Killing Commendatore: A novel (47 page)

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“I'm fine,” he said, rubbing his eyelids. “I've had much worse hangovers. This is mild.”

“Why don't you stick around for a while?” I said.

“Don't you have a guest coming?”

“That's at ten. There's still time. And there's no problem if you're here when they arrive. I'll introduce you. They're both very attractive.”

“Both? I thought there was just one model.”

“Her aunt is her chaperone.”

“Her chaperone? So they still do things the old-fashioned way in this neck of the woods? Like in a Jane Austen novel. They don't wear corsets and ride in a horse-drawn carriage, do they?”

“Not a horse-drawn carriage. A Toyota Prius. And no corsets. When I'm painting the girl, the aunt sits in the living room and reads for the whole two hours. ‘Aunt' makes her sound old, though—she's pretty young.”

“What sort of books is she into?”

“I don't know. I asked, but she wouldn't tell me.”

“No kidding,” he said. “Oh yeah, speaking of books, remember the character in Dostoevsky's
The Possessed,
the guy who shoots himself with a pistol just to prove how free he is? What's his name? I figured you might know.”

“Kirillov,” I said.

“That's right, Kirillov. I've been trying to remember, but it keeps slipping my mind.”

“Why do you want to know?”

“No special reason,” Masahiko said, shaking his head. “He popped into my head, and when I tried to recall his name, I couldn't. It's been bugging me. Like a fish bone caught in my throat. But man, those Russians. They come up with the weirdest ideas, don't they?”

“There are lots of characters in Dostoevsky who do crazy things just to prove that they are free people, unconstrained by God and society. Though looking at Russia back then, maybe they weren't so crazy after all.”

“Then how about you?” Masahiko asked. “You and Yuzu are formally divorced, which means you're now a lawfully unwedded man. So what comes next? Even if it wasn't your choice, freedom is still freedom, right? Why not run out and do something crazy, now that you have the opportunity?”

I laughed. “I'm not planning anything at present. Sure, I may be free for the moment, but that doesn't mean I've got to go out and prove it to the world, does it?”

“So that's how you look at it,” Masahiko said in a disappointed tone. “But hey, you're a painter, right? An artist. Artists flaunt the rules left and right—they make a great show of it. But you've always walked the straight and narrow. The path of reason, I guess. So why not let loose now, throw off the restraints and do something wild?”

“Like murdering an old moneylender with an axe?”

“Yeah, that might work.”

“Or falling for a prostitute with a heart of gold?”

“Even better.”

“I'll think about it,” I said. “But you know, it seems to me that reality itself has a screw loose somewhere. That's why I try to keep at least myself in line as much as possible.”

“Well, I guess that's one way of looking at it,” Masahiko said resignedly.

It's more than just “one way of looking at it,” I wanted to tell him. Indeed, it felt like everything around me was becoming unscrewed—that reality was losing its grip. If I lost my grip too, then the craziness would get completely out of hand. But I couldn't tell Masahiko the whole story at this stage of the game.

“At any rate, I've got to be going,” he said. “I'd love to meet the two women, but I've got work waiting for me back in Tokyo.”

Masahiko finished his coffee, got dressed, and drove off in his boxy jet-black Volvo. Baggy eyes and all. “Glad we finally had a chance to talk,” were his parting words.

One thing that morning completely stumped me. Masahiko's knife, the one he'd brought to prepare the fish, had gone missing. It had been carefully washed, and neither of us remembered touching it afterward, but we searched the kitchen high and low and still couldn't find it.

“Forget it,” he said. “It's probably out for a walk. Grab it for me when it comes back. I'll pick it up on my next visit—I don't use it all that often.”

I'll keep looking, I told him.

I checked my watch once the Volvo was out of sight. The Akikawas would be showing up before long. I removed the bedding from the living room sofa, and flung the windows wide open to let fresh air in. The sky was still faintly overcast and gray. There was no wind.

I took
Killing Commendatore
from my bedroom and hung it back where it had been on the studio wall. Then I sat down on the stool to examine the painting one more time. Red blood still gushed from the Commendatore's chest, while Long Face's sharp eyes still glittered in the lower left-hand corner of the canvas. Nothing had changed.

