End of the World Blues

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  “A thief,” said Kit.

  The old man looked at the corpse.

  “I didn’t kill him,” Kit added, wanting to make this clear. The old man glanced from the dead mugger to the thin blade in Kit’s hand.

  “It was someone else,” said Kit.

  “Ahh.” The man nodded, something clicking into place behind his eyes. “It was someone else. I understand.”

  “It was someone else.”

  “Hai.” A little bow. “Yes, I understand. Someone else.” Glancing anxiously at the blade in Kit’s hand, he asked, “Did I see this someone?”

  Kit sighed. “I’m going now,” he said. “You might want to call the police.”

  The man thought about that. “Might I?” he asked finally. “Only they were here again…” He paused. “Apparently, I didn’t see them either.”

  CHAPTER 6 — Friday, 8 June

  An uyoku van blocked the steps to Pirate Mary’s parking lot. Revere the throne. Expel the barbarian, announced lettering down both sides. Unlike most such vans, which were black with a gold chrysanthemum, this one was gold with the imperial chrysanthemum picked out in black. It still had a revolving fog-horn though, bolted to the cabin roof, ready to harangue people on all sides.

  The van was empty, all its doors locked.

  Kit shrugged. He was drunk, tired, and stank of someone else’s wife; which was probably just as well, at least being drunk was, because had Kit been sober he’d be terrified. Not about the fascist van, but about the dead man behind him and the cos-play’s blade hanging heavy in his pocket.

  Three Suzuki cruisers, all chopped beyond recognition, blocked the truck’s access to the alley. So its driver would need to climb two flights of stairs to Pirate Mary’s, track down three drunk bozozoku bikers, and persuade them to let him out. The faithful-sword-to-the-throne was going to require all the luck he could get.

  Kit knew he should go in. And yet…

  From habit, he reached into his back pocket for a multitool, flipped out the flat-blade screwdriver, and began to re-fix Pirate Mary’s history to the alley wall. Someone was forever trying to steal it. Towards the end of the 1500s a single figure controlled the seas around Ireland—Gráinne Ni Mhaille, known to Elizabeth Tudor, the Queen of England, as Grace O’Malley and to Elizabeth’s government as a wicked director of thieves and murderers.

  She held hostage Elizabeth’s ships, raided villages on the English mainland, stole cattle, and forced Elizabeth to the negotiating table. Máirín Ni Mhaille was Grace O’Malley’s eldest daughter, better known as Pirate Mary. Some reports said she ended on the gallows in Dublin, others that she took James Stuart’s offer of a small castle on the Connemara coast. A revisionist version, recorded by the Bishop of Santiago, had her repenting of her sins and living out her final years as a nun in Spain.

  About half of that was true. The rest Kit had invented after he bought the narrow wooden building in Roppongi and begun fitting out its second floor as an Irish pub. Such is the nature of history that Máirín ending her days at a Spanish convent now featured as fact in a TV documentary examining the links between Ireland and Spain.

  Buying the house had been Yoshi’s idea. Cold and brilliant Yoshi, who blew into Kit’s life and left him standing, because unlike her other lovers he let her blow right through him. He’d asked Yoshi once, near the beginning, if something terrible had happened in her childhood and she’d given a smile both slight and mocking.

  “So simplistic,” she said.

  A day later she asked him if that was his excuse. Kit intended to tell her about his mother, but talked about being a sniper instead.

  “A rurouni,” said Yoshi, at the end of it. “A hitokiri and a rurouni…A killer and a traveller with no destination.”

  It took her three days to make the Kawakami Gensai sequence, a series of twelve pots in shades of desert yellow, slashed across the sides with quick flicks of a knife. The sequence sold within hours of going on display in Mitsukoshi, the majority going to private collectors, although one ended up in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  It had taken two years to repair the wreck of a building, but they’d done it eventually. Another six months were lost in creating a bar, installing the bathrooms and white-washing wooden walls. The sign came last, painted by a small Vietnamese woman who owned a tattoo parlour behind the Almond coffee shop. She did it from a tatty snapshot of Mary O’Mally and a postcard showing the Disney version of Captain Hook.

