by Unknown
‘Will you give me the document wallet?’
‘You are boring me! Not until after fucking midnight! Go!’
I walk several paces, when Leatherjacket, standing on a mound of boulders, whistles. I thought it was to me but it wasn’t. ‘Our friends are coming. Nine vehicles.’
‘Nine.’ Frankenstein shrugs. ‘I had hoped for more, but nine is not bad.’
I begin running up the slope. The bridge is the nearest thing to a safe haven. On the other hand, it is a perfect cell to keep me in. I get within a few metres of the top. I guess I am thirty metres up – high enough for vertigo to clamp my lungs and make my balls retract. I peer over the parapet and watch Nagasaki’s cars draw up. They park semicircling Morino’s two Cadillacs and flick their beams on full. They kill their engines. Four men in each vehicle file out, each with combat jackets, helmets and an automatic rifle, and take up firing positions. Not for the first time today, I feel I have strayed into an action movie. Morino and his men put on sunglasses. No guns, no night vision. Morino holds his megaphone in one hand and keeps the other in his pocket. Thirty-six heavily armed men to seven. A man in a white suit climbs out at leisure, flanked by two bodyguards. I wait for the order to fire. No document wallet. It was all for nothing. Morino’s voice reverbs over the reclaimed land as if his megaphone is a pinhole for the night to talk through. ‘Jun Nagasaki. Do you have any final requests?’
‘I stand here frankly amazed, Morino. Have you really sunk so low so quickly? Rumours of your demise appear to be under-exaggerated. Five tired goons, one ex-arms dealer – I shall kill you myself, Suhbataar, so painfully that even you will be impressed – and an unarmed catamite hiding up a bridge.’ So much for my safe haven. ‘This is your comeback squad? Do you have an aircraft carrier waiting offshore? Are you hoping to kill me by sheer anticlimax?’
‘I summoned you here to deliver my verdict.’
‘Are you a tertiary syphilitic? Are you Ultraman?’
‘I’ll allow you to apologize with honour. You may kill yourself.’
‘This is beyond stupid, Morino, this is rude. Let me get this right. You seriously fuck up my opening day at Xanadu. Persuading the press that Ozaki fell by accident has been a logistical hernia. You hurl bowls at my three managers until their skulls are eggshell – original, I grant you, but annoying in the extreme – then you kill two innocent bouncers the old-fashioned way and shoot my finest dog. My dog, Morino, is what really hurts. You amateur. No operator of style ever, ever harms an animal.’
‘Style? Importing uninspected shitferbeef burgers from the US and killing off Wakayama schoolchildren with O-157, and then getting your Ministry of Agricultural poodles to blame the radish farmers, is this “style”? Blackmailing bank executives over the figures you made them cook by refusing to pay back your bubble-economy loans: “style”? You call the “pay up, Mr Food Manufacturer, or pay for a razor blade in your baby products” scam “style”?’
‘Your failure to grasp the fact that the world has progressed since 1970 is why I inherited and expanded Tsuru’s interests and why you are still drawing your operational revenue on scaring loose change out of Shinjuku bar owners. How, oh how, do you suppose you will still be alive in five minutes?’
‘You forgot my two secret weapons.’
‘Did I! I am ablaze with curiosity.’
‘The first weapon is your blazing curiosity, Nagasaki. Even in the old days, you spoke before you shot.’
‘Is your second secret weapon as terrifying as your first?’
‘I present to you, ladies’ – it is hard for me to catch the next word – ‘NimQ6.’
‘“Nim – Q – 6”? A magic pissing goblin? A drain unblocker?’
‘A plastic explosive developed by the Israeli secret service.’
‘Never heard of it.’
‘Of course you never heard of it. The Israelis do not advertise in Time. But microcells of NimQ6 are imbedded in the triggers of the guns your dumb fucking apes are holding. The casings of your swanky Kevlar helmets are peppered with the stuff. My colleague here, Mr Suhbataar, oversaw the customization of your equipment when he diverted them from his Russian military supplier.’
Some of Nagasaki’s men turn to look at their boss.
Nagasaki folds his arms. ‘In the sad history of sad dumb bluffing fucks with no real cards in their hands, Morino, you are the saddest, dumbest bluffing fuck of them all. Which weapons do you think I used to wipe out Tsuru, for fuck’s sake? If there was a gram of truth in this booby-trap shit we would have found out by now.’
‘You did not find out, because I needed you to bury the Tsuru faction. For this, I thank you—’
‘Thank me when your lying guts are leaking through bullet holes. Now, I have a city to run. Stand away from the motors, you puppy dogs. I ordered those cars myself via our mutual Mongolian and I don’t want to damage the paintwork.’
