The Drowning God (4 page)

 

CHAPTER 7

G
otoh rose wearily from her front stoop as Takuda approached. “So, you prayed for your family?”

He bowed. “It's been a long time, but one never forgets the sutras.”

“Oh, ­people forget,” she said. ­“People in this valley have forgotten truth and piety.” She shook her head violently, as if she were being attacked by insects. “Awful, awful place. You asked me earlier what happened to me. I'll tell you what happened. I watched all the good ­people die. The good ­people like your father all died. The Naga River valley sucked their lives away. Your father lost one son to the river, then he lost his grandson to the canal, and then he lost his mind.” She bared brown teeth at Takuda. It might have been a smile, but it looked painful. “Even your father's faith wasn't enough in the end. The Naga River valley kills the strong outright. The weak just move away.”

Takuda nodded. He was relieved that someone had finally said it aloud. “It's true. I was a weak and cowardly young man. I could have stayed to help make things better here.”

The grimace faded, and her face fell back into lines of worry. She eased herself back down to her stoop. “Oh, I'm a stupid old woman.” She sighed. “No, no, of course you couldn't have stayed here. Your wife would have died of grief, just as your mother did. Wait, your wife is the old-­fashioned girl—­” Gotoh made jabbing motions at her own throat.

Inwardly, Takuda winced. “Yes, she tried to take her own life.”

Gotoh nodded. “You see, I know these things happened to someone, but it's all getting more and more confused. Sometimes I don't remember your father's face, or your mother's. When tragedy comes after tragedy for so many years, it all runs together.”

He sat on the stoop beside her. “What about your family? What happened to them?”

She made a dismissive gesture. “They moved away, and I never heard from them again. That happens, you know. ­People who move away from here never come back, and they hardly even write. When you try to find them, they've already moved again, as if memories of this awful place keep driving them farther away. The old man is my only family now. When he dies, I'll sell this house and get an apartment down in the city. I'll move while I can still walk. Maybe I'll only be able to live on my own for a month, but I'll be out of the Naga River valley. Maybe they'll put me in a home in the city. At least I won't die here.”

Takuda didn't know what to say. No one would buy her house. It was a rotting hulk on a dead-­end street of a dying village in a dismal valley.

Perhaps she had the same thought. “You were right to leave. I should have left, too. I was a fool to stay.”

Takuda pitied the woman. She had been one of the bright and energetic middle-­aged worshippers who had made up the core of the temple lay organization. She had always been in the center of volunteer activities, celebrations, and annual cleanings. Takuda's father had said of her, “She works harder than anyone else at the temple.” Then Takuda remembered overhearing his mother's reply: “Of course she works harder than anyone else at the temple. She has to make up for her husband.”

Her life was blighted just because her husband didn't go to temple?
It didn't make sense.

“Life was good here once, despite everything. You know, right here at the last bend of the canal, that's where everybody used to tie up to make out.” She grinned like a backward child, her mind decades in the past. “More babies were conceived in those flat-­bottomed boats than under the blankets, I assure you. And at the end of the summer, during the festival for the dead, the canal would take our ancestors away on their little paper boats, and the candles would all go out as the boats went over the spillway into the river. That's before they built the northern dam. Now, I suppose the paper boats would just collect down at the drainage pond by the plant. It's all gone now, all those days are gone, and all that's left is a canal full of rusted bicycles.”

Rusted bicycles?
“Doesn't it get dredged?”

“What, the canal? Sure. Sometimes.”

“Who does it?”

“The Farmers' Co-­op used to do it, but they're all old men now. They used it as an excuse to get drunk, and they did a poor job. Now the village does it, barely. In a dry winter, the water level drops so much that you see things sticking out of the water. Bicycles, umbrellas, furniture, anything. When I was still strong, I pulled out a scooter. The registration number was scratched right off, but the sticker was from the city, downriver. I could tell by the color. Who would throw a whole scooter into the canal? I took it to the village police, and nobody claimed it. Now they don't even bother to take them away. See those bicycles and scooters?” She made a vague motion toward the mound of bikes and scooters across from her house. “The village workers pull them out of the canal and just leave them right there.”

“This morning, when I was coming in, I saw that the boat docks were all rotting.”

“Of course they are. Nobody uses them anymore. Some city ­people were building summer houses here a few years ago. Summer houses, here! Can you imagine? They all built new docks, and they tried to get the canals dredged properly. One summer here, and they never came back. In a few years, those new decks will be rotten, too.”

“How long ago did you stop getting around by boat?”