  Pirate Mary’s—Tokyo’s Best Irish Bar. No one but Kit knew where Máirín Ni Mhaille got her face.

  CHAPTER 7 — Friday, 8 June

  “Dozo…”

  The bozozoku glanced round, ready to take offence, recognised his host, and decided to move aside, albeit reluctantly and without bothering to take his hand from the panties of a girl in a tartan skirt.

  Oh well, thought Kit, it gives the place colour. Dope thickened the stairs around him and a snatch of jig, ripped from an old Riverdance DVD, ran on a wall screen outside the bar.

  Without thinking about it, Kit tucked the cos-play’s knife above the lintel, where he usually left a spare key. Then he took a deep breath and pushed open the pub door. The room stank of warm beer and too much skunk. Someone had ripped a chrome grill off the juke box in the hope of making it louder, and two bozozoku in leathers and replica WW2 helmets had crashed a table of art students and were coming on to the girls. No Neck was meant to be having a word with his friends about that.

  “Kit, mate. Over here…”

  People began calling before Kit even shut the door. Yoshi was still here, working the Guinness pumps, a job she hated. No Neck was definitely missing and the food cabinet was entirely empty.

  “Listen…” It was Gaz, an Englishman who ran a studio by day, with a sideline in “portfolios” by night. Every would-be hostess who staggered off a plane at Narita already knew she was selling her breast size, hair colour, and smile. When Gaz suggested life could be better as a model most were happy to believe it.

  He charged them camera use, studio time, the use of cheap clothes, and the services of a bad makeup artist. Model cards came extra. Cards being the best shot printed up with the model’s name, age, and vital statistics.

  These lied as often as Gaz did.

  Kit didn’t really dislike him. He was just one of those people…one of a thousand expats who’d dragged their unhappiness to the other side of the world, expecting everything to be different, and never quite got over the fact it felt the same. At least Kit had arrived with no such expectations.

  “Sweet fuck,” said Gaz, cancelling what he was about to say. “You look wrecked.”

  “Yeah,” Kit said. “Tough night, catch you later…”

  Until Micki appeared, Kit really thought he might make it across the smoky room without being stopped. She looked about twelve but then she also looked like a boy. Her twenty-first birthday had been at Pirate Mary’s, courtesy of her friends in the bozozoku.

  “I’m so sorry,” said Micki, bowing. “My fault…”

  “What is?”

  “Everything,” she said, and promptly burst into tears.

  Kit took a deep breath. “What happened?”

  “Yoshi-san fired No Neck.”

  “She what…?”

  “When he wouldn’t leave, she called the police.” Tears were streaming down the Japanese girl’s face. “They hit No Neck with sticks,” she said, “very hard…”

  “The police?”

  Micki nodded, her mouth a tight butterfly of misery. Tommy No Neck had been chapter leader with the Rebels, Australia’s most notorious gang of bikers. And he was the only foreigner Kit knew who rode with the bozozoku, Japan’s very own speed tribe.

  “Yoshi…”

  Looking up from her pump, Yoshi glanced back long enough to check a glass was full and slapped the lever, delivering a pint of Caffrey’s to the counter with a slight bang. For Yoshi, this counted as full-on rage.

  “Kit,” she said, just
his name.

  “About No Neck…”

  “Leave it,” said Yoshi. “I’m not having this discussion.”

  “He’s my best friend.”

  “That’s why he sells drugs, drinks beer without paying for it, and steals money from the till…”

  “Small change,” Kit said.

  “Also packets of cigarettes, whole boxes of condoms, whisky from the cabinet. He treats this pub like he owns it.”

  “Okay,” said Kit, “we’ll discuss this later.”

  Shaking her head, Yoshi said, “No, we won’t. There’s nothing to discuss.” She glanced at her watch. Almost an hour after midnight. Officially the bar shut at 11 pm. In practise, because his clientele were mostly foreign and the bozozoku fought only among themselves, the police overlooked the fact he stayed open late. Whether that arrangement would last beyond their arrest of No Neck was another matter.

