almost feudal in some of its attitudes toward women. The men believe they are superior beings. The women don't challenge that belief. Not directly, anyway.”

  “So, are you talking complete subservience to every male whim?” I found myself smiling at the two young Japanese women. Superior beings, eh? One of the women caught me looking at her and twittered to her friend. They both giggled at me from behind their hands.

  Durban set me straight. “I meant, made to feel like superior beings.”

  “Thanks for ruining it,” I said.

  She shook her head. “Haven't you figured it out yet?” she said. “Yes, dear… No, dear… whatever. It's always an a
ct. The women here work with what they've got. It's just a different angle.”

  “So, despite appearances, they're no different from the women back home?”

  “And what are we like?”

  “You want an example?”

  Durban nodded. “I can take it.”

  “OK… A man goes to the doctor and brings his wife along. He has a checkup. Afterward, the doctor calls her into the office. He says, ‘Your husband is extremely sick, and his fragile state is compounded by huge amounts of stress. If you don't follow my instructions explicitly, he'll die. In the morning, you have to let him sleep late. When he gets up, you have to fix him a good breakfast. Do not stress him out with chores. At lunch, make him something really delicious. Let him sleep in the afternoon. For dinner, cook something special again. Be nice, friendly, and for God's sake don't load him up with your own problems and concerns. The name of the game is to reduce his stress levels to zero. If you can do this for just one month, your husband will regain full health.'

  “In the car going home, the husband asks his wife, ‘So what did the doctor say?'

  “She replies, ‘You're gonna die.' “

  Durban laughed. “Yep,” she said. “That's us.”

  A tune from a well-known musical began playing in her jacket pocket. Durban pulled out her cell, then excused herself to answer it, turning toward a plate of raw salmon brought to us earlier by a fembot.

  “This place one of your favorites?” I asked when she snapped her cell shut and put it in her pocket. I wasn't sure what I liked least, the food or the entertainment. I chewed on something cold and rubbery, which, come to think of it, was also a suitable metaphor for the music.

  Durban nodded. “One of my regular haunts. It's cheap and it's authentic Tokyo. You ever eaten jellyfish before?”

  “Never,” I said.

  “You have now.”

  It squeaked between my teeth like a piece of inner tube as I chewed. “Actually, it's not bad,” I conceded. “Have some. Show me how it's done.”

  Durban shrugged and picked a few strands out of the bowl with disposable chopsticks. What I wanted more than anything was to spit my mouthful out and go find a hamburger. The sake was good, though, and it killed the taste of the cuisine. Maybe that's why they served it. I reached for the flask.

  “No, no—you never pour your own sake. It's bad luck,” said Durban. I switched cups and filled hers instead. She drank it down, perhaps a little too eagerly.

  I said, “Don't think much of jellyfish either, eh?”

  “Busted. More, please.” She held out her cup. I topped it up again. “It's the one thing on the menu that makes me gag.”

  I picked up a napkin. “Do you mind?” I asked.

  “Go right ahead,” she said.

  I spat the jellyfish into the napkin, then rolled it into a ball.

  “Sorry,” she said. “That was a bit of a test.”

  “How'd I do?”

  “You passed.”

  A couple of businessmen beside us were tucking into a lobster pinned to a slab of wood. I saw its front legs move. They picked at it with their chopsticks while it tried in vain to escape. I lost whatever appetite I had left.

  The guy doing over “Hard Day's Night” left the stage to wild applause—I guessed because he'd finally finished. “So, what about your boyfriend?” I asked Durban. “Is he going to be joining us?”

  She studied me for a moment. “Boyfriend? A, how do you know I'm not married? And B, how do you know who I was talking to?”

  “In answer to A, while you're wearing a ring on your wedding finger that suggests you're married, the finger next to it bears the indentation of a ring recently removed. I'd say you've been asked by someone to baby-sit me and you've shifted the ring across to your wedding finger in case I turn out to be creepy and you need an excuse to hurry on home. As for B, and I admit this one's a stretch, that cell ringtone of yours, the tune ‘The One That I Want' from the musical Grease? Just a guess, but, given the title of the song, I'd say that you've downloaded it especially and assigned it to a caller group of one. As I've just established you're not married, that one has to be your boyfriend. Also, it's the time of day when lovers call each other to see what's up” I'd just pulled the investigator's party trick, the equivalent of a clown twisting a balloon into the shape of a poodle. Nothing to get excited about, really, unless you were an impressionable girl with a few drinks in her, thrilled about being a long way from home. I was almost disappointed in myself.

