by KJ Charles
“Money. I said already.”
“Yeah, money, and…?”
Hearn looked blank. “Office shit. I don’t know.”
“I really hate him,” Taka said in Japanese. “Fine. We’ll just have to get the bloody thing and look ourselves. Ask him how much he owes, big guy, I don’t know the English. We may have to pay it off.”
“You’d better not be looking at me,” I said. “I’m not paying his gambling debts.”
Chanko turned back to Hearn. “How much are you in for with Higuchi-san?”
Hearn’s bruised head drooped. “Round ’bout forty K.”
Forty thousand yen. Around four hundred dollars. That was what he’d stayed for? That pathetic sum, for Noriko’s life, and Kelly’s, and mine?
“Forty thousand yen?” I said incredulously. “That’s all?”
There was a nasty silence.
“Forty thousand dollars?”
“In one night?” Chanko shook his head. “Lucky they left you your kidneys.”
Hearn wasn’t making eye contact with anyone. “I got a disease,” he mumbled defiantly.
“What, stupidity?”
“It’s probably contagious,” Taka snarled. “Let’s get out of here before it spreads.”
Chanko nodded. “Okay, we’re gone, Mike. You can get your ass out of town, or stick around and let the yakuza get you for all I care, but if you cross our paths again, I swear I’m throwing you out the nearest window. Oh, one thing.”
His arm moved in an abrupt jab. Hearn jerked forward with a scream.
“Shoulda said sorry.”
Chapter Eleven
“What a goddamn assclown.”
“Number one loser. One hundred per cent.”
We were walking to the nearest station, having left Hearn unconscious behind us. I wouldn’t have stopped anyone who’d wanted to damage him further.
The others were talking. I was trailing behind.
I couldn’t get Kelly’s smiling face in the photo out of my mind. Hearn must have been draining her for years, long enough to turn her pretty smile avaricious, her happy eyes hard. Guilt throbbed in my stomach. I wished I hadn’t said those words earlier, but they were clinging to me like cigarette smoke in my hair.
“With any luck the yaks’ll kill him if he turns up,” Taka was saying, thinking aloud. “But they might let him talk first. They might make him. Then again, he doesn’t speak Japanese, and would he know how to find the family? Still, if he does, or they find him— Shit. We should go back. We can’t just leave him running around.”
“What you going to do about it, kill him? C’mon. Anyway, they told her to get the case, they must guess she’s in town. But you,” Chanko said, swinging round to me, “next time I tell you to keep your mouth shut, goddamn shut it.”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“He didn’t need to know about you, now he does. It’s your ass on the line here.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, well. Just try and listen to me, okay?”
“I promise. I really am sorry, it was stupid. I just couldn’t help myself.” Had I actually said that? “I mean, obviously I couldn’t control my own actions,” I added. “I’m allergic to morons. It’s a disease.”
Chanko gave me a sideways sort of reluctant grin, then turned to Taka. “So, this Higuchi?”
“I know the guy. Done a few deals with him. Independent operator, doesn’t tread on yakuza toes. Gambling, bit of loan sharking. Moves some product occasionally, mostly a consumer though.” He clicked his tongue. “The question is, does he know what he’s got? The amekō said—”
“Quit the racist shit.”
Taka sighed heavily. “The gaikokujin,” he said, using an elaborately respectful term for foreigners, instead of the offensive one for Americans, “told us there was office stuff in the case. If Higuchi has looked inside, and I bet he has, he’ll know who it belongs to. He’ll have heard the old man was killed, no question—he’s in Shibuya too. So…he’s got a problem. If the yakuza find out Hearn killed the old guy to pay his debt, the family might blame Higuchi for putting the pressure on Hearn. He can’t return the case because that’ll give him away, but he can’t risk throwing it away in case they trace Hearn and ask for it back. If I was Higuchi, I’d want to make it go away.” Taka cracked his knuckles. “I was thinking it might have been something more interesting in the bag—diamonds, drugs—for them to want it back this badly. That would have been tricky. If it’s just office stuff, it shouldn’t be a problem getting it back, because it won’t be sellable. I’ll call Higuchi.”
