Tokyo Zangyo

by Michael Pronko

  Suzuna looked over the edge again and then leaned back against the fence, her socks slipping.

  “Don’t look down there, look at me,” Hiroshi commanded as calmly as he could.

  Suzuna looked back to where Hiroshi was reaching outside the fence.

  “I want to hear you tell me what happened. I believe you.”

  “I killed both of them.”

  “No, you didn’t.” He got his shoulder and arm through the V, but it was still too far to grab her.

  Sugamo circled back closer to Hiroshi, edging close behind him to the left.

  Suzuna said, “At the group meeting, you implied we were responsible for his death.”

  “That wasn’t my meaning. I found out more, so I know what happened. I know the truth now. Emi told me what happened.” Hiroshi stretched farther out through the open fence, but Suzuna shuffled several more steps away and started crying harder.

  “The truth? No one wants to hear that. They just want to hear who’s in charge, who has the power, who’s rich, who follows orders.” Sobs racked her body and she stooped and twisted, wiping her eyes.

  He had no idea about the truth, but he had to tell her something. He wasn’t really sure they had done anything when he questioned them, but it seemed a decent bluff to draw them out. He didn’t count on Suzuna being that sensitive. And was Emi’s story even true? Maybe true enough to lure Suzuna back in.

  Hiroshi took small steps closer, ready to lunge for her. He could feel Sugamo grab the back of his belt and waistband, curling them tightly into his huge fist.

  Suzuna wailed, squatting down with her socks slipping on the gravel.

  Hiroshi knew he had to hurry. “Tell me about studying in America. I studied there, too.”

  “It was great at first when we came back and then everything turned terrible.”

  “But you have a great job now at the flower shop with Toshiko. I talked to her. She wants you to—”

  “I have to pee.” Suzuna started to bounce and scrunch her body.

  “There’s a toilet right by the smoking lounge. Come on back. It’s too cold up here.”

  Suzuna spread her legs apart, reached under her skirt and crouched. A thin trickle of urine sprayed out and pooled on the pebbles of the ledge. She was beyond shame and propriety, wiping herself with a tissue and tossing it over the edge. It floated on the updraft, before disappearing. “I feel better now. I’m ready. I don’t want to exist anymore.”

  “Suzuna!” a woman’s voice called and Hiroshi turned to see the plump woman from the meeting in the flower shop. “Suzuna, please!” Osaki followed close behind her with another woman from the meeting, Shio, dressed in a Disney coat.

  Hiroshi waved to Osaki to let them come closer. He put one foot outside the fence onto the ledge and shifted his weight. Sugamo clutched his waistband tighter and set himself with his hand around the fence.

  Hiroshi reverted to a friendly tone again. “Suzuna, Masayo and Shio are here. So, come back inside and let’s talk. Get back to the warmth.”

  “There’s no warmth,” Suzuna said.

  Masayo stepped closer. “Suzuna, you promised that we’d be honest about everything. So let’s be honest now. We have more work to do.”

  Shio said, “Suzuna, we’ll explain everything. People will trust us. I promise.”

  Suzuna’s fingers clawed the fence, opening and shutting through the links. She stretched her other hand out to test the air and Hiroshi tensed to make a leap for her, Sugamo ready for his lunge.

  Hiroshi waved for Masayo and Shio to keep talking.

  Masayo and Shio stepped closer and Shio put her hand on Suzuna’s fingers through the fence. Almost whispering, Shio said, “Suzuna, in group, we pledged to never let Onizuka hurt another woman. That includes you.”

  Suzuna kept stretching one arm out and back as if testing the air.

  The opening in the fence was not big enough for Hiroshi to slip through quickly, and even if he could, he wouldn’t be fast enough. He was pretty sure he could get a handful of her dress or maybe her arm, and Sugamo could pull back, but he wasn’t sure he could hold on.

  Suzuna touched Shio’s fingers. Masayo put her fingers on top of theirs, the three women touching. Suzuna’s right hand stayed on theirs, but with her left, she touched her lips and set a kiss on their fingers.

  After that, she stretched her left hand up in the air.

  When she did, Hiroshi snatched her arm. Sugamo, still holding his waistband, let him lean forward.

