Bullet Train

by Kotaro Isaka

  ‘If you shoot you’ll give yourself away.’

  ‘Got no choice. Emergency measures. Tangerine’ll understand. Anyway, it’s pretty hard to fight without getting noticed.’

  ‘How did you know who I am?’

  ‘I clocked you the second you walked into the car all nervous. You were basically screaming, here I am, the sacrificial lamb.’

  ‘Sacrificial lamb? What do you mean, sacrificial lamb?’

  ‘You’re the guy who works with Maria, right?’

  ‘You know Maria?’ As he speaks, Nanao looks between Lemon’s face and the gun at his hip. He knows he could be shot at any moment.

  ‘We’re all in the same line of work. McDonald’s knows all about Mos Burger. Bic Camera knows about Yodobashi Camera. Same thing. And our world is pretty small. There aren’t too many people who’ll take on any job someone needs doing. I heard about you and Maria from that old fat go-between.’

  ‘Who, Mr Good News-Bad News?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right. Although most of the time with him it’s bad news. But I hear about Maria all the time. And I heard that for the past couple of years she’s been Glasses Guy’s manager.’

  ‘What do people say about Glasses Guy?’ Nanao doesn’t want to let his guard down for even an instant, but he tries to make it look like he’s unconcerned.

  ‘They say he isn’t bad. To put it in terms of Thomas and Friends, I guess I’d say he’s like Murdoch.’

  ‘Is that one of the characters?’

  ‘Yeah. He’s pretty cool, Murdoch.’ Lemon pauses for a moment, then: ‘A very large engine with ten wheels. Quiet by nature, he likes peaceful places. But he also enjoys chatting with his friends back at the depot.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘That’s Murdoch’s character description.’

  Nanao is thrown off by the sudden recitation, but he also smiles to himself. It’s true that I like peaceful places. All I want is some peace and quiet. But, he reflects with a touch of bitterness, here I am.

  ‘I’ve seen a photo of you before, Glasses Guy. But I didn’t expect you to come wandering in here. Just a coincidence?’

  ‘It’s a kind of coincidence, but also not.’

  ‘Oh, wait, I get it.’ Realisation dawns on Lemon. ‘You’re the one who stole the bag. Well, good. Now I don’t even need to frame you, since you actually did it.’

  ‘First hear me out. Minegishi hired you to bring him the bag, right?’

  ‘So you are involved. You know what’s going on.’

  ‘I’m also working for Minegishi. He hired me to steal the bag.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I don’t know why, but Minegishi hired me without telling you guys.’

  ‘You sure about that?’

  Lemon doesn’t offer any counter-arguments other than that simple question, but it’s enough to unsettle Nanao. After all, Nanao doesn’t know for certain that it’s even Minegishi he’s working for.

  ‘Why would Minegishi want you to steal the bag from us? We’re supposed to be bringing it to him.’

  ‘I know, it’s weird, right?’ Nanao wants to emphasise that something doesn’t add up. ‘So, say Thomas has some freight to carry, but he gets another train to haul it for him. Way I see it, there would only be two reasons: either Thomas is broken down, or someone doesn’t trust him.’

  ‘And are you and your partner broken down? I don’t think so. So that’s not the reason.’ Lemon clicks his tongue. ‘You’re saying Minegishi doesn’t trust us.’

  The barrel of the gun twitches slightly. Lemon is obviously displeased, and his displeasure is making his finger tighten on the trigger. ‘You better give us the bag back, and fast. Where is it? I’ll shoot you, get it? And while you’re wriggling around I’ll go through your pockets and find your ticket. When I go to your seat, I’ll find the bag. Right? So just give me the bag before I shoot your ass.’

  ‘Wait, you don’t understand. I’m looking for the bag too. It’s not at my seat.’

  ‘Looks like you wanna get shot.’

  ‘I’m telling you the truth. If I had the bag, I wouldn’t come looking for you guys. I thought you definitely had it. That’s why I came to this car, even though I knew it would be dangerous. And it turned out to be really dangerous.’ Nanao keeps his voice low and tells himself over and over to stay calm. Showing any fear or agitation will just encourage Lemon. And though he’s still coming to terms with his lifelong bad luck, he’s used to looking down the barrel of a gun. Guns don’t scare him all that much.

