Remote Control Read online

  "Under the car?"

  "That's what they always do in the movies, stick a bomb under the car to blow up the star witness."

  "Pretty corny plotline," said Aoyagi. "Your bad guys aren't very original."

  "No, but they've been around a bit too long to worry about that." Aoyagi felt relieved to see a smile on his friend's face, but the relief faded almost instantly. "Even the bomb's not original—it was so obvious, an amateur like me found it right away." Morita was still grinning, but his face looked ghastly. "Not that it makes any difference whether 1 found it or not. They know 1 can't get rid of it."

  "Are you serious?" Aoyagi l)lurted out, finally understanding the desperation in .Morita's eyes. "We've got to get out of here!"

  "You've got to," said M(uita."

  "N(jt without you."

  "Where would 1 go?" He startled Aoyagi by now saying, "Do you remember Abbey Roail! 'I he medley?"

  It was the Beatles' eleventh album, released before tlu*ir Iasi, l et It lie, but actually recorded later. Something that Paul Mc(!artney slilclu*d togetluM lor

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  a band that had already dissolved. He took the eight songs in the second half of the album, which had been recorded separately, and mixed them into a long medley. Morita had often said how he liked the way Paul had closed it out with "The End."

  "1 was humming 'Golden Slumbers' from it while you were asleep," Morita said.

  "A lullaby? For me?" The lyrics were, in fact, almost exactly like a lullaby, with something strangely moving about Paul's full, straining voice.

  "Remember how it begins?" Morita asked, and then started to hum the opening line. Once there was a way to ^et back homeward. "It always makes me think about hanging out with you guys back in school."

  "That was hardly home," Aoyagi muttered.

  "It was for me, the way we were back then."

  They fell silent for a moment, and this time Aoyagi didn't bother to try to think of anything to say.

  Finally, Morita reached over and took something out of the glove compartment. It was several seconds before Aoyagi realized what it was. "A gun?" he murmured.

  "Weird, isn't it?" Morita said, looking down with an odd little smile at the thing in his hand. "Who'd have thought I'd ever have one of these?"

  "I don't know," said Aoyagi blankly. "Who?" He had never seen a real gun before. It looked as if it might go off at the slightest touch.

  "They told me to bring you here today. And if I couldn't get you to drink out of the bottle, I was supposed to use what they'd left in the glove compartment. I wondered what they meant, so I checked earlier."

  "What the hell's going on?" Aoyagi said, not hiding the panic in his voice.

  Morita put the dull, black barrel up to his eye. "Fooks like the real thing," he said quietly. "In other words, these guys have no trouble getting their hands on something like this, or getting it into my car."

  As he spoke, there was a violent shudder and the sound of an explosion. The air seemed to crack open and shock waves swept over the car.

  Aoyagi sat stunned with fear, but Morita seemed suddenly more relaxed. He looked around to see where the noise had come from, but he didn't appear overly concerned. "That's the bomb," he murmured.

  "Bomb?"

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  'Time's up, my friend," he said. "You've got to run. It's not healthy to stay here."

  "Then let's go."

  "Not me. If 1 go with you, they'll take it out on my wife and my kid. There's only one penalty for not following orders. 1 know what kind of people Tm working for." He made no effort to keep his despair to himself. Yet, at the same time, he seemed calmer than before, and Aoyagi felt he finally had a glimpse of his old friend. It was as if the Morita of long ago had come back, and it seemed all the more important not to let him go.

  People were rushing around in the street outside. They could hear muffled voices in the distance and feel a rumbling under the wheels.

  "1 thought you were going to sleep at least an hour," Morita was saying. "So 1 would have had to leav^e you here. But when you woke up early—well, that was just luck. At least, that's what 1 decided."

  "Luck? Who for?"

  "1 shook the car a little," he continued, "to see if you'd wake up. 1 just sat here and waited, but 1 hadn't decided what Td do if you really did come to." Aoyagi remembered now that the car had seemed to be rocking gently, like a boat at anchor, when he woke up from his nap. Morita reached out and adjusted the angle of the rearview mirror. "At any rate," he said, waving the gun, "you've got to get moving. I'll be staying here. I'm not sure what these guys will do, but 1 don't think I want to cross them anymore. I'll just sit here. It's my way of apologizing for having failed them. I think it's better that way."

