That day, the weather at London was unusually clear and looking through the window Ayer could see the whole yard of the building all the way to the metal fence which was surrounding it. When Vince returned, Kei had already exited it and was walking down the alley that led to the main entrance. At first, she started slowly, then she stopped for a moment like she had noticed something and headed in another direction straight through the garden. Ayer leaned through the window to see the cab which was waiting for her and memorized its brand and plate number.
“So?” Ayer heard the voice of Vince who had already returned, “What do you think about her?”
“She is cute,” Ayer said.
“Cute?”
“Yes, but I do think she is lying. Listen, I have to go now.”
And before Vince had a chance to react, he was already out in the hallway and was running towards the exit. Without stopping, he pulled out his phone and called the cab company which Kei used.
“Hello,” he said with the best impersonation of a Japanese accent he could come up with, “I want to order a cab. But my phone is dead… Yes, my name is Cheng Lee…”
It took a few seconds before the service representative responded. Ayer used that time to make one huge jump and finish off the stairs on his way to the exit.
“Yes, this the first time I am calling. I am just visiting the city.”
“The address? Oh, jee, let’s see.”
“No, I don’t have a profile. But, you know, my wife has one. Can you check our address from her? Her name is Kei Lee.”
“No personal data, just the address.” he already knew he would succeed, as the person on the other end of the line had no doubt whatsoever that he was who he said he was.
“C’ mon man, she is my wife!”
As soon as he got the information he needed, Ayer closed the phone and took a cab from the street.
He arrived just in time to see Kei entering an old, but well-maintained building, close to the city centre. He rushed at the other end of the street both to escape from her field of sight and to be able to catch a glimpse of the windows of the staircase as she was passing by and easily traced the apartment where she entered. He knew that all he could to from this moment on was to wait for a little, hoping that his intuition was right and that she would leave her apartment at the evening, as a girl of her type would. Her type (the way in which he assessed it): rich, spoiled, soulless. Throwing money at any issue which she had, afraid to face her feelings alone with herself and looking for shiny distractions instead.
It would have been no more than a few hours after that moment when he’d learn that this image of her, although it yielded correct results, was entirely wrong.
Ayer was sitting in a small cafe facing the street. A few empty paper cups of coffee were rolling on his table. He had positioned his phone in front of him so that in his field of vision, its screen stood just next to the door of the apartment. For some time nothing happened, but then he saw her. The next time the waitress came to his table, he was gone. Along with the paper cups, laid a few crumpled banknotes.
He followed her until he saw her entering a bar. At that point, he lost interest in what she was doing and went back to his main aim - her apartment. He already knew that he will have no trouble entering there - he was in a good shape, and these old buildings with all of their ornaments and bumps were perfect for climbing. The only thing that could fail him was if someone saw him entering and reported him, but he didn’t consider this very probable - people had long stopped paying attention to what was happening around them. That was what the surveillance system was for, right?
As soon as he was in, he started going through Kei’s personal belongings which were spread through the apartment. There were a lot of cosmetics, books written in English and Japanese and also a lot of high-end jewellery which was laying on the desk. A notebook containing text and sketches grabbed Ayer’s attention, but going through it proved to be quite useless - even after doing so, in his mind she was even more faceless than at the beginning. Nothing that she said or did, left a clue about her true self. She was not generic as some other people for whom there wasn’t much to know about, to begin with, just faceless - a shadow with a pretty silhouette.
Still, in her night-stand, he found, as he expected, the letters that she had exchanged with her sister.
He took the topmost one. Judging by the address, it was written by Den Lee, but he could already guess this by the envelope alone, and by the paint stains that it was covered in. Took another one which was presumably the response - the address was written by Kei, with very refined handwriting and it had such a perfect alignment that Ayer couldn’t stop looking for the invisible (or perhaps unexisting) traces of pencil-drawn straight lines while examining it. But he couldn’t find them, in the same way as he couldn’t see, in her apartment, any other imperfections exposing any weaknesses that she could possibly have.
