End of the World Blues

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  On his way to the door, not just of his office but the bank itself, the sub-manager added his profound regret at the incalculable loss of an Important Intangible Cultural Property and so much of her work. When Kit told him that most of Yoshi’s recent pieces were on tour in New York, the man looked almost relieved.

  “A tragic loss never the less.”

  Nodding, Kit shook hands, bowed briefly, and cut across the road, headed for No Neck’s waiting Speedmaster. It was either that or kick the shit out of KCB’s sub-manager.

  “Okay,” said No Neck, after Kit told him what had happened. “Next stop, her lawyers.”

  The woman behind the desk at Yamanoto & Co was so embarrassed at Kit’s arrival that she sat frozen at her desk, repeating Yoshi’s name to herself, while she fretted about what to do next. She was still glitching when a young woman in a dark suit stopped to listen, overheard Yoshi’s name, and introduced herself.

  “Suzuki,” she said, offering her hand. “Ako Suzuki. Mr. Togo’s senior assistant.”

  “Suzuki-san…”

  “Perhaps,” said the young woman, “it might be best if we used Mr. Togo’s office?” She gestured to a cherry-wood door behind her.

  “I’ll see you outside,” said No Neck.

  Having turned down the offer of both tea and coffee, Kit accepted a glass of water, because turning this down would only have produced the offer of fruit juice or something else. When his water finally arrived, brought by the receptionist, it came in a glass, with ice and a slice of lemon, and Kit and Ms. Suzuki had just agreed it was a pity Mr. Togo was not here himself, that the spring blossom around Inokashira Pond had been spectacular, and the weather was surprisingly humid, even for June.

  Only when Kit had sipped from his glass did Mr. Togo’s assistant put both her hands on the table and bow, very slightly. “We are sorry,” she said, “for your loss.” The language Ms. Suzuki used was so formal that Kit barely understood what she said. He waited for her to add something about Yoshi’s work or the fact Ms. Tanaka was the best potter of her generation. Instead she just reached across the desk for a desk diary.

  “Mr. Togo had the meeting on Tuesday with Mr. Tamagusuku,” she said, flicking back a couple of pages. “Ms. Tanaka’s brother-in-law said he would update you on what was said. I imagine he’s been in touch?”

  Kit shook his head.

  “Ahh…” Ms. Suzuki considered the diary in front of her very carefully. As if it might explain why. “That is unfortunate.”

  She shuffled a few pages and then shuffled back again, got up and went to a filing cabinet, only to turn round and come back again. Although young, Ms. Suzuki did not look like the kind of woman who got flustered.

  “There was a will,” she said. “We gave it to Mr. Tamagusuku.” Of course there was. Of course they did.

  Artists in the West were meant to be untidy and driven by inner demons. Yoshi had demons, all right. Only she’d probably kept their details filed in the order in which they first appeared.

  “You had more than one copy,” Kit stated.

  Ms. Suzuki stared at him.

  “I know Yoshi,” said Kit. “She’d have asked Mr. Togo to notarise two copies, then she’d have filed another with her bank, kept a spare at home, and for all I know, given a final copy to Yuko…”

  He caught Ms. Suzuki’s glance and thought about what he’d said.

  “Okay, maybe not that last one,” admitted Kit, because then Yuko’s husband wouldn’t have been in such a hurry to collect the original.

  “Forgive me for asking,” she said. “How long were…” Ms. Suzuki caught herself. “How long did you and Yoshi live together?”

  “Ten years.”

  Ms. Suzuki made notes on a piece of paper. “No children?”

  Kit shook his head.

  “Probably for the best.”

  When Kit looked surprised, he got a short lecture on single mothers and Japanese inheritance law, followed by a longer lecture on probate for childless couples, both married and unmarried. As Yoshi’s parents were dead, Kit would have inherited three quarters, with Yuko sharing the rest. Unfortunately, the situation with unmarried couples was not nearly so favourable…

  Which raised a whole new set of questions. Such as, if Yoshi was really so organised, why had she filed multiple copies of her will while failing to register their marriage at the ward office as she’d promised she would?