“Me? I stuck to the shopping street. The old man took the boat everywhere until he got smart.”

“Why did he stop taking the boat?”

She shook her head. “Maybe he didn't swim so well anymore. You should be careful of the water, too. Only ­people who understand the canals very well travel freely by water.”

“Who travels freely?”

She struggled to her feet. “There are ­people in Oku Village who've always traveled freely in the canals. Find out who they are.”

“Why? What do you know?”

“I don't know anything. I never wanted to know. If I knew something, what would I do about it? Who would I tell?” She turned to go into her house. “Talk to Reverend Suzuki up at Eagle Peak Temple. He might know something that will help you.”

T
akuda met Officer Mori coming up the shopping street, and he slid into the backseat without a word. There was only one road out, the same hard straightaway that had brought them into the Naga River valley that morning.

Near the top of the straightaway, Takuda had Mori pull over. He got out and looked back down the grade. Mori joined him.

“No lights here, just reflectors on the guardrails,” Takuda said. “Can you imagine riding a bicycle down this road after a night on the town?”

Mori folded his hands behind him. “It would be suicide. Is that the explanation for all the abandoned bicycles and scooters? Stolen by drunken farmers and ridden back into the valley?”

“I don't know how they explain it away. The bikes and scooters started showing up after I left.”

Mori pointed back up the hill. “Around the bend lies the real problem with that explanation. It would take Olympic athletes to pedal those rickety old bikes up those winding roads.”

Takuda looked over the valley, already partially shadowed in the early afternoon. “Let's get out of here.”

Mori drove in silence, as if they had agreed not to speak. They crested the last of the foothills, and they were out of the Naga River valley and into the mountains. They both breathed more deeply. Mori cracked the windows, and the car filled with a fresh, wild breeze. Takuda bowed his head from side to side to crack his neck, and Mori loosened his grip on the wheel.

The breeze swayed the cedars on the mountainsides. It stirred stands of bamboo at the roadside and sent showers of falling plum blossoms across the windshield.

When they left the mountains and began to descend toward the city, Mori closed the windows so he didn't have to shout over the wind whipping through the car.

“So, Kuma is as simple as he looks. He doesn't know anything. He doesn't see anything strange because he's never been anywhere else.”

Takuda frowned. “What happened when you mentioned the water safety question?”

Mori glanced at him in the rearview mirror. “He mentioned a boy you both used to know, a boy nicknamed Little Bear.”

Takuda slapped the back of the seat.
Little Bear.
Sergeant Kuma had been the biggest in the club, so the boys had joked that he was a bear,
kuma
, even though the characters of his family name did not mean “bear.” When the new Kuma had shown up, the nickname “Little Bear” had been inevitable.

“You knew the boy?”

“Yes, the other Kuma. Tadanori was his given name. He was tiny, with arms like chopsticks. His mother pushed him into judo, and he cried every day. About the time he disappeared, we also stopped seeing his father heading to the fields. Someone said they were living with an uncle in the city.”

“This attempted abduction makes you think otherwise?”

“It sounds like the sergeant thinks otherwise, doesn't it?”

Mori didn't reply.

Takuda closed his eyes. Spring sunshine warmed the car, and shadows played blue and orange across the insides of his eyelids. The hum of the car was soothing, almost hypnotic. Soon he dreamt of sunlight flashing on the brownish water of the canal branch beside his parents' house. Something moved beneath the surface, and then he was underwater, face-­to-­face with his brother. His brother was suddenly yanked away, but he dragged Takuda along behind. As they sped deeper and deeper toward the riverbed, his brother became his son. His son screamed soundlessly. Takuda could not see what force dragged his son down into the rocks and murk, but it was relentless. His heart died inside him as his son's tiny hand slowly slipped out of his grasp, again, again, again, always just out of reach. As his son disappeared in the greenish water, the river stilled around Takuda. He could not breathe. He was trapped, spinning in darkness.

Then the river tore his face from his skull.

He woke screaming, but he could not open his mouth. It took a moment to remember where he was.

In the rearview mirror, he caught Officer Mori returning his eyes to the road.

 

CHAPTER 8

A
t headquarters, Detective Takuda filed a perfunctory report while Officer Mori returned the car to the motor pool. Takuda presented a copy at the desk of Superintendent Yamada.

“I'd like to stick around this case. I know the area very well,” Takuda said.

Yamada sat in the center of the office so subordinates could reach him. The detectives at desks that surrounded his didn't bother to hide their interest in the conversation.

