The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel (38 page)

Somewhere beyond the screech and squeal of locking brakes were screams and yells and a blur of motion on the platform above as time slowed and divided and divided again, and Munroe rolled and shoved.

The same man who had been dazed and listless just five minutes earlier now fought for his life, driving fists into Munroe’s shoulders and against her head. Hand to his trachea, she squeezed and choked him, thrusting him over the rails, rolling him flat against the far wall.

The rush of hot air and burning metal brushed by her head and the train came to a stop. Voices rose on the other side, yelling and commanding. Beyond the view of witnesses, free from cameras and observation, Munroe leveraged her full height and weight against Tagawa.

He fought and scratched and bit, drawing blood.

She detached from the pain, blinded by the need to survive and win.

She pushed her thumbs hard into Tagawa’s carotids, pressing down until the man passed out. And then, having subdued him without leaving bruises, having endured the fight without throwing one blow, she lay beside him fighting back the consuming fire inside her head.

Munroe pulled her phone from her pocket and texted Okada.

Call the lawyer.

Tagawa woke. Flashlight beams and shouts reached out from beneath the wheels at both ends of the train. Tagawa struggled to his feet and Munroe didn’t fight him. He called for help and rescuers arrived and with them were the police. He threw accusations at Munroe, which she denied, and she in turn accused Tagawa of assaulting her.

The bite marks and scratches, the bruises rising in response to the punches Jiro’s men had thrown, gave testament to her claims, and in the end they were both arrested and taken away.

Munroe lay on the floor in a room small enough that she could touch the walls without fully stretching out. Beside her was a narrow mat, a joke of a futon, and she eschewed it for the concrete’s greater discomfort.

The guards had yelled at her once, ordering her to sit and face the door, and she’d ignored them. If they wanted to come in and beat her for the transgression, they were welcome to do so, but she expected they wouldn’t bother.

Cameras had recorded her arrival at Kitashinchi station. They’d documented the way she’d approached Tagawa, and the attack by Jiro’s men, and then the shove that had, for all intents, pushed them backward off the platform.

She’d been arrested because Tagawa accused her of assault. She would have been released already if that was all that there was.

She’d been kept because people in power had questions.

Munroe drifted in the twilight of memory and interrupted sleep where time blurred and mattered less. She slept and woke and woke again when officers stood on the other side of the door, barking for her to stand.

She got to her feet slowly enough that she obeyed on her own terms. The door opened. Like a swimmer taking a breath in anticipation of plunging into the depths, she pushed down hard against the instinct that would arise should the officers touch her.

They ordered her out, yelling when no yelling was needed, commanding for no reason other than to degrade her. She breathed in the calm and avoided eye contact and they led her down bare halls to a door, then ordered her inside a room barely twice the size of the cell and locked the door behind her.

Munroe ignored the table and chairs and lay out on the floor again. They’d come for her when they were ready and she wouldn’t lose sleep over wondering when that might be. Arms draped across her abdomen, she allowed the time to take her back under.

Sound and movement pulled her up again.

The door swung open, an investigating officer stepped into the room, dropped a few sheets of paper on the table, and took a chair.

He was maybe in his early thirties, dressed in shirtsleeves and slacks and with shoes polished to a high-spit shine. “Please sit,” he said. His English was heavily accented.

Munroe stood and slid into the chair beside the school-desk-size table.

He looked down at the papers in front of him. “You were fighting,” he said.

“I was assaulted,” she said. “I am the victim. I want my lawyer.”

“We would like to hear your version of what happened.”

“I was assaulted,” she said. “I am the victim. I want my lawyer.”

“I understand,” he said. “You will speak with your lawyer when finished. A statement is necessary to release you, please explain the fight.”

“I was assaulted,” she said. “I am the victim.”

“Yes.” He scratched his cheek. He tapped pen to paper. He looked at her then, and very slowly, speaking as he wrote, glancing up between words, he said, “Was assaulted. Is victim.”

He turned the page around so she could see it.

“Now,” he said. “Please tell the rest.”

Munroe dropped her eyes to her hands and remained silent. Without evidence that her statement was witnessed or recorded, with no guarantee her words wouldn’t be misinterpreted and paraphrased, she had nothing to say.

“We cannot release you until you speak,” the officer said. “You will be held indefinitely, you will spend years cut off from your friends and family, cold and hungry. Why do this? Tell me about the fight and you can go.”

Munroe nodded to acknowledge his threat and kept silent.

Not only was he a liar, he was a bad liar.

They could deport her, certainly, and could hold her for twenty-three days for each charge though she had no idea how many charges they’d laid against her, if any, and they were under no obligation to tell her. But not indefinitely. Not years.

He stood, and his words grew stronger and the volume louder.

She closed her eyes.

He smacked her on the head with the rolled-up papers.

Munroe glanced up just long enough to smile and exhale.

Outside these walls he would be a dead man.

The badgering continued and Munroe blocked the investigator out, descending deep, deep into twilight, where the world was dark and quiet and his spittle and venom were but whispers in the background.

Somewhere out there he struck her with the rolled-up paper again.

She grabbed hold of the rising demons and yanked them back.

And then the door opened and he was gone, and Munroe left the chair for the floor and the cold that seeped into her skin to mute the fire raging beneath.

The door opened again. Two men entered, one older, one younger.

Munroe sat in the chair again, went through the same routine again. They knew there was more; they were hunting.

The younger one said, “You associate with criminals. You are in Japan for criminal activity and you bring shame on your country.”

“I was assaulted,” Munroe said. “I am the victim. I am willing to answer any question but only with my lawyer to act as a witness.”

For something as basic as a fight in which she was clearly not the aggressor, a lecture followed by her formal apology for her involvement should have seen her on her way.