  CHAPTER 18 — Wednesday, 20 June

  “Guinness or Caffrey’s?” No Neck asked.

  Kit nodded, without thinking, and reached the last free table in Paddy’s Tavern a second or so before three Australian backpackers who took one look at No Neck’s tattoos and the bleakness in Kit’s face and decided they’d rather stand at the bar.

  No Neck sighed. “I’ll get Guinness,” he said.

  Slitting open a buff envelope, Kit shook its contents onto the rickety table in front of him. It was just before 1 pm, two days after Kit met Ms. Suzuki and the promised copy of Yoshi’s will had finally been cleared with Mr. Togo himself for collecting.

  Getting the beers while Kit read the will was No Neck’s idea of tact. A gesture No Neck promptly ruined by banging two pints of Guinness onto the table and demanding to know exactly what the will said.

  “Nothing good,” said Kit, killing half of his pint in one go. Having skimmed the document, he read it again more carefully. Ms. Suzuki had kindly included a notarised English translation, but Kit felt he should read the original. It was handwritten and the writing was Yoshi’s own. There was something harsh about knowing this was probably the last piece of her writing he’d see.

  Yoshi’s will was a very simple document, little more than a single page. She left everything to her sister. There was no reference to a loan from Kit and the bar was barely mentioned. The will had been drafted three months earlier and Kit didn’t recognise the name of either witness.

  “You okay?” asked No Neck.

  “Sure,” said Kit. “Everything’s great.”

  No Neck left to get another two beers without being asked. And when he came back it was with the beers, a bowl of udon noodles, and a pair of disposable chopsticks. “Eat,” he said, dumping his tray on the table in front of Kit.

  “What about you?”

  “Micki made noodles for breakfast,” said No Neck. “You look as if you haven’t eaten in weeks.”

  “Micki?”

  The huge man actually blushed. “She’s looking after me,” he said. “Just a temporary thing.”

  The trucks were gone and the jack hammer stood silent when Kit and No Neck reached the site where Pirate Mary’s had been. Someone had swept grit from the road and piled it into a heap. A handful of cigarette ends and a broken polystyrene cup were caught in the sweepings and now mixed with dirt like artifacts from some strange archaeological dig. The concrete foundations they’d seen on their last visit had been reduced to rubble and carried away.

  Coming Soon, announced a sign. Executive Manshon. 9 Apartments. South Facing. A picture on the board showed an elegant block filling the area where Pirate Mary’s and its parking space had been.

  Where jagged foundation once stood the jack hammer had exposed a well. The slab that originally closed off the well shaft was cracked down the middle and someone had used a crow bar to shift the smaller of two pieces. Kit knew this because the bar still stood beside a broken section of slab and both leaned against the low wall around the well.

  “You can’t go in,” No Neck protested, when Kit tried the new metal gate.

  “I own this place.”

  “Maybe,” said No Neck. “But it’s still padlocked. Talk to Mr. Togo in the morning…”

  “I own this place,” repeated Kit, rattling the fence. He felt hands grip his shoulders from behind and the bozozoku lifted him aside.

  “Leave it,” said No Neck. “Learn when to walk away.”

  “I can’t,” said Kit.

  Dark eyes looked at Kit from a face that would scare hardened crimi
nals, the light from a street lamp falling across the bozozoku’s cheek like a scar. “This matters that much?” he said.

  “Yes,” said Kit, “it does.”

  “You want to tell me why?” The bozozoku stood between Kit and the gate, his head bent slightly to show that he was ready to listen. Kit knew almost nothing about No Neck and the man knew even less about him, it was one of the things that let them remain friends. “I mean,” said No Neck. “It’s not as if you and Yoshi even liked each other.”

  “It’s not just Yoshi,” admitted Kit. “It’s the way it’s all getting whitewashed. No bomb, tragic accident. No bar, new apartments. I feel like a ghost in my own life. I want the bar back.”

  No Neck considered that.

  “Okay,” he said.

