Fuminori Nakamura - The Thief

I approached them and examined the woman from up close. She was in her mid-thirties, with narrow eyes and a haggard look. Her red tracksuit was new but her sandals were ugly and dirty. She crouched down to inspect the biscuits, prodding them with her finger and mumbling to herself as if unable to make up her mind. I suddenly thought of Saeko, even though this woman didn’t look a bit like her. When she reached out for a packet of crackers and turned to call her son, I was squatting beside her. I realized that I was about to say something so I stopped myself and started to rise, but she was looking at me in surprise. Seeing her face, I felt as though the words were dragged out of me.

“You’ve been busted.”

“What?”

She glared at me, disguising her fear with anger. The boy stood petrified beside her, skinny and miserable.

“The woman in the navy coat over there. She works for the store. You’ve definitely been spotted. These days they call the cops straight away, so either buy it or dump it all and leave.”

The mother’s desires had greatly exceeded the capacity of the towel in the clumsily modified paper bag the child was carrying. The meat and fish were hidden, but I could see the tip of a bulging packet of snacks. I went to the checkout and joined a queue. It was busy. People were jammed together like ants and everyone was sweating.

After I left the shop I bought a can of coffee, which I’d forgotten to get inside, from a vending machine. I lit a cigarette as the woman and child came walking up behind me. The boy undid the lock on his mother’s bike and watched her back as she approached me.

“Who the hell are you?”

For an instant her face contorted, one eye closing, squeezed tight at the edge. As she stood in front of me the tic showed itself again.

“All I did was warn you that you’d been seen.”

“Are you laughing at me?”

She glared at me and her eye shut firmly yet again.

“I’m feeding my kid properly. It’s not fair to laugh at me.”

Behind her the boy seemed to be assessing how angry she was. Her voice was unnaturally loud, as though her wiring was faulty somewhere, and as I looked at her face I thought once more of Saeko.

“Sometimes I feel happy when people tell me I’ve done something unforgivable,” Saeko once said to me. “Even when I didn’t do it on purpose. Because I do nasty things to everyone. Because I do nasty things to myself as well. Because I trample all over people’s values.”

Saeko’s voice was always low.

“I’m not laughing at you,” I said to the woman.

I took out the coffee I’d just bought.

“Because I’ve shoplifted too. I only told you because you’d been seen. You should be grateful.”

The woman had opened her eyes and was sizing me up. I didn’t think Saeko had ever looked at me with that expression.

“Who are you?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Where do you work?”

“I don’t.”

I was telling the truth, but she was looking me up and down. I was wearing my good clothes, as I always did when I went into the city at night.

“But you’ve got money, haven’t you? Give me a call when you’re free. Ten thousand yen would be OK.”

She took a business card from her purse. It had the name of a club and her picture on it, but the club’s address and phone number had been crossed out with ballpoint and only the cell phone number was left.

“I look much better with my make-up on. Ten thousand will do.”

She grabbed the boy’s arms, lifted him onto the carrier and rode away. He didn’t look back.

When I heard the story from Ishikawa we were in an underground passage beneath a railway line. We’d taken several wallets, divided up the money in a booth in a bar and left, but he wouldn’t let me go. He headed towards the indoor parking lot, then changed his mind and kept walking into the concrete pedestrian underpass beneath the railway line. Occasionally a bike would pass us, but at this hour of night the tunnel was quiet. Coffee cans and the wreckage of rotten lunch containers lay beneath the graffiti. Insects flitted in front of my face and I brushed them away with my hand as we walked deeper inside. The crunch of our footsteps echoed feebly under the low ceiling. Two small black plastic bags lay in the middle of the passage, their contents mysterious. When I touched one with my foot it sprang back with unpleasant elasticity, like dark meat.

“Not exactly the nicest place, I know,” said Ishikawa, leaning against the wall. “That bar would probably have been fine, but maybe outside is better.”

He’d drunk more than usual that day. He faced me and opened his mouth to speak, then looked at the ground. He lit a cigarette and took a couple of drags.

“I’m working for this company.” He wouldn’t look me in the eye. “No, maybe it’s not a company. Anyway, whatever it is, I’m working for it. Maybe.”

I squatted down and lit a cigarette of my own. The tails of my coat were almost touching the floor so I tucked them between my bent legs and rested my back against the wall.

“But it’s risky, as things stand. It’s not just that I might get caught. There’s a possibility I might even get killed — or worse. So I’ve got to get out. While I still don’t know much.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Just listen.”

A homeless man appeared at the entrance of the passage, saw us and shuffled away.

“If I quit now, while it’s just like a part-time job, I can get out. I told someone I wanted to leave Tokyo. They know me, they know I’d never talk to the cops. But somehow he heard about it. I would just have been one insignificant person leaving, but he wouldn’t let it go.”

“Who?”

“The guy you met at the office. Calls himself Kizaki, but that’s probably not his real name. He’s the boss of the company, or whatever it is.”

I felt a vague sense of foreboding.

“You can leave, he told me, but join us for this job first. That’ll make us even for the passport and all the other stuff, he said. Because I’m in a good mood, he said. Even said he’d give me a cut. Wherever I end up, I should always be grateful to him, he said.”

“What’s the job?”

“Armed robbery.”

I went a little weak at the knees.

“What?”

“Not like that. More precisely, they need a bunch of papers. The target’s an old man, a speculator, and it sounds like they’re going to fake a robbery and take the papers along with the money. They’ll be pretty rough — when guys like these get impatient they generally are.”

“What sort of papers?”

“I don’t know.”

I threw my cigarette butt into the gutter and stood up.

“It sounds suspicious. You better quit.”

“Well, here’s the real problem.”

He paused. One of the lights in the passage, which had been flickering, gave up the ghost and went out.

“He told me to get you to come too. He knows about you.”

“What?”

“You used to be in Tanabe’s gang, didn’t you?”

My heart started to beat faster.

“They would get their information sorted ahead of time and do the actual robberies. What type of keys the rich houses had, whether there was a safe. Real pros, completely different from those amateur outfits. The info came from somebody one of Kizaki’s underlings knew. Of course the source’s boss also took a cut. That’s how Kizaki found out about you.”

“This guy, what does he do?”

“I don’t know. I thought he was a yakuza front man but somehow it doesn’t look like it. How can I put it? He’s weird, really weird. Talks a lot, laughs a lot, and there’s a rumor that sometimes he kills people.”