Non-Stop Till Tokyo

by KJ Charles

  “We have to move her.”

  “We can’t. Why—”

  “Because they’re going to kill you. You personally, Yoshi. They know your name. They said, if I don’t magically produce this stupid bag Kelly stole, they are going to kill you and Noriko and me and Chanko.”

  “What?” he said, and then, “What?”

  “They know who you are. They gave me your name. They threatened you.”

  “No, wait. Wait. They can’t know anything about me. It’s just threats. They just know my name because I visited Noriko. This—”

  “I’m sorry, Yoshi. But he said they were going to do to you what they did to Noriko—”

  Yoshi made a strangled noise in his throat.

  “And he said a stupid, vile thing—that you might enjoy it.” I swallowed. “They might know more than your name.”

  “They’ve been looking—Taka!” he yelled away from the phone. “Taka! Oh my God. Kechan, what are we going to do?”

  “Leave.” I approximated Chanko’s stating-the-obvious tone as best I could. “Pack a bag and go. I’ll get the money together to get Nori-chan onto a medical flight, you’ll go with her—”

  “No. Wait.”

  “Yoshi, we have to hurry. I don’t know if they’re watching her—”

  “No. Kechan, you don’t understand. We can’t move her.”

  Something in his voice made the hairs on my arms prickle. “Yoshi?”

  There was a long silence on the other end of the phone, then a painfully indrawn breath.

  “Yoshi! What’s happening? How is Noriko?”

  “Not very good. She… I told you she has bleeding on the brain. They had to operate last night to relieve the pressure. It—it doesn’t look good.” I could hear tears in his voice now. “Moving her didn’t help. I mean, it really didn’t. It probably caused the bleeding. She’s in such a delicate state… We can’t move her again. Not till she gets better.”

  “She is going to get better, though. Isn’t she?” I hadn’t let myself think anything else. “Yoshi, she is going to make it, right?”

  “It’s…it’s a bit different,” he said.

  “No.” I pushed the phone harder against my ear, to hear his quiet, defeated voice and to stop the shaking in my hands. “No.”

  “Maybe… I don’t know. They really hurt her, Kechan. I don’t know, and even if she did recover she might never…”

  He tailed off. I held the phone tightly, listening to his efforts to get his breathing under control, struggling with the constriction in my own throat.

  “I can’t go,” he said. “She hasn’t got anyone else. I can’t let her die alone. I can’t let her wake up and find the only people at her bedside are the yakuza. I can’t leave her, Kechan. You go.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. If it was the other way around, if I was running and you were here with Noriko, you’d stay. I know you would. And I’d run, because it’s the only logical course of action. This is just…how it is. Please, Kechan, go. But I can’t.”

  I stared at the road ahead, the brown bonnet of the car with its chips and dents, the empty plains and distant mountains. I could just keep travelling on forever, I thought. Leave it all behind. So easy. Start a new life, forget the old, and never, ever look back.

  “Right,” I said at last, rawly. “Okay. Text me your account details.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m putting money in there directly, to make it faster. I should be able to get a bit together. Spend everything you need on Noriko, and tell me if you need more.”

  “Kechan…”

  “If anything happens to me, the money’s yours. Please, do me the favour of allowing me to give it to you. Please!”

  “Thank you,” he whispered. “I will. But don’t let anything happen to you, Kechan. Where are— No, don’t tell me where you’re going.” He swallowed, then continued with an awful effort at lightness: “I hope it’s somewhere nice.”

  “Oh, yeah, it’s lovely. It’s Tokyo.”

  “What?”

  “I’m coming back to Tokyo. Now. Today.”

  “The hell you are!” said Yoshi and Chanko in stereo.

  “The hell I’m not. Do I meet you at Taka’s or somewhere else?”

  “You can’t come back. Kechan, have you gone mad?”

  “Tell Taka, okay? Get him to call Chanko. See you this evening, honey.”

  “Kechan!” he squawked down the phone as I hit the button.

