The police were there at that point. They pulled his arms behind his back and cuffed him as the blood dripped from both nostrils, down his face and on to his white t-shirt.
“Konnichiwa. Kare wa kōmu de koko, INTERPOL-tsukidesu.”
“Arigatō,” one officer said to Eddie. He then turned to face me and bowed slightly. “Yoku dekimashita.”
“Thank you. You did well.”
I turned and looked at Eddie, my mouth agape. “You speak Japanese?”
“A little. Always wanted to come here, knew I would someday. Figured learning it in advance would help.”
“Definitely came in handy. Can you ask them what they’re arresting him for?”
“Umm… I think so. Nani shita no?”
“Hawai kara mitsuyu mayakudatta. Marifana.”
“He was smuggling drugs in from Hawaii.”
“Marijuana. I got that part,” I said. I took out my wallet and handed the officer who had been speaking with us my card.
“Dōmo arigatōgozaimashita.”
I nodded. “Dōitashimate.”
Thank you and you’re welcome, almost the limits of my Japanese and only learned through my frequent trips to Japanese restaurants.
With that they walked away, their suspect in cuffs and in tow, still bleeding from the nose although it had slowed a bit.
“Fuck you,” he said as he walked past. All I could do was smile which, of course, pissed him off even more. Next time you try to smuggle drugs into a country with some of the toughest drug laws in the world… well, just don’t.
His nose looked straight still. I hadn’t wanted to break it. A shot to the nose could actually be fatal if the nose broke and the bone was forced upward and into the brain. That was not the goal. The goal was simple: a quick shot, just hard enough to disorient, cause a nose bleed, make the eyes water profusely and put an end to the fight. By those criteria, it was a successful punch.
They left us standing where we were as though nothing had happened, and I couldn’t blame them for it. In my patrol days I’d been in foot pursuit of a break and enter suspect when, out of nowhere, some mountain of a man took the suspect to the ground and held him there for me. I didn’t ask for the man’s name and he didn’t offer it. My thanks were enough for him and his actions were enough for me. When I wrote the report it stated I had “been assisted by an unknown citizen”.
He had helped me out and I saw no reason dragging him into it further, even when the defense lawyer started demanding the man’s name because he had allegedly broken the suspect’s finger during the takedown. It’s impossible to give someone something you never had and, as such, my helper never had to be dragged in front of a judge to answer for assisting a police officer.
I saw the man a year later when I pulled him over for speeding. He was just past the speed I normally charged at (one-twenty-five in a hundred zone on the major highway where everyone did one-twenty anyway) so I had no issue letting him go.
“How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world.” I may have actually said that quote to the man when I stopped him, before I let him go. I realized after that day that quoting Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice in this case) at traffic stops was a waste of time; it was usually lost on people.
Eddie handed me back my ID card and I picked up my bags.
“Well,” Najat said, “that was exciting. I’ve never seen an actual takedown before, and for international drug smuggling at that. Kind of cool, especially since I missed the chase in Lyon.”
“If you think that was good, wait until we actually bring Crawford down.” She was coming out of her shell. There was an unmistakable giddiness in her eyes. “Ever consider forensics? I know he’s got you looking for the missing link, but we could always use people like you.”
“I hadn’t before, not really at all. Now though? This seems pretty exciting.”
“It isn’t always like this, but you definitely would have a major role to play in solving a lot of cases.”
She seemed to be letting it all sink in. “I guess it gives me something to think about.”
“Whatever you choose, this is going to look damned good on your resumé.”
An hour and a half later we stepped off the train and into Kokura Station. Kokura (or Kokurakita) was the main part of Kitakyushu, a city made up of seven smaller wards all in close proximity. We were in one of the smaller wards but also the most densely populated.
There wasn’t much north of the station, just some shopping and industrial areas prior to reaching the Kanmon Straits that separated the south island of Kyushu from the main island of Honshu. Everything was happening either in the station or to the south of it. The station itself had a combination mall and office building attached with several floors of shopping and various businesses from restaurants to medical offices. The Station Hotel was also conveniently attached and was where we would be spending the next couple of nights.
We found a sushi restaurant on the fifth floor and sat down in front of the conveyor belt for our dinner. The belt wound along in front of us, almost like we were sitting at a bar with a raised portion for the food to travel on, and the plates of sushi went past. Each plate had only a couple of pieces of nigiri or a single roll and they were colour-coded for price. There was a list that showed us how much each plate cost.
The white ones were the cheapest at less than two dollars a plate (but they also didn’t have much worth eating on them), and they went up as they changed in colour from pink to yellow to blue to green at several dollars a plate. By the time we were done we had amassed a stack of small round plates, a rainbow of colours rising from the surface of the ‘table’ we were at. I, being the obsessive compulsive person I am, rearranged the plates by colour and ascending price, just to make it easier on the young woman who would give us our bill.
