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The sun was rising by the time Lin was done. The man had been struggling. In the end Lin went for cutting his carotid artery while holding him still and the blood sprayed on Lin’s hair and his dress before he managed to move away.
At least the job was done, he thought, turning away from the body that was going still on the floor and hiding his knife.
He headed to the closet and, after looking through its contents, settled on a navy coat to cover up the bloodstains on his dress. He scowled into the mirror once he put it on because it was shapeless on him and the color was too dark to suit him. It had to do, though.
He left the apartment undisturbed, took off the bloodied plastic gloves once the door closed behind him and stuck them into the pocket of the coat.
It had been a good idea to borrow something to wear over the dress, he realized once he went out of the building, even if that something was ugly, not only to cover up the bloodstains but also because it was chilly outside this early in the morning and he had been waiting for the target to arrive since previous afternoon and hadn’t come prepared for this.
Even wearing the coat, he still got cold on the way to the subway station with his bare legs. It was early enough for the train to be nearly empty, the faces of the other passengers mostly tired after a rough night. With three percent of the population of this city supposedly working as killers, some might have been coming back from the exact same kind of job as him. The thought made it feel almost mundane, just a thing one did for a living, not wrong, not special, just there. Not that Lin had ever been bothered with taking a target’s life. The part of him that could have possibly cared had long since been gone.
He arrived at the Hakata Station and walked out onto the street and once there was blinded by the sun which had climbed much higher on the sky by that time. The blood that had dried up on his clothes and hair in the meantime was starting to stink and it was a good thing that he was so close to Banba’s office already. He wondered briefly if he should buy some mentaiko on the way there out of habit, but it was both too early for the shops to be open and not a good idea to show himself to anyone in his current condition.
He walked directly to Banba’s building, doing his best not to draw attention to himself, climbed the stairs and opened the door to the office with his own key. The air inside was stale and the curtains were drawn. In the semi-darkness, the office part was pretty tidy but the living quarters were a disaster, even though he’d cleaned there before leaving the previous day. It kind of stank from there as well. Lin scowled before stepping inside the apartment. Once inside, he kicked off the heeled shoes he’d been wearing and took off the coat. He still needed to get rid of that abomination later, since it was nothing he would have liked to keep.
As he walked further into the apartment, he thought how the stench in there was quite an achievement when most of what Banba ate was instant ramen and how the clean up after that shouldn’t have been too much, but it was still always like that when he came back and Banba had been home.
He spotted Banba sleeping soundly in his bed, apparently unaware of anyone entering his place.
Lin opened the window in the room wide with a sigh, not caring about Banba getting cold, and headed into the bathroom.
He surveyed the dress carefully once he took it off before soaking it in cold water to try to wash the bloodstains off. Then he took a shower, getting rid of the blood from his hair. Even after a sleepless night, he felt more restless than tired since the job had been an easy kill and hadn’t worn him out at all.
Once out of the shower, he dried himself up, put on a bathrobe and stood in front of the mirror to remove the rest of his makeup and brush his hair. The bathrobe he was wearing was fluffy and pale pink, something he’d taken from one of his female victims’ closets. As usual when he was dressed like a woman, his reflection in the mirror made him think of Chaomei. It was a bitter thought. But that reflection was also everything that was left of her. And he was going to hold onto it, no matter what.
Banba was still sleeping when Lin stepped out of the bathroom. He went about picking up empty instant ramen containers and washing the bowls and cups in the sink. The amount indicated that Banba had most likely had visitors last night. Lin wondered briefly who that might have been.
Since he didn’t take care to be quiet at all while washing the dishes, the noise did the trick of waking Banba up.
Lin watched as Banba sat up with a groan. His hair was a ridiculous mess and he ran his hand through it, making it worse instead of better.
“You could have long since been murdered in your sleep,” Lin pointed out, putting the last bowl away to dry.
“I knew it was you,” Banba said.
“No, you didn’t.” Lin snorted.
“I figured, since you started making so much noise, you wanted me to get up already.” Banba smiled at him.
Lin took off the plastic gloves he’d put on before starting to wash the dishes. They reminded him of the other pair in the pocket of the ugly coat in the hall, covered in blood, but he chose not to follow that train of thoughts.
“How was work?” Banba asked him.
“Easy.” Lin shrugged.
“Good.” Banba nodded and got out of bed.
“I might have ruined my dress, though,” Lin added. “And it was a man who lived all alone. I didn’t get anything new to wear either.”
“If that’s important, maybe you should only take jobs where the target is a woman.”
