Масахико Симада - Death by Choice

A professional would consider a mere five hundred thousand an insult. In fact, Yashiro was driving a hard deal.

“You haven’t notched up a real murder yet, so this is all you’re worth. It includes expenses, by the way.”

Yashiro didn’t have a high opinion of the guy. He tossed him an envelope with a down payment of two hundred fifty thousand. The man tucked it away in the pocket of his dark blue suit, and launched into a complaint about the paradoxical ways of the world.

“In this profession, no sooner do you get a name for doing the job than you’re finished.” It wasn’t worth the game, he declared. He’d probably end up spending his retirement quietly awaiting execution. And if he made a hash of things, he’d die on the job.

“You just do it for a bit of extra on the side, though. I wouldn’t normally even bother asking an assassin who’d never killed anyone, you know.”

“Every assassin’s had a first assignment. Every job’s got to start somewhere. But I’ve spent years studying the art, and gaining knowledge and skill.”

“So all you’re lacking is experience, eh? That’s too bad. Oh well, you can have all the pride you want, just so long as you’re cheap.”

There was a few seconds silence while the contract killer simply stood gaping, then he closed his eyes and started to laugh. Yashiro laughed with him, watching him carefully as he did so. Finally the killer sighed and grew quiet. He drew a deep breath through his nose, and declared shrilly, “This money’s way too little, whatever you say. Too little to buy my skills, too little to buy the other guy’s life.”

“Don’t you worry about the other guy. Kita’s life is already paid for. And things are fixed so he pays you your reward as well.”

The killer looked unhappy. “Does this guy want to get himself killed or something?”

“Well he wants to die, let’s put it that way. This Friday, actually. Don’t ask me why.”

“You don’t need a reason to kill yourself,” said the killer. Still, he didn’t quite get it. Why should he have to kill a guy who’d do the job himself? He could throw in the job he’d undertaken and save the fellow, but it wasn’t the task of an assassin to save someone who wanted to kill himself.

“So my client’s going to get me to do something pointless, eh?”

“Just forget about the client, OK?” Yashiro said softly, his voice low and threatening. “It’s not just a matter of killing him. You seem to have a wide repertoire in the field. That’s why I’m employing you. Well in Kita’s case I want an accident, right? He mustn’t be allowed to kill himself, and he mustn’t die in anything crime-related. You got set it up so it’s clearly an accident, get it? And an accident that leaves his corneas and organs intact. Can you do that?”

A smile hovered on the killer’s face as he replied, “If the guy cooperates, I can extract his organs and deliver them, sure, but it’ll cost more.”

“Oh yeah, that reminds me, didn’t you work in a hospital or something? Surgery, wasn’t it?”

“That’s right. I still do.”

“So your regular occupation’s saving lives, and on the side you’re in the business of taking them, eh? I guess it comes down to a way of balancing things out for yourself.”

The killer seemed dazed and remained silent for a moment, then he recovered with a laugh. “It’s all the same in the end,” he said.

Yashiro had been introduced to this killer through a gangster associate he played golf with. Apparently a younger member of the gang hadn’t had the guts to lop off the tip of his little finger for a misdemeanour as the rules required, so he’d gone along to the hospital and asked the surgeon if there was a way he could get the job done with anaesthetic so it wouldn’t hurt. The surgeon was only too happy to oblige, and promptly did the job that day in his lunch hour. He popped the severed piece of finger into a plastic bag in a saline salt solution, and handed it over to the young gangster like a goldfish in a bag, and even gave him a prescription for painkillers. The gangster froze the piece of finger and took it along and proffered to his boss together with his apology, and there he assumed the matter would end. But word got out that he’d actually had a surgeon do the job for him, and he was ordered to go off and do it all over again. Back he went to the surgeon with his bit of finger, and asked to have it put back on again. The surgeon didn’t so much as blink. He set to and performed a swift and meticulous operation, and there was the fingertip, beautifully reunited with its finger.

But the boss ordered the young gangster to sever his finger again while the stitches were still in the wound. When the man turned up at the surgery for the third time to get his finger stub attended to, the surgeon exploded. He demanded to know the name and address of the boss who’d put him to all this trouble for nothing, then he went right round there personally and gave him a piece of his mind.

“You got complaints about my surgical skills? You’d better learn more respect for the medical profession or else, my friend. I could come along and steal your organs in the night while you’re sleeping, you know!”

The surgeon stared down the gangster boss, gimlet-eyed. His underlings began to move in to eject this insolent fellow, but the boss had other ideas. A flash of intuition had told him that he could use this man. He soothed him with a polite apology about the severed finger episode, and added a hefty payment for all the fruitless trouble he’d been put to.

There was a fuss at the hospital over the fact that the surgeon had helped a gangster fulfil his obligations. The result was that he was removed from his post for unprofessional behaviour, and that was the end of his medical career. But the gangster boss had taken a fancy to him. He found him a new place in another hospital, and in effect he was kept under the wing of the gang as its pet surgeon. Most of his work these days was in the line of extracting bullets and looking after wounded patients who couldn’t reveal their identities in public.

Yashiro was aware of all this, but he hadn’t heard why this surgeon had added part-time murderer to his profession. It just takes a slight rerouting of the neurons for a surgeon to become a killer, of course, but the patients at their hospital have no idea. This man at least had conscience enough to perform the job outside the hospital.

To cut a long story short, the surgeon took on the job of assassinating Kita for five hundred thousand yen. Even if he did get the remaining half of his pay after Kita had met his accident according to instructions, plus an extra hundred thousand, it would still not be enough in his opinion. Sure, it was the going rate for a professional Filipino killer, but this guy came with a guarantee from Yashiro’s gangster friend, so he could be trusted. Yashiro calculated that if Kita could have an accident that didn’t involve much physical damage, he’d get a tidy thirteen million in his own pocket: a million commission for selling the cornea and organ set to a waiting transplant patient, plus twelve million for being Kita’s insurance beneficiary. He’d done a deal with Miss Koikawa behind Kita’s back, which made Kita a paper employee of his company with the company head as beneficiary, and made thirty per cent of proceeds payable to the insurance agent (Miss Koikawa). Yashiro was taking meticulous care that Kita’s death should not go unrewarded.

Kita was apparently of the same opinion. Therefore, when Yashiro had heard from the studio boss that Shinobu had been kidnapped, he’d decided he had to hasten matters with the killer. Once the police got mixed up in the story, the killer would have a harder job, his plans for the insurance money would go awry, and the price of the victim’s organs would go down. Whatever Kita’s motives for this abduction might be, Yashiro wasn’t going to sit back quietly and watch his own profits go up in smoke.