Non-Stop Till Tokyo

by KJ Charles

  I told her briefly what I thought of Jun. “He threw me out of the car, I had to go through Ameyokochō.”

  “I know. But they knew you were going to Ueno to take the Shinkansen, they would only have caught you both.”

  “How did they know where I was going?”

  It was a demand of the gods rather than a question that I expected her to answer, but her long indrawn breath and hesitation were the clearest giveaways possible.

  “Yukie-chan? How did they know?”

  “Ah—I’m sorry—”

  “Yukie!”

  “Mama-san,” said Yukie, in a voice little more than a child’s whisper. “Mama-san told them.”

  I sagged against the side of the train, feeling my knees buckle. “Mama-san? But why?”

  “Oh, Kerry-chan, I’m sorry, but she had to. She tried to help, but she had to give them something—they hit her, all of us—and she waited as long as she could, and she hasn’t yet—” Her voice had become completely inaudible under the rushing of the train at my end and the roar of Shinjuku at hers.

  “Yet what? Talk louder please.”

  Yukie swallowed; I heard the gulp down the line. She pushed the receiver closer to her mouth rather than raising her voice, so that it buzzed and distorted in my ear.

  “She will have to tell them you aren’t really blonde or Western. She hasn’t yet, but soon she will have to give them something else. She’ll tell them about the way you gaijin up—”

  “But why? You know this wasn’t my fault!” I heard the wail in my voice and lowered my volume. “This is ridiculous. I had nothing to do with it. Surely the old man will say—”

  “The old man is dead,” said Yukie. “He died a couple of hours ago. He never regained consciousness.”

  My knees gave way completely, and I had to grab onto the windowsill to stop myself falling to the floor. Hell. All the while Auntie had been chattering, I’d been hanging on to one thing: when Mitsuyoshi-san woke up, he would tell his goons who had attacked him, clear my name, and I could go home. I’d almost convinced myself that he would have woken by now, that there might even be a little something in the way of an apology—

  Shit.

  “Tell me everything, please. From the start.”

  Yukie leaned into the phone and poured out what she knew. She wasn’t the brightest of girls, and her words were falling over themselves in panic, and the more scared she got as she went over last night’s events, the quieter she became. I stuffed my finger in my other ear and stitched together her broken phrases and subjectless sentences into a coherent whole.

  Last evening, a couple of hours before the bar opened, Mitsuyoshi-san had gone to a love hotel. These places are the natural product of a crowded country where the walls are thin—hotels where you can rent rooms for sex, by the hour or two hours or night. They’re reasonably respectable, clean and extremely private. Some are completely automatic and card-operated; even in the unmodernised ones, you don’t see or speak to the cashier, who sits behind a curtain or smoked glass with only his hands visible; and the entrance and exit are separate so you never have to encounter other clients.

  So Mitsuyoshi-san arrived at Dogenzaka, Love Hotel Hill, tottered in to the particularly plush establishment he’d decided to honour with his patronage to meet his gaijin girlfriend, and left his bodyguards outside to wait for him. They waited as per instructions, and waited, and some time later, when he still hadn’t emerged, they stopped making lewd jokes and began to worry. He should have come out half an hour ago to head off to an important meeting. And although they agreed they’d forget about meetings too if they were slipping it to the foreign tart, she would also doubtless be more of a strain on his heart than Mitsuyoshi-san’s wife had ever been. Was he asleep? Should they check? What if they interrupted at a crucial moment? The old man would kill them. But what if they let him miss the meeting?

  Eventually they went to the desk and harassed people, until a frightened clerk was induced to tell them that the room had been taken for two hours, which were now substantially exceeded. Nobody had responded to the automatic requests for more payment, and there would be a surcharge.

  The yakuza ignored such trivial considerations. The room had been taken before they got here. Mitsuyoshi-san’s mistress had got there first, a long way before their appointment. Why? And why had nobody extended the booking if they were still in there?

  The love hotel didn’t have hidden cameras in the rooms, which the yakuza doubtless felt was missing a trick. So they went up and knocked on the door, and when nobody answered they kicked it in and found Mitsuyoshi-san on the floor with his pants round his scrawny knees and a bloody mess where his temple should have been.

