John Rain 08: Graveyard of Memories (11 page)

I shook off the feeling and walked to the back, where the tubs were located. There were four of them, forming an L along two walls: the main tub, with a cold plunge pool next to it, comprising the long end of the L; and two mineral baths, with signs advertising their benefits for muscle aches and a variety of skin conditions, forming the short end. The main bath was at the base of the L, between the cold pool and the mineral tubs, and was easily twice the size of the other three combined.

I went through another sliding door and found myself in an enclosed outdoor garden with another tub at the center, this one done in natural stone in keeping with the setting. A
ronteburo
, unusual for a
sentō
, and, as I’d suspected, probably part of the appeal for people from outside the neighborhood. For the moment, the
ronteburo
was empty, but overall, the place was pretty crowded. So while a steady flow of strangers would allow me to spend some time here to reconnoiter, the same crowds would pose a significant challenge when it came time to act. But one thing at a time.

I went back inside. Japanese bathing etiquette always involves extensive, even elaborate soaping and scrubbing and rinsing before entering the tub, but I went at it even beyond the already strict requirements, wanting to extend my stay as long as I could without becoming conspicuous. While I painstakingly went over every inch of my body with the soapy washcloth, I considered. I thought there was at least a decent chance I could acquire Ozawa here. If so, it wouldn’t be hard to head out shortly before he did, and come up from behind as he headed home. But how was I going to make something like that look natural? I considered a judo strangle, but immediately rejected it. My strangles were pretty good, but I knew I had nowhere near the finesse to put in a fatal one and leave no visible damage to the throat.

I scrubbed a second time, then sluiced the water off myself with a bucket, refilling the bucket with increasingly scalding water each time. My father had taught me the trick to easing into the molten waters of the
sentō
that very first time he’d taken me, and I’d never forgotten. You can’t wash with tepid water and then get right into the bath, he’d explained—the trick is to increase the temperature of the wash water until you can barely stand it. At that point, your body is acclimated, and you can get right into the bath. I did as he had taught me, and when I was done, my skin sunburn-red, I stood, walked over, and eased into the steaming waters of the large hot bath.

Within minutes, my muscles had been reduced to jelly by the pulverizing heat. As the tension flowed out of my body, I felt the anxiety about how to handle Ozawa dissipating from my mind. I’ve always loved the
sentō
, and this one was beautiful. I forgot about Ozawa for the moment and let myself be mindful, as Miyamoto had advised with regard to the drinking of tea. This was an old and noble building, used for a ritual that went back millennia, and I was here and I was connected to all of it, and that was good. That was enough.

A wrinkled
oyaji
walked slowly over, gripped the railing with fingers gnarled from arthritis, and eased himself into one of the mineral baths. I figured the minerals must help with the arthritis. I thought if I were lucky, I might get that old someday. But I didn’t really expect it. I watched as a few clusters of people arrived and departed. No Ozawa.

When I had soaked for as long as I could stand and was about to hit the plunge pool to cool down, a man came in. I squinted through the steam. Ozawa? He’d been clothed in all the file photos, obviously, and it was throwing me to try to make the match with him naked. But there—the limp from that war injury. He came closer, pulled up a stool, and sat in front of one of the spigots. His back was to me but I could see him clearly in the mirror he was facing. It was him.

I hit the plunge pool, the shock of cold finishing off what the sight of Ozawa had already done to my reverie. Then I sat on the side for a few moments, cooling down, watching unobtrusively. A few people greeted Ozawa, and he exchanged brief pleasantries here and there, but this area was for serious bathing. Most real conversation would take place on the couches in the waiting area outside.

When he was done washing, Ozawa stood with some effort and headed over to the baths. The limp was quite pronounced. I watched as, eschewing the main bath, he eased himself into the available mineral tub. I supposed that, like the arthritic
oyaji
, Ozawa found the superheated mineral water eased the discomfort of his wartime injury.

