The Last Train (Detective Hiroshi Series Book 1)

by Michael Pronko

  He took a big breath, and asked, “Where are you going after Paris?”

  “Why not come and see?” she said, pausing at the open door. And then she smiled the smile he always wanted to catch in a photo, but never could.

  Chapter 25

  Shibuya had spent the day collecting what debts he could. Most of the hostesses and AV idol wannabes he managed could only give him designer bags, jeweled lighters, dangling earrings and expensive hair clips. They had no cash, or said they didn’t.

  He stuffed all these unwanted presents from customers into one big Louis Vuitton bag and headed to the pawnshop in an old ferroconcrete two-story house near Roppongi. He didn’t want Michiko to wake him in the middle of the night again before she left.

  The pawnshop garden was lined with a maze of statues and garden decorations, numbered tags dangling from everything. From outside, he could hear the fierce barking of the Japanese Tosa fighting hounds the pawnbroker, Ikeda, and his son kept. He looked up at the first surveillance camera and waited patiently in front of the bollards until the security gate rolled aside and let him in.

  The neatly arranged shelves paraded Fendi bags, Prada perfumes, Valentino dresses, Cartier necklaces, and Armani and Gucci everythings. The long line of hostesses waiting in line up to the window made him exhale in exasperation. He dropped the Louis Vuitton bag on the floor and pulled out his cell phone.

  The Tosa hounds’ barks blasted out from behind the protective glass and echoed through the low-ceilinged room. The girl just ahead of Shibuya in line flipped her long blond hair around her almost-cute face and asked, “They can’t get out, can they?” The dogs’ low growls sounded like motorcycles revving.

  “There’s a door, I’m sure,” Shibuya answered without looking up from his cell phone.

  “I’m afraid of dogs.” She clutched her cell phone with delicate fingers topped by long, thickly lacquered, white and pink fingernails. “How long will this line take?”

  Shibuya looked up. “It’s not usually like this.”

  “I was told it was quick here.”

  “It is when there isn’t a line,” Shibuya answered. “After midnight is rush hour here. What are you cashing in?”

  “Just some stupid purse. This guy brings me a present every week. I never get much at the pawnshops in Akasaka. One of the girls told me to try here.”

  They stepped forward in line.

  “This is the best pawnshop in Roppongi. I’ve been coming here for years.” Shibuya could hardly find her eyes inside the dark-pink eye shadow and glitter powder on her cheeks. The dogs barked again, and the girl pulled her pink-silver shawl tight around her shoulders.

  “I don’t like those dogs,” she said.

  “Why don’t I give you something for it and you can take off?”

  “How much?” she said, holding up the bag. “Is this brand famous?”

  “Marc Jacobs? Not so famous,” Shibuya lied, pretending not to even look at it.

  “I was hoping for twenty thousand yen.”

  “No way. You can stand in line and see, though.”

  The dogs barked again, and her shoulders scrunched together as she crossed her arms. “How much then?”

  “I’ll give you ten thousand. But be careful. There’re cameras everywhere in here.”

  The dogs barked again and she handed the bag to him. Shibuya took a ten thousand yen note and gave it to her with his hand out of sight, against his thigh.

  “Thanks. You saved me,” the girl whispered and hurried away.

  The next girl in front of him smiled through bright purple lip gloss outlined in black. “I heard hosts get really expensive presents. More than we get.”

  “I wish that were true,” Shibuya said, not looking up from his cell phone. Her perfume was too strong and Shibuya turned away. There were still five women ahead of him.

  Behind the Plexiglass window, the pawnbroker’s son, Ikeda had a plump face with drooping eyelids and thick folds of dark brown flesh that wrinkled and unwrinkled as he looked over the goods, picking up each one and eyeing them carefully for telltale details. He wore a short-sleeve Hawaiian shirt throughout the year. A large Tosa sat beside him, staring up at Shibuya.

