1Q84 (89 page)

“Ah-oh-mah-meh,” Fuka-Eri said slowly, as if pondering each syllable.

“Yes. Green Peas. It’s an unusual name.”

“You want to meet her,” Fuka-Eri asked without a question mark.

“Yes, of course I want to meet her,” Tengo said.

Fuka-Eri chewed her lower lip as she took a moment to think about something. Then she looked up as if she had hit upon a new idea and said, “She might be very close by.”

The seven a.m. television news carried a big report on the Akasaka-Mitsuke subway station’s flooding, but there was no mention of the death of Sakigake’s Leader in a suite at the Hotel Okura. When NHK’s news ended, Aomame switched channels and watched the news on a few other channels, but none of them announced that large man’s painless death.

They hid his body
, Aomame thought, scowling. Tamaru had predicted such a possibility, but she had found it hard to believe that they would actually do it. Somehow they had managed to carry Leader’s corpse from the Hotel Okura suite, load it into a car, and take it away. He was a big man, and the corpse must have been tremendously heavy. The hotel was full of guests and employees. Security cameras were everywhere. How had they succeeded in carrying the corpse to the hotel’s underground parking lot without having anyone notice?

They must have transported the body at night to the headquarters in Yamanashi and then held a discussion of what to do with it. At least they were not going to formally report his death to the police. Once you’ve hidden something, you have to keep it hidden.

Aomame, of course, had no idea how they intended to fill the vacuum created by Leader’s death. But they would exhaust every means available to them to maintain the organization. As the man himself had said, the system would endure with or without a leader. Who could inherit Leader’s mantle? That problem had nothing to do with Aomame. Her assignment had been to liquidate Leader, not to crush a religion.

She thought about the two bodyguards in their dark suits. Buzzcut and Ponytail. When they got back to headquarters, would they be held responsible for having allowed Leader to be wiped out before their very eyes? Aomame imagined their next assignment: “Find that woman, no matter what. Don’t come back here until you do.” It was possible.

She ate an apple for breakfast, but she had almost no appetite. Her hands still retained the sensation of driving the needle into the back of the man’s neck. While peeling the apple with a small knife in her right hand, she felt a slight trembling in her body—a trembling she had never experienced before. When she had killed someone in the past, the memory of it had nearly faded after a night’s sleep. Though it never felt good to take a person’s life, those were all men who didn’t deserve to go on living. They inspired more disgust than human pity. But this time was different. Objectively, what this man had been doing was perhaps an affront to humanity. But he himself was, in many senses, an extraordinary human being, and his extraordinariness, at least in part, appeared to transcend standards of good and evil. Ending his life had also been something extraordinary. It had left a strange kind of resonance in her hands—an extraordinary resonance.

What he had left behind was a “promise.” This was the conclusion to which Aomame’s thoughts led her. The weight of that promise was left in her hands as a
sign
. She understood this. The sign might not fade from her hands—ever.

The phone rang shortly after nine a.m. It was Tamaru. It rang three times, stopped, and started again twenty seconds later.

“They didn’t call the police after all,” Tamaru said. “It’s not on the TV news or in the paper.”

“He
did
die, though. I’m sure of that.”

“Yes, of course, I know. No question he died. There were a few movements around there. They’ve already cleared out of the hotel. They called in several people from their city branch office in the middle of the night, probably to help deal with the body. They’re good at things like that. Around one a.m., an S-Class Mercedes and a Toyota Hiace van left the hotel parking lot. Both had dark glass and Yamanashi plates. They were probably back in Sakigake headquarters by sunrise. The police investigated the compound the day before yesterday, but it wasn’t a full-scale operation, and all the officers were long gone by then. Sakigake has a big incinerator. If you threw a body in there, it wouldn’t leave a bone, just clean smoke.”

“Creepy.”

“They’re a creepy bunch, all right. Even if their Leader is dead, the organization will keep moving for a while, like a snake that keeps going even after its head is cut off. Head on or off, it knows exactly where it’s headed. Nobody can say what will happen in the future. It might die. Or grow a new head.”

“He was no ordinary man.”

