It was half past five in the morning and Kai Kurosaki had just finished painting his nails. He shouldn't even have been up. Should have been exhausted, trying to catch up on his sleep, but he wasn't even in bed and nor was Akihito. Neither of them tired easily.
"That girl," Kurosaki said as he examined the nails of his right hand, "has got to be the stupidest spy I have ever come across." He had nice hands; they were deceptively fragile looking and it always surprised people when they discovered his strength, not that any of them were really in any position to comment by that stage.
"What are we going to do to her?" Kurosaki asked. "Why'd you tell me to leave her face alone?"
There were two main ways in which prisoners with influential relatives tended to react to being detained. One was to do what Katsumi had done - keep it quiet and refuse to be drawn either way on the matter or even deny it in the hope that your captors will assume that you know nothing and nobody of importance and leave you alone. The other was to make a big thing of it in the hope that the family name will protect you, make those who have imprisoned you grant you concessions, maybe even make a deal and let you go. Both ways had their merits and their drawbacks. Eri had taken the second path; unfortunately that kind of tactic smacked of desperation and certainly didn't impress the secret police. They had, after all, seen it all countless times before.
Kurosaki laughed with him. "She's a total weirdo alright. Apparently some bureaucrat called Takasaka is incompetent, her father is some kind of superagent and Koji Nanjo is God." Kurosaki tended toward Akihito's view of Koji; that he was an arrogant bastard who shouldn't have anywhere near the amount of influence that he did. He sometimes wondered what it would be like to interrogate Koji Nanjo. He was sure he could make that man scream. "But why make an example of her in particular?"
***
A small room, sparsely furnished. Two, maybe three chairs and a metal table bolted to the floor, a single neon strip light spluttering and buzzing slightly. One high, narrow window, probably north-facing, letting in no light. A concrete floor. Walls painted an institutional green, flaking and peeling slightly in the damp atmosphere revealing cream-coloured paint of an equally institutional shade beneath. A heavy door, opening outwards. Cold, impersonal, more than a little forbidding. The things Katsumi found himself remembering most strongly were the slightly damp smell, the coldness of the floor. A collection of cobwebs in one corner of the ceiling he'd found himself staring fixedly at (anything to avoid meeting someone else's eyes or closing his own, which would have looked, or so it seemed to him, like tacit surrender), the buzzing of the light which had irritated him.
He remembered cutting his forehead on something – or was it that an old wound was reopened? He had a suspicion it was the latter, he knew he'd had a cut there before which hadn't healed properly – and feeling blood running down his face and wishing he could wipe it off. Wanting to scream and at the same time not wanting to. Trying to mark time by counting. Trying to think of anything, of nothing. Don't cry until they leave you alone – don't scream, don't let them know that it hurts. They had all proved impossible. The dull ache in his bound wrists; they hadn't wanted him fighting back or struggling any more than was strictly necessary… probably because they hadn't wanted to risk getting any inexplicable cuts or bruises, not that their superiors would have cared anyway. Cramp in his neck – all this he remembered.
The worst, though, was what he remembered of the conversation, if you could call it that. Some of it had been patronising, some of it had been mocking, some of it had been frankly obscene, but it had all been offensive and intentionally so. The curse-words he'd almost expected and could have coped with because logically he knew he was neither a slut or a whore, though he had never imagined that it could hurt when someone called you pretty or that anybody could turn the word 'boy' into a term of abuse. But he'd learnt a lot in that room and hadn't wanted to know any of it.
Recently he'd had plenty of time to think. To do nothing but lie or sit still and gaze at the ceiling or out of the small window or at his hands, criss-crossed with scars – some old, some new – the nails bitten down to the quick and the cuticles torn and bloody, and struggle with the memories. For there was nothing else to do. He still couldn't remember verse seventeen of that old song. But he could remember what came after.
Yesterday one of the doctors had been to see him. Talking quietly and gently, the way you would to a frightened child, he'd told him why it was he'd lost some feeling in his left arm. You understand what this means, don't you, Katsumi? He sat up in bed now, looking at it as if it belonged to someone else. He couldn't say he really understood a word of what they'd said but it had been something about nerve endings and trauma and unspecified damage and physiotherapy. Physiotherapy: that was the worst. It hurt even to move his arm. Last time they'd changed the dressing on his shoulder he'd looked and tried not to show his shock. No wonder it hurt so bad to move it. But he'd been in pain, both physical and mental, for such a long time now, for years… what was a little more of both? He could cope…
Oh, sure he could. Right, Katsumi. If you can 'cope' why are you so screwed up? No need to bother trying to answer that one. Because you can't, can you?