It wasn’t a cheap meal by the time we were done, but at the same time, we also had eaten far more than we needed to. I paid the bill with yen I had taken out while we were at the airport in Tokyo and prepared to leave a tip.
“No tip, Lincoln,” Eddie said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. They don’t tip in Japan. Just say thank you when we leave and you’re covered.”
“Okay,” I said, putting the money back in my pocket. I thanked the chef behind the conveyor belt and we left the restaurant, a second arigatō on the way out for the hostess. It felt strange to not leave a tip even though I knew it was a custom that much of the world didn’t share. Kat always gave me hell for tipping too much, so maybe that had something to do with it as well. I felt like I was being cheap.
“Everything I’ve read says not to tip,” Eddie said when we left. “Apparently it can get awkward if you do. I read one story about a guy who left a tip at his hotel and they actually refunded the money to his credit card. Took him a while to figure out what the refund was for. Another person left a tip at a bed-and-breakfast-style place after the first night because they had gone out of their way. When he came back later in the day there was a bottle of sake and a box of chocolates worth the same as what he had left.”
“Alright. So easier to just not tip. Got it.”
Eddie laughed. “I have a feeling we’ll make some mistakes along the way if we keep traveling this much.”
“Would it be any fun if we all did things the same way?”
Both Eddie and Najat, who had been listening intently, answered with a “not at all”.
“The differences are important,” Najat said. “My family is from Turkey, so there were some things we had to get used to when we would go visit, but it makes things more interesting.”
We rode the elevator down to the main level, a large area with ticket sales and the entrance to the train station itself as well as shops and fast
food restaurants. There were no doors to the outside, it was open but covered and I was certain that in the case of heavy rains the wind and water would make its way in. It must have been designed for that though, I couldn’t see the Japanese not thinking ahead.
The opening that led out to the south side of the station actually came out above street level where a series of walkways went over the busy street below. It was a terminal street - the end of the main road – and there were numerous cabs and buses turning around at the end and dropping passengers off. The walkway took us over the road to a pair of outdoor, uncovered escalators. My previous thought about designing with rain in mind was reinforced. It was as if they didn’t care when they designed the place; we’ll put what we want where we want it, if you want to rain on it that’s your problem.
And it worked. Given the aging population of Japan, open entrances without doors and outdoor escalators were brilliant ideas. We made our way down to the street and I noticed more simple yet intelligent ideas: ridged surfaces at the edges of sidewalks to keep people from stepping onto the road accidentally (I saw this as being most beneficial to the blind or those with vision problems); chimes or songs that played when it was time to cross the street, with different ones for different directions to cross (the north-south song was different from the east-west one); and walkways over roads to keep traffic moving and pedestrians safe. It was all very logical.
The area was quite busy with numerous shops and restaurants nearby. There was another mall, this one at least twelve-stories, although the footprint of the building was probably the same size as one large store in North America. Think of a building half the size of a standard Wal-Mart but then built upwards several stories.
That was Japan to a tee.
Apartments seemed to have only a few units on each floor unlike the buildings we had with sometimes twenty units to a floor. The Japanese were limited for space, but that didn’t seem to stop them. When you can’t build out, build up. There were some areas that weren’t quite as tall though. Behind the first row of tall buildings lining the main road and before another row of even taller buildings was a covered bazaar of small shops that ran for quite a ways parallel to the main road.
It was getting late though and most of the shops were closed by that time. We stayed on the main road which looked to me to be probably one of the busier streets. It ran north-south through the city and was complete with an elevated monorail. The street and the monorail both led south into the ward of Kokuraminami.
We carried on south then headed west toward where we had been told we would find Kokura Castle. It was something I’d read about on the flight to Fukuoka and its splendor wasn’t lost at night, not with numerous lights illuminating a castle built in 1602 (although it had been rebuilt after being burnt down in 1866 during a war between rival clans). It was only a ten-minute walk and from a distance we could see the tall, white castle looming in the night.
The castle was surrounded by a rock wall and a moat to keep invaders at bay. We stood a bit back and I took a number of photos, the flash of my camera breaking the darkness that surrounded us. We weren’t the only ones taking pictures of the castle as I watched another flash going off several times about fifty metres to our left. The museum and gardens were closed, but I had seen what I came to see. If we had the chance I’d come back and go through the keep itself, but I didn’t hold much hope for that kind of free time tomorrow.
We made our way back to the hotel and said our goodnights. After all the traveling we’d done and the little bit of excitement at the airport, it was time to call it a night and get some rest. The next day was going to be a rough one, I could tell that just from looking at the files.
I seriously underestimated how bad it would be.
Chapter Eleven
We rose early the next morning and took a cab to the local police department. They seemed to have been expecting us, something that was happening a lot lately, and we were brought into an office to wait. A few minutes later two detectives and a uniformed constable entered the room.
