here was nothing for me to do. Nothing I should do, and nothing I wanted to do. I'd come all this way to the Dolphin Hotel, but the Dolphin Hotel that I wanted had vanished from the face of the earth. What to do? I went down to the lobby, planted myself in one of the magnificent sofas, and tried to come up with a plan for the day. Should I go sightseeing? Where to? How about a movie? Nah, nothing I wanted to see. And why come all the way to Sapporo to see a movie? So, what to do? Nothing to do.

Okay, it's the barbershop, I said to myself. I hadn't been to a barber in a month, and I was in need of a cut. Now that's making good use of free time. If you don't have anything better to do, go to the barber.

So I made tracks for the hotel barbershop, hoping that it'd be crowded and I'd have to wait my turn. But of course the place was empty, and I was in the chair immediately. An abstract painting hung on the blue-gray walls, and Jacques Rouchet's Play Bach lilted soft and mellow from hidden speakers. This was not like any barbershop I'd been to — you could hardly call it a barbershop. The next thing you know, they'll be playing Gregorian chants in bathhouses, Ryuichi Sakamoto in tax office waiting rooms. The guy who cut my hair was young, barely twenty. When I mentioned that there used to be a tiny hotel here that went by the same name, his response was, "That so?" He didn't know much about Sapporo either. He was cool. He was wearing a Men's Bigi designer shirt. Even so, he knew how to cut hair, so I left there pretty much satisfied.

What next?

Short of other options, I returned to my sofa in the lobby and watched the scenery. The receptionist with glasses from yesterday was behind the front desk. She seemed tense. Was my presence setting off signals in her? Unlikely. Soon the clock pushed eleven. Lunchtime. I headed out and walked around, trying to think what I was in the mood for. But I wasn't hungry, and no place caught my fancy. Lacking will, I wandered into a place for some spaghetti and salad. Then a beer. Outside, snow was still threatening, but not a flake in sight. The sky was solid, immobile. Like Gulliver's flying island of Laputa, hanging heavily over the city. Everything seemed cast in gray. Even, in retrospect, my meal — gray. Not a day for good ideas.

In the end, I caught a cab and went to a department store downtown. I bought shoes and underwear, spare batteries, a travel toothbrush, nail clippers. I bought a sandwich for a late-night snack and a small flask of brandy. I didn't need any of this stuff, I was just shopping, just killing time. I killed two hours.

Then I walked along the major avenues, looking into windows, no destination in mind, and when I tired of that, I stepped into a cafe and read some Jack London over coffee. And before long it was getting on to dusk. Talk about boring. Killing time is not an easy job.

Back at the hotel, I was passing by the front desk when I heard my name called. It was the receptionist with glasses. She motioned for me to go to one end of the counter, the car-rental section actually, where there was a display of pamphlets. No one was on duty here.

She twirled a pen in her fingers a second, giving me a I've-got-something-to-tell-you-but-I-don't-know-how-to-say-it look. Clearly, she wasn't used to doing this sort of thing.

"Please forgive me," she began, "but we have to pretend we're discussing a car rental." Then she shot a quick glance out of the corner of her eye toward the front desk. "Management is very strict. We're not supposed to speak privately to customers."

"All right, then," I said. "I'll ask you about car rates, and you answer with whatever you want to say. Nothing personal."

She blushed slightly. "Forgive me," she said again. "They're real sticklers for rules here."

I smiled. "Still, your glasses are very becoming."

"Excuse me?"

"You look very cute in those glasses. Very cute," I said.

She touched the frame of these glasses, then cleared her throat. The nervous type. "There's something I've been wanting to ask you," she regained her composure. "It's a private matter."

If I could have, I would have patted her on the head to comfort her, but instead I kept quiet and looked into her eyes.

"It's what we talked about last night, you know, about there having been a hotel here," she said softly, "with the same name as this one. What was that other hotel like? I mean, was it a regular hotel?"

I picked up a car-rental pamphlet and acted like I was studying it. "That depends on what you mean by 'regular.'"

She pinched the points of her collar and cleared her throat again. "It's?hard to say exactly, but was there anything strange about that hotel? I can't get it out of my mind."

Her eyes were earnest and lovely. Just as I'd remembered. She blushed again.