The door lock snapped, the door hit the rubber stopper and the motion sensor bleeped - Kei was back. Ayer had just a second to make a decision. So he slipped Den’s letter in his pocket, rushed through the window, jumped on the sill and disappeared.
On Ayer’s desk laid the five sheets of paper which were inside the envelope that he stole from Kei’s room. He was inspecting them very carefully, but he was not happy. He even felt remorse for taking them, not because they weren’t his, but because they were of no use for him - maybe it was the excitement or maybe it was just wishful thinking, but somehow he failed to realise that if a Japanese person conversed with another Japanese, they had no reason whatsoever to use a foreign language.
Translating a text from Japanese to English was not a hard task by itself, but it was next to impossible in the situation Ayer was in - he didn’t think that his vague suspicions could justify breaching Kei’s privacy, so he couldn’t just hand it to anyone, and his colleagues, were not too fond of “off the table” operations (neither were they fond of him enough to make an exception). He realized how dependent he had become of the people and resources which he used in the last several months.
In the end, he decided that he would contact the Scotland Yard and hope for the best.
“Listen, Vince, don’t ask me how but I think I acquired the letters that Den Lee sent to her sister before she died.”
“Cadman, report to the Scotland Yard headquarters immediately.”
“Why, what happened?”
“I think you can figure that by yourself! Kei filed a complaint for breaking and entering. The Detective had scanned the files and guess what it saw. The penalty is one month in the jail.”
“OK, can we settle that when all this is over.”
“There is no ‘all this’ Cadman,” Vince was doing his best not to show emotions, “And there is no way to postpone your penalty - neither I nor anyone else can modify it.”
Vince made a long pause as if he had something on his mind but wasn’t sure if he should say it, “You have 24 hours,” he said instead.
Ayer immediately started preparing to visit his former colleagues. He packed his backpack in case they took him away immediately and stopped by the first floor to check with his landlord Mrs Johnson and tell her what had happened. He didn’t find her in the living room, so he knocked on the door of her bedroom.
“Come, Ayer,” he heard her voice.
“No, I will wait.”
After a second the door opened and he saw her: “For God’s sake, boy, I don’t know what makes you feel so uncomfortable,”
“No, I mean, you are in your evening gown,” Ayer said.
“So what? It is not like your clothes you are wearing are much morе good looking!” she said and she seated him on a table next to her bed, “If you are expecting that we follow etiquette as if we are still in Victorian times while you young people do whatever you want, you are mistaken.” she kept on murmuring while she was pouring him tea.”
“Listen, I will disappear for a while,” Ayer said, “I will pay you when I get back obviously. But if I am not able to return in a few months, I will be OK if you throw away most of my books and get a new tenant, just store the books somewhere and I will come to pick them up.”
“Nevermind your books,” Linda replied, “Where the heck are you going?”
“Let’s say that I started a job which I am not sure how exactly would I finish,” he smiled.
“As uncertain about himself as always,” she reached out and touched his cheek, “in your job as well as your love life.”
“You know that I have no reason to be certain about anything,” Ayer said.
“Have I told you enough times that critics are the most unhappy folk on Earth?” she asked, and then became serious: “Can I help you, Ayer?”
“Well, no, unless you happen to know someone who speaks Japanese,” Ayer said.
“But I do,” she said. “I do.”
She put on her spectacles and started reading, using her index finger to trace the long columns of hieroglyphics, while simultaneously checking some word definitions from her phone. Took her fifteen minutes to work through the first sentence.
“I want to forget,” she said. “This is what it says.”
Then she spent around half an hour going through the whole text and she left the sheet on her desk.
“This is a letter,” she said. “The author talks about herself a lot. Kinda like in a diary. What do you need to know?”
Ayer wanted to respond but couldn’t think of what exactly to say. “Is there something about crimes?” Ayer asked. This question made her laugh and, after seeing that she wasn’t laughing at him, Ayer joined her.
“The only thing I know for sure is-“ she made a long pause “-that you have to help that girl.”
