End of the World Blues

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  “You want Luc dead?”

  Of course I want… She hesitated. Killing Luc was her duty. Something to which she should dedicate the rest of her life. All the same. “This isn’t fair,” Lady Neku said.

  “Nor is opening that door.”

  For the rest of their conversation Lady Neku sat on the floor, her knees pulled up to her chin and her back against the door she’d been trying to open. She knew the discussion was mostly internal. High Strange just helping to pick through her thoughts.

  “All right,” it said. “I’ve opened the door…Only a fraction,” it added, as Lady Neku scrambled to her feet. “The air is already thinner and your core temperature has begun to fall. That’s why the bleeding is less. In a few seconds Luc and his father will begin to search for you. A short while later, they’ll stop looking and make plans to abandon the habitat.”

  “And me?” asked Lady Neku.

  “Ah yes,” said High Strange. “I need to talk to you about that.”

  Her life was saved by a bowl. Along with the life of Luc, his father, their retainers, other families, and people who clung to existence in parts of the world Lady Neku barely realised were inhabited.

  The whole of humanity had been preserved because of a wafer-thin bowl barely larger than Lady Neku’s cupped hands. It was old, it was cracked beneath the rim, and it was the colour of burned earth. It was also, according to High Strange, proof that humanity was capable of more than it seemed. That they were worth protecting.

  “We are the ghosts,” said High Strange.

  “Of what?”

  “Your machines.” It smiled, she could hear it in the voice. “We tied the knots for you and made the sails. We hold up your habitats. All you have to do is manage yourselves.”

  “We’ve failed.”

  “Katchatka failed. Lord d’Alambert will fold this station into his segment and grow new sails, with help from me. The weather will be stabilised. As your mother once said, everything comes at a price.”

  “Her death,” said Lady Neku, eyes refilling. “My brothers.”

  “No,” said High Strange. “You.”

  Her cloak smelled of smoke and black ash formed moons beneath her fingernails, which were broken from having scrabbled through the rubble of a recently burned bar. The air in High Strange was thin and cold enough to make Lady Neku shiver, though that might have been the last of her memories falling into place.

  Staring round the frozen chamber, Lady Neku saw the banquet table and her brothers where they sat. Lady Katchatka regal in a silver chair. Ice frosting the walls and the tiles and even the knives and forks on the plates laid out in front of the dead.

  “Oh fuck,” she said. “I came back…”

  She’d chosen exile. And offered her choice of time and place, had chosen where and when the bowl was made, because High Strange believed she would be happy there. Denied her own life, Lady Neku accepted a life that came frighteningly close.

  Everything was possible in an infinite universe. That much was obvious. Less obvious, until one thought of it, was the fact that everything possible was possible twice, or three times, or as many times as anyone was prepared to throw the dice.

  “I broke my memories,” said Lady Neku, wondering if this was excuse enough for her return.

  “Neku,” said High Strange. “We’ve been through this. The beads only worked while you were here with me. There’s no me where you went, so no beads and no easy memories. Only you.”

  “It’s weird there,” said Lady Neku. “No one is friendly and Kit’s bar has just burned down and the only normal person I’ve met so far is a cat.”

  “Neku…”

  “I have to go back,” she said.

  “Yes,” said the voice. “You do.”

  PART III

  CHAPTER 59 — Thursday, 5 July

  The shuttle bus from Narita Airport was a quarter full, as always. A Korean boy with spiky hair sat at the back, pointedly ignoring signs not to use his phone while the bus was in motion. Leaning against him was a Japanese girl lost in admiration, but the boy was still embarrassed enough to be angry about something that happened earlier.

  A customs officer had pulled him out of a queue in arrivals and unpacked his luggage with excruciating slowness, carefully unfolding each item of clothing as the line looked on. It had been all the boy could do to bow when she let him go.

  Rain hammered the bus, obscuring its windows. Behind the downpour hid trees and houses, a waterlogged crocus bed looking like a tiny paddy field. Half-seen factories stood back from the motorway, screened by sodden banks of earth. Just another summer’s day in Tokyo, with its heat hanging on the edge of tropical.