  "You're not making any sense!" Aoyagi groaned.

  Morita's eyes narrowed as he stared at the mirror. "There are two cops coming up behind us," he said. "If you're going, now's the lime. Cio on. If you don't. I'll have to use this. You know me, I overact." He was laughing now. "Remember that job we had cleaning the city i)ool?"

  "I remember," said Aoyagi.

  "T he wh(jle time we were scrubbing that sucker, there was a security camera (Jii us."

  "1 don't remember that." His voice was almost a whis|)er.

  "You don't remember the little drama we actetl out lor the camera?"

  ".Morita, jrlease!" Aoyagi jrleaded.

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  "I would tell you to run. 'Run! Aoyagil' Td yell at you. 'Get out any way you can! Get out and live your life!' It was our little joke." Aoyagi was near tears. He opened his mouth but no words came out. "When you rescued that girl," Morita hurried on, his mind apparently wandering now, "they interviewed you on TV and you said you used a judo move to bring down the bad guy."

  "You taught it to us," Aoyagi managed to murmur.

  "1 was watching the tube with my boy. I told him 1 knew you. He was real impressed."

  "Morita?" He stared into his friend's eyes.

  "Don't worry about me. All good children go to heaven. ... At least that's what they say." The hint of a smile played around his mouth.

  Aoyagi said nothing, and Morita began to sing "Golden Slumbers." "Once there was a way to get back homeward” he sang, and then, softly, "Golden slumbers fill your eyes. Smiles awake you when you rise.” Aoyagi had trouble following the English, but the last line stuck in his head—a smiling face at the break of day.

  He turned to Morita to make one final plea, but his friend had lowered the back of his seat and closed his eyes. "Sleep pretty darling, do not cry,” he sang quietly, this time in Japanese. It was as if he were singing himself a lullaby.

  Masaharu Aoyagi

  Aoyagi jumped out of the car and dosed the door. When he turned to look back, he saw two uniformed policemen close behind him. They had evidently come down this side street from Higashi Nibancho. He couldn't see what was happening out on the main street, but it was clear that crowds of people were milling about, and he could hear shouts and general confusion in the distance. Sirens were coming this way fast. He looked up at the sky and realized that smoke was drifting between the buildings.

  He looked back inside the car. Morita was still slumped behind the steer-

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  ing wheel, eyes closed. Aoyagi reached for the handle on the passenger side, but as he did so he heard someone yell "Don't move!" One of the policemen had crouched down a few steps away and his hand was fumbling for something at his belt. Without thinking, Aoyagi straightened up and put his hands above his head.

  "That's right," the cop said. "Don't move." He had drawn his gun. To Aoyagi, who had never seen a real one before today, guns seemed to be multiplying before his eyes. Obviously, something big had happened. He could hear Morita's words echoing in his head: "You'll end up like Oswald."

  Oswald had been shot dead by a man named Jack Ruby while he was being transferred to jail. The report on the assassination conclud
ed that both Oswald and Ruby had acted on their own, without the support of any larger organization or political group. But Aoyagi remembered how that conclusion had infuriated Kazu as they had argued over the Kennedy affair long ago at their fast-food debates.

  But before he could remember anything else, there was an explosion near his head and the rear window of Morita's car shattered. One of the policemen must have fired his revolver. "Get down!" he yelled, moving slowly toward Aoyagi. "Face down on the ground!"

  Aoyagi glanced at Morita through the window. Who should he listen to? A trigger-happy cop or his old friend? It was an easy choice. He ran.

  He dodged across the street. It took some nerve to turn his back on a man pointing a gun at him, but this was no time for caution. If they intended to shoot him, he would at least give them a moving target. But was it better to duck into a building or get away down another street? He decided a building could become a trap.

