by KJ Charles
I couldn’t argue with that.
We were on the motorway before he spoke again. “So, you want to get out of Chubu province or to leave Japan or what?”
“I want to get as far away as I can. I can’t leave Japan, though, I don’t have my passport.”
“Good to remember when you’re going on the run.”
“I didn’t go on the run, I got sent on the run. It wasn’t my idea.”
“Sure it wasn’t,” he said flatly.
“It wasn’t! Chanko-san, this whole thing is a mistake—”
“Look, Taka asked me to get you out of trouble, so I will. Don’t give me the sob story, I don’t want to hear it. Just the basics, so I know who we’re running away from and what they want to do.”
He sounded completely uninterested, but I’d spent two years manipulating male egos, and there was definitely anger bubbling deep down there. I wondered why.
“I hope this isn’t inconvenient for you, Chanko-san?” I ventured.
“Hell, no. I’ve got nothing better to do than play chauffeur for a hooker. Nothing at all.”
It took me a few seconds to catch my breath. It wasn’t just calling me a prostitute: everything he said was in an offensively casual speech form that radiated contempt. I said carefully, “I’m a hostess, Chanko-san. Nothing else.”
“Yeah, sure. I don’t care, okay? Just give me the story. And without any—” He snapped his fingers with a sound like a slamming door, searching for the Japanese word. “Personal judgement of you.”
“Self-justification, would you mean?” I asked sweetly.
“Yeah. Thought you’d know the word.”
You arrogant tub of lard, I thought. You patronising swine.
“Of course, Chanko-san,” I said.
I gave him a brief outline of what had happened. He stared through the windshield a bit. Then he said, “Again.”
I started again. He stopped me when I got to the bit about Kelly getting me to interpret. “Say that again.”
Evidently he was stupid as well as rude. I said it again.
“So you got her to get—I mean, she took the interpreting job—gave the job—” He made a slight noise of annoyance, and I could have slapped myself. He was getting tangled up in the complex grammar of giving and receiving and getting-someone-to-do, which is notoriously hard for non-native speakers. I’d realised Japanese wasn’t his native language of course, but I’d simply not registered that he might be having difficulties, since he’d spoken in pretty good Japanese throughout.
“Would you prefer it if we spoke in English?” I suggested politely.
“What the hell does that mean?”
I blinked at the note in his voice. “I just thought, perhaps you might find English more suitable?”
“More suitable. Why’s that?”
“Well, you’re not Japanese—”
“Great observation,” he said savagely. “Yeah, I’m not Japanese. That means your English is better than my Japanese?” There was real aggression there now. “You think you can do better? With what—kissy-kissy bar talk? ‘Me love you long time’ isn’t going to help right now, understand?”
And that did it.
“Yeah, I can do better, you fat bastard,” I said, switching to furious English. “Your particles are all over the place, you can’t use morau verbs for shit, and you talk like the scum of the streets. Oh, and me no love you long time, arsehole, because me prefer men no look like ‘before’ picture in diet advert— Watch the road!”
He braked sharply. We didn’t ram the lorry, just. Several people honked.
A long silence followed.
“You’re not Japanese,” he said.
“Great observation.” I mimicked his earlier tone, still fizzing with rage.
He checked the traffic, then turned and looked at me. I pulled off my sunglasses and stared back.
“O-kay. Got you. I, uh, may have lost my cool a bit there.” He’d switched to English, American style.
“You don’t say.”
He sighed. “Look, I thought you were saying—”
I wanted him to grovel, the obnoxious son of a bitch. I wanted him to squirm and feel humiliated, and to milk his embarrassment for as long as I could.
I needed him to be on my side.
“You thought I was asking if you could use chopsticks.” I put as much understanding in my voice as I could manage. “I know.”
He glanced at me again. “Yeah? Yeah, I guess you do.”
