Fuminori Nakamura - Evil and the Mask

“Not regularly. And I don’t just talk to girls who look like they might let me into their pants. It’s because you’re kind of pretty.”

“Nice of you to say so. Though I don’t like that ‘kind of’ so much. But it was quite a good comeback. And the timing is perfect. I need money desperately right now. I need it but I’m flat broke, so I’ve been sulking and spending money on drinks. Seriously, I thought they’d kill me.”

The bar’s air conditioning was still bad and the room was thick with cigarette smoke. At a table in the distance a woman was crying hysterically and a man was laughing as he comforted her.

“Kill you?”

“For real. I really thought they would. And even if they didn’t, I’d definitely have to work as a pro to pay it off, because I didn’t borrow it from a regular bank. I’d rather have sex with you than a whole bunch of other guys.”

She pushed her face close to mine.

“But you’re weird. You’re pretty good-looking, so if you’d chatted me up in the normal way you might have got it for nothing.”

“That’s okay. Let’s go.”

She continued to stare at my remodeled face, at Shintani’s face.

WHEN WE GOT to the hotel room she started kissing my ears and neck, saying that she couldn’t possibly ask for two hundred thousand, that my first offer of one hundred would do. I wanted to ask her to put on a white dress, but I missed my chance so I kept my mouth shut. When she asked my name I told her it was Shintani. For some reason she chuckled slightly and said it was funny. I pushed her onto the bed, taking off her clothes. I could smell alcohol on her breath. I put my tongue in her mouth, and accepted her tongue into mine.

While we were having sex, she kept looking at the big mirror next to the bed. She lowered her hips like a crawling dog, with me lying on top of her. As her cries grew louder, she whispered to me to push her head down.

“What?”

“It’s okay, do it.”

I forced her head down and she began to shriek, still watching the mirror.

“It feels like I’m being raped. I love it. You can be rougher if you like.”

I pushed her head into the bed and gripped her neck.

“Yeah, like that. Hey,” she said breathlessly, raising her voice. “Don’t you get the feeling that all the people in the world are inside that mirror?”

She continued to stare at the glass as she gyrated her hips.

“Everyone’s watching. Watching me now, being fucked like this by a guy I hardly know who gave me money. There’ll be some men who are turned on, some women who are disgusted. So I want to show more of myself.”

She started shouting, a smile on her face.

“While they’re watching me … I reach a place no one can understand … I want to come over and over. With everyone watching me, and, and, I wish they’d all just die. Yeah, they can all die. All fucking die!”

She changed position and wound her arms tightly around my neck. For some reason her expression was full of sorrow.

IT WAS ONE o’clock in the morning. I realized that I must have fallen asleep for a while, so I got up and took a bottle of mineral water from the hotel room fridge. She was sitting up in bed, her breasts exposed, lazily reaching for the remote. The lighting had a bluish tinge and the room was quiet. When she turned on the TV, a photo of a missing boy appeared on the screen. She lit one of my cigarettes, blew out a plume of smoke. I missed my mouth and a trickle of water ran down my neck. The picture changed, and the Prime Minster was surrounded by reporters.

“Do you know about this?” she asked. “It’s funny.”

“What is?”

“This terrorist group.”

The PM frowned in response to a question.

“There’s this group doing strange things recently, isn’t there? Like simultaneous explosions in different places. The ones calling themselves JL? They’re on the news all the time. The media are condemning them, calling them ‘The Invisible Terrorists,’ but that’s just spurring them on. It looks like there have already been copycats as well.”

On the TV the interview was still going on.

“And now they’ve made a threat. ‘We’re going to assassinate all the politicians, starting with the baldest. If you want to stop us, the Prime Minister has to hold a press conference and do a perfect impression of the singer Hiromi Go.’ Wouldn’t that be hysterical?”

She laughed out loud.

“Really? That’s crazy.”

“Yeah. It’d be a riot.”

She laughed again.

“I wonder if he’ll do it?”

“I bet he won’t. But it would be amazing if he did.”

My cell phone rang and I reached for my jacket, still lying where I’d dropped it. I looked at the screen. The only people who knew this number were the detective and Azusa Konishi, but I didn’t recognize the caller. When I pressed the button, I could hear a crowd of people, and for a few seconds there was just the sound of someone breathing on the other end.

“Fumihiro Kuki?”

A man’s voice, someone I didn’t know.

“Sorry?”

“Ha, good reaction. Well, talk to you later.”

He hung up.

I REALIZED THAT I was still just standing there, so I sat on the bed. Out of the corner of my eye I could see my damp glass. I took a deep breath and reached for it. My heart was racing.

I picked up my cell phone again, hesitated for a second and then punched in the detective’s number on the room phone instead. He answered in a low voice just before it switched to the recorded message. The music I could hear in the background stopped abruptly in mid-tune.

“Shintani here. Sorry to call so late.”

“No problem. I was still up.”

At that point it occurred to me that I’d never told him that I was Fumihiro Kuki. Even if he was pretty sure that I wasn’t Shintani, he’d never heard from me who I actually was.

“Someone called me on my cell phone just now. He obviously knew it was my number. The only people who know it are you and Azusa Konishi. Is there any way anyone else could have got hold of it, like you losing your phone or something?”

“Not from me, that’s for sure. I’ll check with Konishi. Anyway, I didn’t enter your number under Shintani. And Konishi probably stored it in her address book under the name of a bar or something. I have no idea.”

Without speaking, the woman got out of bed and went into the bathroom. I sat there, racking my brains. It was hard to believe that either of them had passed my number to anyone else. There was no benefit for them, and even if there were, they weren’t stupid enough to do something that would be discovered straight away. I tried to relax.

“Well, please get in touch with Konishi right away, just in case. And I’ll check if the number could have leaked at my end. I bought the phone from a job-hopping part-timer in town, so the contract isn’t in my name. I bought his bank account as well. He has no idea who I am, of course.”

“I’ll contact Konishi. Have you got the man’s number?”

“It wasn’t blocked, so I still have it.”

“Maybe he wants you to call him back?”

“Maybe.”

I hung up and lay back on the bed. I couldn’t work out how he knew my number, but more than that, how did he know I was Fumihiro Kuki? Even the plastic surgeon didn’t know that, and nor did the former gang member I’d used to buy my current identity. He was a broker whose name I’d found in my father’s secret papers, but we never did business face to face and I didn’t tell him who I was.