  “No way,” said Chanko. “No. We need to head to Osaka. Or Hiroshima, or—”

  “Tokyo.”

  “Butterfly—”

  “No. Noriko might not make it.”

  “Hell,” he muttered. “I’m sorry.”

  “Me too. And she can’t be moved. And Yoshi won’t leave her. And I’m not leaving Yoshi.”

  “And I’m not driving you straight into the family’s hands.”

  “Then don’t,” I told him, staring ahead. “Just drop me off where I can get a Shinkansen, okay? I’ll go myself.”

  “You’re not going to Tokyo.”

  “I am.”

  “You’re not.”

  “Don’t try and stop me, Chanko. I appreciate everything you’ve done for me more than I can say, but don’t try and stop me, because I won’t let you.”

  “Yeah?” His voice was grim. “What you going to do?”

  I really didn’t want to say it, but if this came down to a battle of wills, we’d be in the car forever, and he was the one behind the wheel.

  “You work it out. Big scary gaijin man. Little Asian girl. How long do you think it would take me to get you arrested?”

  There was a silence. I didn’t dare look at him.

  “Jesus,” he said finally. “You mean it, don’t you? You’d actually do it.”

  “I’d feel really bad afterwards. Look, just drop me at a station where I can get a fast train. You didn’t sign up for this.”

  “Ain’t that the truth. What the hell are you going to do in Tokyo?”

  “Find the bag. What else?”

  “For fuck’s sake. You think you can do it? Even if you did, you think they’ll keep their word, let you off the hook? You don’t reckon this is a trap to bring you back? Get real.”

  “I don’t care. This is my fault. I’m going back to see Noriko.” I delved in my handbag, checking I still had her lucky charm. She needed her luck a lot more than I did.

  “Butterfly…”

  “The turnoff for the motorway’s just up ahead.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Take it.” The words tasted like iron in my mouth.

  He shook his head, muttering something to himself. But he flicked on the indicator.

  Once I’d given the painful constriction in my throat and the throbbing of my pulse time to subside, I reached for my phone. “I need to make a call, move some money. Do you mind?”

  “You want to stop, do it in private?”

  “No, it’s fine.”

  I rang the familiar number, tapped in my account and PIN numbers at the electronic prompt, and got put through to my usual broker.

  “Password, please.”

  I gave it, adding, “Can you now switch to my alternative password please?” Not that I didn’t trust Chanko with my life, but this was money, which is different.

  “Certainly. Hello, Kerry-san.”

  “Hi, Naoko-san. I’m going to need to liquefy some cash.”

  Naoko tutted. “It’s not a great time.”

  “It’s never a great time,” I joked automatically. “What are my holdings worth at current value?”

  She told me. It was a lot.

  “I need to sell…most of it,” I said.

  She gurgled a bit, then got down to business, recommending I hang on to my shares in a medium-sized electronics company that was expanding well. It was a lucky reminder.

  “No, definitely not. In fact, sell them as soon as possible, please.”

  “It’s a good
investment,” she said cautiously. “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.” Naoko was a nice lady in a male-dominated industry, so I added, “I’ve got a bad feeling about that company.”

  “A bad feeling. Is that like the bad feeling you had with the failed merger the other month?”

  “That kind of bad feeling, yes.”

  “Understood. I’ll sell them now.” And any stocks she had with other clients, I’d bet. In a few more days, there would probably be some very grateful people telling their friends what a prescient broker Ishii Naoko was.

  I sorted out what I was going to keep and what I was going to realise, rang my bank and arranged to move three-quarters of a million yen into Yoshi’s account once my funds had arrived, and sat back, feeling as though I’d achieved something. Chanko kept glancing at me with a funny expression.

  “What?”

  “Wouldn’t have figured you for a stockbroker, that’s all.”

  “I’m not. I just about manage to read the financial pages.”

  “But you can come up with seventy-five man yen like that?” He snapped his fingers.

