by KJ Charles
“Fine,” he said eventually. “You want a war. Okay.”
“Oguya did something to Sonja, I don’t know what, but she sounded awful. Mitsuyoshi called what his shithead grandson did to Noriko an error. I’m sick of them. I don’t want them to get away.”
“No. I can see that.”
“I’m doing something. I’m not running, and I’m not putting up with it. I’m doing something about them. You don’t have to stay if you don’t like it.”
“Don’t insult me, babe,” he said softly.
“Sorry. I’m sorry we didn’t consult you too, but you weren’t here, and we had to do something. And there didn’t seem much else we could do.”
“No,” he said wearily. “I guess there didn’t.”
We started the phone calls at half past six.
“Moshi-moshi?” Minachan said, and the tremor in her voice wasn’t faked. “Kimura-san? Oh, thank goodness. It’s Minachan here, your friend from the Primrose Path—please, don’t hang up. I’m extremely sorry to call you at home, please forgive me, but it’s terribly urgent. No, I don’t need help, I’m calling to help you. Please listen. The Mitsuyoshi-kai yakuza family have taken over the bar—you’ve seen their men, no? One of them has asked for details. He has asked that we should tell lies about our friendship with our honoured customers, so they can extort money with these untruths—”
The squawk was audible from across the room. Minachan jerked the receiver away from her ear.
“I’m going away because of this. If they say I said anything, it will be a lie. Please, believe me, I have never done anything to harm you. Oh. That’s very generous of you—”
I kicked her ankle sharply.
“But I couldn’t possibly accept it,” she went on, glaring at me. “No. No, not at all. You’ve been so kind to me in the past, and I am very sorry to bear bad news. Please, if you have any way to protect yourself from these wicked men… The Mitsuyoshi-kai, and the man who hit me is called Oguya. Yes, he hit me. I think my nose is broken. I’m very frightened. I beg you, please don’t mention my name to anyone. Thank you. You’re very kind.”
“Pin-pon,” said Taka as she hung up. “Who was he?”
“His sister’s husband’s brother is in one of the Kantō Hatsuka-kai families. Shall I do the next?”
Between us, Minachan and I could think of three more clients who were connected, and a further four who had relatives or friends in the police. We called those we had numbers for, vying to produce the most trembling, whimpering voice, and had crossed half of them off after ten minutes. We’d contact the rest at their offices later, plus any more from Sonja.
Yoshi had already scanned in the Mitsuyoshi-kai’s logo off the agenda (they’d probably refer to it as a crest), produced a pretty good version and printed it onto a hundred business cards at the machine in the nearby all-night combini; now Taka produced a kid on a bike who would deliver a card in a plain envelope to each of a list of addresses. On some of them, I scrawled a few inflammatory words in Japanese or Korean.
The thing about guarantees of good faith is, if you can trust someone, you don’t need them.
Take the Mitsuyoshi-kai. It was hardly an act of good faith for them to plant men at every set of coin lockers in Shinjuku station, waiting for someone to arrive with a briefcase, in the hope of snatching someone else from our side. I assume it was every set, at least—Shinjuku station sprawls underground for half a mile or so, and there are plenty of lockers, and there must have been an awful lot of startled salarymen that day, as the grunts grabbed anyone who was depositing a case.
That could have been disastrous for us. If we were stupid.
By five, Taka had started calling people: a couple of night-working friends, a few irregular troops, and the most reliable of his selection of freeters—young people drifting through temporary and freelance work instead of starting lifetime careers. He called in a lot of favours, and asked for more, and the glitter in his eyes looked like mica in black granite.
What happened next is what I’ve been told. Minachan and I weren’t there. We got to stay at Taka’s, waiting for the men to come home. But I’ve heard the story, and I can see it as vividly as though it were playing out on a screen in front of me.
