The Puppeteer King

by Chris Ward

  ‘It’s from a crow. I don’t know how he found out where I was or how long it had been there, but he hasn’t forgotten me. He hasn’t forgotten us.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Where did the last letter from Nozomi say she was?’

  ‘Barcelona.’

  ‘Then I’m going to Barcelona.’

  There’s something else Ken, but I can’ tell you right now.

  Ken tried to raise a hand but winced in pain and lowered it again. ‘Jun, no. Please. Don’t endanger my daughter.’

  Jun stood up. ‘What will you do when the letters stop, Ken? Will you light a candle and shrug and say, oh well, that’s that?’

  ‘I don’t want to see her hurt….’

  ‘Professor Crow has her. Look what he did to you, Ken! You have no idea what he could be doing to her!’

  Ken looked away. He gave a sigh and closed his eyes. ‘Please leave, Jun,’ he said. ‘I don’t need this right now.’

  ‘Ken—’

  ‘Leave. Please.’

  Jun stared at his old friend for a moment, then picked up the box containing the crow’s feather. At the door he turned back to look at Ken one last time. He wished there was something more he could do. This was his fault, whatever Ken said.

  He had failed to stop Crow once before, and life had got infinitely worse. If he failed again….

  He glanced back at Ken one last time, then went out, closing the door quietly behind him.

  4

  Jun meets an old friend

  Jun knew very little about Barcelona other than that it was in northern Spain. Ken had said the letters contained no details beyond the name of the city, and a few vague mentions of beaches and city streets. Randomly showing up in a city of six million people and hoping to find Crow was laughably unlikely but Jun had no other plan, and if he was honest with himself, no other point to his existence. It was this or the nearest bridge.

  He took the train into central Tokyo. In his wallet was a business card for a company called Nakajima Travel Services, and while he couldn’t quite remember how it had got there, it seemed like as good a place as any to book himself a flight.

  The address led him to a quiet district in Shinagawa. A couple of streets from the station he passed a squat, grey building with boarded up doors and windows, a faded sign announcing Shinagawa Cube Live House, and Jun stopped outside to look up at the building where he had played his first show with Ken’s reincarnation of Plastic Black Butterfly. With Jun on vocals and a new bassist and drummer, Ken had been the only original member and had expected the show to be a massive failure. Instead, buoyed by press attention given to some rather bloody happenings up in the Japan Alps six months before, it had been a sell-out, and Jun’s first show as a professional musician had been to three hundred baying metal fans. With Ken wanting to prove a point on guitar, the band had been brutal, and Jun had screamed until his throat was raw.

  In that blast of music both Jun and Ken had shed a little of their misery. While the band had never regained its old popularity in Japan, it had gone on to tour Eastern Europe with some success for several years, until once again it all came crashing down.

  ‘Thanks,’ Jun whispered, reaching up to run a hand over the faded poster shreds on the wall inside the covered doorway, letting his fingers linger for a moment over one that had faded to nothing, one that might once have been theirs. Then he headed on.

  The travel agency was tiny, tucked into a little space between a liquor store and a private electronics store. Jun walked past it once before he realised it was there, then backtracked and stood looking up at the sign over the door, wondering if it wouldn’t be better to go to one of the bigger travel agents around the station where he would be almost certain to get a better deal on a flight.

  He was just turning to leave when the door opened and a girl stepped out.

  She started to stick a poster of some exotic cruise up in the window before she noticed him standing there.

  ‘Can I help…?’ Her voice trailed off, her eyes narrowing. ‘Jun? Jun, is that you?’

  He stared at the pretty Japanese girl with a hint of the foreign about her in the lightness of her hair and eyes, the redder tint to her cheeks. She was his age or a year or two older, but while he had shrivelled like an unwatered plant she had blossomed like a spring flower. For a moment her name was lost, stolen away by the wilderness years. He opened his mouth to speak, hoping that muscle memory would help him.

  ‘Jennie?’

  ‘Jun, it really is you. My god.’

  ‘It’s me.’

  Jennie Nakamura smiled, and the memory of her came drifting back. Once they had shared … something.

  ‘You’re out.’

  He smiled. ‘It’s been a week or so now. I lose track of time.’

  She held open the door. ‘Please come inside.’

  The little travel agency had the air of the personal about it. Maps and photographs were plastered haphazardly across the walls and ceiling, amid shelves of little trinkets from across the world. A couple of racks of brochures in the middle of the room gave it a professional formality, but it was clear that the business was a labour of love.

  Jun went through the door and stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, watching Jennie as she followed him inside. She looked far better than he remembered. The fear he had seen in her eyes on that long ago night in the forest was long gone, replaced by a warm confidence.

