The Pornographers Page 15

  “I’m sort of on the clever side, and I can spot right away just how much of an ass you are in this or that. But stick with me, boy, and get some experience. Then you can walk into the office of any hospital and hold your head up high,” the doctor had explained, laughing coarsely. But Paul’s patience had run out.

  Then after he had divided with the driver the one million yen realized from the doctor’s looted films and equipment and was relaxing at Cocky’s, Paul one day was treated by Subuyan to an elaborate and unprompted exposition of the pornographic profession and its ideals.

  “Yeah, films are part of it. Books are part of it, too. But one thing that a pornographer has to remember is that the essential thing is the woman. Men get drawn this way and they get drawn that way, and the wife they have is not enough for them. And why not? Because every man’s got a dream that he keeps to himself, a dream that the wife he has can never fulfill for him. He’s got this pitiful, unsatisfied yearning inside of him. He wants a woman different from all he’s seen. He wants a woman about whom he can say: ‘This is woman!’ Actually, this kind of woman just isn’t around. She’s not around, but what we have to do is foster the illusion that she is around somewhere. This is our duty. Now it’s true that ours is not the sort of business that you talk about in public, but despite that, I say, the pornographer should not forget for a moment that he may well boast that what he does in the line of pornographic service is done for the benefit of all mankind. All right, so you get money for it. All right, so there are obscene aspects to it. Still and all, the purpose of it all is the salvation of men. This, you might say, is the vocation of the pornographer! The Way of Pornography!”

  Paul had let most of this fervent apologia go in one ear and out the other, feeling that Subuyan was straining the concept of pornographer beyond all reasonable bounds. Who does this guy think he is, a pornographic Musashi Miyamoto?* he thought to himself. But since no other Ways had been open to him at the moment, he had at length yielded to Subuyan’s urging. The business card he carried now designated him as a salesman of medical supplies.

  “Look, we’ve about had it with you. Did you buy the goddamn films or didn’t you? Hurry up, give us an answer!”

  “Lieutenant, I’m deeply ashamed, believe me. I’d better tell you the truth.”

  It was the eleventh day since Subuyan’s arrest. He had concocted a plausible story, and after scrupulously weighing its chances of success, had at last felt confident enough to try it.

  “Okay! Where was your contact? Shikoku? Gifu?”

  “No, no. It’s something entirely different. The gentleman who made the film was an amateur.”

  “An amateur? Who? Where?”

  “Well, now, it was like this,” said Subuyan, pausing for effect and assuming an expression of grave reflection. It was, he told them, a university professor living in Teizukayama who, solely for his own delight, had made this film and others like it. Naturally, he had kept them hidden from his wife. But then the unfortunate man had been carried off by a stroke the previous fall, and as his bereaved wife had been tearfully going through his possessions, she had come upon a collection that contained not only the films but a number of related items.

  “Just between you and me, Lieutenant, the professor’s taste was a bit off the beaten path, so to speak. You can imagine the surprise of his poor wife, who had suspected nothing. No matter how much her husband had treasured this collection, she just couldn’t bear to keep such nasty things in the house. Her husband, by the way, had had to take her family name when they were married, one of those arrangements when there’s no male heir. And she is really a domineering sort of lady. Maybe it was because of that, because he was kind of discontented somehow, that the poor man’s desires ran wild and he ended up this way.”

  The detective had been torn between belief and disbelief, but now Subuyan had hooked him.

  “Yeah? Say, what was in this collection? It’s okay to tell me, since the film is the only thing I’m worried about here.”

  “Well, let’s see,” said Subuyan reflectively. “There were some American police pictures taken at the scene of rape-murders. There were some manuscript accounts of orgies—those would have been pretty valuable, I suppose. There was this foot-long penis lengthener made out of wood, and there was a collection of prewar pornographic pictures. All of it was stuff extremely hard to duplicate nowadays.”

  “So you took all of it off her hands?”

  “Oh, no, not me. But since a collection like this loses its value if you break it up, what I did was introduce a certain gentleman to her, and he took the whole thing. All I did was take those films.”

  “What are you trying to do, make a fool out of me? ‘A university professor’! ‘A certain gentleman’! What kind of official deposition would that make?”

  At this point Subuyan assumed an air of defiance. “This lady confided in me and told me everything, and I was able to help her by giving her an introduction. Now if all this becomes public, the soul of the deceased will incur terrible shame. And not only that, how about the lady’s children? You’ll get nothing more out of me. Do anything you want to me. I don’t care.”

  As he spoke Subuyan calculated his chances. If the police believed that the film maker was an amateur, and a dead amateur at that, the matter was likely to end there. Besides, the manager had not shown the films for profit. As for Subuyan himself, he had been picked up for pornographic photos before; so this time, it seemed probable that the police would not go to the trouble of getting a stay of prosecution to gather more evidence but would be content to let him off with the usual fine. So after suffering no more than a jab in the forehead from the detective, who was pressed by the realization that the next day the prosecutor’s custody limit would be up, Subuyan was brought back to his cell. There he found a new guest, who stood behind the bars, shivering in a light jacket and wearing an ingratiating smile.