  It’s clear enough that Lemon doesn’t believe him, but he appears to be thinking. ‘Okay, then who has it?’

  ‘If I knew that I wouldn’t be here talking to you. But the simplest answer is that there’s someone else, or some other group, that wants it.’

  ‘Some other group?’

  ‘Besides me and the two of you. And now that other party has it.’

  ‘And do they work for Minegishi too? What the fuck’s he thinking?’

  ‘I’ll say it again, I don’t know exactly what’s going on. I’m not the smartest.’ I’m just good at football and dangerous work.

  ‘How come you wear glasses if you’re not smart?’

  ‘Aren’t there any trains who wear glasses?’

  ‘Yeah, Whiff does. A tank engine with glasses, a nice guy who doesn’t get mad even when people gossip about him. But yeah, I suppose he isn’t so smart either.’

  ‘My guess is that Minegishi doesn’t trust contract workers like us.’ Nanao is sharing these thoughts as they occur to him. He figures that as long as he’s talking there’s less of a chance he’ll be shot. ‘So maybe he hired a few different people to make sure the bag gets back to him.’

  ‘Why would he go to all that trouble?’

  ‘When I was a kid there was a man in my neighbourhood who used to ask me to go shopping for him.’

  ‘What does that have to do with this?’

  ‘He told me if I went to the station to get his newspaper and magazines for him he’d give me a little cash, so I ran off to do it. When I got back, he said, look at this magazine, it’s bent, I’m not giving you anything.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘He never had any intention of giving me a tip, so he had an excuse ready. I bet Minegishi has the same thing in mind for you guys. What happened to the bag, he’ll want to know. And then he’ll say, you messed up, and now you’re going to pay.’

  ‘So that’s why he had you steal the bag from us?’

  ‘Could be.’ As he says it Nanao thinks that it really might be true. Minegishi might hate the thought of saying good job and having to pay full price. By setting up a situation like this he can make the people he hired feel like they owe him, instead of the other way round.

  ‘Now you’re gonna pay – what do you think that means, exactly?’

  ‘Maybe he’d make you give him money, or maybe he’d have you shot. I bet he’s thinking, I want someone else to do my dirty work, but I don’t want to have to pay for it, wouldn’t it be great if I could hire someone and then get rid of them.’

  ‘But if he hired someone else to mess with our work, wouldn’t that cost him money too? There’d be no point.’

  ‘If it’s an easier job he could hire someone for less. It would probably work out cheaper for him in the end.’

  ‘When a train works hard, you gotta make it feel good, tell it it’s a useful train.’

  ‘Some people would rather die than praise someone else. Could be that’s how Minegishi is.’

  Nanao is still wary of the gun, still trying to make it look like he doesn’t care. He’s doing his best to distract Lemon from the possibility of pulling the trigger.

  ‘Your partner Tangerine, is he still in the toilet?’

  ‘He has been gone a while.’ But Lemon doesn’t look at the door, he keeps his eyes on Nanao. ‘Maybe there’s a queue.’

  A thought occurs to Nanao. ‘Is there a chance he’s double-crossing you?’
r />   ‘Tangerine wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘He could have hidden the bag somewhere.’ Nanao’s doing a balancing act, he wants to shake Lemon up a bit, but not so much that he pulls the trigger.

  ‘Nah, Tangerine wouldn’t screw me. Not because we share some deep mutual trust or anything. He’s just a cool customer. He knows that if he turned on me it’d be a whole mess of trouble for him.’

  ‘And you’re not mad that while you’re here fighting me he’s just taking his time in the toilet?’ Nanao keeps looking for ways to sow doubt in Lemon’s mind.

  But Lemon just makes a disparaging face. ‘Tangerine knows you and me are in here together, bud.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The second you came in, he said I saw someone I know from the neighbourhood. All of a sudden, you know? Which is our code. For when someone we know shows up. We say it that way so that the person doesn’t know we know. When Tangerine got up to go to the toilet he said he’d leave you to me.’

