Non-Stop Till Tokyo (36 page)

I hustled her into the bedroom and started digging out a few of my things that might be wearable, and a dry towel. “I’ll run you a bath,” I said. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. I think. I’ve never been so scared. I had to hide in the toilet to call you, and they must have been listening, because they came running out after me. Horrible. And my nose hurts. And that pig of a cab driver took all my cash. Three thousand yen for Shibuya to Roppongi, with empty streets.”

“What a rip-off.” I led the way into Taka’s bathroom. It was a fairly typical wet-room, in pink plastic, with a sink outside, a shower, and a short, deep bath, electronically controlled, and with a plastic cover that could be slid over the top of the bath to keep the heat in between users. I hit the buttons on the control panel, setting the fill level a bit lower than Taka’s default, in deference to Minachan’s height.

While the bath ran, I damped some cotton wool with the surgical spirit Chanko had used on me and started dabbing at Minachan’s dried blood, cuts and grazes.

“Ow,” she said. “Thanks for sending Chanko-san.”

“I didn’t. He went by himself.”

“Well, thanks for letting him.”

“Is this hurting?”

“It all hurts. I was really glad to see him. There were these two drunk gaijin, they wouldn’t leave me alone. But they went away pretty quickly when he arrived. He’s very tall.”

“I know.”

“He’s really nice.” Minachan glanced up at me. Her eyes were tired and watery from the pain, but there was a hint of the familiar sparkle there. “Don’t you think? I like him a lot.”

“He hasn’t got any money.”

“Well, I know that,” she said scornfully. Minachan had some kind of sixth sense, not merely for actual wealth, but for whether men would spend it on her: for closet cases trying to compensate or penny-pinching tendencies, unaudited expense accounts or budget-balancing wives. “But I owe him. I thought I could give him, you know, some
personal
thanks— Ouch!”

“I’ll pass on your thanks for you,” I snapped. “Don’t trouble yourself.”

“Ha! I knew it.” She smirked at me, but it was a parody of her normal zest. “Sonja owes me two thousand yen.”

I wasn’t going to ask what the bet had been. “Your bath’s nearly ready. Don’t drown or anything.”

“Thanks. Comb your hair.”

Outside the wet-room, I checked my appearance in the mirror and winced. Hugely distended pupils, sallow skin, dreadful bed hair, eyes ringed with sleep and exhaustion and old makeup. I gave my face a rapid wash, finger-combed, took a fortifying breath and headed upstairs.

From the study door, Chanko saw me coming and pointed a finger firmly down again to the LDK.

“I want to get dressed,” I complained as he shut the door behind us.

“I go away for one hour,” he said. “One goddamn hour, and you’ve not only let Taka talk you into one of his goddamn schemes, you’ve let him shove
yā bā
up his nose first. What the hell were you thinking?”

“Oguya had already started on Sonja. We had to do something—”

“This?”

“Look, I didn’t want to give Hearn up either!” I shouted. “We tried to find a number for him, we emailed, but what the hell were we supposed to do? Leave Sonja with them till we warned him, when it’s all his fault in the first place?”

Chanko had tried to interrupt me a couple of times as I yelled. Now he held up both hands, palms out, commanding silence.

“Screw Hearn. Okay? That was always going to happen. If he hasn’t had the sense to go to the police or leave the country, he’s dead, and seeing as he murdered an old guy, even a shitty old guy, I don’t propose to lose sleep over it. Which I would have told you, if you’d asked.”

“Oh. I assumed— Why are you shouting at me, then?”

“Because of this mess. Jesus wept, Butterfly, you promised me you’d be careful. Now you’ve told the Mitsuyoshi-kai you’re in a position to screw them, and you’re handing them a link to Higuchi—go on, what else?”

“Everything we can think of. We’re going to get Sonja back and frame up the bastards and send out the information.”

Chanko started to say something, then passed a hand over his face. We stared at each other in silence for a few minutes.

“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 follows 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.