I did, actually. You live in this country, you love it, you submerge yourself in the life and speak the language, but you will never, ever be quite accepted, and there is always someone who doesn’t notice your perfect speech, your perfect manners and behaviour, your desperate desire to belong. All they see is a gaijin. And they ask, often with the kindest intentions, “Can you use chopsticks?”
One day I will scream, “The whole goddamn world can use chopsticks!” and then stab my questioner in the eye with them. I suspected Chanko had reached that point. I spoke perfect Japanese and could often pass for a local. He didn’t and couldn’t and never would, and being Polynesian would put him several rungs down the ladder with a lot of people. Not everyone, but enough to make a difference.
He pushed a huge hand through his thick black hair. “That an English accent? What are you, Japanese British?”
“Chinese Swedish, technically.”
“That so? Okay, because your name didn’t sound Japanese.”
“Kerry Ekdahl.” I held out a hand. He hesitated, then took his right hand off the wheel and grasped mine, which disappeared in his warm fist.
“Joseph Tualavu. Call me Chanko. And drop the san, okay?”
“Okay.” I didn’t feel the need to be polite in English anyway. Or to be polite to him at all.
“So, Swedish? Your English sounds pretty good.”
Pretty good? “I’m a British citizen,” I said with as little emphasis as possible. “I lived in England for six years.”
“And your Japanese too. I’d have sworn you for a local. Though, without the glasses, you don’t look so…”
“That’s why I was wearing them.”
“Guess so. Okay, you want to run this thing by me again?”
He hadn’t apologised for calling me a hooker. But then, I wasn’t planning to apologise for calling him a fat bastard. We’d just have to get by.
I started going over the whole sorry business again, and when he stopped me I thought I might scream, but this time he wasn’t looking for clarification.
“I don’t get what this Kelly was up to.” He was frowning like a Pacific thunder god. “Okay, she decides to roll the old man, but if she’s going to do that, she’ll probably have to kill him. What was she going to get from him that would be worth it? Wasn’t he tipping well?”
“He tipped like Bill Gates. Not that Bill Gates has ever been in the bar, but you know.”
“So why’s he more use to her dead than alive? Why kill the goose if the golden eggs are still coming?”
I hadn’t thought of that. “I don’t know. Maybe it was crunch time. Put out or shut up.”
“You mean put up— No, you don’t, okay. So she hadn’t screwed him before?”
“It really isn’t that sort of bar,” I said wearily. “But she was putting herself up for auction, basically, or that’s how it looked. I’d guess Mitsuyoshi-san offered—”
“Mitsuyoshi? As in the Mitsuyoshi-kai?”
“Yeah. Didn’t I say?”
“No,” he said ruminatively. “Well, now. Well, hell. Go on.”
I glanced at him but his face was unreadable. “I’d guess he offered her a lot to sleep with him, but it was a final offer. No more down payments, you know?”
“She wanted the money but not enough to do the job. Must have been a lot of money. She worth it?”
“Wouldn’t have thought so. You know that movie where Jane Fonda’s filing her nails over some guy’s back? That’s how I’d imagine her. B
ut she’s amazing to look at,” I added reluctantly.
“Right. So, why didn’t she run?”
“I don’t know. She was packed and waiting—”
“For what? For who?” His voice was sharp. I wondered if his mind might be too.
“I don’t know. A taxi?”
“If I was going to off a yakuza boss, I’d line up the cab first,” he muttered. “You think this girl is capable of killing?”
“I don’t know,” I said thoughtfully. “She’s a strapping cheerleader type, and the old man probably had bones like a bird. She wouldn’t have had a problem physically crushing his skull, I suppose. Maybe she just meant to knock him out and hit too hard.”
“Nice girl.”
I shrugged. “If you’d asked me was she a murderer, I’d have said no, but then I didn’t see her setting me up for murder either. I guess if he’d offered her a lot of money… Why didn’t she just sleep with him, for God’s sake?”
He glanced at me, then shrugged. “Okay, then, next question, why are they after you?”
