The Last Train

Chapter 2

Chapter 2Hiroshi Shimizu’s cell phone went off as he stepped out of the elevator onto the open-air walkway outside his apartment building. He let it buzz in his raincoat pocket as he twirled his umbrella to spin off the rain. He stopped and looked over the city. No matter how late he worked this view over Tokyo always made him feel, for a minute, that another day was over.

And some of the night. It was just past two. The phone stopped buzzing, but felt heavy in his pocket. The irritating mosquito-buzz sound was one more thing he needed to change.

His building was eight stories high and sat on a hill whose steep slope was tiring to climb at the end of a long day. In the morning, the angle seemed to rush him downhill toward work faster than he wanted. From below, the city looked gray on gray with the heavy rain, but once he was eight floors up, the nightscape of Tokyo unveiled itself like a glistening dream. All the way to the horizon, the city’s lights flickered white and orange and yellow beneath the grey shroud of the sky.

The nameplate on his thick metal door needed changing, too. The clunk of the deadbolt and the creak of rusted hinges welcomed him home. Inside the door, he toed off his shoes in the genkan entryway: an in-between space crowded with still-damp shoes, broken umbrellas and used insoles. He pulled the newspapers, three days’ worth, out of the metal door slot and slipped them onto the recycle pile. Here and there on the tile, dark spots of mold sprang up, feeding on the dust and humidity.

The phone buzzed again.

Requests from overseas detective bureaus for more information about his reports and cases often came in at night from other time zones. As the de facto liaison between the Tokyo police department and their overseas counterparts, he had to answer. Officially, all he was supposed to do was investigate white-collar crime inside Tokyo, but he ended up working with other countries’ police departments more often than not. Crime leapt over boundaries with ease.

Hiroshi gave in and answered. The call was not from overseas, but from Takamatsu who called him as drinking companion and a friendly ear more often than Hiroshi cared for. Takamatsu was lead detective in homicide, which was officially Hiroshi’s division. They had nowhere else to put him. Takamatsu was his senpai and mentor, and his connection to the rest of the department.

“Let’s get a drink another night. I’m tired,” Hiroshi said.

“I need your English,” Takamatsu said. “Finally, something for you to do.”

“You picked up some foreigner?”

“Foreign, yes, but hard to pick up.”

“What?”

“Tamachi station. Drink after. You’ll need it. This one’s messy.”

“Messy English?” Hiroshi asked, but Takamatsu hung up.

Something in Takamatsu’s voice told him this was more than an excuse for drinking.

Hiroshi draped his wet raincoat over the hall door, deciding whether to ignore Takamatsu’s request and get some sleep or go as he knew he should. Officially, he wasn’t required to do anything except office work, but Takamatsu kept dragging him to crime scenes and on-site interviews.

Hiroshi had been lucky to land a job where he could use his English and skip most meetings, so he felt obligated to help Takamatsu when asked. Almost always, helping him out just meant joining Takamatsu for a drink. Tokyo’s work culture demanded drinking and talking outside normal working hours and working in homicide doubled those demands.

In the living room, a blanket was draped over the sofa. Pizza boxes lay scattered on the coffee table and the kitchen tables. An unreturned sushi delivery tray on the sideboard needed rinsing. His stereo was still on, the blue light glowing on the half-empty bookshelf.

In front of the bookshelf were stacks of ABC International Movers boxes. The boxes flopped open, exposing women’s clothes on hangers, a hair dryer, Japanese-English/English-Japanese dictionaries. Two empty rolls of packing tape rested on top. He’d forgotten, again, to get more.

On top of one of the boxes rested a photo of him and Linda—his former fiancé—posed together by the Charles River in Boston. They were both dressed in T-shirts and jeans. The well-washed cotton pulled at his broad shoulders and draped her full bosom, their faces smiling like teenagers surprised to find themselves in their 20s. Her big smile dimpled her cheeks and her blond hair hung loose.

In another photo, framed, he and Linda sat on a moss-covered rock in the garden of a Japanese onsen hot springs hotel. She smiled self-consciously in a wisteria-patterned yukata robe with bright green obi circling her waist. Next to her in a dragon-and-cloud pattern with a dark brown obi, Hiroshi looked like a samurai, square-jawed and serious, his hair hanging long and thick.

He set the photos back in the box, Boston, Tokyo—both lives equally impossible—and dropped his hand into a tangle of kimonos. Linda loved all the black silk with small designs of white or gold forming chrysanthemums, peonies, waves or winding streams. Understated elegance fascinated her after they moved to Tokyo, and she came home with a discreet purchase every other day: kimonos, wood carvings, ceramic cups. But perhaps it was all too understated.

He ruffled the kimonos in the boxes, and flipped over the ugly cardboard top. He was through with women for a while. It was a feeling he’d never had before. He had always been running after them, bored when they liked him, but finally happy to settle in with Linda. Then she gave up on him. Or on Japan, he wasn’t sure. Maybe he didn’t know how to make the best things in his life last. The job as financial investigator with the homicide branch so far had lasted longer than anything else.

Taking care of white collar crime impressed no one he ever mentioned it to, since almost no one understood it except the criminals themselves. Blackmail, credit card theft, identity scams, none of it was sexy. Or so Linda said.

He pulled his coat back on, and at the genkan, shoehorned on dry running shoes, unused since Linda left. He grabbed the umbrella with the fewest broken ribs and let the heavy metal door clang shut behind him, dropping the deadbolt with his key.

The elevator clanged open and carried him downstairs.

At the closest intersection, it took time to find a taxi. Buses and trains were no longer running, so taxis were the only way around. He stood in the rain waiting patiently for one to pass by.

Maybe he should give up the detective job and get on a plane to Boston to try working things out with Linda there. It wasn’t much of a job, tracking down investment scams, or much of a life drinking with Takamatsu, and standing in the rain to do it.

Everything was a trap if you looked at it closely—the boxes, framed photos, the apartment, his office. Sleeping in the office, on the sofa or waking up to take calls at all hours was like college dorm life, with the feeling that everything in life was still coming and nothing at all was yet settled.