Out

by Natsuo Kirino

  'And Cho-san,' he said, 'don't forget about the flowers.' As he watched her smile uncertainly in reply, he realised he would soon have to start looking for a better manager. The hostesses were a different story; they'd all been selected for their looks and youth and a certain class they gave the place. To Satake, they were so much living merchandise. But the manager was the one who had to make the sales.

  Leaving Mika, Satake climbed the stairs to another club on the floor above and stood at the door. This one was called 'Playground' and featured baccarat tables. Here, too, he employed a full-time manager, and Satake, as owner, put in an appearance only a few times a week. About a year before, the mahjong parlour above Mika had gone under. Satake rented the space and opened an after-hours baccarat club for the customers at Mika. Since he didn't have a gaming licence, he couldn't advertise, and he had never intended it to be more than a sideline. But somehow word had got around and the place had been a hit. He had started in a low-key way with two mini-baccarat tables, but when the crowds grew, he hired several professional dealers, added a full-sized table, and kept it open every night from nine until dawn. Now the money was rolling in.

  Satake carefully wound up the loose cord on the white sign and polished the brass doorknob with his handkerchief, but he resisted the urge to go in for a full-scale inspection the way he did at Mika. This was, after all, a gambling club, one of his pet projects, and it was also a gold mine. The cell phone in the bag under his arm began to ring.

  'Where are you, honey? I have to go get my hair done.' Anna's Japanese wasn't always perfect, but cute nonetheless. No one had taught her to talk like that - it just came naturally - but it was clearly a wonderful tool for getting men to do her bidding.

  'Sorry,' he said. 'Sit tight and I'll be right there.' He had almost thirty Chinese hostesses working for him, but Anna's looks and brains set her apart from the rest. And he was just on the verge of getting her the right kind of patron. All her previous customers had been hand-picked, and he wasn't going to let some pushy asshole with an empty wallet step in and mess up his plans.

  Satake made his way out of Kabuki-cho and back to the white Mercedes he had parked nearby. It was a ten-minute drive to Anna's apartment in Okubo. Though it was a new building, there was no security in the lobby. If this guy was really stalking her, she would probably have to move elsewhere. He rang the doorbell on the sixth floor.

  'It's me,' he said into the intercom.

  'It's open,' said a low, sweet voice. As he opened the door, a fragile-looking toy poodle came yipping around his legs. It had apparently heard him coming and was waiting for him. He disliked the dog, but Anna adored it, so he had to at least pretend to indulge it. He pushed it back with the toe of his shoe.

  'Don't you think you're being a bit too laid-back about locking the door?' he called.

  'What does that mean, "laid-back"?' Anna shouted from the bedroom. Satake decided against answering the question. The little dog was writhing with pleasure at his feet, so he teased it with his shoe while he waited for her. The hall of the apartment was filled with rows of shoes in various colours and styles. It had been Satake who had put them in some semblance of order so that she could find the pair she wanted when it was time to go out.

  Anna appeared at last, looking as flamboyant as usual. Her long, wavy black hair was pulled back in a pony-tail, her eyes concealed behind Chanel sunglasses. She wore a large T-shirt with lame embroidery over leopard-skin tights. Even behind the large sunglasses it was immediately apparent that her flawless skin needed no make-up. Satake studied her face, noting again the thick, slightly curled lips that were so enticing to most men.

  'Same place as usual?' he asked.

  'Uh-uh.' She worked her bare feet into a pair of enamelled mules, the red polish on her toenails showing through the open toes. At this point, the dog, realising it was about to be left behind, stood on its back legs and began barking frantically.

  'Now, Jewel,' she said, as if scolding a child, 'you mustn't be naughty.'

  They left the apartment and waited at the elevator. Anna generally rose sometime after noon and went out shopping or for a beauty treatment. After that she would go to get her hair done, have something light to eat, and set out for Mika. Whenever he was free, Satake would chauffeur her on her rounds, just in case someone else came along and grabbed her when he wasn't looking. As they stepped into the elevator, his cell phone rang again.

  'Satake-san?'

