“Filthy dog,” said Masajiro from deep in his throat, shaking in his wheelchair with helpless rage. “You are not my...”
Takeda lost control of himself, pulled a syringe from his pocket, waved it in a circle as if it was a dagger and thrust it into Masajiro’s neck. In almost the same movement he jumped to his feet and covered Masajiro’s mouth with his right hand. Masajiro did his best to fight for his life and break free, but his feeble frame was no match for Takeda’s muscle power. The night before, Takeda had taken his wife’s key to her mother’s apartment and filled a syringe with sixty units of insulin from the ampoules in the fridge. On his way out he hesitated, returned to his mother-in-law’s fridge, and added another twenty units. He hid the syringe in his own fridge at home and crept into bed next to his sleeping wife, who was used to his nocturnal escapades. The entire night he had fantasised a hint of recognition, of guilt and regret and panic in Masajiro’s eyes before he put the man out of his misery.
Masajiro’s eyes closed and his body slumped. He was still alive, but his brain cells were disoriented, dying in their droves in the hypoglycaemic shock brought on by the massive overdoses of insulin. He would be dead in minutes.
“Father,” Takeda rasped as he let the man go. “Say something before you die, show some remorse... it’s your last chance.”
Masajiro rolled his eyes and babbled: “The latrines were full of vermin, mostly maggots and… tiny, tiny bodies.” His head fell to his chest as he sunk into a lethal coma.
Takeda started to panic. How long did he have to wait to be sure Masajiro didn’t wake from the coma? What if someone came into the room? He sat down in a chair in front of Masajiro. He had to wait, had to be sure. If anyone came in he would say he was astonished: Masajiro Amitani had fallen asleep in the middle of a sentence. Sweat trickled down Takeda’s forehead. His body seemed to be energized with electricity. He was alone in the world, alone with the man who had robbed him so many years ago of the possibility of enjoying the pleasures of life. The seconds ticked by and felt like hours.
Why did I do it? Takeda asked himself, genuinely surprised. Why?
* * *
It took months before he dared show his mother the dog-tags. Barbara Gerressen emerged from her attempted suicide as a woman who spread overpowering anger in the air around her, like the smell of burning flesh. All that time, corporal Takeda had been waiting for a knock on the door and the police taking him into custody in handcuffs. But the staff at the home where Masajiro lived had apparently blamed his death on the man’s failing health. And even if they had performed an autopsy, there would have been no traces of the overdose of insulin after twenty-four hours.
Takeda told his mother that he had found the dog-tags when he was tidying her room. He asked in a tone that could be interpreted as accusatory if they belonged to his father. The tags had a strange effect on her. She tore them from his hand and threw them away as if they were poisonous. She clenched her fists, her eyes bulged. Her MS had worsened in recent months and her limbs jerked and shuddered. He finally calmed her down and she told him in a toneless voice, distant, as if she was telling someone else’s story, that most of the camp guards made a habit of picking the prettier women to rape. The man she called “that whore-hopper Masajiro” without paying the least attention to the expression on her son’s face was the first.
After getting her pregnant he had threatened to kill her and when the baby was born they both, father and mother, made sure it drowned in the latrines. Barbara Gerressen wasn’t up to raising a child in the camp. Where would she get the energy? She also hated the baby: it was “brown as a coconut”.
This was the first time Takeda had heard about his dead half-brother. Other whore-hoppers followed, Barbara Gerressen continued, but fortunately none of them got her pregnant.
“Six months before the end of the war I had sex with whore-hopper Genkei Akama, your father,” she concluded. She looked at him as if she wanted to see how deeply her words pained him. “You were destined to meet the same fate as your half-brother, but the war ended and that changed everything.”
He noticed her hands tremble as if she felt sorry she hadn’t been able to toss the second baby into the latrines.
I killed the wrong man, thought Takeda. I took all those risks for the wrong man. He roared with laughter as his mother raised her eyebrows in surprise.
119
On the toll road from Kyoto to Tokyo –
Takeda – March 18th 1995
He still has hours of driving ahead of him and tiredness is already weighing heavy, but he’s determined to get to the suburbs of Tokyo before nightfall and take the metro the following morning to the offices of the Public Security Commission. After the storm of the night before, his car has been assailed all day long by broad swathes of almost blinding golden sunlight. Takeda pays little attention to the motorway and the landscape around him. There’s something cardboard about it all, neat and soulless, constructed in haste. His mind is a merry-go-round of half-digested impressions and streams of ideas, a psychic no-man’s-land without horizons. Takeda realises that he’s been living for days with the same rattled feeling he had twenty years earlier when he was sitting in that tiny room with the man he thought was his father, waiting for him to breathe his last. Then, as now, his mind zigzagged back and forth trying to come to grips with a reality that seemed so unreal, so unacceptable.