  Her sweater slipped along her arm and Hiroshi let go of the fence and stepped out to snatch her other arm, Sugamo letting him all the way outside the fence.

  Suzuna wiggled and squatted down onto the pebbles.

  Hiroshi reached down and got an arm around her waist, but she kept struggling.

  Hiroshi braced his legs to pin Suzuna between himself and the fence. He could feel Sugamo’s hand on his waistband so he could use his knees to corral her as he got his arm around her waist to ease her up.

  She kept twisting like a child throwing a tantrum. Hiroshi had to grab the fence with one hand to keep from being pushed over the edge.

  Kicking and squirming, she kept Hiroshi from getting a firm hold on her, but with each twist, he could move her closer to the opening where Takamatsu was reaching for them over the top of Sugamo.

  Twist by hysterical twist, they reeled her in.

  When Hiroshi got her close enough, Sugamo got a hand around her wrist and yanked. She looked up surprised, hurt maybe, but Sugamo yanked again holding her arm as tight as a vise.

  Takamatsu latched onto Suzuna’s other arm with Osaki holding him from behind.

  Sugamo let go of Hiroshi’s belt band, got a two-handed grip on Suzuna and slid her through the opening back to safety inside the fence.

  Hiroshi’s foot slipped on the pebbles, but Takamatsu got a hand around his wrist and Osaki snatched his waistband.

  Resetting his balance, Hiroshi ducked inside.

  He stood up and looked behind him at the edge of the roof.

  Takamatsu nodded at Hiroshi’s arm. It was dripping blood where he must have ripped it on a sharp edge of the cut fence.

  Osaki wrapped a handkerchief around it and Hiroshi pressed on it to staunch the blood.

  Sugamo called for an ambulance.

  Masayo and Shio wrapped themselves around Suzuna and rocked her back and forth.

  Takamatsu reached for his cigarettes.

  Chapter 35

  The security guards brought a medical kit and a stretcher with blankets. Masayo and Shio would not let go of Suzuna, so the guards gave them a blanket and let them wrap her up and sit down on a picnic bench. Sugamo and Osaki hovered close.

  One of the guards brought a medical kit and poured disinfectant on Hiroshi’s arm. Blood was still oozing from two points where the fence had bit into the flesh. He pressed on it hard for a few minutes and it started to slow.

  Takamatsu finished his cigarette and came over to check on Hiroshi. “I’m getting tired of this roof.”

  “I’m getting tired of roofs in general,” Hiroshi replied, still pressing his arm to stop the bleeding.

  “We better talk to the girls while they’re still upset.” Takamatsu looked over at the three women clumped together.

  Hiroshi let the security guard put a fresh compress on and slip an elastic net sleeve over to hold it in place. Then he stood up, stretched his arm and winced. It would have to do. He pulled his torn overcoat back on.

  The ambulance crew arrived with a stretcher and hurried to Suzuna. Masayo and Shio talked her into lying down, and the crew checked her vitals and covered her in a blanket. She had stopped crying, but her face went blank, her eyes staring at nothing. She’d stopped responding even to Masayo and Shio, who held her hands in theirs.

  Hiroshi told the ambulance crew, “She’s to be on suicide watch. Take her to the police hospital in Nakano.” Sugamo and Osaki did janken to see who would go with her. Osaki lost with scissors. “Osa
ki, call ahead and get it arranged. And leave a message for Sakaguchi.”

  Takamatsu said, “Be sure they let her sleep. She won’t be any help until her shock wears off.”

  Osaki followed the ambulance crew transporting Suzuna.

  Hiroshi and Takamatsu turned to Masayo and Shio.

  Masayo said, “We were ready to tell you when you came to the flower shop, but you ran off.”

  “I was called to another side of the case,” Hiroshi explained.

  Masayo shook her head. “I want to follow Suzuna to the hospital, and be there when she wakes up. I can explain what happened here, what happened that night. I’ll give a statement or whatever I’m supposed to do after I’m sure Suzuna’s all right.”

  Takamatsu took out his cellphone to record it. “Better to explain it all now.”

  Masayo looked at Shio, sighed and resigned herself to explain. “We found each other online. We all had the same experience and formed a survivors’ support group. We met once a month to share our experiences and then go out for a meal and karaoke.”

