by Barry Eisler
This time, I had brought my own toiletries and towels from the hotel, and only had to pay the entrance fee. It was the same mama-san, though she didn’t seem to remember me. Of course, if this went well, it wouldn’t matter either way.
I used the toilet, then placed my clothes carefully in a locker, closing it but not engaging the lock. If things went badly but I had any time at all, I would want to pull my clothes on as quickly as possible, probably while trying to talk my way out of whatever had gone wrong. With nothing but pants, a shirt, and a bag, I wouldn’t need much time.
I rolled a towel around the curling iron, leaving the plug accessible at one end of the roll, and another around the toiletries, then went in through the sliding-glass doors. The steam and heat wrapped themselves around me, but I barely noticed. I was intent on Ozawa. He was seated in front of one of the spigots, lathering up with a soapy washcloth. There were ten people in the main bath and another ten soaping up or rinsing off. Both mineral baths were empty. The last spigot in the row, the one next to the mineral baths, was empty. I walked over and sat in front of it. I glanced around. No one was paying me any attention at all. Bathhouse etiquette—with all the naked bodies in a sentō, people tend to be conscientious about not staring, and the habit was working to my advantage now. The head of the extension cord was still barely visible where I had jammed it under the storage room door. Okay.
I put the towel with the curling iron rolled up tightly inside it against the bottom of the storage room door. To anyone who might have glanced over, I would look like someone just trying to keep a towel dry by placing it out of the way while he washed. I attached the plug to the extension cord, sat on the stool, and started soaping up. After a minute, I leaned over and touched the towel, confirming that the iron was beginning to heat. No reason to expect otherwise after the dry run I’d done earlier, but combat teaches you not to assume. I knew from having handled it earlier that if I left it too long, it would start to scorch the towel. But I didn’t think I’d need even that long.
I finished washing quickly, left my toiletries and the second towel in front of the spigot to mark it as being in use, and made it to the mineral baths ahead of Ozawa. I needed him to use the outer of the two, so I eased into it now. If someone else were to use the other in short order, I’d still be able to vacate this one so Ozawa could get in. And if, as he approached, the other one were empty, I would switch. Odd behavior, certainly, but I doubted he would say anything about it. He’d just wonder absently why someone would do something like that, and avail himself of the open bath.
It turned out to be a good plan. A minute after I’d entered the tub, an old-timer eased himself into the one next to me. “Hot enough for you?” he said, turning to me and smiling with an almost comically perfect set of dentures. I nodded bruskly and turned away. I didn’t care if he concluded I was rude; I just didn’t want to interact with anyone more than I had to, or to do anything else that would make me at all memorable.
But he didn’t take the hint. “You from around here?” he said, sliding down lower until the water was at his chin.
“No, not really.” I used an Osaka accent, thinking if anyone did describe me, it would be better if they described the wrong thing. Ozawa was done soaping up; now he was rinsing himself with the bucket he had brought.
“Sure, I can tell you’re not. Kansai, is it?”
Kansai is western Honshu, the main island of Japan, where Osaka is located. I nodded. Ozawa stood and stretched.
“So? What brings you here?”
“The waters,” I said, thinking of Casablanca.
He laughed, and I wondered if he had caught the reference. “I mean, what brings you to Tokyo?”
Ozawa glanced over at us, then headed to the rotenburo, the outdoor tub. Fuck.
Had he been planning to use the mineral baths, but then changed his mind when he saw they were occupied? Would he skip them entirely tonight? Damn it, I’d been so close, and now I wasn’t sure.
“What?” I said to the old man, realizing he had said something but not having processed what.
“I said, what do you do in Tokyo?”
“Ah. I work for Matsushita.” This was what Panasonic was called back then.
“You don’t say! I worked at Matsushita. I’m retired now, but my son-in-law is there. What do you do?”
Jesus, I thought, feeling I was losing control of the situation, what are the fucking chances of this?
