The Name of the Game Is a Kidnapping

by Keigo Higashino

  Juri turned off the TV hastily. Seeing that, I chuckled.

  “You’re surprisingly naïve.”

  “I just turned it off because it was trashy. If you want to watch it, I’ll turn it back on.”

  “No, thank you. I’m in the middle of important work.”

  “Huh.” Juri crossed and uncrossed her legs. “Men are weird. Why does watching something like that make them so happy?”

  “There are women who are fond of watching stuff like that, too.”

  “Not as many as men. In particular, older men are idiots. They don’t even have that much pocket money themselves but spend tens of thousands of yen to date a minor. They have to be wrong in the head. Do they not get that the girl’s toying with them?”

  “‘Toying with’ sounds so predatory.” My hands stopped and I lifted my face. “Are you sure about that? These older men are fools who’re just being used by young girls?”

  “Am I wrong?”

  “Listen. Most of those guys are surviving in a harsh economic world. They know more than anyone the weight of a ten-thousand-yen bill. If they’re paying, it means they think it’s worth it.”

  “But that’s what—”

  “If you’re saying paying that much just for sex is foolish, it’s not. Just a generation ago, having sex with an amateur high schooler was a dream that not even several hundred thousand yen could buy. Now, it can come true for just a few ten-thousand-yen bills. It’s a bargain. Not jumping on it is weird. Those older guys are thinking, ‘These young girls selling something worth several hundred thousand, no several million yen for birdseed are such fools.’ The girls aren’t just undervaluing their bodies. They lowered the price on their own souls.”

  “They don’t go as far as to sell their hearts. Girls like that say that it’s a business where they just sell their bodies.”

  “They’re just telling themselves that. Sure, they won’t open their hearts as well to some old dude. But so what? Do you think the men are moved by that? When they make love to such girls, those guys are thinking, ‘I bet this chick hates having sex with me so much that she could die. But what do I care? I’ve paid for what I’ve paid for.’ In other words, by paying for it, they think they’ve earned the right to ignore the girl’s feelings. How is that not devaluing your soul?”

  Maybe it was because I rattled on like a machine gun or because she didn’t really understand, but Juri fell silent with her head bowed. I heaved a sigh.

  “There’s stuff in the world that’s worth more than money. I think that’s people’s hearts and time. You can’t move someone’s heart with money, and lost time can’t be bought back with money. So if it’ll help even a little with either of those things, I try not to be stingy.” I pulled a page from my notebook and handed it to her. “Well, so much for our chat, we have to continue with our plan. Like I said, time is more valuable than money.”

  “What is this?”

  “If you read it you’ll know.”

  After Juri finished reading the note, she slowly raised her head. Her cheeks had stiffened. “We’re making a call from here? I’m making it?”

  “That’s right. They want to make sure you’re safe, and if they got a call from you, they’d be satisfied.”

  “Why from here?”

  “Two reasons. One is in case they trace it. The other is those ships. I don’t know what kind of recorder they’ve planted, but if it picks up that sound, we’re in luck. The police will probably try to analyze it. If they figure out it’s a ship’s whistle, they’re bound to presume that the hideout is located near the sea. They might even identify the whistles as being from Yokosuka’s naval port.”

  “Basically, you’re trying to mess up the investigation.”

  “You got it.”

  I pressed several buttons on the phone next to the bed. Soon my cell started ringing. After looking at its screen, I hung up the hotel phone.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I checked whether there’s caller ID. It’s okay, we can call as is.” I pushed the phone toward Juri.

  She folded her arms and stared at it, then licked her lips and lifted her face. “It might not be Papa who answers.”

  “I think it’ll definitely be him, but if it’s someone else, just ask them to get Mr. Katsuragi. Even in that situation, only wait for ten seconds. Tell them that, too. When ten seconds pass, you hang up.”

  “I’m sure Papa will have a lot of questions.”

  “Probably. But there’s no time for small talk. Say you can’t answer questions and only say what’s written on there.”

  “I got it.” Juri slowly closed her eyes once. “I’ll try,” she said, opening her eyes again.

  I indicated the phone with my hand. Juri swallowed. She took a deep breath and reached for the receiver.

  Her shaking fingertips pressed the buttons. As expected, my heart started beating faster. I kept asking myself if I’d missed anything.

  The sound of the ringing escaped from between the receiver and Juri’s ear. There were three rings. Then it connected. Someone’s voice. But I couldn’t tell whether it was Katsutoshi Katsuragi’s.

  “Oh, Papa? It’s me. Can you tell from my voice? It’s Juri,” she said, looking at the note I’d written.

  Even I could hear the person on the other end unleashing a storm of words. Juri sucked in a breath with a look of consternation.

  “I’m sorry. We don’t have the time to talk. You understand, right? Because I’m not alone….I can’t answer that. Please just listen. We’re running out of time.”

  I was staring at the clock’s hand. It was already past fifteen seconds.

  “I’m safe. So don’t worry. They’re saying they’ll let me go home if they just get the money….Ah, I’m sorry. It looks like my time is up.”

  I rested my finger on the call button. Just as I thought I’d hang up in two seconds, I heard a distant whistle. I cut off the call immediately.