  Soon the bus would reach Odaiba and the artificial islands built to house Tokyo’s overspill. Some of this area was still poor, but most had spawned wild architecture and ever-more-expensive shopping malls. It was the same city, Kit told himself. He’d been in love with its anonymity from the moment he first arrived; its anonymity and ability to change so fast it always remained the same.

  It still was that city, but he was going to abandon it all the same, once he’d done what he came to do.

  Having wrapped themselves around each other, the teenage couple behind him fell asleep, lulled by the warmth and that weird jet-lag dilation which means one’s mind has trouble catching up with its owner after a long flight.

  Kit’s fake passport had carried him through customs. He suspected he had the Korean boy to thank for that. So disapproving had the smartly dressed young officer been at the couple who’d preceded him that she gave Kit little more than a glance.

  “Are you carrying drugs?”

  Kit had shaken his head firmly.

  “Why are you here?”

  “Holiday,” said Kit. “I’m only here for a week. At the Shinjuku Hilton.”

  The officer nodded, as if this was where she’d expect someone like Kit to stay, stamped his passport, and motioned Kit through. Both questions had been in English and Kit had been careful to answer the same way.

  The hand in his pocket had been borderline rude, but he was gaijin, and besides being regarded as ill bred was infinitely better than having a Tokyo customs officer wonder why his little finger was missing.

  No Neck answered the phone on the first ring, his wide-cheeked face scowling from Kit’s tiny screen. As Kit watched, the man dragged a smile from his memory. “Media liaison,” he said.

  “What?”

  “English language liaison. 47 Ronin. How can I help?”

  “It’s me,” said Kit, flicking his Nokia to visual.

  There was a sudden silence. “Benny?” said No Neck. “From the Times?”

  In the split second before Kit decided to ask No Neck what the hell was going on, something about the old Rebel’s eyes told him to shut the fuck up and listen instead.

  “Liked your last story,” said No Neck, his voice matter of fact. “You might also want to look at these. Oh, and Tetsuo says he’s been offered cash for news of Kit Nouveau. And we’ve got a herd of rain-sodden lawyers down here trying to serve Mr. Nouveau with cease and desist orders…”

  “Cease and desist what?” demanded Kit.

  No Neck laughed. “You name it,” he said and broke the connection. The URLs that No Neck sent led to a dozen different sources of news, all carrying the same story. It wasn’t the lead (because that was the stand off between China and Japan), or even the second story (which alternated between storm warnings and unrest in Chechnya), but it was usually fifth or sixth and registered a respectable number of hits.

  Stand off in Roppongi. Hammerfest Hells Angels stand by Japanese “brothers”… That was from Aftenposten, the Norwegian daily. The Washington Post was more circumspect. Tokyo mayor bides time. “Civil matter,” he states. Opposition disagrees.

  The occupation of a building site in Roppongi was now entering its tenth day. Questions had been asked in Japanese parliament. Several purchasers of the high-end apartments to be built on the site had al
ready pulled out.

  Pirate Mary’s was described as a biker club house, a bar owing more to Irish myth than any reality, and a soi-disant watering hole for Tokyo’s self-proclaimed anarchic elite. (Battered & Bruised’s travel editor had been refused entry about six months before.) If anyone remembered a woman had died there they forgot to tell their readers.

  Having checked the sites, Kit abandoned the protection of a Shinjuku bus shelter and braved the rain for a narrow doorway between electronic screens. Café Rikishi’s windows had been sacrificed for profit, the advertising bringing in almost as much a week as selling beer made in a month. Besides, those who used the café were unlikely to miss daylight; they came for the chanko-nabe stew, the beer, and the memories it brought of a city only they remembered.

  If the air outside was hot and wet, the café was worse. So humid was the tiny bar that condensation dripped like rain from its ceiling and ran in rivulets down black-painted walls. An old man in a sodden pork-pie hat sat at a table with five dead Kirin bottles in front of him. When not wiping sweat from his brow or gazing mournfully at his empty bottles, the old man shredded a damp napkin to make perfect paper moths.

  “Ito-san,” said Kit, bowing deeply.

