The staircase creaked underfoot, the railings were sticky from other people's hands, and the bulb on the third floor flickered every other moment, as if it had a separate life of its own, full of doubts. Someone had long ago written names on the walls with a spray can; now they were almost worn away, the half-erased letters merging with the cracked plaster.
Genzo climbed to the fifth floor and stopped at the familiar door, upholstered in cracked leatherette. He stood for a while, studying the scratches on the doorframe: from someone's keys, from moving furniture, from time. A muffled sound of a television came from inside.
He pushed the door; it was unlocked, as usual.
"Takamura?"
"I'm here," came from the room. "Take your shoes off, I'm not your maid to mop the floors after you."
He took off his boots and set them neatly against the wall, a habit from childhood, and went inside. The apartment was small but lived-in: an old carpet with the pattern worn away in the middle, a shelf of books that clearly nobody had read in a long time but nobody had thrown out either, the smell of tobacco that had soaked into the curtains for good over so many years. The television was on at full volume; on the screen flashed a photo of a boy in a school uniform, with a ticker running along the bottom: "SUSPECTS WANTED ACROSS THE CITY," and the announcer monotonously repeated the details in a dry, almost indifferent voice.
Takamura sat on the sofa with one leg crossed over the other, in an old stretched-out T-shirt, without a bra. She noticed how Genzo looked away for a second, and smirked.
"What, embarrassed? I go around without a bra at home, get used to it, it's not the first time you've seen it."
"I'm not embarrassed," said Genzo. "Just... you could have warned me."
"About what? That I'm in my own home?"
"I stood outside the door for an hour," said Genzo quietly, sitting on the edge of a chair by the table. "I was thinking about whether to come in or not."
"And you came in anyway."
"I came in."
"Well, good. An hour outside the door, you're a fool, of course, but a persistent fool."
"I rang the bell. Three times."
"Ah, so that was you. I thought it was those people from the bank again."
"What bank?"
"I don't know which one either. They call and stay silent. Anyway, never mind."
Takamura didn't move from the sofa, only stretched out her hand to the remote and turned the volume down a little, but didn't turn it off completely. The boy's photograph went on flickering on the screen among the static and the ad inserts at the bottom.
"You're somehow not yourself today," she said, studying him closely, her eyes slightly narrowed. "Did something happen?"
Genzo was silent for a long time, looking at his hands, studying the lines on his palms, as if what to say next might be written there. Then he said, almost in a whisper:
"Renji is dead."
Takamura froze.
"What did you say?"
"Renji. He's dead," he repeated, and his voice broke on the last word. "For so many years I waited, thinking I'd come back and everything would be like before. That we'd be together again, that I'd fix everything. And now he's gone, and there's nothing left to fix."
She got up from the sofa abruptly, as if something had shoved her from inside, went to the wardrobe, took out a blazer and started getting dressed, though she didn't seem to be going anywhere right now.
Genzo slid from the chair to the floor, wrapped his arms around his knees and hunched over, as if he wanted to become as small as possible.
"I don't know what to do now," he said to the floor. "I don't know at all. It's as if everything was taken out of me at once."
"But I know," said Takamura, buttoning up. Her voice was firm, without sympathy, but without anger either, just a fact spoken aloud. "You'll find them and kill them. Everyone who took part in this. No sniveling. I'll help you however I can."
"I told Mom I was ready to kill... Actually, I'm not."
Genzo raised his eyes. On the table, slightly crooked in its frame, stood an old photograph: he and Renji, still children, hugging each other, squinting in the sun, both laughing, carefree, knowing nothing of what would come next. He looked at it for a long time, and his chest grew tighter and tighter.
There was a knock at the door, three short knocks.
"It's open!" shouted Takamura without turning around.
The door opened, and four people came into the hallway one after another. First, a tall guy with a kind, slightly shy face, that was Sua. Behind him, Miyuki, then Raiden, who silently nodded instead of greeting, and last, Mika, with a cigarette in her mouth, not yet lit.
Genzo jerked his head up, surprised.
"Where did you all come from?"
"Takamura called," said Sua gently, taking off his jacket and carefully hanging it on the back of a chair. "She said something bad had happened to you. We decided it was better for you not to be alone right now."
He came over, crouched down on the floor next to Genzo and carefully hugged him, not tightly, not abruptly, but the way you hug a person who is about to fall apart if you squeeze any harder.
