End of the World Blues

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  Kit was walking the streets in search of answers. He was looking for them inside his head, in the eyes of those coming the other way on crowded pavements, even in the mirrored world he could see in shop windows. So far he’d collected enough wrong answers to make him believe it was only a matter of time before he stumbled over one that was right.

  According to Charlie, a mathematician at Cambridge once said that if people saw only the one-in-a-hundred answers that proved correct, then the answer obviously looked extraordinary, because the ninety-nine failures went unseen. It was like videoing yourself throwing four dice, and editing the result to retain only the times when every number came up six.

  Kit had a feeling the boy meant to be supportive. In the three hours Kit had to waste before he could make the call, he stamped an unconscious pattern of anxiety into crowded streets from Euston Road in the north to Leicester Square and Piccadilly in the south, throwing dice in his head, making deals with God, wondering what he could offer in return for Neku’s safety.

  George Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf had both lived in the same house in Fitzroy Square, just at different times. An Englishman was once briefly King of Corsica. The dining club founded by artist Joshua Reynolds was now Blacks, a drinking den for journalists. Soho got its name from the Duke of Monmouth’s habit of calling So-Ho when hunting. In between the dice and deal making, Kit learned back history from heritage plaques on the walls.

  Every plan that came to his mind got dismissed for one reason or another. Yoshi always insisted that ideas, like everything else, followed a path made from tiny steps that looked obvious only in retrospect.

  Every bowl she made was the result of a hundred bowls she chose not to make. It followed that every act, whether the finding of a new proof for a complex mathematical problem or a twist of vision that turned one school of art into another was a result of endless failure. It was the unconscious editing of the process that made the outcome look clever, not the process itself.

  It also followed, at least it did to Yoshi, that every problem, no matter how intricate, could be broken into smaller pieces. How these pieces fit provided one with the answer.

  Try as Kit might, he couldn’t make it work. He had the problem, he had a willingness to shuffle endless permutations of what might be behind Neku’s kidnapping, but he couldn’t make his pieces fit. Who was he threatening by asking questions about Mary? Nobody, at least nobody Kit could see. So he tried to tie Neku’s disappearance to what had happened to his bar in Tokyo, but that made even less sense than before.

  Outside the French Protestant Church on Soho Square, while still worrying about what he should do, Kit realised it was after twelve and he was five minutes late making his call.

  “It’s me,” he said. “I got your note.”

  “Ahh…At last, my friend. You’re a difficult man to find. Where are you now?”

  “In Soho.” Silence followed. Maybe this was meant to make Kit nervous. If so, it worked. All the same, Kit made himself wait.

  “I was sorry to hear about Mary,” said the man. “She was a nice girl. Still, you seem to have found yourself someone else.”

  “What do you want from me?” Kit demanded.

  “Ben, come on. Let’s not make this harder than it need be.”

  “I’m not…” Common sense kicked in a split second ahead of Kit telling the man he wasn’t Ben Flyte. Common sense, and sudden hollowness in his gut. Life had just got very messy indeed.

  “You know,” said the voice. “You and Sergeant Samson have to be stupid to keep jerking me around. Very stupid.”

  The accent was foreign. East European, maybe.

  “No one’s jerking you around,” said Kit. “Tell me what you want and I’ll do it.” He heard muffled voices and an unexpected shriek of feedback, followed by a sharp command. The noise fell silent and inside the silence was music, a vacuum cleaner, and the sound of glasses being stacked.

  He was being called from a bar or club, somewhere with a sound system and an open mic. Not a huge surprise. In Kit’s experience clubs were ideal for laundering money and fronting less legit enterprises. Drugs could be confiscated and recycled, girls hired as dancers and then required to diversify, protection rackets marketed as concern for the local good.

  Always the first industry to embrace global opportunities, crime had taken the remains of the Soviet Union and created modern Russia, introduced the Balkans to free market values, plus bullets. Whole governments in Central America owed their existence to its patronage, and it worked so seamlessly alongside religion and commerce that most barely noted its existence. Half of Japan still couldn’t tell the difference between crime and politics.

