by KJ Charles
I heard Chanko suck in a breath.
“She died a month later. Barely spoke to her husband again. Refused to see Ian. Turned her face to the wall and stopped living. Or at least that’s what Ian said when he turned up at my school screaming about it. And that’s how it started. My school was pretty good, and at least it was a long way away, but once I’d left…he tracked me down at university, sent letters when I was on my year in Japan, all the rest, and it just got worse as he got older. I kept moving but he always managed to find me, even here, until I moved in with Noriko and got the job at the bar and dropped out of sight completely. Which is why the police can’t find me now, so every cloud, silver lining, you know.”
Chanko was silent. I twisted round to look at him, unsure what that meant or what he was thinking. His eyes were shut, his jaw was set so hard the cords in his neck were standing out, and he was breathing through his nose, very deeply and very slowly. I’d have been happier if he were shouting.
“It’s over.” I felt a twitch of alarm. “Really, I haven’t heard from him in two years. He’s probably forgotten about me. And compared to the yakuza…”
“He contacts you again, you tell me,” Chanko said through his teeth.
“It was only post and email since I left France anyway—”
“You tell me.”
“If he turns up in person, I’ll tell you.” Yeah, right. Ian wasn’t worth the murder charge that was written all over Chanko’s face. “I promise, okay?”
He exhaled hard, opened his eyes. “Where the hell were your family while all this was going on?”
“My parents were dead, that was the point. I don’t have any other relatives. Well, presumably I have some in Hong Kong somewhere, but I don’t know them. My father was an only child, and neither of my parents were family types. They liked to travel.”
“No family at all? Hell, Butterfly. What about the school? Didn’t they get the police involved?”
“They offered to, but…” This was the worst bit, the bit I couldn’t live with or think about. The bit I’d never told anyone, not even Yoshi and Noriko.
If he’d asked or pressed, I might have run, but he didn’t. He just sat there, patient as a mountainside, waiting.
“I wanted her to read the letter.” I stared at the magazines on the tabletop. “I knew she might see it and I still sent it. I didn’t address it to her, but deep down, I hoped she’d read it and hate them as much as I did, and I got my wish, and it killed her. I couldn’t face having to stand up in front of a court after that. I felt so guilty, and to have Ian put his side of the story and call me a liar and… I don’t know, probably it wouldn’t have happened like that, but I just couldn’t face it. It was easier to run away.”
“I don’t see you got anything to beat yourself up about. You think other people wouldn’t have wished the same?”
“But she was the one who got hurt. She didn’t deserve it.”
“Nor did you,” he said harshly. “Turn around.”
I didn’t move.
“Come on, Butterfly. Look at me.”
I shifted round, and he gripped my face with his big, calloused hands, his dark gaze steady. He started to say something, and then he said, “Oh, sweetheart,” and then his mouth was on mine, warm and fierce, and he was dragging me to him, and his body was telling me everything he couldn’t find the words for.
He pulled away after a few minutes but kept me snuggled in close, on his lap, stroking my hair. I rested my head on his chest. It felt weird, having told him. There was a raw sensation, like a drawn splinter or the peculiar emptiness in the mouth of a pulled tooth. I wasn’t sure if it was a good feeling.
Chanko was still silent, still running his hand lightly over my hair. “What are you thinking?” I asked.
“Family. You shoulda had family. Shit, even at the worst, there was still me and Ruth and Eli to look out for each other. You shoulda had family.”
I couldn’t think of what to say to that. I held on to as much of him as I could instead, and he moved his hands down, stroking my back. I wriggled round on his lap, running my hands under his shirt and over the warm, smooth skin, until his breathing changed. I could feel him hardening, and my skin prickled responsively. His tongue flicked my earlobe, and I quivered all over.
The hell with the time or the place. There might not be another.
“Are you staying up to meet Taka, or are you taking me to bed?”
“Damn, Butterfly.” He scooped me up effortlessly as he rose to his feet. “You ask the toughest questions.”
