IT WAS raining children all over the nation. What had started as a mere sprinkle, a body here, a body there, was now a torrent—kids were jumping off buildings from Wakkanai to Kagoshima.
Nakazono sat on a bench in Ueno Park and scanned the sky nervously. He’d lost weight and hadn’t shaved in a week. He felt small inside his suit but not small enough. To shrink was a blessing, but she had sharp eyes. If only he was a blade of grass, one in a billion. If only he could disappear.
She’d started whispering to him the day after Jiro had thrown the brick through her children’s window. Now her imps were dropping like tears from a cloudless sky.
It had all begun the day Junko Ando had died. Junko had been a pop singer, a fourteen-year-old cutie with bashful eyes, short curly hair and a fondness for clunky black shoes. She’d made everybody smile and her rise to the top had been spectacular.
Dancing across the country in her crazy too-big shoes, curtsying for the Empress, Junko had befriended every lonely child in the land. Fathers had escorted daughters to concerts, mothers had touched her poster above children dreaming in bed. In village and town, on islands far to the south, girls had descended in droves on shoemakers wrinkled and brown.
Soon every enterprise, from noodle maker to public railway, had owned a piece of Junko. She’d smiled her way through eighteen-hour days, never once complaining, obediently following her mom and her managers. Until one day she’d fallen behind, stopping to tie her shoes, frowning at the pushing and the pulling. No one had noticed and Junko had found herself alone, and the knots, once so simple, far too complex. They’d discovered her shoes atop a midtown Tokyo building, placed neatly against the rail. Even animals in deep forest hamlets were said to have cried.
Nakazono winced, feeling a body hit the pavement five hundred miles away. Elena cooed, urging him to join them. Twenty-six suicides in the past seven days and Nakazono had felt them all. The older girls, their heavier bones pulling them down, were like a cold brush of wind on his cheek—they cried and were quickly gone.
But the younger girls, as light as leaves, they floated down, caught on sunshine. Even smaller than Junko, their shoes as neatly placed, they jumped through a hole in his heart.
Inside his apartment he’d drunk himself blind and begged Elena to silence the leapers and leave him alone. An accident, an accident—he’d beseeched her. She’d laughed and promised relief if he would step out on the balcony.
He’d been late for work every day this week and was late again today. Just as vulnerable at the station as at his apartment, he took refuge in the open spaces of the park. Hara had visited his office the day before with three of his men. He’d started calmly enough, casually listing the names of mutual acquaintances who’d failed to pay substantial debts. All had either died or disappeared. After commenting on Nakazono’s ragged appearance, he’d launched into a rambling monologue about the look and smell of bodies burning.
Nakazono could almost see the flames and feel the heat. Hara would kill him if he didn’t get the gaijin out of the building, Elena would push him off a balcony if he did.
His patrolmen ducked their heads as he rumbled into the station. The desk sergeant looked up. “There’s a woman waiting for you in your office.”
A bargirl wanting a favor? If she’d lift her skirt and bend over his desk he might oblige. He shook his head sadly. The way he was feeling he doubted he could get it up. Something small and ghastly was seated behind his desk. It waved a bony hand and spoke. “I’ve been looking for you, Lieutenant.”
He turned his back and slowly closed the door. It was just an illusion, another of Elena’s tricks. He looked over his shoulder, waiting for it to vanish. There was a cigarette burning in an ashtray and he pulled himself together. It wasn’t a ghost, just an old woman. She didn’t look like anything to be afraid of. “Who are you?” he growled.
May’s aunt wasn’t about to be intimidated by some cop, especially one as crooked as Nakazono. She’d asked around after the local yakuza had laughed at her plan and kicked her out. He was just the kind of man she was looking for—cruel and greedy. She took a drag on her cigarette. “I’ve got a proposition for you, Lieutenant.”
He didn’t have to take this, he didn’t have to listen to some rag-bag country yokel. Nakazono reached over the desk, picked her up with one hand and slammed her into the straight-backed wooden chair reserved for unimportant visitors. She squawked and grabbed her purse as he reclaimed his chair. “For the last time, who are you?”
“You bastard, you hurt me.”
“That’s it, you’re outta here.”
“Hold it. I’m Elena Takagi’s sister-in-law. I’ve come all the way from Kochi to see you.”
“What do you want?” He winced and slumped deep in his chair. Now he remembered. She’d been at Elena’s wake, an unappetizing nuisance clutching at the sleeves of mourners.
“I hear somebody’s trying to get their hands on my sister-in-law’s building,” she said. “They’re trying to force her kids to move.”
“I know. I’m doing everything I can to prevent it,” he lied, turning his head away. She smelled like mothballs and dried fish. He sucked in some fresh air and looked back. “We’re investigating. I appreciate your concern but what’s your interest? It’s her son’s building.”
She grinned, crimson lipstick caked on jagged teeth. “But it doesn’t have to be, does it? That should be my building. I got a loan all lined up. All I need is a little help getting rid of the competition.”
Nakazono groaned. This was the last thing he needed. “What makes you think he’ll sell it to you? Like you said, somebody has already threatened him and it didn’t work.”
“Well, of course it didn’t. A broken window ain’t gonna scare nobody. I gotta much better idea.”
“What?”