"I guess I don't know what you mean, but I'm sure it will take a little time to talk about and we can't very well do it here. You seem like you're pretty busy."

She looked over at the other receptionists at the front desk, then bit her lower lip slightly. After a moment's hesita- tion, she spoke up. "Okay, could you meet me after I get off work?"

"What time is that?"

"I finish at eight. But we can't meet near here. Hotel rules. It's got to be somewhere far away from here."

"You name the place. I don't care how far, I'll be there."

She thought a bit more, then scribbled the name of a place and drew me a map. "I'll be there at eight-thirty."

I pocketed the sheet of paper.

Now it was her turn to look at me. "I hope you don't think I'm strange. This is the first time I've done something like this. I've never broken the rules before. But this time I don't know what else to do. I'll explain everything to you later."

"No, I don't think you're strange. Don't worry," I said. "I'm not so bad a guy. I may not be the most likable person in the world, but I try not to upset people."

She twirled her pen again, not quite sure how to take that. Then she smiled vaguely and pushed up the bridge of her glasses. "Well, then, later," she said, and gave me a businesslike bow before returning to her station at the front desk. Charming, if a little insecure.

I went up to my room and pulled a beer from the refrigerator to wash down my department-store roast beef sandwich. Okay, at least we have a plan of action. We may be in low gear, but we're rolling. But where to?

I washed and shaved, brushed my teeth. Calmly, quietly, no humming. Then I gave myself a good, hard look in the mirror, the first time in ages. No major discoveries. I felt no surge of valor. It was the same old face, as always.

I left my room at half past seven and grabbed a taxi. The driver studied the map I showed him, then nodded without a word, and we were off. It was a-thousand-something-yen distance, a tiny bar in the basement of a five-story building. I was met at the door with the warm sound of an old Gerry Mulligan record. I took a seat at the counter and listened to the solo over a nice, easy J&B-and-water. At eight-forty-five she still hadn't shown. I didn't particularly mind. The bar was plenty comfortable, and by now I was getting to be a pro at killing time. I sipped my drink, and when that was gone, I ordered another. I contemplated the ashtray.

At five past nine she made her entrance.

"I'm sorry," she said in a flurry. "Things started to get busy at the last minute, and then my replacement was late."

"Don't worry. I was fine here," I said. "I had to pass the time anyway."

At her suggestion we moved to a table toward the back. We settled down, as she removed her gloves, scarf, and coat. Underneath, she had on a dark green wool skirt and a lightweight yellow sweater — which revealed generous volumes I'm surprised I hadn't noticed before. Her earrings were demure gold pinpoints.

She ordered a Bloody Mary. And when it came, she sipped it tentatively. I took another drink of my whiskey and then she took another sip of her Bloody Mary. I nibbled on nuts.

At length, she let out a big sigh. It might have been bigger than she had intended, as she looked up at me nervously.

"Work tough? "I asked.

"Yeah," she said. "Pretty tough. I'm still not used to it. The hotel just opened so the management's always on edge about something."

She folded her hands and placed them on the table. She wore one ring, on her pinkie. An unostentatious, rather ordinary silver ring.

"About the old Dolphin Hotel?," she began. "But wait, didn't I hear you were a magazine writer or something?"

"Magazine?" I said, startled. "What's this about?"

"That's just what I heard," she said.

I shut up. She bit her lip and stared at a point on the wall. "There was some trouble once," she began again, "so the management's very nervous about media. You know, with property being bought up and all. If too much talk about this gets in the media, the hotel could suffer. A bad image can ruin business."

"Has something been written up?"

"Once, in a weekly magazine a while ago. There were these suggestions about dirty dealings, something about calling in the yakuza or some right-wing thugs to put pressure on the folks who were holding out. Things like that."

"And I take it the old Dolphin Hotel was mixed up in this trouble?"

She shrugged and took another sip. "I wouldn't be surprised. Otherwise, I don't think the manager would have acted so nervous talking to you about the old hotel. I mean, it was almost like you sounded an alarm. I don't know any of the details, but I did hear once about the Dolphin name in connection with an older hotel. From someone."

"Someone?"

"One of the blackies."

"Blackies?"

"You know, the black-suit crowd."

"Check," I said. "Other than that, you haven't heard anything about the old Dolphin Hotel?"

