The fire crackles and the cassette hums, having run to the end but not stopped automatically. A distinctive resonant nasal voice fills the room. ‘I was a violent young man and I died violently.’
Chris jumps up. It’s a cassette, not a record, so there can be no hidden message in the run-out. He pushes the stop button.
‘That’s why I went on about peace and love so much in my last years,’ Lennon’s voice says from the speakers. Chris ejects the cassette, his heart thumping. Am I mad?
Silence returns, the pop and crackle of fire. He stares at the cassette in his hand.
‘But I came around to a new way of thinking shortly before I was murdered. I felt that peace should not be bought at any price. That’s the reason I was murdered, actually.’
‘Where are you?’ Chris whispers.
‘It’s very dark and cramped. Suffocating.’
‘What can you see?’
‘Fire.’
‘Can you move?’
‘No.’
This, Chris thinks, is God’s justice?
‘Hang on.’
The front of the left speaker is kicked out by a foot in a white sneaker. Somehow Lennon, full-size, clad in an off-white suit and sporting his late-era Buddy Holly glasses and gingery sideburns, climbs out of it. He stretches luxuriously. ‘Ah, that’s better.’ Eyeing the broken speaker he says, ‘I always was a fan of mono.’ He turns and stands with his back to the warming fire, looks at the ceiling thoughtfully. His large sideburns cast a pale copper glow on his white suit, in the way a buttercup glows a chin yellow. Looking down, Lennon fixes Chris gravely in the eye. ‘Of all the martial arts, Chris, I favour Aikido. But sometimes in self-defence you have to hurt your attacker, even stop him for good, you know. Sometimes it’s you and your family or him.’ Opening his palms and drawing a deep breath, Lennon is about to speak again when the sound of the bathroom door opening disappears him, and repairs the speaker.
‘I need to lie down,’ Hitomi says.
‘I’ll join you.’
She shakes him awake. ‘Chris, Chris.’ Tears are running down her face. She’s been crying for a while.
‘What?’
‘They’re coming to kill you.’
‘Who are?’
‘Noble Dawn’s men.’ She slips back and hunches in the space between the wall and bed in anticipation of a beating.
‘I won’t hurt you. Tell me.’
‘They’re coming to kill you. You must leave.’
‘When?’
‘Soon. At 3 o’clock.’
It’s 2:15. ‘Have they spoken to you?’
She nods. ‘You must go.’
‘Will Noble Dawn come?’
‘I don’t know.’
He sits up and she flinches. ‘I won’t hurt you,’ he says. It takes fifteen minutes to untangle her, for her to believe he won’t hit her.
Then she holds him. ‘I love you. Really, I think I always have. I’m crazy, you know.’
‘We’re okay, Hitomi. It’s the world that’s crazy.’
‘Huh.’ A smile flashes across her face.
‘We can run, or kill Noble Dawn and run.’
‘Where can we go?’
‘There’s a place.’
‘Where?’
‘The Ureweras, on the east coast. We can leave tonight and join the resistance.’
‘Oh.’
‘They’ll embrace you, I’m sure.’
‘As a hostage?’
‘No, Hitomi, as a fighter, as a source of information, as a symbol of the struggle.’
‘What else can we do? Right? I’ll try.’
She is supposed to leave the front door open if he is asleep, and wait in the bathroom from 3 am. They wait together in the lounge, which is very dark even with the door open, and peek between a gap in the curtains. At 3 precisely a large black sedan pulls up. The brakes flare red then go out. He squeezes her hand, and she goes to the door. A man gets out of the car: Noble Dawn’s attendant.
‘I did the job myself,’ Hitomi announces as she walks towards the car.
Another man in a suit gets out. A man he hasn’t seen before.
‘Poison,’ she says jauntily.
‘Really?’
‘And a plastic bag to be sure.’
‘Oh.’ The men look at each other. ‘Well.’
‘Come and see,’ she trills.
They follow her. The second doesn’t bother to draw his gun. She waits for the second man and stops him to say something he finds amusing. He’s several metres behind the first as Chris takes up his position inside the door with the hatchet raised above his head. He’s practised the blow several times, so it will be automatic when the time comes. His resolve has been steeled by Lennon’s last visit. The time for talking and apologising, he tells himself as the footsteps approach, is over. The attendant walks in and drops under a clean strike; he’s out for good before he even hits the floor. The pistol in his hand presents an opportunity, but there’s no time to change the plan, only enough to pull the body a couple of metres to the side.
‘I would like that very much,’ Hitomi is saying to the second man as he reaches the door.
‘Good,’ he replies, and stops.
It’s too dark for him to see anything immediately. Instinct makes him pause. Chris holds his breath, the hatchet over his head. The silencer on the end of the man’s pistol comes into view. Should I grab it?
‘Uh.’ The man lurches forward, pushed by Hitomi. The first blow strikes the shoulder of his gun hand; the second blow drops him. The third is probably unnecessary.
