Masako Togawa - The Lady Killer

“Ah, Très Bon,” she said wistfully. “We were so green that we didn’t know anywhere else. So we went there on New Year’s Eve, too.”

“So we did.”

“And at midnight, when the church bells rang, everyone started kissing each other, even total strangers.”

“Yes—very American, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, but so lovely. I wish we were back in those times again.” She nuzzled close to him, and he felt her soft hair brush his face, but felt a repugnance beyond his control and turned away quickly. As an excuse he slipped his forefinger down the front of his collar and twisted it around vigorously. “The hotel laundry just doesn’t know how to starch a shirt properly,” he explained apologetically. His wife withdrew and fell silent. Once again, they were up against the solid, opaque film that always seemed to separate them.

“It can’t be helped,” he muttered, as he always did on these occasions. His wife remained silent, her eyes showing either reproach or pity, he could not tell which.

After dinner, they went bar-crawling again and had a superficially good time calling strolling musicians, singing songs, and drinking heavily. Before they noticed, it was 3 a.m.; the alcohol seemed to have washed away some of the latent hostility between them.

They decided it would not be safe to drive, so Taneko left her Mercedes Benz in a garage and they walked arm in arm until they caught a taxi and drove back to Ashiya. As they passed through the stone gate, the light in the entrance hall came on, and the old housekeeper appeared like a phantom before them.

“Welcome home, young mistress,” she said in her old-fashioned way. She was over seventy and a faithful retainer of the old school; her rheumy eyes were unblinking as she gazed at them attentively. Ichiro found this old woman, who had played a mother’s role to Taneko and still seemed to do so, difficult to handle. She had used exactly the same stilted greeting when they came back from America as she did tonight.

“You shouldn’t have waited up for us!” protested Taneko. But the housekeeper ignored her, concentrating on locking the door.

They looked into the dining room to make sure that Taneko’s father wasn’t still up and then made their way upstairs to their bedroom.

Ichiro took a shower and came out to find his wife removing her makeup. She looked at him and said in a matter-of-fact way, “Darling, you kept repeating Hamlet’s line in the bar. You know, ‘To be or not to be.’ What did you mean by that?”

Ichiro looked at her in the mirror; by now, she was combing her long, black hair.

“Nothing in particular,” he replied. “I just think of death from time to time nowadays, that’s all.” His wet hair hung down his forehead, contrasting blackly with his face as pale as a corpse, but there was a strange beauty about his face nevertheless.

She went on combing her hair; after a little while, she questioned him again in the same expressionless manner. “Why so morbid, all of a sudden?”

“Well, I don’t know…” He went to turn down the central heating in the bedroom while his wife went into the bathroom. During her absence he lay on his back with his eyes open. She came back, wearing a beige dressing gown.

“Well, after all, we didn’t get divorced, did we?” she remarked, taking off the dressing gown and standing naked for a moment before getting into bed. Her body was silhouetted against the bedside lamp and cast a shadow on the ceiling.

Without turning toward her, he replied, “Maybe it’s because we’re Christians.” His voice was so soft that she could hardly hear him.

She turned on her side and examined her husband’s profile.

“You know, you are still very important to me. I feel that you are a half of my body,” she said.

They fell silent; not even their breathing could be heard in the quiet room. Ichiro suddenly got out of bed, standing on the cold floor, and looked down at his wife, who had closed her eyes. She lay motionless, and he imagined that he could see shadows under her eyelashes. He moved toward her and peeled back the bedclothes, exposing her white body, but still she did not move. He buried his face in her pudenda and lay there gripping her breasts; still she did not move. After a while, he looked up, the expression in his eyes hollow. He placed his hands on her stomach; the skin was soft, but not as soft as the skin of his victims.

He thought of the infant, born obscenely deformed, the birth of which had come between him and his wife. He threw himself down on her, kissing her frantically—her breasts, her narrow waist, her armpits. She moved spasmodically, but her eyes remained closed.

After a while he desisted and began to sob—but was it tears, or was it hysterical laughter brought on by despair? Once again he was impotent in the presence of his wife, as he had been a week ago… a fortnight ago… a year ago… two years ago…

Taneko opened her eyes and gazed at him silently; her look was one to kill any emotion.

He went back to his side of the bed, his hands hanging by his side in the dejection of a defeated fighter.

On the fifth of January, he took the noon plane back to Tokyo. Contrary to his normal custom, he had a window seat. The skies were clear and cloudless, and he could see the pure white cone of Mount Fuji from a great distance. Looking at the unsullied mountain against the blue sky, he found it hard to believe that two women had been killed in Tokyo at the end of the last year. The memory of Fusako Aikawa lying naked and dead in the dark, damp room in Koenji had all but vanished from his mind. How foolish he had been to fear that he would be accused of the crime! He had been afraid of the scandal and didn’t want to get involved, that was all.

However, he had better stop using the name Sobra from now on. He could change the name on the passport to something a bit more British, something with a grave and serious ring about it. Hume, perhaps, or Wigland; those were good names. Just as other salarymen applied themselves, during their leisure, to do-it-yourself, he would apply himself to modifying the passport.

Well, it was time for a change, and he could alter his life so simply; the obsessive fear of being hunted himself vanished from his mind. He accepted a cup of tea from the stewardess. Next to him, a fat foreigner was engaged in the crossword of an English-language newspaper. He felt cocooned and safe in this environment—the fat foreigner, the smiling stewardess, the passengers all around him. He had nothing to do with the deaths of the two women; it was purely coincidence that they had both been his victims. He really began to believe that he was safe. All he had to do was to abandon the name Sobra, and Ichiro Honda’s connection with the murders would be severed. He touched the window and wrote the name “Sobra” on it with his fingertip and then rubbed it out.

There is a game called capping or tailing —he had heard it called both. One takes the last syllable of a word and starts the next word with the same syllable. Although it is a game for two, he played it with himself to pass the time. He began with the name Sobra and carried on from there. Playing this game of linking suddenly brought another linkage clearly before his mind. Of course he could not be proved guilty; he always had an alibi. The alibis linked onto each other, just as in his game.

For example, whilst the cashier was being murdered in her room at Kinshicho on the fifth of November, he had been with Fusako Aikawa in her flat at Koenji on the other side of Tokyo. Even if he was suspected, apart from the scandal of sleeping with someone not his wife, he was safe; he had an alibi.

And—linking again—while Fusako Aikawa was being murdered, he was with the art student. Admittedly, the two apartments had been much closer than in the previous case, but nonetheless he had certainly been in Asagaya with Mitsuko at the time. So he had a watertight alibi in each case.