“Yes, I think he does have a low voice. We have so many guests staying, you see… it’s hard to remember.”
“But he really is staying there, isn’t he?” The clerk fancied he heard a tone of relief in her voice, as if she had tracked down the man at last after many difficulties. She went on: “Do you know how long he’s staying for?”
“Wait a minute and I’ll see.”
He put down the receiver and checked the reservation for room 305. It turned out that Ichiro Honda was a long-stay guest who had spent the last three months in the hotel. Maybe she’ll make it worth my while, Oba thought; he looked around carefully to see that he was not overheard before picking up the receiver again.
“Hello. Mr. Honda is a long-stay guest. I was just thinking, maybe I could give you any information you need face to face. It’s not very suitable for the phone, you know. I could meet you somewhere outside and give you good information.”
“What do you mean by that?” The woman’s tone hardened as if he had put her on her guard.
“Well, I was just thinking… I thought that if you wanted, I could possibly… I mean, I was just…” he stammered, wiping the cold sweat from his forehead.
“All I was asking was how long Honda will be staying for.” The voice was relentless. He tried to apologize for his misunderstanding, but to no avail. The woman became sterner and sterner. Now she had even dropped the polite “Mr.” from Honda’s name, speaking as if he was a criminal.
“Well, I really don’t know what his plans are. All I know is that he has stayed here for three months so far. If you ring again tomorrow, we could ask him what his plans are.”
“That will not be necessary,” she snapped, but behind her arrogant tone he thought he detected some uncertainty. Plainly, she was from a detective agency or something like that. Maybe she had been put on the job by a business rival, or else a prospective client.
“If you prefer, I could find out without reference to the guest himself. How about that?”
She did not reply, so he went on: “I am Oba, reception clerk. Over the years I’ve helped a lot of inquiry agents, you know; I usually get a small fee for my services, of course. If you are interested, I go off duty at eight tonight, and I’ll be waiting at the coffee shop over the road from this hotel—it’s called ‘Konto,’ and if you ask for me at the desk, they know me. If you’re interested, turn up there.” And he replaced the receiver rapidly before she could say anything more, but she was too fast for him and hung up even before he did. The negotiation was plainly over, but would she come?
“Lying bitch!” he muttered. Then he looked up and saw a foreign guest approaching the counter. He put on his practiced smile and greeted the customer in English.
Before he went off duty, by dint of inquiry amongst his fellow reception clerks and the room boys responsible for 305 he had acquired some interesting information about Ichiro Honda.
This guest certainly did have a deep voice. Although a long-stay guest, he paid his own bills in cash. He only used the hotel room to sleep in and usually came back late at night. He was a fluent speaker of English; though his name and appearance were Japanese, he rarely used that language, but was often to be seen conversing with foreigners in the lobby or coffee shop.
Even that should be enough for him to earn some money, Oba thought. And there was one more suspicious circumstance: Mr. Honda always went off somewhere for the weekends. He went to the coffee shop across the road and waited.
At eight forty-five he was called to the phone. He picked up the receiver and heard the same cold voice he had listened to earlier in the day.
“I checked, and your guest Mr. Honda isn’t the one I’m looking for, so I won’t bother to come and see you.”
“But madam!” he spluttered. “There must be some mistake! My Mr. Honda certainly does have a deep voice!”
She said nothing but hung up. He paid his bill, cursing the money wasted on his coffee and cake.
THE FIRST VICTIM (NOVEMBER 5)
The Day Kimiko Tsuda Was Strangled at Minami Apartment at XX, Kinshicho, Koto Ku, Tokyo
1
He awoke before seven; someone, a traveler with an early start, no doubt, was walking down the corridor wearing slippers. It was now three months since Ichiro Honda moved into the Toyo Hotel.
He reached over to the portable alarm clock on the bed-side table and turned off the alarm. Recently, he felt, he had become a light sleeper—just like an old man. Why was this so? He presumed it was because of his nightlife, and particularly his experiences with women.