He knew all about the kind of fun Akihito and Kurosaki had talked about so casually, he knew what frustrated, lonely men could do to people they considered their enemies, and it kept him awake at nights. From the age of nine to thirteen he'd suffered from insomnia, but had hoped he'd got over it. No such luck. They'd looked at him like he was less than human and there'd been nothing he could do about it.
You understand what this means, Katsumi?
He wanted to see Yoshiya, even if it was only for a minute. Katsumi didn't even know where the man was. He'd known, for over a month, precisely where Yoshiya was, which was normally very close to him, and to suddenly not know any more was hard for him. He wondered if all he'd ever been to him was a burden. Maybe he'd resented having to baby him. He shouldn't have cried in front of Yoshiya. He certainly shouldn't have told Yoshiya about what had happened, for all that it had helped, but not a lot, to talk about it. Why talk to Katsumi Shibuya when you didn't have to, when you could talk to somebody else? Someone less emotional, less anxious, someone with fewer problems. Someone who didn't cry in his sleep. Someone who was happy, mature and sane rather than a seventeen year old screw-up. No wonder Yoshiya hadn't wanted to stick around.
Where the hell was Yoshiya? Where the hell was anybody?
Never mind all that, Katsumi thought, and tried to force himself to calm, to think of something else, something nice. He sighed and bit his lip and stared out of the window at the landscape outside but found nothing to distract him. Not that there was much to see; what little scenery was visible was shrouded in snow, the sun weak as watercolour and partly hidden by thin clouds and the shattered buildings. There was, he knew, no warmth in that sun, not at this time of year. It wasn't even midwinter yet and already the cold was biting. So cold. He shivered and blinked back tears. Why was it that even though they'd repeatedly told him he was safe now he still couldn't sleep, couldn't concentrate, couldn't even begin to forget?
Five minutes later Yoshiya walked into the room to find Katsumi curled up on one side in his bed, crying softly into the pillow.
***
What, wondered Koji, am I thinking of, coming back here again?
Ultimately he'd had to take Izumi home. He didn't want to stay on the road forever. There had to be somewhere he could take the boy – somewhere he could put him where no one else could find him. If he'd wanted to do this by the book he'd just have let the men at the base take the boy and have him arrested. But that wasn't the way he wanted to play it. He'd taken Izumi so no one else could have him, so no one else could even see him. The only place he could think of where he could do that successfully for any length of time was, ironically enough, his home.
More to the point, Koji didn't know what he was doing in… well, if he was going to put it crudely, not jumping on the boy and screwing him the minute he had the chance, although... He'd found out very little about what Izumi had been doing in coming to his country in the first place, but had often found himself thinking back to their first meeting. He'd had two other people with him – probably brothers, they'd both looked pretty similar – two people he remembered only vaguely, only one of whom had been reacting to the situation at all normally. The other had just stood there and stared vacantly at nothing at all – and certainly not at Koji. The only thing Koji had noticed with any real certainty about him was how exhausted he'd looked, both physically and mentally. And he couldn't have been more than eighteen. Koji guessed he knew why that was, everyone knew what could happen to boys in prison, and it was Izumi's spirit that had attracted him. He didn't ever want to see Izumi looking as utterly defeated as that boy had been.
But at the same time, Koji wasn't used to sparing anyone's feelings. He'd never done so with any of his so-called girlfriends and saw no real reason to start doing so now.
Another part of him said that scaring Izumi would be one way to keep him under control, that he'd get used to what was happening. That Izumi was spirited enough that merely sleeping with him wouldn't break him. That if he spared Izumi now the shock when he finally made a move would be far greater. That he just plain didn't want to wait much longer before he slept with Izumi. So he wouldn't. He knew that much about himself at least.