  “Done!” I shook my fist and stood up. After closing the window, I turned to Juri. “Luck’s on our side. That whistle went off at the perfect moment.”

  But Juri seemed off. Her back was hunched as though she felt cold.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked her, sitting next to her.

  Her whole body was trembling. Just as I was about to ask her if she was okay, she clung to me.

  “I’ve done it now, there’s no going back,” she murmured, pressing her cheek against my chest.

  “Are you scared?”

  Juri didn’t answer. As I stayed still, I felt her trembling against my arm.

  “It’s natural,” I said. “What we’re doing isn’t normal. It’s something normal people are unable to do. But what we’re getting in return isn’t insignificant.”

  Juri nodded slightly and looked up at me. Her eyes were moist.

  Unexpected feelings swelled inside of me. A certain impulse, you could say. Something that I hadn’t noticed—or rather, that I’d noticed but had chosen to ignore—shook my heart.

  I hugged Juri tighter. She looked at me with startled eyes.

  Various thoughts crossed my head. Among them were a good number of self-serving takes. Sleeping with this girl here wouldn’t be such a big deal. In fact, deepening our relationship might be conducive to advancing the plan—I thought that, too.

  But I loosened my arms and moved away from her. What I wanted to do wasn’t this. Right now, I was contending in the game of a lifetime.

  “For now, let’s leave. I don’t think they traced the call, but nothing good will come from staying here for long.”

  Juri silently nodded.

  We went back to the car, and I turned on the engine. When I was about to promptly depart, Juri said, “One sec.” I stepped on the brake.

  “I have a request,” she continued.

  “What is it?”

  “There’s a place nearby that I want to go to.”

  “Do you have something else you need to do?”

  “It’s not t
hat, it’s a place I like. Somewhere my mother who passed away took me once. Because I want to calm myself down…Please.”

  I saw Juri put her hands together and was taken aback a little. I didn’t think the girl had it in her.

  “Is it far?”

  “I don’t think it’s that far.”

  “But I’d prefer to get as far away from this place as possible.”

  “Then it should be fine. It’s not that close. I just meant it’s not far by car.”

  “Hmm.” I took my foot off the brake pedal. The car slowly moved. “Do you know the way?”

  “Yeah, I think.”

  I let out a sigh. “Then I’ll leave the navigation to you.”

  “Got it. First, go back to the original road.”

  “Okay.” I made a wide circle on the steering wheel and stepped on the accelerator.

  I followed Juri’s directions and continued down the highway. Soon, we got to a coastal road. On the left was the ocean, on the right were a chain of tall hills. After some time, Juri instructed me to turn right. As I turned the wheel and continued on, the road became steeper.

  “We’re going pretty high. Are you sure this is the way?”

  “Yup,” Juri answered confidently.

  As I drove, the houses thinned out again. Nothing obstructed our view all around, and it was as though we could see the horizon. Apparently we’d gotten up the hill and what followed was flat road.

  “Stop around here.”

  Since Juri said so, I stepped on the brake. The place was pitch dark. It didn’t seem like there were cars coming from either direction, but I parked on the roadside at least.

  “Hey.” Juri looked at me. “Could you open this?” She pointed to the roof.

  “Here?”

  “Because we’re here.”

  I hesitated for a moment but eventually pressed the open switch for the hood. It quietly retracted. A chilly wind brushed my cheek. It was mixed with the smell of grass and soil.

  “See? It’s amazing.” Juri looked up and pointed with her index finger.

  Ohh, I let out a dumb gasp. The night sky was that beautiful. On the infinitely large, nearly jet-black display shone countless lights. Their positions were flawless. My heart was getting sucked in just from looking. “It’s cliché but—”

  Juri warned before I could finish, “Just don’t say it looks like a planetarium.”

  I grinned, still looking up. She was right, I should stay away from that simile. “I don’t know much about constellations. I’m regretting it.”

  “I just know Orion, pretty much. But that doesn’t matter.” She raised both her arms, stretched, and breathed deeply. “This feels great. It feels like it’s not Japan.”

  I looked at our surroundings anew. The hills and valley were submerged in darkness. There seemed to be fields spread out in front of me.

  “I wonder which way the ocean is,” the words slipped out of my mouth though I didn’t particularly need to know.

  “That, that, and even that’s the ocean.” Juri pointed to three sides. “Because this is around the tip of the Miura Peninsula.”

  I nodded. The impressions I’d had as I’d driven agreed with what she said.

  “Well, do you feel a little better?” I asked her.

  “Yeah, thank you.” Juri looked at me with a beaming smile. She blinked twice. “Is it okay if I ask you something?”

  “What is it this time?”

  “You tried to get closer to me back there, didn’t you?”

  For a moment, my breathing stopped. I averted my eyes from her and slowly breathed out. “You’re the one who hugged me.”

  “That’s not what I mean…” After pausing, she repeated, “You know that’s not what I meant.”

  I didn’t answer. I put my right hand on the steering wheel and fluttered my fingertips.

  “Why did you stop? Because it’d be dangerous if we stayed there too long? In that case, would you have gone ahead if we did have the time?” she asked in a near whisper.