He got out of bed and, still in his pajamas, went into the bathroom. He followed the same routine every morning. He would take a fresh towel from the rack, dry his face and then crumple the towel like a paper ball and hurl it carelessly into the corner. Self-consciously, like an actor in an American film, he took a suit out of the closet and threw it onto the bed. Little by little he dressed: a well-starched shirt, a slim tie, tasteful and in solid colors; pearl cuff links. He dressed with his usual care. Today, having looked at himself in the mirror, he undid his tie and retied it, but otherwise it was his practiced routine; watching him, one knew that he was an habitué of hotel life.
On the luggage rack there was a blue suitcase covered with first-class stickers from the world’s best airlines and the most famous hotels in the United States. It was a very expensive case and his only luggage apart from another case in the closet.
In this hotel, he was known as a long-stay traveler. Even he thought of himself as a traveler. Once a week he would commute to Osaka for a short weekend, and this, too, was traveling. In Osaka he had a wife, Taneko, whom he had married whilst a postgraduate student in the United States. But after they got back to Japan, his wife said that she didn’t want to live in Tokyo, this despite the fact that she had been to college there and even had a small part in a professional drama there once. She said that she was happier staying in the parental home in Osaka, so Ichiro Honda spent his weekdays living in a hotel in Tokyo.
Taneko’s father was still in good health and continued as President of D Corporation, a top-ranking public company. His wealth had accustomed her to having her own way ever since she had been a child. Now she lived with him and a housekeeper in their large mansion in Ashiya, forcing Ichiro to travel to Osaka and back every weekend. However, she had become accustomed to this style of living, and it seemed to her to be the most natural form of existence. For his part, too, he had come to enjoy a double life where he could enjoy the advantages of a single man for much of the time. Whatever his wife got up to whilst he was away was of no concern to him; he was no more concerned, either, in how she endured her lonely life. Just a month ago, his wife had had a small studio built in a corner of the garden where, the housekeeper told him, she would withdraw for two or three days at a time. If this kept her happy, well, so much the better.
Just as he was not jealous of his wife, so Taneko affected no interest in whatever he did to pass the time in Tokyo. He always flew between the two cities, but he seemed to suffer most from emotional strain whilst he was in Osaka. On his return flights to Tokyo he always looked gloomy, which must in some way have been the fault of his wife. His plane would get into Haneda on Sunday evening. The other passengers would have the light step of people returning home, but not he; he looked more like someone walking in a cortege. He displayed duty and hesitation rather than pleasure. He would take a taxi to the hotel and sit slumped in the back without saying a word; Saturday nights were obviously an ordeal for him. As soon as he got back to the hotel he would go straight to bed—the one night of the week when he did so.
By nine sharp on Monday mornings he would be in his office, a private room on the sixth floor of the K Precision Machinery Company in the center of the business district. He occupied a fairly senior post as a computer specialist in this company. Just as gas companies send out staff to supervise the fitting of boilers and so forth, so he was sent out as a consultant to visit large companies, depart
ment stores, insurance companies, canning factories, and the like, advising the clients of the most effective way of solving their problems.
So during the eight hours between nine and five, Ichiro Honda led a blameless life, five days a week, plus the time of his visits to Osaka. As far as the world was concerned, he was a devoted husband and a serious worker. But for him, his real life was bounded by the hours of his freedom in Tokyo in the evenings. Ichiro Honda, the computer specialist married to a rich wife, vanished from the face of the earth in the evenings. At first he had drifted, lonely and bored, and had then taken to finding solace in the arms of women.
Every day, he would go back to his hotel straight after work, to wash, perhaps change, and have dinner: on one day meat, on the next fish, but always a bottle of Bordeaux to wash his meal down. Leaving the dining room, he would saunter into the lobby and read the evening papers, both in English and in Japanese. Some evenings he would enjoy a conversation with an Englishman who occasionally stayed in the same hotel. Honda prided himself on his ability to speak the Queen’s English. His favorite topics on these occasions were drama and literature.
