Remote Control Page 4

model shop. The picture was in black and white, but the face of the man coming up to the register was quite clear. He turned aside and kept his hand over his mouth—perhaps aware of the camera—as he paid for an Ooka Air Hover.

  'There's no way to be absolutely sure, but there is a strong resemblance," said one of the commentators. He sounded absolutely sure. Torn, too, thought the man looked exactly like Masaharu Aoyagi.

  There was also a report that Aoyagi had been eating a meal at a little tonkatsii restaurant one street off Higashi Nibancho Avenue not long before it happened.

  "It was before noon, so the place was still empty. He sat right in that chair, eating lunch and watching TV." The owner, a man in a white jacket with thinning hair and glasses, glared at the chair as though it were somehow cursed. "They had a lot of stuff about Kaneda on the TV before the parade started, and it was a little creepy the way he kept griping about it. I had a bad feeling about him as soon as he walked in the door."

  "And you're certain it was Masaharu Aoyagi?" pressed the woman holding the microphone in his face.

  "You don't believe me? Of course it was. We give free seconds on rice, and twice he called me over to ask for more. Didn't leave a single grain in his bowl. Pretty weird, don't you think? Who has an appetite like that before he goes out and kills somebody?"

  "But are you sure it was him?"

  "What do you mean 'Am I sure?' I said it was, didn't 1? Wait a minute," he added, disappearing into the kitchen. When he came out, he was holding a credit card. "Here, have a look at this. He forgot it when he left."

  The woman took the card and held it up for the camera. The name at the bottom read "Masaharu Aoyagi."

  "What did I tell you?" said the shopowner. "He was muttering all sorts of crazy stuff about Kaneda. Seemed pretty weird to me."

  "You should probably turn this over to the police," said the woman.

  There was also a tape from the security camera in the parking lot of an apartment building somewhere. It had caught some suspicious activity the jiight before.

  "I thought 1 heard glass breaking in another apartment," said a man who was apparently a resident of the building with his face blurred to protect his

  THE fiUDIENCE

  identity, "but when I looked out the window, I saw a guy opening the door of a car in the lot." The footage from the security camera was fuzzy, but it was clear enough to make out a figure moving from car to car and trying the doors.

  "Looking for a getaway car," said one of the panelists.

  "While the police are conducting their investigation, where is Masaharu Aoyagi and what is he doing?" said a serious-sounding voice as the screen was filled with a close-up of Aoyagi. Then they broke for a commercial.

  Toru let out his breath, realizing that his shoulders had gone rigid and he'd been staring a hole in the TV. His roommate seemed to be coming up for air as well.

  "1 don't get it," Hodogaya said. "Two years ago he was some minor celebrity, and now he's supposed to have done this?"

  "Maybe he missed the spotlight. They made such a fuss over him for a while and then just dropped him. Maybe he wanted back in."

  "Well, 1 feel sorry for Kaneda if Aoyagi killed him for a few more minutes on TV."

  Toru nodded. He could see how a prime minister might prefer to be assassinated for political reasons or at least in some kind of conspiracy.

  "But they'll wind this up in no time," Hodogaya said, as if watching the chess program on TV.

  When the show returned after the commercial, there was an interview with a man who was filmed from the neck down to disguise his identity. His voice, however, had not been altered. "Right from the start, 1 thought there was something funny about that burglar story," he was saying. The caption explained that the man had lived next door to the starlet Rinka at the time of the break-in two years ago. " I he insulation in the building is |)retty good, j)retty soundproof, so 1 always wondered how he could have heard her screaming through the door. Seemed pretty unlikely to me. I always thought he set the whcde thing uj), tor some reason."

  Back in tlie studio, the host aj)ologized lor allowing the account number to be seen when they had broadcast the |)icture ol Aoyagi's credit card. " I'he accfjunt has been deactivated," he said.