“No,” Lin said right away, feeling a lump form in his throat. “It’d make it seem as if I was into that for the wrong reasons, like…”
Chaomei had been killed by a man who had been into that for the wrong reasons, Lin thought. And he could never be like that.
“Besides, not all women are my size anyway.” He shrugged. “And not all of them own any cute clothes.”
“Good. It’s best not to play favorites.”
“Who was here last night?” Lin asked to change the topic.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Banba said with a smile before disappearing inside the bathroom.
“Not really,” Lin shouted after him.
It must have been one of their friends, he figured, since Banba wouldn’t have tried to woo a woman with a bowl of ramen, that would have been too ridiculous even for him. Though who knew, Lin reconsidered. Still, if that would have been a woman, what if he’d shown up last night, back from his job already, with his looks and his make-up and his clothes. No way any woman would have taken lightly that Banba lived with a friend like him.
Anyway, Lin didn’t care either way. The breeze from the open window made him shiver in his bathrobe and he went to close it, welcoming the distraction. When he came back to the kitchen, he went about preparing breakfast. He took out the rice and washed it, filled the rice cooker and turned it on.
Banba joined him in the kitchen by the time the rice was done, wearing his usual attire.
“Are you going to sleep now?” Banba asked when they sat down to eat.
Lin topped his rice with an egg, watching Banba put mentaiko on his.
“No,” he said. “I’m not really tired. Maybe I’ll sleep in the afternoon.”
“Then you should get dressed. A client made an appointment in half an hour.”
Lin nodded and started to eat, while thinking about what to wear. He decided to settle on something obviously informal, maybe a summer dress.
“If that client thinks I’m your secretary again,” he said, remembering all the previous times that had happened, “tell them they’re wrong this time around.”
“And if they ask who are you then?” Banba asked good-naturedly.
Lin considered the question. It couldn’t be easily answered, he thought. What was connecting him to Banba, the five years worth of mentaiko he owed him for the help in avenging Chaomei, was impossible to explain to anyone.
“You could say I’m your sister,” he said in the end.
“Well, you’d still be expected to serve tea,” Banba pointed out.
“That’s bothersome.” Lin sighed.
They finished eating and Banba got up to collect and wash the bowls this time around. He acknowledged Lin’s efforts to keep the place clean like that, though once Lin wasn’t home, he reverted back to just not cleaning anything.
“It’s been a while since I went to visit my sister’s grave,” Lin observed thoughtfully.
He’d promised himself to go at least once a week but was often too busy to make it.
“You want to go today?” Banba asked.
“Maybe.” Lin felt his throat tighten and the backs of his eyes start to burn.
His reluctance to visit Chaomei’s grave, even though it ended up being so conveniently close to where he lived, wasn’t all about lacking time for that, he had to admit. There were still times when he almost forgot that she’d been killed. But faced with her very grave, he could no longer pretend that she was still alive somewhere. That was why he didn’t want to go. He still should, maybe even right now.
“Hey,” Banba said.
Lin shuddered. He hadn’t even realized that he’d squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them, Banba was right in front of him.
“It wasn’t your fault she died,” he said.
Lin could have argued that point but he chose not to under Banba’s concerned gaze. The horror of Chaomei’s death, of the way she’d died, was something that was still keeping Lin up at nights. And while he could hide his anguish well enough from everyone else, that didn’t exactly work with Banba, not when they were living together.
“If I could switch places with her,” Lin said, his voice sounding raspy to his ears, “I would have done that without a second thought.”
That was what he was doing to an extent already anyway, letting Chaomei live through him. And that was what was keeping him going, other than the debt he needed to repay to Banba. Silly reasons to live, both of them, he supposed, especially when he himself was a killer and continued to take others’ lives to go on, but good enough for him.
“But since it’s too late for that, I…” he said.
“It’s okay,” Banba reassured him.
Lin wasn’t sure why he did that, but he reached for the back of Banba’s neck then and was instantly pulled into a hug. It felt nice, though.
One of these days, he was going to ask Banba why he was helping him at all, since it couldn’t possibly be just about lacking a player in a grass-lot baseball team, but not right now.
“I’d better go get dressed,” he said and disentangled himself from Banba’s arms. “And throw away some things.” He remembered about the coat in the hall.
He tried on three different dresses before settling on one and put on makeup in front of the bathroom mirror. Then he headed out with the coat he’d stolen in a bag.
Once he was outside, he realized the new day had started in the meantime, with people out and about and the shops open.
Picking up some mentaiko while he was out seemed like a good idea.