  ‘Oh, oh really?’ Nanao is struck with a feeling of incompetence. Everyone in the business uses secret codes and messages. He tries to think back to the conversation he overheard. He can’t recall having noticed anything that stood out, but he figures Lemon is probably telling the truth.

  There’s also a new rush of urgency. If Tangerine knows Nanao’s here, he could come back at any moment, and two against one is not good odds.

  ‘Hey,’ Lemon says suddenly, ‘you don’t hate being woken up, do you?’

  ‘Being woken up?’

  ‘I heard about somebody in the biz who hates being woken up. Supposed to be a beast. I thought for a second it might be you, but I guess not.’

  Nanao had never heard about anyone like that. It seemed like kind of a silly thing for a professional to be known for. ‘He’s tough, huh?’

  ‘He’s like the legendary train City of Truro. Even Gordon was too slow to beat City of Truro.’

  ‘Sorry, I don’t know the reference.’

  ‘Listen, you’re not gonna be able to beat me, bud. And if somehow you manage to kill me, I still won’t die.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘I mean that the great Lemon is immortal! Even if I die, I come back. I’ll appear before you and scare the shit out of you.’

  ‘No thanks,’ Nanao says, scowling. ‘I’m not into the afterlife and I don’t like ghosts.’

  ‘I’m worse than a ghost!’

  At that moment Nanao notices another Shinkansen passing in the opposite direction across the aisle and out the far window from where they’re sitting. It roars by, and the two trains seem to be jostling one another, as if to say that there’s no peaceful passage through life, everything is a struggle.

  ‘Hey, maybe that’s Murdoch,’ Nanao mutters absently, not intending anything in particular. It isn’t a ploy, and if it were he wouldn’t expect it to work. He just noticed the other train and wondered what model it was, and spoke his thoughts aloud.

  But Lemon, without any scepticism whatsoever, excitedly says, ‘Where?’ and turns to look. Nanao is astonished. Lemon has a gun on him, but he looked over his shoulder as if they were just having a friendly conversation. Not going to get another chance like this, Nanao realises. He grabs the gun hand and forces it down, at the same time ramming his other fist into Lemon’s chin. Snap back the chin, rattle the brain, knock the opponent unconscious. It was another of the techniques Nanao had practised over and over again in his teens, just like he practised football. He hears a sound like a muscle popping or a large switch being flipped.

  Lemon’s eyes roll back and he slumps over in his seat. Nanao hauls the long body across to the window seat and arranges him against the window. For a moment he wonders if he should break Lemon’s neck, but something stops him. After the Wolf, it feels too risky to kill again. And he’s also sure that if he takes Lemon’s life he’ll have to deal with an enraged Tangerine. He needs to try to keep these two from becoming his enemies. It’s hard to imagine that they’d become allies, but he knows he doesn’t want to provoke them more than necessary.

  Now what do I do? What now? What now?

  His head feels like it’s heating up. The gears start spinning faster.

  He takes Lemon’s gun and secures it in his belt under his jacket. He also takes Lemon’s phone. Then he leans down and looks at the knife on the floor. He thinks about grabbing it, but decides not to.

  What next? The pulleys and blocks of thought work furiously, hoisting up one idea after another. The ideas appear and then vanish. What are you going to do? whispers a voice inside.

  Should I go to the front of the train or to the back? Tangerine will be here any minute. As soon as he thinks that and remembers where Tangerine’s coming from, he knows he can’t go forward. The only choice is towards the rear.

  His mind buzzes with options and fragments of escape plans. Even if I go towards the back Tangerine will just come for me. Both ways are dead ends. He has to figure out some way to get past Tangerine.

  He opens his waist pack. First he takes out a tube full of first-aid cream, unscrews the cap and spreads some where Lemon slashed him. It isn’t bleeding heavily, but it seems like a good idea to try to stop what bleeding there is. The arm throbs with pain both from being cut and from blocking punches. Bruises are already forming where he was hit. Lemon had got a few good blows in, pounding Nanao’s flesh and bones. Every move stings, but there’s nothing he can do about it.