“I would have helped her-“ Ayer said and then he almost told Linda about Den Lee’s murder, the thought that it would make her uncomfortable coming almost a second too late, “-but I am a detective, that is not what I do,” he said to hide his error.
“You don’t know what the hell do you do, anyways,” she said, “Look, you are a wise man… in some respects,” Linda said. “Talk to her. You know that she has a problem, right?”
“I thought that she might be involved in something…” Ayer said.
“Involved in something?” She burst into laughter for a moment and the next one she looked more serious than ever: “Sweety, from what I read I would be surprised if the author of this letter can go to the store and fix a meal for herself, not to mention other more complex activities.”
“Ayer, are you OK?” she saw him staggering as if he was about to faint and caught him by the shoulder.
“So you are saying she has issues?” Ayer said.
“Some very serious ones at that. But how are you? Are you OK?”
“No,” he said. “My head hurts. I think I may have made a very serious mistake.”
“What mistake?”
“I blamed an innocent person.”
“It’s all good to feel sorry, but please don’t die here,” she resumed laughing and this time Ayer couldn’t bring himself to smile with her, “If a second man dies from a heart attack in my bedroom, I might have some issues on my own. You know, you can always make up for what you did. The important thing is that you make up for it, no matter how vulnerable it makes you feel.”
He recognized her right away, although she had turned her back on him. Her looks were again flawless and, as the last time when he saw her, she sat alone without paying much attention to her surroundings. He sat next to her and touched her shoulder. She turned to him and stared at him with her eyes just a few centimetres away from his. Some people had such eyes that staring at them made Ayer feel like he was staring directly into their soul. Kei’s eyes left him with the impression that he was looking into a dark and endless void.
“What do you want, Mr Cadman?” She said.
“I wanted to give you this,” he took the letter from the pocket of his coat and put it on the table.
“You don’t want your colleagues to find it in your possession?” she asked.
“No, I want to apologise.”
“You broke into my apartment,” she said without touching the letter, “you went through my belongings and stole some of them. And now you return it and you expect me to be nice to you?”
“No, I don’t expect that from you,” Ayer turned to her and tried to smile, “As I said, I wanted to return it to you, so just take it,”
Kei slowly reached out for the letter and slid it to her part of the table.
“Now if you would be willing to forget about our last meeting for a minute,” he continued, “I want to ask you something: How did it all happen? I want to know everything. All events related to your sister ending up as she did.”
“I want to ask you something too,” Kei said, “Who gives you the right to get your nose in my personal life? And I mean that literary. Your colleagues told me that what you did was illegal in your country.”
“Breaking and entering is illegal in every country,” Ayer smiled. “as for the reason I am bothering you, let’s say its mere curiosity.”
“Your curiosity is your problem,” she continued.
“There wasn’t any reason to hide it, you know?” Ayer continued.
“I didn’t hide anything. I told her that she-“
“Yes, and you were marvellous in your ability to deceive. And also very experienced, you even deceived me. But I figured it out.”
“Because you are such a capable investigator?”
“No, because I am in a very similar position in some respects,” Ayer said.
“What?” In spite of her makeup and her constant mannerisms, at that moment Kei looked even younger than she actually was. “What are you talking about? What do you want from me?”
“I just want to know. No, scratch that - I want you to tell me?”
“What was this bullshit about you being in a similar position?”
“Why aren’t your parents with you?”
“I don’t know? Why did they throw her out of our house? And did not allow me to speak to her? How can you even think that-“
While she was speaking, Ayer was mesmerised by her face, seeing it changing, becoming more youthful, more expressive and more characteristic of her as emotions were making it turn red. “Alright, you know, I will tell you the whole damn thing. Just promise that you would listen. So firstly, I have no idea how you could think that my sister would involve herself in some petty crimes. Secondly…”
She made a long pause and continued speaking in a very different tone.