  'Kunimatsu? Is that you?' Kunimatsu was the manager at Playground. Satake glanced over at Anna, and for a second she returned the look before glancing away in apparent disinterest and busying herself with a bottle of nail polish, the same shade she wore on her toenails. 'What's up?' Satake said into the phone.

  'There's something I'd like to get your advice about. Do you have any time later today?' Kunimatsu's shrill voice echoed in the tight space of the elevator, and Satake held the phone away from his ear as he answered.

  'Sure,' he said. 'I'm taking Anna to the beauty parlour now, so I'll have time while she's there.'

  'Where will you be?' Kunimatsu asked.

  'Nakano. Why don't we meet there?' After deciding on the time and place, Satake hung up. The elevator had reached the ground floor, and Anna, getting off first, turned to look at him coyly.

  'Sweetie, did you talk to Cho-san 'bout that little problem?' she asked.

  'I told her not to let him into the club any more. You just do your job and don't worry about it.'

  'Okay,' she said, looking up at him over the top of the sunglasses. 'But even if he doesn't come to the club, he could still come here,' she added.

  'Don't you worry about it,' he repeated. 'I'll keep an eye out.'

  'But I think I'd still like to move,' she said.

  'Okay. If it keeps up, I'll think about it.'

  'Good,' she said.

  'What's he like anyway?' Satake asked. He rarely showed his face at Mika.

  'He gets so angry if they try to give him any of the other girls.' Anna grimaced. 'He's always making trouble, and then just recently he stopped paying his bills and asked for credit. I hate that! Everyone knows there are rules about that kind of thing, even in a place like ours.' She finished her little speech as she lowered herself into the Mercedes. Anna may have looked like a beautiful doll, but inside she was a sturdy young woman from Shanghai. She had come to Japan four years earlier to study Japanese, and even now her visa status suggested she should still be attending language classes.

  -

  After dropping Anna at the hairdresser, Satake headed for the cafe where they had agreed to meet. Kunimatsu, who had arrived first, waved discreetly from a table at the back.

  'Thanks for coming,' he said, smiling amiably as Satake settled into the deep sofa. In his polo shirt and golf pants, Kunimatsu, who wasn't yet forty, looked more like an instructor at a sports club than a casino manager. In fact, though, he had been in the business quite a while. Satake had recruited him from a mahjong place in the Ginza where he'd been an assistant manager for some years.

  'So what's up?' he asked, lighting a cigarette.

  'It's probably not that important,' Kunimatsu began, 'but I'm a bit worried about one of the customers.'

  'Worried how?' said Satake. 'You think he's a cop?' The old saying that 'the nail that sticks up gets hammered down' went double for this business. If word got out that Playground was making money, the police were likely to make it a scapegoat for all the other gambling clubs.

  'No, no, not that,' said Kunimatsu, fluttering his long fingers. 'It's a man who's been coming almost every night lately, and losing heavily.'

  'Nobody who plays baccarat every night wins,' Satake laughed. Kunimatsu, too, gave a laugh as he stirred the straw in his orange juice. Neither he nor Satake could drink. Satake took a sip of the iced caf£ au lait sitting in front of him. 'So how much has he lost?' he asked.

  'About four or five million in the last two months. Not all that much, really, but once they get started t
hey usually don't stop.'

  'But it's small-stakes stuff, right? So what's worrying you?' said Satake.

  'Well, the other night he suddenly started asking to borrow from the house.' In general, Satake's club operated strictly on a cash-stakes basis, but on rare occasions a regular customer was sometimes advanced a few hundred thousand yen, though no more. He must have seen someone else taking advantage of this service.

  'Then don't mess around with him,' Satake said. 'Throw him out.'

  'Which is exactly what I did. I was polite enough about it, but I made it clear he wasn't welcome. He made a helluva fuss before leaving.'

  'A loser,' said Satake. 'What does he do, anyway?'

  'Works for some little company somewhere. Actually, I wouldn't have bothered you about it at all except that I had an idea he was stopping in at Mika, too, so I called Cho-san. She tells me he's blacklisted there as well.'

