A Knife Edge (3 page)

And that was pretty much where we left it. There was a little discussion about us both being free agents, but nothing, thankfully, about us remaining friends—a surefire admission that we'd never speak to each other again.

The Boeing bumped around on some air currents and a light indicated that I should strap in. There being no lap restraints in the lavatory, I made the mental adjustment that it was time to take a seat without a hole in it.

I washed my hands, pushed open the concertina door and, leaning forward, climbed up the aisle toward my seat. The aircraft was still gaining height and the attendants were a little while from serving coffee and tea. The sessions I'd been doing to combat my fear of flying were working; I was almost getting on top of things. Actually, once airborne, it wasn't the fear of flying that chewed on me, it was fear of un-flying, like maybe the plane would suddenly realize it was doing something it shouldn't and drop out of the sky. Irrational, I know, but that's a phobia for you. I repeated the mantra:
The higher you are, the safer you are, the higher you are, the safer you are, the higher…

We'd been airborne for ten minutes now, well outside the forty-second danger zone where there wasn't enough altitude for the pilots to prevent a catastrophe if things went into the shitter and, say, a wing fell off. Actually, not even Chuck Yeager could do anything about a wing falling off—except to eject, of course—not an option, even for passengers traveling first class, last time I looked. My bowels were churning and my heart rate was up. Six months ago, the only way I could have done this would have been with a headful of barbiturates. Now what I wanted sleeping tablets for was so that I could maybe get some shut-eye and perhaps find myself in a dream with Anna, which was the only way I could see that I'd ever be able to spend any time with her.

T
he Tokyo city coroner, Dr. Samura Hashimura, wore a plastic sheath and clear plastic industrial glasses, and he breathed through an industrial face mask of the kind spray-painters use, while he worked over the corpse on the stainless-steel autopsy table. She stared with open milky eyes at the ceiling and appeared completely unconcerned that the coroner was digging around in her small intestines as if he was looking through his sock drawer trying to match a pair. My nose told me the woman had been dead about ten days, and hadn't been refrigerated for most of it. Once you experience the smell of death, you never forget it.

I was chaperoned by a uniformed officer from the local Tokyo police force who didn't know any words of English except for “Make my day,” which he'd repeated enthusiastically several times already. An interpreter-slash-liaison officer provided by the U.S. embassy also accompanied me. Michelle Durban was around twenty-five, blond, petite, with pale blue eyes and a dimple in her chin. Think cheerleader. She'd look great in a schoolgirl-style tartan microminiskirt, the local male fantasy of choice if the advertising around town selling everything from motorcycles to seaweed snacks was anything to go by.

Needless to say, my interpreter-slash-liaison officer was not dressed in a microminiskirt. For one thing, it was too cold. The
outside temperatures had taken a nosedive below freezing. Snow had begun to fall, sweeping off the mountains of Siberia and blanketing the island of Honshu. For another, Durban was CIA and microminis were not part of the dress code. Instead she wore slacks, boots, and a puffy parka that looked like a pink marshmallow with sleeves.

Dr. Hashimura set down a couple of instruments that looked disturbingly like chopsticks and mumbled a few words be hind his mask. Ms. Durban replied in Japanese. The coroner grunted. His rubber nonslip shoes squeaked on the polished concrete floor as he made his way out the door and across to a bank of stainless-steel drawers. He detoured to a computer screen and consulted it before returning to open one of the drawers. He pulled out the tray within, which rattled lightly on its bearings as if it wasn't carrying any weight. On the tray sat a rectangular stainless-steel box covered by an opaque plastic sheet. The coroner nodded at the box. I didn't need to speak Japanese to know that here were the remains of Dr. Hideo Tanaka, U.S. citizen and former employee of Moreton Genetics, the DoD contractor.

The coroner peeled back the plastic and said something to Ms. Durban as we looked down on what was left of the late doctor. “What'd he say?” I asked.

“He said that they thought at first it was a coconut.”

A coconut? The hairy ball in the tray could well have passed for one, especially if you weren't prepared to see it for what it was—a severed head. The coroner retrieved a large pair of forceps from a nearby tray and flipped the head over. The skin was greenish brown, the face swollen. The tongue was a livid purple. The eyes were missing, as were the eyelids. The stump of the neck was shredded. A single strip of muscle dangled from it, concealing a dirty white collarbone within.