  I hadn’t seen these questions coming. “Then let me ask you.” I turned to her, wearing a smile. “Why did you hug me? You might have gotten scared calling home, but I’m supposed to be nothing more than an accomplice to you.”

  She cast down her eyes before looking up at me again. “Because I decided to trust you. Because now that it’s like this, I thought the only person I could trust was you.”

  The gleaming sincerity in her eyes confounded me. The tricky emotions that had threatened to sprout back at the love hotel were crawling into my heart again.

  “Stockholm syndrome,” I said.

  Her lips opened as though to say, Huh? It was an incredibly childish expression that she hadn’t shown until now.

  “When a terrorist and hostage are together for a long time, supposedly a sense of solidarity will develop between them. Both parties do want the situation to be resolved quickly. It’s a term for that state of mind. They mentioned it in a Bond movie.”

  “I’m not a hostage. You’re not a terrorist.”

  “It’s the same. You’re isolated under abnormal circumstances. Even though it’s staged, we’re both hoping that the ransom exchange goes well, and that’s just like the terrorist-hostage relationship.”

  Juri shook her head. “There’s something that’s completely different.”

  “What?”

  “The solidarity that develops between the hostage and the terrorist is originally unnecessary, right? You can even say it’s unnatural. But that’s not the case for us.”

  I licked my lips and gave a small nod. “Certainly, our solidarity is a must.”

  “Right? So I wanted to feel it. My solidarity with you.”

  Juri’s eyes caught me and wouldn’t let go. I was growing weary of putting on the brakes. They even started to seem superfluous.

  I drew her face closer with my left hand and our lips came together. Just before they did, she closed her eyes.

  —

  It’s called flow. If you kiss, you want to put your tongue in. If the woman doesn’t put up any resistance, you also want to touch her breasts, and if that continues, next you want to reach your hand into her underwear.

  I wanted a change of venue but never got the chance to suggest it. Saying something like that could cool her passion. While I indulged in her lips, I thought this was a case of the syndrome after all. The act of calling home and talking to her father had wrecked something in Juri. As a result she was feeling hopelessly anxious. She couldn’t deal with it without telling herself that she needed the man who was with her.

  Well, what about me? Did I love the girl? No, that would have been stupid. It wasn’t why I’d become interested in Juri, and my motive for staying with her belonged to a completely different dimension. I felt a very natural sexual desire simply because she was a young woman. I knew pursuing that was foolish, so I hadn’t let it show in my behavior, and I still didn’t mean to give that away to the very end.

  But things turning out this way wasn’t something that I could never welcome. I needed to dispel my anxiety no less than she did. Completing a game as big as this required absolute trust. For a man and woman to establish that, a physical connection was perhaps essential. It could even be an illusion, actually. It didn’t matter if the emotions were momentary or false. Stockholm syndrome was precisely such a phenomenon.

  When Juri brought out a condom from somewhere, I was fairly flabbergasted. It seemed she had brought it from the love hotel, but that meant she’d been expecting this to happen. I had to wonder if having a physical relationship was a standard way of establishing solidarity for her.

  Inside the cramped car, we brought our bodies together and stimulated each other’s membranes. To me, Juri seemed accustomed to sex. She also seemed to know how to enjoy it, too.

  After the act, Juri said she was throwing out the trash and got out of the car. She didn’t come back right away, so I put on my pants, too, and opened the door.

  She was
lingering at a spot not too far away. I called out to her back, “What are you doing?”

  “Oh, nothing. I was just looking at the scenery a little.”

  I looked where she was facing. I could faintly see the ocean. When I moved my line of sight to the foreground, it entered my vision. I had to laugh.

  “What is it?”

  “Look. There’s a jizo right there.”

  She turned around and recognized the small stone Buddhist statue and its miniature shed. “You’re right. I didn’t notice.”

  “And you just said it feels like it’s not Japan.”

  “Yeah.” Juri’s eyes were smiling, and she hugged my arm. “I feel a little cold. Let’s go home.”

  “Sure,” I agreed and kissed her one more time.

  9

  By the time we got back to the condo, it was nearly three a.m. In one night we had made a round trip to Yokosuka, had Juri make a phone call, and had car sex as a bonus. It was no wonder my body was tired, but oddly I didn’t feel sleepy. Fortunately tomorrow was Saturday. When my focus had been on the automobile park plans, holidays weren’t relevant, but now I didn’t have any work to go in to the office for.

  I booted my computer and visited the CPT website. Sure enough, there was a new post on the bulletin board.

  I confirmed the quality of the product (Julie)

  Excuse me again, I’m the newbie Julie.

  Maniac, thank you for your valuable advice. Just earlier, I checked it. It seems there’s no problem with the CPT’s quality.

  The agreement is next, at last. But I haven’t been able to prepare the money and am in trouble. The banks are closed tomorrow so it might take some more time. Plus, I still don’t know exactly how I’ll be paying.

  It seemed Maniac was the handle of some helpful person who didn’t know the true meaning of the posts and had given Julie advice. Whoever it was had to be wondering how Julie had checked the car’s quality in the middle of the night and scratching his head after seeing this message.