“Well, Kelly told them—”
“You know, I don’t think most people would say, hell, yeah, it was me smashed your boss’s skull in. I figure the yaks would expect her to lie.”
“Yes, but the way she set me up—”
“Well, it would cause confusion, I can see that. But Taka said they’re really gunning for you. He said there’d been collateral.”
Collateral?
Collateral.
“Pull over. Now.”
He wrenched the car across two lanes of traffic onto the hard shoulder without a word of question, and though I didn’t make it out of the car, I could at least open the door and hang halfway out of my seat as I retched and retched.
It seemed to take a long time. After a while, I felt a huge hand on my shoulder, his heat sinking through to my skin. He produced a half-full bottle of Pocari Sweat energy drink when I’d finished, and I sloshed the warm, sugary liquid around my mouth and spat it out to get rid of the sour taste. The other taste, of guilt and blood, wasn’t got rid of so easily.
“Sorry,” I said thickly.
“You want to tell me?”
No, I didn’t.
“They went to my flat—my apartment. They trashed it. They, ah, Jesus, they raped my flatmate, my friend. Several—oh God—”
“Hey.” He was still holding my shoulder. “Hey.”
“They kicked her head in, put her in a coma. And Yoshi, another friend, I called him from the bar, he thinks they’re after him too, because of me. Is that collateral? Is that what you meant?”
“Taka didn’t give me the story,” he said very calmly. “Is your roommate going to be okay?”
“She’s got brain damage. She’s been gang-raped. No, I don’t think she’ll be okay.”
I wanted to hit him, scream at him, slam my fists into his broad chest, and somehow, I thought, if I did, he would let me. I dug my nails into my palms.
We sat in silence for a few more moments until he said, “You ready to go on? We shouldn’t stay stopped here.”
“Yeah.”
He pulled back into the stream of traffic with more aggression in his driving than he’d used before, and we carried on down the motorway to wherever we were going. I stared at the distant mountains and wondered what had happened to my world.
“You okay to talk about it?” he asked a few miles on.
No. “Yes.”
“I’m thinking Kelly must have set you up better than you know. Or she tells a damn good story. The yaks aren’t all-powerful. They know that the police will be after whoever attacked your friend. And what’d they do it for? Revenge on you, like killing an enemy’s family?”
“I suppose.”
“But you were running anyway. They’ve gotta know you’d run faster and further if you thought they were going to do the same to you.”
“Oh, my God. You think they’ll—”
“Well, hell, sounds like a threat to me.”
I hoped I wasn’t going to be sick again.
“So why…” His voice tailed off, and he was frowning. “Something ain’t right about this. They seem to want you scared.”
“They’ve got their wish, then. I’ve never been so scared in my life. Oh, God, I can’t—if they—”
“Hey, butterfly. They’ll have to get through me first.”
He said it quite casually, with absolute assurance, and I looked at that calm face with the broad nose and fierce, dark brows, and for a second it was as though a mountain were standing between me and the yakuza. I swallowed a sob.
“Guess they’ll need tanks, then,” I said with a shaky smile.
“Guess they will.”
An hour or so later, we were coming into the outskirts of some sprawling town. The road was lined with pachinko parlours, love hotels, huge superstores and a million restaurants, probably one every three buildings. My forcibly emptied stomach rumbled, and Chanko announced it was time for lunch.
We stopped at a noodle place, where I ordered a plate of cold soba noodles with tsuyu dipping sauce and pickles, and he got a “stamina set” of large negi-ramen with double rice. What arrived was like a vat of noodles, the bowl maybe nine inches high, plus enough rice for four. I gazed at the vast pile of carbohydrates with awe.
“Not on Atkins, then?”
He dug expertly into the rice with chopsticks that looked like toothpicks in his gigantic hands. We were sitting at a table for four, and he must have been sitting across two of the plastic chairs because he filled the whole other side of the table, and the staff were gaping, in a very polite and surreptitious manner. I hoped the yakuza didn’t ask about us here, because Chanko was likely to prove memorable.
