Eriko remembered something that happened back when she was in middle school – the night she and Yukiho had found one of their classmates, abandoned, naked from the waist down.
She remembered the girl’s mother telling them that only her clothes had been removed – nothing else. Even they hadn’t believed her, but now that the same thing had happened to Eriko, she knew it was possible, just as she knew she would never be able to convince anyone else.
‘I hope you feel better soon. I’m here for you, whenever,’ said Yukiho. She held Eriko’s hand tighter.
‘Thanks, Yukiho, you’re the only friend I have.’
‘It’s OK. We’ll make it through this.’
The two girls sat quietly. The nightly news had come on TV and the newscaster’s voice echoed in the silent room.
‘… the victim – a businessman in the Tokyo area – said the money was taken out of his account without his knowledge. He only discovered the theft when he went to the bank to attempt to make a withdrawal, and discovered that instead of the two million yen he expected to find, the balance was zero. An inquiry by the bank found that the money had been withdrawn in seven separate transactions by ATM card at a branch of the Sankyo Bank in Fuchu, the last transaction taking place on April 22. Apparently, the victim had applied for a cash card from the bank, which he never used. The card was safely in his office desk. Police believe that someone forged a copy of the card and are investigating —’
Yukiho leaned over and flicked off the switch.
SIX
Tomohiko Sonomura glanced both ways to make sure no one was looking at him, drew a deep breath, and walked through the automatic doors.
He immediately felt as if his wig might slip and had to resist the urge to reach up and adjust it. Ryo had given him explicit instructions not to do so. The same went for his glasses. Drawing undue attention to either might give away his disguise.
There were two ATMs at the Sankyo Bank’s Tamatsukuri branch. One was currently occupied by a middle-aged woman in a baggy purple dress. She was taking a long time at it; perhaps she wasn’t used to the machine. Occasionally she would look around, searching in vain for a bank employee who might explain it to her, but the cashiers had already locked up for the day. After four it was just the machines.
Tomohiko worried that the plump lady might look to him for help, which would force him to call off the whole operation. This made him reluctant to approach the ATM next to her, but there were no other customers, and it would be even more suspicious if he simply stood there waiting. He realised he should probably turn around and walk out, but then he probably wouldn’t get another chance to go through with the test until tomorrow and he really didn’t want to wait that long.
Slowly, he approached the open machine. Next to him, the woman was still frowning, jabbing at the buttons with her finger.
Tomohiko opened his bag and reached inside. His fingertips touched the card and he was just pulling it out when the woman turned in his direction. ‘Excuse me, I’m trying to put money into this thing, but it’s not working.’
Keeping his face down, Tomohiko waved dismissively and shrugged.
‘They keep telling me these things are easy to use,’ she said, ‘but I’ll be damned if I can make head or tail of them.’ Tomohiko shrugged again and shook his head. Whatever he did, he couldn’t speak to her.
The doors to the bank whisked open and Tomohiko heard the woman’s friend call in, ‘What’s taking so long? We’re going to be late if you don’t hurry.’
‘This isn’t working,’ the woman called back. ‘It’s not giving me the deposit thingy. You ever use one of these things?’
‘Never,’ her friend replied. ‘Why don’t you just come back when one of the tellers is here? It can wait, can’t it?’
‘Yeah, but I had my banker make me a card and everything. It seems silly not to use it. He kept saying the machine was much easier than waiting for a teller at the window, but I don’t know.’ She sighed and took a step back from the machine. ‘Ask me, they’ll get rid of these things in a couple years and everything will back the way it was.’ The woman walked out, muttering under her breath.
Tomohiko breathed a little sigh and went back to his bag – a black purse with sequins along the top edge. Slowly, he pulled out the card. In size and shape it was identical to a Sankyo Bank ATM card, but the face was blank, save for a single magnetic strip. There was nothing printed on it at all: no account number, no name, not even a logo. Which was why he had to make sure the card stayed out of sight of the security camera.
Tomohiko looked up at the keypad, and pressed the button for a withdrawal. The light next to a small label that read PLEASE INSERT CARD lit up. Feeling his heart begin to race, Tomohiko slid the white card into the slot.
The machine asked him for his PIN.
Here goes.
His hands went to the number keys and input the sequence 4-1-2-6. He pressed the ‘Enter’ button.
There was an interminably long interval during which nothing happened. If the machine did anything out of the ordinary, he would have to leave right away. But the moment passed, and the machine asked him how much money he would like to withdraw. Tomohiko resisted the urge to leap for joy and keyed in two hundred thousand yen.