  Behind him, the cops were yelling tor him to stoj). I heir voices were sharp, as though in the same breath their hands were reaching out over the distance he'd ccwered to slip under his arms and pin them back. He caught sight of a liquor store on the corner. T his had not been his district when he was driving the delivery truck, but he'd been down this street any number ot times. A map of the area unlolded in his head. It he turnetl lelt, he'd come immediately t(i an alley on the right. . . .

  A white-haired man emerged troin the shoj), wiping his hands slowly on

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  his apron. He called something to someone inside. He looked back around just as they were about to collide, and Aoyagi had to swerve to avoid knocking him over.

  Another shot. Glancing back, he saw that one of the cops was crouching down and aiming his gun. He thought for a moment that he'd been hit, but there was no pain, no shock of impact. Then he realized that the shopkeeper was falling backward onto the sidewalk. The collapse seemed endless, as though he were seeing it in slow motion, and as he fell he looked up at Aoyagi with a puzzled expression. When at last he came to rest in a heap, there was blood spurting from his shoulder. A woman came running out of the shop. Aoyagi stopped and started to bend over the man, but then caught sight of the cops out of the corner of his eye and took off again. He was fairly sure the shopkeeper was still conscious when he left him.

  The police were still after him. As he ran, Aoyagi began to realize that something wasn't right. This wasn't the Wild West. Japanese police didn't draw their guns for every little offense. And they didn't ignore an injured bystander to go on with a chase.

  As soon as he dodged into the narrow side street, there was an alley to his right. Then, if he turned left at the next intersection, he would come out on a bigger street running east and west. He had managed to operi up a bit of distance on the police, so he fumbled in his bag and pulled out his cell phone. But who to call?

  He realized with amazement that he was completely out of breath. Was he already so out of shape just three months after quitting his job?

  People were beginning to drift out of the buildings on either side, and when he looked up, he saw that many more had opened windows to peer out. For a moment, he had the scary feeling that everyone was staring at him, that they were there to keep an eye on him and point him out to his pursuers. He felt outnumbered and trapped, and he was tempted to lie down on the ground and surrender. But then he realized that no one was looking at him at all, that their attention was focused further off to the east, to the parade on Higashi Nibancho, where Morita had said the killing would take place.

  Aoyagi emerged into a narrow, one-way street to find a scene of utter

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  chaos. Smoke was billowing into the air, and people were running in every direction as if they'd lost their minds, hurtling down sidewalks, threading their way through stopped cars, scattering in wild flight. He reached out to stop a man in a suit who came running past.

  "What?" the man shouted.

  "What happened?" Aoyagi asked.

  "There was an explosion."

  "But where's everybody going?"

  "Running to see? Running away? Who knows?"

  "Was there much damage?" he pressed him.

  "Enough," said the man, turning to hurry off with the nosy bystander's sense of purpose. "1 don't think Kaneda could have made it."

  Kaneda dead? The news stopped him in his tracks. It seemed unreal. But one word kept coming back to him from Morita's ramblings: Oswald.

  Just then, the air seemed to billow out from behind him—from the area he'd just left. There was a loud crack, a gust of wind, someone screamed. The people running near him stopped and all eyes turned in the direction Aoyagi had come from.

  "Another bomb?" someone wondered.

  Unsure where to go now, he ran to his left, then turned and ran back the other way. Suddenly, through the crowd, he caught sight of a taxi stopped in traffic. T he "Eor Hire" light was lit, and without a second thought he made his way over and jumped in the back seat.

  "Looks like another one," the driver said. His hair was long, but the strip of forehead in the rearview mirror was wrinkled. T heir eyes met in the reflection.

  "Was that really an explosion?" Aoyagi said.

  "Sounded like one."

  "(Jan you get us out of here?"

  "Where to?" the driver asked.

  "The east exit," he blurted out. His first iinjiulse had been to say "anywhere," but thinking better of it, he had fixed on a destination that would |)ut some distance—and Sendai Station—between him and the two cops. He realized where he really wanted to go was back, back to the hambuigei joint, back to Morita and their conversation before all this had started. If he could

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  just go back, tliis chaos might go away, and he would find iiimself sitting across from liis friend again, calmly watching him bend a French fry in two.

