by KJ Charles
I got the meeting to order. We settled on English as language of choice for the sake of security, me to translate if, or rather when, Taka got stuck. Yoshi was pretty fluent, and Minachan’s understanding was as good as her speech was erratic.
“Before we start,” I said seriously. “We all know the situation. I need to get the family off my back, and I’d like your help to do it, but it’s up to each of you. I’m not planning to go against them, but it still means getting involved, and that could be dangerous. If you don’t want that, then please, go now. Okay? Because nobody should get into this unless—”
“Hang on. We’re not going against them?” Sonja scowled. “What the fuck are we doing here then?”
Minachan and Taka nodded vigorously. Yoshi groaned.
“We’re making them leave us alone,” I said. “Getting them away from Noriko. They’ve threatened her again.”
“Yeah, I hear.” Minachan had a pixie-ish look normally, but her jaw was set like a mule’s. She and Noriko had been friends since school—in fact, it was through Minachan that Noriko had known the Primrose Path. I wondered how Minachan felt about that.
“So, we’re all staying? Okay, then.”
I quickly went over the basics of the business for the girls. I could see Chanko frowning, and to be honest I had my own doubts since Sonja had spilled the beans once already, but we needed to know the score at the Primrose Path, and for that they needed to trust me. I didn’t mention the boyfriend or the bag yet, instead asking for an update on the situation at the bar.
“It stinks,” said Sonja briefly, and drew an expletive-laden picture of things. Mama-san constantly harassed, worn to a shadow. The girls corralled, bullied, leaned on. Regulars already starting to disappear, and new, nasty faces arriving, and the pressure to offer a different kind of hospitality. Yukie’s tiny winces and awkward stance, and the long sleeves she was suddenly wearing.
They had torn the bar apart the other day, as Yukie had told me, looking for something. They hadn’t told the girls what, but they’d searched every bag and locker, and in every drawer, and made a hell of a mess. They had played CCTV recordings, pale-haired women on jerky film going in and out of doorways, and demanded identification: me or Kelly? And they had questioned the girls again and again as to Kelly’s friends and acquaintances.
“Did anyone say anything?” I asked.
“Hell, no. Nobody knows anything about the bitch, nobody had anything to say. What have you got, Kerry? You know something we don’t?”
I glanced at Chanko and decided to go for it. “I might have a place to start, anyway. I think Kelly had a boyfriend—”
“Big Amerikajin, ne? Yeah, I know.” Minachan nodded then looked around at our faces. “What?”
I was gaping. Yoshi was gaping. Taka was giggling hysterically, and Chanko was leaning forward with one heavy hand on the table. Minachan reared back in her seat, eyes widening, and I hissed, “You’re looming.”
“Sorry.” He sat back. “You want to say that again, Minako-san? You know him?”
“Not like friend. I saw. Is big guy, not big like Chanko-san, but more tall and wide to Taka-san. Brown hair, very little.”
“Short hair, you mean? Or bald?”
“Ah, very, very short, but also it’s go like this.” She sketched a sharp widow’s peak on her own black bob. “White guy.”
“Very short hair,” rumbled Chanko. “Soldier boy. Uniform—soldier clothes?”
“Blue jean.”
“Eyes? Face?”
She shrugged. “Big nose,” she offered vaguely, not to anyone’s surprise. Every European has a big nose. “Face always on Kelly face. Kiss-kiss.”
Yoshi and Taka tutted righteously. Public displays of affection in Japan are ill-mannered.
“So, by the way, I saw two time, same man.”
“Where? When?” asked Yoshi sharply.
Another shrug. “Roppongi, I think. One month, two month…dunno.”
Chanko made an exasperated noise, but Sonja and I were already chorusing, “Who were you with?”
“Ee!” Minachan’s eyes lit up. “Chester. One time, early from I meet—” She paused, trying to pick through the grammar in her head, then hissed and switched languages. “Yeah, it was a few days after I started seeing Chester. I remember thinking I was glad the thieving bitch had someone else to occupy her attention. And then again—let’s see, it must have been the last time we went out, because he bought me that amazing necklace with the little diamond drops, you know the one, and I know I was wearing it because I really wanted her to notice it, but of course she didn’t even look up. Call it two days before he flew out, and that was the seventeenth.”