“Good morning,” the constable said. “My name is Arata Fukuda. I’ve been briefed on the case and will be assisting today to help with translation.” He gave a bow as he told us his name.
“Thank you,” I said. “Your English sounds… Canadian.”
He laughed. “I lived in Vancouver for a few years from when I was about seven until almost twelve and then I went to U of T for my undergrad.”
The University of Toronto. That explained why he sounded so much like… well, so much like me.
“Sorry, getting ahead of myself. Lincoln Munroe,” I said, giving a bow. It was apparently the right thing to have done as everyone in the room looked pleased by my actions. “This is Eddie Fromm, our computer expert, and Najat Şentürk, a graduate student doing her Ph.D. in anthropology.” Both Eddie and Najat bowed when I spoke their names.
“Detectives Akio Watanabe and Takashi Satō.” They both bowed as well and the introductions were finished. Arata leaned toward us and spoke more quietly. “We use –san after names like you use mister or missus before. For me, Arata is fine. But they’re used to being addressed more formally, so Watanabe-san and Satō-san.”
We all nodded. I’d heard of this before. It was no different than at home really, they just used a suffix instead of a prefix. Once you got to know someone, the honorific san could be ignored.
“Okay,” I said now that the introductions and formalities were dealt with. “I’ve read up on all the information that was sent to INTERPOL. Where are we heading first?”
“The e-mail Crawford sent listed one body and then said, ‘you will also find the body of’ and listed the next one. Personally, I think we should start with the first one he lists. The detectives were thinking the same.”
“I guess it makes sense. I’d assume he listed them in the order he killed them. Crawford seems like he’d keep things in line, almost seems fastidious in regard to the details.”
“Alright. Both bodies are in the mountains, the first one is closer to the summit.”
“So we have a hike ahead of us?”
“Yes,” Arata said. “A good one. We should get going. The humidity here is like nothing you’ve experienced.”
“Wonderful,” I said. “Then let’s get a move on.”
The detectives took one vehicle and the three of us went with Arata in a marked cruiser. We drove through the city, over narrow waterways and past a large Ferris wheel on top of a mall. The waterways I could explain as they seemed to be the equivalent of our storm sewers, they just kept theirs open. The Ferris wheel on the roof of a building… that one defied explanation for me.
“That’s Cha-Cha Town,” Arata said as we drove past. “It’s got everything. There’s fast food, clothing stores, a grocery store, a pet store, a hyaku-en store, a movie theatre, an arcade, and…”
“And a Ferris wheel on the roof.”
“Yeah, basically. It’s a little odd, for sure, but you get some awesome views from up there.”
“Hey,” I said. “What was that you said, a ya-koo something?”
“Hyaku-en, means a hundred yen. Basically the Japanese equivalent of a dollar store. Great deals there… I probably shop there more than I should admit.”
“Don’t worry about it, I love dollar stores.”
“I’m still a student,” Najat said. “I basically live there.”
“I buy most of my electronics stuff there, cables and that. It’s ridiculous that I can buy an HDMI cable for two bucks there or forty everywhere else.”
“I hear you, Eddie. When I bought my first LCD TV they talked me into some hundred dollar HDMI cable. When it quit I bought one from the dollar store… never noticed a difference.”
“I go for the snacks,” Arata said. “Can’t beat only spending a hundred yen on some dried squid or fish.
”
“Damn, I could go for that,” I said. Eddie and Najat didn’t seem too keen on the idea.
Arata kept driving and eventually he came to a stop in front of a cemetery at the base of a mountain. The cemetery was terraced up the slope a ways before the stairs led into the forest.
“Interesting, never seen a terraced cemetery before.”
“We need to do what we need to do. Land isn’t easy to come by around here. We need to take the stairs up into the forest and then it’ll be a while to get to the body. The first one is quite a ways in, almost at one of the summits.”
It was only just past ten but I could already feel the heat and humidity. Arata was right, I knew then it would be like nothing I’d experienced. The previous day had been like what I’d expect in southwestern Ontario, but maybe it had been worse. I just wouldn’t have noticed since I hadn’t had to climb a mountain.
We talked as we hiked west from the cemetery into the dense forest that blanketed the mountain range. It wasn’t a high range, nothing like Mt. Fuji, Japan’s most famous mountain, but they were still high and steep enough to make for a solid workout. Eddie and I had been gentlemen and were now carrying Najat’s tools which didn’t make the climb any easier when the path decided to take a sudden turn for the vertical.
“Okay, so the first body is…”
“Megumi Tanaka, schoolgirl. She was only eighteen when she went missing, uh, it would’ve been twenty-one months ago now. End of summer two years past. She had gone to a friend’s house for the day and was on her way back on her bike. I think it was just after five in the afternoon when she left the friend’s house. Shouldn’t have taken her more than a half an hour to get home at a normal pace.”
Death By Degrees Page 10