“Uh, air-conditioning.” And if you tell me your son-in-law is in air-conditioning, too, I’m going to drop that curling iron in your tub.
Instead, he said, “I was in lighting. So is my son-in-law.”
“Yeah? That’s great.”
“Well, it’s a living. Long hours, though. No time for anything but work. He’s gained twenty pounds since he started there. Not like you.”
“What do you mean?”
“You look like an athlete. Lucky to have time to exercise.”
Enough. “Whew,” I said, pulling myself out. “That’s as much as I can take. Good talking with you.”
He laughed. “Easier at my age. Less to lose.”
I glanced at the towel as I got out. Still there, just a rolled-up towel someone had placed at the foot of the storage room door.
I dunked myself in the plunge pool and waited. The old man got out and went to one of the spigots to rinse himself. Both mineral baths were empty. I thought about repeating what I had done before, but I was afraid of a similar outcome. I decided this time to just wait.
After a few minutes, Ozawa came back inside. He glanced over at the mineral baths, and seeing them empty, started to head over. I got out of the tub and realized I had overestimated how long it would take him to reach the baths—he was going to beat me there, and he had walked past the outer tub and was about to get in the inner one. Shit.
“Uh, listen,” I said, reaching him just in time. “It’s none of my business, but I don’t think you want to use this one. I couldn’t help notice…the old guy who just came out, he seemed to have had a little accident on the way, if you know what I mean. I don’t want to make a big deal of it or embarrass him. I’ll tell the mama-san so she can take care of it discreetly.”
Ozawa’s eyes widened and he glanced at the tub, perhaps to check whether the accident in question had been of the shoben or daiben variety—in English, number one or number two. There was nothing to see, but still, who would want to soak in urine?
He thanked me and got into the outer tub. My heart was pounding. I glanced around. No one was paying either of us any attention at all. Ozawa eased back against the wall, sliding all the way down into the steaming water.
I sat in front of the spigot I had been using earlier, and inspiration suddenly took hold of me. I leaned over and grabbed the towel with the iron wrapped inside it, letting a sufficient length of cord pay out as I straightened on the stool. Then I turned toward Ozawa and, holding the rolled-up towel at the edge of the bath and glancing into the water, said, “Oh my, it looks like he had an accident in this one, too. I think that’s a turd behind you.”
He sat up abruptly and looked over his shoulder. “What?”
Come on, come on…“No, not there. The other side. Behind you.”
He looked the other way, and then, seeing nothing, scooted forward and grabbed the faucet to pull himself out. The instant his fingers curled around the metal, I released the rolled-up iron into the water just behind him.
For an instant, it seemed nothing had happened. Ozawa wasn’t moving, wasn’t reacting at all, and I wondered whether something had gone wrong. But then I saw he was shaking slightly, almost vibrating, his hand frozen fast to the metal faucet. His mouth was contorted into an odd rictus of effort, and a barely perceptible half groan, half squeal was issuing from between his twitching lips. If he’d been sitting on a toilet instead of reclining in a tub, he would have looked like nothing more than a man straining to achieve a difficult bowel movement.
I watched in h
orrified fascination. He seemed to be looking straight ahead, but I sensed he could no longer see. I glanced around. No one was looking. I didn’t know if he’d received a lethal jolt, but the longer I waited, the greater the risk of discovery. I grabbed the cord, pulled the plug out of the socket, and hauled the iron out of the water.
Instantly Ozawa’s body relaxed. His hand drifted from the faucet, his lips parted, and a long, sibilant sigh escaped from his mouth. His eyes rolled upward, and he eased back into the water like a man lying down to sleep. His shoulders went under, then the back of his head, and then, his eyes now trained in the direction of the ceiling, his face.