  The metal fence was designed so that sections locked together. It should have been possible to separate one section from another merely by lifting. Unfortunately practise turned out to be very different from theory.

  An old woman in a yukata had appeared from one of the few remaining wooden houses, a building even more ramshackle than the bar had been. And Mr. Ito now stood at the edge of the darkened graveyard, leaning on his broom. Both were watching intently and neither looked like being much help.

  “We need more people,” Kit said, looking round.

  “Tomorrow,” promised No Neck. “We’ll have lots of people. Let me make some calls first.”

  “Want to talk about Yoshi?” asked No Neck, a few hours later, after one of the many calls he’d promised to make delivered them to another bar. With No Neck it was always a bar, unless that was just Tokyo.

  “No,” Kit said. “I don’t think I do.”

  “Okay,” said No Neck. “You ever wondered what it was you and Yoshi had in common?”

  “I just said…”

  “You’re not talking about it,” said No Neck. “I am. You ever wonder?”

  Kit shook his head.

  “Nothing,” said No Neck. “That was what you had in common…All those empty rooms. No television, no radio, no computers. Four floors of your own building in central Tokyo and the only room you bothered to decorate was the bar. Everything else was just storage space, without the storage.”

  “Yeah,” said Kit. “Probably.”

  “Does that sound like a marriage to you?”

  Kit looked at him.

  “She didn’t register it,” said No Neck, “because that way Yoshi could walk away…”

  “If she needed,” said Kit.

  No Neck nodded.

  “Look,” Kit said. “You want to tell me what happened that night?”

  Kit and No Neck sat in Seventh Gear, a biker shack on the northwest edge of Kabukicho, built under a raised section of the Seibu Shinjuku line. And Kit had earned his share of stares and comments just by pushing his way through its bead curtain. No Neck had to do some quick talking, his share of stares, shoulder slapping, and arm gripping before Kit’s presence became accepted.

  “Sure,” said No Neck, taking off his shades to reveal bruises purple enough to make a goth rainbow. “Why not? She shopped me to the cops…The cops decided to beat the crap out of me, repeatedly.”

  “Shit,” said Kit. “You know why?”

  No Neck snorted. “Why do you think?” he said. “By then, they wanted me to sign a confession saying my friends bombed your bar.”

  “They gave you a translation?”

  “I can read Japanese.”

  Kit stared at him. “You’re worse than me,” he said. “Everyone knows that.”

  No Neck looked embarrassed. “I can read it,” he said. “And talk Japanese, if I must.”

  “So why the me no speaks stuff?”

  “Think about it,” said No Neck. “Why does Micki keep coming round to my apartment?”

  “To teach you…” Kit stopped.

  “Yeah.” The huge man smiled. “I’ve been here for twenty-five years,” he said. “Remember Madori? Namiko? Mai? They all wanted to teach me Japanese. You’d be surprised how many of those lessons ended up in bed.”

  Actually, Kit wouldn’t.

  “The police knew it wasn’t me,” said No Neck, with a shrug. “But it would have been tidier. One gaijin bombs another, famous Japanese artist caught in the conflict…they came very close,” No Neck added.

  “Close to what?”

  “Getting their confession.” Upending his bottle, No Neck killed what was left of his Kirin. “Not sure what changed,” he said. “One moment some psycho has me in a cell, the next there’s a knock at the door and I’m alone on the floor with foot prints on my face.” The Australian checked he really had finished his beer and got up to fetch another.

  When No Neck returned it was with four Kirin and a saucer of chili nuts. “The bastard didn’t even bother to come back,” he said, sounding more fucked off by that than anything else. “Just left me on the floor in my own piss…a uniform kicked me free. Gave me back my wallet, permit, and resident’s card and told me to behave myself in future. He looked about twelve…”

  “It could have been worse,” said Kit. “They could have shipped you back to Sydney.” For reasons unspecified, the bozozoku had let it be known that returning home could be fatal.

  “Ex-wife,” said No Neck, as if hearing Kit’s thought. “Turkish, big family, half a dozen brothers.” Reaching for the chili nuts, he emptied the saucer with a single scoop and swallowed the lot, pulling a face. “Her father hated how it began and loathed how it ended.”