  Shibuya smiled at the dog and held up the Marc Jacobs bag. “Here’s the big ticket item!”

  Ikeda looked at him without a word and pulled open the large thru-wall drawer. Shibuya put the stuff inside, and Ikeda pulled it to his side of the glass.

  “Twenty thousand yen on the Jacobs bag.”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “Twenty-two, but I’m going to look carefully at this other stuff.”

  “You won’t find any knock-offs in here,” Shibuya said, calmly checking his cell phone. Ikeda wrote out the tickets and slid them through the currency tray. Shibuya picked up the total and said, “You’re joking!”

  “Times are tough,” Ikeda said. “I can’t move half of what I get these days. A couple of yours are knock-offs. You have to watch that. Not everyone will buy something fake anymore. It’s not the bubble years.”

  “What about this chain?” Shibuya said, holding up the chains around his neck.

  “Chains are one thing I have too many of.”

  Shibuya signed the receipt, folded the money into his pants’ pocket, and hurried. He scurried through the garden and stepped out to peer both ways down the street.

  He paused at the entrance to the garden, his elbow resting on a weatherworn Jizo statue, stolen—no doubt—from a temple, by someone really desperate.

  Shibuya was careful to tuck the notes in two places—the interior of his vest and the inside waistband of his pants in a special pocket. After slipping on his loose, summer jacket, he was startled to hear Michiko’s husky voice behind him.

  “Did you get enough to take me out?” she asked, taking his arm.

  “Were you following me?” Shibuya asked. He looked around to see where she had come from.

  “It’s been so long since we had a drink together, just the two of us.”

  Shibuya gathered himself and said, “I’ll buy you a sayonara drink. Would you like that?”

  “You were always my favorite,” she said.

  He gave her a kiss on her neck. “Aren’t I still?”

  “Where should we go?” she asked. “Dancing? That couples club? Or maybe that blue bird tattoo girl has worn you out?”

  “I have plenty of energy,” Shibuya said, taking her arm.

  “Then, let’s have some fun.”

  “Just one drink. I have to check on some girls.”

  Michiko smacked his shoulder, hard.

  He jumped from the pain and clutched his arm. He didn’t want to explain being picked up by the cops and having his shoulder pulled out of socket, so he just said, “Okay, okay, two drinks.”

  Michiko smacked his shoulder again.

  Shibuya stopped and grabbed his arm. “Don’t do that. My shoulder is killing me.”

  “Did something happen?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “One of those older women hurt you tying you up?”

  “Just a sore shoulder. I collected some debts like I told you. I have some of your money.”

  “Let’s forget about that for tonight. I’m leaving, so it doesn’t matter.”

  Shibuya stopped and asked, “You can give me more time for the rest?”

  “All the time in the world,” Michiko said.

  “Really?”

  “You’ll never pay it all back anyway, will you?”

  Shibuya looked embarrassed.

  “Let’s go spend what you have there and call it even,” Michiko said, pulling him on. “I need to let off a little steam.”

  Their steps started to sync as they got under the lights and heard the bustle of the main streets of Roppongi. She kept a hand on him.

  “Let’s go to the David,” she shouted, like a schoolgirl, holding both her hands out toward him in invitation. “We can dance.”

  “I don’t want to go there,” he
answered, stopping and growling at her. “You know why.”

  “Please? For old times’ sake?” She stopped and came back to him, putting her hands on his hips.

  “Let’s go someplace else.”

  “Let’s stop by the David, just for a few minutes, and then you can take me to one of your favorite spots. What about that place in Ebisu?”

  Shibuya nodded his head, okay, and took her arm.

  ***

  Inside the David, the action was already in full swing.

  “I’m going to go wash my hands,” Michiko said.

  “I’ll be at the bar,” Shibuya answered.

  The early evening jazz and J-pop had given way to wild Latin club music. The bar was packed with women in tight full-body dresses and stiletto heels. The escorts and hosts and boyfriends were dressed in light summer suits, shirtfronts open to reveal tanned, hairless chests draped with gold necklaces.