She shook her head and fiddled with her ring. "I'm scared," she whispered. "I'm so scared I?I don't know what to do."

"Scared? Because of me and magazines?"

She shook her head, then pressed her lip against the rim of her glass. "No, it's not that. Magazines don't have anything to do with it. If something gets printed, what do I care? The management might get all bent out of shape, but that's not what I'm talking about. It's the whole place. The whole hotel, well, I mean, there's always something a little weird about it. Something funny?something?warped."

She stopped and was silent. I'd finished my whiskey, so I ordered another round for the both of us. "What do you mean by 'warped'?" I tried prompting her. "Do you mean anything specific?"

"Of course I do," she said sharply. "Things have happened, but it's hard to find the words to describe it. So I never told anyone. I mean, it was really real, what I felt, but if I try to explain it in words, then it sort of starts to slip away."

"So it's like a dream that's very real?"

"But this wasn't a dream. You know dreams sort of fade after a while? Not this thing. No way. It's always stayed the same. It's always real, right there, before my eyes."

I didn't know what to say.

"Okay, this is what happened," she said, taking a drink of her Bloody Mary and dabbing her lips with the napkin. "It was in January. The beginning of January, right after New Year's. I was working the late shift, which I don't generally like, but on that day it was my turn. Anyway, I didn't get through until around midnight. When it's late like that, they send you home in a taxi because the trains aren't running. So after I changed clothes, I realized that I'd left my book in the staff lounge. I guess I could have waited until the next day, but the girl I was going to share the taxi with was still finishing up, so I decided to go get it. I got in the employee elevator and punched the button for the sixteenth floor, which is where the staff lounge and other staff facilities are — we take our coffee break there and go up there a lot.

"Anyway I was in the elevator and the door opened and I stepped out like always. I didn't think anything of it, I mean, who would? It's something that you do all the time, right? I stepped out like it was the most natural thing in the world. I guess I was thinking about something, I don't remember what. I think I had both hands in my pockets and I was standing there in the hallway, when I noticed that everything around me was dark. I mean, like absolutely pitch black. I turned around and the elevator door had just shut. The first thing I thought was, uh-oh, the power's gone out. But that's impossible. The hotel has this in-house emergency generator, so if there's a power failure, the generator kicks on automatically. We had these practice sessions during training, so I know. So, in principle, there's not supposed to be anything like a blackout. And if on the million-to-one chance something goes wrong with the generator, then emergency lights in the hallway are supposed to come on. So what I'm saying is, it wasn't supposed to be pitch black. I should have been seeing green lamps along the hall.

"But the whole place was completely dark. All I could see were the elevator call buttons and the red digital display that says what floor it's on. So the first thing I did was press the call buttons, but the elevator kept going down. I didn't know what to do. Then, for some reason, I decided to take a look around. I was really scared, but I was also feeling really put out.

"What I was thinking was that something was wrong with the basic functions of the hotel. Mechanically or structurally or something. And that meant more hassle from the management and no holidays and all sorts of annoying stuff. So, the more I thought about these things, the more annoyed I got. My annoyance got bigger than my fear. And that's how I decided to, you know, just have a look around. I walked two or three steps and — well, something was really strange. I mean, I couldn't hear the sound of my feet. There was no sound at all. And the floor felt funny, not like the regular carpet. It was hard. Honest. And then the air, it felt different, too. It was?it was moldy. Not like the hotel air at all. Our hotel is supposed to be fully air-conditioned and management is very fussy about it because it's not like ordinary air-conditioning, it's supposed to be quality air, not the dehumidified stuff in other hotels that dries out your nose. Our air is like natural air. So the stale, moldy air was really a shock. And it smelled like it was?old — you know, like when you go to visit your grandparents in the country and you open up the old family storehouse — like that. Stagnant and musty.

"I turned around and now even the elevator call buttons had gone out. I couldn't see a thing. Everything was out, com- pletely, which was really frightening. I mean, I was entirely alone in total darkness, and it was utterly quiet. Utterly. There wasn't a single sound. Strange. You'd think that in a power failure, at least one person would be calling out. And this was when the hotel was almost full. You'd've thought a lot of people would be making noise. Not this time."

Our drinks arrived, and we each took sips. Then she set hers down and adjusted her glasses.

"Did you follow me so far?"