Even as I studied
Killing Commendatore,
though, I couldn't erase Yuzu from my mind. It had been no dream, of that much I felt sure.
I had truly visited our apartment that night.
I was as sure of that as I was that Tomohiko Amada had visited the studio several days before. Like him, I had overcome the laws of physics by some means to make my way to our Hiroo apartment, penetrate her, and discharge my semen inside her body. People can accomplish anything, I thought, if they want it badly enough. There are channels through which reality can become unreal. Or unreality can enter the realm of the real. If we desire it that strongly. Deep in our heart. But that didn't mean that we were free. It might demonstrate quite the opposite.

If I had the chance, I wanted to ask Yuzu if
she
had experienced a similar dream in late April of this year. If she had dreamed shortly before dawn that I had come to ravish her while she was fast asleep (or else somehow deprived her of her freedom). In other words, was my dream something I alone experienced, or was it a two-way street? That's what I wanted to confirm. Yet if the dream was one we had shared, wouldn't she view me as sinister, a villain? Could such a presence exist within me? I hated to think of myself in that way.

Was I free? As far as I was concerned, the question was wholly irrelevant. What I needed now more than anything was a firm reality to hold on to. A solid foundation on which to stand. Not the sort of freedom that allowed me to rape my own wife in my dreams.

Mariye didn't speak that morning. She just sat there, the perfect model, in the simple straight-backed chair, and gazed at me as if at some distant landscape. Since my stool was taller than her chair, she was looking up at a slight angle. I made no special attempt to talk to her. There was nothing I had to say, nor did I feel any particular need. So I plied my brush across the canvas in silence.

I was painting Mariye's portrait, yet I could sense elements of my dead sister Komi and my former wife Yuzu creeping into the work. This wasn't intentional—they worked their way in quite naturally. Perhaps I was searching within Mariye for reminders of those two women, so important to me, whom I had lost. I couldn't say if this was healthy or not. But that was the only way I could paint at the time. No, to say “at the time” is off the mark. When I thought about it, I had operated like this from the very beginning. Giving form to what eluded me in reality. Inscribing secret signals only I could decipher.

Whatever the case, I was able to push Mariye's portrait forward with relative ease. Step by step, it moved steadily toward completion. Like a river, it followed the contours of the land, pooling in the hollows until it overflowed the final barrier to stream unobstructed to the sea. I could feel it circulate through my body, like blood.

“Can I come visit you later,” Mariye said in a small voice just before we finished our morning's work. The lack of inflection made it sound like an assertion, but it was a clear question.

“You mean through your secret passageway?”

“Yes.”

“I don't mind at all, but around what time?”

“I don't know yet.”

“I don't think you should come after dark,” I said. “You can never tell what's in these mountains at night.”

All sorts of weird things could be lurking out there: the Commendatore, Long Face, the man with the white Subaru Forester, Tomohiko Amada's living spirit. Even the incubus that was my sexual alter ego. Yes, depending on the circumstances, I might turn into one of those sinister creatures that prowled the night. The thought gave me a chill.

“I'll try to come before dark,” Mariye said. “I want to talk to you about something. Just the two of us.”

“I'll be waiting.”

We wrapped up for the day not long after the noon-hour chimes sounded.

Shoko was sitting on the sofa, once again focused on her reading. She appeared to have almost finished the thick paperback. Taking off her glasses, she noted her place with a bookmark and looked up at us.

“We made good progress today,” I told her. “One or two more sessions and we should be done. I'm sorry to be taking so much of your time.”

Shoko smiled. It was a beautiful smile. “Not at all,” she answered. “Mariye seems to enjoy sitting for you, and I so look forward to seeing the finished portrait. And this sofa is the perfect place to read. I'm never bored in the slightest. In fact, it's a welcome change of pace for me to come here—I always feel better afterward.”

I wanted to ask her how their visit to Menshiki's house had gone the previous Sunday. Had his fine mansion impressed her? What had she thought of him as a person? But asking questions like that would have been a breach of etiquette—I had to wait for her to raise the subject first.

Once again, Shoko had dressed for the occasion. It was most definitely not what a regular person would put on to visit a neighbor on a Sunday morning. A perfectly pressed camel hair skirt, a fancy white silk blouse with a big ribbon, and a dark blue-gray jacket with a gold pin adorning the collar. The pin had a jewel embedded in it, which I took to be a real diamond. The whole outfit seemed rather too fashionable to wear behind the wheel of a Toyota Prius. But who was I to say? Toyota's director of marketing would likely have a very different opinion.

