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  I stood up. “I’ll go.”

  “Will you, Yuri? That’s great. I’ll make the arrangements.”

  The dispatcher looked relieved, but after he told the man on the other end of the phone okay, I noticed that he was smirking to himself. I realized that he might have been grateful to me for my willingness from a business point of view, but from a personal point of view it was clear that he despised me.

  I pulled out my compact and touched up my makeup. The other women looked at me in disgust. I knew they were thinking, My, my, you certainly pay a lot of visits on men without bathrooms!

  Don’t be so squeamish, girls, I wanted to say. You’re too soft. If you do business with a man who has a handicap like that, you can turn it to benefit yourself. Serve him shorter and charge him more for the inconvenience. Laugh at me now, but you wait and see what it’s like when you’re thirty-seven. Then you’ll understand. I wasn’t going to let those silly girls get me down.

  In three years’ time, I’ll be forty. That’s when I’ll retire from this group. I’ll have to. My time will be up for this line of work. If I can’t get work as a call girl, I’ll market myself as a “mature lover.” Or I’ll start trolling the streets and procure my own customers. And if I can’t stand it, I’ll have to quit all together. But once I’m no longer able to find liberation in my night work, I imagine my day job will fall apart as well. That’s what I fear, but I have to keep on living even so. So my biggest obstacle is my own insecurity. If I can’t keep my balance, I need to harden myself further.

  I stepped into the tiny bathroom and changed into a blue miniskirted suit. I’d bought it off the bargain racks at the Tokyu Department Store for ¥8,700. Next I put on a long-haired wig. The hair fell all the way to my waist. Kazue Sat had turned into Yuri. I felt I could do anything. I picked up the slip from the dispatcher with the address and phone number of the client and walked out the door. I searched through the bucket, selecting what was probably the Braid’s long stylish umbrella, got in a cab, and headed toward the man’s apartment in Gotanda.

  The apartment was beside the train tracks. I paid the cab fare and made sure to get a receipt. Some agencies have their own cars and drive girls to their customers, but my office has us pay for cabs. Then they reimburse us later.

  Mr. Hiroshi Tanaka, Apartment 202, Mizuki Heights. I took the flight of stairs on the outside of the building and knocked on the door to apartment 202.

  A man opened the door. “Thanks for coming,” he said.

  He was nearly sixty and had the rugged physique of a construction worker. His face was brown from the sun, his body hard. The apartment smelled of mold and cheap liquor. I peered in, quickly scanning the interior. I wanted to be sure there were no other men inside. We didn’t have to take this kind of precaution when we were sent to a specific love hotel. But at a private residence it was important to be careful. A girl I know went to service one man and then had several others show up, one right after the other. She ended up being gang-raped by four men. That meant they only paid once for the price of four. What a ripoff.

  “I don’t mean to be rude, but I really expected them to send someone younger.” Tanaka looked me up and down without the slightest hesitation and sighed with audible disappointment. The furniture in his apartment was cheap. How the hell did he expect to get some hot young thing with the pathetic kind of life he lived? I turned to look back at him, my trench coat still wrapped over my shoulders.

  “Yeah? I was hoping for a younger client, myself.”

  “Well, then, I guess that makes two of us, huh?”

  Resigned to his disappointment, Tanaka tried to laugh it off. I looked around the apartment without so much as a smile. “Hardly. I understand you don’t have a bathroom on the premises. Nobody wanted to come over, but I took the call as an act of kindness. You should be grateful.”

  My complaint had hit home. Tanaka scratched the side of his face, clearly embarrassed. I had to take precautions to ensure he didn’t try to abscond without paying. The first thing I did in the apartment was call the office to let the dispatcher know I’d arrived and all was well.

  “Hello. It’s Yuri. I’m here.”

  I put Tanaka on the phone.

  “She’ll do. I mean, I don’t have any complaints. I guess I can’t expect too much, without a bath. But next time won’t you send a younger one?”

  His gall really pissed me off, but I was used to it, so I didn’t take any real offense. Instead, I took my anger and applied it to my eagerness to get the job done. I wanted to get my money and get out of there. I’d get my revenge by gouging Tanaka a bit on the price.

  “What do you do for a living?” I asked.

  “Oh, a little of this and a little of that. Mostly construction.”

  Well, I work for an architectural firm, you asshole. I’m the assistant manager of the research office, and I make ¥10,000,000 a year. In my heart I screamed this at him. I could feel my anger rising; it was what sustained me. I despised the man. Customers who are passive and weak-willed tend to be a lot of fun even for the prostitute.

  “Save the small talk. I’m paying by the hour.” Tanaka looked at his watch as he spoke. He wasted no time spreading out a wafer-thin futon. The quilt he dragged out had been wadded up and looked filthy. I felt my resolve slipping. To bolster my courage I asked curtly, “So did you clean yourself there?”

  “I washed, yeah.”

  Tanaka pointed to the sink.

  “Just a little bit ago, I washed it real good, so how about sucking it some?”

  “I only do straight-up sex,” I said brusquely, as I fished a condom out of my purse. “Here, put this on.”

  “I can’t get it up just like that,” Tanaka mumbled uneasily.

  “Well, I get paid whether you do or not.”

  “You’re a cold bitch.”

  I took off my trench coat and folded in neatly. The rain marks were still there on the front. I put some spit on my finger and tried to rub them out.

  “Hey, why don’t you stand there and take your clothes off? Give me a striptease.”

  Tanaka hoisted his T-shirt over his head and pulled off the workman-type trousers. Men are such pigs, I thought, as I looked at his shriveled sex organ under the mound of white pubic hair. Thank God he was small. I don’t like large men because it always hurts later.

  “No, I don’t do that sort of thing,” I reminded him gently. “I’m just here for the main event.”

  I hurriedly got out of my underwear and lay down on the thin mattress. Tanaka looked at my naked body and started to rub his penis. Twenty minutes had already passed. I looked at the watch that I’d set beside the bedding. I had one hour and ten minutes to go. But I planned to trick him into shortening that to fifty minutes.

  “I’m sorry, but would you mind spreading your legs apart and giving me a look?”

  I gave in to Tanaka’s request, slightly. He was so meek and mild, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to indulge him just this much. If I were too cold it could backfire and make him angry. That would be dangerous. But he was a complete stranger, someone I’d never seen before, and for some reason that always allowed me to act more audaciously. It was strange. I’d heard about one prostitute who killed her john in an Ikebukuro hotel. It wasn’t really self-defense, so it was somewhat unusual. But those things happen, now and then. The john had tied her up and was videotaping her. He stuck a knife in front of her face and threatened to kill her. I can well imagine how scared she must have been. I haven’t yet had an experience like that, but you never know when you’re going to end up with some weirdo. It’s scary, but I almost want to have something like that happen, as long as I don’t die. Being scared out of your wits helps affirm that you are alive.

  Once Tanaka finally got an erection, he picked up the condom with trembling hands and tried to put it on. It took him forever. I normally help the guy out in those situations, but since Tanaka didn’t have a bath in his apartment, I refused to touch him. Sheathed, Tanaka fell o