He shook his head and sighed.
“Too bad for you, Lieutenant, but the gun isn’t loaded,” he said after clicking the cap of his fountain pen into place. “You can tell by the weight. Give it a little shake up and down. Eight 7.65-millimeter cartridges weigh eighty grams.”
I didn’t believe him. Without hesitation, I pointed the muzzle at his forehead and pulled the trigger. The only sound was a click. He was right: it wasn’t loaded. I put the gun down and bit my lip, unable to think. Boris opened the desk drawer and took out a handful of shells, holding them on his palm for me to see. He had trapped me. The whole thing had been a ruse.
“I have known for a long time that you wanted to kill me,” he said softly. “You have imagined yourself doing it, pictured it in your head any number of times, am I right? I am certain I advised you long ago never to use your imagination. It can only cost you your life. Ah, well, never mind. There is simply no way that you could ever kill me.”
Boris took two of the shells from his palm and threw them at my feet. They clattered across the floor to where I stood.
“Those are live shells,” he said. “This is no trick. Put them in the gun and shoot me. It will be your last chance. If you really want to kill me, take careful aim. But if you miss, you must promise never to reveal my secrets. You must tell no one in the world what I have been doing here. This will be our little deal.”
I nodded to him. I made my promise.
Holding the pistol between my knees again, I pressed the release button, took out the magazine, and loaded the two cartridges into it. This was no easy feat with one hand—a hand that was trembling all the while. Boris observed my movements with a cool expression on his face. There was even the hint of a smile there. Once I had succeeded in thrusting the magazine back into the grip, I took aim between his eyes, forced my hand to stop trembling, and pulled the trigger. The room shook with the roar of the gun, but the bullet only passed by Boris’s ear and slammed into the wall. White, pulverized plaster flew in all directions. I had missed from only six feet away. I was not a poor marksman. When stationed in Hsin-ching, I had done my target practice with a great deal of enthusiasm. And although I had only my right hand now, it was stronger than that of most people, and the Walther was the kind of well-balanced pistol that let you take precise, steady aim. I could not believe that I had missed. Once again I cocked the hammer and took aim. I sucked in one deep breath and told myself, “You have to kill this man.” By killing him, I could make it mean something that I had lived.
“Take steady aim, now, Lieutenant Mamiya. It’s your last bullet.” Boris was still smiling.
At that moment, The Tartar came running into the room, his big pistol drawn.
“Keep out of this,” Boris barked at him. “Let Mamiya shoot me. And if he manages to kill me, do whatever you like.”
The Tartar nodded and pointed the muzzle of his gun at me.
Gripping the Walther in my right hand, I thrust it straight out, aimed for the middle of Boris’s contemptuous, confident smile, and coolly squeezed the trigger. The pistol kicked, but I held it steady. It was a perfectly executed shot. But again the bullet grazed Boris’s head, this time smashing the wall clock behind him into a million pieces. Boris never so much as twitched an eyebrow. Leaning back in his chair, he went on staring at me with his snakelike eyes. The pistol crashed to the floor.
For a moment, no one moved or spoke. Soon, though, Boris left his chair and bent over to retrieve the Walther from where I had dropped it. After a long, thoughtful look at the pistol in his hand, he returned it to its holster on the coatrack. Then he patted my arm twice, as if to comfort me.
“I told you you couldn’t kill me, didn’t I?” Boris said. He took a pack of Camels from his pocket, put a cigarette between his lips, and lit it with his lighter. “There was nothing wrong with your shooting. It was just that you couldn’t kill me. You aren’t qualified to kill me. That is the only reason you missed your chance. And now, unfortunately, you will have to bear my curse back to your homeland. Listen: Wherever you may be, you can never be happy. You will never love anyone or be loved by anyone. That is my curse. I will not kill you. But I do not spare you out of goodwill. I have killed many people over the years, and I will go on to kill many more. But I never kill anyone whom there is no need to kill. Goodbye, Lieutenant Mamiya. A week from now, you will leave this place for the port of Nakhodka. Bon voyage. The two of us will never meet again.”