  “Mr. Flyte, I want my consignment back. Otherwise…”

  Yes, Kit knew about that bit. “Let me talk to the kid.”

  “She’s sleeping,” said the man. It was the first thing he’d said Kit didn’t believe.

  “This consignment,” said Kit. “What if it’s not all there?”

  “Then we kill her anyway,” said the voice. “Call me when it’s ready. You have twenty-four hours.”

  “Wait,” Kit demanded. “Please…”

  “Why?”

  “It’s going to take longer.” Kit needed time, more time than this man was going to give him. Much more. “I need two days,” he said. “What you want is hidden. It will take me two days to recover it.”

  “Thirty-six hours,” the man said. “Maximum.” A click told Kit the conversation was over. After a minute or so he remembered to close his phone.

  The South London Gazette covered an area of fifty square miles in total, from Lambeth, through Southwark, and across to Lewisham. It was a free sheet, delivered weekly to over 150,000 households. Kit knew, he’d talked to its advertising manager, a woman who sounded as if she habitually worked Saturdays and had been slightly displeased that Kit might think otherwise.

  The paper used a basic flatplan, she told him, with the facility to swap stories at a local level. The version in which Kit was interested covered an area of 12,000 households on the Lambeth/Southwark borders. And yes, she’d be happy to e-mail him a distribution map.

  Focus, Kit told himself. Find yourself a plan.

  He might actually have intended to return to the Queen’s Head, an old pub in the shadow of the Telecom Tower, or it might have been an accident, his feet following a path so faded he only remembered the local landmarks when he saw them. Mary O’Mally had taken him here. It had been the O’Mallys’ local before Kate moved the family out of London.

  At the till two members of staff were discussing a third. “Plus,” said the man, “he fucks anything that moves.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “Well, nothing that goes baa, moo, or Mummy.”

  The woman laughed. “When I was a kid in Sydney,” she said. “We fucked but that was just pretending to be grown-up. It wasn’t like we really liked them or anything…”

  Speak for yourself, thought Kit.

  Cutting between tourists, he chose a table that let him sit with his back to the wall, then took a long look around the pub. No one was smoking. Half of the clientele were drinking Diet Coke or wine. The locals he remembered inhabiting the place had been reduced to a hardcore cluster of old men near the bar.

  London wasn’t a city Kit recognised anymore.

  Flipping open Neku’s laptop, Kit logged into his mail. Anti-ageing drugs, Chinese porn, a note from the consigliore of a Brazilian crime family offering unspecified riches in return for borrowing Kit’s bank account.

  The note from Hiroshi Sato was brief.

  A single link to an English-language news story on Tokyo Today. No Neck, Micki, Tetsuo, and half a dozen others had been arrested and unexpectedly released. A teenager had been killed in a battle to retake the site, but since he was bozozoku no one was making much of a fuss. A second note, from Micki, told the same tale in rather more breathless prose. What should Tommy and his friends do if things got really ugly? she wanted to
know.

  Well, No Neck wanted to know, really.

  “Nothing.” His first reply seemed too abrupt, so Kit sipped his brandy and thought about it. What should No Neck do? More to the point, what could No Neck do? Other than marry Micki, find himself a proper job, and walk away from his friendship with Kit…

  “There was an uyoku van,” Kit wrote finally. “Gold sides, with the imperial mon picked out in black. See what you can find out about it.” Still too bald, so Kit added, “And take care of yourself…”

  The last e-mail Kit opened contained a map showing a tight jumble of streets in the shadow of a new overpass. Layers of history in a muddle of names, as Napier and Maffeking, old generals and battles intersected with Nelson Mandela Drive. Somewhere in that jumble of streets was the bar where Neku was being held. All Kit had to do was find it.

  He was aware just how absurd that sounded.

  Clubs and pubs needed to be licenced. A place with live music probably needed a different type of licence again. Someone would have that list. It’s all about small steps, Kit reminded himself.

