Fuminori Nakamura - The Thief

When he opened it we were met by a wave of noise and red light. Under the powerful glare was a writhing mass of men and women, their naked bodies squirming on tables and couches. An old man had his face buried between the legs of a woman sitting on a table, and I could hear another woman’s cries of delight in response to a young man’s thrusts. Several couples were humping on the sofas, their tongues in each other’s mouths. Still holding my arm, the man made his way through them. My eyes met those of a woman with a guy’s penis in her mouth. Behind her was another woman, mouth open, been fondled urgently by two handsome young men. A man dressed as a waiter stepped silently from behind the counter to lead us, paying no attention to the people around him. A woman groveling like a dog on the floor grabbed my leg, shouting something unintelligible. I brushed her arm away but she seemed unaware that she’d grabbed me in the first place, never mind that she’d been shaken off. I saw the sprawled body of a woman staring into space and a well-built man collapsed on the floor. We passed a woman being strangled, her head pulled back towards the ceiling, and a man being licked all over by a woman. One lone woman was having convulsions on the floor. Beyond her was another door. For some reason I was struck by the thought that Ishikawa might be here.

The waiter opened the door, crossed a narrow corridor and ushered us into a small room. Two couches faced each other with a low silver table between them. Apart from an Impressionist style painting of some fuzzy plants, the walls were bare.

“Something to drink?” the man asked, apparently indifferent to the scene we had just witnessed.

“No, thanks.”

“Well, water then. And the usual.”

The waiter bowed deeply and left, closing the door behind him. The noise was immediately muted and in the quiet room I heard a high ringing in my ears, as though someone was calling me from far away.

“This place is hell. Fascinating, isn’t it?”

He took a cigarette from a case and put it between his lips.

“But it’s a safe hell, because only people who’ve passed an STD check can join. Once you become a member, though, there’s no getting out. Because it’s hell. There’s not one person who doesn’t come back.”

There was a knock at the door and the waiter entered. On the table he placed a tall glass etched with spirals, a bottle filled with what looked like whiskey, a clear glass and a bottle of water. Then he left and the room was silent again. The man sipped his whiskey, smiling, without saying a word. I poured water little by little down my sore, parched throat. He watched me, drumming his fingers on the table.

“This wasn’t by chance, was it?” I asked, my voice still hoarse despite the drink.

The muscles at the back of my arms went slightly numb.

“Of course it wasn’t by chance. I’ve known for a long time you were back in Tokyo.”

“How?”

“I heard it from Tachibana. But even if I hadn’t, I’d have found out anyway. Because it just so happened that I wanted to see you. I heard from a subordinate that you were in Shinjuku, and then I looked out the window and there you were. And when I went closer, voila! You came to me! Just like a true pickpocket.”

“And Ishikawa?”

“He’s gone. Without a trace.”

I felt a dull ache in my heart.

“To be completely accurate, only his teeth are left. We burned his corpse and ground his bones into white powder. His teeth are probably scattered somewhere in Tokyo Bay. Too much trouble to crush them. It’s not like there’s a body buried some place. He has literally disappeared.”

“So am I going to disappear too?”

“Didn’t you get my message? That I was going to let you live? You could be useful and it might be entertaining. Him, he knew too much. Probably he didn’t tell you anything, but he knew too much so he said he wanted out. I just got him to help with that robbery before I killed him.”

My body went weak and for a second my eyes lost their focus. From behind his sunglasses the man seemed to be looking directly at me, unblinking.

“Why?”

“What?”

“Why didn’t you do that robbery by yourselves? Why hire us?”

The man wiped his lips. Absurdly, it occurred to me that even guys like this wipe their lips.

“If by some chance in a million something went wrong with our plan and the cops didn’t believe a Chinese gang was behind it, then we needed some dead bodies. Burglars’ bodies. We planned to make you three into another team of imaginary robbers, separate from us, to make it look like you were working for a different outfit. If we killed people we’ve worked with before it would definitely lead back to me. Maybe not all the way to me, but close enough. If you were dead, though, all the cops could do was head in the direction we pointed them. You know why?”

I said nothing.

“Because you guys have no family. Because you’re all alone in the world and even if you’d died there wouldn’t have been a single person who cared. It would have taken them ages just to ID you. Faced with a bunch of corpses and no clues, the police would have swallowed the fake evidence we planted hook, line and sinker. So at the time I needed some loners, people with no attachments. Of course, since they had no attachments they could have run away from me. They had that freedom.”

“That job.” My voice shook slightly. “It wasn’t really a robbery, was it? Maybe you needed the money and papers too, but it was really about murder.”

“Yes. But that’s not the whole story.”

The man continued to smile, sipping his drink.

“I needed a death which the public and the media would think was just bad luck, a killing during a robbery. But a tiny group of people would recognize that politician’s death as my handiwork. That was the point. The message wasn’t just, ‘If I cross him I’ll be killed.’ It wouldn’t be a violent death that raised doubts, like being pushed in front of a train or shot dead. It would be assassination disguised as a run-of-the-mill crime. Everyone would take it for granted that they’d died during the course of an actual crime, as though they’d walked in on the robbers, with not a shred of doubt. That’s got to be scary. Some people would think I’m powerful enough to get the Chinese mafia to work for me, others would think that I’ve got the criminal knowledge and systems to make it look like the Chinese mafia. Either way, it makes them afraid of me.”

He moistened his lips with whiskey and moved his tongue inside his mouth as though softly stroking the inside of his cheeks.

“That politician, he was an errand boy for some powerful people, some major players in the underworld. He was in the way. And his death frightened the people who were reluctant to deal with us. Now they’ve agreed to do business. Of course they didn’t tell us why they’d come round. They made up plausible excuses, like their boss finally gave them permission, or what the hell, profit comes first. But there were obstacles getting in the way of many of those dealings, and with the documents we got our hands on I could eliminate some of them. I knew that meant that several people would die, and I also knew that their deaths would make it even easier for us to operate. If this happens, then that happens, and so on. It’s all a jigsaw puzzle. With the profit we made, the money we gave you was just small change. It’s not just about profit. It’s about power too. And this is just a sideline. It isn’t even that important to me.”

“Why did you let me live?”

“There was no reason to kill you. I told you, you might be useful. I don’t need two pickpockets. Maybe if you hadn’t turned up Niimi wouldn’t have died. It all depends on my mood. And now, I want you to do something for me.”