Under the Face

Installment two of a serial. He opened the envelope.

The envelope had no money in it.

I broke the seal under the awning with my thumb, slowly, so he would have to watch me do it. He watched. He did not stop me. That was the first wrong thing.

Inside: a key, a photograph, a folded receipt from a rental place off the Ooka, and nothing else.

The photograph was Mio, younger by three or four years, standing in front of a door with a number on it. School clothes. Somebody had kept that picture, which means somebody had loved her before I met her, which means this was not a job that started in an alley.

“Wrong envelope?” I said.

“No.”

“Then where is the second half.”

“Spent.” He said it without flinching. “On the key. On me. On you.”

I want to be exact about what I felt, because it is the part I keep turning over now. I was not angry about the money. I was interested. The gap in that fee had a shape after all, and I was standing inside it.

“Who hired you,” I said.

“A woman. On the phone.”

“Name.”

“No name. The work was easy and the money was real, so I did not ask.” He shrugged inside his wet coat. “Bring her across. That was the whole brief. Bring her across, leave her at the door, do not stay to watch what happens next.”

“And you hired me for the part where somebody might have to be carried.”

“I hired you because you look like the kind who opens the envelope.” His smile was not friendly and it was not unfriendly. “I am not built for that. You are.”

So there it was. A woman pays a courier. The courier pays a knife. The knife is told to deliver a girl to a door in the rain and then walk away, and the fee sits between the price of a walk and the price of a body, because it is the price of a witness. A witness has to be paid like a body. A witness could talk.

I put the photo in my coat and went back to the car.

Mio had not moved her ten steps. Rain was running off her jaw and she did not wipe it.

“You opened it,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And?”

“There is no money in it. There is a key and a picture of you at nine years old.”

She closed her eyes. Not shock. Arithmetic.

“Show me the number on the door,” she said.

I held the photo up under the light. She read the number the way I read a room.

“That is my mother's house,” she said. “The rooming house. She has been telling the street for a month that I ran off with a man from Tokyo and it would end badly and I would come back and everyone would see how I came back.”

“So she paid a courier to bring you home.”

“She did not pay to bring me home.” Mio's voice did not rise. That was worse. “She paid to make me arrive. In front of everyone. At night, in the rain, with a hired man holding my bag. She wants the neighbours to watch her being right about me.”

I understood the job then, all of it. Not a killing. A display. The worst kind of work, because it pays well and leaves the person breathing, so nobody in the trade counts it as anything.

I could drive her the other way. It cost me nothing but the half I already had, and I have walked away from more than that.

Here is what I actually did.

“I am going to take you to that door,” I said.

She looked at me like I had spat.

“Because she paid you.”

“Because I want to see your face when it opens.” I said it plainly, because it was true, and because the true version is never the polite one. “I have been paid to stay out of rooms my whole life. Tonight I want to be in one.”

She studied me for a long time in that rain, and then she got back in the car, which was the first thing she had done all night that she chose without doing it exactly as told.

“That is the worst reason anyone has ever given me,” she said.

“Yes.”

“It is better than a good reason from a liar.”

She set the bag on her knees and did not let go of it again.

We came off the bridge on the far side, past the shuttered ramen place with its sign half dead, and down the river street where every house is four metres wide and every window has somebody at it. The rooming house had the right number over the door. It also had the light on, and the light was not the yellow kind a house keeps for a stranger. It was the white kind you leave on when you are waiting to be proven right.

The courier was already gone. The brief said not to stay.

I stayed. I stood in the rain with my hand on the car and my eyes on the door and her back, and I did not take a coin for it.

That is the first thing I did that night that was mine.

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Installment three is the door, and whoever is behind it. [email protected]