"Pretty much," I said. "You got off the elevator on the sixteenth floor. It's pitch black. It smells strange. It's too quiet. Something funny is going on."

She let out a sigh. "I don't know if it's good or bad, but I'm not especially a timid person. At least I think I'm pretty brave. I'm not the type who screams her head off when the lights go out. I get scared but I don't freak out. I figure that you ought to go check things out. So I started feeling my way blind up the hallway."

"In which direction?"

"To the right," she said, raising her right hand. "I felt my way along the wall, very slowly, and after a bit the hallway turned to the right again. And then, up ahead, I could see a faint glow. Really faint, like candlelight leaking in from far away. My first thought was that someone had found some emergency candles and lit them. I kept going, but when I got closer, I saw that the light was coming from a room with the door slightly ajar. The door was pretty strange too. I'd never seen an old door like that in the hotel before. I just stood there in front of it, not knowing what to do next. What if somebody was inside? What if somebody weird came out? What was this door doing here in the first place?

"So I knocked on the door softly, very softly. It was hardly a knock at all, but it came out sounding really loud — maybe because the hallway was dead quiet. Anyway, no response. I waited ten seconds, and during those ten seconds, I was just frozen. I hadn't the slightest idea what I was going to do. Then I heard this muffled noise. I don't know, it was like a person in heavy clothing standing up, and then there were these footsteps. Really slow, shuffle?shuffle... shuffle?em>, like he was wearing slippers or something. The footsteps came closer and closer to the door."

She stared off into space and was shaking her head.

"That was when I started to freak out. Like maybe these footsteps weren't human. I don't know how I came to that conclusion. It was just this creepy feeling I got, because human feet don't walk like that. Chills ran up my spine, I mean seriously. I ran. I didn't even look where I was going. I must have fallen once or twice, I think, because my stockings were torn. This part I don't remember very well. All I can remember is that I ran. I panicked. Like what if the elevator's dead? Thank god, when I finally got back there, the red floor-number light and call buttons were lit up and everything. The elevator was on the ground floor. I started pounding the call buttons and then the elevator started coming back up. But much slower than usual. Really, it was like this incredible slug. Like, second.?third.?fourth?I was praying, c'mon, hurry up, oh come on, but it didn't do any good. The thing took forever. It was like somebody was jamming the controls."

She let out a deep breath and sipped her drink again. Then she played with her ring a second longer.

I waited for her to continue. The music had stopped, someone was laughing.

"I could still hear those footsteps, shuffle.?shuffle.?shuffle.?, getting closer. They just didn't stop, shuffle.?shuffle.?shuffle?, moving down the hall, coming toward me. I was terrified! I was more terrified than I'd ever been in my whole life. My stomach was practically squeezed up into my throat. I was sweating all over, but I was cold. I had the chills. The elevator wasn't anywhere near. Seventh?eighth.?ninth?The footsteps kept coming."

She paused for twenty or thirty seconds. And once again, she gave her ring a few more turns, almost as if she were tuning a radio. A woman at the counter said something, which drew another laugh from her companion. If only they'd hurry up and put on a record.

"I can't really describe how I felt. You just have to experience it," she spoke dryly.

"Then what happened?"

"The next thing I knew, the elevator was there," she said, shrugging her shoulders. "The door opened and I could see that nice, familiar light. I fell in, literally. I was shaking all over, but I managed to push the button for the lobby. When it got there, I must've scared everyone silly. I was all pale and speechless and trembling. The manager came over and shook me, and said, 'Hey, what's wrong?' So I tried to tell him about the strange things on the sixteenth floor, but I kept running out of breath. The manager stopped me in the middle of my story and called over one of the staff boys, and all three of us went back up to the sixteenth floor. Just to check things out. But everything was perfectly normal up there. All the lights were shining away, there was no old smell, everything was the same as always, as it was supposed to be. We went to the staff lounge and asked the guy who was there if he knew anything about it, but he swore up and down he'd been awake the whole time and the power hadn't gone out. Then, just to be sure, we walked the entire sixteenth floor from one end to the other. Nothing was out of the ordinary. It was like I'd been bewitched or something.