  I shrugged. “I did say I had enough money.”

  “Sounds like enough to me.” We were on the motorway now and going at a hell of a speed. He whipped us through an unconvincingly small space between two lorries and said, as one provoked beyond endurance, “Alright, goddammit, I’ll bite.”

  “What?”

  “Where d’you get the money?”

  “I earned it.”

  “Enough to pay for flights and hospitals and fake passports and saving your boyfriend’s ass. And you keep it in stocks and shares you don’t know anything about. C’mon, spill. You won a lottery?”

  “Nope. I did start with the remains of an inheritance, but I made the rest.”

  “Well, how the hell—”

  “Keep up,” I told him. “What do I do for a living?”

  “I’m beginning to wonder.”

  “Do you want to know or not?”

  “Okay, sorry.” He frowned. “I’m missing something, right? What you do… You talk to men?”

  “What kind?”

  “Losers. Salarymen. You talk to businessmen.”

  “Well done. Except mostly I listen while they talk.”

  “Holy crap,” said Chanko. “They spill business secrets?”

  “These aren’t generally people with rich inner lives. My guys have to pay for a friend for the evening, after doing a fourteen-hour day. They don’t have much else to talk about, and they want a sympathetic ear while they moan about how the merger’s going to be delayed because of that idiot in Finance, or brag about a great acquisition.”

  “So you take the information—”

  “And use it. I’m not Rockefeller, but I got in on the ground floor of a couple of deals that turned moribund companies into profit machines, and I’ve been able to sell high a few times before the shares drop. I do all right. Stuff like this company I’m selling, one of their senior people was crying all over me—it was the night before this all happened, actually. He wasn’t specific, of course, but I was left with the very strong impression that I needed to divest my stock before it turned into waste paper. So I bought low and I’m selling high, which is how you’re supposed to do it.”

  “That’s what they say. Jeez. All the regulations and laws on disclosure and insider trading and confidentiality, and meanwhile the MD’s spilling his guts in a hostess bar. No wonder the stock market’s screwed. What the hell are these people thinking?”

  “It’s what they’re not thinking. I swear, half my clients, it’s never crossed their minds that I’m a human being with an independent life. I’m a smile and a pair of legs, that’s all. And the other half—well, they’re treating me like their girlfriend, but on some level they remember they’re paying me. They don’t really think I’m listening, or that I care.” I shrugged. “Either way, you get really smart people who’re good at what they do, but they check their common sense at the door because they need to talk.”

  Chanko shook his head. “I guess. What I don’t get is why you do it. Why d’you want to get treated like that?”

  “It’s not that bad. Nice bar, fun girls, some of the clients are okay for a laugh.”

  “Except they don’t treat you like a human being.”

  “They don’t treat you like a human being in a sweatshop either, and the bar pays a lot more,” I snapped. “Sure, instead of being a hostess, listening to salarymen bore on at me without caring what I think, I could be an interpreter, listening to salarymen bore on at me without caring what I think. I’d earn maybe an eighth of what I do at the bar, and I’d have to buy my own drinks, and I wouldn’t be able to change the subject when my ears started to bleed, but that’s okay because I’d have a glow of virtue, right?”

  “I get your point.”

  “Well, it’s moot anyway. I have a feeling my bar career is over.”

  “Guess so.” He changed lanes with inches to spare, to the outrage of a lorry driver, and added, “So what do you interpret, Japanese to English?”

  “My home languages are English, Cantonese and French, and I can do them from Korean, Japanese or German. My Swedish and Dutch are very good. I can get by in most Germanic or Scand languages, plus a couple of other Chinese dialects.”

  “That all? What about Russian?”

  “Conversational only, I haven’t made much effort. We don’t get many Russians in the bar.”

  He blinked at me. “You’re kidding.”

  “No.”

  “You seriously speak all those?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you work in a bar?”