  The women dancing in the middle circled their fists up at the ceiling to the heavy Latin beat, crouching down, thighs stretching, hips pumping, shaking their work stress away.

  The bartenders made drinks as fast as they got the orders, straining ice-filled shakers into frosted glasses, silver ice tongs and drink stirrers flashing in the spinning lights, no time to re-cap the bottles of wine and champagne.

  Michiko, her hair spilling down her back, squeezed next to Shibuya at the bar. She handed her purse to the bartender for safekeeping in a cabinet above the bar. She ordered drinks and surveyed the throbbing, dancing crowd.

  After their first cocktails, Michiko pushed Shibuya out to the middle of the dance floor. She moved effortlessly, loosely. The music jumped to a faster, funkier tempo, and the whole club moved as one.

  Ceiling lights at the corners circled over the crowd, exposing lightning glimpses of long, bare necks, sturdy calves and slender, pretty arms all moving in time to the music. As if searching for someone or something, the lights roved over their drunk-silly smiles and lusty, let-loose eyes.

  The room warmed up and the air was mingled with perfume, cigarettes, aftershave and expensive liquor. The dancing heated up everyone’s personal scent. Shibuya stretched his shoulders and breathed in Michiko’s lotus perfume.

  A pile of jackets began to form at the end of the bar. A young guy, too drunk to work the buttons, yanked off his shirt and tossed it in the air, exposing his lean muscles and deep tan to the loud whoops of women who danced over to run their fingers over his sweaty skin. They shimmied their bodies at him to get him to dance more wildly, and when he did, they laughed and danced away.

  Two women ripped the pants off a boy who seemed to be just out of high school. He laughed and went with it, kicking his shoes off to whoops of approval. Standing in black designer underwear and socks, he swung his body in circles as the women screamed girlishly and slapped his round butt cheeks as he circled by. A woman fell on top of him and pinned him against the bar, the frenzied crowd egging her on.

  Some of the women, with their dates or with each other, slumped against the walls in deep, private clinches, their faces pumping kisses, hands working each other’s bodies, everyone writhing to the heavy beat of the music.

  On the dance floor, Shibuya moved against Michiko, putting his hand on her hips. She ordered another drink for him by nodding at the bartender. They wriggled over to the bar, and Shibuya slurped it down. “That’s three drinks,” he said, holding up the empty glass.

  She snuggled up to him, putting her arm around his thin waist, gently kissing his neck, saying, “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Where to?” Shibuya asked.

  “What about a big breakfast?”

  “It’s about time.”

  Michiko checked her watch. “We can just catch the first train if we hurry.”

  Chapter 26

  Out the north exit of Kichijoji Station, Hiroshi opened his umbrella and hurried past the traffic circle toward a pedestrian shopping street. He was late and could not remember the directions. He stopped to scroll through his phone but kept walking as he scanned the long row of narrow shops—packed in like giant books on a shelf—for the coffee mill statue he was supposed to find.

  There was no giant coffee mill statue, so he dropped his umbrella in the stand outside the coffee place that looked like it should have a statue and walked down the steep stairs into the basement, hoping he was right.

  In the calm space of the coffee shop, she was even more beautiful than he remembered. She was a petite woman, with fine features. Hiroshi watched her as she tucked the book she was reading into her bag and waved to him from a corner table.

  Sanae Atsuki, the mother of the girl, Yukari, caught for trying to shake down the Russian guy on the train, didn’t look old enough to have a daughter in her last year of high school.

  Hiroshi asked, “Where’s the coffee mill?”

  “It disappeared!” she said, laughing. Her hair was pulled back into a thick, flat ponytail. “I almost called you, but I thought, well, you’re a detective!”

  “I used the detective technique called a wild guess,” said Hiroshi.

  “Is that how you do it?”

  “More often than not.”