***
Standing outside the base and watching the snow fall, Takasaka found himself wondering, why me? He didn't even know why it was he'd chosen to work as a spy any more, though he had a feeling it was probably through the misplaced patriotism of a young man. He'd been twenty-one when he'd left his own country. Too young to have made a choice like the one he had made, but he had refused to be told. Probably hadn't been told. There had been nobody around to tell him. He hadn't been conscripted, unlike those two boys he had helped back across the lines – the call-up age had been older then, when he was in his teens and early twenties. To Takasaka's mind, it was set far too young now. He'd been horrified when the older boy, Yoshiya (who was only barely in his twenties and didn't really seem old enough for war) had told him that Katsumi, his friend, the boy he'd shot, was seventeen years old and a conscript and that he'd been forced to drop out of school because of it; he knew there had been cases where boys as young as fifteen got call-up papers. By the time Takasaka had been the right age for conscription, by contrast, he'd been working for the government; a career which had guaranteed him exemption. Still, he'd wanted to do something… and he had done something.
He hadn't thought of himself as at all exceptional. Certainly he'd never thought himself lucky.
But for six years he'd been working in a hostile country living a dangerous double life. He'd been told from the beginning how hazardous the job was and how unlikely it was that he would survive it, but somehow he'd done it. Six years was a good length of time, when you were working as a spy. Six years with only one major mistake, sitting quiet through several false alarms and not managing to betray his own position through sheer nervousness, surviving the security crackdowns without so much as a suspicious glance in his direction when people he'd worked alongside and had known had nothing to do with spying were arrested and executed, without the secret police ever acting like they even knew of his existence, managing to escape the country without anyone asking what he was doing… he couldn't think of many other people who'd had a lucky streak like that.
He couldn't actually think of that many other people who'd even come back.
Takasaka was – had been – ideal spy material. He was quiet, discreet, efficient, unobtrusive. The kind of person who didn't even attract a second glance in the streets. One of many. He had no ties, no known relations, had come to the job after breaking up with a girlfriend whose name he could no longer remember and whose face he had only the vaguest recollections of. She had probably forgotten most of the things about him as quickly as he had forgotten her. He didn't remember his parents at all; the only thing Takasaka knew about them was their names and that they'd died when he was very young.
Nothing to hold him back. Nothing to tie him down.
Eri on the other hand… Eri had been far from ideal. Young, sexy, bubbly gregarious and stupid. Men stared at her as she walked to work. She had a boyfriend back home – it had finally been demonstrated to her that it was not a good idea to try and keep in touch with him. Her father was important, she still lived with her family. Eri was the kind of person who was normally gently dissuaded from taking on such a job, but this time Takasaka assumed her father had intervened.
What of Eri? Now that his own position was secure, he could begin to wonder about what had happened to her. The Secret Police, he knew that much, but what? He told himself there was nothing more he could have done for her and there was no way he could have got her out of the country as well as himself, but couldn't help but feel guilty. He was safe, but what of her? Whilst he was being trained, he had been told of the tactics of the Secret Police: he had gone through training exercises designed to simulate their interrogation techniques. One of the men who had trained him had advocated suicide over capture. After what he had found out of their methods, Takasaka had been inclined to agree with him.
And, on top of everything else, he would have to be the one to break the news of her capture. There was no hope of rescue for her. He'd been told that as well: it was standard practice. If a spy was captured, of course the government would deny all knowledge of them.
If someone wasn't prepared to deal with the consequences, then they were not allowed on active duty. End of story. Eri had known the risks – she'd had to. She'd had to.
But had she understood them?
***
Eri came round slowly. She hadn't known. She just hadn't thought. She'd had so many preconceptions about the job she was doing, the job she had chosen to do, and they'd all been so wrong, so completely wrong. She'd thought it would be glamorous and exciting, like something out of a thriller or a film. She'd thought she'd go to exotic places, mix with beautiful people, get flirted with by handsome young men who made Kunihide look pretty hopeless. She was a socialite where she had come from and had confidently expected to move in the same kind of circles in her chosen career. She had expected to find out secrets and plans through pillow talk and idle chatter. She hadn't expected it to be anything like the way it had turned out to be.
The reality had been far different. She'd ended up in a dingy flat working as a secretary, a job she had no real idea how to do. A boring job, made worse by having to stay behind late to rifle through desk drawers and look for official papers. She was not important enough to find out these things by sitting in on any meetings. She wasn't anyone's private secretary. The city she'd worked in was gloomy and drab, the war economy and patriotic zeal meant there were very few glamorous bars or restaurants to go to and those that were still in existence cost far too much for her to afford on her meagre wages. She'd had to rely on bureaucrats taking her out. At first she had been almost hopeful at this, but most of the men who flirted with her were middle-aged at best, married and seeking a discreet fling with a pretty girl. They never talked business with her, probably assuming that she wouldn't understand it.