  “Hey, not bad. I'm impressed,” she said, gazing at me with, if I wasn't mistaken, lust. “You're right on all counts—even about the baby-sitting gig. I've had to do it a couple of times in recent months and every time I've been hit on by a guy who thinks he can play because he's beyond his spouse's reach—you know, outside the five-hundred-mile zone.”

  “The what?”

  Mischief curled a corner of her full and, I had to admit, sexy lips. “The chances of bumping into someone you know while you're out on the town, or ending up in bed with someone your partner went to school with, for example, reduce the further away you get from home. Five hundred miles, they say, is when your survival odds are greater than the risk of being caught.”

  “Nice to hear something useful is being taught at spy school these days,” I said. Her knee brushed against mine under the table. Her cheeks were flushed with color brought on by the rice wine.

  “As for the boyfriend, I've been dating my boss, the deputy assistant director, but it's not going anywhere,” she informed me.

  “Why's that?” I asked, not knowing what else to say.

  “Because he's married.”

  “So much for the five-hundred-mile zone.”

  Durban wrangled those lips of hers into a pout. “Don't approve?” she asked.

  I answered her question with a noncommittal shrug.

  “What about you?” she asked. “Married?”

  “Divorced,” I said.

  “Everybody's doing it,” she opined. I considered telling her that I'd caught my wife having an affair—all four inches of it in her mouth, as I recall—if only to put a little distance between us, particularly between Durban's hand and my thigh, which she'd started kneading like she wanted to bake it. The truth was that while I was technically single, I still felt attached to Anna. And yet… there was a conflict of interest about this burgeoning between my legs. If I were going to avoid waking up tomorrow with Durban in my bed and a head full of regret, I had to leave, or get rescued. And fast. “So, is your boyfriend joining us?” I repeated with as much nonchalance as I could manage.

  “No. I just told him I was working late.” Her nails were now tracing figure eights on the fabric of my pants, the circles getting wider and coming dangerously close to The Wakening Serpent. “I told him we were going through the case … you know…”

  There wasn't that much to go through that we hadn't already covered, but I said, “Good idea.”

  An ancient woman shuffled up to us and exchanged our empty sake flask for a full one. I protested, but she just waved at me and told me in Japanese not to be stupid. While I didn't speak Japanese, I'd been told not to be stupid enough times in a multitude of languages to know exactly what she said. Obviously, I was in the middle of some female plot to get me drunk, and it was working. “So, as I was saying, a recap of the case is a good idea.”

  “What's to go through?” Durban said. “The guy got drunk, fell off the boat, and became bait.”

  She picked up the flask and poured me another shot. Yeah, this girl had Trouble tattooed on her forehead. I felt a pang of sorrow for Mrs. Deputy Assistant Director—the woman was getting screwed, along with her husband. Time to refocus. “We don't know that as fact, do we?” I asked.

  “Know what?”

  “Exactly what happened to Tanaka?”

  “So you don't think he got eaten by a shark?”

  “Yeah, I'm sure he got eaten, but that's all we know.”

  “I guess.” Durb
an sucked in her bottom lip and held it there.

  “Tanaka was drunk,” I said.

  “I remember. So?”

  “He didn't drink. Ever. Not according to the FBI, anyway.”

  Durban's eyes widened, like she'd just discovered a plot. “Really?”

  “The Bureau could have been wrong. Or maybe Tanaka just chose that night to take a stroll with Johnnie Walker—either was more likely than any other reason.”

  “Like murder,” said Durban.

  “Yeah, like murder.” The other minor outstanding issue was those twelve hours. Why had it taken so long for anyone to discover that Tanaka was missing?

  Durban interrupted my thoughts. “So, what do you DoD people do, exactly? No specifics, of course, just in general. You guys are even more hush-hush than we are.”

  The CIA was “ hush-hush”? That was a new one on me. Every now and then Durban said something that reminded me she was still really just a kid, albeit an oversexed one. First impressions aren't always right, but this was mine: The biggest struggle in her life had probably been with the occasional tight peanut butter jar lid. That, and she was way too pretty for her own good. Or anyone else's, for that matter.

  “No, it's okay. I can give you specifics,” I answered. “For the past five months I've been waging war on apostrophes. You know, whether they go before or after the 5? It's a huge problem. You'd be surprised how many people get that stuff wrong. Next month, I'm going after parentheses.”

  “You're kidding me.”

  “Honestly, all I've done since being transferred out of OSI is review paperwork—other people's. This is my first real case in six months.”

  “Six months?” She was surprised. Almost as much as I was. What was I still doing in the armed forces, anyway?