Morino stubs his cigar out on the paintwork. ‘Shut up and learn. A gram of truth, you said. NimQ6 microcells weigh one twentieth of a gram. A dot on a page. It is a perfectly stable explosive, even under repeat-fire ricochet conditions, until – here is the beauty of the piece – it is oscillated by a specific VHF frequency. Then the microcell explodes with a force ample to blow away body parts. The single oscillator east of Syria is built into my mobile phone.’ To me, shivering with cold heat thirty metres up, probably with a sniper aiming at my head, this does not sound overly convincing.
Nagasaki acts bored. ‘Enough of this pseudo-science wank, Morino, I—’
‘Humour me for ten more seconds. NimQ6 is the stuff of the future. I enter the code – I took the precaution of doing this prior to your arrival tonight – and simply press the dial button. Like this—’
Blossoms of explosions boom and flame and thunder.
I duck.
Shock waves scalp the air.
The reboom echoes off the mountains.
Finally I peer over the parapet. Nagasaki’s men are scattered around where they were standing. The men who are out of the glare of the headlights are shadowy piles, but the ones who fell in the light – red as a slaughterhouse floor. Most of the torsos still have their legs attached, but the gun hands are blown away. And their heads – imploded by their combat helmets – are nowhere. I never learned the vocabulary I need to take this in. Only in war movies, horror movies: nightmares. The Cadillac door opens and Popsicle falls on to her knees. She gives a yelp of disgust, as if surprised by a spider in the bath. ‘Yaaa!’ Lizard bounders around. ‘Yaaaaaaaaa! Fucking yaaaaaaaaahaaaaaaaaay!’ Nagasaki is still alive – no helmet to remove his skull – and trying to get to his feet. Both arms are shredded stumps after the elbows. Morino struts over and puts the megaphone into his enemy’s ear. ‘Isn’t science wonderful?’ Bang!
The megaphone turns to me. ‘Seasonal fireworks, Miyake. Now listen. Midnight has passed. So the document wallet in the Cadillac is all yours. Yes. Father keeps his word. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to appreciate your hard-earned information because you’ll be dead as a fucking dodo. I brought you along just in case Nagasaki wheeled your father out of retirement. I credited the cretin with too much cunning, so it seems we have one witness too many to the night’s entertainment, instead of a possible bargaining chip. Mr Suhbataar has asked to put the bullet through your head, and as he is the chief architect of my master plan, how could I say no? Goodbye. If it makes you feel any better, you were a totally forgettable boy who would have lived a bored, stifled, colourless life. And yeah, your father is a meaningless jerk too. Sweet dreams.’
Why bother? Dead is dead.
‘You should crouch for your own safety,’ my killer insists.
My fear mangles my response to a stillborn huff.
‘No?’ Leatherjacket primes his gun. ‘Well, I warned you.’
In his hand is not his gun but his mobile telephone. He enters a number, leans over the parapet, points down at the Cadillacs, and crouches.
The night rips open its guts,
I am knocked over by a sheer wall of noise, the bridge shakes, a metallic, stony hail falls, I glimpse a flaming piece of car arcing overhead, and the document wallet containing my father is cinders. The night rezips. The echo sonic-booms off the mountains. Gravel presses into my cheekbone. I sort of stand – to my surprise, my body still works. Smoke pours upward from the craters where the Cadillacs were parked.
Leatherjacket enters another number into his mobile phone. I crouch, wondering what could be left to blow up – is he a walking bomb who explodes his own evidence? – but this time the mobile phone is only a mobile phone. ‘Mr Tsuru? Suhbataar. Your wishes regarding Mr Nagasaki and Mr Morino have been realized. Indeed, Mr Tsuru. Just as they sowed, they reaped.’ He puts his phone away and looks at me.
Burning and crackling.
My lip is bleeding where I bit it. ‘Are you going to kill me?’
‘I am thinking about it. Are you afraid?’
‘I am very, very afraid.’
‘Fear is not necessarily a weakness. I disdain weakness, but I disdain waste. To survive, you must persuade yourself that tonight was another man’s nightmare into which you accidentally strayed. Find a place to hide by daybreak, and stay hidden for many days. If you assist the police in any way, you will be killed immediately. Do you understand?’
I nod, and sneeze. When I look up, smoke swallows up the night.