"We went back down and the manager took me into his office. I was sure he was going to scream at me, but he didn't even get mad. He asked me to tell him what happened again in more detail. So I explained everything as clearly as I could, from the beginning, right down to those footsteps coming after me. I felt like a complete idiot. I was sure he was going to laugh at me and say I'd dreamed the whole thing up.

"But he didn't laugh or anything. Instead, he looked dead serious. Then he said: 'You're not to tell anyone about this.' He spoke very gently. 'Something must have gone wrong, but we shouldn't upset the other employees, so let's keep this completely quiet.' And let me tell you, this manager is not the type to speak gently. He's ready to fly off the handle at any second. That's when it occurred to me — that maybe I wasn't the first person this happened to."

She now sat silent.

"And you haven't heard anybody talk about something like this? Weird experiences, or strange happenings, or anything mysterious? What about rumors?"

She thought it over and shook her head. "No, not that I'm aware of. But there really is something funny about the place. The way the manager reacted when I told him what happened and all those hush-hush conversations going on all the time. I really can't explain any better, but something isn't right. It's not at all like the hotel I worked at before. Of course, that wasn't such a big hotel, so things were a little different, but this is real different. That hotel had its own ghost story — every hotel's probably got one — but we all could laugh at it. Here, it's not like that at all. Nobody laughs. So it's even more scary. The manager, for example, if he made a joke of it, or even if he yelled at me, it wouldn't have seemed so strange. That way, I would've thought there was just a malfunction or something."

She squinted at the glass in her hand.

"Did you go back to the sixteenth floor after that?" I asked.

"Lots of times," she said matter-of-factly. "It's still part of my workplace, so I go there when I have to, whether I like it or not. But I only go during the day. I never go there at night, I don't care what. I don't ever want to go through that again. That's why I won't work the night shift. I even told my boss that."

"And you've never mentioned this to anyone else?"

She shook her head quickly. "Like I already said, this is the first time. No one would've believed me anyway. I told you about it because I thought maybe you'd have a clue about this sixteenth-floor business."

"Me?"

She gazed at me abstractedly. "Well, for one thing, you knew about the old Dolphin Hotel and you wanted to hear what happened to it. I couldn't help hoping you might know something about what I'd gone through."

"Nope, afraid not," I said, after a bit. "I'm not a specialist on the hotel. The old Dolphin was a small place, and it wasn't very popular. It was just an ordinary hotel."

Of course I didn't for a moment think the old Dolphin was just an ordinary hotel, but I didn't want to open up that can of worms.

"But this afternoon, when I asked you about the Dolphin Hotel, you said it was a long story. What did you mean by that?"

"That part of it's kind of personal," I said. "If I start in on that, it gets pretty involved. Anyway, I don't think it has anything to do with what you just told me."

She seemed disappointed. Pouting slightly, she stared down at her hands.

"Sorry I can't be of more help," I said, "especially after all the trouble you took to tell me this."

"Well, don't worry, it's not your fault. I'm still glad I could tell you about it. These sort of things, you keep them all to yourself and they really start to get to you."

"Yup, you gotta let the pressure out. If you don't, it builds up inside your head." I made an over-inflated balloon with my arms.

She nodded silently as she fiddled with her ring again, removing it from her finger, then putting it back.

"Tell me, do you even believe my story? About the sixteenth floor and all?" she whispered, not raising her eyes from her fingers.

"Of course I believe you," I said.

"Really? But it's kind of peculiar, don't you think?"

"That may be, but peculiar things do happen. I know that much. That's why I believe you. It all links up somewhere, I think."

She puzzled over that a minute. "Then you've had a similar experience?" "Yeah, at least I think I have."

"Was it scary?" she asked.

"No, it wasn't like your experience," I answered. "No, what I mean is, things connect in all kinds of ways. With me? But for no reason I could understand, the words died in my throat. As if someone had yanked out the telephone line. I took a sip of whiskey and tried again. "I'm sorry. I don't know how to put it. But I definitely have seen my share of unbelievable things. So I'm quite prepared to believe what you've told me. I don't think you made up the story."

She looked up and smiled. An individual smile, I thought, not the professional variety. And she relaxed. "I don't know why," she said, "but I feel better talking to you. I'm usually pretty shy. It's really hard for me to talk to people I don't know, but with you it's different."

"Maybe we have something in common," I laughed.

