by KJ Charles
I didn’t want to be here. I wanted to be with Noriko, to give her back the lucky charm that throbbed guiltily in my bag. I wanted to be with Yoshi, who’d sounded as desperately alone as I felt. I wanted to be on a plane, heading the hell out of Japan and not coming back. I really did not want to be stuck in what was starting to feel like a very small car with the single most miserable bastard I’d ever come across in my life.
The first half hour of the journey had passed in pretty much complete silence. I’d wanted to sleep, but I can’t sleep in cars, and every time I shut my eyes, I saw the same things I’d seen all night. I tried to plan how I’d get my passport, but I couldn’t get past the idea of my flat as a crime scene, and now I was fretting that the police had found my passport, that they might be circulating my name, maybe my photo. Then I started thinking about whether the British media might pick up the story, and then I started to panic.
I needed to talk, to drown out the babbling in my brain, and the only person I could talk to was Chanko. Plus, we’d got off to a pretty bad start, and now we were stuck in a car together. The least I could do was make him enjoy the experience, so I got to work. “Set phasers to charm,” as Sonja said. I didn’t think it would take much effort: he was a man, and I was very good indeed at making men enjoy my company.
Apart from him.
For one thing, Chanko was the first man—the first person, probably—I’d ever met who didn’t want to talk about himself. At all. It wasn’t that I was prying. I couldn’t have cared less where he’d been brought up or what had made him come to Japan. But apparently he didn’t give a damn about those things either. He responded reasonably civilly at first, then gave one-word answers, then just grunted, and the more I tried, the worse it got. He radiated—not unwillingness to answer, it was more remote than that. It was as though I were asking about a vague acquaintance who he didn’t really know or care about.
He clearly didn’t want to talk about his sumo past, and I’d never taken an interest in the sport anyway, so no hope for a neutral topic there. Baseball bores me too, but it’s an obsession that Japan shares with America, so I mentioned a recent scandal around a Japanese player whose sordid porn-film past had come to light in an American tabloid. Chanko grunted.
I asked him who his team was.
“Who’s yours?”
That was a bit more promising, except that I didn’t have a team. I kept up with the results in order to congratulate or commiserate with clients, and then forgot them as soon as they were no longer necessary. And knowing my luck, if I just picked one they’d turn out to be his team’s deadly rivals.
“I don’t really have a team.” I offered him a winning smile. “I probably need to support someone to get into it more. Who would you recommend?”
Chanko looked round at me, very deliberately, then returned his gaze to the road, shaking his head. He didn’t reply, but I heard him mutter something in his throat, so low it was almost out of hearing. It didn’t sound complimentary.
Fine, I thought, relapsing into the unwelcome silence. Sit there. See if I care.
Except that meant I had to think about the world outside the car.
“I need to get a new phone,” I said abruptly.
“Retail therapy? Or did you forget to bring that too?”
“I didn’t forget my passport, someone else did. And the mobile—cellphone—is how they caught me back there. They rang my number and looked to see who answered.”
“Your mama-san gave them the number, you figure?” He whistled. “She sure screwed you over. Pretty dumb to leave the phone on.”
“Obviously,” I agreed thinly. “Anyway, I want a pay-as-you-go. Charged, so I can call my friend. I need to find out about Noriko, my flatmate, and my battery’s almost dead.” Naturally Noriko hadn’t thought to pack the charger. I wouldn’t have done either.
“Okay. We’ll stop at an out-of-town place. Keep a look-out for stores.” He paused, then added, “You want to use mine now?”
I didn’t want any more favours from him, apart from saving my life. “It’s okay. I’ll wait. Um, listen, Chanko, I was thinking about tonight.”
“Yeah?” Totally neutral. Giving nothing away.
“Well, it seems to me that you’re…quite noticeable. I know that the yakuza can’t put out an all-points bulletin or anything, but they do have syndicates, don’t they? Relationships with other groups. And if they’ve told their people in Chubu that they’re looking for—” a gaijin the size of Godzilla and with all his social graces, “—a very big man…well, I might be being paranoid, but perhaps we should—”
“Love hotel.”
