Chapter 61: The Missing Piece (2)
The bolt slid back, and I heard the door open onto the landing.
From where I was, wedged upright between the hanging clothes with the shoebox crushed against my chest, I could barely see anything, but the two wardrobe panels didn’t quite meet and there was a vertical gap between them letting through a line of light, wide enough to give me a thin slice of the hallway and, at the end of that hallway, a piece of the living room with the couch and the corner of the coffee table.
A man’s voice said something I couldn’t make out, and footsteps came into the apartment.
Not the footsteps of someone waiting to be invited in, but of someone coming home, with that ease in the walk that belongs only to people convinced the place is theirs by right.
He crossed my slice of vision.
He must have been twenty-five, maybe a little less, with hair bleached blond and black roots that had been growing back for a while, a shirt open three buttons too far, and an enormous watch on his wrist that caught the ceiling light with every gesture. He wore chains around his neck and a ring on each hand, and he had that way of rolling his shoulders as he walked that tries to take up more room than necessary.
Who is this guy?
He went to the middle of the living room and turned back toward Alice without hurrying.
"So why weren’t you answering my messages, exactly?" His voice was calm, almost friendly, and that was far worse than if he’d shouted. "I’ve been paging you for hours, and after a while I had to come all the way over here, which is a shame for everyone really."
And Alice, in the narrow field the gap allowed me, lowered her head.
"Sorry, I was busy and I didn’t see my phone."
No.
No, no, this is all wrong, Alice doesn’t talk to anyone like that, Alice doesn’t lower her head for anyone, and certainly not in that voice.
She stood with her shoulders drawn in and her hands folded in front of her, in a posture I had never seen on her and would not have believed possible, and everything of her that had been in that room went out all at once, leaving in its place a girl apologizing for not having checked her phone quickly enough.
Around me, in the dark of the wardrobe, my body had started to tremble.
I didn’t know whether it was rage or fear, and I leaned heavily toward rage given what I had just heard, because on my side, in this version of me that watched all of it without being able to move an eyelash, something enormous and burning was rising against this guy who plainly held some power over her and who used it with an ease that gave away long practice.
"Hmm." He rolled his shoulders and looked around. "Anyway, go get me a pack of cigarettes, I’m out."
She nodded.
She nodded without a word, picked up her own wallet from the hall table, put on her shoes and left, and I heard the door close behind her with a snap that stayed in my ears a long time.
She took her own wallet.
He sends her out for his cigarettes and she’s the one paying.
The guy found himself alone in the middle of the apartment, and he began to wander.
He moved slowly from one room to another, lifting things as he went, opening a drawer only to shut it again, examining the contents of a shelf with the interest of a man appraising rather than looking, and at one point he came into the bedroom and passed less than a meter from the wardrobe.
I saw him up close through the gap, his shirt, his jaw, the sweat shining at his hairline, and I stayed perfectly still because my body wouldn’t have obeyed me in any case.
He went back out without noticing anything.
Then he stopped in front of the coffee table.
I understood what he’d seen before he even leaned down, because the photo was still where Alice had dropped it as she stood, lying flat on the wood, with that orange sunset and those two silhouettes sitting shoulder to shoulder on the sand.
He picked it up between two fingers and held it in front of him.
He looked at it for a long moment without saying anything, then raised his eyes and swept the room around him, slowly, stopping on the hallway and on the closed doors, with something on his face that looked a great deal like the beginning of understanding.
He’s worked something out.
His phone rang.
He tossed the photo onto the table without even setting it down properly, pulled the phone from his pocket and answered as he moved off toward the window.
"Yeah, I’m at her place right now."
A silence during which he took a few steps, and I saw his reflection cross the living room glass.
"Yeah, okay. So how did it go on your end?"
He listened, nodded to himself while scratching the back of his neck.
"Hmm, I see. So the grandmother really is loaded, that’s confirmed?" He let out a low whistle. "Because I’d been told about the company but not on that scale, I thought it was just some provincial construction outfit with two sites and three trucks, not something worth that much."
The company.
Kazawa & Sons, the construction firm Alice’s grandfather had founded and that his widow had kept running after his death, with the sites and the land and everything that came with it.
I was never particularly close to that side of the family, my stepmother’s side, but I knew there was money there and I knew the grandmother had held all of it, alone, for years.
"Okay."
He kept listening as he walked, and I gripped the box against me without meaning to, because my fingers weren’t mine.
So it’s extortion.
This guy is here for an old woman’s money, and he’s using Alice to get to it, and Alice never told me anything, not about him, not about any of it, not about anything.
And why does he come all the way to her apartment, at this hour, as though the place belonged to him?
"Yeah, yeah, don’t worry." He gave a short laugh. "I’ll drop her the second we’ve bled her for the whole lot, it’s not like I’m going to saddle myself with her afterward."