“Not Atkins, no. On a diet, though,” he added, lifting a mass of noodles with his chopsticks and slurping them in the approved Japanese manner.
“A diet, eh.” I looked at the heaps of food. “You know, I think I can see where you’re going wrong.”
“Hey, I lost seventy pounds already. I should write a book.”
That surely confirmed it. He had been a wrestler, and he had left his sumo stable. I wondered why, and if he wanted to talk about it.
“How long were you a rikishi?” I asked casually.
“Long enough to get fat.”
His tone suggested I drop it, so I did. Whatever had happened to make him leave, it was presumably quite recent, and it was unlikely to be good.
“Seventy pounds?” I said instead, admiringly. “Wow. Did that take long?”
“Not so much.” He slurped again. I picked out a chunk of vinegared radish and set myself to imagine his strong cheekbones with more definition, the square jaw and hard, planed features standing starkly, those thick, powerful muscles bulging even more clearly under the bronze skin…
Wow.
Not that he looked terrible with the extra bulk. He was big enough to carry a lot, and those inky, hooded eyes and set mouth gave his face all the definition it needed. Sumo wrestlers never had much trouble getting women, and I could sort of see why.
“Not so much?” I asked, pulling myself together. “Seventy pounds?”
“My size, it don’t take long.”
“I suppose not. How tall are you?”
“Six seven. Why, how tall are you?”
“Five foot five—oh. I guess you get sick of people mentioning it.”
“Uh-huh.” He slurped a tangle of noodles and shredded spring onions, then went for the boiled egg, and finally added, “When I first got here, I figured takai desu ne meant hello.”
I laughed, mostly to be friendly, but also because I could imagine it. Takai means tall, and the Japanese have no reticence in making personal comments. It’s usual to hear things like “Gosh, you’re very fat” and “Haven’t you got a big nose?”, and it’s pretty hard to make Westerners believe that there’s no malicious intent. Chanko probably heard takai desu ne—“Tall, aren’t you?”—five times a day.
He
finished the last grains of rice about the same time that I pushed away my half-empty bowl, and we paid up at the cash register by the door. The till jockey looked up at Chanko with admiring eyes and said, “Takai desu ne.”
“You should see my sister,” he said, and we left.
We were back on the road when he next spoke. He was as laconic in English as in Japanese, but the accent worked better: Midwest American, but with a hint of the musical quality that Polynesians often have in their speech, and the voice deep enough to vibrate in my fingers.
“So, you thought where you want to go?”
“Not really. I can’t leave the country without ID, and I don’t honestly know what to do at all except to keep out of the yakuza’s way till this gets sorted out.” I didn’t want to think about how that was going to happen. “I suppose I just need to stay out of sight somewhere while I work out how to get at my passport.”
“Where is it?”
“In my flat.”
“Police have it, then. And they’ll be wanting to talk to you.”
“Maybe not. It’s kept fairly securely. It’d be worth getting someone to look for it—”
“Except your place is a crime scene.”
I had to take a couple of breaths before I could control my voice enough to reply to that.
“Well, I need to lie low then. I don’t know. I have no idea what to do. Where do you think I should go?”
He drove for a few minutes, and I couldn’t tell if he was thinking or ignoring me or what, until he said, “Might as well head for Kanazawa.”
“Okay. You’re the expert. Why?”
“Big. Tourists. Easy place to stay.”
I opened my mouth and managed to shut it again in time. Of course, anyone who looked like he did would find that an awful lot of hotels were inexplicably full whenever he wanted a room. I had European friends who’d been unable to find rooms in cities like Hiroshima and Yokohama, and they weren’t even scary-looking people. Chanko was extremely scary, and we were in a pretty rustic part of the world.
“Fair enough,” I said. “Let’s go to Kanazawa.”
Chapter Four
It was a three-hour drive, and it felt a lot longer.