“Love hotel,” I agreed, in the most matter-of-fact tone possible.
“Right.”
There was a pause. I knew it was the right choice, but I wondered how to broach the topic of sleeping arrangements.
“I’ll tell you now,” he said. “I’m too damn big to fit on the floor of any love hotel I’ve ever seen.”
“That’s fine. No problem.” There would be barely enough floor space for me, probably, but I didn’t care. I had spent much of last night waiting for the yakuza to kick their way into my bedroom, dreaming of bleached hair and cold eyes. I wanted three hundred pounds of wrestler in between me and the door.
“Great,” he said flatly.
We drove the rest of the way in silence.
I got a spare charger and a reasonable pay-as-you-go handset from a big communications warehouse outside Kanazawa, and texted Yoshi the number but didn’t call him straightaway. Uncomfortable as the car journey was, I felt safe in here, cocooned. Yoshi meant the outside world and reality.
“You like gardens?” Chanko spoke as though he hadn’t been completely silent for forty-five minutes. “I like gardens,” he added in a heavily helpful voice.
Gardens? Whatever. “Yes, I love gardens.”
“Thought you might,” he said with gloomy satisfaction, and relapsed into silence again.
Perhaps I could just surrender to the yakuza.
“What about gardens?” I asked, in a voice that held lots of polite interest and hardly any desire to hit him.
Actually, I should have known the answer. Kanazawa’s Kenroku-en is one of the most beautiful gardens in Japan. Covering much of a large hilltop, with a view over the city, it has man-made winding streams, huge ponds surrounded by elegantly twisted pines, and small rocky waterfalls, miniature hillocks, stone lanterns, little bridges to nowhere, and wooden pavilions for watching the winter plum blossom and contemplating the transitory nature of the material world and the briefness of life.
As if I wanted to think about the briefness of life right now.
Chanko strolled around the main lake, through the varied crowds of tourists, and I trotted to keep up with his long stride and fumed quietly.
“Why are we here?” I asked eventually, keeping my tone pleasant with an effort.
“Got to be somewhere.” He seemed to be waiting for something, but when I didn’t reply—I was biting my tongue—he continued, “Can’t think sitting in a car. Need to stretch my legs while we figure out what next. Plus, this place has the most people around, and the most gaijin, and I don’t figure the yaks stake out the tourist attractions, and nobody’s opening fire in a crowd like this. Okay?”
It made sense. “Okay. So what do you—”
I broke off abruptly as I felt my mobile—my proper mobile—vibrate (I’d silenced the ring, belatedly). I felt a pulse of shock, looking around frantically as I fished it out of my bag.
“Withheld number. Is it—”
“Answer it,” said Chanko, frowning. “I’m looking out.”
“Moshi-moshi?” I faltered over a bleep from the phone.
“Is that Kerry-san?” A businesslike voice, speaking Japanese with a Tokyo accent. “Well? Answer me!”
“Yes, it’s Kerry. Who’s that?”
“Do you know what happened to Katori Noriko?”
My throat caught tight.
/> “Do you?” he repeated, his voice hard.
“Yes. Did you—”
“You want it to happen to you?”
“No!”
“You want us to go to the Ikebukero General Hospital? Ward five, seventh floor. You want us to visit her again?”
“Oh God,” I whispered. “Please, don’t. Listen to me, I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me—”
“Where is the bag?”
“What bag?”
“Don’t play games with me, gaijin bitch,” said the voice, soft and cold. “You give us back the bag or we visit Katori-san again. With knives this time.”
“No, please, let me tell you, you’ve made a mistake—”
The phone bleeped again.
“No mistake. Where is the bag?”
“I don’t know! It wasn’t me!” I sucked in a breath, digging my nails into my palm. Voice calmer, softer. High-level respect language. Radiate credibility.