“Takuda, it's a good thing someone knows that area. Some ­people think it's the ass crack of the prefecture, and other ­people think it's the armpit. As with ass cracks and armpits, no one ever gets a good look. I forget it's even there. Every time I meet someone who's actually been, I'm surprised.”

“Oku Village is my hometown, Superintendent.”

Yamada raised his eyebrows as he put aside Takuda's report. “I think I knew that, but I forgot. Did anyone else remember that?”

The other detectives had drifted off from the conversation. A few appeared busy, but others stared off into space as if lost in thought.

Yamada looked Takuda in the eye. “Don't let this confuse you. One attempted kidnapping doesn't mean anything. Chief Nakamura is a fool, but he might be right this time.”

Why is he dressing me down?
“I'm not confused,” Takuda said. “I'm trying to do my job.”

“Telling the station chief you make recommendations about prisoners' custody? Not your job. Nobody asked you to decide anything.”

Takuda felt the blood rise to his face.

“The chief was on the phone with me while you interviewed the suspect. Now, I don't care what you tell the village police, and you have your reasons for what you're saying up there, but it's really not like you. Don't get confused. Sometimes discipline and process are all we have.”

Takuda said, “The fact is, there's something strange in the Naga River valley. Do you remember that Yamaguchi-­gumi enforcer we had in here last fall? The kneecap-­cracker?”

Yamada studied his fingernails.

Takuda pressed on. “Nobody wanted to be in the same room with that guy. Even when he was shackled, the attorneys had a hard time talking to him.”

“I remember, Detective. I'll never lend you to the Organized Crime Division again, okay? Is that what you want?”

“Superintendent, five minutes with that thug made us want a weekend at a hot spring to scrub off the filth.”

“What's your point?”

“It's the same thing here, repellent evil, but it's not from a hardened criminal. He's a hydrological engineer.”

Yamada slouched forward to read Takuda's report. “It says here that he emits a foul odor—­possible neurological damage—­nothing about repellent evil.”

“Of course not. Look at the bottom.”

“Ah—­‘Suspect may have criminal background not documented by village police personnel,' and—­” Yamada read on, then looked up with a deep frown. “You're making recommendations in your dailies now? Recommending that we keep him in Oku Village while you burn man-­hours investigating a failed abduction? When will you recommend to the prosecutor that this suspect be charged? What is your threshold for prosecution of a suspected pedophile and failed kidnapper, Detective Takuda?”

Takuda put his hands on his knees. He stopped himself from bowing. It wasn't over yet.

“Well? What do you say for yourself?”

“If the suspect stays in the village holding cell long enough, accomplices might surface. If he is charged, he'll be brought to the city, and we'll never know about local contacts who might have shown up.”

Yamada leaned back in his chair. “You think he had accomplices.”

“He's told us as much. He said he is never alone, as if he were a madman. I think he's hoping to cover a lie with a thin blanket of truth.”

“But he laid it on too thick.”

“I don't think he expected anyone to take him seriously.”

“Why did you take him seriously? Are you hearing what you want to hear?”

Takuda stood.

“Detective, we're not finished here.” Yamada made to stand, but he looked around and decided to remain seated. “Look, Takuda, I just need to hear you say you'll know when to walk away. No detectives in Japan get more freedom than this crew. That's how we keep this prefecture clean. But that means we have to produce results. Do you understand? It's not playtime.”

As he walked down the hall, Takuda wondered why the superintendent was chewing him out for pursuing the case but still giving him the freedom to continue.
Maybe just giving me enough rope to hang myself
.

He spent the afternoon looking through case files related to drownings in the Naga River valley. They were useless, a shambles. The cross-­referencing was nonexistent, so he had to hunt down individual folders. Many of the folders were misfiled in obviously sloppy ways, some were dumped in a hand-­labeled “miscellaneous” section, and most were missing basic documentation. It was as if the prefecture itself avoided knowing anything about the Naga River valley.

The files on his brother and his son looked pristine, exactly where he expected them. He didn't read them.

T
hat evening, he left the office to oversee an aikido class at the local community center. The class practically ran itself thanks to a few dedicated young men and women, but casual students complained if no senior black belt showed up. It was absurd. Many of them didn't practice between classes. They wanted to absorb the art just by being in the same room with advanced black belts. This kind of foolishness was the last thing he needed after a morning in the Naga River valley and a strange afternoon at headquarters.