  Calling the police station where Amy worked, Kit hit his next problem—no one had heard of her. “You say she claimed to work here?” The Inspector on the other end was more interested in this than anything else Kit had to say.

  “Yes,” said Kit.

  “And you’re definitely not a journalist?” The Inspector was tapping away at a keyboard, so he had to be checking on Amy, unless he was simply getting on with his own work.

  “I’m a friend.”

  “Right,” said the man. “Give me a number and I’ll call you back.” Five minutes stretched into ten and then into twenty; when this became half an hour, Kit stopped bothering to watch the time and began watching people instead.

  A Saturday crowd came and went, deals were done, four girls went to the bathroom together and came out looking much happier. Money or drugs seemed the obvious answer to what Kit was expected to produce. A bar in South London was the where. In Japan, kidnapping was the preserve of hardcore criminals. Over here, Kit wasn’t sure, maybe amateurs got in on the act as well. He needed someone who would know.

  When his mobile buzzed he got her.

  “You’ve been looking for me?” It was Amy, her voice guarded enough to give Kit pause.

  “Look,” said Kit, “I need some help.”

  “Yes,” Amy said. “I enjoyed supper too.”

  I enjoyed?

  In the background behind Amy, a printer was clattering and half a dozen men discussed flack jackets, raising their voices to be heard above the noise. It sounded like any office, apart from the number of times Guv, Ma’am, and Boss got dropped into the conversation. A conversation that stumbled when Amy said, “No, there’s nothing I need to tell you…”

  Someone sniggered. “Hey,” he said. “We’ve got ourselves a domestic spat.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” snapped Amy, remembering to add, “sir.” Unless that was meant to be part of the insult.

  Oh shit, indeed.

  “I’m at work,” said Amy. “Call me later.”

  “This can’t wait,” Kit told her. “I need to know about Ben Flyte. Everything you’ve got.”

  “Why?”

  “Because whoever’s taken Neku thinks that’s who I am.”

  “Unlikely,” said Amy. “Ben Flyte’s dead.”

  “He’s what?”

  “Murdered,” she said. “Six months ago. We just haven’t released the news. If I call you back it will be in five minutes. Go somewhere private.”

  A courtyard behind the Queen’s Head was stacked with metal barrels and mixer crates full of empty bottles. Its walls were high enough to muffle traffic from the street beyond. No one stopped Kit when he walked through the kitchens and took up position against the wall.

  “Kit,” he announced, answering his phone on the first ring.

  CHAPTER 45 — Nawa-no-ukiyo

  “I’m sorry,” said Luc.

  “For what?” Lady Neku had never met anyone like the boy for apologising. He’d been sorry about tripping on the stairs, although she got in his way, rather than the other way round. He regretted taking up her time and not wanting to practise with Nico, Petro, and Antonio in the duelling room. Now he was apologising again. Hadn’t anyone ever told him never apologise and never explain?

  “What am I sorry for?” said Luc. “I’m sorry for everything.”

  Lady Neku laughed. “You can’t be,” she said. “No apology would be long enough.” She watched him think that through.

  “You’re not what I expected,” Luc said finally.

  “Really…what did you expect?”

  Oh God, thought Lady Neku. Now she’d embarrassed him. They were loitering in a corridor that led from the duelling room to the archives, which was an old name for an area now mostly given over to rubbish.

  “Antiques,” her mother called them. “Heirlooms.”

  Rubbish all the same.

  “I don’t know,” said Luc. “Someone…”

  “Weirder?”

  He grinned at that. “How long do you think they’ll be busy?” Luc asked, glancing at the entrance to another corridor. One that led to the throne room, where Lord d’Alambert and Lady Neku’s mother were locked in discussion. It amused Lady Neku that Luc had such trouble orientating himself in her habitat. A lifetime of exploring corridors and levels had imprinted a mental map into her subconscious. Unless, of course, it had been imprinted earlier and she’d been born with the thing.