Several seconds later he was the proud owner of twenty ten-thousand-yen bills and a receipt. He retrieved the blank card and stepped quickly out of the bank.
The flared skirt he wore wrapped around his legs just below the knees, making it hard to walk naturally. There were a lot of cars on the road in front of the bank, but not many pedestrians, which helped. His face felt tight under a layer of make-up, as though his skin had been smeared over with glue.
The van was waiting about twenty metres away along the side of the road. The passenger side door slid open when he got near. Tomohiko glanced around, hiked up his skirt, and got in.
Ryo shut the manga he’d been reading, Tomohiko’s well-worn copy of Urusei Yatsura, and turned the key in the ignition. ‘How’d it go?’
‘Take a look,’ Tomohiko said, showing him the purse and its haul of fresh banknotes.
Ryo glanced at the money, put the van in low gear, and pulled out into traffic. His expression didn’t change.
‘Sounds like we cracked the code, then,’ he said, his eyes looking straight ahead. There was no trace of pleasure in his voice. ‘Not that I had any doubt.’
‘Neither did I, but man, when it worked, I started shaking,’ Tomohiko said, scratching his thigh. The pantyhose made his legs itch powerfully.
‘You watch out for the security camera?’
‘Yeah, no problem there, I made sure not to look up. Just —’
‘Just what?’ Ryo glanced over at him.
‘There was this lady there…’
Tomohiko briefly explained their exchange in the bank.
Midway through his story, a cloud came over Ryo’s face. He slammed on the brakes and pulled the van over to the side of the road. ‘What did I tell you?’ he said, angrily. ‘I said if anything out of the ordinary happened, anything at all, you were supposed to get out of there.’
‘Yeah, I know, but I thought it wouldn’t be a problem.’ Tomohiko was unable to hide the quaver in his voice.
Ryo grabbed Tomohiko by the collar of his blouse. ‘I don’t want you thinking on your own like that. This is life or death, man. And it’s not just your ass on the line.’ His eyes flashed.
‘She didn’t see my face,’ Tomohiko said in a squeaky voice. ‘I didn’t talk, either. Honest. There’s no way she knew I was a guy.’
Ryo’s face twisted into a scowl. He swore under his breath and let go of Tomohiko’s collar. ‘Idiot.’
‘What?’
‘Why the hell do you think I made you put on that getup anyway?’
‘It’s my disguise, right?’
‘That’s right. And who’s that disguise supposed to fool? The bank people, the police, right? When they find out we used a forged card the first thing they’re goin
g to do is check the security tape. They’re going to see you, and ten out of ten of them will think you’re a woman. You’ve got a delicate build and a face that started a fan club in high school.’
‘But the camera didn’t see my face —’
‘Maybe not, but it definitely got an eyeful of the chatterbox. So what the police will do is they’ll go find her. And when they find her – which they will, because she was trying to use the machine, and they probably have a record of that – they’ll start asking questions. They’re going to want to know if she remembers anything about the woman standing next to her. What if she says, “But officer, it wasn’t a woman at all. It was a man in woman’s clothes.” So much for your disguise then.’
‘She won’t say that. Look, I swear, she didn’t notice a thing.’
‘How can you know for sure? Women always pay way more attention to other people than they should. She might even remember the brand of the handbag you were carrying.’
‘I still don’t see how that’s a problem.’
‘As long as there’s a possibility she noticed something, it’s a problem. You can’t just hope that you’ll get lucky if we’re going to do this for real. We’re not talking about ripping a jacket off of some boutique.’
‘I know, I’m sorry.’ Tomohiko bowed his head.
Ryo sighed and put the van back into low gear. Slowly, they pulled away from the kerb.
‘Still,’ Tomohiko said, a little gingerly, ‘I really don’t think we have to worry about that lady. She was completely focused on that machine.’
‘Whatever. The disguise was a total waste of time.’
‘C’mon, man —’
‘You didn’t talk to her at all, right? Not a single word?’
‘Right. That’s why —’
‘That’s why it was a waste of time,’ Ryo said in a low voice. ‘What kind of person says absolutely nothing when someone asks them a question? The police are going to know you had a reason why you couldn’t speak. Then someone’s going to get the idea that maybe you couldn’t speak because your voice would give away the fact that you were a guy dressed up like a woman.’
Tomohiko’s mouth flapped open, then shut again without saying a word. Ryo was right, as always.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
Ryo’s eyes were on the road. ‘I’m not telling you this again.’
‘Yeah. You won’t have to. Promise.’ Tomohiko said. He knew all too well that Ryo did not look favourably on people who made the same mistake twice.