At eight o’clock promptly, by which time it was always dark, he would pick up a taxi at the hotel entrance, and his evening would begin. But before getting into the car, he would stand and appreciatively sniff the aroma of Tokyo, which seemed to be compounded of darkness and neon; satisfied that night had indeed once again transformed the city, he would head for the town, for the places where the women awaited him.
His targets were never professional women; rather, they were the lonely and those others who pined for love. To hunt them down, he nightly patrolled music cafés, bars, dance halls, and even cinemas, but all of them away from the business or fashionable entertainment areas. Office girls, sales clerks, typists, beauticians… students, even. They all lay in wait for him along the walls of dance halls or seated in coffee shops and cinemas. They lay in wait, but they were his victims; all he had to do was to find them.
To him, women were no more than tinplate targets at a shooting gallery in a fair. The man pulls the trigger, the woman falls, but after all they are made of tinplate and will rise again. So he could go on shooting to his heart’s content.
Until such time as the target turned out not to be tin, and blood would be shed…
Ichiro Honda had a way with women. He had the faculty of penetrating their psychology at first meeting. Was the woman interested in the arts? Very well, he would be a musician or a painter. In time, he had been sailor, airline pilot, poet, bartender. To hear him in the last role explaining how to mix drinks was enough to make one feel thirsty. And as for his nationality, he had found it effective to represent himself as having come from somewhere outside Japan. His story was that he had been born in England, or Paris, or had spent his boyhood in Chicago. He didn’t have to go into much detail—the story itself was usually enough. As a child, his classmates had mocked his foreign looks, but his clean-cut, chiseled features now stood him in good stead.
He even had a British passport, already expired and abandoned by its owner, which he would flash around. It had taken him three days to change the photo and signature and correct the dates, but it was worth it. He was breaking no law; customs or immigration were never involved, just women. He would leave it, ostentatious in its navy blue cover with the gold coat of arms, on a bedside table or on the counter of a bar. Words were quite unnecessary—the woman only had to see it to believe.
Despite his use of such tactics, he was inside himself convinced that women were naturally his prey because of some innate gift, some supernatural sense, that he had been born with. Often he awoke with a premonition of what woman the day would bring him. He could not explain it—it was just there, a blend of the excitement of his mind and the inner rhythms of his body. These foretastes of the evening would occur to him during purely routine activities such as knotting his tie. Not even his work at the office could drive these thoughts from his mind; they lingered with him all day long, so that he felt as if his soul had left his body and was flying around somewhere over his head awaiting the dusk.
On October 15—a day that would be burned into his mind by the subsequent interrogations of the police, the prosecutor, his lawyer, and the judge—such a premonition came over him as he was tying his tie. He retied it carefully; as he picked up his room key, he broke into a cheerful whistle and ran down the stairs two at a time, eschewing the elevator as being too pedestrian for such a day. He read the papers in the lobby, taking his morning tea at the same time, and then went into the dining room and ordered toast and ham and eggs. He glanced at the local news in the press; traffic accidents, double suicides, and murders—what did these have to do with him? All of these human dramas were for him but arrangements of print on the page; he could not foresee his feelings on reading the papers a few weeks later. Did he but know it, he was no more than an insect in flight over whom the net was about to descend. As far as he was concerned, the world took no account of him and his doings.
As he walked to the subway, the burden of expectation oppressed his chest. He felt like a hunter setting forth for the field, and the whole world seemed to be bathed in sunlight.