That was the last I ever saw of Boris the Manskinner. The week after that, I left the concentration camp behind and was shipped by train to Nakhodka. After many convoluted experiences there, I finally reached Japan at the beginning of the following year.
To tell you the truth, I have no idea what this long, strange story of mine will mean to you, Mr. Okada. Perhaps it is nothing more than an old man’s mutterings. But I wanted to—I had to—tell you my story. As you can see from having read my letter, I have lived my life in total defeat. I have lost. I am lost. I am qualified for nothing. Through the power of the curse, I love no one and am loved by no one. A walking shell, I will simply disappear into darkness. Having managed at long last, however, to pass my story on to you, Mr. Okada, I will be able to disappear with some small degree of contentment.
May the life you lead be a good one, a life free of regrets.
A Dangerous Place
•
The People Watching Television
•
The Hollow Man
The door began to open inward. Holding the tray in both hands, the waiter gave a slight bow and went inside. I stayed in the shadows of the vase, waiting for him to come out and wondering what I would do when he did. I could go in as he came out. There was definitely someone inside Room 208. If things continued to develop as they had done before (which was exactly what was happening), the door should be unlocked. On the other hand, I could forget about the room for now and follow the waiter. That way, I could probably find my way to the place where he belonged.
I wavered between the two, but in the end I decided to follow the waiter. There was something dangerous lurking in Room 208, something that could have fatal consequences. I had all too clear a memory of the sharp rapping in the darkness and the violent white gleam of some knifelike thing. I had to be more careful. Let me first see where the waiter would lead me. Then I could come back to the room. But how was I supposed to do that? I thrust my hands in my pockets and found there, along with my wallet and change and handkerchief, a short ballpoint pen. I pulled the pen out and drew a line on my hand to make sure it had ink. I could use this to mark the walls as I followed the waiter. Then I could follow the marks back to the room. It should work.
The door opened and the waiter came out, hands empty. He had left everything inside the room, including the tray. After closing the door, he straightened himself and began whistling The Thieving Magpie as he hurried back along the route he had followed here. I stepped from my place in the shadows of the big vase and followed him. Wherever the corridor forked, I made a small blue X on the cream-colored wall. The waiter never looked back. There was something special about the way he walked. He could have been acting as a model for the World Hotel Waiter Walking-Style Championship. His walk all but proclaimed, “This is how a hotel waiter is supposed to walk: head up, jaw thrust out, back straight, arms swinging rhythmically to the tune of The Thieving Magpie, taking long strides down the corridor.” He turned many corners, went up and down many short flights of stairs, through stretches where the lighting was brighter or dimmer, past depressions in the walls that produced different kinds of shadows. I maintained a reasonable distance behind him to keep from being noticed, but following him was not particularly difficult. He might disappear for a moment as he turned a corner, but there was never any danger of my losing him, thanks to his vibrant whistling.
Just as a salmon migrating upstream eventually reaches a still pool, the waiter came out of the final corridor into the hotel lobby, the crowded lobby where
I had seen Noboru Wataya on television. This time, however, the lobby was hushed, with only a handful of people sitting in front of a large television set, watching an NHK news broadcast. The waiter had stopped whistling as he neared the lobby, so as not to disturb people. Now he cut straight across the lobby floor and disappeared behind a door marked “Staff Only.”
Pretending to be killing time, I ambled around the lobby, sat on a few different sofas, looked up at the ceiling, checked the thickness of the rug beneath my feet. Then I went to a pay phone and put in a coin. This phone was as dead as the one in the room had been. I picked up a hotel phone and punched in “208,” but this phone was also dead.