I paused, that phrase
mineral water
repeating itself in my mind for no good reason. Unlike the other two baths, the mineral baths were one-person affairs, each not much more than a large tub. They were enclosed. They were small. And of course, they were filled with minerals. Salt, mostly. So salt water.

Salt water, which is especially conductive of electricity.

I was suddenly excited, and had to concentrate on maintaining my casual posture. Could I do this? Would it work?

The
oyaji
pulled himself up and went to rinse off. I got back into the hot bath. This time, I barely felt it. I waited and watched unobtrusively. After about ten minutes, Ozawa leaned forward, gripped the faucet of the tub, and pulled himself out.

The way he’d gripped that faucet…was that a habit? Things were more primitive in those days, ergonomics not yet a science, and the baths at Daikoku-yu were devoid of railings and handholds and steps. For anyone physically challenged—like the
oyaji
, like Ozawa—the most natural handhold to use when it was time to leave the bath was the faucet.

The metal faucet. The
grounded
metal faucet.

I got out of the bath again, letting one hand dip unobtrusively into the mineral bath on the way. I tasted a finger. Salty, as I had hoped. In the corner of the room, immediately to the left of the mineral-water baths and sharing a common wall with them, there was a door marked
SERVICE
. To its left, along the adjoining wall, was a spigot and stool—the last washing station along a row of ten. If I could get that station, I’d be not much more than an arm’s length from the closer of the two mineral baths. Unless someone was at the station right next to me, I thought I might have the necessary freedom of movement to carry out what I was beginning to see in my imagination.

The problem was, I saw no electrical outlets. This wasn’t completely surprising. Electrical codes were a lot less stringent in those days, and items such as ground fault circuit interrupters were not at all widespread. It would be dangerous to have an outlet in close proximity to the baths—it might encourage an idiot to use a radio, or a hair dryer, or whatever—something electrical that could accidentally wind up in the water. But there would be an outlet somewhere, and I had a feeling that service closet would be the place. I’d have to check a fuse box, too, of course, and ensure one way or another that any overcurrent protection would be inadequate. But that was a distinctly minor challenge. The main thing was, if I did things right, there would be no marks, no evidence, no signs of foul play. Just a man who, whether from the heat or from exhaustion or from some other nebulous thing, had lost consciousness and slipped peacefully beneath the water. An arrhythmia, maybe. Maybe an embolism. Maybe the random act of a cruel and capricious God. No way to know, really, and so there would be no investigation, only sympathy and sadness and speculation, and even these, I expected, would be short-lived.

The most immediate thing I needed was a way to look the place over, set things up, and do a dry run. It wouldn’t do to drop something in the tub only to have—
oops
—a circuit breaker kick in and kill all the lights. I had to come back, when everyone else was gone.

I rinsed off, dried myself, changed in the locker room, and headed out. Ozawa was already gone. That was all right. The way he’d made a beeline for that mineral tub, I knew he was a regular. He’d be back. And I’d be ready for him.

I headed out, pausing while I knelt and tied my shoes to examine the lock on the front door. It didn’t look like much—this was a bathhouse, not a bank, after all—but it didn’t look like the toy locks they had on the clothes lockers, either. I could force the door, I was sure, but that would be noticed. I realized I didn’t know anything about picking locks. And that I was going to have to learn. Fast.

I inhaled a bowl of
tachigui
ramen and a beer near the station, plus about a liter of water to replace what I’d lost in the
sentō
. It had been a long day, and on top of being tired, I felt half drugged from the excessive time I’d spent soaking in the boiling tub while waiting for Ozawa. But I really wanted to get started on my crash course in lock-picking. I wondered where I might find someone to teach me. It would have to be someone skilled, obviously, while also not unduly concerned about bonding requirements and the other such niceties governing the lock-smithing trade. Which implied…someone who Japanese society didn’t fully accept, and who held himself apart from that society in turn. As I did. My mind immediately flashed on Shin Ōkubo, Tokyo’s Koreatown. Yes, that felt right.