Mariye was dressed as usual. The same old varsity jacket, her hole-studded jeans, and a pair of white sneakers even dirtier than the ones she usually wore (the backs of these were stomped flat).

When they were heading out the door, Mariye looked back and gave me a wink, a secret sign that said “See you later.” I flashed a quick smile in response.

When Shoko and Mariye had gone, I went to the living room, lay down on the sofa, and slept. I had no appetite, so I skipped lunch. It was a brief nap, about thirty minutes, deep and dreamless. I was grateful for that. It was more than a little scary to think what I might do in my dreams, and even scarier to think
what I might become
.

My mood that Sunday afternoon was as unfocused as the weather. It was a quiet, slightly overcast day with no wind to speak of. I read a little, listened to a little music, cooked a little, but nothing helped me work out my feelings. It promised to be one of those afternoons where nothing gets resolved. Giving up, I ran a hot bath, got in, and soaked for a long time. I tried to remember the names of the characters in Dostoevsky's
The Possessed
. I was able to come up with seven, including Kirillov. For some reason, since my high school days I've had a knack for memorizing lengthy Russian names. Maybe now was a good opportunity to go back and reread
The Possessed
. I was free, with time on my hands and nothing that had to be done. The perfect conditions for reading long Russian classics.

I thought about Yuzu some more. Her belly would probably be showing after seven months. I pictured how that would look. What would she be doing now? What would she be thinking? Was she happy? Of course, I had no way to know any of those things.

Perhaps it was as Masahiko had said. Perhaps, like a nineteenth-century Russian intellectual, I should do something out-and-out crazy just to prove I was a free man. But what? Something like…spend an hour shut up at the bottom of a pitch-black pit?
That
was what Menshiki had done. True, his actions might not fit the category “out-and-out crazy.” But they were definitely beyond the pale, to put it mildly.

It was after four when Mariye showed up. The doorbell rang, I opened the door, and there she was. She slipped through the half-open door like a wisp of cloud and looked around warily.

“No one's here.”

“Nobody's here, that's true,” I said.

“Someone was here yesterday.”

That was a question. “Yes, a friend of mine stayed over,” I said.

“A man.”

“Yes, a man. A male friend. But how did you know?”

“There was an old car I'd never seen before parked in front of your house. It looked like a black box.”

That would be Masahiko's ancient Volvo station wagon, what he called his “Swedish lunch box.” Convenient for hauling reindeer carcasses.

“So you came yesterday.”

Mariye nodded. It appeared that she was using her passageway to come and check on the house whenever she had time. She'd probably been doing this since long before my arrival. After all, it was her playground. Or “hunting ground” might be more accurate. I was just someone who had chanced to move in. In which case, could she have come face-to-face with Tomohiko Amada at some point? I had to ask her about that sometime.

I led her into the living room. We sat down together, she on the sofa, me in the armchair. I offered her something to drink, but she said no.

“The guy who stayed over is a friend from my college days,” I said.

“A good friend?”

“I think so,” I said. “In fact, he may be the only person I can call a true friend.”

Such a good friend that he could introduce his colleague to my wife and keep me in the dark when they started sleeping together—a situation that had led to my just concluded divorce—without casting a cloud over our relationship. To call us friends would hardly be stretching the truth.

“Do you have any good friends?” I asked her.

Mariye didn't answer. In fact, she didn't bat an eye, just acted as if she hadn't heard what I'd said. I guessed it was something I shouldn't have asked.

“Mr. Menshiki isn't a good friend of yours,” she said. I knew it was a question, though her intonation was flat.
Do you mean Mr. Menshiki isn't a good friend of yours?
was what she meant.

“As I've told you,” I said, “I haven't known Mr. Menshiki long enough to call him a real friend. I started talking with him after I moved here, and that was only six months ago. It takes longer than that for people to become close. Still, he strikes me as a very interesting person.”

“Interesting.”

“How can I explain? His disposition strikes me as a little different than the average guy. Maybe more than a little, actually. He's not an easy person to figure out.”

“Disposition.”