  “Excuse me very much, but I just let a fart, something not nice at all, I know,” he informed Subuyan and the guard, and remaining impervious to the latter’s angry remonstrances, he went on tranquilly to introduce himself. “My name is Kabo. I’d like to be a TV performer. Glad to make your acquaintance,” he said and at once struck the pose of holding a guitar and strumming it, accompanying this with a “jun, jun, jun, jun, jun!” and vigorous pelvic contortions.

  My God! thought Subuyan. Is this what they’ve got me with now? He looks like a rare one, all right.

  “What are you in for?” asked Subuyan from the eminence of his seniority.

  “He was sleeping on the roof of an apartment house, beside the water tank. It looks like he’s got no home,” said the guard, and Kabo kept up his “jun, jun, jun, jun, jun!” unremittingly.

  “Okay, buddy,” said Subuyan, “take it easy. Sit down if you want.”

  “Thank you. And if you won’t think I’m nosy, Sensei, would you please tell me what business you’re in?”

  One addressed as “Sensei” could hardly reply that his line was pornography, but Subuyan slipped out of the dilemma.

  “I need a bigger audience before I can start talking about my business in the right way,” he replied, his black suit and cool demeanor heightening the effect of his words. Then, after thinking a bit as to what might be amusing, he decided that as far as passing the time went, perhaps this Kabo might not be quite so hopeless after all.

  “I should think that a handsome young man like you has had all kinds of girls, huh? That fair skin, those nice, thick eyelashes, those eyes.”

  “No, no! I’m no good at that.”

  “Is that right? Ahah! Now I understand. You’re gay, huh? I should have known it from the way you moved those hips. Well, if that’s the case, see that you don’t get too familiar and try to pull something funny during the night.”

  “Me? I’m still a virgin!”

  “A virgin? How do you mean?”

  “How do I mean? There’s no two ways about it, is there? Somehow I just never got the chance
to get rid of it.”

  This seemed to Subuyan to be a rather odd way of putting it; but since Kabo seemed like a pleasant fellow, he decided to make him an offer.

  “Look, if you like, suppose I fix you up with a position?” he said. Kabo’s good looks might be of service to the business. And if things turned out otherwise, Subuyan could always fire him. So it seemed to be an altogether agreeable arrangement.

  * A famous warrior.

  IV

  THE NEXT DAY, after Subuyan had paid his fine in court and returned to the workaday world after a lapse of twelve days, he at once put in a call to the office, leaving a message for Paul to contact him. And this was merely the start of a long frenzied round of telephoning.

  “Well, to tell the truth, there was one of those little mishaps that occur from time to time. I had to put up with some pretty bad cooking for a few days. But now everything is safely arranged. From now on everything will be fine, and I’ll be looking for opportunities to be of service to you and be depending upon your kind patronage. Yes, yes, I’ve just gotten out, and I’m calling across the street from the court. Oh well, it’s all part of human experience. And there are quite a few good stories I’ve got to tell. Any time that’s convenient for you, I’d be most happy to get together with you …?”

  And so Subuyan paid his respects to his clients. To run afoul of the police occasionally did the business no harm in his customers’ eyes—on the contrary, it added a dash of spice.

  There was not much point in returning home immediately since Keiko was probably still at school. Well, he would have to shave first of all, he thought. So he decided to go right over to Banteki’s and do it there.

  He found Banteki surrounded by debris, wrestling with an odd-looking lump of foam rubber.

  “How’d you make out with the police?” Banteki asked.

  “No trouble. You can run rings around a stupid bunch like that. The only thing is, next time I’m picked up, I won’t be able to get off without a sentence. So we’ll have to watch our step.” Then, pointing his finger, Subuyan asked, “What’s that thing, anyway?”

  What it was was Banteki’s own painstakingly constructed version of the Arima bath attendant’s male solitary consolation device, considerably improved over the original.

  “You squeeze this bulb,” he explained, “and the hole contracts.” He had gotten the idea from a toy jumping frog. “Here’s another thing: from this tube here, a lubricant drips down. Of course the thing doesn’t have a very nice look to it. The hair’s a problem. You want to make it as realistic as possible, but still …” Banteki had experimented with the Arima souvenir, and in the course of this, the hair, which seemed to be merely pasted in place, had often worked loose and become entangled in his own, which later made for a rather painful situation.

  “You know,” said Subuyan, “it seems to me I heard something about these expeditions to the South Pole taking along something like this.” Banteki expressed a keen interest in obtaining one and doing further research. “Okay, I’ll look into it,” Subuyan said. “There should be somebody who knows about it among my customers.”

  As Subuyan was enjoying that refreshed feeling that comes after a shave, Paul burst in. “Ah! Congratulations, boss!” he said, his greeting obviously influenced by having seen too many gangster movies. “I’ve been dying for a chance to have a conference,” he rushed on. “And I was so afraid that you wouldn’t get out in time.”