  “You want me to ring the bell?”

  Yoshi shrugged.

  “Last call,” Kit shouted at the noisy crowd. Ten minutes after this, he rang the bell for drinking up and ten minutes after that he called time, simultaneously turning up all the house lights. Calling time was tradition, and tradition was what Tokyo’s Irish pubs sold.

  It was as he hooked back the doors and began to herd his customers towards the stairwell that Kit finally heard the furious howl of a police siren, coming closer by the second. Mr. Ito, it seemed, had left the body for someone else to find.

  Yoshi and he cleaned the bar together, Kit taking four trays on which newly pulled pints were placed and tipping their slops into a bucket. He collected up the glasses and emptied the ashtrays into a plastic bag, tying it tightly. Yoshi wanted to say something. It was the way she stood, with one foot forward and her arms awkward at her sides.

  “You were late,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Kit, “I know. Something happened…”

  “I was meant to see Yuko tonight.”

  Yuko and Yoshi, the Tanaka twins. Yuko was a few minutes younger, and had married Tek Tamagusuku, a well-known property developer. Yoshi was famous, so famous that complete strangers turned up begging Yoshi to sell her pots to them. It had taken Kit years to work out what she wanted from him and why they were still together: he kept her family away, apart from Yuko.

  “You were meant to…?”

  “I told you,” Yoshi said. “Tamagusuku-san’s in London. So Yuko invited me to supper. I was meant to stay the night. I even bought the baby presents.” This wasn’t as big a commitment as it sounded. Yoshi spent her life buying presents for Yuko’s children.

  “You promised,” said Yoshi.

  That was the problem. Yoshi kept her promises. If she said she was going to do something she did it. Kit was into territory he understood, without actually feeling the intricate web of Japanese emotions that accompanied it.

  “About No Neck…”

  “I fired him,” Yoshi said crossly. “He kept saying you’d be back. I asked him where you were. He wouldn’t tell me.”

  “I was giving an English lesson.”

  Yoshi shook her head. “No,” she said, “that was over hours ago. Why wouldn’t No Neck tell me?”

  “He didn’t know,” said Kit. “Mrs. Oniji booked a table at Red Bamboo. You know how long those things take.”

  “You’re lying.” Yoshi’s eyes were large with tears.

  “No. I’m not…Look,” Kit said, “why don’t we get you a taxi. Yuko will understand.”

  “It’s too late,” said Yoshi.

  He hoped she was talking about the taxi.

  CHAPTER 8 — Friday, 8 June

  Neku’s cloak was actually a coat. That is, it was cut with sleeves rather than mere slits through which to put one’s arms, though its sleeves were very short, almost vestigial. The garment appeared to be modelled on one worn by Vampire Hunter D in an old film, with an upturned collar and a silk lining that glistened wetly as Neku climbed the stairs towards Pirate Mary’s.

  In an ideal world the cloak would keep her warm at night, wrap itself around her against the rain, and harden to a shell should anyone try to kick her while she slept. But in an ideal world Neku wouldn’t be sleeping in doorways in the first place and she was in this world, so her cloak just flapped, although it still managed to look better than she did.

  Wrapping the cloak around her, Neku knocked politely at the half-open door of the bar. “Gomen-kudasi.”

  “We’re shut.”

  The voice was flat to the point of being hostile. So Neku knocked again, because she wasn’t sure what else to do, then put her head round the edge. The bar was empty, chairs upended on tables and the tiles wet from having been recently mopped.

  “I told you, we’re…” The woman looked up and whoever she was expecting to see she saw someone else.

  “Yoshi…”

  Seeing the woman blink, Neku realised that perhaps she should have called the woman something more formal. Yet Yoshi was famous. People wrote about her in Tokyo Today. How could Neku not know her name?

  “Who are you?”

  “Lady Neku,” said Neku, bowing slightly. “In exile on this world.”

  Yoshi scowled. “I don’t have time for games,” she said. “If someone’s told you about the bar job I’ll need to know your proper name. And you will call me madame.”

  “Bar job?”

  “You didn’t come about No Neck’s job?”