I squeezed the excess water out of the towel, and used the bottle of body soap I had brought to shove the protruding end of the extension cord back under the door. If anyone looked inside the storage room, it would still be odd to find the cord plugged in, but not as odd as finding it plugged in and jammed under the door. Either way, I doubted the proprietors would go out of their way in sharing any suspicions they might have. Confirmation of an electrocution would be bad for business, and knowing this would help them decide that any suspicions were far-fetched and not worth sharing.
I heard someone say, “Daijōbu?” Is he all right? I glanced over. One of the men in the main tub was standing and pointing at Ozawa. But his question was to the people around him, not to me specifically. I wrapped the second towel around my toiletries and the wet towel with the iron inside it and stood, looking around as though unsure of what the man was talking about. Another man hauled himself dripping and streaming from the main bath and started heading over, his focus on Ozawa. I took a step back as though uncertain and wanting to give him room. Another man ran forward from one of the spigots.
I kept moving, wanting to put as much distance as I could between myself and where everyone would soon be focusing their attention. By the time I had reached the sliding-glass doors, they had pulled Ozawa into a sitting position and several more people had converged on the scene. Ozawa’s skin was blue and his head lolled on his neck. If he wasn’t already dead, he was at least deeply unconscious.
I headed straight to my locker, shoved everything into my bag, and pulled on my pants and shirt. No one emerged from the bathing area. I imagined by now they had hauled Ozawa out of the bath. These days, with the prevalence of portable defibrillators, he might have had a chance. But from what I’d just seen, even if anyone in there knew CPR, it wasn’t going to be enough.
I went out to the vestibule, forcing myself to walk slowly, the way people inevitably do after boiling themselves in the sentō. I slipped into my shoes and headed at a steady but not attention-getting pace back to Thanatos. I fired up the bike and rode off, the wind cool against my wet skin.
I dropped the curling iron into the polluted waters of the Sumida River. The towels and toiletries I threw in anonymous trash bins. Only when I was back inside the Yamanote did I permit myself a moment of exultation. I had done it. Later, I would go through what had gone well and what I might have done better. There would be lessons to be learned. But for now, I had done it.
I pulled into the shadows of a deserted parking lot and let the shakes work their way through me. So many things could have gone wrong, but they hadn’t. Logistical problems, electrical problems, witness problems. But in the end, it had all been okay.
It’s so easy to miss the forest when you’re focusing on all those trees.
chapter
seventeen
I called McGraw. I didn’t know where he was at that hour, but an embassy staffer put me through to him.
“It’s done,” I told him.
There was a pause. “It looks the way it needs to look?”
“You’ll read about it in the paper tomorrow, I’m sure.”
“I’ll look forward to that.”
“You owe me two more files.”
“If I read in the paper what you just told me I’ll be reading, they’re yours. Meet me tomorrow morning. You know the Nakagin Capsule Tower?”
I’d read about the tower. Completed that year, it had caused a lot of excitement in Japan as an example of a movement called metabolism, which claimed to be a new approach to building and habitation, fusing architectural concepts with those of biological growth. Each of the Nakagin’s residential units was individually attached, upgradeable, and replaceable—supposedly the future of human urban living. Today, only a few of the one hundred forty capsules are still inhabited. The rest are used for storage or office space, or have been abandoned entirely, and the building itself feels like a ghost, a monument to an ideal that was promised but that never came to be, its exterior dark with rot and rust, its once bright circular windows dull as cataract-covered eyes, an Ozymandias of a structure standing mute and helpless and alone while the city fathers who blessed the building’s birth now dither over plans to bury it.
“Yeah. I know it.”
“In front, ten o’clock.”
I didn’t like him telling me what to do. “You better have those fucking files,” I said, and hung up.
I got back on Thanatos and headed off, thinking about where I should stay that night. I felt like Sayaka would take one look at me and know what I’d just done, or at least know I’d done something. But that was ridiculous. There was no mark of Cain. Or, if there was, I was already wearing it. In spite of everything that was going on, I wanted to see her. No, not in spite of…because of it. I didn’t have anything else right then. I didn’t want to lie awake alone in another anonymous room, with nothing for company but my own thoughts and nothing to look forward to but another set of files and another set of kills. I wanted something outside all that. I wanted something to look forward to. I wanted her.