A new thought makes him tug the wheel involuntarily. If Norikazu and his men have Yori under their control, then the mafia boss now knows about the existence of Beate Becht and that means she could be in danger. His jaws tense. He’s botched up big time, one blunder after the other. Becht is unstable, has already attempted suicide before. It won’t take much to get her to talk. The inspector tries to calm down. What happened, happened. He’s determined not to deviate from his plan. It’s not a good plan, but it’s his only plan. In contrast to the traditional detective novels his wife used to read with such pleasure, the events of the last few days had been nothing but chaos. Takeda had been involved in plenty of investigations in his career that were just as chaotic, hanging together by a thread, the work of the inadequate and the confused. Since murdering the man he thought was his father, Takeda has subscribed to the theory that “normal” life is like being under water: everything is blurred; the people and things around you do the same every day, listless, pointless. But serious crimes propel you to the surface where everything is sharp and unexpected. Suddenly you realise that creatures have followed you from the deep. You see predators you didn’t notice before and they scare the shit out of you.
He feels like a tiny cog in a huge machine, turning and churning, stirring the pot.
After the confrontation with his mother and the realisation that he had killed the wrong man, Takeda suffered a nervous breakdown and took sick-leave for four months. It wasn’t appreciated. The force had little sympathy for policemen with mental problems, a reality he had to deal with later when he still struggled to pass the inspector’s exam in spite of being significantly older than the other candidates. When he got back on his feet, he decided it was time for a new Takeda. Prior to his breakdown he had been the model policeman, following orders to the letter wherever possible, a born yes man. But now he seemed to have developed such an instinct for crimes and the motives behind them that his colleagues and superiors started to talk behind his back of his “sixth sense”. Rumours gradually spread about his talents and Takeda was even tempted to believe in them himself. Fortune and accident combined to help him solve a couple of difficult cases. Once he had separated himself from the pack, he inevitably drew attention to himself; not exactly an advantage in Japan. His superiors used him with relish to get results, but they didn’t trust him; not only because he was a half-breed, but now because of what they called his eccentric behaviour. Takeda resigned himself and cultivated his image. It helped him forget the past and come to terms with the fact that he wa
s destined to be an average run-of-the-mill police officer for the rest of his life. He channelled his underlying vengefulness and ambitions into the cases that came his way and gradually developed a sense of pride in being a lone wolf. At the same time he learned to live with the widespread corruption that riddled the force in a country where losing face was the worst thing that could happen to a person and crime figures were kept artificially low. The outside world saw Japan as an anthill society in which everyone played their part to the best of their ability, but Takeda was convinced that the Japanese were the biggest anarchists on the planet, they just managed to keep it under wraps.
Years passed, time flew.
Now he was sitting behind the wheel of a rented car on his way to Tokyo to save his own skin.
But was his skin worth saving, he asked himself. He had treated his wife as an object of little value. He had indulged his hidden desires on whores. The thin line he had walked for so many years reminded him of the months of fear that had followed the death of Masajiro and the slowly evolving conviction after the event that he wasn’t going to be caught.
But I should have been caught. That thought kept him focussed and helped him mask the dark side of his character. It was only in the tiny, tidy, impersonal cubicles of the love hotels that he was able to reveal the true Takeda. But he would drive home afraid after each visit: a police inspector who enjoyed a bit of hard-handed action with prostitutes was exposed to any number of dangers. Sooner or later he was going to rough up a woman who worked for the yakuza and his unusual appearance would make him easy to find. Takeda knew he was playing with fire; perhaps he wanted to be punished. He asked himself time and again if he did what he did because he hated his mother. Then he would try to cultivate feelings for her, but nothing ever came, beyond a slight sense of irritation, as if she hadn’t suckled him enough.
As tears go by. Takeda remembers a Rolling Stones song he had to translate when he was a student. He has no idea what makes him think about it now.
But what he does know is that the tears in his life have gone by without him being able to cry them.
120
Tokyo – Hibiya line – Ueno Station – metro heading to
Naka-Meguro – Takeda – Monday March 20th 1995
Takeda has the taste of ash in his mouth. He spent the entire previous day in his hotel room being chased by memories and being forced to confront himself once too often. He had called the Public Security Commission and passed through the usual echelons before being granted an appointment. An appointment on March 19th wasn’t possible, which left him with a day on his hands to mull over his chances again and again.
7.58am. The Hibiya line is packed as usual. Takeda squeezes between the other passengers as they push towards the door of the train. A railway official dressed in the familiar green uniform and regulation white gloves tries to prevent all the pushing and shoving from getting out of hand. Two men wearing surgical masks board the train behind him to his right, not an unusual sight on overfull metro trains where bacteria has free reign. Decent people wear a mask out of respect for their fellow travellers when they feel a cold coming on. One of the men is carrying an attaché case and an umbrella, just like hundreds of thousands of others on their way to work in the metropolis. He squeezes in behind Takeda. The other walks past him.