  Neku shook her head. “Your man,” she said, looking around. “Is he here?”

  “Why?” demanded Yoshi.

  “Because we have business.”

  “You have…?”

  Watching the other woman’s eyes open, Neku wondered what this famous potter saw. A curve of cheek? A single line encompassing Neku’s nose, mouth, and chin…? When Neku caught herself in a shop window she saw a ragged cos-play, with flattish face and hunched shoulders. The lithe and deadly assassin Neku remembered had been missing for a while.

  “What business?” Yoshi demanded.

  “He has something of mine.”

  “Of yours?” Yoshi must have known how lame that sounded, Neku decided, because the woman blushed and then shook her head in irritation. “What?” Yoshi demanded. “What could Kit-san possibly have of yours?”

  My knife.

  This seemed an inappropriate thing to say, so Neku just shrugged. “He borrowed something,” she said. “I want it back.” She looked round for somewhere to sit.

  “He’s out,” said Yoshi. “Banking tonight’s cash. You can’t wait here.” She seemed torn between insisting Neku leave and a need to ask more questions. And it was obvious, at least to the younger of the two, that the fewer questions anyone asked the better.

  “I’ll be downstairs,” said Neku.

  “Wait…” Yoshi held up one hand. “This thing, when did he borrow it?”

  Well, Neku almost said, it wasn’t exactly borrowed. She’d gone back for her knife the second she realised it was missing and found the body, still warm and slumped against the railings, only her knife was gone and the police were due to arrive. So she’d come here because this was where the cat said the foreigner lived, and because her knife was important.

  “About an hour ago,” said Neku, then wondered what she’d said.

  When Kit got back he found the outside light still on. That was his first warning all was not right. His second was that the cos-play sat on Pirate Mary’s bottom step, wrapped in her cloak. Kit’s third and final clue came when Yoshi threw an ashtray from the top of the stairwell. She threw it badly, possibly because tears ruined her aim. It was also possible she intended to miss.

  “How could you?”

  “What?” Kit asked.

  “Look at her,” said Yoshi.

  Neku clambered to her feet. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to cause problems.”

  “She’s just a kid,” said Yoshi.

  Neku’s chin came up at that. “No, I’m not.”

  Kit looked between Yoshi an
d the cos-play, who were now glaring at each other. “God,” he said. “Yoshi. How could you even…”

  The girl stamped, it was a very childish gesture. “Look,” she said, holding out her hand. “Just give it back.” Her fingernails beneath her lace gloves were bitten and broken, the gloves themselves were torn.

  Pulling 15,000 yen from his wallet, Kit held the notes out to her. “Find somewhere to sleep,” he said. “Have a shower. Get something to eat.”

  “I want my—”

  “I don’t have anything of yours,” said Kit. Turning to Yoshi, he shrugged. “She’s a street kid,” he said. “I’ve given her a couple of coffees, bought her a bowl of noodles, that’s all.”

  “Kit…”

  He hadn’t expected Neku to know his name.

  “Leave,” he told her. “Before we call the police.”

  “You wouldn’t dare.”

  “Try me,” said Kit. What else could he say? Yoshi was within listening distance.

  “Yeah,” said the girl. “Ain’t that the truth…”

  CHAPTER 9 — Saturday, 9 June

  When Kit got back after locking the door to the alley where the bins were kept, and the door at the top of the stairs, which let customers into Pirate Mary’s, he found the dishwasher rumbling and Yoshi nowhere in sight. So he checked the window locks, wiped down the counter one final time, and began to type out a note advertising No Neck’s job, since this looked like the price Yoshi intended to extract for making peace.

  “You okay?” he asked, having tracked Yoshi down to the bathroom. A question too stupid to merit an answer.

  “Tomorrow,” she said, “we’ll talk tomorrow.”

  Kit shut the bathroom door on his way out. He shut it softly, climbed the stairs to the next level, and walked out onto the balcony, to watch Tokyo’s lights twinkle like a mat of stars around him. He no longer felt drunk, he no longer felt afraid. Kit was coming to accept that he no longer felt anything very much at all.