  They didn’t involve the police, nor did they recommend the hotel staff do so. They took the CCTV recordings of the entrance and exit, and they got a trustworthy doctor, and they shipped the dying Mitsuyoshi-san to an accommodating private hospital, and then they sat down to watch what had happened. In went a blonde woman in a short clingy dress. Fast forward and there was Mitsuyoshi-san tottering in, and, just a mere half hour after that, out came the blonde again, on her own, in a long coat with her giveaway hair hidden beneath a hood. Neither of the bodyguards had even seen her leave.

  “Wait a minute, Yukie, how do you know all this?”

  “They’ve been at the bar for ages. Telling us everything so they can ask questions. One of them…I knew him, from another bar. Um. I—he liked me, before, so…I dated him a few times, but I didn’t really like… Um. He came over.” She didn’t sound like it was a welcome reunion. “He wanted to talk to me, when he saw me. So I did. I had to…be friendly. And I talked to him too.”

  “Oh, Yukie, no,” I said, horrified, knowing what friendly meant. “You didn’t.”

  “We needed to know,” she said softly. “It’s very bad for us all.”

  So the yakuza went to find Kelly, who was at home.

  If she had just paid for the love hotel for the night, she might have got away with it. Maybe not, given he had a meeting, but without the suspicious overstay, they might have waited that bit longer. But it would have been a waste of money, and Kelly always did hate to waste money. She knew how long she needed—why pay out an extra four thousand yen? That was about forty dollars, after all. Look after the pennies, and the organised criminals will look after themselves while you miss the big picture completely.

  Even then, if she had just cut and run, walked straight out of the love hotel and into a cab to Narita Airport—but she didn’t. She had packed up all her belongings, and her suitcases were lined up against the wall, but she was still in the flat she shared with a couple of other gaijin when the yakuza put the door in.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid Kelly.

  So they picked her up and took her somewhere, the family headquarters I suppose, and they asked her to explain what had happened to Mitsuyoshi-san, and she told them she didn’t know and it wasn’t her. She told them she had lost Mitsuyoshi-san’s affections to the other blonde—the one who always sat with them. The one with the same name. So they called the Primrose Path and spoke to Mama-san, and guess what? The other girl was in the bar right now, with her long blonde hair, wearing a short clingy dress.

  I interrupted Yukie with some comments on Kelly’s character and parentage, with which she wholeheartedly agreed.

  “But surely by now they must know it was her? If she was packed and ready to leave, surely—”

  “It’s a bit different,” said Yukie cautiously, using the Japanese circumlocution for no. “The others, her flatmates, said she wasn’t dressed up when she went out, she was just in jeans. You were the one dressed up. And you both sat with him all the time, and the bodyguards think—well, you know, that you look similar…”

  They all look the same to me. You can’t tell them apart. And with only glances from a distance in a smoky bar, I was sure the bodyguards had just typed us as Tall Gaijin Tart and Shorter Gaijin Tart.

  I groped for an alibi
. “But everyone can say I was in the bar all night.”

  “We didn’t open till nine, and this thing happened earlier. I think Kelly was maybe quite clever with that.”

  “She set me up. That bitch set me up.”

  “Yes, that’s right, she did,” Yukie said, in the tone of one agreeing with an idiot child. “Kerry-chan, I have to hurry. Listen. Mama-san is going to tell them about you, maybe she already has, maybe even what train you are on—”

  “What?”

  “—so you have to get away. Just go somewhere, anywhere, away. And don’t call the police. Please don’t call the police.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “They said not to. The family. Not to cross them. Do what we’re told. They aren’t saying the old man was murdered, do you see? So if someone calls the police, they’ll know it was one of us and they’ll blame Mama-san. Please, Kerry-chan, I know you aren’t from here, but please try to understand. Mama-san has to work with them, she’s got no choice.” She hesitated. “Um, if she calls you, if she asks where you are…maybe it would be best not to say.”

  “She’s selling me out.” I could barely believe it. “She’s— Yukie, why is she doing this to me?” I wailed. “I thought she liked me!”