  "East exit?" echoed the driver. "Don't know if that's going to work. 1 forgot about all the streets they closed off for the parade or I would never have come in here. 1 was just trying to figure out a way around this mess."

  "Can you see how far we can get?"

  "You got it, buddy."

  just then the car ahead of them began to move. The cab driver pressed the lever to close the rear door, put the car in gear, and immediately made a hard right turn. "If I do a U-turn here, we might be able to get around the station. Sound okay to you?" He seemed to have suddenly come to life. Aoyagi wondered why he'd bothered to ask, since they were already on their way, but he grunted his approval and sat back.

  As the driver made his way aggressively through traffic, Aoyagi found his mind going over something Morita had said . . . how the bad guys always put a bomb under the car in the movies. . . . Arid, to his horror, he finally realized that the second explosion must have been under Morita's car. He pressed his face against the window, but the world outside was a blur.

  "1 caught a glimpse of a cop in the mirror just now," said the driver. "First time I've ever seen one with his gun out like that."

  "A cop?" Aoyagi murmured.

  "Yeah, just now. He was right behind you on the street. They must be on high alert. Doesn't look like the Sendai I know."

  h

  Masaharu Aoyagi

  "Doesn't look like the Sendai I know," said Kazu, glancing over at Aoyagi in the passenger seat.

  "It's a bigger town than you think," Aoyagi said. He was in his second year of college, student backpack on his lap. He reached inside now and fished out a paperback he had just bought.

  "What's that?" Kazu asked.

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  "It's called a 'book/" Aoyagi laughed. "I feel like my brain's turning to mush from all the hamburgers and bullshit with you and Morita. Thought I might try reading once in a while."

  "Wouldn't be Dostoevsky by any chance?" Kazu asked. Aoyagi jumped and turned toward him with a startled look. "Did I guess right?"

  "How did you know?"

  "I was talking to Morita the
other night, and he said you'd be reading Dostoevsky soon."

  "But how did he know?"

  "A few days ago we were out drinking with Haruko and she asked if we'd ever read Dostoevsky, said everybody should try him at some point. Morita told me later that he was sure you'd decided on the spot to read him." Kazu seemed unimpressed by the prediction. "I guess you're more of a softy than I thought," he added.

  "Softy?" said Aoyagi, feeling a bit offended.

  "But it was really Morita who put Haruko up to the whole thing. He wanted to see how susceptible you were."

  "Susceptible?" Aoyagi said, not quite following.

  "You see," Kazu giggled, "she's never read Dostoevsky herself."

  "Shit," muttered Aoyagi.

  "Except for a manga version of Crime miii Punishment.''

  "Shit," he repeated.

  "And 1 thought 'Dostoevsky' was some kind of Eskimo," Kazu confessed.

  Aoyagi suddenly wanted to toss the j)aperback out the window.

  "You made a wrong turn somewhere," Aoyagi said.

  "1 guess so," Kazu laughed quietly. He didn't seem very u|)set; in fact, he almost seemed to enjoy being lost. "Morita's maps aren't too helpful."

  "Eet me have a look."

  Kazu fished a sheet of paper out of his jacket jiocket and passed it over. Helpful it wasn't. T he maj) liad a cross, indicating north and south, and arrows snaking west on Route 48 to a jilace marked "Here!" in big letters. Along the way was a coiujilicated intersection wliere several roiids came together. It had [)een circled, and a note fiad been stribbled underneath: "(lets jiretty messy here!" 'I hat was it.

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  ''He sure is out in the boondocks," Kazu observed noncommittally.

  "When we started school, he was living in this fancy place downtown."

  "1 know. He let me crash there once after we'd been drinking. Why would he have moved out of a place that was that convenient?"

  "He probably decided that 'convenience is not the mother of invention' or some crap like that," said Aoyagi.

  "The voice of the forest?" Kazu chuckled. "How long has he been talking about that?"