The cop who was pawing my underwear earlier now walks over to me with two cell phones in his hands: “These yours?”
“Yes, but, um, I no longer use thatone,” I say pointing to the older of the two. “It hasn’t worked for months.”
“We’re confiscating both of those, too,” Nakata calls from the dining room.
Pyon-kichi hops back towards me, scratches playfully at my legs, then takes off for the balcony, a trail of droppings left in his wake.
One of the cops asks me where my wife is. When I reply that I’m not married, his eyes widen. Perhaps he believes he’s just caught me in a lie. “But, you said your wife named the rabbit.”
“One, we are divorced and, two, Pyon is an old rabbit.”
“Aah so,” he replies, somewhat crestfallen, and drifts away, scribbling in his notebook.
Meanwhile, the other cops continue to go through my belongings. There is no rhyme or reason to their search: they give the contents of one box a thorough going over only to overlook the next box altogether. They run their gloved hands through the contents of one drawer, but leave the drawer next to it alone. It only serves to reinforce my initial impression that they don’t know what they are looking for. When they first started poking around my apartment, I expected them pack everything up in uniform white boxes and march away in a neat line—as I’ve often seen on the news—leaving me in nothing but my skivvies in the center of a cleaned-out apartment. After nearly an hour, though, all they have confiscated are my passport and cell phones.
A middle-aged cop, poorly dressed and sweating profusely, shows me a stash of unexposed film in one of my smaller Balinese containers, about ten rolls from some of my more recent trips.
“What’s this,” he asks.
“Film.”
“I know it’s film, but what is it of?”
“This and that.”
It’s not that I’m trying to be difficult, but, really, what’s the point in being too cooperative?
He turns to Nakata and asks if he should pack the film up and take it to the lab as evidence.
“By all means, please take them,” I interject. “And while you’re at it, I’d really appreciate it if you could you make extra copies for me, too. I haven’t had the money to get them developed.”
Nakata tells him to forget about the film.
Damn.