  "And this just came in," he added. "We have received an im|)ortant piece (j 1 inlormation Iroin one ol our viewers." He went on to explain lluit a

  REMOTE CONTROL

  housewife in Izumi Ward had sent in footage that she had shot several months earlier at a riverside ball field north of the city. She had been recording a little league game there—the backstop, the kids in uniform, the opposing pitcher—when a remote-controlled model helicopter had suddenly floated up in the background, 'ds that a helicopter?" says a voice on the tape, apparently belonging to the woman shooting the film. At this point, the camera angle shifts, swinging down to focus on a man standing on the bank of the river, and zooming in on the controller he's using to fly the machine.

  The man in the picture seemed somewhat nervous—and looked exactly like Masaharu Aoyagi.

  "He was practicing," murmured one of the panelists as the tape ended. "That seems pretty clear."

  Then they moved oii to an interview with a woman who was identified as working at a well-known chain restaurant. "He came in last night, sat down right there, and ordered some pasta." She spun around and pointed frantically at a table behind her. "When I went over to take his order, he was real grumpy and mean. Then a police officer showed up and things got out of hand."

  "In what way?" asked the interviewer at the restaurant.

  "He started throwing around chairs and breaking windows." The camera moved to a shattered pane of glass, while the reporter pretended he'd just realized the extent of the damage. The TV theatrics seemed a bit overdone to Torn.

  The studio had also received a tape of Aoyagi's call to the police, which had just been released. The voice of the officer he had spoken to had been edited out, so the recording was a bit jumpy.

  "This is Masaharu Aoyagi," a voice said. And then, "I did it."

  T he TV station, ever prepared, had called in a voice-print expert, who claimed that the voice on the tape was identical to Aoyagi's from recordings made two years earlier at the time of his brief celebrity.

  The special broadcast continued. Kaneda's deputy in the Liberal Party, Katsuo Ebisawa, held a news conference outside his official residence. He announced that he was assuming the position of acting prime minister, as the constitution required, and emphasized that the authorities were still in a fact-finding mode.

  THE AUDIENCE

  "My party is providing any information it can concerning Masaharu Aoyagi and cooperating fully with the police investigation/' he added.

  "How?" a reporter shot back. He seemed almost surprised when Ebisawa began to answer.

  "Letters slandering Prime Minister Kaneda have been arriving at our party headquarters for the past two months. Similar letters have also been mailed to the prime minister's residence. Masaharu Aoyagi's fingerprints have been recovered from these letters."

  The uproar in the press pool forced Torn to pull off his earphones. He stretched, reached for his crutches, and stood up. Hodogaya had turned off his TV and was flipping through a manga. "Taking a leak?" he asked.

  Toru nodded. "Sick of the tube?"

  "Completely," said Hodogaya.

  "This is just the beginning," said Toru, feeling sure there would be much more to come.

  "They'll catch him soon enough. He's making a good game of it, but he's an amateur all the same." Hodogaya's tone made it clear that he was no amateur himself, and Toru knew that he was likely to launch into another dubious story of some exploit in the past; and sure enough, the next words out of his mouth came in the form of advice to the fugitive. "If it were me, I'd go underground," he said.

  "Literally? Underground?" Toru was barely able to contain his laughter.

  Hodogaya bristled. "Every city in this country has an underground system,"
he said, as though addressing a classroom. "Two systems, to be more exact: the sewers and the storm drains."

  "Is this a long story?" Toru interrupted, starting out of the room. "Afraid my bladder won't wait."

  When he'd finished in the bathroom, Toru decided to go down to the first floor to look around. 1 le found it easier now to navigate the halls on crutches. In the gift shop, he flipped through the weekly news magazines, but it was still too soon to have any coverage of the assassination. He read the sports |)apers instead.

  Two young women stood next to him at the magazine rack. One ol them was carrying a basket ol Iruit, a gilt lor someboily they'd come to visit.

  REMOTE CONTROL

  " can't believe it," one was saying. "They let out this stuff bit by bit, but it looks bad. And 1 liked him a lot. 1 was still in high school two years ago, but I had a major crush on that guy, the delivery man."

  "I did, too," said the other girl. "Everybody did."

  Torn was curious to hear what they had to say about Aoyagi.

  "I don't know anything about bombs," the first girl said, "but that stuff he did on the train's disgusting. Completely gross!"