Tamaru offered no opinion on that matter.

“Completely different from the others,” Aomame said.

Tamaru took a moment to gauge the resonance of her words. Then he said, “Yes, I can imagine this was different from the others. But we’d better start thinking about what happens
from now on
, and be a little more practical. Otherwise you won’t be able to survive.”

Aomame thought she should say something, but the words would not come. The trembling was still there in her body.

“Madame tells me she wants to talk to you,” Tamaru said. “Can you talk?”

“Of course,” Aomame said.

The dowager took the phone. Aomame could sense relief in her voice.

“I am so grateful to you, more than I can ever say. You handled this one perfectly.”

“Thank you very much. But I don’t think I’ll be able to do it again,” Aomame said.

“No, I realize that. We asked too much of you. I’m so happy you’re all right. We won’t be asking you to do this anymore. This was the last time. We have prepared a place for you to settle into. You won’t have to worry about a thing. Just lie low for a while in the safe house. In the meantime, we’ll make arrangements for you to move into your new life.”

Aomame thanked her.

“Do you have everything you need there? If not, let us know. I’ll have Tamaru take care of it right away.”

“No, thank you. As far as I can tell, everything I need is here.”

The dowager lightly cleared her throat. “Now, this is something I want you to keep in mind. What we did was absolutely right. We punished the man for his crimes and prevented him from committing any more. There will be no more victims. We put a stop to that. You must not let this bother you.”

“He said the same thing.”

” ‘He’?”

“Sakigake’s Leader. The man I took care of last night.”

The dowager remained silent for a full five seconds. Then she said, “He knew?”

“Yes, he knew I was there to take care of him, and still he let me in. He was, if anything, hoping for death. His body had already suffered serious injury and was heading toward a slow but inevitable end. All I did was speed up the process somewhat and provide relief to a body tortured by intense pain.”

The dowager seemed seriously shocked to hear this. Again she was at a loss for words, something most unusual for her.

“You mean to say—” the dowager said, looking for the right words, “that he himself was hoping for punishment for his deeds?”

“What he wanted was to end his painful life as soon as possible.”

“And he made up his mind to let you kill him.”

“Exactly.”

Aomame said nothing about the bargain she had struck with Leader. In exchange for letting Tengo go on living in this world, she herself would have to die: this was an agreement known only to Aomame and the man. No one else was to be told.

Aomame said, “The things he did were deviant and deserving of death, but he was no ordinary human being. Or at least he possessed something special.”

“Something special?” the dowager said.

“It’s hard to explain,” Aomame said. “It was at the same time both a special power or gift and a cruel burden. It was, I think, eating him alive from the inside.”

“Could it be that this special
something
urged him on toward his deviant behavior?”

“Probably.”

“In any case, you put a stop to it.”

“That is true,” Aomame said, her voice dry.

Holding the receiver in her left hand, Aomame spread out her right hand, with its lingering sensation of death, and stared at the palm. What did it mean to “have ambiguous congress” with those girls? Aomame could neither understand it nor explain it to the dowager.

“As always, I made the death appear to have been a natural one, but they will probably not do us the favor of seeing it that way. Given the circumstances, I’m sure they will conclude that I had something to do with it. And as you know, his death has not been reported to the police yet.”

“Whatever steps they choose to take, we will do everything in our power to protect you,” the dowager said. “They have their organization, but we have strong connections and ample funds. Also, you are a careful, intelligent person. We won’t let them have their way.”

“Have you not yet found Tsubasa?” Aomame asked.

“We still don’t know where she went. My thought is that she is in the Sakigake compound. She has nowhere else to go. We haven’t found a way to bring her back yet, but I suspect that Leader’s death has put the group into a state of confusion. We may be able to do something to exploit that confusion in order to save her. That child must be protected.”

That child
in the safe house was not actual substance, according to Leader. She was merely one form of a concept and had since been “retrieved.” But Aomame could hardly say this to the dowager now. Aomame herself did not know what it meant. She did, however, remember the levitation of the marble clock. She had seen it happen with her own eyes.

Aomame asked, “How many days will I be hiding out in this safe house?”