  Mr. Ito grew up in Shitamachi, a working class area destroyed in the fire bombing of Tokyo, and his generation kept a rigid demarcation between public and private behaviour—his shock at seeing Kit was quickly disguised.

  Of course, maybe he was too drunk to recognise Kit at all. It could have been the shock of seeing a rain-soaked foreigner that Ito-san discarded, one brave or stupid enough to invade the sticky gloom of a café under the Shinjuku railway line.

  Since Café Rikishi was barely larger than a broom cupboard, its crowd consisted of the owner and Mr. Ito, Kit, and a vast Korean mechanic who was stripping a Yamaha clutch at a table in the corner. When it became obvious he was not required to heave the gaijin back onto the street, the Korean went back to his gears.

  “Mr. Ito.”

  “Nouveau-san.”

  So he had been recognised.

  The old man stared at Kit, somewhat owlishly. “You know,” he said, ripping a strip from his paper napkin and rolling it between his fingers. “People said…”

  “I’d left Tokyo?”

  Mr. Ito twisted off another strip of napkin and folded both strips together, placing a tiny paper rifle on the table. “You’d met with an accident.”

  “Hardly,” said Kit. “I’ve been on holiday.”

  Mr. Ito allowed himself to look doubtful.

  “Let me buy you a beer,” Kit said, ordering two Kirin, and remembering to use enough polite form to make his request acceptable. The ex-Sumo behind the counter glanced at Ito-san, who nodded.

  All Sumo learned to cook, as did dervishes from half a world away, Zen and Sufi both considering it no stranger to look for truth in a bubbling pot than anywhere else. Kit had no idea if dervishes ran restaurants, but half the Sumo in Japan opened cafés as soon as the time came for them to hang up their ceremonial aprons.

  The bottles of Kirin were so cold that steam from the chanko-nabe condensed across their sides and began to trickle into damp circles. When Mr. Ito returned his bottle to the table, he was careful to place it exactly inside the mark it made.

  “Another?” Kit asked.

  Mr. Ito nodded. “And maybe food?”

  The stew was hot and filling and took the edge off the beer. It tasted of soy, garlic, and rice wine, daikon and shimeji mushroom mixed with burdock root. The chicken and tofu were near perfect, the chrysanthemum leaves still slightly chewy. The udon came separately, in its own tiny bowl.

  “Gochisosama deshita.”

  Kit’s simple thank you earned him a slight nod from the ex-Sumo, who then swept crude chunks of tofu into boiling broth. Obviously enough, the tofu wasn’t really diced crudely, merely chopped in a fashion designed to look crude.

  After a third bottle of Kirin, Mr. Ito decided it was time to face whatever brought the Englishman to this café. So he sat back on his stool and signalled that Kit had his full attention. This involved little more than a slight change of expression and a relaxing of Mr. Ito’s shoulders.

  “That night,” said Kit.

  Mr. Ito nodded, not needing Kit to specify which one.

  “I have a question about the afternoon.” Kit had been thinking hard about this. Look for the money, Mary had told him. Odds on, that’s your motive.

  The insurance on Pirate Mary’s was limited to what was required by law. So far as anyone knew he and Yoshi were married; he’d thought so himself. Even gaijin in Japan got to inherit from their partners. The price of Yoshi’s work might have doubled in the week following her death, but most of it was held in trust or owned outright by museums. It seemed a poor motive, assuming her death had been anything other than an accident.

  Only the building value of the land made sense. And Kit needed Brigadier Miles to come through with a name on that. In the meantime…Kit had been landing at Narita when he remembered something Ito-san said.

  “I was wondering,” said Kit. “About that afternoon. You said you saw a car?”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Ito, “and a policeman.”

  “In uniform?”

  Mr. Ito shook his head. “No, but he said he was police.”

  “Can you remember how this man looked?”

  Small, neatly dressed, somehow amused? The expression that always came to mind when Kit thought about Oniji-san. The face he’d seen the first time Mr. Oniji walked through the door at the hospital and police officers stepped aside to let the oyaban see the foreigner who’d been fucking his wife.