Bending himself like a contortionist, Tomohiko wriggled his way into the back seat of the van. He pulled his own clothes out of the paper bag there and began to change, balancing himself against the swaying of the vehicle. He felt a strange sense of freedom as he took off the tights.
Ryo had assembled the pieces of his disguise: clothes, shoes, handbag, wig, glasses, and make-up. He hadn’t said where or how he got them and Tomohiko hadn’t asked. There were many things he had learned not to ask Ryo about over the years.
He had just finished taking off the make-up when the van stopped. They were in front of a subway station.
‘Drop by the office tonight,’ Ryo said.
Tomohiko was supposed to go out with some friends to catch the new sci-fi animation, Gundam, that was playing in all the theatres.
‘Yeah,’ he replied. ‘I was planning on it.’ Tomohiko opened the door and stepped out of the van. He waited until the van took off, then went down the stairs to the subway.
The lecture on high-voltage engineering was a pitched battle against sleep. Word had got out earlier in the term that the professor didn’t take attendance and it was easy to cheat on the exams, so the classroom, which could easily seat fifty, held only a dozen or so students that morning. Tomohiko sat in the second row from the front, trying to maintain consciousness while the white-haired professor spoke in a slow drone about the mechanisms of arc discharges and glow discharges. Tomohiko took notes. If he didn’t keep his hand moving, he felt like he would slam head first into his desk.
Tomohiko was, to all appearances, a serious student. At the very least, that was what everyone in the electrical engineering department at Shinwa University thought. He had an excellent attendance record in all of the classes he signed up for. The only ones he skipped were the classes on law, art, and general psychology – courses that had nothing to do with his major. As he was still a sophomore, he had quite a few of these required curriculum courses left to suffer through.
And there was really only one reason Tomohiko paid such close attention to his courses in his major: because Ryo had ordered him to. It was a cost of doing business, he had said.
Ryo had a big influence on Tomohiko’s initial choice of electrical engineering, too. Because his scores in maths and science were good as a senior, Tomohiko had been contemplating engineering or physics. But he hadn’t yet chosen a major when Ryo said, ‘From here on out, it’s all about computers. Learn everything you can about them and that will help me out, too.’
In those days, Ryo had been keeping up his business selling games by mail, with considerable success. Tomohiko had been helping all along on the programming side. But Ryo’s interest in Tomohiko’s choice of major wasn’t about maintaining the status quo. He wanted to expand.
If it was so important, Tomohiko said to him once, why didn’t Ryo apply to college himself? Ryo’s scores in the sciences had been as good as or better than Tomohiko’s.
Ryo had smiled. ‘If I had enough time to go to college, I wouldn’t be working this job.’
It was the first time that Tomohiko had realised Ryo wasn’t planning on going to college. It made his choice easier, in a way. He wouldn’t just be learning about computers and electrical engineering for his own benefit. He’d be helping Ryo out too.
That, and Tomohiko had a debt that would take years to repay, if he ever repaid it at all. What had happened in his junior summer of high school had left a deep scar in his mind.
So it was that Tomohiko paid attention in class and, much to his surprise, whenever he brought his notebooks to the office, Ryo would read them avidly. Sometimes he would open a textbook beside them, going back and forth between the notes and the text. It was safe to say that, though Ryo had never attended a single class at Shinwa University, he knew more about the subject material than most of the actual students.
Ryo had a new passion these days: magnetic-strip cards, like ATM cards and credit cards. He first got involved with the cards right after Tomohiko matriculated and spotted an interesting device while touring his department’s offices. Called an encoder, the device could read and write data on magnetic strips.
When Ryo heard about it, his eyes sparkled. ‘You could make a duplicate of an ATM card with that.’
‘Yeah, you could,’ Tomohiko said. ‘But what would be the point? You’d still need a PIN.’
‘A PIN, huh?’ Ryo seem to be mulling something over for a while after that.
It was two or three weeks later when he came into the computer software office carrying a cardboard box about the size of a portable stereo. The box contained an encoder. It had a slot for magnetic cards, and a panel to display the information they contained.
‘How did you get your hands on that?’ Tomohiko asked, but Ryo just shrugged and grinned.
Shortly after obtaining the encoder, Ryo forged his first ATM card. Tomohiko didn’t know whose the original had been, but whoever it was, they never knew about it. Ryo only needed it for a couple of hours to make the copy.
Ryo used the card twice to withdraw a total of almost two hundred thousand yen. To Tomohiko’s amazement, Ryo had been able to decipher the PIN from the data encoded on the card itself.