2
On the evening of the fifth of November, Ichiro Honda boarded a bus at Yotsuya Sanchome, arriving at Shinjuku Oiwake. He was clad in a loose-textured tweed coat and hunting cap of the type affected by French film actors in the 1930s. The whole ensemble was brown. He had changed into this outfit at the apartment that he had rented under the assumed name of Shoji Ueda for the last two years. He had gone directly to this apartment, in a building called Meikei-so, immediately after he had left work. The landlord was under the impression that he was a writer who used the apartment to get on with his manuscripts in private.
The flat had two rooms, one about a hundred feet square and the other about seventy-five. Both were in the Japanese style with matted floors, and it served his purpose. For one thing, it was more private than most similar places—the caretaker was not curious, nor were those in the neighboring rooms. Of course, Honda never took anyone else there. The wardrobe was full of suits and coats; there was also a desk and a bed. Here he would always change into whatever costume took his fancy for that night. The decision was not always an easy one between the hunting cap, a trilby, or a French beret; between, say, the sweater with the red lining or a shabby raincoat. Sometimes he would change costumes several times before he was satisfied. Then he would sit down and write his diary.
He called it “The Huntsman’s Log,” and in it he would record all his adventures with women. He had been keeping it for many years, and the fat notebook was almost full. Such was his routine on days like this when the morning premonition came over him; he would go to the flat, change, and read or write up his diary of conquests.
Reading each entry would recapture for him the remembrance of his successes; he could resavor the taste of each woman. He could evoke the feeling of a breast beneath his hand, or the rustling of an underslip as it slid from a body. Visiting these past experiences would prepare him the better for the pleasures that waited him that night.
On this particular evening, the book fell open at an entry made about a year before. Later, he believed that this was no mere accident, that some hand had guided his, but at the time he thought nothing of it. Reading the passage, he recalled the woman clearly; he saw again her face as she sobered up. She had had a muddy complexion, and her face was cratered with acne scars. His eyes ran down the words he had written in his clear, forceful hand:
July 18
Fierce heat. At 3 p.m. the thermometer read 38 Centigrade. I dirtied my Italian shoes in the melting asphalt in the road between the hotel and work.
I was asked to go for a swim but felt no attraction for the sea and declined.
The heat reminded me of a slack afternoon in a Chicago café some years ago when I just sat and watched the electric fan in the ceiling rotate sluggishly.
I was torn between
listlessness and carnal desire. I was particularly attacked by sexual feelings twice at work—once in the morning and once in the afternoon.
Dined at the hotel. The heat, persisting after sunset, conversely cooled my zest for hunting. Went to an air-conditioned cinema but fell asleep after ten minutes. Headed for Shinjuku; drank scotch with water at several bars—Roi, Black Swan, Bon Bon. Found a victim at the fourth place, Boi.
Shot her dead.
REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
Strolling musicians came in. Asked them to sing “Zigeunerliedchen,” an old favorite of my schooldays. Surprised when a velvety female alto joined in upstairs. Most dramatic. Sang the song several times. Was stimulated more than I had been for a long time by sensing my victim, invisible upstairs.
Turned out to be a skinny girl. No need to hunt her; she flew straight into my hand. Left Boi and took her to several more places.
Taxi driver took us to an air-conditioned inn where I remember having slept before. Charged me twice as much this time—ridiculous—remember not to go there again.
Prey had a strong head for drink? Anyway, no resistance, no hysterics, no overacting. Just put herself into my hands. Felt like a god accepting a human sacrifice.
Did her best to satisfy my every need, but was too tense and kept trembling. Took two hours to kill. She was a virgin; drew blood.
She slept for three hours, a strangely relieved look on her face. Couldn’t think why.
Checked her handbag. Obviously not well off, so slipped in a few thousand yen.
Left inn at 5 a.m. and took prey to Omori by taxi. Had to wake maid at inn—she was in bad mood and accepted my tip with ill grace. My victim noticed and said, “Well, it must be a hard life for her, too.”
All her relatives killed by atom bomb; lives with 29-year-old sister at Omori.
Keiko Obana
Aged 19
The Lady Killer Page 3
