Non-Stop Till Tokyo (37 page)

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 Sonja 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.

I wished Chanko were here. In a handful of days, I’d got used to his presence, not precisely comforting, but always there, and always, unquestionably on my side. I didn’t know how I was going to carry on without it.

I would not think about that
I don’t care
, back in the subway station. He wasn’t going to take some insane risk. He’d said there was going to be a
later
.

But if he was intent on bringing Sonja back to me…

If Sonja got out of this alive, I was going to kill her.

It was a lovely crisp morning. I looked out of the window at the deep-pink blossom of a plum tree, petals sticking to the twisted black boughs against a cloudless sky, and as I looked I started to understand something that I’d never quite appreciated. The rage for Noriko and Sonja and Minachan, the sick fear for Yoshi and Chanko: they were burning in my gut, but the plum blossom was still perfectly, transiently beautiful. This was why castles built for bloody siege had to have curved roofs and moon-viewing platforms, why a besieging feudal lord would come within bowshot of the castle walls to listen to an accomplished flute player within, and get an arrow in the chest for his pains. Maybe you didn’t really get the plum blossom until you had the war.

I was sitting in the LDK, thinking about it, when the back door exploded open.

It was a maelstrom of noise. Flying glass and splintering wood, and the door thudding back against the wall, and the roaring, thick-necked man charging through it, and my screams. I flung myself up from the floor cushion, losing crucial fractions of a second, hurled myself along the hallway, scrabbled at the front door, still screaming, trying to pull it open, but the fucking chain was on and—

And there was cold metal at my neck.

“Shut up, bitch. Turn round.”

I turned. I couldn’t do anything else.

He had cropped hair, a round head on a meaty neck, and marks all over his face. One eye was swelling, and his thin lips were distended and purple. The beating looked raw and very recent. There was a gun in his hand, and he stroked the muzzle against my face, down the side of my cheek.

“Fucking bitch,” he said softly, and punched me in the breast.

I had no idea how much that would hurt. I was gasping, staggering backwards, bumping painfully into the locked door, and he grabbed me by the throat and forced my head back against the wood, hard.

“Who’s in the house, bitch?”

“Nobody,” I choked, hating the tears of pain that were spilling down my cheeks.

“If you’re lying to me, I’ll cut your tits off.”

“
Nobody
.”

He jerked at my neck, so I came staggering forward, and grabbed my arm, twisting it up behind my back, then shoved me along, nudging the muzzle of the gun under the hem of my sweater, against my skin.

“Let’s take a look.”

The only rooms on the ground floor were the LDK and the bathroom. He checked the toilet first, glancing inside. Then he pushed back the sliding door to the wet-room and stepped in, dragging me with him.

The bath cover had been slid back to halfway position, showing it was empty of anything but water. The surface was smooth and still.

Oguya—it had to be—glanced briefly around the empty room and shoved me back out, hard, so that I stumbled and he got to pull on my arm. The muscles at my shoulder screamed.

“Upstairs,” he ordered me.

The bedrooms were upstairs. I couldn’t move for a second, and he jammed a knuckle into the small of my back, twisting hard. “Go!”

He changed his tactics when I reached the top of the stairs, grabbing me with his arm round my neck instead, so that I was a human shield in front of him. He had the gun out in his other hand.

“If you don’t come out, I’ll kill her,” he called out, almost singsong.

“There isn’t—” I began, and he grabbed the hair on the back of my head and pulled, viciously.

“Shut up, whore. Move.”

He threw open Taka’s bedroom door first, the two futons still haphazardly out on the floor in a riot of bedding. Then the second bedroom, mine and Chanko’s.

I hadn’t folded the futons away this morning. It hadn’t seemed worth it. But I had straightened the quilt, over the two mattresses together, so the double bed was ready for use.

Oguya made a little noise in his throat. He pressed his face into the back of my neck and licked upward, his hot tongue slithering wetly into my hair and over the side of my face.

“Just wait, bitch,” he said into my ear. “You’ll get yours soon.”

He shoved me round, threw open the last door, to the study, and stared.