Kojo Suzuki - Spiral

Nakayama held the stack of papers out to him. “Go right ahead.”

“Oh, and one more thing,” Ando added. “You took a blood sample, I assume?”

“Of course.”

“Can I have a little of it?”

“A little, sure.”

Ando realized that he had to confirm immediately whether or not Mai had been carrying the smallpox-like virus. If he found it in her blood, it would be proof that she’d watched the video. He needed to determine if the tragedy that had befallen her had its source in the video or was the result of something entirely unrelated. At the moment, all he could do was amass data, little by little. If he could illuminate the video’s role in this, perhaps he’d come one step closer to solving that “mutation” riddle.

Soon after he’d encountered Mai’s corpse, Ando was notified of the death of Kazuyuki Asakawa. As Asakawa’s condition had deteriorated, he’d been transferred from Shinagawa Saisei Hospital to Shuwa University Hospital, but he’d died almost immediately. Ando had been notified about the change in Asakawa’s condition, but he hadn’t imagined the patient would go so quickly. According to the attending physician, the death came about as the result of an infection, and the patient had passed away peacefully, as if from old age. Asakawa had never regained consciousness after losing it in the accident.

Ando went to the Shuwa hospital and told the doctors in charge of the case to look out for something during the autopsy: a sarcoma blocking the coronary artery, a smallpox-like virus in the tumor. Ando figured these points were crucial in terms of forecasting the future. He made sure the attending physician understood the importance of the situation and then left.

As he walked back to the station, he felt renewed disappointment that Asakawa had never awoken. He’d possessed essential information, and he’d died having imparted it to no one. If only Ando knew what Asakawa knew, he’d have a much better idea what to expect. The future was maddeningly opaque now. Ando didn’t know what to prepare for.

The biggest thing worrying Ando right now was whether Asakawa’s death had been bad luck or a necessary outcome. The same question applied to Mai, for that matter. Both of them had wasted away and died after accidents-a traffic accident in Asakawa’s case, a fall in Mai’s. Their deaths seemed to have something in common. But Ando had no way of knowing if it had anything to do with their having watched the video.

As he walked, he suddenly realized that the building where Mai’s body had been found was not far from the hospital he’d just left. He’d been wondering why she had chosen to climb to the roof of a shabby old office building; now was his chance to have a look and maybe find out. He needed to go soon, before any of the evidence disappeared.

He decided to go back to Nakahara Street and catch a cab. He’d be there in ten minutes.

After stopping once on the way to buy some flowers, Ando had the taxi let him off in front of a warehouse belonging to a shipping company. All he’d been told at the M.E.’s office was the name of the company and the instruction that the building was to be found to the south of the warehouse; he didn’t know the name of the building itself.

Standing on the sidewalk, he stared south at a building. There was no mistaking it. It had fourteen stories, and an exposed staircase spiraled up the narrow space between its outer wall and the warehouse.

Ando moved toward the front door and then stopped. He walked around to the outside staircase. He thought he’d try to figure out how Mai had gone up. She could have taken the elevator to the fourteenth floor, gone out to the fire escape landing from there, and climbed the ladder to the roof, or she could have taken the fire escape stairs all the way up from the street to the ladder. At night, the front door was probably locked and protected by a metal shutter, so she’d have had to go in through the service entrance, which was surely guarded. And if it was too late, even the service entrance might have been locked, the guard gone. If she’d gone up at night, she must have used the fire escape.

But there was a gate at the edge of the second-floor landing, and it looked impassable. Ando climbed up to it to take a look. It was an iron gate, with a knob. He tried to turn it; it wouldn’t budge. It had to be locked from the other side to prevent entry. The gate, however, was only six feet high or so, and a light and agile person could scale it without much problem. Mai had been on the track team in junior high; she’d have been able to get over it with little trouble.

Next to him on the landing was a door leading into the building. He tried turning the knob, but, unsurprisingly, this door too was locked. He wondered what time of day Mai had come here. If it had been day-time, she probably would have taken the elevator to the fourteenth floor. If it was night then she must have climbed over the gate and taken the stairs.

Ando returned to the front door of the building, entered, and went to the elevators. There were two of them, and both were waiting at the ground floor. Each floor of the building seemed to be occupied by a different business or businesses, whose names were all written, floor by floor, on a board by the elevators. But nearly half of them had been crossed out. They must have moved without the landlord being able to find new tenants to take their places. The building was quiet and felt rather abandoned.

On the fourteenth floor he stepped off the elevator into a dark hallway, where he started looking for stairs to the roof. After walking the length of the hall once, he hadn’t found anything.

Mai would have had to go outside. Indeed, there was a door at the end of the hall, and Ando opened it and stepped outside. The wind off the ocean was so strong that he had to turn up the collar of his coat. It was only here, on the top floor, that he realized how close Tokyo Bay was. There was the Keihin Canal, beyond it Oi Pier, and then finally the Tokyo Harbor Tunnel, which was quickly swallowed up by the sea. From his vantage point, the two black holes of the tunnel entrance looked unnatural. He thought they looked like the nostrils of a drowned man floating face-up in the water.

From here, he also realized why the fourteenth floor had seemed so cramped despite the size of the building. The architects had made the square footage of this story about half that of the other floors, using the rest of the space for the outdoor balcony that encircled the building on all four sides. Stepping out, Ando saw that the landing for the fire escape was actually a corner of this balcony. But Mai’s body had been found yet another level up.

Right next to the door there was a ladder built right into the wall, leading up. It looked to be about ten feet to the top.

Trying to imagine what Mai could have been feeling, Ando put the flowers in his mouth, grasped a rung on the ladder, and started climbing.

What made her want to come up here anyway? wondered Ando, as he pulled himself up rung by rung. It wasn’t because she wanted to jump. That was clear enough from the way the building had been designed. A jump from the roof would only have landed her a dozen feet below on the balcony. To fall to the ground, she’d have had to leap from the fire escape landing on the fourteenth floor instead.

It wasn’t the kind of roof you went up to for the view, either. The water-resistant paint was peeling and cracking, and it gave way unpleasantly under his feet as he walked across it. There was no railing around the perimeter, and he wasn’t going near the edge even if there was a balcony not far below.

There were concrete protrusions lined up at regular intervals, and they were shaped like the tetrapods used as breakwaters on beaches. Ando had no idea what they were for, but they were just the right height for him to sit on. Instead of going to the edge of the roof, he climbed up on top of one and had a look around. It was just before five o’clock, and it was the time of year when the sun set earliest. Lights had come on already in the surrounding buildings and the shops down below. Across the canal he could see a red Keihin Express train going by on the elevated tracks. It was actually an express train; it sped past the station platform that seemed to hover in the air. He knew that platform. He’d been on it a couple of times to visit Mai’s apartment. Swathed in a diffuse white light, it was relatively empty for the time of day.