I rode Thanatos to Uguisudani, parking near the station as usual and walking to the hotel. Sayaka looked up when I came in and smiled. I couldn’t help noticing the newness of both those behaviors. Ordinarily, she’d hear the door and pause before looking up from her textbooks, obviously caring more about studying than she did about who might be coming in for a room. And she’d never smiled when she saw me.
“I wondered whether you were going to come back tonight,” she said, as I walked up to the glass.
I smiled back. “It’s my home away from home.”
“Yeah? Well, you weren’t here last night.”
“Were you worried about me?”
She rolled her eyes theatrically. “Don’t get cocky.”
In fact, I didn’t feel cocky, though I was glad she seemed to be showing some interest. I just didn’t want her to ask anything more about where I’d been.
“Anyway,” I said, “here I am.”
“I guess this means you haven’t sorted out that jam yet?”
“I’m…getting closer.”
She looked at me. “You okay?”
I should have deflected it. Instead, I said, “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. You look…different. Tired or something.”
“Well, I am a little tired.”
There was an awkward moment of silence. She said, “So…a stay?”
“Yeah. The usual.”
I gave her the money and took the key. I was about to turn and go when she said, “In case I don’t see you in the morning—tomorrow’s my day off. Well, night off.”
Impulsively I said, “Yeah? You want to do something?”
She laughed. “You are feeling cocky.”
“I’m serious. How about dinner?”
Her laugh faded, and she looked at me with a directness and honesty I found half moving, and half intimidating. “Look,” she said. “I can’t get around well.”
“I don’t care.”
She nodded. “I know you don’t, and I won’t deny that’s something I like about you. But if you think you know what it’s like to go out with me, you don’t.”
I was mildly giddy at her protests. They all struck me as practical, and practical concerns could always be addressed, right?
“Why don’t we
find out?” I said.
She was still looking at me so directly. “Because, Jun, finding out for you might be embarrassing for me.”
I realized what she was telling me wasn’t easy for her. That tough facade she always presented…it was a kind of armor. And she was removing some of it now. It was exciting, encouraging. And it also made me feel strangely honored, and in her debt. She was trusting me, and I had to show her I was worthy of that. Had to be worthy of it.
“I really don’t think there’s anything about you that should ever be embarrassing,” I said. “At least not to me.”
She smiled. “That’s sweet.”
“I mean it.”
“I know. Thanks.”
I shook my head. “Don’t thank me. Just let me take you to dinner.”
She laughed. “Okay.”
“Okay, great! I’ll find a place that’s…ground floor. You know, no stairs. What kind of food do you like?”
“I like everything.”
“Sushi?”
“I think sushi’s included in ‘everything,’ yeah.”
“Okay, I’ll find a place. Where do you live?”
She shook her head as though in amazement that I could be so dense. “Close by.”
“Oh. Right. Of course. Well, how about if we meet in front of JR Uguisudani Station? North entrance? Seven o’clock?”
She nodded. “Okay.”
I couldn’t help grinning. She rolled her eyes again and went back to her studying, the armor firmly back in place.
Except that I’d seen underneath it. A little.
I took the longest, hottest shower I could stand, then soaked in an equally scalding bath until the water began to cool. It relaxed my body, but my mind wouldn’t follow suit. I was excited about dinner with Sayaka and I tried to focus on that, tried to use it to eclipse everything else. But I couldn’t. Not entirely.
I felt…bad. Not as bad as I supposed I should. But maybe my mother’s efforts at Catholic indoctrination hadn’t been quite as futile as I’d told myself. I felt like I’d crossed some line tonight, done something I would need to account for, expurgate, confess. But I’d also felt the same way after my first combat kill. It had passed then, and I imagined it would now.