She didn't know what to make of that remark, and in the end didn't say anything. Instead, she sighed. Then she asked, "Feel like eating? All of a sudden, I'm starving."

I offered to take her somewhere for a real meal, but she said a snack where we were would do.

We ordered a pizza. And continued talking as we ate. About work at the hotel, about life in Sapporo. About herself. After high school, she'd gone to hotelier school for two years, then she worked at a hotel in Tokyo for two years, when she answered an ad for the new Dolphin Hotel. She was twenty-three. The move to Sapporo was good for her; her parents ran an inn near Asahikawa, about 120 kilometers away.

"It's a fairly well-known inn. They've been at it a long time," she said.

"So after doing your job here, you'll take over the family business?" I asked.

"Not necessarily," she said, pushing up the bridge of her glasses. "I haven't thought that far ahead. I just like hotel work. People coming, staying, leaving, all that. I feel comfortable there in the middle of it. It puts me at ease. After all, it's the environment I was raised in." "So that's why," I said.

"Why what?"

"Why standing there at the front desk, you looked like you could be the spirit of the hotel."

"Spirit of the hotel?" she laughed. "What a nice thing to say! If only I really could become like that."

"I'm sure you can, if that's what you want," I smiled back.

She thought that over a while, then asked to hear my story.

"Not very interesting," I begged off, but still she wanted to hear. So I gave her a short rundown: thirty-four, divorced, writer of odd jobs, driver of used Subaru. Nothing novel.

But still she was curious about my work. So I told her about my interviews with would-be starlets, about my piece on restaurants in Hakodate.

"Sounds like fun," she said, brightening up.

"'Fun' is not the word. The writing itself is no big thing. I mean I like writing. It's even relaxing for me. But the content is a real zero. Pointless in fact."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, for instance, you do the rounds of fifteen restaurants in one day, you eat one bite of each dish and leave the rest untouched. You think that makes sense?"

"But you couldn't very well eat everything, could you?"

"Of course not. I'd drop dead in three days if I did. And everyone would think I was an idiot. I'd get no sympathy whatsoever."

"So what choice have you got?" she said.

"I don't know. The way I see it, it's like shoveling snow. You do it because somebody's got to, not because it's fun."

"Shoveling snow, huh?" she mused.

"Well, you know, cultural snow," I said.

We drank a lot. I lost track of how much, but it was past eleven when she eyed her watch and said she had an early morning. I paid the bill and we stepped outside into flurries of snow. I offered to have my taxi drop her at her place, about ten minutes away. The snow wasn't heavy, but the road was frozen slick. She held on tight to my arm as we walked to the taxi stand. I think she was more than a little inebriated.

"You know that expose about how the hotel got built," I asked as we made our way carefully, "do you still remember the name of the magazine? Do you remember around when the article came out?"

She knew right off. "And I'm sure it was last autumn. I didn't see the article myself, so I can't really say what it said."

We stood for five minutes in the swirling snow, waiting for a cab. She clung to my arm.

"It's been ages since I felt this relaxed," she said. The same thought occurred to me too. Maybe we really did have something in common, the two of us.

In the taxi we talked about nothing in particular. The snow and chill, her work hours, things in Tokyo. Which left me wondering what was going to happen next. One little push and I could probably sleep with her. I could feel it. Naturally I didn't know whether she wanted to sleep with me. But I understood that she wouldn't mind sleeping with me. I could tell from her eyes, how she breathed, the way she talked, even her hand movements. And of course, I knew I wouldn't mind sleeping with her. There probably wouldn't be any complications either. I'd have simply happened through and gone off. Just as she herself had said. Yet, somehow, the resolve failed me. The notion of fairness lingered somewhere in the back of my mind. She was ten years younger than me, more than a little insecure, and she'd had so much to drink she couldn't walk straight. It'd be like calling the bets with marked cards. Not fair.

Still, how much jurisdiction does fairness hold over sex? If fairness was what you wanted, your sex life would be as exciting as the algae growing in an aquarium.

The voice of reason.

The debate was still raging when the cab pulled up to her plain, reinforced-concrete apartment building and she briskly swept aside my entire dilemma. "I live with my younger sister," she said.

No further thought on the matter needed or wanted. I actually felt a bit relieved.