"I'm sorry, Genzo," he said quietly. "I'm truly sorry."
Genzo awkwardly hugged him back with one arm, feeling a lump rise in his throat.
"Thanks," he forced out.
Raiden silently walked to the wall, leaned against it with his shoulder, crossed his arms over his chest and stayed standing like that, not sitting, not saying anything, just watching what was happening from under his brows. He rarely spoke first anyway, preferring to listen, and now it was noticeable that the news about Renji had hit him too, though it was hard to read on his face, except in how tightly he gripped his own elbow.
Miyuki walked to the table, pulled a thick wad of bills held together with a rubber band out of her bag and threw it onto the table so that it landed with a dull thud.
Genzo stared at the money.
"Where's this from?"
"From the underground fights," said Miyuki, sitting down opposite, crossing her legs and studying him with narrowed eyes. "Mika and I found out about your buddy. We decided to chip in what we could. Don't thank us, I'm not doing this for thanks, it's just the rule."
"I don't need money," Genzo said quietly.
"It's not money you need," said Miyuki. "You need people, weapons, connections. And all of that is bought with money. Take it and don't make a fuss, I don't have time to fuss over you."
"That's a lot," said Genzo, not touching the wad.
"It's exactly as much as is needed."
"Who put in how much?"
"Why do you want to know?"
"I want to know whom I owe."
"You don't owe anyone," Miyuki sighed. "I told you, it's the rule. Mika, for one, gave half and says nothing."
"Not half. And don't talk about it."
"What, ashamed?"
"I just don't like it when people count."
Mika finally lit her cigarette, blew smoke at the ceiling and sat on the windowsill, dangling a leg.
"By the way," she said, "the fight sponsor praised you recently."
"What sponsor?" asked Genzo, without raising his head.
"The one for those fights, the underground ones," Miyuki answered for her. "I saw the recording where you smashed a guy on the head with a brick. He went straight into a coma, still hasn't woken up, I think. The sponsor said the precision was jeweler's, as if you hadn't thrown a brick but shot a rifle. He said you'd have to search a long time for people like you, used to fighting, you don't flinch."
Genzo said nothing, only clenched his fingers into fists.
"I'm not proud of it," he said at last, very quietly.
"Nobody's asking you to be proud," Miyuki snorted. "It just came up."
"So it was definitely Kaoru who arranged it all? With Renji?" Raiden asked quietly, speaking up for the first time in the whole conversation, without moving from the wall.
"I don't doubt it for a second," said Takamura, fastening the last button of her blazer. "Who else, if not her? She has her own sect right there, everyone hangs on her every word, ready for anything."
"None of us doubts it, to be honest," Sua added quietly, still sitting next to Genzo on the floor. "It's too similar to what she's done before. Too much her style."
"What exactly did she 'do before'?" asked Genzo.
"Remember the story with that guy from the neighboring district?" said Sua. "He also disappeared first, then was found. Nobody proved anything."
"I remember," Genzo answered dully.
"It's the same here. Quiet, clean, no witnesses."
"She's also gathered a whole army for herself on the internet, if you know where to look," Raiden said in a low voice from the wall, looking somewhere toward the television. "She started some forum, gave it all a nice name, like a hobby club. But in fact it's a sect. Ten thousand people already, I heard. On the internet it's easy to deceive people if you know how to present things."
"And by the way, the police shut down this site, apparently recently, well, partially of course. Before that they didn't even know it existed; you couldn't get in there by simple means."
"It was an ordinary anonymous forum for those teenagers who want to and are ready to kill people, a forum of sadists, basically. The police couldn't catch absolutely everyone who was a fanatic of Kaoru, but they still caught some and put them away. And surprisingly, the forum and the site were anonymous. The site was called 'The Violet Rose and Cross.' It disguised itself as harmless. Entry by invitation only."
"By invitation," Miyuki repeated. "So you can't just walk in."
"No. Someone inside has to vouch for you."
"And if the guarantor turns you in?"
"Then both he and you get kicked out," said Raiden. "That's why there's collective responsibility there."
"Interpol simply refused to cooperate with the police of our district. Ours is too corrupt and selfish. And our district is a godforsaken place anyway."
"The hosting was abroad. The server was in a country that doesn't cooperate with the local police."
"So it can't be shut down?" asked Mika.