She reached into her blouse, adjusted her bra and wriggled on the seat. “What do you think he’d do if his sister disappeared? I bet he’d sign the papers real quick to get her back.”
A horrible idea. Elena’s anger would be terrifying. She was trying to push him off a building over a harmless bit of vandalism. What would she do if her daughter was endangered? He closed his eyes. “Forget it, that’s kidnapping.”
“No, it ain’t, at least not exactly. I’m the brat’s aunt. The law ain’t gonna do nothin’ to me even if I do snatch her. If he doesn’t hand over the building and goes to the cops, all I gotta say is I was worried about her and thought she needed a better home life.”
He laughed, imagining the home life she would provide. “It’s still kidnapping.”
“Shit. What world do you live in, Lieutenant? He’s a gaijin—nobody believes them. And what if they do? The worst that can happen is I gotta apologize and promise never to do it again. It works every time.”
Nakazono hesitated. She was right, the gaijin would do anything to protect his sister. Maybe the worst was over with Elena, maybe it had all been in his head. He hadn’t heard a body drop in three hours. “What’s in it for me?”
“I’ll give you ten million yen to make sure nobody else gets their hands on the property and another ten million to grab the brat and deliver her to Kochi.”
It wouldn’t make a respectable down payment on his gambling debts. He was crazy to even consider it. Even if Elena left him alone, nobody double-crossed Michio Hara and lived. His intercom buzzed.
“You got Hara-san on line two, Lieutenant.”
It was all the reminder he needed. “Tell him I’m out and I’ll get back to him, uhh, later.”
May’s aunt narrowed her eyes. “I just finished talking to that bastard. You’re in on it with him, aren’t you? You and Hara are trying to steal my building.”
“And sergeant?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Get in here and escort my visitor out. We’ve finished our discussion.”
An ashtray whizzed past his ear and bounced off the window.
“Never mind, Sergeant. I’ll do it myself.”
Ex-Staff Sergeant Tokunaga cursed a pair of kids flying down the sidewalk on bicycles. Their eyes widened and they wrenched their bikes off the curb into Kokusaidori traffic, fleeing his anger and his terrible eyes. A city bus driver hit brakes and horn, skidding to a stop a foot from the nearest kid’s head. Tokunaga grinned and kept walking.
Tokunaga towered over the other pedestrians and if anyone got in his way he shoved them aside. Not that many did. One look at that tiny head perched on his broad shoulders and they shied away. His was not a face that gave comfort. Watery eyes lay in a skull so thin it appeared defective. His liver was shot; chronic pain had etched furrows across his forehead and spider tracings down his cheeks. Stubble covered his jaw. Hands that trembled from sake made shaving dangerous and he rarely bothered.
He was getting older, true, but he still worked out every day and knew he was a match for any man that crossed him. He was bigger than nearly everyone and while his size had been the source of much pride, it had also gotten him into trouble more than once. As a drill instructor he’d broken a recruit’s neck. He’d had no qualms about the death, the kid had been a pussy. But his superiors had disagreed and he’d been cashiered from the army.
He smiled as he turned off Kokusaidori. Really, the pencil-necked little bastard had done him a favor. If they hadn’t thrown him out of the service he never would have discovered the education racket. After a few months in the stockade and subsequent discharge, he’d bought an old farm on the outskirts of Kochi, slapped a coat of paint on the buildings and rechristened the place Tokunaga's School for Wayward Children.
He now spent his time teaching children rejected by normal schools. Some were too smart, some not smart enough and many just too shy. The word teaching was, of course, employed in its broadest sense—the parents knew their kids were going to get their butts kicked.
The smart ones were easy to whip into shape—after a few weeks of mistreatment they invariably learned to conceal their advantages. The dumb ones and the shy ones—shit, Tokunaga couldn’t do a thing with ‘em. He just kicked their asses for as long as their parents paid the freight and then sent them packing.
But the discipline business had fallen on hard times recently and now he was in Tokyo, a city he hated.
Tokunaga turned a corner and his destination was in sight. He leaned against a wall facing an apartment building and scanned the schoolyard across the street. A group of girls were kicking a ball around in the corner of the playground watched over by a teacher in her twenties. He saw a couple of kids that might be May, both fit the rather sodden description provided by her aunt. It didn’t matter, today was just a reconnaissance mission.
The crazy bitch had only let him come up from Kochi with her on the condition that he share her bed and provide certain services. He’d agreed and had put up with her bizarre demands last night but this morning she’d still insisted on enlisting local help in conning her sister-in-law’s son out of his property. The yakuza had laughed her out of their office and now she was talking with some crooked cop. He checked his watch. It was time to get moving, he was supposed to meet her in half an hour and he still wanted to take a look at the building where the kid lived.
One of the girls crouched down to retrieve the ball and Tokunaga spotted something white, possibly panties. He crossed the street for a better look and stood just outside the gate. The girl saw him and the ball slipped from her fingers. It slowly rolled away and nudged the legs of her teacher sitting on stone steps reading a paperback. She looked up, straight at Tokunaga, and a frown of distaste shadowed her pretty face.
Tokunaga was halfway down the street by the time she reached the gate. She could almost hear his thoughts as he hurried away. Even at thirty yards, the anger and the perversion were deafening, like a jackhammer cracking open pavement. Her stomach twisted in a knot as she turned back to her girls, trying to smile.