  “Hours, I guess,” said Lady Neku. “Maybe days if my mother is feeling difficult. It depends how much negotiating they have left to do.”

  Luc looked shocked. “What’s to negotiate?” he asked. “The major domos agreed everything in advance.”

  Lady Neku was about to say this was the first she’d heard of it, only she’d been saying this a lot recently and it worried her to discover Luc knew things she didn’t, so she swallowed her comment.

  “Come on,” she said instead. “I want to show you something.”

  “What?” demanded Luc. He was still asking when Lady Neku reached the drop zone. A dozen opalescent pods sat gathering dust, while the thirteenth was already releasing its door.

  “Get in,” Lady Neku said.

  “You’re joking…”

  “Why would I do that?”

  As Lady Neku watched, the door sprang open and its inner membrane began to nictate. The pods liked to do these things for themselves, so Lady Neku made herself wait. Once door and membrane were open, Lady Neku reached for a grab bar and hauled herself inside, sitting patiently while the pod grew straps.

  “Yuck,” said Luc, watching sticky tendrils tie themselves tight around Lady Neku’s upper arms and shoulders.

  “It brushes off,” she promised. “Come on, climb in.”

  Luc did, reluctantly, only realising too late that he should have entered from the other side; after all, that was where the pod had grown a door for him.

  “It’s okay,” said Lady Neku, as Luc began to climb down. “Just clamber over me…and hold tight,” she added.

  Luc was about to say something when the door membranes finished regrouping, both doors sealed, and the floor fell away, turning the pod a hundred and eighty degrees, before releasing it towards the planet below; which had suddenly become the planet above.

  “Warned you,” Lady Neku said.

  Slow entry speeds were essential. Even so, the friction on the falling pod was sufficient to ionize its surface and create a luminous bubble that trailed colours behind them like a broken rainbow.

  “Is this safe?” said Luc, looking at dials that had begun to spin wildly.

  Such a child. Did he really think pods came with dials on the original spec? Lady Neku considered admitting the dials had been her idea and she’d demanded needles that spun, but decided not to bother.

  “Well,” she said. “This is my tenth drop and I’m still alive.”

  Luc didn’t seem to find this comfo
rting.

  After a while, Lady Neku flicked out the wings and had the pod roll through another hundred and eighty degrees, changing her descent to a wide spiral. The forces on her body felt more natural that way.

  Cracks in the earth became ruined towns and those towns expanded to reveal districts and finally roads and even houses. Only the very largest buildings could be seen from this height, but half of one town was obviously buried by sand and an earthquake had ripped another across its edge like badly torn paper.

  “Welcome to Katchatka Segment,” said Lady Neku. “Glory of Planet Earth.” Leaning forwards, she brushed one finger across the window and sat back as a living town spread itself across glass.

  “Shit,” said Luc. “What’s that?”

  “History,” Lady Neku said, removing the town with another brush of her finger. “What used to be…how old are you really?” she asked.

  “Sixteen,” said Luc, sounding offended. “You know that.”

  “And me?” She was going to have to do something about his habit of changing colour. Luc couldn’t keep turning pink at every question, or her brothers would never leave him alone.

  “Fifteen,” she told him. “I’m fifteen.” Lady Neku paused. “Do you believe that?”

  Luc nodded. “What’s not to believe?”

  “What if I’m a copy?” said Lady Neku. “Then how old am I?”

  Luc looked at her.

  “Okay,” said Lady Neku. “Think about it…Fifteen, plus the age of my mother when the copy was made. Right?”

  The boy shrugged.

  “But what if my mother was a copy, then how does it work? My age, plus her age when I was copied, plus the age of her mother when she was copied? That would make me…” Lady Neku began shuffling numbers in her head, only to abandon her sum when the pod caught the outer edge of a massive dust cloud.

  “Turbulence,” she said. “You might feel sick.”

  “I already do.”

  As she grinned, Lady Neku watched Luc make himself release his grip on the chair; he minded her noticing his knuckles had gone white.

  “Don’t worry,” said Lady Neku.