It was a long time before we slept. The disc and Ian and Noriko were crowding the back of my mind, but I pushed them away into the place for things I didn’t think about, concentrating on the feel of his hands and mouth and body, and on negotiating my way round his sheer bulk—he had the logistics nailed down, but thank God for those massive muscles taking his weight—and pretty soon I wasn’t thinking about anything at all.
I drifted off to sleep with his warm, heavy arm wrapped protectively over me. And a few hours later, my phone started ringing.
I was so tired, I couldn’t even work out what the awful noise was or why there was a flashing light in the room. I muttered and groaned and put my hands over my ears, and Chanko reached over me and grabbed the damned thing off the floor.
“Yeah, what?” he snarled in English. “Uh, moshi—Nanni? Yukkuri itte.” Slow down.
I sat up, blinking.
“Sonja-san? Shit. Where? Shit. Where are you? What? Get out of there, right now. Okay, calm down, I heard. No, hold on—shut up. Yes, I will, but get out of there right now. Don’t head home. Go to—got any money? Crap. Okay, hang on. Butterfly, somewhere near your bar Minachan can wait. With people around.”
I couldn’t think of anything. It was three in the morning, Tokyo would be mostly shut down, and I was sick from tiredness. I opened my mouth to ask what was happening, saw Chanko’s expression, and said, “Um—God—Ōwada Hospital. Go under the expressway to Sakuragaokamachi.”
He repeated that. “Go to the emergency department. Where there’s light and people. Fake something. Hurry. I’ll come get you from the hospital. Get the hell on with it.”
He ended the call and immediately started dialling again. A phone gave a muffled shrill. It came from the room next door.
“Shit.” He grabbed for his sweatpants. “Get up, Butterfly, we got a problem. Taka!”
I thrust my arm into a dressing-gown sleeve that didn’t seem to work properly, and pulled the thing haphazardly around myself as I hurried after him. Chanko hit the light switch in Taka’s bedroom to a cry of protest, then yanked off the quilt under which Taka was burrowed. Yoshi sat up on his own futon, blinking.
“Get up. The yakuza have taken Sonja. We need to get Minachan before they grab her too.”
I clutched at the doorframe. “No. Oh, no.”
“Sonja-san?” Taka shook his head, eyes dull.
“Christ, of all the times for you to sleep at night. Where’s your bike keys?”
Taka jerked himself up, then fumbled a set of keys out of a drawer and threw them over. Chanko snatched them out of the air.
“Right. I’m going to get Minachan. You call the yakuza right now. Tell them we got the disc, and if they hurt Sonja, we’ll send it to the cops. Whatever you like. Stall them. Right now, Taka.”
I lurched out of the way as he strode past, back to our room. He dressed fast, scooped up his mobile, then took something from a drawer.
“You’re taking a gun?”
“Just in case.” He checked the safety and shoved it inside his baseball jacket. “Get in there and get Taka moving. I’ll bring Minachan back. You work on Sonja.”
“She must have said something. I told her—”
“Save it. Move, Butterfly!”
He sprinted down the stairs. I looked after him, then swung into Taka’s room, where he was frantically flicking through a phone book. Yoshi was in the study, and I heard the chime of a compu
ter booting up.
“Find out what happened,” Taka told me.
I grabbed for my phone and dialled Minachan’s mobile. No answer.
“Shit. She’s not answering.”
“Try again!”
I did. On the third try she answered with a semi-shriek of “What?”
“It’s Kerry. Are you okay? Where are you?”
“Sorry, sorry. I thought it might be them. I’m in a cab.”
“Cab? Where to?”
“Roppongi. They followed me. They came out after me and shouted and chased after me, and there was a cab going by and I nearly fell under it making him stop, and he wouldn’t go anywhere but Roppongi because nowhere else is open, and I don’t have enough money to go anywhere else anyway.” She was breathing heavily. Her voice was adenoidal, as though she had a cold, and she sounded close to tears.