  Next he takes out a digital wristwatch. No time to think. He sets the alarm volume to max and picks a time. How long will I need? Too early won’t help, too late is no good either. Just in case, he decides to set a second alarm on a different watch, ten minutes later than the first.

  He places one watch on the floor under Lemon’s seat and the other on the luggage rack above his head.

  Nanao is about to leave when he glances at the row in front, the three-seater where Lemon and Tangerine had originally been sitting and where the third man still sits motionless by the window. Something seems off about the man, so Nanao moves closer and touches him warily on the shoulder. No response. No way, he thinks. He lays his fingers on the man’s neck. No pulse. Who is he? Nanao sighs, overwhelmed by the unknown, but he knows he can’t hang around any longer. Just before he steps away he notices a plastic water bottle, half empty, in the seat-back pocket where Lemon had been sitting. He hits on a sly little idea and takes a packet of powder from his waist pack. Water-soluble sleeping medicine. He tears it open and pours it into the bottle, then shakes the bottle up and replaces it in the pocket. He has no idea whether Lemon will drink it or if it will even work, but he reasons it’s best to plant seeds wherever he can.

  Then he hurries towards car number two. Okay. What now?

  The Prince

  JUST AS HE’S THINKING MAYBE he should go back to his seat, the toilet door opens and Kimura steps out wearing an agitated look.

  ‘What was the combination?’

  ‘How’d you know I got it open?’

  ‘I could tell by the look on your face.’

  ‘Well, you don’t look surprised or even happy. You’re just used to being lucky, is that it? It was 0600.’ Kimura glances down at the suitcase under his arm. ‘I locked it back up for now.’

  ‘Let’s go.’ The Prince turns and leads the way, Kimura following with the bag. If they bump into the bag’s owner it’ll be easy enough to blame everything on the older man.

  They arrive at their seats and the Prince has Kimura sit by the window. This next part’s critical, he thinks, readying himself. He’ll feel much safer if he can manage to get Kimura tied up again.

  ‘Mr Kimura, I’m going to retie your hands and feet, okay? Your son’s well-being is at stake so I imagine you won’t try anything stupid, but we might as well do you up like before.’

  I don’t particularly care if you’re tied up or not, either way is fine by me – the Prince is trying to project this attitude. When in fact the difference between whether an opponent
is bound or free is considerable. Kimura is much bigger than he is. Even if the man knows his son’s life hangs in the balance, something could make him snap, launch a desperate suicide attack. If that happens, the Prince might not be able to stop him. Things don’t always go as expected when the situation turns violent. The best way to ensure his safety is to put things back how they were before. But he also has to make sure Kimura doesn’t realise all this.

  The Prince knows this is the key to exerting control over someone else. If someone understands that the moment of truth has come, that if they’re ever going to make a move to change the situation then now’s the time, then they’ll most likely take action, regardless of what kind of person they are. If they know for certain that this is their only chance they might fight with a wild abandon. That’s why if you can prevent someone from knowing this, you’re much more likely to win. Lots of rulers do it. They hide their true intentions, as if they were taking a horde of passengers on a train journey with no information about where the train is going and yet this state of affairs was the most natural thing in the world. The passengers could get off at any of the stations along the way, but they’re never allowed to realise this. The conductor just keeps the train going, perfectly calm. By the time people start to regret not having got off earlier, it’s too late. Whether it’s war, genocide, or revisions to the law, in most cases people don’t notice until it’s already happening, and they feel like they would have protested earlier if they only knew.

  That’s why when the Prince finishes re-securing Kimura’s hands and feet with the bands and tape, he feels considerable relief. Kimura doesn’t even seem to notice that his chance to fight back slipped away.

  The Prince puts the suitcase at his feet and pops it open, exposing the sheaves of notes. ‘Look at that.’

  ‘Not much of a surprise. Nothing special about a bag full of cash. The bank cards thing is new though.’

  The Prince takes another look, and sure enough in the webbing on the inside of the suitcase he finds five debit cards. Each one has four digits written in marker on the back. ‘I’m guessing these are the codes to make a withdrawal.’