From the Fatherland, with Love, page 60
It wasn’t easy dragging yourself up the steps on a bony elbow while hanging on to a huge backpack. Shinohara was reminded of the way poison worked its way into the body. It was as if the hotel were a gigantic organism and he a drop of poison. To do its work, poison first has to enter the body by being eaten or drunk or inhaled or injected. Probably the easiest route for it to take, however, was through an open wound. We are poison entering the Koryos’ bloodstream through a tear in their flesh, he thought, struggling to ignore the pain in his elbow and legs as he crawled up the steps.
When he finally reached the landing, Fukuda was lying there on his stomach peering straight ahead and gesturing for him to stay down. Kaneshiro too was flat on the bricks, frozen. Shinohara opened his mouth, but Fukuda shushed him with a finger to the lips. Directly in front of them were hedges of azaleas and hydrangeas. Beyond these hedges was a landscape garden about the size of two basketball courts, bordered at the other end by a number of small old-timey Japanese buildings connected by covered walkways. There were white gravel paths in the garden, pines and plum trees, stone lanterns, and two ponds—one crescent-shaped and one kidney-shaped. Hino and Tateno reached the landing, and Fukuda signaled them too not to speak or budge. Kaneshiro crawled slowly backward until he was level with Shinohara. “Something’s moving,” he whispered. Peering through the azaleas into the dark grounds, Shinohara could indeed see movement near a stone lantern beside the crescent pond.
“Dogs,” Kaneshiro said, keeping his head low. It was hard to make out in the dark, but yes, there were two dogs standing side by side, worrying something in the grass. “What are dogs doing in a roof garden?” Hino muttered beneath his breath. “We got in here,” Fukuda whispered. “Even easier for them.” Kaneshiro scowled and said, “In any case, they’re dogs. If they see us they’ll bark.” Any sudden barking, and the Koryos would surely come to investigate. The dogs seemed to be tearing meat from something on the ground. Among the small buildings was a seafood restaurant with a fish tank. Maybe it wasn’t so strange that stray dogs should find their way here to feast on the dead fish or whatever.
Fukuda suggested they go back and use the emergency stairway, but Hino shook his head. “Too dangerous. That stairwell’s right next to the elevator hall.” Kaneshiro was peering at Tateno. “Can you kill them with?…” Tateno tilted his head, gauging the distance, and said it was difficult because of the building right behind the dogs. “I’ll give it a shot, though,” he told him. Near the shrine in Meinohama where he collected insects, Shinohara had seen Tateno throw his boomerangs a number of times. When somebody used one in movies or manga, it would cut off the target’s head or arm and come right back to the thrower, who would catch it in his bare hand. But Tateno had assured him that this was impossible: to try to catch a razor-sharp blade that was spinning so fast as to be a blur would be suicidal. The idea was to have the boomerang return and stick in the ground in front of you. Tateno took the L-shaped leather case from his daypack and extracted a bundle of boomerangs with blades about twenty centimeters long. “They could ricochet off the gravel,” he whispered, “so I’ll bring them back to this bush. You’d better go back down the steps.”
Kaneshiro and Fukuda exchanged a doubtful glance, but when Shinohara mentioned that the blades were coated with centipede poison, they meekly retreated into the stairwell. Tateno selected two boomerangs, tested the feel of their grips, and removed the plastic wrapping from their blades. The grip ends had little grooves, and Tateno had spent hours winding them tightly with string. Each was slightly different from the other, and apparently he chose his weapons in a given situation instinctively, by feel. He licked a finger and held it up to test the wind, then rose to a crouch with the two boomerangs in his left hand and crept behind the azaleas. Shinohara was thinking it must be hard to home in on a target in such dim light, when Tateno suddenly stood up and made two successive slicing motions with his right forearm and wrist. There was a soft whoosh, and then another. “Did he throw them?” whispered Hino. Kaneshiro said, “Where’d they go?” Just then one of the blades glinted as it swept above the surface of the pond. It didn’t look L-shaped but circular. The first boomerang passed about ten centimeters over the dogs’ heads and then swung upwards. Fukuda shook his head and said, “Missed.” Hearing the first one pass above them, the dogs reflexively looked up, and the moment they raised their heads the second one skimmed beneath their jaws.