The two men conferred, speaking in front of her, oblivious to the weapon of language and how in their assumptions their words were used against them.

They picked up again with offers to release her if only she would provide an account, and when that failed, they continued with threats of long detention: They were lions without teeth.

Munroe waited them out.

Eventually they left, and she lay down to sleep again, and when at last the first officer returned, Bradford’s lawyer was with him.

He scanned her face and her lips, his eyes lingering on the places where her skin was tender and sore. The officer motioned to the table and the lawyer sat next to Munroe. He placed a digital recorder on the table.

Munroe coughed and said, “Thank you for coming.”

The status light on the voice activation lit up.

“You have your lawyer,” the officer said. “Tell us about the fight.”

Eyes to the table, Munroe began. She spoke slowly. Enunciated clearly. Darted an occasional glance at the recorder to be sure it continued functioning as it should, and she walked them through the day, from the beginning.

Law enforcement in Japan was a single force without jurisdictional issues and territorial grabs, and even two districts over from where Bradford was being held these officers would have no problem connecting the cases.

She explained why ALTEQ-Bio had brought in consultants and used that as the basis for why she’d trailed Tagawa, laying down in simple sentences all that connected him to the murdered woman, and to organized crime, and to the theft from within. Additional questions followed and with each answer Munroe wound back to Tagawa, always Tagawa, and the murder, the mafia, and the theft.

Her cuts and bruises and her accusations of assault were enough to guarantee that they’d hold him for at least twenty-four hours. Now that he was in custody and she’d connected the dots for them, it was only a matter of time before they started asking better questions. Tagawa, the paranoid man with guilt on his soul and blood on his hands, the same man who’d watched his carefully constructed world crumble at his own doing, would do what he was expected to do: confess. Tagawa would break.

She hadn’t had the time to conjure proof, but she’d conjured a crisis.

The officers left the room and Munroe and the lawyer sat in silence.

On a pad of paper he asked if there was more that he should know.

She scribbled that they should have coffee when this was over.

The officers returned and the clock ticked on. The lawyer left. Procedure and bureaucracy took over, and by the time Munroe was dumped out onto the front steps of the detention center, the night was over.

The lawyer, in his car, met her at the train station.

She sat in the passenger seat and he offered her a steaming Styrofoam cup. He left the engine idling. At her feet was the backpack she’d left with Okada when she’d torn after Yuzuru Tagawa. She sipped the coffee and said, “Are the investigators taking the accusations seriously?”

“My impression is that they are proceeding cautiously,” he said. “Any lack of follow-through will become problematic for careers now that there are criminal elements threaded through the story, even if some are paid not to look.”

“If they pursue it, the confession will come.”

“You’re certain?” he said.

Munroe smiled and reached for her backpack. “Thank you for the coffee,” she said, and stepped out of the car.

Munroe stood just inside the facility entrance, watching and waiting, as she’d done for the last hour, while the trickle of employees passing through the stiles grew to a rapid flow. Spotting Munroe, they averted their eyes.

News had traveled fast: another scandal tied to another foreigner.

Facts never really mattered.

Arms crossed, Munroe kept her focus beyond the glass to where Mother Nature, sighing her own breath of fresh air, provided an overcast sky and early-morning rain in a temporary welcome relief to the muggy heat.

A flash of gray caught her attention: the reflection of Nonomi Sato’s car pulling into the lot. Munroe counted off the beats and then moved to the door, allowing the woman time to gather her things and begin the long walk in.

They met a quarter of the way down the sidewalk.

Munroe stopped in front of Sato, who, in a perfectly timed bow, said, “I’m sorry,” and continued on around her.

Artistry filled her walk, her demeanor, and the lies and pretenses tightly controlled behind a veneer that never cracked. Munroe let her go a pace or two and then said, “I know who you are and what you’re doing.”

Sato kept walking as if Munroe had spoken to someone else.

“If you enter the facility today, you’ll be arrested.”

This time the woman stopped. She turned just slightly and looked over her shoulder. “You are speak at me?” she said.

Perfectly timed, perfectly performed.

“I am,” Munroe said.

“I help some things?”

“Let’s take a walk.”

Sato blushed, as if Munroe had uttered an alien language. She waved a hand in front of her face as if fanning away a bad smell, the Japanese gesture for
embarrassment
and
no
and
go away
and
discomfort
and
refuse to engage
. Mixing
l
s and
r
s perfectly, she said, “I am not understand English.”

“I’m sure you do.”

Sato blushed deeper and waved her hand faster, and she turned and walked away, continuing the charade, perfect as it was, far past its useful point.

“Nonomi,” Munroe called out, singsong and lilting, “don’t make this harder than it needs to be. Go in there and I will permanently blow your cover. Come walk with me and you’ll have a chance to continue things as they are.”

Sato stopped again, turned again. She bowed in apology, still blushing, face scrunched with confusion and in a tone that offered not even a fine-line crack in the veneer, she said, “Am not understand English.”

The beauty in the performance was real to the point of creating doubt.

Like a pilot disoriented in the fog, unable to tell up or down, Munroe trusted the instruments. She’d done her homework, she knew the facts, and she knew the performance in the way she knew herself. Facing Sato, with her perfect masquerade, was like facing a mirror.

Munroe motioned the woman nearer. “Come with me, I’ll teach you.”

Sato responded to Munroe’s sign language with measured cautious steps and an expression full of skepticism and shy doubt.

Every inch closer was a reconfirmation of the illusion, the guise.

When the woman was close, Munroe stuck out her hand and said, “I’m a great admirer of your work.”

With a face full of innocence and uncertainty, Sato shook Munroe’s hand limply, as if handshakes were a foreign thing, as if she wasn’t in that same heartbeat calculating how best to eliminate this threat.