Five
STUDY OF TALES
MARGINS
Goatwriter peered out at the starless night. His breath misted up the windscreen. First frost floated a wafer of ice on eidelweiss wine. Goatwriter counted three noises. The candle spluttering on his writing bureau; Mrs Comb battling in her sleep, ‘Don’t care was made to care, Amaryllis Broomhead!’; and Pithecanthropus, snoring in his undercarriage hammock. The fourth noise, the whisperings which Goatwriter was waiting for, was still a way away, so Goatwriter rummaged for his respectable spectacles to leaf through a book of poems composed by Princess Nukada in the ninth century. Goatwriter unearthed this volume one thundery Thursday in Delhi. Since midsummer, every night went the same. The venerable coach parked, Goatwriter woke, and nothing would make him sleep again. One, two, three hours later the whisperings came. Goatwriter told nobody about his insomnia, not even Pithecanthropus, and certainly not Mrs Comb, who was sure to prescribe a ghastly ‘curative’ worse than the complaint. In the beginning, Goatwriter believed the whisperings were the local Aberdeen waterfalls, but this theory was scotched when the whisperings followed to other locations. Goatwriter’s second theory was that he was insane. But with no other mental faculty affected, Goatwriter had come to believe that the whisperings had their origins in his fountain pen – the selfsame pen Lady Shonagon wrote her pillow book with, over thirteen thousand crescent moons ago. Goatwriter heard a hush, a rustle, and his heart raced faster. He slid Princess Nukada back on the shelf and pressed his ear against the pen shaft. Yes, he thought, here they come. But tonight, the words were more distinct – listen! A ‘queer’ here, a ‘pear’ there, an ‘ebony mare’ everywhere. Goatwriter picked up the fountain pen and began to write, slowly at first, as the words spattered singly, but soon sentences flowed, filled and overspilled.
‘Oh, sir, this is the giddy limit!’ Mrs Comb opened the morning curtains. ‘If you go gallivanting in the wee hours, wrap up proper! If your rheumatism plays up again, Muggins here’ll have to do your lugging and carrying, mark my words.’
Goatwriter unpeeled his sticky eyes open. ‘Unquiet slumbers, Mrs Comb – I dreamed of m-metal detecting for Norse nonagons in a delta where it was Wednesday m-morning for all eternity.’
Mrs Comb tied her apron strings tight. ‘I told you ninety-nine times, sir – “Creams and honey, dreams turn funny.” But you insist on your Devonshire suppers. Now, up and about with you. Your breakfast is done. Earl Grey with Zanzibar kippers, grilled to your fancy.’ Mrs Comb looked out at the landscape. ‘A right dreary spot, and no mistake.’
Goatwriter found his pince-nez on a monocle chronicle and peered. The venerable coach had rolled to a cold shoulder of more still moored still moors. ‘Inky landscape, paperpulp sky. I remain in little doubt, Mrs Comb, we are in the margins.’ Hawthorn huddled in well-wallowed hollows.
‘Drab name for a drab place,’ Mrs Comb pronounced.
‘The soil is too acidic for colour to take root. A m-marginal duke once tried to station a daffodil plantation, but the yellow bleached away. Even evergreens never greened. No bird is heard, no low crows fly by.’
‘Aye, well, sir. Your kippers’ll be growing cold.’
Goatwriter frowned. ‘Strange to say, Mrs Comb, but of appetite I am bereft. Perhaps I might ask you to put the fish on a dish, and I shall eat them by and by. For now, a splash of tea would suffice—’ Goatwriter lost the tail of his sentence. ‘How vexatious! I wrote dozens of pages last night – but where are they now?’ He looked beneath, between, behind his table – but the pages were gone. ‘This is disastrous! I wrote fragments of a truly untold tale!’
Despite decades of service, Mrs Comb was cross about the kippers. ‘You had another writing dream, I dare say, sir. Remember when you dreamed you wrote Les Misérables? It took your editor a week to persuade you not to take Victor Hugo to court for flagellism.’ The door banged open and the wind sprang in. A fearsome prehistoric creature filled the frame with his hairy, mud-spattered torso. He grunted several times in the language of clay and blood. Mrs Comb glared fiercely. ‘Don’t you dare clomp your filthy mudluggers on my clean carpet!’
‘A jolly good m-morning to you, too, Pithecanthropus.’ Goatwriter forgot his missing pages. ‘What are you holding there, my dear fellow?’
Pithecanthropus opened his cupped hands towards Mrs Comb. A delicate white flower drooped from its clod of earth. ‘I say!’ exclaimed Goatwriter. ‘A Snowdonian snowdrop! In September! How exquisite! How rare!’
Mrs Comb was less impressed. ‘I’ll thank you for digging up your mucky weeds and carrying them elsewhere! Such a muckster I never beheld! And shut the door on your way out! Do you want me and Sir to catch our deaths?’
Pithecanthropus grunted dejectedly and closed the door.
‘Nowt but a hairy savage, that one.’ Mrs Comb scrubbed the kipper pan. ‘A savage!’ Goatwriter felt sorry for his friend, but he knew better than to come between Mrs Comb and her temper.