Shinjuku station, ten minutes to nine. A dozen exits and a hundred shops, pinned down by the skyscrapers above it and the rail and subway lines that snake through it. And busy, not as bad as an hour ago but still heaving and swelling with humanity, with salarymen and schoolchildren, panicking tourists craning their necks above the throng, buffeted by ranks of commuters, knocked against pillars and kiosks and vending machines and struggling for footstep space in the tidal wave of people. This is the station where the people-pushers operate, white-gloved rail workers shoving more suited bodies into carriages so packed you’ll see people sleeping upright, supported by the pressure of the crowd. The system works, though, because everyone knows the rules. You queue in the right places, you walk steadily, you face the same way in the carriage, in courteous, respectful silence. And you don’t just stand around, blocking up useful commuting space, not unless you enjoy being buffeted by eddies of people.
There were three men and a woman standing around by the JR gates, though. Breaking the rules. Getting in the way.
The overground Yamanote Line loops through the city’s main stations, to Yoyogi and Shinagawa and Akihabara and Ueno, and, of course, Ikebukero, home of the gigantic Sunshine City shopping complex, and the closest hub station to Taka’s home, Ekoda. You can get onto any line, into any place, if you start from Shinjuku and take the Yamanote Line. That was a major headache for anyone trying to work out where Sonja might go. I don’t know if the three men by the gates worried about it, or if it was someone else’s problem. They were ostentatiously blank-faced; their knock-off designer suits were salaryman grey; and one of them gripped the elbow of the tall gaijin woman in an ill-fitting, bright purple mac with a hood pulled over her head. Their flashy mobile phones were in their hands, and their gazes roamed around the station, trying to identify possible targets in the steady stream of people.
They ignored the two market porters who had obviously been working all night, and who leant against a high table at a nearby coffee shop, joking and smoking and chugging coffee. They didn’t approach them, so we don’t know if they noticed them or not, but if they were watching, they only had to see the way passersby recoiled from the pair to know they were genuine. You can’t fake the smell of working all night in a fish market, followed by a few shots of cheap and lethal shōchū spirit.
And, indeed, Taka-from-the-fish-market didn’t have to. Crazy Taka, who was used to the way Fish Market Taka smelled after a hard night, wore a borrowed pair of filthy split-toed shoes and a thick, stained, stinking jumper, with a woollen cap pulled over his hair, and one hand casually in his pocket, in the disreputable way of porters and such people. He looked at the woman as best he could without seeming to be staring. Her hood was up, but soon enough she looked round, and when he saw her face, he pressed Send on the mobile concealed in his pocket.
In Shibuya, a phone bleeped, and a young man on a bike freewheeled down a back street, past the front of a small anonymous office building. He dumped a half-full sealed plastic bag in a doorway thirty yards away and cycled off, dialling a preset number as he did so.
In Ikebukero station, Yoshi answered his mobile, grunted (spending too much time with Chanko does that to you), glanced at a timetable, and then made a call himself, on a public phone, to a number we’d used last night.
“I’m calling from someone named Ekudaru-san,” he said without preamble. “I have been given an urgent message to read to you. Are you ready? The message states: The goods you want are in a plastic bag four doors up from your office. Please collect them now and check the contents. Please inform your men that the gaijin must get on the train alone. Please ensure she is on the 9:08 train. Please be aware that serious consequences will result if the gaijin misses the train or if anyone foll
ows her, and that the situation is being monitored. Please do not follow the gaijin. That is the end of the message.”
I imagine the yakuza who took the call sprinting out, grabbing the plastic bag, tearing it open to see the papers, the disc, the sawn-up briefcase. I don’t know if they had been looking out alertly for someone with a bag that could hold something the size of a briefcase, but I like to think so.
They probably swore, but they placed a call. Taka saw one of the men bring his phone to his ear at 9.05. He looked furious at what he heard. They checked their watches, they looked around aggressively, and at a few seconds past 9.06 they shoved the woman forward. She stumbled, cursed, and was swallowed in the stream of salarymen heading through the gates and up the escalators and onto the northbound platform to queue for the train that pulled up at 9.07.55.
