Read Online After Dark by Haruki Murakami - Free Book Online Page B

snaps at them: “Hey, gimme a break, will ya? You’re supposed to be talking about
this
stuff. You can yap about that shit somewhere else.”
    Komugi: “Sorry.”
    Kaoru reverses the video to 10:52 and sets it to play frame by frame, pausing it at one point and enlarging the man’s image in stages. Then she prints the image, producing a fairly good-size color photograph of the man’s face.
    Komugi: “Fantastic!”
    Korogi: “Wow! Look what you can do! Like
Blade Runner
!”
    Komugi: “I guess it’s handy, but the world’s a pretty scary place now if you stop and think about it. You can’t just walk into a love ho any time you feel like it.”
    Kaoru: “So you guys better not do anything bad when you go out. You never know when there’s a camera watching these days.”
    Komugi: “The walls have ears—and digital cameras.”
    Korogi: “Yeah, you gotta watch what you’re doing.”
    Kaoru makes five prints in all. Each woman studies the man’s face.
    Kaoru: “The enlargement is grainy, but you can pretty much tell what he looks like, right?”
    Komugi: “I’d definitely recognize him on the street.”
    Kaoru twists her neck, cracking and popping the bones, as she sits there, thinking. Finally, an idea comes to her: “Did either of you guys use this office phone after I went out?”
    Both women shake their heads.
    Komugi: “Not me.”
    Korogi: “Or me.”
    Kaoru: “Which means nobody dialed any numbers after the Chinese girl used the phone?”
    Komugi: “Never touched it.”
    Korogi: “Not a finger.”
    Kaoru picks up the receiver, takes a breath, and hits the redial button.
    After two rings, a man picks up the other phone and rattles off something in Chinese.
    Kaoru says, “Hello, I’m calling from the Hotel Alphaville. You know: a guest of ours beat up one of your girls around eleven o’clock? Well, we’ve got the guy’s photo. From the security camera. I thought you might want one.”
    A few moments of silence follow. Then the man says in Japanese, “Wait a minute.”
    “I’ll wait,” says Kaoru. “Till I turn blue.”
    Some kind of discussion goes on at the other end. Ear on the receiver, Kaoru twiddles a ballpoint pen between her fingers. Komugi belts out a song using the tip of her broomstick as her mike: “The snow is fa-a-a-a-lling…But where are yo-o-o-o-o-u?…I’ll go on wa-a-a-a-iting…Till I turn blu-u-u-u-e…”
    The man comes back to the telephone. “You got the picture there now?”
    “Hot off the press,” says Kaoru.
    “How’d you get this number?”
    “They put all kinds of convenient features into these modern gizmos.”
    A few more seconds of silence follow. The man says, “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
    “I’ll be at the front door.”
    The connection is cut. Kaoru frowns and hangs up. Again she pops the bones in her thick neck. The room falls silent.
    Komugi speaks hesitantly. “Umm…Kaoru?”
    “What?”
    “Are you really gonna give those guys the picture?”
    “You heard what I said before: I’m not gonna let that bastard get away with beating up an innocent girl. And it pisses me off he skipped out on his hotel bill. Plus, look at this pasty-faced salaryman son-of-a-bitch: I can’t stand him.”
    Komugi: “Yeah, but if they find him, they might hang a rock on him and toss him into Tokyo Bay. If you got mixed up in something like that, there’d be hell to pay.”
    Kaoru is still frowning. “Nah, they’re not gonna kill him. The police don’t give a shit when those Chinese guys kill each other, but it’s a different story when they start bumping off respectable Japanese. That’s when the trouble starts. Nah, they’ll just grab him and teach him a lesson, and maybe cut off an ear.”
    Komugi: “Ow!”
    Korogi: “Kinda like van Gogh.”
    Komugi: “But really, Kaoru, d’you think they can find the guy with just a photo to go on? I mean, it’s a big town!”
    Kaoru: “Yeah, but once those guys make up their minds, they never let go.