After that, I went to sit in a chair somewhat apart from where the people were watching television, to observe them unobtrusively. The group consisted of twelve people, nine men and three women, mostly in their thirties and forties, with two possibly in their early fifties. The men all wore suits or sports coats and conservative ties and leather shoes. Aside from some differences in height and weight, none had any distinguishing features. The three women were all in their early thirties, well dressed and carefully made up. They could have been on their way back from a high school reunion, except that they sat separately and gave no evidence of knowing each other. In fact, all the people in the group appeared to be strangers whose attention just happened to be locked on the same television screen. There were no exchanges of opinions or glances or nods.
I sat watching the news for a while from my place somewhat apart from theirs. The stories were of no special interest to me—a governor cutting a tape at the opening ceremony for a new road, a recall of children’s crayons that had been discovered to contain a harmful substance, the death of a truckdriver who had been hit by a tourist bus in Asahikawa because of icy roads and reduced visibility in a major snowstorm, with injuries to several of the tourists on their way to a hot-spring resort. The announcer read each of the stories in turn in a restrained voice, as though dealing out low-numbered cards. I thought about the television in the home of Mr. Honda, the fortune-teller. His set had always been tuned to NHK too.
These images of the news coming over the air were at the same time very real and very unreal to me. I felt sorry for the thirty-seven-year-old truckdriver who had died in the accident. No one wants to die in agony of ruptured internal organs in a blizzard in Asahikawa. But I was not acquainted with the truckdriver, and he did not know me. And so my sympathy for him had nothing personal about it. I could feel only a generalized kind of sympathy for a fellow human being who had met with a sudden, violent death. That generalized emotion might be very real for me and at the same time not real at all. I turned my eyes from the television screen and surveyed the big, empty lobby once more. I found nothing there to focus on. There were no hotel staff members present, and the small bar was not yet open. The only thing on the wall was a large oil painting of a mountain.
When I turned back to the television screen, there was a large close-up of a familiar face—Noboru Wataya’s face. I sat up straight and turned my attention to the reporter’s words. Something had happened to Noboru Wataya, but I had missed the beginning of the story. Soon the photo disappeared and the reporter came on-screen. He wore a tie and an overcoat, and he was standing at the entrance to a large building, with a mike in his hand.
“… rushed to Tokyo Women’s Medical University Hospital, where he is now in intensive care, but all we know is that he has not regained consciousness since his skull was fractured by an unknown assailant. Hospital authorities have refused to comment on whether or not his wounds are life-threatening. A detailed report on his condition is to be released sometime later. Reporting from the main entrance of Tokyo Women’s Medical University …”
And the broadcast returned to the studio, where the anchorman began to read a text that had just been handed to him. “According to reports just in, Representative Noboru Wataya has sustained severe injuries to the head in what appears to have been an attack on his life. The young assailant burst into his office in Tokyo’s Minato Ward at eleven-thirty this morning and, in the presence of the persons with whom Representative Wataya was meeting at the time, delivered several strong blows to the head with a baseball bat, inflicting severe injuries.”
The screen showed a picture of the building that housed Noboru Wataya’s office.
“The man had posed as a caller to Representative Wataya’s office, bringing the bat in inside a long cardboard mailing tube. Witnesses say the man pulled the bat out of the tube and attacked without a word of warning.”
The screen showed the office where the crime had occurred. Chairs were scattered on the floor, and a black pool of blood could be seen nearby.
“The attack came so suddenly that neither Representative Wataya nor the others with him had a chance to resist. After checking to be certain that Representative Wataya was unconscious, the assailant left the scene, still holding the baseball bat. Witnesses say the man, approximately thirty years of age, was wearing a navy-blue pea coat, a woolen ski hat, also navy, and dark glasses. He stood some five feet nine inches in height and had a bruiselike mark on his right cheek. Police are looking for the man, who seems to have managed to lose himself without a trace in the neighborhood crowds.”
The screen showed police at the scene of the crime and then a lively Akasaka street scene.
Baseball bat? Mark on the face? I bit my lip.