“Is that a good idea?” I asked nervously.
“No, it isn’t,” Chanko said. “You’re not linked to this right now.”
“You’re not going to get anywhere with him,” Taka said. “He won’t hand it over to just anyone. And he’s got a lot of backup. We might as well try to steal something from the Mitsuyoshi-kai HQ as from Higuchi’s place. But the main thing is, he’ll want to keep out of trouble.” He yanked out his phone and flipped it open, looking around for a quiet spot by a shuttered shopfront near the station entrance. “Look, just leave this to me, okay?”
I glanced at Chanko. He shrugged.
“Moshi-moshi, can I speak to Higuchi-san? … Tell him it’s about the case the gaijin left on Saturday,” Taka said down the phone, cutting to the chase. It evidently worked.
“Higuchi-san, hello, good to talk to you. It’s Yamada Taka here.” It always seemed ironic to me that his name was the one he’d have picked of his own accord: the Japanese equivalent of John Smith. “No, different Yamada,” he was saying now. “We did some business a fortnight ago, some recreational product… Yes, that’s me. Oh, did it? Really? All of it? Well, I’m sorry about that.”
Chanko and I exchanged looks.
“Anyway, I’m calling about a rather delicate matter. I understand there’s an American who’s been failing to meet his obligations, who came and paid you back on Saturday? And he had with him a briefcase full of cash that didn’t belong to him? … No, of course you don’t. I don’t know anything about it either. But the people who the case belong to, they took the amekō’s girlfriend, and a friend of hers would like to help. He wants to find and return the stolen goods.” He listened, mobile eyebrows rising, then made an obscene hand gesture. “I’m not saying it has anything to do with you. All I’m saying is that this guy’s plan is either to return the missing property or to hand over the amekō to the people he upset, in exchange for the girl. Which seems fair enough to me, only if he does that, the American will probably talk, say what he did and why, and where the money is, so my friend—sorry, were you saying something? Oh, that. Well, I heard five million yen.”
He grinned nastily down the phone and let the heated noises from the other end die down before continuing. “That’s not the problem. My friend’s happy to replace the contents—oh, yeah, totally cuntstruck. … Blonde. Big tits.”
I glared at him. He grinned at me.
“So the best thing for him all round would be to get the amekō out of the picture and keep him out. … Well, if he returns the stolen property, or what’s left of it, he thinks he can get what he wants without producing the Yank. And it’s in everyone’s interests to ensure the amekō isn’t in a position to upset a delicate situation with loose talk.”
He listened for a few minutes, then gave us a thumbs-up. “Good. Great. Well, I can’t promise, but there’s no reason for your name to come into it—okay, fine, I’ll make it a condition with my friend, I guess that’s fair. Hey, have I ever let you down?”
There was quite a lot of talking from the other end.
“Oh, come on, there was nothing wrong with it. No. I don’t do retroactive discounts. … Five. No, not a point more. … Well, don’t, then. No skin off my nose, I was only doing a friend a favour here. … Impossible. Seven and a half, and that’s final. Fine. Fine. Well, I’ll be down your way later on, is it there? Okay, I’ll just pick it up, then.
About—can we say two hours? Great. Pleasure doing business with you.” He hung up. “Prick. Come on, let’s hurry, we want to be there in half an hour max.”
“Think he believed you?”
“As much as he needed to. I’ve given him a way out and a name to blame. And he doesn’t have my address, before you ask, so if they do talk to him, they can have fun checking out all the Yamadas in the phone book.”
“I guess you trust him, then.”
Taka shrugged. “He’d sell me out if the yakuza came asking, but if they knew to ask him, they’d have done it already. Ditto if he was going to own up to them. The guy’s desperate to get shot of the case. I never thought he’d go under ten.”
“What was it you sold him, anyway?” I couldn’t help asking.
“Perfectly good product for his personal use,” said Taka with dignity. “And a certain amount of washing powder. Perfectly good washing powder, though, none of your supermarket own-brands.”