“From ever since we were little we did not resemble the other kids. Maybe because we were interested in Europe, and the fairy tale aspect of it, that you Europeans often miss. As we grew older we saw the places that we envisioned slowly disappearing. The problem has been there ever since I could remember. Like everyone else, I was a little appalled by her. I remember thinking that I surely was ugly too, being related to her, however my condition, however, lasted only until I started going outside of the house, and her’s only worsened with that.”
“You are saying your sister was ugly. How? Physically?” Ayer asked.
“Physically of course!” Kei said. “She was the best person I have ever known.”
“So, she is ugly, how?” Ayer asked.
“Please, you don’t need to pretend. Although it would have probably helped under certain circumstances,” she continued talking and Ayer felt too uncomfortable to interrupt her again.
“Maybe the issue was that she was like that always? Most people get broken at some point in their lives but hers was nothing but. Started with overhearing witty remarks from our relatives. Continued with our peers in the kindergarten, our parent’s lack of attention, and the dismissal of her ambitions, even ones that did not have anything to do with looks, which started out subtle, but gradually became as explicit as it can be without breaking the good tone. Being the only one who saw that, I could have said something that would make her feel better, but I didn’t.”
“Why?”
“I was afraid I would make them mad,” Kei said. “Perhaps I should mention that they were idolising me with the same meticulousness with which they were demonising her. They viewed me as their compensation for having to take care of her, and as such, I had to be her antipode in every respect: because she was ugly, I had to be beautiful. Because she had no friends, I had to be social. Because she was sad, having to cope with all this, I had to be happy.”
Ayer still could not fully comprehend how this conflict came to be. He wanted to shout: “But you look the same as her, I thought that you were her the first time I saw you even though I knew that she was dead, how can all of that be?”
“The more rejected she was, the more detached from her I became.” Kei continued, not noting his bafflement. Seeing how her life unfolded and all of the negative reactions that she provoked in my parents made me want to be as different from her as I possibly could. And the only way to verify that unlike her I was worth something was to constantly seek for their approval. This was all that I ever did until I reached my teens.”
“And did that work?”
“I don’t know if this question is part of your investigation game,” Kei said “but if it is, you can congratulate yourself - I still felt worthless. But it was (and you probably figured this one as well), little in comparison to how worthless I am feeling now. I feel like I can crush my life and trash it, like a useless piece of paper.
“Right. But this is because you felt compassion. You weren’t so opaque as your family you didn’t feel content with taking any part of the dehumanization of another human being because it felt as a dehumanization of yourself.”
Kei looked at him, puzzled. “Oh, please, I agreed to talk to you so I can help you, not watch you pretending to care.”
“Actually you got it the other way around. It was when I expressed interest in your case that I was being dishonest, as I am entirely convinced that you are correct in asserting that your sister committed suicide. I actually came here because I want to hear more from you. So please continue.”
Kei stared at him again, as if she was trying to see his thoughts through his skull, and then, for a moment as short that he could miss it by blinking, a smile flickered in her eyes.
“You know what was the most unusual?” she asked.
“Do tell me about it.”
“When we were little, we used to go to bed together and talk until we fall asleep. And as soon as we turned off the lights, all these differences suddenly became superficial. We would discuss everything without any form of taboo and would jump from one topic to another, sometimes the two being totally unrelated, without ever losing context. Aged nine, I felt like it was the first time that I was seeing a being that was the same species as myself. But as we grew older and they moved us to separate rooms, although completely unjustified, the fear that being close to her would make me unhappy became stronger. We would still talk and be friendly with each other but the connection between us soon became weak enough for it to be replaced by other, more novel stuff and once it was lost, we could not be together again, despite both mine and her best attempts. The difference between the way we handled the situation being that I quickly moved on, and with her, the bullying and lack of support were already transferring into psychological issues and she couldn’t.
“You are sorry that you left her?”
“No, we were still best friends, even after that. Best and only friends.”
“So you did not persist your social lifestyle?”
“I did, and I still do as a matter of fact. However I don’t consider the people that I go out with my friends, I merely use them to satisfy my sexual desires.”