  Mr. Ito leaned back to think. Had he been in a chair this would have been fine. Unfortunately Ito-san sat on a stool, and for a moment Kit thought the old man might topple backwards. All that happened, however, was that Mr. Ito lurched forward again as if on a spring, and finished up with his elbows on the table.

  Mr. Ito was drunk and slightly scared, which made Kit remember something else. So far as Ito-san was concerned Kit had knifed a homeless man and left his corpse against a cemetery railing. And that meant Mr. Ito believed his beers were being bought by a killer.

  Kit could understand how that might make him nervous.

  “Was he small, this man…smaller than you?”

  Mr. Ito shook his head.

  “Are you sure?”

  “He was big,” said Mr. Ito. “Like a Russian, and broad here.” He touched his shoulders, indicating width…“That’s the truth,” Mr. Ito added, seeing the doubt on Kit’s face.

  “Japanese?”

  Mr. Ito appeared to think about that. Although it turned out he was considering, not whether the man was Japanese but what kind of foreigner he might be.

  “Like me?” Kit asked.

  A shake of Mr. Ito’s head.

  “What then?”

  “Maybe half Korean,” Mr. Ito said finally. “But dark.”

  No one Kit knew came close to fitting both parts of that description. “You’re certain about this?”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Ito. “Broad, bear-like, half Korean…” His words were loud enough to disturb the ex-Sumo behind the counter, who glanced across, considered things carefully, and went back to dicing tofu.

  Oh well…

  “Thank you,” said Kit, pushing back his stool. “Let me buy you a beer before I leave.” He waited for the huge ex-Sumo to sweep diced scallions into his bubbling pot and reach for a note pad.

  Seven beers, two bowls of chanko-nabe—the seaweed crackers obviously came free. Sliding 5,000 yen onto a small white tray, Kit took his change. It was as he turned to go that Mr. Ito looked up from his final beer.

  “The other man was Japanese,” Ito-san said.

  Kit sat down again.

  “What other man?”

  “The one in the car.” Mr. Ito thought about it some more. “Three men,” he said finally. “Two in the car, one outside.”

  “The big man, he got back in the c
ar?”

  Mr. Ito shook his head. “No,” he said. “He arrived in the car and then the car drove away. This was in the afternoon, before…”

  “What were the two like?”

  “One was young,” said Mr. Ito. “A chimpira.” He used the expression with disgust, as if things had been different in his day, which they probably were. Baby gangsters didn’t dress like cut-price Hollywood stars for a start.

  “And the other?” Small, neatly dressed, somehow amused?

  “Swept back hair, expensive watch,” said Mr. Ito. “You know the type. Almost a yanqi, but older. Pale suit. Quite tall.”

  Pale suit?

  “This man,” said Kit. “Did you get a good look at him?”

  Mr. Ito nodded. “I see most things,” he said. “Sometimes I see more things than exist, often many more things.” Sitting back, he shook his head, as if aware he probably shouldn’t have said that.

  “Cats talk,” said Kit. “Girls disappear into thin air. For the last five days I’ve been throwing dice that don’t exist, waiting for a winning number. I look into shop windows and see the reflection of someone else…”

  “Ahh,” said Mr. Ito.

  “I’m going to describe someone,” said Kit. “He’s tall, quite thin, and has high cheekbones, a pointed chin, and dyes his hair, which is swept back and slightly grey at the temples. He’s Okinawan, so his skin is dark.”

  “Is this man real?”

  “Yes,” said Kit.

  “Good,” Mr. Ito said, “because he sounds like the man in the car.”

  CHAPTER 60 — Thursday, 12 July

  It took Kit five days to decide he should call Amy, ten minutes to argue himself out of that idea, and another three days to conclude his first decision had been right. In that time he changed hotels, followed the bozozoku stand off in Roppongi, and worked his way through Neku’s translations of the original police papers, which she hid behind a site supposedly dedicated to a history of Emily Strange.

  Neku wrote him e-mails, which Kit stopped collecting when he remembered Brigadier Miles and her comment about how Kit’s name first came up on an international database. No one in England had his new number and he’d locked number display/caller ID before phoning No Neck that first time, but Kit still changed his phone twice, dumping the second of three phones in the bin without having used it once. It didn’t make much sense to him either.