  Yukie gave a hiss that I’d heard before in Japan, the one that said, God, these people are selfish. “One of her girls has killed a senior member of a—a family,” she said, as bluntly as she could. Shinjuku station is the busiest in the world, with over a million people rushing through per day, and noisy as hell, but she still wasn’t going to use the “y” word aloud. “The family want revenge. She gave them Kelly’s address, and she will give them you too. She knows you didn’t do it, but if she doesn’t cooperate, they will be…” She struggled for a word. “Angry. Really angry.”

  I knew Yukie well enough to know what angry meant: enraged, brutal, murderous.

  “Yes, okay, she has to do something. But she knows I didn’t do anything, and she’s selling me out, and that’s not fair. Why—”

  “They might take the bar. They might make it into another kind of bar, for all of us.”

  That cut through my whining like a scalpel.

  I knew the yakuza forced women into prostitution to make payments against debts which somehow never managed to wipe out the spiralling interest. It was a modern form of slavery, nothing less. Murder would be the biggest debt of all, and if Mama-san was implicated, she would owe them everything, and they would take it. They’d turn the bar into a cathouse, and God help the hostesses if they tried to fight it. It had happened before, often. It could happen to the Primrose Path, to round-faced, kind-hearted Yukie, and cheerful Keiko, and tiny, sharp Minachan, and crazy Sonja…

  “Please excuse me, I was very rude,” I said formally. “I’m sorry, Yukie. Please tell Mama-san I understand, and please tell Jun-san I’m sorry for using bad language to him. I’ll just hide till this is over. Mama-san should—” I stopped abruptly.

  “Hello? Are you there?”

  The thought that had struck me dumb was making my stomach cramp too. I vaguely wondered if I was going to be sick.

  “Kerry-chan?”

  “Mama-san gave them Kelly’s address,” I heard myself say through a tight throat. “Did she give them mine too?”

  “Um. She might have.”

  “No. Oh no. I have to go. Call me tonight maybe, if you can, thank you, bye.” I hit the off button, then speed-dialled my home number, feeling sweat prickle along my hairline.

  Noriko. Sunny, ditzy Noriko, who laughed at me when I told her to check people’s identities before buzzing them into the building. “This is Japan, Kechan. What do you think will happen?” Who thought what was happening was “just a misunderstanding”, because I’d told her so. Who was probably at home. Alone.

  The phone rang and rang, but there was nobody there and the voicemail didn’t kick in. I called her mobile phone, but all I got was her cheery voice message, and as the beep came I realised I had no idea what to say.

  “Nori-chan, this is—if you get this—don’t go home. Please don’t go home.”

  Maybe she hadn’t, I told myself, fighting the fear. Perhaps she’d gone to Yoshi’s place. She’d looked sick with terror and tiredness when she’d given me the bag; she’d want comfort, and that would be from Yoshi. I called his home—no answer. Might he be working overtime? It was nearly half past seven now, and his mobile was switched off. Maybe Nori-chan was sleeping there. I left a message telling him to ring me, and to make sure Noriko didn’t go home.

  Oh God.

  Now what?

  The drinks trolley was coming through, and I found a couple of hundred yen for a cup of coffee. I’d been up all night and my brain was thick with tiredness and fear. I wasn’t hungry, but the night’s drink was sitting sourly in my stomach and oozing through my skin. I needed sleep, and a shower, and for none of this to be happening to me.

  I needed to know where Noriko was.

  I sipped my coffee, still standing, since going back to Auntie’s babble seemed preferable only to surrendering to the yakuza, and made myself think.

  There was nothing I could do about Noriko now except hope she had left the flat last night. Meanwhile, I had to get off this train. Since they hadn’t been back, it seemed likely that the goons had disembarked at the first stop, but I had to assume that by now Mama-san had given the yakuza the train details. They’d know where I was until I got off.

  And I didn’t have a lot of choice. Given my pick of escape routes, I’d have taken a Shinkansen that went to Kyoto and Osaka, offering two big international airports, and a million tourists and travellers to hide among. This train was heading up towards Nagano and the Japan Alps. Lovely part of the world, apparently, once a site of the Winter Olympics, famous temple, one Shinkansen route, no airport.