Three two-man groups, who had been making a nuisance of themselves standing on the platform, getting in everyone else’s way, did the same, all joining different carriages. They had surveyed the platform as best they could, and it was obvious to them that the railway workers were genuine staff and that nobody else was on the platform watching them. So, since there was nobody else to grab and nobody to stop them, they got on the train after Sonja, two on the same carriage by a different door, the other pairs on the carriages to the right and left, by the closest doors. They’d be watching when she got off the train.
The fish-market porters, who’d finally finished their coffee and cigarettes and started strolling up the escalator just as the yakuza answered the phone, got on too.
It was four stops to Ikebukero station, and standing room only. Sonja pressed her lips together and concentrated on how much she hated yakuza, and rush hour, and Texel, the Dutch island where she was born. If it hadn’t been such a shitty place to live, she wouldn’t be stuck now in bloody Japan on a bloody commuter train full of murderers, let alone in some poxy, stinking basement with the sodding yakuza stubbing out fucking cigarettes on her. She hated Texel, and right now she was so frightened and exhausted and humiliated and lonely that she might even wish herself back there, and she was not going to start crying because the carriage was probably crawling with the fuckers, and she wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction.
Two feet away from where Sonja was locking her knees in a fierce effort not to collapse on the floor and howl, an intermittently employed freeter and aspiring actor going by the name of Bobby Kim finished typing a rapid text message and hit Send To List. Phones vibrated simultaneously and (mostly) silently in the pockets of a number of other people on board the train.
Nothing happened for three stops, except that several people shifted around a bit. The yakuza stood in their salaryman suits, waiting alertly for the woman in the purple mac to move. I’m sure they prided themselves on their anonymity, except that everyone else was either reading a lengthways-folded newspaper or dozing on their feet.
Finally, as the train pulled into Ikebukero, a number of things did happen, pretty much at once.
One of the yakuza in the carriage to Sonja’s right had been jammed up against a woman for much of the journey. She was probably a bit chunky for his taste, and definitely past her prime, as she was pushing thirty, and I don’t imagine he even noticed her until, as the train lurched slightly as it slowed, she swayed against him, gave a shrill gasp of fury, turned and punched him in the groin with a cry of “Groper!”
The yakuza went down like a sack of bricks, as any man would do, considering that Junko was a prizewinning kickboxer, and her thick mittens were pulled over knuckledusters. The crowd swayed out of the way to let the poor man collapse, whereupon she gave him a short-range kick to the same target with her pointy shoe, adding, “Pervert!” with righteous indignation. At this point his partner grabbed at her arm. Junko turned deftly, so that he appeared to be going for her breast instead, let out a shriek of maidenly alarm, and swung her loaded handbag, smacking the second man in the face so hard he went stumbling back into the awed crowd, where a hitherto unnoticed young man in a rather cheap suit jabbed two rigid fingers into his kidney as the train came to a complete stop.
On the carriage to the left of Sonja’s, things weren’t going great for the yakuza either. A pair of porters, stinking of fish and drink, had started giving a nervous-looking chap a hard time for his very obvious disgusted recoil. He was standing right next to the two yakuza, and the whole thing was drawing attention to them, but they weren’t fool enough to get involved. They edged away, staring through the vulgar display as though it wasn’t happening, like any good commuters. The train was slowing for the next stop, and they needed to keep an eye on the gaijin.
A porter waved a fist at the nervous man, whose name was Ando. He stepped back in terror, onto a yakuza’s foot. The goon pushed him away, Ando lurched forward, inadvertently smacking one of the porters as he flailed, and the two drunks charged in.
The watchers in Sonja’s carriage weren’t aware of any of this unprecedented commotion. They knew their role, which was to keep an unobtrusive eye on the gaijin, and since she was now standing by the middle doors of the carriage, they were both asserting their presence at the next doors up, ready to jump off the train, right behind her.
Until, as the train was coming to a stop, the young Korean-looking guy who’d worked his way up the carriage and was now standing next to them went into a fit.