“You should assume it will be from four days to a week. After that you will be given a new name and situation and moved to a faraway place. Once you have settled down there, we will have to cut off all contact with you for your own safety. I won’t be able to see you for a while. Considering my age, I might never be able to see you again. It might have been better if I had never lured you into this troublesome business. I have thought about that many times. Then I would not have had to lose you this way. But—”

The dowager’s voice caught in her throat. Aomame waited quietly for her to continue speaking.

“But I have no regrets. Everything was more or less destined to happen. I had to involve you. I had no choice. A very strong force was at work, and that is what has moved me. Still, I feel bad for you that it has come to this.”

“On the other hand, we have shared something, something important, something we could not have shared with anyone else, something we could not have had any other way.”

“Yes, you are right,” the dowager said.

“Sharing it was something that I needed, too.”

“Thank you for saying that. It gives me a measure of salvation.”

Aomame was also pained to think that she could no longer see the dowager, who was one of the few ties she possessed with the outside world.

“Be well,” Aomame said.

“You, too,” the dowager said. “And be happy.”

“If possible,” Aomame said. Happiness was one of the farthest things away from her.

Tamaru came on the phone.

“You haven’t used
it
so far, have you?” he asked.

“No, not yet.”

“Try your best not to use it.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

After a momentary pause, Tamaru said, “I think I told you the other day that I grew up in an orphanage in the mountains of Hokkaido.”

“You were put in there after you were evacuated from Sakhalin when you were separated from your parents.”

“There was a boy in that orphanage two years younger than I was. He was mixed: half Japanese, half black. I think his father was a soldier from the American base in Misawa. I don’t know about his mother, but she was probably a prostitute or a bar hostess. She abandoned him soon after he was born, and he was put in the orphanage. He was a lot bigger than me, but not very smart. The other kids teased him, of course, mainly because his color was different. You know how that goes.”

“I guess.”

“I wasn’t Japanese, either, so it fell to me one way or another to be his protector. Our situations were similar—a Korean evacuee and the illegitimate mixed-race kid of a black guy and a whore. You can’t get much lower than that. But it did me good: it toughened me up. Not him, though. He could never be tough. Left on his own, he would have died for sure. In that place, you had to have a quick wit or be a tough fighter if you wanted to survive.”

Aomame waited quietly for him to go on.

“He was bad at everything. He couldn’t do anything right. He couldn’t button his own shirt or wipe his ass. Carving, though, was something else. He was great at that. Give him a few carving tools and a block of wood and before you knew it he had made a really fine carving. No sketches or anything: the image would pop into his head and he would produce an accurate three-dimensional figure, tremendously detailed and realistic. He was a kind of genius. It was amazing.”

“A savant,” Aomame said.

“Yes, sure. I learned about that stuff later, the so-called savant syndrome. People with extraordinary powers. But nobody knew about that back then. People assumed he was mentally retarded or something—a kid with a slow brain but gifted hands that made him good at carving. For some reason, though, the only thing he would ever carve was rats. He could do those beautifully. They looked alive from any angle. But he never, ever carved anything but rats. Everybody would urge him to carve some other animal—a horse or a bear—and they even took him to the zoo for that purpose, but he never showed the slightest interest in other creatures. So then they just gave up and let him have his way, making nothing but rats. He made rats of every shape and size and pose. It was strange, I guess. By which I mean that there
weren’t
any rats in the orphanage. It was too cold there, and there was nothing for them to eat. The place was too poor even for rats. Nobody could figure out why he was so fixated on rats…. Well, anyway, word got out about the rats he was making. The local paper carried a story, and people started asking to buy them. The head of the orphanage, a Catholic priest, got a craft shop to carry the carved rats and sell them to tourists. They must have brought in some decent money, but of course none of it ever came back to the boy. I don’t know what they did with it, but I suspect the top people in the orphanage used it for themselves. All the boy ever got was more carving tools and wood to keep making rats in the workshop. True, he was spared the hard fieldwork; all he had to do was carve rats by himself while the rest of us were out. He was lucky to that extent.”