  "I know! I was so disappointed. It's worse than killing the prime minister!"

  Stuff on the train? This was new to Torn. They must have been watching a different channel, saw some new wrinkle. He swung around on his crutches and headed back to his room.

  "It was about two months ago. I was on my way to work, on the Senseki Line. It was evening, but the train was pretty crowded. I remember this woman near the window saying 'Please stop!"' Torn had changed the channel to find a young man in sunglasses speaking into a mike. "We were all staring at him, pretty sure he was one of those train mashers, and then a few stops before Sendai Station, the woman grabbed the man's arm and pulled him off the train. They argued for a while on the platform. I had the feeling I'd seen him somewhere, and then I realized it was that delivery guy."

  When the interview was over, the announcer read accounts from other witnesses who said they'd seen a man who looked just like Masaharu Aoyagi being pulled off a train in a groping incident two months earlier.

  Then a small, pale woman who looked like a secretary came on with pictures she'd taken on her cell phone of a man and a woman arguing on a platform. There was no doubt that the man looked a lot like Aoyagi. "While I was shooting these," the woman said, "another man came along to help the girl, and the first man ran off."

  An actress on the celebrity panel sniffed in disgust. "So, he's a coward, too. Assaulting that poor woman on the train is bad enough, but then to run away! It's awful!"

  "It certainly is," said the moderator, sounding somewhat less indignant. Then he paused and pressed his fingers against the mike in his ear. "It seems we have a report just coming in," he said. Tom swallowed and adjusted his earphones. "A man resembling Masaharu Aoyagi was spotted just moments

  THE RUDIENCE

  ago in the Kashiwahara neighborhood in Aoba Ward. Tlie police pursued him, but he commandeered a car and fled, driving the wrong way down a one-way street. The car collided with an oncoming vehicle and struck a wall, but the man escaped in another car. An elderly woman was knocked down when he drove off, and was taken to the hospital with minor injuries."

  "If he's still somewhere in Sendai, they're bound to get him soon with all those Security Pods," observed one of the commentators.

  "There's a report of another crash in Sendai last night, and while there's no confirmation yet, we do know that one of the cars involved was a police vehicle. It seems likely that incident involved Aoyagi as well."

  Toru punched his remote and changed the channel. A woman he didn't recognize was reading another bulletin: "This just in: a woman reports seeing a man resembling Masaharu Aoyagi driving south on Route 4." The broadcast was produced by the national network, but most of the live reports from Sendai used local talent. The network shows had all been forced to link up with the Sendai stations and were broadcasting anything they could get their hands on.

  Next was a man who said he'd spoken to Aoyagi just before the incident. He was middle-aged and unshaven, and aj^parently had a small delivery business. "1 used to run into Mr. Aoyagi all the time when 1 was out making deliveries," he said, adding the "Mister" despite the fact that he was twice Aoyagi's age. "T hen he turned up again yesterday morning. It had been a while, so 1 was glad to see him. He was with another man."

  "Another man?" prompted the interviewer.

  "Yes, that's right," he said. "He's in a lot of trouble, isn't he?"

  "You feel sorry for him, do you?" said the reporter, sounding shocked.

  "1 didn't say that," he j)rotested. "My j)ackages were wrecked, and I'm not sure what I'm going to do." It was unclear what this meant, but the man didn't seem j)articularly uj)set. In fact, he was almost grinning as he said it.

  Another channel. This time it was a middle-aged woman with a surprisingly good figure. "He went that way," she said, pointing stage right. She seemed eager to tell her story. "A big man, with a big gun, going that way."

  "And you're sure it was Aoyagi?" asked the reporter.

  "I guess," said the woman. "But 1 was too scared to breathe!"

  If the T V is this crazy. Torn thought, then the Intel iK*t must be a iiKidhouse.

  REMOTE CONTROL

  He was glad to be in the hospital where there were no computers, otherwise lie would have been following the story around the clock.

  "New eyewitness account!" trumpeted an announcer toward evening. To loru, most of what they'd shown so far was junk, so he was amazed at their enthusiasm for each new dribble of information. But this time the clips were more impressive.

