Bob van Laerhoven - Return to Hiroshima

“Your daughter didn’t approach the police if that’s what you’re thinking. It only takes one little stone to start an avalanche. That’s what happened.”

“Sometimes life indeed is like that.” The man gets to his feet. “Farewell, Adachi.”

The police doctor grits his teeth, says nothing.

The mafia leader turns on his heels as if he’s suddenly thought of something. The uv light has affected Adachi’s eyes and conjures a halo around Rokurobei, a dark amorphous cloud.

“A careless young man claimed this evening that he had imprisoned my daughter in a place I will never find. He confessed this just before he died. That’s why I believe him. I’ve had his friends interrogated, but none of them was able to tell me where my daughter is. Do you believe me when I tell you that I love her more than life itself?”

Adachi nods. He is exhausted. A reverberating light-headedness plagues him. He hopes he will soon lose consciousness. His eyes close.

The voice next to his face makes him jump.

“I think you deserve this, in spite of everything,” says Norikazu. “Your courage is many times greater than I could have imagined.”

The knife plunges into Adachi’s liver and is jerked sideways. Adachi’s body lunges in spite of the ropes, but to no avail. His fettered feet sway back and forth like a fish on dry land.

The voice is still close; it penetrates the searing pain.

“With shibari it would have taken at least another hour for you to die. Now? A few minutes…”

Its compassion sounds genuine.

Takeda has his duty weapon at the ready. He feels ill-at-ease in the darkness of the squat. Beate is waiting by the stairs. The place appears abandoned. The personal belongings of the young folk who used to live here are scattered across the floor, as if someone had recently rummaged through them. Takeda peers through the iron-barred windows and tries to picture what life was like for the people whose protest against society took shape in this building. It reminds him of the fact that he had always been obedient and compliant on the surface, in spite of the many contradictions inside. A dark irregular stain on the floor in the right hand corner of the room attracts his attention. He crouches to get a better look. Congealed blood. A large quantity. Beate walks in uninvited. “I heard something downstairs,’ she whispers.

Takeda walks towards her, brings his lips to her ear. The smell of her jasmine perfume doesn’t prevent him from observing how fine and fragile her ear is. “Stay here.”

He descends the stairs on tiptoe. He notices that the door on the ground floor that was locked before is now half open. He heads for the door, sees that it leads to a cellar. He hears noises downstairs, stuff being shifted around. He makes his way down with the barrel of his gun pointing upwards. A single light bulb illuminates the cellar space. Metal filing cabinets corner off part of the room and he hears noises behind them. He approaches, slowly, cautiously. A man is stuffing a computer into a rucksack.

Takeda takes aim: “Police.” The man is young, probably in his late teens. He’s thin and his face is covered in acne from excessive use of speed. He steps back in shock and bumps into a filing cabinet. “It’s not what you…” he says.

“Who are you and what are you doing here?”

“My name is Sho. I…”

“Are you a member of the Suicide Club?”

“Eh… Yes.”

“Where are the others?”

“The club was disbanded. There were disagreements.”

“Where is Reizo Shiga?”

The junky lowers his eyes. “He… He’s gone. We don’t know…”

Takeda moves closer and looks him in the eye. “You’re lying.”

To his surprise the young man starts to sob. “We found him dead! He was headless. We didn’t want any trouble.”

“Calm down. Control yourself. Tell me what’s going on.”

The boy tells Takeda his story in fits and starts. A couple of club members had come back to the building the previous night in the hope of scoring some drugs from Reizo’s extensive supply. They found his decapitated body in a pool of blood in a corner of the main room. The head had disappeared. They had panicked, certain that the authorities would blame them for the killing. So they dumped the body in the rubbish chute in the old restaurant in the hope that no one would find it. They did their best to get rid of the blood stain and then went looking for drugs. They found nothing and left. But Sho had come back because he remembered that Reizo Shiga had a brand new computer in his workshop. If he could sell it he could score.

Takeda forces Sho to bring him to the rubbish chute in the restaurant on the first floor, beneath what used to be the machine room. Takeda only has to take one look. The body is visible in the midst of the trash.

“Get out of here, now,” Takeda barks at the boy. “And never come back.”

Sho races to the exit. Takeda follows his narrow frame. The boy is old for his age. The inspector asks himself what the parents of such children go through. If he had had a child, he or she would have been the same age as the young junky heading for the door.

The inspector makes his way upstairs. Beate is sitting on an old chair in the middle of the room. She seems small, lost. The photographer has been asking herself how she got into this nightmare. The chronological puzzle is the easiest part. She’s used to thinking in pictures and the pictures are clear. It’s the why of her emotions and the stubbornness with which she’s clinging to Takeda in this gloomy situation that surprises her.

The inspector tells her what happened.

“We should drive to Adachi’s place,” he concludes.

The diminutive German woman looks him in the eye. In the beer-coloured light of the main room she looks like a nervous cat. “But what about Reizo’s computer? Is it still working? Maybe he left some kind of clue.”

With her bowed head and naked back, Yori is the picture of subordination. The tattoo on her back glistens metallic through the sweat on her skin. Rokurobei rests his hands on her shoulders, covering them completely.

“So you call yourself ‘Mitsuko’s best friend’? How long did you know her? A couple of days? Three?”

Yori nods almost imperceptibly. She mumbles something.

“What?”

“It felt like longer. She confided in me.”

Rokurobei wraps his hands around her neck. “Is she dead?”

Her voice is little more than a whisper: “I don’t know. I told you: she was gone when I woke up. I was afraid of Reizo and I…”

“My men are on their way to the German photographer’s hotel. We’ll soon know if you’re lying.”

“It’s the truth.”

“What should we do to kill time while we wait?” He lifts Yori’s chin with his right thumb and when she looks at him he moves his face closer. “If Mitsuko is no longer alive, are you going to tell me how smart and cunning my daughter was? Are you going to tell me time and again how you lay in each other’s arms on the mattress and lamented your fate together? Doing that, are you going to bring colour to my old age?”

Yori undergoes a remarkable transformation. She stands on the tips of her toes, throws her arms around Rokurobei’s neck and looks him deep in the eye.

“Are you going to tell me then, superior spirit, that from now on I’m your daughter and that you love me deeply?”