Chester, a corporate attorney, had lasted Minachan’s course a month or so, and in the process provided us all with the welcome spectacle of a lawyer being taken to the cleaners. He’d returned to Washington, with stars in his eyes and nothing in his wallet, about a fortnight ago. The timing suggested we’d hit paydirt.
“Did Chanko-san understand?” said Yoshi patronisingly, switching back to English. “Okay, so what did Minachan say to family?” (It’s standard to address people by name in Japanese, as using “you” is rude, and Yoshi never could shake the habit.)
“Nothing.” Minachan looked offended.
“But they ask—”
“Family is asshole. I don’t say nothing. I don’t tell them time. I know what they do on Nori-chan. Asshole.”
“You cow,” said Sonja. “I had that thick-necked thug shouting in my face for two hours yesterday—me and Kelly are both gaijin, so we must be best friends, right?—and you knew what they wanted all the time and you sat there with your mouth shut? Goddamn you.”
Minachan shrugged innocently, looking as sweet and demure as ever, and not at all like four foot eight of solid, relentless bloody-mindedness.
“What about this guy?” demanded Sonja, giving up. “Kelly had a boyfriend, so what?”
“So we think he might be her accomplice.” I explained about the bag. “The family are desperate to get it back. It’s obviously what they were looking for in the bar. I don’t have it, and Kelly doesn’t seem to, either. Somebody else must. Somebody Kelly’s protecting. Maybe this boyfriend.”
“Got you. So you’re going to try and find this guy?”
“We help!” Minachan announced. “Maybe someone help with us too?” She gave Chanko a coy glance. He looked distinctly alarmed.
“Hold up,” he told her. “There’s a risk in getting involved.”
“Ach, nonsense,” said Sonja, going very Dutch. “We’re getting out anyway. The bar is for shit.”
“What about you, Minachan?”
She waved an airy hand. “I go place.”
Sonja gave her a nod of approval. “See? So what do we do, hit the bars, ask some questions, find the little shit?”
I grimaced. “Might be a bit more complicated than that. I mean, if I was him, I’d be on the other side of the Pacific by now. But we’ll look anyway. Is there anything else you can tell us about him, Minachan?”
She thought, then shook her head. Sonja lifted a hand.
“If this joker was in the love hotel, maybe he would be on the security tape, coming in and out? The family are just looking at the woman, and definitely nobody goes in with her, but maybe—”
“That’s what we thought,” I agreed. “We need to get a look at those tapes.”
“Better not watch in bar,” said Minachan. “Too many bad guy. Make copy.”
“Have they got the tape there?”
“They did yesterday.” Sonja frowned. “I don’t think it can be a tape, though, can it, because they were playing it on Mama-san’s computer.”
“Now we often use digital file,” Yoshi pointed out. “Upload image to server, maybe. With video, quality can go bad if we record too many times.”
“The quality wasn’t fantastic anyway. I wouldn’t hold your breath for it. The best you’ll see is the top of a bunch of people’s heads.”
/> “Surely you can see it isn’t me, though?” I demanded. “Isn’t it obvious?”
“Nope,” Sonja said. “Couldn’t be the titch here, couldn’t be Chanko-san in a wig, but apart from that…”
I bit my lip. Taka gave a snort of laughter.
“Well, we need to get a copy tonight, anyway, unless anyone has any better ideas. We haven’t got much time.” I switched back to Japanese. “Yoshi, Taka, you’re the technical men. How do we do this?”
“Depends,” said Yoshi. “For a start, it depends if it’s accessible. I mean, have they downloaded the file to Mama-san’s machine? Or are they bringing it in to show to the hostesses, then taking it away and wiping the temporary files?”
“Why would they protect the information?” I asked. “I mean, we want to see the recording because we know about the boyfriend, but why would anyone else? It presumably doesn’t prove anything about who did it or they wouldn’t be chasing me round the place. You don’t see the old man come stumbling out covered in blood, right? It’s not evidence of a crime. It’s not something they need to hide. Or am I missing something?”