* * *
Takeda tries to organise his thoughts. He can’t appear nervous in front of the Commission. He dives into his memories as he used to dive into the sea in his youth when he wanted to be alone. He remembers his first holiday job selling tyres for a car-part firm and how he stammered and stuttered in front of his first customer. At university he joined a Buddhist organisation called Soka Gakkai, but it didn’t last. The path to inner peace was not for him, although he longed for tranquillity in the depths of his being. Several months police-training in Tokyo followed, the city without beginning or end, where millions of people work, dream, fight and fuck. The metropolis always worked him up, and now the same old fever invades his bones in spite of his best efforts to think serene thoughts. He looks around the compartment. The train slows down. Akihabara Station is the next stop. The man with the surgical mask behind him places a number of parcels wrapped in newspaper on the floor and looks around. At that instant Takeda looks over his shoulder in response to what feels like a tingling in his neck. Their eyes meet and for a moment Takeda is confronted with his own loneliness. He turns back and is unaware that the man behind him is poking the parcels on the floor with the sharpened tip of his umbrella. The train stops. The man wedges up against Takeda to get off. There’s a chemical smell in the air, the smell of concentrated cleaning fluid. The man pushes Takeda aside and jumps onto the platform. Takeda shakes his head at his rudeness, but is quickly confronted by a new sensation: a hurried crowd pushes and shoves its way into the carriage. The inspector tries to stand his ground against the increasing pressure from the bodies around him. The smell in the compartment becomes penetrating, like nail varnish remover. The passengers begin to shout, push to the front, gasping for air. Takeda feels an oncoming wave of nausea. His eyes are irritated and his chest tight. The scene in the compartment begins to undulate as if he’s under water. A mother of a headache sets in.
* * *
The second man was chosen because of his skills as a metro pick-pocket. He’s young, smart, cheeky, and equipped with lightning reflexes. Like his accomplice, he was given an injection of atropine that morning, an antidote for sarin. Small, agile and slightly cross-eyed, he knows precisely what to do. When the passengers start to cough and rub their eyes, he has to do the same to avoid drawing attention to himself. The adrenalin begins to pump. He watched his companion leave the train and he knows that it’s now his turn. When panic breaks out he sees Takeda lose balance. Not long now. The train is approaching Kodemmacho station. A couple of passengers have found the source of the deadly fumes: three plastic bags on the carriage floor. When the train stops they kick the bags onto the platform. In their panic they hit people trying to board the train. Chaos breaks out on the platform and people start to scream. Takeda falls to his knees, snot pouring from his nose and a yellowish fluid from his mouth. The second man stoops and grabs the attaché case his victim has been holding with both arms the entire time. Takeda looks at him with bloodshot eyes and makes a feeble gesture, as if insisting the man give him his bag back. He knows, the second man thinks. He knows what I want from him. He spits in Takeda’s face, jumps from the train, skilfully avoids the convulsing bodies on the platform, and rushes towards the exit with the attaché case clasped to his chest. He runs outside as the sirens begin to wail in the distance. He hums, almost imperceptible, his favourite song: Lord Death Counts His Followers.
* * *
Inspector Takeda vomits and tries to get to his feet. All the evidence he had is now gone. His last thought before losing consciousness: I should have fired a sea of bullets as I crossed the street, when I saw him there with his follower and their motorbikes and leathers and flashy helmets as if they were from a different planet...
121
Hashima Island – Norikazu and Yori –
March 22nd 1995
The spring sky is bright and capricious as molten iron. The sea by contrast is deep blue with occasional white-crested waves. As sea and sky collide, the buildings on the island seem like relics of a forgotten civilisation of giants. Norikazu is made for this island, Yori thinks, as if its concrete ground gave birth to him. Today he’s without make-up. In the sunlight his pockmarked skin is speckled black. Yori once saw photos in an underground magazine of Vietnamese with skin diseases brought on by the American defoliation compound Agent Orange. Their damaged skin looked like that of Norikazu. It’s amazing how bright daylight makes him appear old when he’s without his make-up. Today Yori can clearly see that he’s well into his sixties. At other moments, at dusk and at night, he seems much younger, in part because of his jet-black hair, whic
h he probably dyes.
“I saw it on TV,” she says. “They’re calling it ‘an aimless gas attack in the metro’. Aimless, father?” She likes to call him father. Norikazu smiles, exposing his pointed teeth. In this light they’re yellow and irregular.
“How did you manage to track down the inspector?”
He turns away from her. Today, as is often the case on Hashima, he’s wearing formal attire. His hakama is charcoal grey. His broad-waisted gi is black. His grey trouser skirt hangs to the floor and accents his height. He looks at once like a badly assembled meccano man and an impressive stage actor, larger than life itself.
“Come, father. You know how curious I can be.” She stands beside him, rests her head against his chest. He smells of metal long exposed to the sun. He almost always does.
He relents: “The German photographer was able to tell us the name of the motel he would use on March 18th. He had promised to take her with him and had reserved two rooms. She still had a record of their reservation. After that it was easy to trace Takeda and shadow him. He contacted the Public Security Commission and was given an appointment for the morning of March 20th. The rest is history.”
“Is that so? The papers say the attack was the work of Aum Shinrikyo, father.”
“The papers, the papers... They also say it’s a miracle that so few people died, my daughter. The sarin had been mixed with acetonitrile to slow its release. If it had evaporated quicker, thousands would have perished, perhaps even tens of thousands.”
“I heard that Shoko Asahara is a member of your Yuzonsha.”
He pushes Yori away and leans over her. His shadow covers her completely. “And who told you that, my daughter?”
“People talk, father, even here on the island.”
Return to Hiroshima Page 31