  “How did it start?”

  “In a school gym.”

  Kit looked at No Neck. “I was teaching,” said No Neck. “She wasn’t…”

  It was a long story, not pretty and the only thing No Neck would say in his defence was that he’d loved the girl. She’d been six months under legal and he’d married her as soon as he was allowed. Things had gone downhill from there.

  “You know how many bodies I buried in the first Iraq war?”

  Kit shook his head.

  “Nor do I,” said No Neck. “There were that many, kids and conscripts…we just bulldozed sand over the top. I always thought that was my worst and then Maryam announced she was leaving and taking the kids.”

  He caught Kit’s look, the unspoken question. “I was drinking,” he admitted. “Spending too much time with the Rebels. Things were rough.”

  “So you ended up here?”

  “There are worse places,” said No Neck, glancing round. He nodded to a couple of bozozoku in the far corner. One was wearing a white headband with shades, the other just had the shades. “These guys are family,” No Neck said, thumping his ribs over the heart. “Know what I mean?”

  The Australian was missing when Kit got back from taking a piss. Although Kit found him easily enough, over in the far corner with the guy wearing a headband. “Meet Micki’s brother Tetsuo. He’s going to help us shift that fence.”

  Kit shook, trying not to wince at the other man’s grip.

  “According to Tetsuo,” said No Neck, “someone out there is looking for you.”

  “Police?”

  Micki’s brother and No Neck exchanged glances. “No,” said Tetsuo. “A gaijin, someone like you…A woman.” He thought about it some more. “An old woman.”

  “Has this woman said why?”

  Tetsuo shook his head. “No,” he said. “She just said whoever finds you gets 500,000 yen. So if you want help tomorrow shifting that fence…”

  The bozozoku escort was presented as a compliment, an honour guard to escort Kit and No Neck through the neon squalor of north Shinjuku. “Tell her I’ll come by the hotel for my money,” said Tetsuo, and No Neck nodded.

  Like most bars in the city Pom Pom Palace had a lurid sign. Only this one was bleached almost white by time and advertised girls who probably hadn’t danced in years. A Korean in a shiny tuxedo opened a door at the bottom of some steps and began bowing them inside.

  “You’re expected,” he said.

  A girl was on stage under
a single light. She wore a silver G-string and white gloves and was dancing, fairly badly, to “Jenny Was a Friend of Mine.” Half a dozen Italian tourists sat round a Formica table in front of the stage that looked as if it had been salvaged from a sandwich shop. They looked like they’d been expecting rather more for their money.

  There was something intrinsically sad about Shinjuku. A vacuum-packed hollowness that no quantity of neon could hide. Roppongi was the same, only there the sadness was older and more Western. All that movement to so little purpose. A million strangers searching for a cure to the darkness behind their eyes in the void between someone else’s legs.

  It could be on film, behind glass in a peek booth, printed out and pasted on walls; or it could be on stage under a single light, looking down at strangers, beyond caring why the strangers stared back.

  “Rock ’n’ Roll Lies.”

  Another band, another nearly forgotten track, another girl about to dance. Wrapping one arm around Kit’s shoulders, No Neck said, “Come on. Let’s get this over with.”

  “You knew about this?”

  “Not until just now,” said No Neck. “Well, maybe a little…I’d heard someone was asking for you.” He shook his head sadly. “I mean, that’s not exactly news. But I figured…”

  “You figured what?”

  The huge Australian seemed embarrassed. “You know, someone wanted to finish what they started. Except Tetsuo says it’s not like that at all. This woman wants to hire you. And, God knows, you need something to stop you coming apart.”

  “I’m fine,” Kit said.

  No Neck sighed. “Take a look at yourself,” he suggested.

  “So they found you…” The woman who stood up from the corner table looked her guest up and down as one might look at a cut of meat in the butcher’s before arguing about price. Which was entirely fitting because Kate O’Mally began life in a butcher’s shop, before her lack of squeamishness and facility with a blade let her move into more profitable areas, allegedly…