"You can close the domain," Raiden answered. "But they'll open a new one in a week."
"The rituals are the most important thing, gatherings where people felt part of something big. The sect even used psychotropic substances to heighten suggestibility."
"How do you know about the substances?" asked Takamura.
"From the testimony of those who were jailed. Some of it was posted in the archives."
"There were also those who doubted, who were afraid to leave, who worked for the police as informants."
"They had informants?" Miyuki asked in surprise.
"They did. Some were identified."
"And what happened to them?"
"Nothing good," Raiden answered curtly.
"Right now the sect isn't whole, only the most loyal are left, the rest didn't dare and left."
"So the most dangerous ones are the ones who stayed," said Sua.
"Exactly," Raiden nodded.
"Honestly, our police are weak, the district is very poor, sometimes there are rallies here and even mass killings. The whole budget goes to hospitals and transport. And the police simply have no resources for cybercrime. They have no time to look for some forum when there's shooting in the streets," Raiden admitted honestly.
"Their ideology, to become something grand, beyond human will, to know the truth outside of being, is bullshit, nothing more. I even went on that forum once and saw so much there... Afterward they banned me for being too active. And I won't be able to get back in."
"You went in?" Genzo asked sharply.
"Once. Long ago."
"And what did you see there?"
"Better not to tell it at the table," Raiden answered. "But believe me, there's nothing grand there. Just filth."
"This means," Raiden continued, "that there will be hundreds of fans who will take the blame on themselves or give her an alibi. The police in a poor district won't spend years collecting evidence against a creature like Kaoru, they simply don't need it..."
"You said a lot. How do you know all this?" asked Genzo.
"I just studied the archives on the internet. Of course, there's a lot I haven't had time to study, but what I know, I've told."
"Is that why you sit at the computer at night?" asked Miyuki.
"Not only that."
"What else for?"
"I can't sleep," Raiden answered curtly, and nobody asked further.
"Ten thousand psychos ready to die for her," Mika added from the windowsill. "And Ayako went over there too, my rival from the club. She hates Christianity, can't stand religion at all, but she attached herself to Kaoru, for money, naturally, what else would you expect from her."
"Are you sure it's for money?" asked Sua.
"What else for? For an idea? Ayako? Don't make me laugh."
"People sometimes deceive themselves."
"Ayako doesn't deceive herself. She always knows how much she's being paid."
"So Kaoru now has money, and people, and her own army of fanatics," Raiden summed up quietly and fell silent again, lowering his eyes.
Genzo's phone vibrated with a short signal. He pulled it from his pocket and looked at the screen.
"Sorry," he muttered, getting up from the floor. "Just for a minute."
He went out of the room into the hallway, then turned into the next room; it was dark, nobody had turned on the light. He opened the message: his mother had written that tomorrow they were going to train, they would learn to shoot firearms. She wrote that she had found a suitable place, quiet and secluded.
He raised his eyes from the screen, and in a dark corner of the room two points glinted, as if someone's eyes. Genzo flinched and stepped back toward the wall.
Pardon slowly came out of the darkness, smiling.
"Scared you?" he asked softly, almost guiltily, turning on the light. "Sorry, I didn't mean to."
"Damn it," Genzo exhaled, pressing a hand to his chest. "Why were you sitting here in the dark?"
"Just lost in thought, didn't turn on the light," said Pardon, still with an apologetic smile. "Sorry again."
Genzo looked him over.
"Wait. You were supposed to fly to the US. Why are you here?"
"I canceled the tickets, they refunded the money," said Pardon calmly. "I found out your friend was killed. I couldn't just fly off and leave you alone with this."
"You dreamed about that trip."
"I did. I'll go later."
"And in the hospital, remember? You were holding tickets, weren't you?"
"Tickets from South Korea to Japan, straight to you."
"So you deceived me? You bought the tickets after all?"
Genzo felt something rising in his throat, not tears, but close to them.
"Thank you," he said quietly. "Really."
Pardon lightly patted him on the shoulder, and they returned to the room together, where the conversation was already going on in its own way.
"The Christian club closed, by the way," Miyuki was saying as they came in. "The owner went bankrupt, the accounts were frozen. So now I only have my own left, it's called 'F.' A hundred people, all tough, they'll help if needed."
"Help with what?" asked Genzo, sitting back down on the floor next to Sua.