“I’m sorry to contradict you, but it’s different. I was not involved at all. It was the American hostess, the tall one, the one who doesn’t speak Japanese. She set me up in order to conceal her crime. I am the friend of the Mitsuyoshi-kai. I have never acted against you. I’m only a hostess.” I was sweating cold, but the silence on the other end of the line was encouraging. “I don’t know anything about any bag, or about this crime. If there was anything I could tell you, anything I could do to prove I am the Mitsuyoshi-kai’s humble friend, I would. Please instruct me. Tell me if I can help prove it was the American. Please.” I was begging. I didn’t care.
“You want to redeem yourself?”
I haven’t done anything, you fuck. “Absolutely, sir.”
“Bring us the bag,” said the voice.
I don’t think I have ever been so close to hysterics. “I don’t have the bag.” My voice was really shaking now. “I don’t have it, I don’t know where it is, I don’t know what it is. I’m very sorry but I don’t know.”
“Then I tell you what—” My phone bleeped three times over the words, and a fresh wave of panic hit me.
“My battery’s dying. I need to charge, please call back—”
One final bleep. I took the damned thing from my ear. The screen was dull and inert.
Dead phone.
I stared at it, one hand clamped over my mouth. There was sour bile in my throat.
“What was all that?”
I fumbled for the other phone, flapping a hand for silence as I dialled Yoshi’s mobile, then wrapped my free arm round my waist for some sort of warmth or comfort.
“Mosh—”
“Yoshi, it’s Kechan. Where’s Noriko? What hospital, what ward?”
He gave the address the yakuza had given me, his voice worried. “Why?”
“They know where she is.”
“Shit!”
I think that was the first time I’d ever heard Yoshi swear.
“Get her moved. A private hospital? And hire security.” With what? He’d lost his job. “Use the panic fund. You’ve got the new numbers, don’t you? Spend as much as it takes.” I had no idea how much that would cost, probably a lot more than was in there. I could get more, of course, but if Noriko was in for the long haul and we had to protect her all that time…
“Just take all the money, do what you have to. I’ll make sure there’s enough. But fast, Yoshi, please. We can’t let them get to her again.”
“But why are they doing this?” he almost screamed. “What did she ever do to them?”
“It’s what they think I did. They think I have some bag. Something that Kelly stole from them, I guess. I don’t know. My damn phone died on me while they were talking.” And, oh God, if the voice thought I’d just hung up on him… “Yoshi, please, just get Noriko moved right now.”
“Okay,” he said, his voice wobbly. “Okay. Panic fund. And you stay out of sight. Take care of yourself.”
“Yeah. Obviously. Call me back as soon as you’ve done it.”
He rang off and I felt my legs wobble. Chanko’s big hand closed round my arm, grasping and supporting.
“Sit down. Come on, get your butt on the bench before you hit the floor. That was our friends back home, threatening your roommate?”
“They know where she is, the hospital ward. They said they’d visit her with—with knives if I didn’t give them the bag. They said—”
“What bag?”
“I don’t bloody know what bag. How would I know? It wasn’t me, remember?”
“What exactly did they say?” His tone was entirely unemotional, slightly bored, and it pulled me together faster than any amount of soothing could have achieved.
“They said I had to give them back the bag,” I said tightly.
“Back, as in return it? Right. And he said kaban? So it could be a shopping bag, a briefcase, a rucksack maybe…”
I was supposed to be the language expert round here. I mentally kicked myself. “Yes. He didn’t specify.”
“Uh-huh. Who did you call?”
“My friend Yoshi. He’s the one who knows Taka.”
“Do I know him?”
“I don’t know, do I? Longish hair, glasses, computer genius, twenty-six.”
“Don’t recall him. Your boyfriend?”
“No.”
“Right. Only, ordering him around, telling him to spend his money… Hell, sounded like a boyfriend to me.”
“It’s my money, actually,” I said, as evenly as possible. “Come on, we should go. I need to charge this phone.”
He didn’t move. He was scowling, but this time it was with the effort of thought. “This bag,” he said ruminatively. “Say they think you rolled the old man and took his bag…”
“I’m sure they do.”