“No, sounds about right.” Yoshi drummed his fingers on his barely touched beer glass. “Let’s work on the assumption they’ve saved the file to Mama-san’s machine and left it there for future viewing. So we just need to copy it.”
“Okay,” I said cautiously. “How do we do that?”
“Remote access.” Taka was instantly energised. “We’ll go on a war walk, see if we can pick up her wireless network from outside. If it’s not properly encrypted—”
“The bar doesn’t have wireless, it distracts the punters,” Minachan interrupted.
“Crap. Okay, a remote-access trojan.”
“Which is?” I asked.
“We sneak a program onto her computer that gives us access to all her files from outside. We can just send it to her. Don’t even need to set foot in the bar.”
“Wow,” I said. “We can really do that?”
“If we can rely on her going online.”
Minachan shook her head. “We can’t. Not at the bar in working hours. We can’t assume she’ll so much as check her email till we shut up shop, and maybe not till tomorrow afternoon. She’s not very technical.”
“We don’t have the time,” Chanko said.
“We could physically install the trojan and connect her to the internet.” Taka shrugged. “But that means going in, and if we’re going in, there’s better options.”
“There isn’t some other way to do this remotely?” I’d liked the sound of remote.
That led to a flurry of discussion. Taka argued that if Mama-san’s monitor was an old model, it might be the kind with a cathode-ray tube. In that case the answer was simply to play the film out, and a passing TV detector van could pick up and record the images without anyone needing to go inside the bar. It was a brilliant piece of technical thinking that I’d have leapt on if anyone remembered what kind of monitor she had and if we had any way to get hold of a TV detector van.
“Someone needs to go in.” Yoshi spoke over the noise of Chanko telling Taka to shut the fuck up. “If we could get physical access, we can put a wireless USB plug into the machine and—”
“Autorun. Slam in some spyware and share all drives,” Taka agreed. “Then pick up the files remotely.”
“How hard is that?” I asked cautiously. “For a non-techie person?”
“Not. We preinstall the spyware on the stick. You just plug in these two little bits of hardware and leave. Takes maybe two seconds.”
“Uh-uh,” said Chanko. “Whoever does it has to take the gizmos with them.”
“The Wi-Fi plug is what gives us remote access to the files,” said Taka overpatiently. “It has to be plugged in to the com-pu-ter for us to make con-tact.”
“They find your bits of crap, they know someone’s been sneaking around, odds are they guess it has to do with Kerry. Ask questions.” Chanko jerked a thumb at Minachan and Sonja.
“Good point. Fuck that,” said Sonja.
“Also, do we have the hardware to hand?” asked Yoshi. “We don’t have time to hit the shops in Akihabara.”
Taka sniffed. “You lot are no fun. Fine, just use a thumb drive. Whack it into a USB port, download the file, take the stick and go.”
“How long is this going to take?” I asked.
Yoshi frowned. “Assuming it’s several hours of camera recording, it might be a pretty big file. You have to find it on the system first, then call it 300 megs, and if her machine is slow… You’d want to allow several minutes for the whole thing, realistically.”
“And the thumb thing has to stay stuck in until it’s done?”
“Yes. And then you need to take it with you. Not you, obviously. Whoever does this.”
“Me,” I said.
“Bullshit,” said Taka. “Me.”
“Because you’d look so inconspicuous in the private areas of a hostess bar where only the girls go,” I agreed. “Don’t be a jerk. Anyway you don’t know where Mama-san’s office is.”
“I could—” Yoshi began.
“No, you couldn’t, none of you guys. You don’t look like clients. Yoshi’s too young, Chanko’s too big and Taka’s too…weird. They’d spot you in a second.”
“It’s gonna have to be one of the girls,” Chanko agreed slowly.
“Yeah, me,” said Minachan. “Sonja couldn’t tell a laptop from a lapdance. I’m pretty good with computers—”
I wasn’t having that. “No. No way. You two are going to be right out in the bar under the yakuza’s eyes the whole time. I’m not having them suspect you. They’ll look at you anyway if this goes wrong.”