"In a fight," said Miyuki. "Those you want to kill have plenty of weapons and people, you understand that yourself. Going there alone is pure suicide."
"It'll be fun," Raiden said quietly from his wall, and it sounded not like a joke but rather like a statement of fact, delivered without any enthusiasm.
"Fun is an understatement," said Genzo wearily but not rudely; in his voice there was only that quiet, exhausted desperation. "Fine. Since you're all gathered here, tell me, is Hirakami actually a dangerous district? I've lived here for so many years and don't really understand."
"Compared to the neighboring big district, no," said Sua. "There you'd better not walk in the evening without protection. Ours is calmer, after all."
"Calmer," Miyuki scoffed. "That doesn't mean safe. There are plenty of small gangs here, each one sits on its own street and shares it with someone else."
"And plenty of cults of our own," Raiden added.
"Like Ayako's," said Mika, flicking ash out the window. "They said she has an antichrist cult."
"Big words," Miyuki shook her head. "More like a local gang that gives itself a fancy name. Twenty people, no more."
"But twenty people who'd tear out throats for her," Sua remarked quietly.
"Exactly," Raiden nodded. "That's why Hirakami is never completely calm."
Genzo nodded, was silent for a moment, then began speaking again, more quietly, as if addressing not so much those present as himself.
"As a child I was completely different. Until about nine I didn't do anything at all, I was fragile, completely skinny. I wore whatever clothes I wanted. Sometimes I put on dresses, my mom's old ones, some still girlish ones, not because I was forced, I just liked it, they were soft, colorful. My father saw me like that once and went berserk. For real. He shouted that I was disgracing him, that someone like that had no place in his house. Once he even beat me, for that one dress, I was probably about eight then. My hair was longer then than now, tousled, nobody really combed it."
"You were eight," Takamura said quietly. "Eight years old."
"Yes."
"And for a dress."
"For a dress."
"Scum," she said curtly.
"He's my father."
"He's scum and your father at the same time. One doesn't get in the way of the other."
"And what happened then?" Pardon asked quietly, sitting on the arm of the sofa.
"When I was ten, my father sent me to the mountains," Genzo continued, still looking at the table. "We went there on foot, a long way, several days. The area was mountainous, there were almost no people. A master lived there, Fan Li was his name. He's the one who taught me."
"What did he teach?" Sua asked gently, without pressure.
"Various things," said Genzo. "How to pierce veins with a big needle. How to break a bone fastest. How to put an arm back in place if the joint is dislocated. He could cut down a whole house with just a katana. He died a long time ago, that master. And I left that village and never went back there."
Silence hung over the table a little longer than necessary. Even Miyuki said nothing, only looked at him somehow differently, without the usual sharpness in her eyes.
Finally Takamura rose from the sofa and slapped her palm against her thigh.
"All right," she said, "since that's how it is, I'll go fry some eggs, otherwise we'll just sit here listening to each other and starve to death. You can't have serious conversations on an empty stomach, I'm telling you this as the elder."
"I'll help," said Sua, getting up.
"Sit. You'll oversalt everything."
"I don't oversalt."
"You oversalt when you're nervous. Sit, I said."
She went to the kitchen. A minute later the sound of oil on a red-hot pan reached them, a quiet, even sizzle, then the knock of eggs against the edge of a bowl, then the sizzle again, louder now: she had poured them into the pan. The smell of hot oil and fried egg white drifted through the apartment, mixing with cigarette smoke and the smell of old curtains, with that particular homey atmosphere that exists only in apartments where people have lived for a long time and aren't in a hurry to move out.
"Should I add salt for anyone?" she shouted from the kitchen.
"More for me," Raiden responded dully from his wall, the first joking remark of the whole evening, though still said quietly, without a smile on his face.
"You should eat less salt in general, your face swells from it," Miyuki snorted.
"Go on," Raiden grumbled without malice, but you could see from his eyes that he had still smiled a little, though only with the corners of his lips.
Genzo listened to this exchange, and for a second he felt a little lighter, as if the ordinary bickering in the kitchen had for a moment covered over the weight that had been pressing on his chest all day.
The announcer kept droning from the television: about the search, about the city, about the fact that the killers hadn't been found yet.
"Turn off that nonsense," said Mika, without turning from the window.
"Let it drone," answered Sua. "At least some sound."