But as she got out, she asked if I would see her to her door. Probably no reason for concern, she apologized, but every once in a while, late at night, there'd be a strange man in the hall. I asked the driver to wait for a few minutes, then accompanied her, arm in arm, up the frozen walk. We climbed the two flights of stairs and came to her door marked 306. She opened her purse to fish around for the key. Then she smiled awkwardly and said thanks, she'd had a nice time.

As had I, I assured her.

She unlocked the door and slipped the key back into her purse. The dry snap of her purse shutting resounded down the hall. Then she looked at me directly. In her eyes it was the old geometry problem. She hesitated, couldn't decide how she wanted to say good-bye. I could see it.

Hand on the wall, I waited for her to come to some kind of decision, which didn't seem forthcoming.

"Good night," I said. "Regards to your sister."

For four or five seconds she clamped her lips tight. "The part about living with my sister," she half whispered. "It's not true. Really, I live alone."

"I know," I said.

A slow blush came over her. "How could you know?"

"Can't say why, I just did," I said.

"You're impossible, you know that?"

The driver was reading a sports newspaper when I got back to the cab. He seemed surprised when I climbed back into the taxi and asked him to take me to the Dolphin.

"You really going back?" he said with a smirk. "From the look of things, I was sure you'd be paying me and sending me on. That's the way it usually happens."

"I bet."

"When you do this job as long as I have, your intuition almost never misses."

"When you do the job that long, you're bound to miss sometime. Law of averages."

"Guess so," the cabbie answered, a bit nonplussed. "But still, kinda odd, aren'tcha pal?"

"Maybe so," I said, "maybe so."

Back in my room, I washed up before getting into bed. That was when I started to regret what I'd done — or didn't do — but soon fell fast asleep. My bouts of regret don't usually last very long.

First thing in the morning, I called down to the front desk and extended my stay for another three days. It was the off-season, so they were happy to accommodate me.

Next I bought a newspaper, headed out to a nearby Dunkin' Donuts and had two plain muffins with two large cups of coffee. You get tired of hotel breakfasts in a day. Dunkin' Donuts is just the ticket. It's cheap and you get refills on the coffee.

Then I got in a taxi and told the driver to take me to the biggest library in Sapporo. I looked up back numbers of the magazine the Dolphin Hotel article was supposed to be in and found it in the October 20th issue. I xeroxed it and took it to a nearby coffee shop to read.

The article was confusing to say the least. I had to read it several times before I understood what was going on. The reporter had tried his best to write a straightforward story, but his efforts had been no match for the complexity of the details. Talk about convolution. You had to sit down with it before the general outline emerged. The title, "Sapporo Land Dealings: Dark Hands behind Urban Redevelopment." And printed alongside, an aerial photograph of the nearly completed new Dolphin Hotel.

The long and the short of the story was this: Certain parties had bought up a large tract of land in one section of the city of Sapporo. For two years, the names of the new property holders were moved around, under the surface, in surreptitious ways. Land values grew hot for no apparent reason. With very little else to go on, the reporter started his investigation. What he turned up was this: The properties were purchased by various companies, most of which existed only on paper. The companies were fully registered, they paid taxes, but they had no offices and no employees. These paper companies were tied into still other paper companies. Whoever they were, their juggling of property ownership was truly masterful. One property bought at twenty million yen was resold at sixty million, and the next thing you knew it was sold again for two hundred million yen. If you persisted in tracing each paper company's holdings back through this maze of interconnecting fortunes, you'd find that they all ended at the same place: B INDUSTRIES, a player of some renown in real estate. Now B INDUSTRIES was a real company, with big, fashionable headquarters in the Akasaka section of Tokyo. And B INDUSTRIES happened to be, at a less-than-public level, connected to A ENTERPRISES, a massive conglomerate that encompassed railway lines, a hotel chain, a film company, food services, department stores, magazines,?, everything from credit agencies to damage insurance. A ENTERPRISES had a direct pipeline to certain political circles, which prompted the reporter to pursue this line of investigation further. Which is how he found out something even more interesting. The area of Sapporo that B INDUSTRIES was so busily buying up was slated for major redevelopment. Already, plans had been set in motion to build subways and to move governmental offices to the area. The greater part of the moneys for the infrastructural projects was to come from the national level. It seems that the national, prefectural, and municipal governments had worked together on the planning and agreed on a comprehensive program for the zoning and scale and budget. But when you lifted up this "cover," it was obvious that every square meter of the sites for redevelopment had been systematically bought up over the last few years. Someone was leaking information to A ENTERPRISES, and, moreover, the leak existed well before the redevelopment plans were finalized. Which also suggested that, politically speaking, the final plans had been a fait accompli probably from the very beginning.