  'It's Yamamoto. Women and money.' Satake sighed and stubbed out his cigarette. There were plenty of men falling all over themselves for his beautiful young Chinese hostesses, but when the money ran out, they usually came to their senses and gave up on the women. But this character seemed to be trying to win at baccarat in order to keep seeing Anna. Or maybe he had suddenly realised how much he'd spent on her and was trying to win some of it back. Whichever it was, Yamamoto had come unglued, and Satake had seen enough people like him to know that neither the woman nor the gambling was any fun for him any more. He probably hadn't even meant to cause so much trouble, but Satake could sense the danger to both Anna and his business.

  'If he shows up again, could I tell him that the owner wants to have a word with him?' Kunimatsu asked.

  'Okay. Call me if he comes, but I'm not sure he's going to get it, even coming from me.'

  'No, I guarantee that when he sees that the owner looks like a yakuza, that'll be the last of him.' Satake laughed quietly at the little joke, but his dark eyes didn't change. 'You know, you really can be pretty scary,' Kunimatsu went on, seemingly oblivious.

  'You think so?' said Satake.

  'Those clothes, that look - you'll send him running.'

  'What's so scary?'

  'Well, you look nice enough, but there's something a bit . . . disturbing....' Just then, the cell phone in Satake's bag rang, as if to put a damper on Kunimatsu's laughter. It was Anna.

  'Honey, I'm finished,' she said. The words - the exact same words - sent a jolt of recognition through him.

  -

  The woman had gasped beneath his heavy body. He rubbed against her, lubricated by the warm, sticky liquid, but as her body gradually grew cold, he felt as though they'd been glued together. She seemed to be seesawing between agony and ecstasy, but finally Satake pressed his lips over hers to quiet the groans - of pain or pleasure - that were leaking from her mouth. He found the hole that he had made in her side and worked his finger deep into the opening. Blood was pumping from the wound, staining their sex a gruesome crimson. He wanted to get further inside, to melt into her. As he was about to come, he pulled his lips from hers and she whispered in his ear: 'I'm finished .. . finished.'

  'I know,' he'd said, and he could still hear the exact sound of his own voice.

  -

  Satake had once killed a woman.

  During high school he'd had a fight with his father and left home for good. For a while, he made it as a mahjong hustler, until a gang member from a yakuza family took him under his wing. His patron was getting rich in the prostitution and drug rackets in Shinjuku, and Satake took on the job of making sure that none of the girls decided to jump ship. One day, however, something bad happened. The gang had learned that a certain woman was recruiting their girls for another gang, and had sent Satake to work her over; but he had killed her instead. He was twenty-six at the time, and he spent seven years in jail for the crime, a fact that not even Anna knew, let alone Kunimatsu or Cho-san. It was his prison record, though, that had convinced him to keep a low profile in his businesses, hiring Cho and the Taiwanese floor manager for Mika and Kunimatsu for the casino.

  Now, almost twenty years later, he could still recall the whole incident in vivid detail - the sound of her voice, the expression on her face at the moment she died, the sensation of her fingers scraping across his back, the chill running down his spine. The fact was, you never really knew your own limits until you'd killed someone - there was nothing else quite like it. To be sure, there was a deep sense of guilt, but Satake had also discovered in himself a tendency to enjoy inflicting pain, as well as a powerful charge from the proximity to death itself.

  'That's kind of overdoing it.' The other guys in the gang had looked at him in disgust when they saw what he'd done, though they were used to violence themselves. He would never forget the look of revulsion on their faces, but in the end he told himself that no one else could understand what had passed between the two of them.

  While he was inside, he'd been haunted by the memory of torturing her to death - but what troubled him wasn't guilt so much as the desire to do it all over again. Ironically, though, when he finally got out, he was completely impotent. It wasn't until some years later that he realised that the intensity of the moment when he'd killed her had somehow shut him off from the more mundane experience. When you discovered your limits, it seemed, you sealed the knowledge away, and ever since, Satake had been very careful not to break the seal. No one else could really know the self-control this required or the loneliness it entailed. Still, since they could never see this hidden self, women came to him, defences down, and became his pets. And since they lacked the power to disturb his well-guarded dream, they remained nothing more than lovely pets.

