“Which leaves a workplace romance as the only possibility—except there aren’t any decent men there. They’re all brain-dead jerks who can only tell dirty jokes. They’re either born stupid or they think of nothing else but their advancement. And these are the guys responsible for the safety of society! Japan does not have a bright future.”

“Somebody as cute as you should be popular with the men, I would think,” Aomame said.

“Well, I’m not exactly unpopular—as long as I don’t reveal my profession. So in places like this I just tell them I work for an insurance company.”

“Do you come here often?”

“Not ‘often.’ Once in a while,” Ayumi said. After a moment’s reflection, she said, as if revealing a secret, “Every now and then, I start craving sex. To put it bluntly, I want a man. You know, more or less periodically. So then I get all dolled up, put on fancy underwear, and come here. I find a suitable guy and we do it all night. That calms me down for a while. I’ve just got a healthy sex drive—I’m not a nympho or sex addict or anything, I’m okay once I work off the desire. It doesn’t last. The next day I’m hard at work again, handing out parking tickets. How about you?”

Aomame picked up her Tom Collins glass and took a sip. “About the same, I guess.”

“No boyfriend?”

“I made up my mind not to have a boyfriend. I don’t want the bother.”

“Having one man is a bother?”

“Pretty much.”

“But sometimes I want to do it so bad I can’t stand it,” Ayumi said.

“That expression you used a minute ago, ‘Work off the desire,’ is more my speed.”

“How about ‘Have an opulent evening’?”

“That’s not bad, either,” Aomame said.

“In any case, it should be a one-night stand, without any follow-up.”

Aomame nodded.

Elbow on the bar, Ayumi propped her chin on her hand and thought about this for a while. “We might have a lot in common,” she said.

“Maybe so,” Aomame agreed. Except you’re a female cop and I kill people. We’re inside and outside the law. I bet that counts as one big difference.

“Let’s play it this way,” Ayumi said. “We both work for the same casualty insurance company, but the name of the company is a secret. You’re a couple years ahead of me. There was some unpleasantness in the office today, so we came here to drown our sorrows, and now we’re feeling pretty good. How’s that for our ‘situation’?”

“Fine, except I don’t know a thing about casualty insurance.”

“Leave that to me. I’m good at making up stories.”

“It’s all yours, then,” Aomame said.

“Now, it just so happens that two sort-of-middle-aged guys are sitting at the table right behind us, and they’ve been looking around with hungry eyes. Can you check ’em out without being obvious about it?”

Aomame glanced back casually as instructed. A table’s width away from the bar stood a table with two middle-aged men. Both wore a suit and tie, and both looked like typical company employees out for a drink after a hard day’s work. Their suits were not rumpled, and their ties were not in bad taste. Neither man appeared unclean, at least. One was probably just around forty, and the other not yet forty. The older one was thin with an oval face and a receding hairline. The younger one had the look of a former college rugby player who had recently started to put on weight from lack of exercise. His face still retained a certain youthfulness, but he was beginning to grow thick around the chin. They were chatting pleasantly over whiskey-and-waters, but their eyes were very definitely searching the room.

Ayumi began to analyze them. “I’d say they’re not used to places like this. They’re here looking for a good time, but they don’t know how to approach girls. They’re probably both married. They have a kind of guilty look about them.”

Aomame was impressed with Ayumi’s precise powers of observation. She must have taken all this in quite unnoticed while chatting away with Aomame. Maybe it was worth being a member of the police family.

“The one with the thinning hair is more to your taste, isn’t he?” Ayumi asked. “I’ll take the stocky one, okay?”

Aomame glanced backward again. The head shape of the thin-haired one was more or less acceptable—light-years away from Sean Connery, but worth a passing grade. She couldn’t ask too much on a night like this, with nothing but Queen and ABBA to listen to all evening.

“That’s fine with me,” Aomame said, “but how are you going to get them to invite us to join them?”

“Not by waiting for the sun to come up, that’s for sure! We crash their party, all smiles.”

“Are you serious?”

“Of course I am! Just leave it to me—I’ll go over and start up a conversation. You wait here.” Ayumi took a healthy swig of her Tom Collins and rubbed her palms together. Then she slung her Gucci bag over her shoulder and put on a brilliant smile.

“Okay, time for a little nightstick practice.”

CHAPTER 12

Tengo

THY KINGDOM COME

The Professor turned to Fuka-Eri and said, “Sorry to bother you, Eri, but could you make us some tea?”

The girl stood up and left the reception room. The door closed quietly behind her. The Professor waited, saying nothing, while Tengo, seated on the sofa, brought his breathing under control and regained a normal state of consciousness. The Professor removed his black-framed glasses and, after wiping them with a not-very-clean-looking handkerchief, put them back on. Beyond the window, some kind of small, black thing shot across the sky. A bird, possibly. Or it might have been someone’s soul being blown to the far side of the world.

“I’m sorry,” Tengo said. “I’m all right now. Just fine. Please go on with what you were saying.”

The Professor nodded and began to speak. “There was nothing left of Akebono after that violent gun battle. That happened in 1981, three years ago—four years after Eri came here to live. But the Akebono problem has nothing to do with what I’m telling you now.

“Eri was ten years old when she started living with us. She just showed up on our doorstep one day without warning, utterly changed from the Eri I had known until then. True, she had never been very talkative, and she would not open up to strangers, but she had always been fond of me and talked freely with me even as a toddler. When she first showed up here, though, she was in no condition to talk to anybody. She seemed to have lost the power to speak at all. The most she could do was nod or shake her head when we asked her questions.”

The Professor was speaking more clearly and rapidly now. Tengo sensed that he was trying to move his story ahead while Fuka-Eri was out of the room.

“We could see that Eri had had a terrible time finding her way to us up here in the mountains. She was carrying some cash and a sheet of paper with our address written on it, but she had grown up in those isolated surroundings and she couldn’t really speak. Even so, she had managed, with the memo in hand, to make all the necessary transfers and find her way to our doorstep.

“We could see immediately that something awful had happened to her. Azami and the woman who helps me out here took care of her. After Eri had been with us a few days and calmed down somewhat, I called the Sakigake commune and asked to speak with Fukada, but I was told that he was ‘unable to come to the phone.’ I asked what the reason for that might be, but couldn’t get them to tell me. So then I asked to speak to Mrs. Fukada and was told that she couldn’t come to the phone either. I couldn’t speak with either of them.”

“Did you tell the person on the phone that you had Eri with you?”

The Professor shook his head. “No, I had a feeling I’d better keep quiet about that as long as I couldn’t tell Fukada directly. Of course after that I tried to get in touch with him any number of times, using every means at my disposal, but nothing worked.”