  The video had apparently been shot a few hours earlier by a man who lived in the northern part of the city. It was looking down from a balcony and showed a group of men, some uniformed police and some apparently plainclothes officers, standing with their guns trained on two other men. T he arms of the man in front were pinned behind his back, with the second one holding a knife against his throat. A delivery truck was visible in the background.

  "That's definitely Masaharu Aoyagi," said the announcer. "He's apparently taken a hostage!" Despite the shaky picture in the home video, he was quite recognizable. He could eventually be seen dragging his hostage out of sight down a narrow side street.

  "The hostage was found later a short distance away, apparently unharmed," the audience was informed.

  ‘'And where the hell is Aoyagi now?'' was Hodogaya's own sarcastic voiceover.

  "Probably already offed himself somewhere," Toru muttered.

  "1 suppose they won't stop until he's dead."

  "Game over," said Toru.

  Hodogaya seemed finally to have lost interest in the television and was busy fiddling with his cell phone. When it rang a moment later, Toru wanted to remind him that they weren't supposed to use these things in the hospital, but Hodogaya hobbled out into the corridor.

  Some time later. Chief Sasaki held yet another press conference, announcing that the investigation was moving toward a conclusion, but that the situation was nevertheless serious and potentially dangerous. "Masaharu Aoyagi is a desperate man," he said, staring into the camera. "Two people have died and five more have been injured during his attempt to escape." Someone broke in to ask whether the casualties were law officers. "No," said Sasaki. "They were innocent bystanders." At this, the reporters pushed forward, insisting on knowing who was to blame—blame being one of their specialties.

  THE AUDIENCE

  'Tast night, Aoyagi commandeered a car, crashed it into a police vehicle, and then tied on foot. T he body of a woman was found in the car."

  "Was she killed in the crash?" asked a reporter.

  "No," Sasaki answered. "She had been stabbed in the chest." More shouting from the press corps. "Therefore," Sasaki continued over the noise, "we have issued tranquilizer guns to the officers involved in the manhunt." The pressroom was suddenly quiet except for scattered gasps;
Toru realized he had gasped himself.

  There was something about the term "tranquilizer gun" that seemed brutish—Toru pictured a target painted on Aoyagi's back—perhaps because it equated a human being with a wild animal.

  Toru knew from news reports that powerful narcotics had been developed for use in dart guns as a last resort, in response to the restrictions on the police using live ammunition. Though a culprit might be armed and dangerous, public sentiment still favored a nonlethal sedative over deadly force. So the research on these dart guns had been fast-tracked, and now that the tests had been completed and a quantity of them produced, the police apparently intended to use them on Aoyagi.

  As if in support of this, the man Aoyagi had held hostage, who turned out to have worked at the same delivery company, said on television that "he's completely different from the guy 1 knew at work. 1 think he would have killed me. . . ."

  At some point in the evening coverage, Toru glanced over at Hodogaya. His roommate had turned off his T V and sat there looking fed up.

  "You give up watching?"

  "It's getting pretty boring."

  "You're right, the same stuff over and over."

  Halfheartedly, Hodogaya mentioned something al)out a visitor—his usual ruse—then j)icked uj) his cell phone and headed outside. 1 le was gone for some time, and while he was away T(^ru felt an odd compulsion to keep watching, as if it were his resjjonsibility to keep track (jf developmefits lor their room.

  They were now showing lootage ol an interview with Aoyagi's lather, aj)parently recorded earlier. The old man was s|)eaking into a microphone in trout (j 1 a house in a neighborhood irlenlilied as being in Saitiima I’relec-ture. He was small but |)()werlully built and he seemed br.iced against the

  REMOTE CONTROL

  onslaught of reporters. He looked tanned and healthy, his short hair and bushy eyebrows reminding loru somehow of a sailor. His answers were curt, to the point of being rude. Torn could understand a father's need to believe in his son's innocence, but at the same time it seemed a little ridiculous to insist he wasn't involved. But the little man went even further, urging his son on camera to keep running. The reporters seemed to disapprove.