  Satake knew that the only woman who could ever really understand him, the only one who could tempt him - to heaven or to hell - was the woman he'd killed. So it was only in his dreams that he could be with a woman, only in his dreams that he could find that intensity again. But that was enough. And because he lived only in his dreams, there was no pimp more considerate than he was. He kept the face of the woman he'd killed locked away inside him, a face he had never seen before the day they met. But in the end, this arrangement had made him a bitter man. And though he had no desire ever to open the lid he had closed on his personal hell, now, with just a few words from Anna, the lid had been knocked loose. Satake quickly wiped the sweat off his forehead, hoping that Kunimatsu hadn't noticed.

  -

  When he got to the beauty salon, Anna was waiting outside. He opened the door and waited for her to get in. Seeing the way Anna's hair had been set, piled up on her head 1970s style, Satake laughed out loud.

  'That takes me back,' he said. 'That's how all the women wore their hair when I was young.'

  'That's ancient history,' Anna said.

  'More than twenty years ago, before you were born,' he said. He studied her for a moment. It was somehow miraculous that a woman could be so beautiful and have a good head on her shoulders, and plenty of nerve, too. Lately, she had also started to show signs of the pride that went with being his number one girl, a kind of unapproachable self-possession. Privately, he even felt a certain sympathy for the men who'd fallen for her. As he steered the Mercedes away from the kerb, he found himself gazing at the seam of her tights where it dug into her thigh; the flesh was soft yet elastic, the effect one of luxuriance.

  'Always stay this beautiful,' he said eventually. 'I'll take care of the rest.' He knew how short-lived beauty was and that when she got older, he would have to look for a new Anna. The remark had been meant to acknowledge this.

  'Then you'll have to sleep with me, at least once,' said Anna, her tone both seductive and almost serious. Satake knew that the people in the clubs, ignorant as they were of his past, thought he was a cold fish.

  'I don't think so,' he said. 'As products go, you're much too valuable.'

  'Am I a product?' she asked.

  'Yes,' he said. 'A beautiful, dreamy toy.' For some reason, the word 'toy' reminded him of the other woman, but h
e was temporarily distracted by the tail lights of the car ahead and the thought passed. 'A very expensive toy, one that only rich men can play with.'

  'But what if I fall in love, then someone else might get me.'

  'You won't,' said Satake, looking over at this new, more assertive Anna.

  'I will,' she replied, reaching over and folding her hand around Satake's as it rested on the steering wheel. He immediately returned the hand to the soft surface of her thigh. Satake lived his life in the secret embrace of a dark memory, and the only woman he needed wasn't alive. His main source of satisfaction now was to make a series of pretty toys available to the men who wanted them. Hence his concern over the success of his two clubs, and hence the need to see to the matter at hand: getting rid of this man named Yamamoto.

  -

  That evening, as Satake was getting ready to leave his own apartment in West Shinjuku, a call came from Kunimatsu.

  'Yamamoto's here,' he said. 'He wants to play, for about twenty or thirty thousand. What should I do? Kick him out?'

  'No, let him play. I'll be right there.' Satake put on a collarless shirt and a grey sharkskin suit he'd just had made and left the apartment. After parking the car at a batting cage in Shinjuku, he first looked in at Mika. Anna glanced up from her table at the back and waved. She had on her work face: sexy yet somehow utterly innocent. As if not to be outdone by Anna, the other girls looked stunning as well. Satisfied that they passed muster, he summoned Cho-san. She made her way through the club, discreetly greeting the customers, and stood next to him.

  'Thanks for making time,' he said, 'and thanks for putting Kunimatsu wise to that guy.'

  'Sure. I hadn't realised he was going upstairs as well.'

  'And having no more luck up there,' said Satake. Cho giggled. In her pale green Chinese-style dress, she looked younger yet somehow more reliable than usual. But when he glanced around at the vases, he noticed that the water was still cloudy and the flowers even more wilted. Without saying anything, though, he took his leave, anxious now to get a look at this Yamamoto who was after Anna.