  “Having a lot of languages doesn’t actually help that much. I’ve still only got two ears and one mouth. Plus there’s a hell of a lot of people out there who can translate pretty much anything into English or French, Cantonese too, these days. Basically, speaking eight languages well is no more use than speaking three, even two, especially if they’re not obscure.” I shrugged. “And, as noted, the pay’s lousy. There’s a lot of natural linguists out there.”

  He was shaking his head. “You got any idea how hard I worked to get somewhere with Japanese?”

  “Well, you did pick a bitch.”

  We chatted about that for a bit, and then he demanded an explanation of what the hell was going on with those verbs of giving and receiving, seeing as I was such a big-shot linguist, and the intricacies of morau and kureru carried us through the next hour or so, which was a whole hour that I didn’t have to think about Noriko, or about what the hell I was doing going back to Tokyo.

  It couldn’t last, of course.

  “You had some time to think yet?” he asked after a longish silence.

  “About what?”

  He rolled his eyes. “The next World Series. What exactly you’re going to do in Tokyo. How bad an idea this is. When we’re going to turn the hell around.”

  “I know it’s a bad idea, I just don’t seem to be able to do anything else. I just—look, I can’t walk away from my friends like this, and that’s all there is to it. Sorry.”

  “Not me you should be apologising to.”

  “Who, then?” I asked, honestly baffled.

  “Your parents, for a start. Loved ones. Anyone you owe money to.”

  “I don’t owe any money, I haven’t got any parents, and my loved ones are Noriko and Yoshi.”

  “Yeah, and what the hell is he doing letting you come back?” He paused. “You ever think, a guy who lets his girl be a hostess ain’t worth all this effort?”

  “Listen, Yoshi doesn’t let me do anything, and more to the point—” I began angrily, then paused as something jogged in my brain.

  He glanced round at me. “Point? Butterfly?”

  “I just thought of something I’d forgotten, something…odd. Something that seemed weird. I mean, it’s probably nothing, but…I think Kelly has a boyfriend.”

  “Jeez. Imagine that. So?”

>   “So nobody knew about him at the bar, smartass. We all thought she was saving herself for the highest bidder, and she never talked about anyone. And yesterday Yukie said the yaks were asking about Kelly’s friends, but she didn’t mention them looking for a boyfriend. I think, if Kelly hasn’t mentioned him to the yakuza, I might be the only person who knows he even exists, as far as this business is concerned.”

  “How come? Thought you two weren’t friends.”

  “We aren’t. But there was one night—sometime last week, I guess, it feels like last century—when the old man was being revolting. He was a lecherous clown, and he had his hands all over her, and when he got up to relieve his prostate for about the sixth time, she said something like, ‘If my soldier boy saw this, he’d kill him right now. Baby’s sorry, sweetie.’ Talking to herself, not me, and then putting on a girly voice, you know? If you’re a good interpreter, people forget you’re there, and I think she did.”

  “‘He’d kill him right now’,” repeated Chanko. “You didn’t think to mention that before?”

  I stared at him. “Oh, my God. It didn’t even cross my mind. I just thought it was one of those things you say. ‘I’ll kill you for that.’ You don’t think—”

  “She was already setting you up. But then, if she was planning a murder, she’d have surely got her escape route planned out too, so maybe it was just a figure of speech. Okay, suppose she has a boyfriend. So what?”

  “Well…suppose he was her accomplice? Suppose he has this bag now?”

  “That’s a hell of a suppose.” Chanko’s eyebrows angled in thought. “Okay, say you’re right. Could be why she took the room early—to meet the boyfriend, let him know the room number. Maybe he took a different room, waited there. The old man gets ready to rumble, the boyfriend whacks him on the head, they take the bag and get out of there.”

  “Separately,” I added. “Yeah. You think that’s what happened?”

  “It’s one option. If the guy even exists.” Pause. “Except that we know Kelly didn’t have the bag with her when the yaks picked her up, and we know she was waiting for something—someone?—when she should have been running. And we know she’s not talking, and most people would talk…unless they had someone to protect.”