And this is where the Dolphin Hotel entered the picture. It was the spearhead of this collusive cornering of real estate. First of all, the Dolphin Hotel secured prime real estate. Hence, A ENTERPRISES could set up offices in this new chrome-and-marble wonder as its local base of operations. The place was both a beacon and a watchtower, a visible symbol of change as well as a nerve center which could redirect the flow of people in the district. Everything was proceeding according to the most intricate plans.

That's advanced capitalism for you: The player making the maximum capital investment gets the maximum critical information in order to reap the maximum desired profit with maximum capital efficiency — and nobody bats an eye. It's just part of putting down capital these days. You demand the most return for your capital outlay. The person buying a used car will kick the tires and check under the hood, and the conglomerate putting down one hundred billion yen will check over the finer points of where that capital's going, and occasionally do a little fiddling. Fairness has got nothing to do with it. With that kind of money on the line, who's going to sit around considering abstract things like that?

Sometimes they even force hands.

For instance, suppose there's someone who doesn't want to sell. Say, a long-established shoe store. That's when the tough guys come out of the woodwork. Huge companies have their connections, and you can bet they count everyone from politicians and novelists and rock stars to out-and-out yakuza in their fold. So they just call on the boys with their samurai swords. The police are never too eager to deal with matters like this, especially since arrangements have already been made up at the top. It's not even corruption. That's how the system works. That's capital investment. Granted, this sort of thing isn't new to the modern age. But everything before is nothing compared to the exacting detail and sheer power and invulnerability of today's web of capitalism. And it's megacomputers that have made it all possible, with their inhuman capacity to pull every last factor and condition on the face of the earth into their net calculations. Advanced capitalism has transcended itself. Not to overstate things, financial dealings have practically become a religious activity. The new mysticism. People worship capital, adore its aura, genuflect before Porsches and Tokyo land values. Worshiping everything their shiny Porsches symbolize. It's the only stuff of myth that's left in the world.

Latter-day capitalism. Like it or not, it's the society we live in. Even the standard of right and wrong has been subdivided, made sophisticated. Within good, there's fashionable good and unfashionable good, and ditto for bad. Within fashionable good, there's formal and then there's casual; there's hip, there's cool, there's trendy, there's snobbish. Mix 'n' match. Like pulling on a Missoni sweater over Trussardi slacks and Pollini shoes, you can now enjoy hybrid styles of morality. It's the way of the world — philosophy starting to look more and more like business administration.

Although I didn't think so at the time, things were a lot simpler in 1969. All you had to do to express yourself was throw rocks at riot police. But with today's sophistication, who's in a position to throw rocks? Who's going to brave what tear gas? C'mon, that's the way it is. Everything is rigged, tied into that massive capital web, and beyond this web there's another web. Nobody's going anywhere. You throw a rock and it'll come right back at you. The reporter had devoted a lot of energy to following the paper trail. Still, despite his outcry — or rather, all the more because of his outcry — the article curiously lacked punch. A rallying cry it wasn't. The guy just didn't seem to realize: Nothing about this was suspect. It was a natural state of affairs. Ordinary, the order of the day, common knowledge. Which is why nobody cared. If huge capital interests obtained information illegally and bought up property, forced a few political decisions, then clinched the deal by having yakuza extort a little shoe store here, maybe beat up the owner of some small-time, end-of-the-line hotel there, so what? That's life, man. The sand of the times keeps running out from under our feet. We're no longer standing where we once stood.

The reporter had done everything he could. The article was well researched, full of righteous indignation, and hopelessly untrendy.

I folded it, slipped it into my pocket, and drank another cup of coffee.

I thought about the owner of the old Dolphin. Mister Unlucky, shadowed by defeat since birth. No way he could have made the cut for this day and age.

"Untrendy!" I said out loud.

A waitress gave me a disturbed look.

I took a taxi back to the hotel.