One after the other, the boomerangs banked in front of the building and headed back this way in a pair of pretty arcs, finally embedding themselves in the azaleas in front of Tateno. Both dogs squealed briefly and made as if to scratch at their throats with their hind legs but then collapsed like unstrung puppets. Tateno carefully extracted the boomerangs from the bushes, where they had sheared through several large branches. There was no blood on the blades. Tateno wiped them down, quickly wrapped them in plastic, and put them back in the leather case. When Kaneshiro asked if the dogs’ throats had been slit right through, Tateno just said, “The poison got ’em.”
They crept across the garden in the shadow of the bushes and trees, then through the seafood restaurant to a corridor that led to the hotel tower. Guest rooms on the middle and upper floors overlooked the garden, so they hadn’t dawdled to inspect the dead dogs, but there didn’t seem to be any blood where they lay. Tateno said that if the cut was clean enough, sometimes there was very little bleeding. “If not for the poison, I’d have had to cut their heads off, or stick the blades in their hearts, to make sure they died.”
Fukuda wondered aloud if it was all right to leave the carcasses lying there. Kaneshiro said the Koryos would just think the dogs had eaten something bad, and Hino smiled and said, “What if they ate the dogs? Would they die?” Shinohara said, no, they wouldn’t, though it might give them the runs. He was pleased with his blend of star anise, Rohdea japonica, and centipede. Judging from the way the dogs had dropped, it was clear that the poison had worked directly on the heart. Kaneshiro asked Tateno if he’d thrown the first one too high on purpose, so the dogs would look up, at which he just smiled very slightly and said, “Secret.” He wasn’t excited or puffed up at having brought down his target but casual and matter-of-fact. Like a carpenter who’d just repaired a friend’s bookshelf, Shinohara thought.
Fluorescent lights illuminated the elevator hall on the sixth floor of the tower. Kaneshiro and Fukuda checked it out, and once they were sure no one was in there, they signaled for the others to come. The four elevator shafts were in the center of the ship-shaped tower.The rooms on the “port” side of them were in the Japanese style, with fancy names rather than numbers—Cloud Grass, Willow Flower, Fragrance of May, and so on—and across from Crimson Camellia and Green Destiny was a door marked PRIVATE.
This was unlocked, and beyond it was a room-service corridor, with shelves of tableware, a staff room, a storage area for cleaning equipment, shelves of toothpaste and razors and other amenities, four more elevators for service or emergency use, and an office. Farther on was another door that said AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, behind which was a space lined with electric switchboards. Hino identified it as the electrical room and shut the door. They continued another twenty or thirty meters along the narrow corridor, between pipes and valves, until they came to a door with EMERGENCY GENERATOR on it, opposite which was yet another door, a gray one. A low rumbling emanated from behind it, and the concrete floor beneath them vibrated noticeably. There was no lock on the door, and Hino turned the handle and pulled it open.
It was cold inside. The room was deep and wide and filled with rows of gigantic, unfamiliar machines. They all looked the same to Shinohara, but Hino studied each of them and the control panel on one of the pillars, saying, “So that’s the boiler… This is the air-conditioning unit,” and so on, then stood in front of one machine about the size of a shipping container. “This is it,” he said, and began preparing his equipment. The ventilator looked less like a machine than a prefab house made of thin sheet metal. There was a cylindrical fan housing in front, a big box of the same sheet metal at the back, and stacked in between were dozens of metal meshwork plates. Two square ducts protruded from beside the fan and one more from the big box behind it, and all were wrapped in silvery insulation. Hino laid his tools on the stainless-steel frame that lined the machine’s base, then stepped up and began stripping insulation from the duct in the rear. He pried out each staple connecting the seams and gently removed the silver, cottony material, revealing the bare duct, which was big enough to have accommodated several bodies side by side.