  Shio pulled her Disney character overcoat tight and said, “We could talk freely together. We had new friends, a new start, regular jobs. It was a relief.”

  Hiroshi pulled his coat against the wind. “So when did the idea for revenge come up?”

  Shio looked out from her Disney hood.

  “Suzuna brought us a plan. Mayu’s plan. At first we laughed,” Masayo said. “But the next time we talked in our group, it turned serious.”

  “Serious?” Hiroshi asked.

  “I don’t know where to start.” Masayo looked at Shio. “Shio had been sending tweets, the ones you found, about Onizuka, and another manager at Senden. She’d also taken a lot of photos at drinking parties and karaoke. They were embarrassing, but nothing more than drunk salaryman photos. Well, we got an online response right away.”

  Shio’s face came alive. “It turns out a lot of people, women especially, hate their bosses. The horrible stories and embarrassing photos poured in. We were deluged.”

  “What were the hashtags?” Hiroshi checked Takamatsu’s phone to be sure it was recording. He didn’t trust Takamatsu with technology.

  Masayo said, “We used #hatemyboss, #bosshole, #buchoasshole. Suzuna thought them all up in English. We laughed a lot. Then, it took off. We made Facebook groups, curated videos on YouTube, posted on Instagram. It’s mostly all still up there.”

  Shio smiled under the Disney character hood of her coat.

  Masayo pointed at Shio. “Someone posted herself cutting her boss’s tires. It got to be too much, so in group we decided we’d just do one more thing and quit.”

  “That’s when you got in touch with Mistress Emi?”

  Masayo nodded.

  “How did you know about Mistress Emi?” Hiroshi asked.

  Masayo frowned. “Being at work all day every day at a company, it’s impossible to hide much. But it was Suzuna who knew. Mayu had told her long ago. So, Suzuna contacted Mistress Emi and she was up for it. She said it was a whole new level of humiliation. Said she’d been reading more psychology and incorporating it into her act.”

  Hiroshi thought about the psychology of it all. “But where did the plan come from?”

  “That’s the beautiful part. It was Mayu’s plan,” Masayo said. Shio smiled.

  “Mayu’s? But she—”

  “Suzuna found one of Mayu’s notebooks after she moved in with Toshiko and started working at the flower shop. Mayu had written all this down in tremendous detail. She was a very organized person.”

  “Like Mayu, we just wanted to humiliate him,” Shio added.

  “So, why did you bring him up on the roof?” Hiroshi asked.

  Shio nodded. “That was the whole point. We were going to text everyone at Senden, tell them there was a morning meeting, and Onizuka would be there naked, with some bondage toys, tied up, hungover.”

  Masayo said, “And that’s all we did.”

  Takamatsu said, “How did he end up dead?”

  Masayo said, “We were more surprised than anyone when we heard. We had a special meeting, but no one had any idea what happened.”

  “When you left, was he sober enough to walk?” Hiroshi asked.

  “He was tied up,” Shio said. “There was no way to get out of that on his own.”

  Hiroshi couldn’t remember any rope in the things they found on the roof. Maybe there was rope fiber somewhere they could trace, but none of the crime scene reports mentioned it. They’d have to go over the roof again. “What kind of rope?”

  Masayo looked surprised. “Some kind of soft rope. Jute maybe?”

  Takamatsu hummed. “So, you picked him up from Mistress Emi. How did you get him up here?”

  “With six of us, he wasn’t hard to move around. We practiced.” Shio and Masayo crossed arms to make a four-handed seat to show Hiroshi. “Onizuka wasn’t that heavy. Like a couple bags of potting soil.”

  “So, you’re saying Mayu planned this?” Hiroshi looked at Takamatsu, who was trying to hold his cellphone steady to record everything.

  Masayo choked up. “I wish she’d done all this instead of… of… killing herself. We almost lost Suzuna, too.”

  Shio rubbed Masaya’s back. “We wanted Onizuka to die of shame, not to really die.”

  Hiroshi looked at Takamatsu who was fiddling with his lighter with one hand and holding the cellphone in the other to record them. Hiroshi frowned. “So, how did you get him past the security cameras.”

  Masayo smiled. “That was tricky, but Mayu had it figured out. She was a perfectionist.”

  Shio said, “We could never have done it without Mayu working out all the details years ago.”