So I wake up staring at another unfamiliar ceiling, and slip into my amnesia game. I am numb and I want to stay numb. I used to play this after Anju went, when I began my nine-year round of uncles’ spare rooms and rice-cracker futons – ‘Eiji is visiting this month’ – and cousins who had the atomic warhead in any possible argument – ‘If you don’t like it here, go back to your grandmother’s house!’ Anyway, the object of the game is to hold on to this sensation of not knowing where I am for as long as possible. I count to ten but I am still clueless. I slept on a ballooning sofa in the middle of a living room, pale curtains covering a big bay window. I have a mouth ulcer the size of a hoofprint. Bang! goes the memory bomb. The heads in the bowling alley. I see Morino, cigar-lit. The Mongolian on the unfinished bridge. I flex my sore muscles. My nose and throat in the corked-up stage of a bad cold; my body sorts itself out despite its idiot brain. How long have I been asleep? Who fed Cat? A box of Lark cigarettes on the coffee table. Only three left, and I smoke one after another, lighting them with matches. My teeth feel clad in lagging. The room is warm. I slept in my clothes, my crotch and armpits are stewing. I should open the window, but I can’t be bothered to move quite yet. While I lie here nothing new can begin, and more distance opens up between me and the deaths of thirty, forty men. I groan. I cannot unsee what I saw. It will be national news, if not international news. Yakuza Wars, from now until the new year. I groan. Forensics men will be crawling over the battleground with tweezers. The Serious Crime Squad will be interviewing Xanadu shoppers. A girl employed at the already infamous pachinko parlour will have told reporters about an impostor claiming to be the manager’s son, moments be
fore Mr Ozaki himself was thrown through the second-floor security window. Police artists will be making charcoal sketches. What do I do? What will the unseen Mr Tsuru want done to me? What has become of Mama-san and Queen of Spades? I have no plan. I have no cigarettes. I have no tissues to ungunge my nose. I listen hard, and I can hear . . . absolutely nothing.
How else would I shunt loose my morning dump if I gave up smoking? Bowel-shaking is one quality of cigarettes that never appears in the surf ’n’ bronzed ads. I regret sleeping in my jeans, but I was afraid to undress in case I woke up to hear the door being jemmied and needed to bolt. I still am. This is worse than waiting for an earthquake. But what do I do if I think I hear an intruder? Hide? Where? I have no idea even how many floors this house has. I get up: first stop, toilet. Japanese-squat style, with a bowl of bitter herbs. A good clean birth – Western toilets increase the risk of complications. A Niagara Falls flush. The kitchen is terracotta and spotless – the owner loves cooking, judging from the flour-thumbed recipe books. Each cooking implement hangs on its own hook. Through the window I see an empty carport and a front garden. Roses, weeds and a bird table. A high privet hedge hides the house from the outside world. The cleaning cupboard is well stocked, but is too obvious to hide in. The living room is Japanese – tatami matting, a Buddhist altar with photographs of the recent and long dead, an alcove for flower arrangements, and a hanging scroll with kanji that would give me a headache if I tried to read them. There is no TV, no stereo and no telephone – just a receiver-less fax machine on the top of an ample bookshelf. The books are old, illustrated collections of tales. ‘The Moon Princess’, ‘Urashima Taro’, ‘Gon the Fox’. This house seems too orderly for kids. I open the curtains an inch. The back garden is somebody’s pride and joy. The pond is bigger than my grandmother’s – I can see carp lurking in the green. Late dragonflies skim over the duckweed. A stone lantern sits on an island. Pots of lavender, and a high bamboo grove, thick enough to hide in. Birds nest in an orange mailbox nailed to a silver birch. You could watch this garden for hours. It unfolds. No wonder there is no TV. I go upstairs. The carpet is snowy and lush under my bare feet. A lavish bathroom with seahorse taps. A master bedroom – the décor suggests a middle-aged couple. The smaller bedroom is only used for guests. Well. No hiding places here. You have to be nine years old to find good hiding places in the average house. Anju won by hiding in the washing machine one time. I assume my tour is complete, but notice a slatted cupboard door at the end of the landing. Its knob twizzles uselessly, but it swings open anyway. Its shelves are not shelves, but steep stairs. A knotted rope hangs down to help you haul yourself up. On the third step my head hits the ceiling, which shifts. I push, and a crack of daylight opens as the plyboard trapdoor swings up. I was way wrong. This is better than a hiding place. I emerge into a library/study with the highest book population density I have ever come across. Book walls, book towers, book avenues, book side streets. Book spillages, book rubble. Paperback books, hardback books, atlases, manuals, almanacs. Nine lifetimes of books. Enough books to build an igloo to hide in. The room is sentient with books. Mirrors double and cube the books. A Great Wall of China quantity of books. Enough books to make me wonder if I am a book too. Light comes in through a high triangular window. A sort of wickerwork light shade hangs down. Apart from the bookcases and sagging shelves, the only item of furniture is an old-fashioned writing bureau with square holes to lose papers and bills in. My grandmother had the same sort. Still does, I guess. On the writing bureau are two piles of paper – one white and blank as starched shirts, the other a manuscript laid in a special lacquer tray. I cannot help myself. I sit down and begin reading page one.