I didn’t feel like riding all the way across Tokyo yet again that day. But what difference would it make? Shin Ōkubo had plenty of love hotels; nearby Shinjuku, even more. I could try to find the right person and then just spend the night in the area. It wasn’t as though I had a fixed address to return to.

I shook my head ruefully. The problem wasn’t riding all the way back to the western side of the city. The problem was, where I really wanted to spend the night was here, in the east. Specifically, in Uguisudani. I wanted to go back to the Hotel Apex and see the girl who worked there again. Which was idiotic, given the amount I already had on my plate, but still.

Well, I supposed I could just head over, look for the kind of guy I needed, then head back. It wasn’t really so far, and rush hour was already long since done, so it wasn’t as though I was going to hit traffic, neither on the way out nor especially coming back. Sure, I was on the run and mixed up in murder, but what did any of that have to do with maybe getting to know a girl a little better?

I was still young, of course. I didn’t yet understand just how dangerous a rationalization could be.

chapter
twelve

I
bombed west on Thanatos, cruising along one of the elevated highways, the lights blurring past me, the cooling evening air glorious after the pummeling heat of the
sentō
. It took me less than a half hour to reach JR Shin Ōkubo Station, where I parked and started strolling east, along Ōkubo-dōri, the main thoroughfare. Once away from the blinding lights and giddy electronic music of the
pachinko
parlors surrounding the station, it didn’t just feel like I was in a different section of Tokyo—it felt like I was in a different city entirely. The buildings lining the street were ramshackle, with an insane variety of tiny storefront restaurants serving
bolgogi
and
ogokbap
and every kind of kimchi, all of it advertised by laminated photographs with Korean and Japanese captions and by hawkers calling out in a mix of both languages to passersby from the sidewalk. The street itself felt narrow relative to the density of stores and restaurants, offering only one lane in each direction, and the crowded sidewalks would have been dim if there hadn’t been so much indirect light spilling out of the densely clustered shops. There were karaoke joints and massage parlors; counterfeit handbag and perfume purveyors; all-night discount stores selling everything imaginable and all for under a hundred yen. I passed through air pockets perfumed by grilled meat, spiced vegetables, sweet pastries; tobacco and beer and sweat. But the kind of person I was looking for wouldn’t have a shop on the main street. The rents would be too high there, and his trade wouldn’t require the
shōtengai
foot traffic. His customers would know where he was located, and they would come to him.

A kilometer or so from the station, the crowds began to thin. As packed restaurants gave way to shuttered shops, the sidewalks grew dimmer; the streets, quieter; the atmosphere, for my purposes, more promising.

I turned onto a narrow street lit only by a stand of vending machines. The buildings on either side were mostly of wood, dried and darkened by decades of heat and humidity, their corrugated awnings jagged and torn, exposed bolts bleeding rust. A mad profusion of wires and pipes clung to the facades like the tentacles of some exotic alien parasite, garbage piled in plastic bags beneath the tangled tapestry. All the stores seemed closed. But there were a few dim lights glowing amid the overall gloom ahead, and I moved toward them.

The first place I reached was a tiny bar, filled with eight laughing customers. The second was a Korean noodle place, similarly small, similarly filled. The third was a shop advertising itself in Japanese—and presumably also in Korean, which I couldn’t read—as
Spaaki
, which in English would be Sparky. I thought perhaps this was a play on the English phrase
spare key
, and indeed the large image of a key on the bottom of the sign suggested I might have found the place I was looking for.

There was an old, emaciated man sitting at a table inside, a desk light on a swivel arm shining down before him and casting his face in shadow. His tee shirt sagged, and the white headband knotted around his temples and thick glasses perched on his nose made his head look too large for his body. A smoldering cigarette stub dangled from his lips like a growth. Several cooking knives were assembled in a row in front of him, and he was honing one of them with long, precise strokes across a grinding stone. There were clusters of electronics piled up all around—toasters, fans, a vacuum cleaner. This looked like my guy—a
benriya
, more recently known as a
nandemoya
, literally a “Mr. Anything,” a local jack-of-all-trades who residents could come to with any household thing they needed help with.