by Mark Dawson
Whatever. Life was too short to worry about the opinion of a patronising taxi driver, and Ziggy didn’t push it. In any event, he was buoyed by the sense of anticipation that he felt. He rested his bag on the seat next to him and thought about the situation that he had found himself in. The arrangement was far from satisfactory, but it still gave him shivers of excitement whenever he thought about it.
He thought of Shoko.
Ziggy had been single for years, long since before he had made his way to Tokyo. It was one of those things that he had come to accept. Some people were in relationships; others were not. He was one of the people who were not. He had tried to persuade himself that it didn’t matter and had immersed himself in his online world as a counterweight to the things he lacked in real life. And, for a time, it had worked. He spent hours lost in online games, using a hack he had written to level up a mage in World of Warcraft until he was so powerful that he was almost a God. When he bored of that, he made a name for himself on the forums where hackers met to buy and sell data. There were skilful coders there, but he knew he was better than all of them. He adopted a boastful online persona and defended his reputation against anyone who claimed that they had his measure. He developed a data packet that could be transmitted through forum posts, with the eventual consequence of wrecking the recipient’s machine. A man of his talents could make himself rich beyond measure in a place like that, but he performed hacks mostly to inflate his status.
He thought that the distractions would be enough to take his mind off the fact that he was alone, but they had not. He still found himself drawn to porn sites, and he still found himself looking at couples who walked hand in hand in Roppongi with a hot stab of jealousy. In the end, he had to admit it to himself.
He was lonely.
He was determined to fix it just as he would fix any other problem. He would use data and logic to optimise his opportunities. He conducted a survey of the local online dating scene. It was big in Tokyo, and getting bigger. None of the sites he remembered from his time at home had been able to crack the market, but home-grown businesses, built on the same principles but with a Japanese slant, were gaining market share.
For someone with Ziggy’s particular set of skills, that was an opportunity.
He chose the one with the best reputation. It was called JapanCupid and had the best-looking women in Tokyo, who, fortunately, were reputed to have a preference for rich Western men. Ziggy had the ethnicity and he could add money whenever he needed it by ripping off credit card information and selling it in the forums. The problem he had experienced during his first forays, however, was that women evidently didn’t find him attractive. They ignored his profile and, when he did manage to meet a girl in real life, she inevitably turned up her nose, made her excuses and left him embarrassingly early.
Ziggy was not what would be considered good looking. He was short, with a thatch of untidy ginger hair that he had no interest in taming. His eyes bulged a little and, since he worked at night and rarely saw the sun, his complexion was as pallid as a ghost’s, pitted with the old acne scars that had blighted his adolescence. At least he was self-aware enough not to pretend that he was attractive. He wasn’t vain and didn’t labour under the misapprehension that he was better looking than he was: he knew his appearance was a problem, especially in a culture where the women put so much store in a handsome mate.
He had considered using a fake photograph on his profile, but what was the point of that? He could string them along for as long as he liked, and that might be enjoyable to a point, but, in the end, he was going to have to meet them in the real world and his ruse would be busted in seconds.
No. He would be clever.
He improvised two workarounds that improved his efficiency. First, he registered with another dating site and posted a profile that targeted women in Nagoya. Far enough away that he wouldn’t be found out, close enough that the women would share the same characteristics. He wrote an automated script that approached women who met a number of selection criteria. The script changed his profile picture and copy, switching through a series of eight, and then compiled the results of the split test so that he knew which combination of picture and copy was most likely to elicit a favourable response.
That was the first part. With that information in hand, he created an optimal profile and wrote a second script that contacted every eligible woman on the site in Tokyo. The script texted him every time he received an interesting response and, at a prompt, would begin pre-scripted conversations for him.
It had been effective. The script had contacted over five hundred women thus far. Fifty of them had replied. Five of them had graduated through the automated sequence and he had taken over the correspondence himself.
Two of them, in particular, were promising.
He met the first woman for dinner at Mikawa Zezankyo, and, over flawless tempura served straight from the wok to the plate, he had suffered through the most excruciating two hours that he could remember. The girl was self-absorbed and purely materialistic, and he had found her quite awful. He escaped as soon as he could, his wallet lightened and his confidence shaken.
And then he met the second woman.
Her name was Shoko Miyazaki.
And she was special.
Chapter Eleven
SHOKO HAD arranged to meet him at Kozue, a restaurant elevated above the bustle of the city on the fortieth floor of the Park Hyatt. The girl had expensive taste, and Ziggy had sold several lists of credit card details in order to afford their various rendezvous. This place, in particular, had proven to be one of her favourites.
She was waiting for him at the same table that they had been given before. It was at the window, with a vast view of the western hills. It had been daytime the last time they had visited and they had been rewarded then with a clear view of majestic Mount Fuji, its cone silhouetted in the distance. Tonight, it was dark, and there was just the suggestion of a dark mass beyond the glow of the neon that leached into the night.
Ziggy went across to her. “Hello, Shoko.”