Hino attached the hoses to the acetylene and oxygen tanks, hooked them up to the torch, and told Shinohara to be ready with the insects. He wanted to cover the hole up again as soon as the bugs were released inside. Apparently if the fan’s output decreased for an extended period, the machinery would, for safety reasons, automatically shut down. Shinohara and Tateno opened the two large backpacks and with the help of Kaneshiro and Fukuda took out the vinyl sacks of flies, crickets, springtails, and camel spiders and the flat Tupperware containers filled with centipedes. “Wow,” Kaneshiro muttered, turning his face aside as he lifted one of the sacks of flies. Into each long, narrow bag, the capacity of which was roughly a liter, Shinohara had put about ten thousand flies—close to the maximum number for that amount of air. The flies and crickets and springtails surged thickly against the inner walls of the sacks, looking almost like a milky liquid. Hino opened the two valves on the tanks and checked the numbers on the gas regulator. With the torch in his right hand, he called Shinohara over and pointed at a seam on the air duct. “I’ll cut out a square from this seam down. As soon as I pry it open, bung in the bugs.”
Hino continued to mutter as if to himself as he pulled out the YOTCHAN’S PUB lighter and ignited the torch: “With galvanized sheet iron, it’s hard to get the flame right, so that it doesn’t melt and stick back together.” He turned the valve on the torch to transform the flame into a narrow blue stream, the tip of which he positioned diagonally against the metal, cutting through it as if it were paper. It took only a few seconds to cut three sides of the square. He then inserted a screwdriver into the uppermost gap and pried open a strip about the size of a sports tabloid. A low rumbling issued from the hole, inside which Shinohara placed one end of the first vinyl sack. He slit the end open with a box cutter and whispered, “Bon voyage.” The flies billowed out in a cloud, like a giant dandelion disintegrating in the wind, and disappeared inside the duct.
There wasn’t so much as a draft or breeze in the artificial jungle. Tateno had folded the green wedding dress into a small bundle, which he was now tying with string. Shinohara asked him what he was going to do with it, and Tateno said that after sleeping with the thing all this time he’d become attached to it and thought he’d use it for naps during the LSC-setting operation. “A whole day we’ve spent here,” Shinohara said, looking up at the glass ceiling. If the hotel came down, this structure would be the first to be crushed. Not even a trace would be left of all these plants. If only he could use a place like this as a vivarium for his dart frogs—he’d had this thought any number of times during the past twenty-four hours. With this much space, he could recreate morning mists and evening squalls. He could spread moss and fallen leaves and make a system of circulating creeks. He could stock the place with small animals and birds, and maybe even a few large reptiles. In the abundant puddles and pools, the frogs would lay their eggs and carry their young around on their backs between the garish flowers, to bathe in the wells of neoregelias and tillandsias and other bromeliads.
But he couldn’t help feeling that there was something unsound about even this vision of his, and in the end he always came back to thinking that this artificial jungle too needed to be destroyed. Hanging from the semicircular glass wall was a neon sign saying CAFE LUGGNAGG. The whole thing was meant to be a representation of some fictional South Pacific island paradise, a superficially reconstructed scene to give visitors a “tropical experience.” Shinohara’s actual vivarium, though much smaller than this, represented an effort to recreate the tropics from the inside out, so to speak, in that he gave priority to making conditions ideal for the raising and breeding of his frogs. This place, like so much in this world, was about faking it. Before coming to Fukuoka, everyone he’d ever met had been faking something, pretending to be something other than what they were. There were prototypes for the warm, loving family; the good, upstanding citizen; the fulfilled, happy life—and people tried to conform to those types, to fit themselves into those molds.
“Shall we?” he said, and they headed first for the lobby. Before beginning operations on the fifth floor, Takeguchi wanted to make sure that the noise they’d be making couldn’t be heard from there. When attaching the LSCs to the columns, you needed to leave a precisely gauged gap, which was referred to as the stand-off, in order to maximize the metal jet’s cutting power. For thirty-millimeter-thick steel frames, the ideal stand-off was 2.5 centimeters. Takeguchi and Fukuda had brought hundreds of matchbox-size blocks of styrofoam to attach to the columns and serve as platforms for the LSCs. The columns were covered with cloth or marble or wood veneers that had to be removed in order to judge the stand-off correctly. Hino was in charge of cutting through the coverings, but he would need to use electric tools, which would produce noise and vibrations. They had to know if this work on the fifth floor would be detectable below.