Durban spoke to the coroner, who then scraped around in the ooze at the bottom of the tray with the forceps until he found what he was after. He pulled out something, then went over to a bench to wash it. He returned a moment later and gestured at
me to hold out my hand. In my palm he deposited a white serrated triangle. Then he talked in an animated manner for several minutes. When he finished, Durban informed me, “There is no question that the doctor was attacked by a very large great white shark. The size of the tooth makes the animal over twenty feet in length. That's well over twenty-five hundred pounds of fish.”

“So his head was like the pit?” I asked, motioning at the thing on the tray.

“What?”

“Like the pit in a piece of fruit—the bit you don't eat.” Durban still didn't get it. “Did the shark spit the head out or something?” I asked.

Durban wasn't sure whether I was being serious. I was. Not knowing anything about shark attacks, I was interested to know why there was anything left of the man at all. She frowned, then put the question to the coroner. The man laughed like he'd just heard an extremely funny joke and then proceeded to play a little impromptu charade for my benefit. Durban interpreted as the coroner acted out. “He thinks the shark came up beneath the doctor and took his whole body in its mouth.” Just as well Durban was on my team. I was still stuck on the coroner miming what appeared to be
“three words, first word rhymes with night.”
To assist my understanding, the Japanese man traced his hand across his own shoulder and neck. And then what he was acting out clicked:
bite.
Just as I caught on, Durban said, “He believes the shark bit clean through Tanaka's neck and shoulder. The tooth was found embedded in the collarbone.”

I had an image of the shark using the doctor's collarbone as a toothpick and then licking its lips. “Have toxicology tests been done?” I asked.

Durban passed the question along and then handed back the translation. “Yeah. Seems he was smashed. Blood-alcohol content up over zero point one.”

“How does he know that?” I asked. As far as I was aware, alcohol didn't hang around in the blood indefinitely, and I knew
the head had been found almost a week after it had been parted from its body.

Durban asked Hashimura, and then said, “The human body processes around an ounce of alcohol every hour. But once you're dead, those processes stop. Also, the head's been kept chilled in near-freezing water a couple of days. That preserves the blood and tissue.”

I nodded. The unusual circumstances surrounding the recovery of the doctor's head came to mind. They'd been elaborated upon in my briefing notes. One of the engines on the
Natusima,
Tanaka's expedition ship, overheated and had to be shut down. A storm and dangerously high seas meant the ship, reduced to one engine, had to be towed to Yokohama. It was dry-docked and the problem was traced to a blocked seawater intake essential to the engine's cooling system. Inside the pipe, wedged there like a cork in a bottle they found Tanaka's head, which I now knew everyone thought at first was a coconut.

“Have the local police followed up?”

Durban repeated the question for the coroner, who nodded and then spoke.

“They have and they're satisfied,” Durban translated. “Every one's calling it accidental death.”

“Yeah. I guess it'd be tricky murdering someone with a great white shark.”

“I don't know… Several years ago, a guy dressed in a panda costume murdered a woman in a Tokyo park. He caught the train home afterward. True story,” Durban added, just in case I was waiting for the punch line. I imagined a panda with bloodstained fur sitting cross-legged in the train, surrounded by Japanese workers heading home, everyone reading their newspapers. I said, “Do you think that's relevant to what we've got here?”

“No. What you said about someone using the shark as a murder weapon just reminded me.”

Whether the shark had anyone inside it before it struck its victim, who knew? But it certainly had someone inside it now—Dr. Tanaka, or at least most of him.

T
he Tokyo uniform gave us a lift to the Roppongi area in his patrol car. It was 1430 hours and already dark. The falling snow was light and dry. The wipers pushed the snowflakes around the windscreen like shredded paper and they swirled in bright spirals in our headlight beams. I looked into the swirls and felt like I was falling. It was hypnotic. I broke the spell by checking out the side window. There was enough neon bouncing around from all the signage to fry insects. “I'd like to talk to Tanaka's partner—the other scientist—and also to the ship's master,” I said, picking up the thread where I'd left it.