“So the girl, Kelly, didn’t have it with her when they picked her up, then.” His thick brows drew even closer together. “They say anything about what was in it?”
“No. It was probably the bagful of cash Kelly was going to sell her virtue for.”
He shook his head. “I don’t see the family doing all this for a bag of money. They got money. Unless it was millions…don’t see it.”
“What else are they doing it for, then?”
“They got to get revenge for the old man, that’s important. And they got to put on a big display to keep face, but— Hell, I don’t know. Point is, the Kantō gangs keep their heads down. This ain’t Kansai. The big Tokyo associations—they don’t mess with the police, they don’t openly break the law like that. They play low.”
“They broke into our flat,” I said. “They raped Noriko. Is that playing low?”
“That’s what I’m saying, Butterfly. They don’t know it was you did the old guy, they even got another suspect, but they hit your friend anyway. Was she a hostess?”
“No. Never. OL from high school.”
“Decent young woman, home invasion. That’ll be all over the papers, police are gonna need a result. It comes out it was yakuza, the rest of the Kantō families will be pissed. She gets attacked again, in hospital—front-page news. So why the hell would they do it?”
He was right, at that. “Because they want to scare me?” I offered, for lack of anything better.
He rolled his eyes. “Yeah. But it’s got to be more than that.”
I scowled at my feet. “Like?”
“Like, it’s an extreme-prejudice job, taking out all your friends and family. Which seems pretty odd if they’re not sure it was you who did it. Or…”
“Or they really, really want this bag back?”
“And they’ll bully the hell out of you and Kelly till one of you coughs it up. It’s a theory. Be interesting to know what was in it. Because I don’t think this is over a few man yen.”
I felt my lips wobble. Man is the Japanese counting unit for ten thousand, and Noriko’s personal brand of flaky Jinglish was peppered with it. “Ee, Kerry, boots is nine man yen, bery bery high!” Chanko’s deep, dark musical rumble of a voice had nothing at all in common
with Nori-chan’s high-pitched, heavily accented squeal, but the picture was in my head all the same, and I dropped my face into my hands.
I felt him shift his weight slightly beside me. The bench creaked.
“Damn flimsy things,” he muttered. “You think your boyfriend can get protection for your roommate?”
“Yoshi? I suppose so. I don’t know how it works. I suppose he’ll go to bloody Taka, seeing as he seems to be in the protection business now.”
“What’s wrong with Taka?”
“He’s a lunatic.”
“Bit off-centre, maybe.”
“He’s a headcase and a pain in the arse,” I snapped, and then remembered this guy was his friend. “No, I’m being mean. He’s okay. A nice guy. It’s just that he gets Yoshi in trouble sometimes, and that upsets me a bit. You know how it is.”
“Sure do,” he said, in the flattest voice I’d ever heard.
I bit at my knuckle. My dead phone lay on the bench beside me, accusing. I knew I should go and charge it, so they could call and threaten and bully me some more. I really didn’t want to.
I wanted to run away and never answer the phone again and leave it all far, far behind.
“Do you think we should tell the police Noriko’s been threatened?” I asked abruptly.
“Anyone talked to them about any of it?”
“No. We’ve got no proof of anything and they haven’t reported the old guy as murdered, and we thought…” I tailed off.
“Yeah.” It sounded as though he understood it all and agreed. I wondered if gaijin ex-sumo slipped through the cracks in society as easily as hostesses.
“I saw a goon talking to a policeman. In Nagano,” I offered. “Waiting at the bus station. I thought they were waiting for me.”
“Probably were.”
I’d hoped he wasn’t going to say that.
“But Noriko,” I said. “She’s not involved. We could still report threats.”
“Could. They gonna believe the yakuza are after an OL?”
“We could say it was some crazy who read about her in the papers,” I suggested.
“Could.” He didn’t sound that impressed. “You know, that guy was probably pulling your chain just now, putting on the pressure.”