The corridor leading directly to the lobby from the artificial jungle was blocked by fire shutters. Shinohara and Tateno walked back to the end of the shopping arcade and crossed through the office behind the front desk out into the lobby. The Koryos had evacuated the fourth floor that morning and locked all the entrances and exits, stopped the elevators, and closed the fire shutters. The shutters had been lowered on the entrance as well, and a powerful smell of fumigants was in the air. “Amazing that all the flies are gone already,” Tateno said as they walked across the empty lobby. After sending the insects through the air ducts into the large banquet room on the third floor, Shinohara had released the remaining hundred thousand or so flies directly on the fourth, fifth, and sixth floors.
Most of the centipedes had gone into the banquet room, and after saving one containerful for emergency use, he’d scattered the rest in the fourth-floor lobby. These the Koryos seemed to have got rid of, but Shinohara had also prepared a quantity of powdered medium which he’d injected into the third-floor air ducts along with the flies. It hadn’t been scientifically proven, but according to Shinohara’s experience, flies tended to seek out and stick to the medium in which they were hatched and raised. Whenever he messed up and accidentally let a large number of flies escape, he would put the medium they’d been hatched in outside in the trash, and the next thing he knew they’d be gone. He was sure that the flies released on the higher floors would make their way down to the third. “You think they get homesick for where they were born?” Tateno asked him. He said he didn’t know, but that he’d seen them distinguish between their own medium and another batch made of exactly the same ingredients.
The cellphone vibrated in his pocket. It was Takeguchi, asking him to go and stand in the men’s room next to the express elevator. He made his way to the guest tower in the darkness. His eyes had become accustomed to the dim light from the exit signs, but no light at all reached inside the restroom. He switched on his penlight and reported to Takeguchi that he was in. “If you face the wall, you should see the bulge of a column in the right-hand corner. I’m going to cut through the covering on that column up here for about three seconds. Let me know how much you can hear or feel down there.” A moment later there was a sound like a rain shower issuing from the ceiling above. Shinohara asked him to do it again and put his hand on the column. He heard the same faint noise and felt a slight vibration. “Well?” Takeguchi said. “It’s all right,” Shinohara told him. The Koryos were in the first-floor banquet hall now, and that had a two-story-high ceiling. There was little chance of their noticing anything.
“Good,” Takeguchi said. “Come on up.” The staticky sound of the electric cutter started up again. The operation had begun. Takeguchi had been laying out the wires to connect the LSCs since earlier that day, and that part of the work was now completed. Eleven more hours, Shinohara thought as he hurried across the lobby.
10
TATTLETALE
April 11, 2011
ONOE CHIKAKO removed the additive-free waffle from the oven, poured some Japanese lotus honey over it, and put it on the table along with a few organic cherry tomatoes, fresh orange juice, and some Koiwai pasteurized milk. She was determined to feed her kids the healthiest food money could buy. Her daughter, Risako, had already eaten and left for school. It was apparently her turn to look after the school rabbit, so she’d had to leave early. Risako had just started her second year of elementary at Nishijin municipal, although ideally Chikako would have sent her to a private school. Nishijin was one of the best, but the standard of municipal education in Fukuoka had been steadily declining, and there was always the bullying problem, although it wasn’t as bad here as in Tokyo and Osaka. Her hope was that in a few years she’d be able to send Risako to a private middle school for gifted kids.
Her son, Kenta, was pointing at the TV screen and saying, “Boats! Mommy, look, boats!” It was the NHK morning news. A nervous newscaster was announcing that the North Korean fleet had reached the border of the exclusive economic zone between Japan and Korea, and was now passing to the west of Takeshima, proceeding southwards. The South Koreans hadn’t dispatched any of their navy and apparently had no intention of using armed force to stop the fleet from heading for Japan, and the US forces in Korea had issued a statement to similar effect. The screen switched to a shot of Japanese coastguard and naval vessels: sleek gray things with gleaming paintwork and names like Chikuzen, Kunisaki, Genkai, Hayanami, Ariake, Kirisame, and Inazuma visible on their hulls. Compared to these ships, the patched-up North Korean fleet looked more like a flotilla of refugee boats. Some of them were red with rust or listing heavily as they sailed. They were all being used as troopships, with some of the larger ones carrying several thousand men, many sitting on the decks huddled against the wind, now and then glancing up impassively at an NHK helicopter filming them. They would reach Japanese territorial waters in about four hours, the news anchor solemnly reported.