She was wearing a crop top and a pair of fitted jeans. Her hair had been coloured a vivid red and she bore that striking hue as if it were a badge to denote that she wouldn’t be like other Japanese women her age. She never bowed, and her voice was natural and confident and without the high pitch that was a common affectation of local girls in the company of strangers. Ziggy looked at her. She was extraordinarily attractive.
“Have you been here long?”
She ignored his question. “Well?”
Straight to business today, he thought. Very romantic. “Yes. I got it. It’s done.”
“Where is it?”
“In the usual place.”
Finally, she smiled for him. Her face, which had a tendency towards the stern, temporarily lit up. For that moment, basking in the glow of her beauty, he forgot just how foolish this whole scheme was. She reached across the table and laid a hand across his, and, as easily as that, his reservations became irrelevant.
“Very good, Ziggy. It was okay?”
He dismissed the suggestion that it might have been anything other than easy for him. “Simple.”
“You are talented man,” she said.
He felt his cheeks redden; she rarely praised him.
The waiter arrived. Ziggy took up the menu and searched through it as Shoko ordered sweetfish and matsutake mushrooms. He had shabu-shabu of marbled beef from premium wagyu cattle. He knew that the bill would be high, especially with the sake that he wanted to drink, but he didn’t care about that. He had inflated his credit card limit to an obscene amount and he would just go into the bank’s systems and reset the balance to zero when they were done.
He looked across the table at his date. She was young and headstrong, beautiful, with a disdainful curl of her lip that somehow made her even more attractive to him. Their first meeting had been difficult. He had known that she was out of his league and that, unless he did something to c
hange the way she looked at him, she wouldn’t be interested in seeing him again. She had mentioned in their online correspondence that she was interested in technology and, seizing that as a dying man seizes a lifebelt, Ziggy had begun to show off. He had been working on hacks to exploit the loopholes in car security for several months. Not because he was interested in stealing cars, but because he liked to challenge himself. He had demonstrated his software to her, thinking that his ingenuity would be a good way to woo her. He had been right. She had watched agog as he started the engine of her BMW from the window of the restaurant, and her reticence had—temporarily, at least—melted away.
He knew why now, of course. His talents and the opportunities she was interested in exploiting were a fortuitous combination. But it had bought him time, and her favour. She had pretended to show interest. Unfortunately, although Ziggy wasn’t stupid and had known that she was stringing him along, he had allowed his lust to blind him. He should have disengaged there and then, before anything had the chance to develop. But he hadn’t. He had stuck around, trying to develop a relationship with her even when he had known that it was a bad, bad idea. By the time he finally listened to his doubts, it was too late. She had settled on the notion that they were going to work together, and that was that.
The hacking software wasn’t something that he would have followed up in a professional capacity, but she had been impressed enough that, when they met for their third date, she had a proposition. She had grown distant from him in the days preceding her visit, ignoring his emails and texts, but she promised that this offer would be a chance for them to become more intimate. They would develop a business relationship that could, she promised, be extremely lucrative for them both. Ziggy’s instincts screamed at him to politely decline, to leave and then never speak to her again. His lust, though, would not be dissuaded. She said that a business relationship could lead to something else… and he was sold.
Shoko explained that her brother was involved in buying and selling cars. He would supply the details of vehicles that he knew he could sell; Ziggy would “acquire” them, and he would be paid generously for his efforts.
And, like the worst fool, he had agreed.
The Ferrari was the third car that he had stolen for her. There had been a Lexus and a Range Rover before that. He had brought them to the underground lot and left them there. Each time, she had made fresh promises to him, and he would be dragged just a little bit deeper under the surface.
Their food arrived and he watched her as she ate. She was stunning, and the haughtiness made her even more appealing. The fact that she was prepared to spend time with him was something that he couldn’t quite understand. He knew it was the cars and the money he was making for her brother. The opportunities he was providing were the only reasons she tolerated his presence. But, on other occasions, when he allowed himself the luxury of dreaming, he wondered whether, just perhaps, there could be something else. He allowed himself that luxury now. That small bud of hope, so unlikely when set against all the rational evidence—the possibility that she might be attracted to him—drew him back, time and time again, like a moth to a flame.
He tried to engage her in small talk, but her replies were crisp and clipped and discouraging. He told her about a new hack he was perfecting, one that would allow him to infect a computer using ultrahigh-frequency sound waves, but she didn’t seem particularly interested and he quickly gave it up. He resumed watching her as discreetly as he could, but she still noticed. She gave him a flat little smile and then looked past him into the restaurant. It was as if she were dining alone.
Ziggy was finishing his steak as he noticed a man enter the restaurant, pause next to the maître d’, and then head toward them. He passed all the other tables that he might have stopped at until there was no doubt that he could only be headed for them.
Ziggy felt his stomach flip. “Shoko?”
“Relax.”
“Who is this?”
“It is my brother.” The man took an empty seat from the adjacent table and placed it next to theirs, between Ziggy and Shoko. “Ziggy,” Shoko said, “this is Kazuki.”
“I said I would only work with you,” he protested.