“I'll arrange it.” The look on Durban's face said,
You got suspicions?

I elaborated. “It was at least twelve hours before anyone realized Tanaka was missing. I'd like to have that time accounted for.” I didn't say that I'd come all this way and I needed to return home with something more substantial than a receipt for my minibar bill at the Hilton and a shark's tooth on a chain around my neck. Remembering the tooth, a present from the coroner, I pulled it from my jacket pocket. It was basically a blue-white equilateral triangle, each side over an inch in length. Serrations dimpled two of those sides and it came to a wicked point. I pictured a mouth full of these little steak knives attached to a fish that hit with the force of a runaway Cadillac. It
wouldn't have been a very nice way for Dr. Tanaka to leave the party.

“You been to Tokyo before?” Durban asked.

“No,” I said.

“What are your first impressions?” She took her hat off and tamed her straw-colored hair, running her fingers through it. I smelled lavender.

“It reminds me of a pinball machine I used to play, lit up for five times bonus and extra ball.”

Durban smiled. “You want to grab something to eat?”

I didn't need to give the invitation too much thought. The alternative was heading back to the Hilton and reading the hotel's brochure on its extensive range of gym equipment. “Sure. What you got in mind?”

A short while later we were sitting on high stools eating raw fish, delivered by a stream of robots. A glorified cigarette machine with red lips and bumps on its chest area crafted to resemble breasts on a cold day delivered something to us that jiggled on the plate. The machine said something in Japanese in a breathy voice that sounded like it wanted to exchange brake fluids with me. Before I could say
“Domo arigato,”
the only words I'd managed to learn from the Lonely Planet phrase book, the machine did a one-eighty and rolled off into the crowd.

To kick the evening off, I said, “So, what do you call a woman with one leg?”

“What?”

“Eileen. What do you call a Japanese woman with one leg?”

Durban shrugged.

“Irene.”

She laughed. “That's not funny.”

“Hmm,” I said. “Maybe I need to work on my delivery.” An awful sound coming through the ceiling speakers distracted me. There was a karaoke stage. A businessman sweating sake was tonguing the microphone, his tie loosened and his belly hanging over his belt like he was six months pregnant. The song was vaguely familiar but at the same time not. And then I recognized
it, The Beatles' “Hard Day's Night”—in Japanese. If I were one of the Fab Four, I'd be suing him for damages. Several women who were far too young and pretty to be accompanying him clapped excitedly, adoringly. This had to be the sort of behavior men paid for. Escorts, obviously.

“Those women—they're not what you think they are,” said Durban, doing a little mind reading.

“No?” I said. “What do I think they are?”

“I saw the way you looked at them.”

I wondered how I looked at them and decided not to respond with another question, in case Durban mistook me for a shrink.

“Japanese women handle things differently from Western women.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, they missed the whole feminist thing here. In fact, this place is almost feudal in some of its attitudes toward women. The men believe they are superior beings. The women don't challenge that belief. Not directly, anyway.”

“So, are you talking complete subservience to every male whim?” I found myself smiling at the two young Japanese women. Superior beings, eh? One of the women caught me looking at her and twittered to her friend. They both giggled at me from behind their hands.

Durban set me straight. “I meant, made to
feel
like superior beings.”

“Thanks for ruining it,” I said.

She shook her head. “Haven't you figured it out yet?” she said. “Yes, dear… No, dear… whatever. It's always an act. The women here work with what they've got. It's just a different angle.”

“So, despite appearances, they're no different from the women back home?”

“And what are we like?”

“You want an example?”

Durban nodded. “I can take it.”

“OK… A man goes to the doctor and brings his wife along.
He has a checkup. Afterward, the doctor calls her into the office. He says, ‘Your husband is extremely sick, and his fragile state is compounded by huge amounts of stress. If you don't follow my instructions explicitly, he'll die. In the morning, you have to let him sleep late. When he gets up, you have to fix him a good breakfast. Do not stress him out with chores. At lunch, make him something really delicious. Let him sleep in the afternoon. For dinner, cook something special again. Be nice, friendly, and for God's sake don't load him up with your own problems and concerns. The name of the game is to reduce his stress levels to zero. If you can do this for just one month, your husband will regain full health.'