“Hold on. Taka, call Chanko, she’s gone to Roppongi!” I yelled. “Meet him at…the police box opposite that pink coffee shop on Roppongi Crossing, okay? That should be as busy as anywhere.”
Taka signalled assent and reached for his phone. I took a deep breath. “Minachan, be careful of the driver, but what happened with Sonja?”
I heard the clunk of Minachan pulling a glass partition across. “It was that bastard, Oguya. Yukie came in tonight. He’d beaten hell out of her, and then he ordered her in and said she had to work as a cleaner all night because she wasn’t fit to be seen. Black eyes, puffy lips, cheekbones bruised. Bastard.”
Bile rose in my throat.
“Yukie was crying, and Sonja was so angry. She said not to worry, Oguya would soon be getting his too, and she yelled at him, she said he was a psycho, a rapist, she knew what he did—”
“She didn’t. Oh, no no no. Why can’t she ever shut up?”
“Well, why did you tell her anything?” Minachan said in a suppressed shriek.
“I wanted to stop her from picking a fight with him. Oh, bloody hell. Then what?”
“When the bar was shutting, he and his friends didn’t let us go. Two of them told her to come with them. To their headquarters. There wasn’t anything we could do, they grabbed her, they were hitting and pulling her with them, and I tried to stop them and one of them hit me in the face, and my nose is bleeding, and they kept us there for ages. I had to climb out of the toilet window to escape, and they came after me and I ran, and they were going to get me if the taxi hadn’t come—”
“When? Minachan, when did they take her?”
“About an hour ago.”
An hour. What could they have done in an hour?
Too much.
“Okay. Try to calm down. It’s okay, Chanko’s coming for you. We’ll get Sonja. I have to go now, honey.”
Taka was waving at me, having found the number he wanted.
“They took Sonja to the Mitsuyoshi-kai HQ an hour ago,” I told him, putting down my phone. He nodded grimly and began to dial.
“What are we going to tell them?” I started asking, but he waved an airy, reassuring hand.
“Hello?” he said politely. “Hi, is that the Mitsuyoshi-kai family? I want to speak to the Brother. The live one. Why, yes, I do think you should wake him up, thanks for asking.”
His speech switched abruptly from courtesy to snarling rudeness.
“Because I’ve got his bag, his disc and his password, that’s why, asshole. You wake up your bosses and tell them we’ve got the disc, and you can tell them Banzuiin1622. I don’t give a flying fuck if you don’t understand. I’ve got what the old man was murdered for—oh, do I have your attention now? Banzuiin1622, that’s his password, and it proves that we’ve got the disc, and we can send all the documents for the meeting to anyone we like. We can have your bosses arrested, got it? Good. Now, I’ll be calling back in exactly one hour. I want to speak to a senior man, and I’ll want to speak to Sonja, the gaijin hostess your fuckwits just kidnapped. And if she’s hurt, if you lot have abused her, if she’s even mildly annoyed or a little bit hungry or if her period is troubling her, I am going to make sure everyone in Tokyo sees this information by the morning. Have you got that? So the first thing you do is stop anyone even thinking about hurting her, because if she’s dead, so are you cocksuckers. And get your fucking boss waiting for my call. One hour!”
He turned off the phone.
“Well, that was great,” Yoshi said. He and I had stood in stunned silence listening to Taka’s tirade. “Was that call traceable?”
“I blocked the number. Anyway, it got their attention.” Taka’s eyes were snapping with fury.
“It’s ten past three. We have an hour to work out how we’re going to play this. We need to discuss—”
Yoshi went on, but I wasn’t listening. Everything I didn’t think about, everything I flinched from, seemed to be crowding out my mind. Noriko, and Sonja, and indomitable Minachan sounding so frightened. Yukie, beaten and broken. Yoshi’s grey face. Kelly’s happy smile, frozen from years ago. Soseki and Oguya, smashing up our lives with such casual cruelty. Ian.
“Kechan, are you listening?”