  “And Suzuna just stumbled on the diary?”

  Masayo nodded. “Mayu had told her, but Suzuna thought it was a joke. But when she found Mayu’s diary, it was all in there, the whole plan, down to the kind of baseball hats to hide our faces.”

  “There’s a kind of light, what’s it called, Masayo?” Shio scratched her Disney hood.

  Masayo said, “I think it’s infrared LED, right?”

  Shio bounced her head. “Yes, IR LED. We had to order it specially, but if you shine it into the lens, it makes the camera go white long enough to sneak up and put a piece of tape over it. Mayu had stolen keys a long time ago, and Suzuna found those taped inside the box with the diary. Her mother saved every scrap of hers and kept it in boxes.”

  Hiroshi thought of all the things he and Akiko had found in her room. He hadn’t told Takamatsu the half of it.

  Shio continued. “We took the tape off on the way down to cover ourselves, doing it all in reverse.”

  “What about the camera in the parking lot? It’s too high to reach,” Takamatsu said.

  Masayo smiled. “That camera uses radio waves, so you can just buy a jammer. Actually, we figured out that part, but it was the easiest. The other parts took coordination and practice.”

  “So, what happened after you left Onizuka here?” Hiroshi pointed at the roof.

  Masayo pointed at the bench by the smoking lounge. “We left him on the bench. We don’t know what happened after that.”

  Shio said, “We wanted him to get fired because that’s what Mayu wanted. We wanted to do that for her and move on. We figured he’d get fired, or if not, we’d have photos of him and could release those.”

  “Where are those photos?” Hiroshi asked.

  Shio and Masayo looked embarrassed. “Suzuna keeps them in a cloud storage file. We’ll have to wait until she wakes up.”

  Hiroshi pointed at the fence. “How did the fence get cut?”

  Shio said, “We didn’t do that.”

  “You didn’t see it?”

  Shio shook her head.

  Masayo said, “We left him right here.” She pointed down at the spot by a bench. “After we made it out, we started to worry he would freeze to death. He only had on a thin summer jinbei, and it was cold up there.”

  �
��And the alcohol,” Shio added.

  “So we called the company and gave them an anonymous tip to go find him.”

  “That ruined the plan for him being found in the morning,” Shio said. “But we had photos.”

  “Who did you talk to at the company?” Hiroshi asked.

  Masayo and Shio looked at each other. Shio said, “The security guard, I guess. It was late. I hung up quickly.”

  “How long did it take you to get up and back out?” Hiroshi asked.

  Masayo smiled. “We did it faster than we planned, eighteen minutes.”

  Takamatsu turned off the recording. He’d heard enough and stepped aside to light a cigarette.

  Hiroshi looked at Masayo and Shio, starting to believe them.

  The blanked-out space on the security tape ran a total of forty-two minutes. The extra twenty-four minutes must have been extended by someone. Where did those extra minutes come from? Tech glitch? The video must have been blacked out twice. The only people with access would be the security guards or the HR people. It must be the latter. He looked around the roof, wondering if they needed to start from scratch and run through it all again.

  Takamatsu was smoking, the guards were securing the fence, and Tokyo’s lights felt far away.

  His arm still bled a little and as he pressed on it again, he noticed Chizu, the tall assistant from Human Resources, standing by the elevator. She wore a long trench-coat and carried a soft briefcase and a big, full bag. She waved for Hiroshi to come over.

  Hiroshi told Masayo and Shio to think of more details and left Sugamo to watch them. He walked over to Chizu. “Where have you been?”

  “We need to hurry,” Chizu said. “I was up here that night. I’ll explain on the way, but now is our chance.”

  Chapter 36

  Hiroshi whispered, “How did you know we were here?”

  “I told the chief security guard Imasato to call me if anything happened,” Chizu explained. “Is she all right?”

  “She’s in shock, but seems stable.”

  “We need to go now,” she said turning for the door.

  “Wait a minute.” Hiroshi walked back to Sugamo. “Take these two with you to the hospital. You and Osaki take turns watching them together with Suzuna. Don’t let them leave.” He turned to Shio and Masayo. “You have two choices. Stay in the hospital with Sugamo and Suzuna, or we’ll take you in to headquarters. Which is it?”