  I watched the scrolling LED giving the destination: Nagano. It should have given the other stops on the way, but it just kept showing Nagano. Was it malfunctioning?

  Or was the train an express that only stopped once before the final destination?

  If their boys had got off at the Oomiya stop, they’d know I hadn’t. They’d know I was going to Nagano.

  Shit.

  I stuffed my knuckles into my mouth, biting at them, and tried to make myself think. What could I do? Matsumoto was somewhere near Nagano, and that had a domestic airport, I thought, but it would be a small one.

  That was good. They couldn’t fly up and then drive from Matsumoto and still beat me to Nagano. They couldn’t be waiting for me.

  They could be on the next train up, though.

  I tried Yoshi again. His phone was still switched off.

  Crap, crap, crap. I could feel the sweat pooling. What to do? I could just leap on the first local train to anywhere, but I felt pretty sick about that. I’d never been up here before, and I didn’t like the odds of finding myself in some one-horse town with one train a day and curious locals. Anyway, though Japanese trains are as reliable as they get, I’d spent years in Britain, where the railway system was the wonder of the world a hundred and fifty years ago, and they haven’t improved it since. And yakuza could get on trains too.

  No. I should hurry to Matsumoto and try to catch a domestic flight. They’d surely send someone to watch the airport, but I’d get there first. It would work if there was a flight soon.

  If not… I didn’t have a Japanese driving licence, of course. I could hire a car with my British licence, if only Noriko had thought to pack it—

  My thoughts came to a screeching halt.

  I’d told Yoshi to tell Noriko to pack my passport and ID.

  But I didn’t remember seeing them in my bag.

  I went back to my seat, grabbed the bag over Auntie’s startled head, hurried to the toilet and sat there, telling myself not to panic. She wouldn’t have forgotten. If I just checked…

  I checked. I pushed things around. I emptied the lot onto the cubicle floor, and shook everything out, and checked every poc
ket and crevice and zip, and there was nothing. That featherhead, that idiot, that half-witted, scatterbrained, useless baka rayō had packed me everything I needed to leave Japan, except my fucking passport.

  No passport, no ID, no plane, no car.

  I put my head in my hands and sat there for a few minutes fighting back tears, then took a very deep breath. Fine, I told Fate silently. Make it a challenge. See if I care.

  Nagano was pretty sizeable. I’d go to ground right there. Why not? If I was so sure they’d be checking the station and airport and car hire places, I might as well not be at any of them.

  I needed to change my appearance. Then a hotel? Could they check the hotels? Could I get into a hotel without ID? I couldn’t remember if you needed to show ID or not. Would I look memorable? Noticeable?

  I would go to a public bath, that was it. Clean up, change the way I looked, hide out in the women’s section. I would lurk—in shops and ramen bars and maybe the temple, seeing as they wouldn’t expect me to go sightseeing—and I would check in to a hotel no earlier than, say, four o’clock, looking like I’d just got off the train. I’d call Yoshi and Noriko, make sure they were okay and he had her safe, and talk to Yukie again, and by the time the yakuza caught up with me, Kelly would have admitted the truth, and it would all be just fine.

  I didn’t want to think about what they would be doing to Kelly until she told them the truth.

  Stupid bitch. Greedy, manipulative, murderous bitch.

  Poor bitch.

  Nagano is probably quite nice if you’re not in fear for your life. I wouldn’t know. It was done up for the Winter Olympics and it’s a “gateway to the Alps” skiing town, but I wasn’t here to ski and it was getting towards spring and, frankly, I didn’t give a damn what it looked like. I had to go shopping, and for that I needed money.

  I stuck with the crowd as I got off the train, and let it carry me along to a shopping area with cashpoints. I knew my current account was looking okay, but the next few days weren’t going to be cheap and I’d need a lot of liquid cash. Luckily, I had it. I’d set up a panic fund some time ago, after an evening turned nasty and Sonja, a fellow hostess, didn’t have money for bribes or, later, bail. Hostesses exist on the fringes of society as it is, and you never know when you might need to cut and run, so I’d made sure there was always enough to run with.