  “What’s up?” asked Subuyan.

  Paul gave him the details. A buyers’ group was coming from Southeast Asia, and the companies doing business with them wanted eleven women to provide them with. The recipients were the sort of men who would certainly be fed up with cabaret hostesses and fashion models; and since providing them with outright amateurs to answer to their wants was too difficult a bill to fill, the idea was to furnish girls who at least seemed to be, if not scrutinized too closely. Paul then eagerly told of his own skill in upping the price by claiming that the girls would demand more because of the differences in skin color involved. Thus the fee for each girl would come to five thousand yen, making for a total of over fifty thousand. This could not be let go by, he insisted. “They’re coming the day after tomorrow. The only thing set so far is the hotel.”

  Subuyan’s rejoinder, however, deflated the ebullient Paul. “It’s a shame you’ve worked so hard at it,” he told him, “but you’ll have to tell them we can’t handle it.”

  “What do you mean, boss? You mean to say you can’t get your hands on eleven women in no time at all?”

  “No, that’s not it. I just got out of jail, and it’s too risky. And not only that, I’ve pretty much decided that about now we’re going to start letting those call girls we have go their own ways,” Subuyan explained.

  “You mean, then,” put in Banteki eagerly, “that we’re going to concentrate on movies from now on?”

  “We’re going to do that, too, of course. But the thing is that this last session in jail has been very educational for me. When you sell something to a customer, no matter how carefully you’ve selected him, you’re running a risk. There’s just no way we can force our customers to keep their mouths shut about having bought the stuff from us. So what we do, then, is every time we sell a film we plant another time bomb. Any one of these time bombs might blow us all up someday.” Subuyan’s thoughts had thus ripened considerably in the course of his twelve-day incarceration; and he had decided upon a new plan, which he would disclose at a meeting that night, when Cocky and Hack would also be present. “But now I think I’ll be going home,” he said, getting up. As he did, however, Banteki suddenly spoke.

  “You said that you didn’t have many relatives, didn’t you?”

  “Oh, there’re some, but we don’t have anything to do with them. But why do you ask that all of a sudden?”

  “Well, it’s not easy to say,” answered Banteki, stumbling over his words. “But—well, it looks like Keiko hasn’t been home for two or three days.” Since Banteki and Cocky had naturally been worried about her being all by herself, they had taken turns stopping in to see her, especially at night. “The night before last and last night, she wasn’t at home. Now just being away for a while would have been all right, but the thing is that the morning and evening papers were piled up at the door. There was no sign that she had been back at all. We thought she might be at some friend’s or relative’s house, but then she had never said anything about it.”

  “That sounds funny,” said Subuyan, at a loss. “Anyway, I’d better get home.”

  The entranceway doors were of course locked. Subuyan felt for the key, which was usually kept on the ledge above the toilet window, but it was not there. Over the house hung an air of uncanny stillness that he found unnerving. Just at this point, a cheerful voice called out.

  “Sensei! I hope you don’t mind me waiting here for you.” The figure of “jun jun jun!” Kabo suddenly materialized. He had been released just after Subuyan’s final ride in the green bus.

  “Oh, it’s you,” said Subuyan, but at the moment he could not spare Kabo much thought since he was taken up with peering through the glass of the front door and tapping against it. Since no opening offered itself here, he went around to the rear and managed to unfasten the kitchen window. “My God! Suppose she committed suicide!” muttered Subuyan to himself as he peered fearfully in. The drainboard was bone-dry, a clear indication that no one had been there for one or two days. “Hey, Kabo! You’re light, so climb in here, will you, and go around and open the front door. I don’t have a key.”

  Kabo at once leaped into action and did as he was told. He opened the front door for Subuyan with a bright smile: “Welcome home!” And a moment later, “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  “Yeah, why don’t you go out and get some candy or something?”

  Subuyan had to look around the house carefully; and so, once he had gotten rid of Kabo, he searched Keiko’s dresser, but being a man, he was unable to tell if
anything significant was missing. All at once, a chilling thought struck him, and he hurried upstairs. He searched the inside of the closet for his bank book and his personal seal, but they were missing. “The little bitch! She took them. What a thing to have happen!” Subuyan was stunned. His thoughts in a turmoil, he went back downstairs. He searched frantically around in the desperate hope that she had left some sort of note or letter of explanation.

  Should I put in a missing-person report? If she stayed in Osaka, there might be some hope of finding her, but if she went up to Tokyo … There was half a million yen in the bank account. And to crown it all, some bastard will probably take her for all of it.

  Subuyan stood brooding in front of the clouded mirrors of the barber shop, which had been left just as is, even after Oharu’s death. Oh, what the hell! he thought, rubbing his freshly shaven face. Mother dead, stepfather arrested—you could hardly blame the kid for running away.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting so long.” Kabo was back, and he had brought with him dried cuttlefish, sweet rolls, caramels, and a variety of other sweets, the kind that schoolchildren carry on an excursion. And soon he had the kettle boiling, another sort of domestic task for which he seemed quite able.