The dowager seemed seriously shocked to hear this. Again she was at a loss for words, something most unusual for her.

“You mean to say—” the dowager said, looking for the right words, “that he himself was hoping for punishment for his deeds?”

“What he wanted was to end his painful life as soon as possible.”

“And he made up his mind to let you kill him.”

“Exactly.”

Aomame said nothing about the bargain she had struck with Leader. In exchange for letting Tengo go on living in this world, she herself would have to die: this was an agreement known only to Aomame and the man. No one else was to be told.

Aomame said, “The things he did were deviant and deserving of death, but he was no ordinary human being. Or at least he possessed something special.”

“Something special?” the dowager said.

“It’s hard to explain,” Aomame said. “It was at the same time both a special power or gift and a cruel burden. It was, I think, eating him alive from the inside.”

“Could it be that this special something urged him on toward his deviant behavior?”

“Probably.”

“In any case, you put a stop to it.”

“That is true,” Aomame said, her voice dry.

Holding the receiver in her left hand, Aomame spread out her right hand, with its lingering sensation of death, and stared at the palm. What did it mean to “have ambiguous congress” with those girls? Aomame could neither understand it nor explain it to the dowager.

“As always, I made the death appear to have been a natural one, but they will probably not do us the favor of seeing it that way. Given the circumstances, I’m sure they will conclude that I had something to do with it. And as you know, his death has not been reported to the police yet.”

“Whatever steps they choose to take, we will do everything in our power to protect you,” the dowager said. “They have their organization, but we have strong connections and ample funds. Also, you are a careful, intelligent person. We won’t let them have their way.”

“Have you not yet found Tsubasa?” Aomame asked.

“We still don’t know where she went. My thought is that she is in the Sakigake compound. She has nowhere else to go. We haven’t found a way to bring her back yet, but I suspect that Leader’s death has put the group into a state of confusion. We may be able to do something to exploit that confusion in order to save her. That child must be protected.”

That child in the safe house was not actual substance, according to Leader. She was merely one form of a concept and had since been “retrieved.” But Aomame could hardly say this to the dowager now. Aomame herself did not know what it meant. She did, however, remember the levitation of the marble clock. She had seen it happen with her own eyes.

Aomame asked, “How many days will I be hiding out in this safe house?”

“You should assume it will be from four days to a week. After that you will be given a new name and situation and moved to a faraway place. Once you have settled down there, we will have to cut off all contact with you for your own safety. I won’t be able to see you for a while. Considering my age, I might never be able to see you again. It might have been better if I had never lured you into this troublesome business. I have thought about that many times. Then I would not have had to lose you this way. But—”

The dowager’s voice caught in her throat. Aomame waited quietly for her to continue speaking.

“But I have no regrets. Everything was more or less destined to happen. I had to involve you. I had no choice. A very strong force was at work, and that is what has moved me. Still, I feel bad for you that it has come to this.”

“On the other hand, we have shared something, something important, something we could not have shared with anyone else, something we could not have had any other way.”

“Yes, you are right,” the dowager said.

“Sharing it was something that I needed, too.”

“Thank you for saying that. It gives me a measure of salvation.”

Aomame was also pained to think that she could no longer see the dowager, who was one of the few ties she possessed with the outside world.

“Be well,” Aomame said.

“You, too,” the dowager said. “And be happy.”

“If possible,” Aomame said. Happiness was one of the farthest things away from her.

Tamaru came on the phone.

“You haven’t used it so far, have you?” he asked.

“No, not yet.”

“Try your best not to use it.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

After a momentary pause, Tamaru said, “I think I told you the other day that I grew up in an orphanage in the mountains of Hokkaido.”

“You were put in there after you were evacuated from Sakhalin when you were separated from your parents.”

“There was a boy in that orphanage two years younger than I was. He was mixed: half Japanese, half black. I think his father was a soldier from the American base in Misawa. I don’t know about his mother, but she was probably a prostitute or a bar hostess. She abandoned him soon after he was born, and he was put in the orphanage. He was a lot bigger than me, but not very smart. The other kids teased him, of course, mainly because his color was different. You know how that goes.”

“I guess.”

“I wasn’t Japanese, either, so it fell to me one way or another to be his protector. Our situations were similar—a Korean evacuee and the illegitimate mixed-race kid of a black guy and a whore. You can’t get much lower than that. But it did me good: it toughened me up. Not him, though. He could never be tough. Left on his own, he would have died for sure. In that place, you had to have a quick wit or be a tough fighter if you wanted to survive.”

Aomame waited quietly for him to go on.

“He was bad at everything. He couldn’t do anything right. He couldn’t button his own shirt or wipe his ass. Carving, though, was something else. He was great at that. Give him a few carving tools and a block of wood and before you knew it he had made a really fine carving. No sketches or anything: the image would pop into his head and he would produce an accurate three-dimensional figure, tremendously detailed and realistic. He was a kind of genius. It was amazing.”

“A savant,” Aomame said.

“Yes, sure. I learned about that stuff later, the so-called savant syndrome. People with extraordinary powers. But nobody knew about that back then. People assumed he was mentally retarded or something—a kid with a slow brain but gifted hands that made him good at carving. For some reason, though, the only thing he would ever carve was rats. He could do those beautifully. They looked alive from any angle. But he never, ever carved anything but rats. Everybody would urge him to carve some other animal—a horse or a bear—and they even took him to the zoo for that purpose, but he never showed the slightest interest in other creatures. So then they just gave up and let him have his way, making nothing but rats. He made rats of every shape and size and pose. It was strange, I guess. By which I mean that there weren’t any rats in the orphanage. It was too cold there, and there was nothing for them to eat. The place was too poor even for rats. Nobody could figure out why he was so fixated on rats.… Well, anyway, word got out about the rats he was making. The local paper carried a story, and people started asking to buy them. The head of the orphanage, a Catholic priest, got a craft shop to carry the carved rats and sell them to tourists. They must have brought in some decent money, but of course none of it ever came back to the boy. I don’t know what they did with it, but I suspect the top people in the orphanage used it for themselves. All the boy ever got was more carving tools and wood to keep making rats in the workshop. True, he was spared the hard fieldwork; all he had to do was carve rats by himself while the rest of us were out. He was lucky to that extent.”