My heart stopped.
And not for the reason it should have, not because a woman was being systematically stripped of everything she had, not because I was watching something sordid unfold, but for a far pettier and far more selfish reason that landed on me with a violence I wouldn’t have thought myself capable of.
Alice has a boyfriend.
Alice has someone in her life and she never once mentioned it to me, she hid it from me, she spent entire evenings with me on that couch without ever saying his name.
Is that why she shut me in here? Is that why she panicked when she heard the knocking? Was she afraid he’d see me? Was she afraid of losing him, him, and not me? Was she afraid of losing that guy?
Alice, what is this?
"With that, honestly, it’ll give our income a decent boost for a while."
Move.
I screamed inside that body that wasn’t listening to me, I screamed against every muscle and tendon and joint that didn’t belong to me, I screamed against this guy standing motionless in a wardrobe with a shoebox in his arms while a stranger strolled around the apartment calmly explaining to someone how he planned to empty her out and throw her away.
Move, you bastard, move your legs, that’s all I’m asking, push this panel open and get out of here.
You’re three meters from him, all you have to do is shove this door and take him by the throat and crush him into the wall, and you’re doing nothing, you’re standing in the dark shaking like a coward.
I hate you. I hate myself. Move, move, MOVE.
Nothing.
Not a finger, not an eyelash, not one breath that belonged to me.
"Aaahahaha!" The guy’s laugh reached me from the living room, open and relaxed. "You know how my father raised me, and honestly I deserve no credit for this one, because she was already in pieces when I found her."
He laughed again, and I felt something freeze in me.
"She was weak and crying all the time after some so-called Kuro turned her down, so I took advantage and played the decent guy, and you should have seen me, man, my acting was incredible."
What?
"I comforted her, I took my time, I didn’t rush anything for weeks, and look, you can see it’s paying off." The sound of a lighter, then nothing, because he was out of cigarettes. "I really did the right thing playing along, damn, ahahah."
After some so-called Kuro turned her down.
After I turned her down.
That night on the beach, what we said to each other the next day to pretend nothing had happened, everything I brushed aside because it was simpler for me to act as though it hadn’t.
She fell apart because of me and this guy scraped her up off the floor.
"What, me, a piece of trash?" He burst out laughing. "Well, yeah, man, I’m a piece of trash, and if I get it from my father, how do you think he got me in the first place, ahahahah!"
I’m going to kill him I’m going to kill him I’m going to kill him I’m going to kill him I’m going to kill him I’m going to kill him I’m going to kill him I’m going to kill him I’m going to kill him I’m going to kill him I’m going to kill him I’m going to kill him I’m going to kill him I’m going to kill him I’m going to kill him I’m going to kill him I’m going to kill him I’m going to kill him I’m going to kill him I’m going to kill him I’m going to kill him I’m going to kill him I’m going to kill him I’m going to kill him I’m going to kill him.
The laughter stopped short and his voice came back down.
"What, you’re telling me we’ll have to wipe the evidence either way, is that it?" He clicked his tongue, annoyed. "Come on, man, you think I’m an amateur?"
He resumed his pacing across the living room while he listened, and his steps brought him back toward the coffee table.
And his eyes fell on the photo again.
He bent down, picked it up between two fingers, and this time he turned it in the ceiling light to look at something other than the image, because there was something written at the bottom, in the corner, in blue ink.
I watched his lips move as he read.
"Kuro, I love you."
The silence lasted the length of one breath.
Then his foot went through the coffee table.
The wood split across, the glasses and the packet of cookies flew against the wall, and he started shouting into the phone in a voice that had nothing left of its earlier calm.
"I’M GOING TO KILL HER, YOU HEAR ME, I’M GOING TO KILL HER!"
He drove his foot into what was left of the table, then into the cabinet, then into the wall.
"No, I’m not waiting for the end of the plan, man, I’m going to beat her to death, that bitch, she’s been laughing at me from the start and I’ve been playing the nice guy for months while she writes his name on photos!"
Something shattered against the floor in a burst of glass.
"THE SECOND SHE WALKS IN, SHE’S DEAD!"
He swept the shelf clear with the back of his arm, tore a frame off the wall, overturned the armchair, and the apartment filled with the sound of things breaking while I watched it through a gap a few centimeters wide, the memory box crushed against my chest.
She’s going to come back.
She’s going to come back in five minutes with a pack of cigarettes she paid for out of her own pocket, she’s going to turn the key and push that door open, and he’ll be behind it.
Move.
Move.
Move, move, move, move, MOVE, DAMN IT, MOVE!
And my arm came up.
It rose slowly, shaking all over, the open hand reaching through the dark toward the wardrobe panel, and I felt the wood under my fingers.
Then the door opened.