he following afternoon they dredged the Maserati out of Tokyo Bay. As I expected. No surprises. As soon as he disappeared, I saw it coming.

Another corpse. The Rat, Kiki, Mei, Dick North, and now Gotanda. Five. One more to go. What now? Who was the next in line to die? Not Yumiyoshi, I wouldn't be able to bear that. Yumiyoshi was not meant to die. Okay, then Yuki? The kid was thirteen. I couldn't let that happen to her. I was going down the list, as if I were the god of doom, dealing out orders for mortality.

I went down to the Akasaka police station to tell Bookish that I'd been with Gotanda the previous night until right before his death. Somehow I thought it was the right thing to do, though naturally I didn't mention Kiki. That was a closed book. Instead, I talked about how exhausted Gotanda had been, how his loans were piling up, the problems with work, the stresses in his personal life.

Bookish took down what I said. Unlike before, he made simple notes. Which I signed. It didn't take an hour. "People dying left and right around you, eh?" he said. "At this rate, you'll never make friends and influence people. They start hating you, and before you know it, your eyes go and your skin sags. Not a pretty prospect."

Then he heaved a deep sigh. "Well, anyway, this was a suicide. Open and shut case. Even got witnesses. Still, what a waste. I don't care if he was a movie star, he didn't have to go blitzing a Maserati into the Bay, did he? Ordinary Honda Civic or Toyota Corolla would've done the job."

"It was insured."

"No sir, insurance never covers suicides," Bookish reminded me. "Anyway, you can go now. Sorry about your friend. And thanks for taking the trouble to come in," he said as he saw me to the door. "Mei's case isn't settled yet. But the investigation's still going on."

For a long time after, I walked around feeling as if I'd killed Gotanda. I couldn't rid myself of the weight. I went back over all the things we'd talked about that night. If only I'd given him the responses he'd needed to save himself, the two of us might be relaxing on the beach in Maui right now. No way. Gotanda had made up his mind from the beginning. He'd been thinking about plowing that Maserati into the sea all along. He'd been waiting for an excuse. It was his only exit. He'd already had his hand on the doorknob, the Maserati in his head sinking, the water pouring in, choking him, over and over again.

Mei's death had left me shaken, Dick North's death sad and resigned. But Gotanda's death lay me down in a lead-lined box of despair. Gotanda's death was unsalvageable. Gotanda never really got himself in tune with his inner impulses. He pushed himself as far as he could, to the furthest edge of his awareness — and then right across the line into that dark otherworld.

For a while, the weeklies and TV and sports tabloids feasted on his death. Like beetles on carrion. The headlines alone were enough to make me vomit. I felt like throttling every scandalmonger in town.

I climbed into bed and shut my eyes. Cuck-koo, I heard Mei far off in the darkness. I lay there, hating everything. The deaths were beyond comprehension, the aftertaste sickening. The world of the living was obscene. I was powerless to do anything. People came and went, but once gone, they never came back. My hands smelled of death. I wouldn't be able to wash it off, like Gotanda said.

Hey, Sheep Man, is this the way you connect your world? Threading one death to another? You said it might already be too late for me to be happy. I wouldn't have minded that, but why this?

When I was little, I had this science book. There was a section on "What would happen to the world if there was no friction?" Answer: "Everything on earth would fly into space from the centrifugal force of revolution." That was my mood.