"It drains the soul."
"Then at least quieter."
He took the remote and turned the volume down a bit more, so that the announcer's words turned into an even, indistinct buzzing.
A few minutes later Takamura came out of the kitchen with a big frying pan and set it right on the table, on a towel folded in half so it wouldn't scorch the wood. The fried eggs had crispy edges, slightly burnt on the bottom, the yolks bright orange, still trembling, not set all the way, shining in the light of the lamp over the table.
"Dig in," she said, taking forks from the drawer and handing them around. "While it's hot."
Everyone reached for the pan, some with forks, some just tearing off a piece of bread with their fingers and dipping it in the yolk. Raiden finally came away from the wall, sat down next to the others, silently took a fork, said nothing, but you could see he appreciated it. Genzo took a fork too, though he didn't feel like eating at all, and still he speared a piece, just so as not to stand out, to be part, even for a second, of this simple, ordinary action, and not the person who an hour ago had been sitting on the floor not understanding how to go on living.
"Delicious," Sua said quietly, having tasted it.
"Of course," Takamura snorted, finally sitting down at the table with everyone. "I've been frying eggs for twenty years, I have to do at least something well in this life."
Someone at the table laughed quietly, and the conversation flowed on, no longer so heavy, a little easier, a little more human, though the photograph of the boy on the television screen still hadn't gone anywhere.
Mika pulled a plate toward herself, tore off a piece of bread and dipped it in the yolk.
"Listen," she said, looking at Genzo, "has Kaoru had this forum for long? I mean, been gathering her army."
"Three years, probably," Raiden answered quietly, not raising his eyes from his plate. "Maybe longer. It all seemed harmless at first: some group, discussions, then they started collecting money, then you can't tell anymore where the discussions end and the orders begin."
"And nobody raised the alarm?" asked Pardon.
"Who would have?" Raiden shrugged. "People went there themselves. She knows how to talk so that it seems you decided everything yourself, and she didn't push you. She has a talent like that, a completely vile one."
"Nice to hear she's talented at something, at least," Takamura remarked dryly, breaking off a piece of fried egg with her fork.
Sua smiled quietly and glanced sideways at Genzo, checking how he was reacting. Genzo sat silently, poking at his plate with his fork, but no longer the way he had before, as if the conversation were gradually pulling him back into the room, into the present, from that place inside himself where he had spent the whole day.
"How many people does she have who are actually ready to fight?" asked Mika. "Not just clicking likes, but showing up with weapons."
"Hard to say exactly," said Miyuki. "The forum is big, ten thousand subscribers, but the active ones, the combat ones, who would really show up if she called, maybe five hundred, maybe a thousand. The rest are just spectators, commenters."
"Five hundred is not a small number either," Pardon remarked.
"Not small," Miyuki agreed. "Especially if they have weapons too, and not just fists and anger."
Raiden put down his fork and looked at Genzo, directly for the first time all evening, not sideways.
"You can't go in there head-on," he said quietly but firmly. "Even with us. First we need to figure out who's in charge on her side, who's just the crowd. Remove the head, and everything else will fall apart on its own."
"You talk like a man who's already come up with a plan," Takamura observed, studying him with interest.
"I thought it over on the way here," Raiden answered curtly and lowered his gaze to his plate again, as if he had said more than he meant to.
Genzo looked at him, a man who had stood by the wall all evening, uttered a dozen phrases at most, and now had suddenly said the most sensible thing of everything that had been said at the table.
"Thanks," he said quietly.
Raiden only nodded, not raising his eyes.
Outside the window the city was still making noise; somewhere in the distance a car with open windows drove past, music drifting from it, then fading. In the kitchen a loosely closed tap was dripping, thin and steady, as if counting off seconds. Takamura got up and topped off everyone's tea from the old metal kettle, the one with a whistle that had long ago stopped whistling and only hissed dully when it boiled.
"So," she said, sitting back down, "since we almost have a plan, shall we discuss who to start with?"
"With Ria," Genzo said quietly. "She'll be first."
"But the question is whether I can kill a person....."
"Calm down, it's all right," Miyuki cut him off. "The past stays in the past."
"Then we'll start with her," said Takamura. "Just not today. Today finish eating and go to sleep, all of you. We have a lot of work ahead, and good plans aren't made with an empty head and an empty stomach."
Nobody argued.