“You’re all heart,” Chanko said as we entered the ticket foyer. “Where— Did you say Higuchi lives in Shibuya? And you want us to go there? Are you nuts?”
I could see his objection. Shibuya was where the Primrose Path was, and where the Mitsuyoshi-kai had their headquarters. On the other hand, it was one of the busiest parts of Tokyo of an evening, even a weekday evening, with tens of thousands of people of every race and type. The chances of me bumping into somebody I knew in the teeming crowds were minimal. As Chanko pointed out, that didn’t mean they were zero.
“His place isn’t on Dogenzaka or anything,” Taka snapped, in the low tone in which we were conducting the whole flaring row, so as not to cause a commotion on the platform. “It’s the middle of the evening. The whole place will be crawling with gaijin and suits. Nobody’ll notice us. The only way this’ll go wrong is if we twat around here arguing for the next hour and give him time to think it through and arrange a welcoming committee. I’m not going in without backup, before you ask,” he added. “I don’t want to disappear.”
“I’m coming, goddammit,” said Chanko. “But Kerry should go home.”
“I don’t want to go back on my own,” I said. “And if there’s trouble, I might be useful.”
Chanko didn’t look like he agreed, but a train was pulling in, and we got on without another word.
God knows, if there was trouble, I didn’t want to be anywhere near it. But Shibuya was where Noriko and I had partied on endless lemon-sour-fuelled evenings, where we’d shopped and giggled and flirted. I knew the area by heart.
And yes. I was scared to be alone.
It seemed eerily normal when we got out onto the streets. I don’t know if I’d expected the lights to be dimmer, but it seemed jarring that they were as garish as ever, the crowds flooding over the streets as thick and varied, the clothes as wild. Shibuya was out on the razz: young women by the hundred, with hair and clothing arranged and coloured ever more strangely; a mass of gaijin, black, white and Asian; salarymen and party people; pleasure-seekers packed one against another under the neon night.
We walked through it all. We plunged down the twisting paths, hearing the rattle of a million pachinko ball-bearings, the tinny wails and explosions of amusement arcades, the blare of different music from every part of every shop; seeing the giant flickering advertising screens, the signs and flags bearing naked women and cartoon aliens and elegant calligraphy, mechanized crabs grimly waving their claws in welcome above restaurant doorways and plastic pufferfish advertising fugu dining. Alleys shot off at angles, open doorways spilled bright light, stairs curved away up and down, leading nowhere the eye could reach before it was dazzled by electric brightness. And through it all, Taka weaved a rapid, jerky path, and I followed a few steps behind, and Chanko paced us both, silent and watchful.
I knew every step we walked. Past Noriko’s favourite gyoza stall, and that shop where she’d persuaded me to buy those absurd diamante shoes, and the bar where she and Yoshi had accidentally pulled the same guy on the same evening. Along streets I’d staggered with her and Minachan, holding each other up after too much shōchū and not enough sense. Down the paths of what used to be my home, till the yakuza took it away from me. The hot, dull pain in my left foot was almost welcome just for the distraction.
“Wait round here,” Taka murmured, as we stopped before a corner well off the main drag that I knew turned into a street lined with closed shops, busy eating houses and a couple of love hotels. “Give me ten, max, don’t clump when we leave—I’ll get a cab if it’s not too rammed, but we’ll probably do best to take the underground—and watch out for watchers.”
He headed around the corner without another word. Chanko eased after him, disappearing into a pool of shadow. I stayed on the road they’d turned off, drifting along to browse the window of a shoe shop, unable to keep my eyes off the reflection in the glass in case someone was coming up behind. The hairs on the back of my neck were standing up, and the tension was throbbing through my skin.
Taka’s crazy, but he’s not stupid, I told myself. He wouldn’t be doing this if he thought it was a terrible idea. Higuchi has no reason to sell him out. If the yakuza don’t know about Hearn, they don’t know about Higuchi, and surely he’ll want to keep it that way.
Surely.
I couldn’t believe how long it was taking. He seemed to have been gone for hours, but a glance at my watch told me it had been four minutes.