  Jazz streamed from large speakers in the corner of the room, and they both smiled at the waitress who brought a menu made of Japanese paper glued to a thick wooden board.

  “I didn’t know if there were regulations about this,” Sanae said.

  “About what? Drinking coffee?”

  “About meeting…um—”

  “Innocent people?”

  “I didn’t feel innocent that day in the station.”

  “You were, and so was your daughter, Yukari, more or less.”

  She brushed her ponytail in nervous strokes and looked at him as if for the first time.

  “When are you leaving?”

  “A couple days.”

  “So soon? How…”

  “When we got home that day, I told Yukari to start packing.”

  “I’ll bet she was thrilled.”

  “She was, but funny thing, as soon as I said let’s go to America, she started speaking in Japanese again. She even dyed her hair back to natural black.” Sanae shook her head and rolled her eyes.

  Hiroshi chuckled.

  “She was right, though. There’s nothing for her here. For me either. Her school here is terrible. I don’t want her to waste her life like I did.”

  “You didn’t waste your life. You’re still young.”

  “Kids always win one way or another.”

  “And you. You’re ready to go back?”

  Sanae shrugged her shoulders. “I guess I am. I’ll have to be.”

  At the police station with her daughter, she’d been crushed by shame and worry, but now, across the table, she opened up. Her face flowered with inflection and attention. Hiroshi tried to look at her without her noticing. Sanae tried not to notice him looking.

  Their cappuccinos arrived. The barista had put brown smiley faces into the foam, one with long hair and a feminine face and the other with a man’s face.

  “Look at these!” Hiroshi said.

  “What are these?” Sanae blushed and giggled.

  They hesitated to sip them and ruin the faces. They looked over at the barista who was intent on the next order.

  Sanai took a breath and said, “The reason I invited you was to thank you for saving Yukari. She insisted I call you.”

  “I’m glad you did.”

  “If you hadn’t been there—”

  “Nothing would have happened. It was okay.”

  “She’s had so much trouble. I finally realized she was crying for help. I wasn’t listening because, well, I wasn’t listening.”

  “America will be a fresh start. For you both.”

  She took another sip and recomposed herself. “The green card’s been the best part of the marriage.”

  “Where’s your husband from?”

  “New York.”

  “That’s a good place.”

/>   “It would have been.”

  “If…?”

  “If my husband treated me like I imagined American men would.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He had this image of me as exotic and passive.”

  “And beautiful.”

  “Looks don’t count for much in the end, though, do they?”

  She sipped from the top of the foam head figure floating on the coffee.

  “I was so young when I got married, and Yukari came along right away. We tried things in the States for a while. The problem wasn’t the country or the language; it was us.”

  “Where did you meet?”

  “I was working as a hostess. He was a customer. Simple as that.”

  “Things like that are never simple.”

  Sanae hummed her agreement. “I had two sisters and two brothers. So, if I was going to pay tuition at a two-year women’s college, I had to work. The hostess club paid best.”

  “There’s no shame in that.”

  “I feel ashamed of using him. If I was whatever I was to him, he was a ticket out for me. I wanted things to be better for Yukari.”

  “They will be.”

  Sanae looked up. “Will they?”

  He hummed “yes” deep in his throat and sipped from the outline in his foam.

  “But what about you? You must meet a lot of people as a detective.”

  “I met you.”

  Sanae blushed.

  Hiroshi continued. “My work is pretty routine. Phone calls, files and emails. I can go for days without seeing anyone face to face.”

  “That sounds, well, inhuman.”

  As if in response, his cell phone buzzed. Hiroshi reached down and turned it off. “Things have changed the past couple days.”

  “You met someone?”

  “What? No, no, just at work. More time out of the office. I was living with someone, but she went back to the States.”

  “So, you had an international relationship, too?”

  “Same as you, but in reverse. She was American. It was difficult.”

  “It’s like speaking two different languages at once.”

  “Japanese and English, you mean?”

  “No, two different languages of the heart.”