‘Wave and shut the door,’ Chris says as he takes up the pistols. His hands are shaking, he’s panting.
‘They expected to have me after killing you,’ she says bitterly.
‘Can you use a gun?’
‘Yes.’
‘Go out to the car with the pistol behind you, like this.’ He puts it in the back of her jeans. ‘Shoot the driver. If Noble Dawn’s there, leave him to me.’
She practises drawing the gun out a couple of times.
‘Good luck.’
She steps outside, waves cheerfully to the car and walks down the driveway, the pistol’s silencer in her waistband. She is acting much cooler than Chris feels. The driver rolls his window down. He can’t tell if anyone’s behind him.
‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ she calls.
‘Tea?’
‘Yes, or something a little stronger?’ At the car window now, her hand creeps around for the gun. She steps back, plants her feet, points with a two-hand grip, and fires. Chris is at the car in a second, wrenching open the rear door. Noble Dawn’s face is speckled with blood. Impassive, he stares straight ahead.
‘Get out,’ Chris tells him.
‘No,’ Hitomi says, ‘he’s too big to move.’
Chris trains his pistol on Noble Dawn’s temple. It’s trembling in his hand. Do I just shoot him? Noble Dawn continues to stare out the front window, as if nothing has happened, as if his driver’s blood isn’t sprayed across his face. He blinks slowly.
‘I suppose you want to know why,’ Noble Dawn says glumly, still looking straight ahead.
‘Yes.’
‘Can I have a cigarette?’
‘Don’t move, I’ll give you one. Hitomi, light one for him.’ He cautiously hands over the lit cigarette.
Noble Dawn takes a big drag. ‘Menthol?’ He flashes a glance at Chris for the first time.
‘Take it or leave it.’
He takes another drag and smoke jets from his nostrils. ‘Recently your big brother found himself isolated. It hurt his pride. He started drinking too much and telling people he threw the bouts I won against him in Japan.’ Noble Dawn blinks heavily and taps ash onto the knee of his suit pants. ‘I should have been celebrated after my years in the ring, not snickered at behind my back in restaurants.’
Chris’s finger tightens on the trigger. He nearly pulls it. ‘You lie. My brother would never throw a fight.’
>
‘Many of us threw one occasionally to help a colleague keep his ranking. Some even threw bouts for money. Your older brother did it to get out of Japan alive in ’79 and ’80.’ Chris feels that Noble Dawn’s calm is a way of jeering at him and his shaking pistol. ‘He couldn’t win everything, Little Train. We are a proud people. But here is the thing. These agreements between wrestlers are always kept secret. To the grave. Always.’
‘Your retirement’s been ruined?’
‘Rumours began to reach Japan. They had to stop.’
‘So to punish him you murdered Sarah and Chiyo?’
Still staring ahead, Noble Dawn flicks the half-finished menthol cigarette into the front seat. He rolls his shoulders once.
‘I mean Patrick’s little girl, Sarah,’ Chris says, ‘and his wife Chiyo, the whore Tanaka, as you called her.’
‘Wife?’
The pistol sneezes. The corpse retains its sitting position; the head hangs, pillowed on chin and neck.
Chris stands and looks over the roof of the car to the pines. A roaring noise fills his ears. The house over the road is in darkness. Suddenly weak at the knees, he sits on the pavement.
‘It’s this easy?’ Hitomi says.
‘Huh?’
‘What shall we do now?’
His thoughts are washed away as if by a torrent of water. She stares at him, waiting for instruction, as he slowly stands. He walks to the ragged apple tree and picks up the figurine of his brother. The cool white porcelain smears red. It’s someone else’s blood. He stares at its happy little face.
Epilogue
A sharp crack and a shiver of leaves; a louder crack and the car is gone, hidden in dense bush. They stand in gloom on the gravel road above the gully, in their tourist-new green bush-shirts and packs, with the pistols fastened to them with bungy cords. The car’s sudden and emphatic disappearance, the approaching night, and the silence and smells of the Urewera bush send deep currents of anxiety through him. He plays their new torch over the foliage below. Its beam is feeble.
‘Gone,’ says Hitomi, peering down from the edge of the road. She wears a black beanie over her blond wig. Her mouth forms a rueful expression.
It feels to Chris that they are being listened to, as if the bush itself is hostile, hosting the gathering of spirits as light leaves the sky. A memory of the lifeless assassins on the bach floor, of the struggle with Noble Dawn’s corpse to get it prone in the back seat and out of sight, makes him take her hand. His own death may come as easily as theirs, but she is likely to suffer the horrors unique to women captured in war. It must not happen to her.
Now they must walk all night into the unknown and not fall into a trap, get stuck on some bluff, or blunder around in circles. The approaching dark and her hand’s tender warmth shoulder him a vast responsibility. He knows the hardest test is yet to come.
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