“Anyway, when I became a teenager I started going out with people while my sister was constantly in her room drawing. She did it all the time, which was strange when you think about it, as she wasn’t so interested in art in general and she didn’t seem to be very ambitious about it either. She wasn’t, as you would have expected from someone who is unpopular, trying to prove to everyone that she is better than them. I think that she did it just to direct her negative emotions somewhere, and apparently, that worked for her very successfully. When she was depressed, she could knock off 10-20 pieces and per hour and come up happy again. There were times when we would dump some of them in the trash, simply because there was nothing else that we could do with them. People were actually aligning so they can take them.”
“So how did she got here?”
“I probably know less than you do about that, but she must have used the help of professionals - people who help you disappear without a trace. Once you do that you are a nobody, but you are free to live the rest of your life however you like.”
“But still she didn’t break her ties with you?”
“A month later I received what was supposed to be her farewell letter. I responded to it. Soon another one followed. It looked like it was written by a different version of her - like someone who spent his life under different circumstances. She told me, among other things, that she was selling her art at a Sunday market somewhere around her house. It looked like she was feeling fulfilled and financially secured, although she’d never explicitly mentioned it. Our connection grew deeper reminiscent of the time when we were little. I even helped her set up an online store, for her to sell her stuff.” She became silent.
“And then?”
“And then she got worse again,” Below the thick layer of makeup, Kei’s face showed the full spectrum of human emotion as if Ayer was watching a timelapse of everything that she went through for the last few years. “It all started, I think when people began opening for her stuff. She generated so much interest, that she couldn’t handle it. She wasn’t ready to open for the world.”
“What about the black dolls, the “women in black” as she called them right before ending her life. Do you know about them?”
“Why do you care?”
Ayer could easily have answered that in any other situation, but that moment the question almost paralysed him. “Why do you care, really,” he heard Kei’s voice in his head, “when it is obvious that you are wrong not only when it comes to me and my sister, but in your whole perception of our world. Why do you care, when you know that grasping the circumstances under which we lived is way above your abilities. Is it because when you feel you understand it, it somehow makes you less afraid? Or is it merely the case of one lost soul, trying desperately to find another one?”
Ayer shook his head and stared at Kei. She was smiling at him.
“No reason, I am just a fan of your her art. I am sorry about everything that I caused you,” he said.
“No need to apologise, Ayer, quite the opposite. You did something that no one else has ever done for me.”
“Besides, storming your apartment to steal some personal belongings?”
“You tried to understand me. No one has ever done that. The only reason why I don’t feel completely content tonight is that I am alone in sharing myself. So tell me this - I have been hiding my emotional state since I was six. I devised a whole new persona so as for my publicly exposed feelings not to interfere with my real ones. And yet, you knew what I was doing right from the start. How do you know that? Or rather, why do you know it?”
“I don’t know, I just like solving mysteries,” Ayer said.
“I don’t believe that at all. And I don’t know how can a person who knows so much about other people, can know so little about himself,” Kei said and smiled, but Ayer did not respond to her smile - he shrugged his shoulders and disappeared in the dark.
“Wait? Where did you go?” Kei shouted, “Let’s meet again.”
He kept thinking why had he lied to her at the end. Or perhaps the real question was rather why he contemplated on telling her the truth, as opposed to what he did to all people who were smart enough to understand him. Perhaps what he felt towards her was quite different from what he felt to the other members of that group - while everyone else in it was in some sense alien to him, Kei was there because she was, in many ways, similar to himself. Like himself, she was a foreigner. Like himself, she chose to live without technologies. And she probably did it for the same reason as he did - because she still had hope for a world which was not completely soulless. He wanted to be close to her, but at the same time, her behaviour was scary for him, as if she was exposing to him, his own self with weaknesses which he didn’t know he possessed. If he was the person who he thought he was, he would have no reason to be scared. If he was the person whom he thought he was, he would not have made that mistake when judging her. She was the proof that he wasn’t who he thought, or claimed he was. She was his blind spot.
After he left her, it was already night, but still, he boarded the train to the Scotland Yard and spent half an hour not thinking about anything.
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