“But—”
“I can’t have another friend in hospital, alright?” I almost shouted.
“And you think I can?” she flashed back.
We glared at each other. There was a brief silence. Yoshi had his teeth dug into his lip, the flesh white around them.
“You on the inside,” I said. “Me on the outside. You get me in, and I get out with the file.”
“Oh God.” Yoshi looked sick. “Kechan…”
“Nah, she’s right,” said Taka cheerfully. “Easiest way, least wastage if she gets caught.”
“Thanks,” I muttered.
Chanko exhaled hard. “I’ll be outside. Close. If there’s trouble, I’ll come get you.”
Chapter Eight
It was dark and cold in the back streets of Shibuya. The sounds of midweek revelry and the rattle of pachinko balls bounced off the walls, but there was nobody around.
I wriggled off the back of Taka’s motorbike, shed my coat and grabbed my bundle, fishing the wig out of the bag and giving it a quick comb. The hair was still wet, and it was cold and clammy and difficult to adjust with my shaking hands.
“Good luck,” said Chanko, very quietly.
I nodded. I didn’t want to speak in case I begged him to go in for me or just take me away. I could feel my heartbeat all the way through my body, the accelerated, thumping pulse rate throbbing in my fingertips.
The Primrose Path was on the third floor of a ten-floor block, fronting onto a main street, back entrance up a grimy fire escape in an alley. We were in a little-frequented side street off the alley where Chanko and the bike would wait for me, out of sight. Out of screaming range.
I made my way to the mouth of the alley, where I could see the stairs up to the bar, and looked around. There was nobody waiting on the fire escape, nobody loitering significantly. Maybe they were all inside.
I sent an empty message to Sonja’s phone from a new pay-as-you-go I’d picked up, not wanting my number to appear on her phone, then gave Chanko a twitch of stiff lips in lieu of a smile and hurried up the stairs.
They’ve searched the bar, watched the tape, interrogated the girls. They don’t have any reason to guard it or to think I’ll come back. They’re hanging around the hostess bar to stare at women, and because they’re going to take i
t over. They won’t expect me to come for the film.
I’d said that repeatedly to Yoshi. It had sounded more convincing back in Ekoda.
The oily, grimy metal was cold and damp under my bare feet. I reached the third floor and sank back into shadow, waiting, checking again that my phone ring was silenced, wiping my feet surreptitiously on the corner of the towel I held.
After a long twenty seconds, the phone vibrated, giving me the all-clear. I rapidly hit the entry code on the keypad and pushed open the back door.
There was nobody in the vestibule that led to the main back corridor. Go.
My sleeveless and strapless dress, provided by Sonja, was basically a Lycra tube, and I wasn’t wearing a bra. I pulled up the hem, tucked it into my knickers, folded the top half down to my waist, and flung the towel around myself, checking the muddy bit was inside and that the necklace I wore was tucked under the cloth. The whole thing took maybe three seconds.
That was a start. Now we just had to see if the rest of the plan would work.
I desperately wanted to take a sneaky look round the corner, see if they were there, not walk into the bastards blind. I knew I couldn’t. No creeping around, Taka had said. People notice surreptitious movement. Walk as if you belong there.
I am starting a late shift. I have just had a quick shower. I haven’t come in from outside; I was out here because I left my phone in the pocket of my coat. This phone right here.
I trotted out into the corridor without looking. Down to the right were the tiny bathroom and small kitchen; to the left the room we kept for dressing, and Mama-san’s office. I went left. Just walking along, going to get dressed—
There were three men lounging outside the office, at the end of the corridor.
—just goons, we see them all the time these days, I keep my head down—
Please God, not Jun. If one of them was Jun, I was dead. He’d spent too long working with sexily dressed women to look at legs instead of faces.
—and I have to dry my hair properly, or Mama-san will kill me, I’m late starting as it is without looking scruffy—
The office door was open. I could see Mama-san’s plump figure moving around inside.