“Noboru Wataya was a rising star among economists and political commentators when, this spring, he inherited the mantle of his uncle, longtime Diet member Yoshitaka Wataya, and was elected to the House of Representatives. Widely hailed since then as an influential young politician and polemicist, Noboru Wataya was a freshman Diet member of whom much was expected. Police are launching a two-pronged investigation into the crime, assuming that it could have been either politically motivated or some kind of personal vendetta. To repeat this late-breaking story: Noboru Wataya, prominent freshman member of the House of Representatives, has been rushed to the hospital with severe head injuries after an attack late this morning by an unknown assailant. Details on his condition are not known at this time. And now, in other news—”
Someone appeared to have switched off the television at that point. The announcer’s voice was cut short, and silence enveloped the lobby. People began to relax their tensed postures. It was obvious that they had gathered in front of the television for the express purpose of hearing news about Noboru Wataya. No one moved after the set was switched off. No one made a sound.
Who could have hit Noboru Wataya with a bat? The description of the assailant sounded exactly like me—the navy pea coat and hat, the sunglasses, the mark on the cheek, height, age—and the baseball bat. I had kept my own bat in the bottom of the well for months, but it had disappeared. If that same bat was the one used to crush Noboru Wataya’s skull, then someone must have taken it for that purpose.
Just then the eyes of one of the women in the group focused on me—a skinny, fishlike woman with prominent cheekbones. She wore white earrings in the very center of her long earlobes. She had twisted around in her chair and sat in that position for a long time, watching me, never averting her gaze or changing her expression. Next the bald man sitting beside her, letting his eyes follow her line of vision, turned and looked at me. In height and build, he resembled the owner of the cleaning store by the station. One by one, the other people turned in my direction, as if becoming aware for the first time that I was there with them. Subjected to their unwavering stares, I could not help but be aware of my navy-blue pea jacket and hat, my five-foot-nine-inch height, my age, and the mark on my right cheek. These people all seemed to know, too, that I was Noboru Wataya’s brother-in-law and that I not only disliked but actively hated him. I could see it in their eyes. My grip tightened on the arm of my chair as I wondered what to do. I had not beaten Noboru Wataya with a baseball bat. I was not that kind of person, and besides, I no longer owned the bat. But they would never believe me, I was sure. They bel
ieved only what they saw on television.
I eased out of my chair and started for the corridor by which I had entered the lobby. I had to leave that place as soon as possible. I was not welcome there. I had taken only a few steps when I turned to see that several of the people had left their chairs and were coming after me. I sped up and cut straight across the lobby for the corridor. I had to find my way back to Room 208. The inside of my mouth was dry.
I had finally made it across the lobby and taken my first step into the corridor when, without a sound, all the lights in the hotel went out. A heavy curtain of blackness fell with the speed of an ax blow. Someone cried out behind me, the voice much closer to me than I would have expected, a stony hatred at its core.
I continued on in the darkness, edging forward cautiously with my hands against the wall. I had to get away from them. But then I bumped into a small table and knocked something over in the darkness, probably some kind of vase. It rolled, clattering, across the floor. The collision sent me down on all fours on the carpet. I scrambled to my feet and continued feeling my way along the corridor. Just then, the edge of my coat received a sharp yank, as if it had caught on a nail. It took me a moment to realize what was happening. Someone was pulling on my coat. Without hesitation, I slipped out of it and lunged ahead in the darkness. I felt my way around a corner, tripped up a stairway, and turned another corner, my head and shoulders bumping into things all the while. At one point, I missed my footing on a step and smashed my face against the wall. I felt no pain, though: only an occasional dull twinge behind the eyes. I couldn’t let them catch me here.
There was no light of any kind, not even the emergency lighting that was supposed to come on in hotels in case of a power failure. After tearing my way through this featureless darkness, I came to a halt, trying to catch my breath, and listened for sounds from behind me. All I could hear, though, was the wild beating of my own heart. I knelt down for a moment’s rest. They had probably given up the chase. If I went ahead in the darkness now, I would probably end up lost in the depths of the labyrinth. I decided to stay here, leaning against the wall, and try to calm myself.