The only men under thirty she had spoken to were that Takasaka, who hadn't looked at her like she was anything special, and Akihito Nanjo and his friend Kurosaki. And that had hardly been a friendly chat.
Eri sat up and looked round the room they had unceremoniously shoved her into. A cell like the one she'd been in before, but she had no way of telling if it was the same one or not. Shivering from the cold, she pulled the tattered, flimsy material of her pyjama jacket round her, and tried very hard not to cry. She had a feeling she'd been pretty cross with them at first. She hadn't wanted to answer any of Nanjo's questions… so Kurosaki had set about attempting to persuade her.
Kurosaki had a line he used in interrogations, just before he got started. It was basically a get-out clause. It ran something like "You're going to tell us what we want to know anyway, even if it's only to make me leave you alone, so why not do it now and save me a lot of time and trouble and you a lot of pain?" Eri had assumed he said it to be intimidating but she'd been wrong. He said it because he meant it.
There was nothing even remotely glamorous about this.
***
Dressed in a loose silk robe, Koji stood up, a cigarette burning in his hand. With his other hand he pulled his long hair from the collar of the robe where it had become trapped when he put it on. His darkened bedroom was illuminated only by the moonlight streaming through his windows, through which the night city could be seen, the light cast by the neon lights on the buildings and the streetlights which traced the patterns of the streets almost overpowered by the light of the moon. The moon was bright tonight. In two or three nights' time it would be full moon. There was no such thing as natural darkness in Koji's world and even if there had been that moon would have kept it from being properly dark, for all that the skies were black.
Turning away from the panorama his windows provided him with, which he had seen so many times that he couldn't find it in himself to think it any more than extremely dull anymore – he was jaded, totally jaded, and not even eighteen years old yet! – he gazed round the bedroom, eyes lighting on the huddled figure in his bed, and wondered what to do now.
Izumi hadn't liked him that much before – Koji had been smart enough to work that one out. He was prepared to bet that the boy hated him with a passion by now. He'd have hated himself if he'd been in Izumi's position, but there was no way their circumstances could have ever been reversed; it just wouldn't have happened. Koji was protected by his position and his name. Practically everyone on both sides had heard of the Nanjo family and of Koji himself. Izumi had not got this advantage. He was a captain and a young one at that, he had no name to speak of, he wasn't important enough in the military or in the social hierarchy to justify the expense of looking for him. After a while he'd just be 'missing, presumed dead', and that would probably be the last anyone from his own side heard of captain Takuto Izumi.
Oh, well. Koji shrugged, quickly pushing his doubts to the back of his mind. There were other things for him to worry about. Izumi may have been spirited but there wasn't a whole lot that he could really do about his current position, for all that he may have wanted to.
Koji, of course, had assumed that Izumi was asleep. He wasn't, for all that he was lying still and forcing himself to breathe as if he were sleeping, even though it was difficult. He wondered if there was any way to attack this Koji character and kill him or, if that proved impossible, kill himself. The only thing he could think of was the windows – it was a long way to fall – and they would probably be made of reinforced glass. There would be no easy way to open them and breaking them would be out of the question.
He couldn't have overpowered Koji anyway. Hadn't that just been proved to him? Koji was… Koji, basically. Not the kind of man who would let himself get overpowered by just anybody. Izumi was a trained soldier, he didn't think he was flattering himself too much by saying that he wasn't 'just anybody', but at the same time he still didn't think that in unarmed combat he could have bested Koji. Koji may have been a reluctant general but he was a general all the same and could hardly have been described as a pushover. Besides, Izumi wasn't suicidal. Yet. Still, if it came down to it he would have no compunction about killing Koji if there was any way he could get out alive. There had to be something he could do, he couldn't just give in.
Izumi knew he was a prisoner just as surely as Katsumi had been, for all that their circumstances were different. But he wasn't Katsumi. He could cope with this. He had to, if only because of his sense of pride. Kimie Mori had been right, he'd done far more difficult and dangerous things than the mission he was currently on (in spite of everything, Izumi still regarded himself as on a mission, even if it was a mission to get himself back safely) and therefore no matter what happened he could survive it, and he would survive it no matter what came next.