Bobby Kim had recently played an epileptic on stage, in a tiny production for a tiny theatre in front of tinier audiences. He’d done a huge amount of research, nevertheless, and the single review had described his seizure as extremely convincing (“in decided contrast to the rest of his performance”). He hit the floor like a master, jerking and foaming, right by the doors. A doctor who just happened to be standing nearby leapt to help—as did a real doctor and a nurse, which caused a certain amount of embarrassment later on—and the goons realised that Sonja was stepping off the train, and the doors were suddenly blocked by a medical emergency who didn’t even have the decency to lie down neatly so he could be stepped over, and the yakuza had to get all the way through the crowded carriage to the next set of doors—like everyone in front of them.
They pushed and sweated and forced their way through as fast as they could, but there was nowhere to go, and by the time they’d made it off the train, Sonja had disappeared. Two of their colleagues charged off the carriage to the left at the same time, having finally extricated themselves from the brawl with some solid punches, and all four of them started to push and shove their way down the solid escalators and crammed stairs into the station, craning over the heads of the crowd for a sight of the purple hood or the distinctive head. One of them caught sight of Sonja disappearing off to the left, and they began to barge desperately through the crowds, anonymity forgotten for the moment.
By the time they’d reached the concourse and the crowds had spread out enough to run through, they’d lost sight of her.
They doubtless knew they’d been had by this time, but they also knew she couldn’t disappear. She couldn’t take the mac off, so she had to be visible if they just clambered onto pillars or railings and looked over the heads of the crowd…
And maybe they would have spotted her if she’d been slower to pull on the hooded black plastic raincoat that Bobby had shoved into her hand as he passed. But even so, once she had on a black mac—in a Japanese March, at commuting time—the odds were that she’d still have disappeared into the crowd.
Yoshi saw the yakuza looking frantically around, cursing, and grinned to himself. He sent Taka a text message, and then trotted off to catch the train home.
Sonja hurried through the station, clutching the two coats around herself, forcing herself not to run, convinced a heavy hand was about to land on her shoulder. She headed out of the west exit, past the department store windows without even looking, and came out into the air and daylight with a gasp, and realised she had no idea what to do now.
Chapter Fifteen
Everyone with a useful role in getting So
nja out of trouble had left by eight. Minachan and I finished making our alarmist phone calls to the remaining clients. We double-locked and chained the door, drank a lot of coffee, tried and failed to get to sleep. I had a bath, and around nine, when it was all going down in Shinjuku, we sat there and stared at the walls.
Well, I did. Minachan was climbing them.
“Is this going to work? It won’t work. Have they got enough people? What if they hurt Sonja again? What if they made her tell them where Taka lives? Does she know? Shouldn’t we have phoned again? What if it’s a trap?”
“Shut up. Please, shut up.”
“I can’t. I talk when I’m nervous. I want some more coffee.”
“You don’t need any more caffeine. Anyway, there’s no milk.” She drank coffee like a cat would, full of milk and sugar.
“Crap. Do you think it’s working? Isn’t there anything we could do? What if they don’t call? What do we do then?”
I couldn’t stop wondering if they were walking into a trap either. Logically there was no reason for the yakuza to assume Sonja would head for Ikebukero, and there was no way they could cover the whole Yamanote Line. Nevertheless…
“Stop it, Minachan. We’ll both go mad this way.”
She shoved the overlong arms of her borrowed sweater up to her elbows. “I can’t stand this. I’m scared. Aren’t you nervous? How come you’re not nervous?”
“Everyone I care about bar you is in the middle of Tokyo, trying to outwit a professional criminal organisation. Since you ask, I am a touch nervous right now.”
Minachan wrapped her arms around herself, putting her hands over her feet to warm them. “I’m freezing.”
“Have a bath. The water should still be hot.”
“Yeah. Okay. Wake me up if I fall asleep.”
Fat chance. She was twitching like Taka on a bad day. I packed her off to the bathroom and gave myself a few minutes to calm down. The tension was thrumming through my body, and I wanted to pace around, run, scream.