The guilt was raw and bloody in my mind, but it was nothing to the rage that darkened my vision and fizzed through my bloodstream and effortlessly swept my control away. If this was how Chanko usually felt, I reflected vaguely, it was amazing he hadn’t ended up like his brother long ago.
“Kechan? We need to work out what we’re going to do!”
“We’re going to do damage,” I said.
Chapter Fourteen
Four minutes later, we were jammed into the study, with a large-scale map of Tokyo spread out over the futon, a huge underground map and a pile of yakuza magazines. Yoshi was connecting an array of wires and boxes to one or the other of Taka’s workstations. Taka was chopping a small pile of white powder on a black lacquer tile with the side of a credit card.
“What are you doing?”
“I’ve had maybe an hour’s sleep. Coffee isn’t going to do it.”
Yoshi and I glanced at each other. His eyes were darkly ringed, and I knew mine were the same. The sleeplessness was giving me a dizzy, unreal feeling of floating on top of the roiling anger.
“Okay,” I said. “But just enough for an edge.”
In Taka’s case, that was a thin line snorted through a ten-thousand-yen note. He shook his head as he sniffed up the last few crystals, his pupils widening. I licked a finger and dabbed, rubbing the powder onto my gums for a slower effect. The vile taste, bitter and metallic, made me shudder, but I could feel my senses sharpen as the exhaustion evaporated. I passed the tile to Yoshi, who took a reluctant dab and screwed up his face hideously as he sucked the speed off his finger.
“Right.” Taka clapped his hands. His razor-blade smile was glittering, and I found myself grinning back as the amphetamine rush built. “Time to play.”
Fifty-two minutes later, we’d come to an agreement on almost everything. Almost.
Yoshi’s laptop whirred as he tapped frantically.
“Any luck?”
“No. I can’t get a number anywhere. I sent an email through an anonymous remailer, but that’s it. What are the chances of him checking his email in time?”
“He might have gone,” said Taka.
“With no money?” Yoshi asked.
“Or they might have him already.”
“We have to work on the assumption that he’s still there. You know that.”
We knew. Taka scowled. “If we don’t give him up, we might not get Sonja out.”
“And if we do, they’ll kill him,” said Yoshi. “There’s no point pretending they won’t. They’ll probably make him talk before they kill him, and if they do, he’ll probably mention Higuchi. Higuchi can name you.”
Taka gave an irritable sniff, wiped at his nose. “We can get to Higuchi first, and he doesn’t know where I live. We can’t risk it with Sonja. And screw Hearn.”
They looked at each other. Then they both looked at me.
“This whole mess is Hearn’s
fault,” I said. “I’m not protecting him at Sonja’s expense.”
Taka nodded sharply.
“There’s a difference between not protecting him and giving him up,” said Yoshi.
“I know.”
“Three minutes.” Taka held out the tile to me. I licked and dabbed, just a few crystals, enough to keep it sharp, and looked at my scrawled list of notes.
“Is this going to work?”
“Sure it is,” said Taka confidently.
“Probably not,” said Yoshi. “But it’s all we’ve got.”
They picked up the phone on the third ring. We had them on loudspeaker so we could all hear. Our connection was being routed through the internet and via half a dozen countries and twice as many exchanges, and Yoshi assured me the FBI wouldn’t be able to trace the call, let alone a bunch of technophobic goons.
It didn’t stop me clutching my dressing gown around me against the goose bumps when I heard the voice.
“Yes?”
“Good morning,” I said. “Who am I talking to?”
“Who’s this?”
“This is Kerry Ekdahl. My colleague called you one hour ago. Please inform me who’s speaking.”
There was a brief, muffled conversation at the other end, then an old man’s voice came down the phone, slow and creaky. “This is Mitsuyoshi Junichiro,” he said. “You have something of mine.”
“We have the bag that was stolen from your honourable brother Mitsuyoshi-san when he was murdered,” I said. “We have the disc that was in the bag, and the password. We have seen the documents on the disc.” I was speaking keigo, the highest level of respect speech I knew. It wouldn’t hurt.
“I see.”