2.03 Matori

One of the last men to enter my apartment was a pudgy little man with salt-and-pepper hair and a shitty little pencil mustache. Right away, he buttonholed me in my dining room and waved a badge and a piece of paper in front of my nose. After blabbering something at me, he turned and started rattling off quick, excited orders to the others.

By comparison, the cop in the sunglasses was cool as a cucumber. He explained that he was Ozawa from Matori, the Mayaku Torishimari Kyoku, the Japanese equivalent of America's DEA. He also had a piece of paper: a warrant to search my apartment.

"Fine," I said. "Knock yourselves out."

What else could I say? This wasn't the States where you demanded to see your lawyer; the only thing I could do was let them go about their business and hope against hope they didn't find what they were looking for. In the meantime, I went to the back room and sat down on the sofa.

Ozawa followed behind me, taking a seat near mine, while an older cop in a baggy double-breasted suit sat down beside me.

"Do you know why we're here?" Ozawa asked.

"No."

"You have no idea?" He said, giving the older cop a look that spoke volumes about what he thought of the gaijin before him.

"No. None at all," I said, matter-of-factly.

Ozawa didn’t buy it. He pushed his sunglasses up on to the top of his shaved head and rubbed his eyes. Looking long and hard at me, he said, "You can't think of any reason that would have all of us come here?"

The guy had the build of a wrestler, the hands of a strangler. He also had a good 20 to 30 pounds of meat on me. If he wanted to knock me about, there wouldn't have been anything I could do but pretend to enjoy it.

"A mistake?" I offered.

"A mistake?" The cop in the suit chuckled.

Ozawa looked away in disgust.

Another cop with longish hair and acid-washed jeans was standing a few feet away, filming our conversation on a small video camera.

"Yes, a mistake,” I said. “My neighbor down the hall in four-oh-five is yakuza. People are always confusing our apartments."

"Are you trying to make a fool of us?" Ozawa yelled.

"No, no, no, not at all. It's just that you asked . . . Never mind. I'm sorry."

The fusuma partitions separating all of the rooms had all been thrown wide open so that I could see most of the apartment from where Ozawa, the suit, and I were sitting. Plainclothes officers milled about, going through my things with gloved hands. Two cops went through the pockets of the clothes hanging in the closet, while others opened the baskets and containers I had on the bookshelf in the living room.

Another cop--it was hard to keep them straight--came up and asked who I lived with.

"I live alone."

"Why have you got two bicycles then?"

"Because I have two bicycles?"

He made a notation in his book and walked away.

I never was the kind to harbor blanket contempt for law enforcement, but the longer I watched the cops search my apartment the less professionalism they exhibited. I got the impression that they were just as bewildered as I was. They didn’t seem to know what they were looking for.

A cop venturing out onto the balcony exclaimed, "Hey guys, check this out!" A flurry of curious policemen gravitated towards the balcony. "He's got bamboo and hydrangea out here."

"And a Japanese maple tree!" said another. “Well, I’ll be!”

It was true. They had me there. Where most Japanese have laundry racks and bags of recyclables, I did indeed have two thickets of black bamboo growing on my balcony and a number of hydrangea of varying colors, which happened to be in full bloom. The leaves of the Japanese maple still had that fresh green hue that I loved. When the afternoon sun shown on them, the bedroom would fill with a comfortable virescent glow. The morning glories I had planted only a few weeks earlier were just starting to wind their way up the railing and bamboo trellis I had built in an odd fit of frenetic activity only a week earlier.

On the northern half of the balcony which you could see from my Japanese-style bedroom with its antique tansu chest of drawers, I had arranged plants typically found in Japanese gardens. The other half of the balcony, visible from where Ozawa, the older cop in the suit, and I were, was more Mediterranean in theme with a palm tree, bougainvillea and herbs such as lavender and rosemary. I also had deck chairs and a parasol.

If they were to charge me with having good taste and a green thumb, then I was, without a shadow of doubt, guilty.

© Aonghas Crowe, 2010. All rights reserved. No unauthorized duplication of any kind.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

No. 6 is now available on Kindle.