The Thief (3 page)

Because of the demands of the part of his life I wasn’t supposed to ask about, he spent Monday to Friday in an office all by himself, watching the phone. From time to time a call would come in and he’d answer with the name of a company that was probably fictitious. He collected the mail and very occasionally he’d receive a visit from a man who appeared to be some sort of official. Going out on the town with me was pretty much limited to Saturdays and Sundays.

At his request I went to the office several times to keep him company. But as fate would have it, when I was there one day I met the man. The door flew open, I spun round in surprise and there he was, right in front of me. At the entrance he turned off the light and looked silently around the room. I don’t know why, but the moment I saw him I regretted having come. In the darkness, without saying a word, the man walked inside.

With his black hair and sunglasses he looked like a broker of some kind, but I couldn’t guess his age. He could have been thirty, he could have been fifty. In the dim light shining though the curtain his shadow stretched along the
wall. Naturally it moved when he moved, and his footsteps rang out strangely. Still watching Ishikawa, he opened the safe, took out ten million yen or so and stuffed it casually into a bag. Then he turned his attention to me for some reason.

“I’ll see you again,” he muttered.

I had no idea what was going on so I just stared back at him. After the man left, however, Ishikawa went on talking about pickpocketing, as if he didn’t want to give me a chance to open my mouth.

“There’s only been one time I really didn’t like dipping. It was a fireworks display, see? It’s pretty unusual, but sometimes you get some rich people mingling with the crowd, right?”

Looking at his face I gave up on asking about the man. Probably he fell into that category of things I was better off not knowing about. I tried to forget about him, though not very successfully.

“A middle-aged guy watching from his hotel room with his mistress, for example. She starts pestering him to go down and get yakisoba, or wants to go for a walk together or something. Ever since I was a kid I’ve loved fireworks. Poor people can see them for free and they’re
great entertainment. Up in the sky, they’re equally nice for everyone.”

Sometimes Ishikawa’s expression was so innocent that he looked defenseless, but the echoes of the man still lingered in the room, and his eyes wouldn’t stay still.

“They’re really beautiful. One of the most beautiful things in this life, in the world. But we take advantage of that beauty, yeah? We’re waiting for a chance, when everyone’s absorbed in the beauty. We’re not looking at the fireworks, we’re looking at people’s pockets. That’s—I don’t know how to describe it.”

That’s what he said, but for me it was his skill that was enchanting. Nipping a wallet with three fingers, passing it back to me, and by the time I took out the money and return it he’d already have lifted the next one. Then he would lean his arm against the first wallet’s owner and without even looking he would put it back in the guy’s pocket again. In my eyes his movements were one of life’s beauties. At the time it never occurred to me that this beauty would vanish as swiftly as the fireworks.

5
When I went outside again the rain had stopped, so I dumped my umbrella in the basket of a nearby bike. I buttoned my coat, ignoring the cat that had been following me for some reason, and went into a supermarket.

It was warm in the shop and I started to sweat. I thought I spotted Tachibana, but then realized there was no reason for him to be there and exhaled in relief. One of
the staff was watching me. I put bread, ham and eggs into my basket, grabbed a bottle of mineral water and headed for the checkout.

I was trying to work out why I’d come back to Tokyo. Ever since that violent, elaborately planned attack, I’d known it was dangerous to return. I wanted news of Ishikawa, but I wasn’t sure if that was the real reason. Thinking about how the situation had unfolded back then, I knew there was a strong possibility that he was dead, and almost certainly it wasn’t safe for me to be here either.

I noticed a mother with her child and I stopped. The woman, her damaged hair tied in a ponytail, touched the boy lightly with her knee. At that moment he slipped a packet of fish fillets into the Uniqlo bag he was carrying. A towel had been placed inside and by shaking the paper bag the stuff was hidden. My heart skipped a beat and I was annoyed with myself. The child was seizing the items earnestly, as though trying to live up to his mother’s expectations. He was skillful, and he seemed determined that even if he were caught his mother wouldn’t be blamed. Skinny legs poked out from his blue shorts and the sleeves and pockets of his green jacket were frayed.
Inside the shop, with its cheerful piped music, they were conspicuous. I stood and looked at the boy’s clothes. The woman smacked him, maybe because he was walking too slowly. People turned to stare, but he was smiling. I thought he was probably ashamed. His smile looked automatic, insisting to the onlookers that he wasn’t the kind of kid who gets treated like that by his mother and that his mother wasn’t that sort of parent, trying to mask his mother’s disgrace.

I found myself following them. She nudged the boy with her knee again and he swiftly put some cup noodles in the bag. His hands were quick, but the bag was too small to meet his mother’s demands. A middle-aged woman in a dark blue coat disappeared around the corner of the aisle, keeping an eye on them. I was certain she was a store detective, employed by the supermarket to catch shoplifters. The child seemed to have noticed, but he couldn’t tell his mother.

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.

6
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.”

A young man in a suit entered the tunnel, muttering to himself. When he saw us he shut up, quickened his pace and disappeared out the other side. In his wake he left a strong smell of alcohol.

“Can’t you do a runner?”

“Not easily. They say a couple of people have run away from him and ended up dead. He’s relentless, I hear. He’s like the yakuza in that way at least.”

“You can’t trust him.”

A train passed over our heads, a freighter by the sound of it. I was nervous and I felt a throbbing warmth deep inside me. I knew that soon I would feel nothing but that heat. When the tower appeared in front of me, the dirty
black plastic moved into clearer focus. I stared at the pathetic, flesh-like trash.

“But armed robbery means killing, doesn’t it? I don’t like—”

“No, it won’t.”

“Why not?”

“They want to avoid getting the cops involved. Even if he’s robbed, the old man can’t go to the police. The money comes from tax evasion and they’d be very interested in his papers as well. But if they kill him then it’ll have to become a police matter.”