“Personality. The traits that make a person who they are.”

Mariye stared at me for a while. As if selecting the exact words she ought to use.

“He can see my home from his deck—it's right across the valley.”

It took me a moment to respond to that. “Yes, you're right. That's the lay of the land. But he can see my house just as clearly. Not yours alone.”

“Still, I think that man is
spying on
us.”

“What do you mean, spying on you?”

“He's got something like a pair of big binoculars on the terrace, though he hides them with a cover. They're on a kind of tripod. He can see us really clearly if he uses those.”

So the girl found him out
, I thought. Watchful, observant. Eyes that missed nothing of importance.

“So you think that Mr. Menshiki has been observing you through those binoculars?”

Mariye gave a terse nod.

I took a deep breath, then let it out. “Still, that's just a guess on your part, right? They don't necessarily mean he's peeking into your house. He could be observing the moon and stars.”

Mariye's gaze didn't waver. “I've had this feeling like I'm
being watched
,” she said. “For a while. But I didn't know who was watching me, or from where. But now I know. It's
that person,
for sure.”

I took another long, slow breath. Mariye's supposition was on the money. Menshiki was watching her through his high-powered military binoculars on a nightly basis. Yet to my knowledge—and this was not to defend Menshiki—his motives for being a peeping Tom were far from nefarious. He just wanted to see the girl. This beautiful thirteen-year-old girl who might be his biological daughter. For that reason, and that reason alone, he had purchased the mansion on the other side of the valley. Wresting it from the family living there and booting them out. Yet I couldn't reveal that to Mariye.

“Let's say you're right,” I said. “But then what's his motive? Why is he so fixated on your home?”

“I don't know. Maybe he has a crush on my aunt.”

“Has a crush on your aunt?”

She gave a brief shrug of her shoulders.

Mariye couldn't imagine she was the target. She hadn't yet reached the stage where she could see herself as an object of male desire. I found it strange, yet I didn't dare call her version of events into question. If that was how she read the situation, better perhaps to let it ride.

“I think Mr. Menshiki is hiding something,” Mariye said.

“What, for example?”

“My aunt is seeing Mr. Menshiki,” she said, not answering my question. “They met twice this week.” Her tone suggested that she was passing on highly sensitive state secrets.

“On dates?”

“I think she went to his house.”

“Alone?”

“She left a little after noon and didn't return until late.”

“But you can't be sure she went to Mr. Menshiki's, can you?”

“I can tell,” she said.

“How can you tell?”

“My aunt doesn't leave the house that much,” she said. “Sure, she'll volunteer at the library or go shopping, but then she doesn't take a long shower, or paint her nails, or put on perfume and her fanciest underwear.”

“You really have sharp eyes, don't you,” I said, impressed. “You see everything. But are you sure the man she's meeting is Mr. Menshiki? Couldn't it be someone else?”

Mariye narrowed her eyes at me. She gave a small shake of her head. As in,
Do you think I'm that stupid?
After all, under the circumstances it was unlikely to be anyone but Menshiki. And Mariye was anything but stupid.

“So your aunt spends quite a bit of time at Mr. Menshiki's house, just the two of them together.”

Mariye nodded.

“And the two of them—how should I put this?—are engaged in what we might call a very intimate relationship.”

She nodded again. “Yes, a very intimate relationship,” she said, her cheeks turning a faint pink.

“But you're in school all day. Not at home. So how can you know these things?”

“I can tell. I can tell that much from a woman's face.”

But I couldn't tell. Yuzu had carried on an extended affair while we were living together, and I was clueless. Looking back, I should have been able to figure out that much. How could a thirteen-year-old girl pick up on something I couldn't that quickly?

“So things really moved fast between those two, didn't they,” I said.

“My aunt's no dummy—there's nothing wrong with her head. But her heart has a weak spot. And Mr. Menshiki is stronger than normal people. A lot stronger—she's no match for him.”

She's probably right, I thought. Menshiki did have some special power. Once he made his move, it would be almost impossible for an average person to resist. Myself included. I doubted he would find it difficult to make a woman his, if that was his goal.

“So you're worried about your aunt, right? That Mr. Menshiki is using her for some reason.”

Mariye swept her hair back with her hand, exposing her ear. It was small and white, and its shape was lovely. She nodded.