The man sat. “I know what you said. But you knew my sister was working with me.”
“That’s not the point.”
“I like to know with whom I am working. We are sending a lot of work your way. It is reasonable that I assure myself that you are trustworthy.”
“But it isn’t what we agreed.”
Ziggy started to rise. He would walk to the door and take the elevator down to the street. He would ignore Shoko, pretend that he had never met her. He would—
“Stay there, please.”
Ziggy stopped. Kazuki was holding up a single finger.
“No. I’m going. I’m done.”
As Ziggy paused, Kazuki wagged his finger from side to side. “You are not done. You stay. I want to talk to you.”
“I’ve had enough,” Ziggy said. “Your car is in the usual place. A quarter of a million dollars. Give me my money and we’ll call it quits. No hard feelings, we all move on.”
“No. We will not do that. I would like to talk to you. Somewhere else.”
* * *
HE KNEW he couldn’t say no. They took him to Roppongi in a BMW that was waiting in the street below. They parked the car and walked the rest of the way. The district was thronged with high-rises and drenched in neon, with vast electronic billboards projecting gigantic figures onto the flanks of the buildings. It was a sleek and futuristic cityscape that, nevertheless, did not obscure the area’s sleazy underbelly. In just the last few weeks, a famous singer had been busted for supplying drugs to a groupie that led to her death, and two sumo wrestlers were disgraced after they tried to buy weed from undercover cops. The area was one of the main draws for foreigners, and their presence and the promise of their money drew in local prostitutes and illicit traders all looking to make a quick buck at their expense. Ziggy watched as a Lexus pulled up to the side of the road and a salon-tanned beauty in vertiginous high heels stepped out onto the pavement, her hands smoothing down her short skirt and just barely maintaining her modesty. A Westerner in a sharp suit slid out of the driver’s seat and she anchored herself to him, clinging to his arm in a fashion that struck Ziggy as almost comically proprietorial. They passed a balding Westerner who was clearly drunk, his fly undone, leching after a local girl who, Ziggy assessed, could have only been legal by a few months if she was legal at all. He passed a karaoke bar, a Western salaryman slurring out the words to “Sex on Fire” while grinding his crotch against a waitress too jaded by the relentlessness of it all to give it even a moment of disgust.
Ziggy looked left and right, taking it all in, and moved on. It was a warm night, and the frantic buzz of activity that made Tokyo so special seemed as if it had been amped up a little by the heat and the humidity. The streets were busy with revellers passing between the area’s bars and clubs. Ziggy was cautious. He scanned the faces of the men and women around him and saw no one that he recognised. He knew that he had to tread carefully. Recent events had reminded him that it was foolish to think that you could ever be too careful. He still felt the ache of the injury that he had suffered during his first trip to New Orleans, and he still remembered the beating he had been given during his second. Both served to remind him that bad things happened when he lowered his guard.
They reached the broad avenue of Gaien Higashi Dori. He saw groups of predatory local girls looking for prey, a raucous stag party, a drunken man who had been separated from his friends and now could only maintain his balance by clinging to a lamp post. An elderly woman leaned against the doorway of a building, trying to tempt tourists with Photoshopped pictures of girls in a laminated brochure. Drug dealers loitered on corners, their business transacted in darkened alleyways. He saw gorgeous Western women who, having failed at whatever it was that they had come to Tokyo to do, now made ends meet by offer
ing conversation and sometimes more to the local salarymen who were enchanted by their long legs and foreign beauty.
Kazuki and Shoko stopped as they reached their destination. Womb was a well-known dance club and there was already a queue of youngsters waiting to get inside. Shoko made her way to the front of the line and told the bouncer that she had a reservation, and the man stepped aside so that they could get into the building.
The club offered non-stop performances by a cohort of up-and-coming DJs seeking their first breaks and jaded veterans who played for the free bar and wide-eyed groupies they could enjoy in return. It was a dark space on the second floor of an office block, accessed by an unreliable shoebox lift. As he stepped out of the lift into the steamy atmosphere of the darkened room, he saw that the place was jammed, the atmosphere soupy with humidity and the low ceiling dripping with moisture. Electronic dance music throbbed out of the big speakers, enough to rattle the unattended glasses on the table.
There was a hostess waiting at a lectern just inside the entrance. She had a louche, haughty beauty to her, her face perfectly made up and with a pair of discreet plugs nestled in her ears. She looked at Shoko and then Kazuki, and then him. As she regarded him, her expression changed to one of mild disgust. Shoko spoke to her. She nodded her satisfaction and, without a word, beckoned to another woman who was waiting inside the club. The hostess turned away without another look, as if the effort of looking at Ziggy was as much as she could stand. Ziggy had a momentary feeling of inadequacy and, self-consciously, looked down at the clothes he was wearing. He didn’t normally care what he looked like, but now he realised that his moderately expensive jeans and shirt looked cheap compared to the outfits sported by the revellers inside the club. The hostess must have pegged him as someone without the means to be worth her time.
Well, Ziggy thought, she was wrong about that.