He was preoccupied. During the freestyle drill, the entire class lined up to attack him, one by one. After the first few throws, the hobbyists approached him very slowly, even timidly. He barked at them to keep up the pace. It took him several more throws to realize that his practice partners were ending up very far behind him. They were taking a long time getting back to the end of the line, and some were missing. He turned to see a few students sitting at the edge of the mats rubbing their limbs and checking each other's teeth. He had tossed them all the way to the back wall. He had tossed them like laundry.

He rushed over to help the seated students back into line. Luckily, they at least knew how to fall, and no one was injured. Takuda was ashamed and confused, but he managed a quick, impromptu speech about demonstrating the power of aikido. He hoped they didn't think he was bullying them. He merely wanted to show them where they were going if they kept on the path.

They bought it. The relief shone in their faces, and most of them even seemed inspired. Takuda calmly restarted the drill, but he was in turmoil. Only with the advanced black belts did he ever use more than a fraction of his true power, and usually just to demonstrate the martial application of the techniques. Tonight, the flow was more powerful than usual, more powerful than it had ever been. As the drill continued, he barely touched the hobbyists. He was rooted deep into the ground by an invisible axis of energy, and that energy
pulled
the students toward him. He simply took away their support, and they fell as he wished.

When the young black belts got to the front of the line, he eased into a little more power. When he applied a full technique, even with very little of his newfound power, the strongest of the young black belts flew away from him and bowled over the next three students in line.

While they picked themselves up, Takuda stood on the mats, flexing his hands. They looked normal, but he could have crushed a man's forearm with grip strength alone, and that was just the beginning. His whole body was charged with power beyond physical strength. He was
connected
. He flexed his feet on the mats, and he felt the tough straw stretch and snap. He could have pulled the flooring to bits with his toes.

Only the blindest, most foolish vanity would let him believe that his years of practice had suddenly paid off with superhuman power. This was new. He simply hadn't been this strong in the morning.

Where did this come from?

He looked up at his next partner, a young office worker named Matsuo. She had received her first-­degree black belt in the winter test. Her chin was high and her expression was calm, but she was ready to burst into tears. She was not ready to practice with him.

He stopped the drill and had students practice in pairs. This strange new strength was easy enough to control, but it was seductive. Even after endangering his students, he still wanted to experiment with it.

The class continued without incident, but the students seemed more interested in talking about him than in practicing their techniques. They seemed impressed and excited. That was the most humiliating part. Not only had he abused his students, not only had he been tempted by the power so that he continued the experiment when he knew it was dangerous, but now his students admired him for it. Showing off like that was a perversion of the art, an abuse of the trust placed in him by his own teachers.

Humiliation made Takuda laugh at himself: He was now in agony over his own betrayal of the hobbyists, students whom he had held in complete contempt at the beginning of the class.

I don't know what I'll think ten minutes from now.

It helped to make small talk after practice. The camaraderie of fellow martial artists and a hot shower made him feel like a member of the human race again.

Matsuo fell into step with him as he left the showers, and they left the building together.

“I wasn't afraid back there, Teacher.”

“I could see that.”

“I'll fight you now, if you want.”

“You're a fool, Matsuo. Go home.”

She laughed and tousled her hair. It was still damp from the showers, and it smelled of—­lemons? He gave an involuntary shudder.

“You were really tossing us around back there. A very powerful man, aren't you?”

“Aikido is about discipline and control. I'm embarrassed about that display.”

“Yeah, it was a little much. Still, I'll bet ­people will work harder. That is, if anyone comes back.”

He laughed for her sake, but it was a poor effort.

“Teacher, a few of us go to a pub at the next station after practice. You should join us. Some of the guys you tossed would probably like to buy you a beer. It would cheer us all up.”

He wondered if there was an ulterior motive. He mentally reached for his intuition as a carpenter might reach for a saw, but he found nothing. It was strange. Maybe Matsuo was just a modern girl trying to get laid. Maybe she was attracted by the strength he had shown in practice. Maybe, like the hobbyists, she thought she could just absorb Aikido technique by being around him. Or maybe she was just trying to be polite. He didn't know. The day before, he would have known to a near certainty what she wanted. For some reason, he suddenly had no clue to his own intentions, much less anyone else's.

He turned to her and bowed. “Listen, please tell them that I'm sorry, Matsuo. Tell them that drinks are on me after the spring testing, okay? For right now, ah—­I've got to go.”

He left her standing there bowing and confused. It was awkward, but Matsuo could take care of herself. Right now, he had bigger problems, problems that made his unexpected power seem insignificant.

He had to tell his wife he had been to the Naga River valley.