I felt incredibly self-conscious standing there. The shoes weren’t worth four seconds of browsing time, and the next shop along sold sporting equipment. And my injured foot was really hurting now. I shifted my weight onto the other hip, and I contemplated the menu of a ramen shack, checked my phone for messages, couldn’t imagine what I’d do if I were just idling along innocently. Surely I must look impossibly obvious?
Six minutes. What was he doing in there, playing cards?
After eight minutes, I gave up on the shoes and opened my religious magazine. It held my attention for all of forty seconds.
He’d said ten minutes and it was nearly ten minutes and what the hell was he doing? What was Chanko doing? What was I going to do?
I was so wracked by nerves, I almost didn’t notice Taka coming out onto the main road again. He was carrying a black case. It looked incongruous, given his army jacket and dustman’s knitted cap, but I didn’t care and I didn’t suppose he did.
We had the bag.
A few seconds later, Chanko slid out of the shadows, strolling unhurriedly up the road. I set off in his wake, trying not to look like I was following, trying not to limp too obviously. My foot was feeling hot and red by now, and the knowledge we were going home, where I could sit down, made the pain perversely harder to tolerate, but we’d got the case. It was all but over.
Chanko caught up with Taka without trying. “Give,” I heard him say imperatively.
“I’ve got it.”
“Yeah, and you never leave important shit on the subway, do you? Hand it over.”
“That was years ago.”
“Three months. Give.”
Taka, grumbling, passed the case to Chanko as we joined the stream of human traffic heading for Shibuya station and home. The bigger man dropped back slightly, letting Taka’s long legs and nervy speed carry him slightly ahead, so that the three of us were spaced more evenly, with him walking just ahead of me, not looking round, but comfortingly there.
And we had the case.
We had actually got the damned thing. Another round to us, the big one this time, the one that would get the yakuza off Noriko for good. We’d done it—
Then the shout came.
“Tsuarabu?” a male voice called with something like astonishment, and Chanko’s head reared up and back, and there was a bellow, fierce and commanding. “Tsuarabu! Stop there!”
I saw him hesitate. I don’t think I’d seen that before. There was that one long, horrible second of indecision as I came up alongside him, staring, and he said in a low, clear voice, not looki
ng at me, “Keep walking,” swung round and headed back.
Just like that, he was gone, the sudden absence leaving me gasping and vulnerable and bewildered.
My whole body wanted to turn and gape, and I probably would have if Taka hadn’t grabbed my elbow and dragged me forward. I lurched with the effort not to stumble as the next few thoughts arrived in my head fully formed, faster than I’d known I could think.
We had to keep going. I wanted to run, but that would draw attention to myself. And—my left foot hit the ground with a jolt of pain—I wasn’t going to outdistance anyone who wasn’t on crutches.
Why did I want to run? I’d registered the shout in the vaguest way, part of the white noise of the street, but something had caught…
The speech form. The shouter had used an incredibly rude form, one that said he was speaking to the lowest scum of the streets. You wouldn’t speak like that to a friend, not in fun, not in anger, not at all. Whoever had called to Chanko meant nothing but ill.
And they had called him, no question. Tsuarabu meant nothing, but I’d been hearing Noriko’s voice in my head as I walked through the places we’d shared—her bouncy, rapid speech; her bright-eyed enthusiasm; her terrible English, making no attempt at the sounds that don’t belong in Japanese. Boots bery high! If Noriko tried for Tualavu, she’d come up with something very like Tsuarabu.
It had taken maybe two steps for that to come to focus in my head, squeezing all the breath out of my lungs, and I still don’t know how it was I didn’t falter, turn, scream, swear, cry. Frantic thoughts collided in my head. Yoshi’s suspicions; the name; the contemptuous speech. Was Chanko in trouble with an enemy?
Or with a boss?
“Taka…”
“Keep walking,” he said through his teeth. “I’ll double back.”
“Go home. You have to look out for Yoshi. I’ll do—something.”
He pulled me sideways, cutting across the crowd to reach a bus shelter by the side of the road, and checked the timetable as though escorting me to a bus, speaking under his breath. “Those are family, Kerry, what the hell are you going to do?”