  He had met her on the back of a failed, brutal marriage and a career that was falling apart. By the look of her now, those days had been banished into the past.

  ‘This is your place?’

  She smiled. With one hand she reached back and turned around a sign in the entrance to “Closed”.

  ‘Mine,’ she said. ‘I took that bastard to court for what he did to me. I didn’t think I had a chance, him being a lawyer and all, but I won. He got two years for domestic violence and animal abuse, and the compensation I received paid for this place.’

  ‘That’s great. I’m so pleased things worked out for you.’

  She shrugged. ‘They did and they didn’t.’

  He didn’t need to ask what she meant. It was difficult to remember exactly when she had stopped coming to see him. Catatonic for the first few months, when he began to rise up out of a haze of medication he couldn’t bear to be around her. She was a living, breathing reminder of everything he had lost.

  How easy it was for him to understand now what Akane had gone through. When he saw her again—

  She’s dead, Jun.

  No no no.

  ‘I found your card,’ he said, reaching into his wallet and holding it out to her. ‘I don’t remember when you gave it to me.’

  She brushed a tear out of her eye. ‘The last time,’ she said, ‘you were in such a rage that they had to restrain you. ‘I asked a nurse to give it to you, so she must have slipped it into your wallet after you were sedated.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Jennie gasped, her body sagging like a balloon losing a sudden rush of air. ‘Don’t be, Jun. What happened … it wasn’t something you can just brush over.’

  He nodded. ‘It was a mess, let’s put it that way.’

  She took a step towards him and reached out a hand, giving his a little squeeze. ‘Shall we take a walk? It’s about time for my lunch break anyway.’

  ‘I’d like that.’

  Not far from Jennie’s shop was a little river with a concrete promenade built below the level of the road it flowed alongside. They walked side by side, mostly talking about small things: the weather, the current government and life in Tokyo, but everything would come around in the end to that desperate day at Heigel Castle, when so many people had died. Among them had been Karin Kobayashi, former singer with the pop band Girls Chorus, as well as Naotoshi Waribe, a 1960s TV star, and Grigore Albescu, one of Romania’s most prominent businessmen.

  Not among the dead had been Karin and Ken’s daughter, Nozomi, a
nd a deformed madman who went by the name of Crow.

  ‘Ken said she’s in Barcelona,’ Jun said. ‘That’s why I’m going there.’

  ‘You know it could be all lies, don’t you?’ Jennie said. ‘Even if this is Nozomi, do you think Crow is stupid enough to leave a trail? Did you even see the letters? Ken might have been delusional for all you know. After what happened to him … I’m amazed he has a thread of sanity left.’

  ‘I have nothing else to go on. It’s a reason to move forward. There’s something else, too.’

  ‘What?’

  Jun opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again and shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s just … it doesn’t make any sense. Just a feeling, that’s all.’

  ‘After what happened, I can’t believe you would go anywhere near where Crow might be. He could have killed you, Jun, but he chose not to. He wanted to make you suffer instead.’

  ‘I know that, but it feels like my destiny. There’s nothing else I can do. And if there’s a chance I can find Nozomi….’

  Jennie sighed. ‘You know I’m supposed to tell you not to go, right? Isn’t that how it works? I plead with you not to go and we argue and then you go and do it anyway?’

  Jun smiled. ‘Start pleading.’

  ‘I said everything I could say when I visited you, Jun. And you didn’t so much as acknowledge me. Now you show up out of the past, standing in front of me like a real person again. You know how many times I wished for that?’

  He shook his head. ‘There was so much medication….’

  She nodded. ‘I know, Jun. I’m just glad you’re back. And you know what? I think you should go. I’ll tell you right now I don’t think you’ll find Crow or Nozomi, but if it makes you think you’re doing something worthwhile then it could be good for you. And perhaps the change of scenery will do you good.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I’ll make sure it does.’

  He stopped. ‘Jennie … no.’

  She looked up into his eyes. ‘You can say what you like, Jun Matsumoto, but you can’t just show up at my shop one afternoon and then walk away again. Things don’t just work like that.’

  He shook his head. ‘They have to. It’s the best way.’

  ‘For who?’

  ‘For everyone.’

  She turned and started to walk away. ‘I’ve never been to Barcelona,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard it’s nice at this time of year. I’ve not had a vacation in ages and it’s pretty easy to get discount tickets when you run your own travel agency.’

  ‘Jennie….’

  She ignored him and carried on walking. As she marched off up the street, he stared after her, wondering when all the strength had drained out of him. He felt like a shell of a man, hanging on to one last thread of life.

  #

  Jennie didn’t look back as she returned to her little travel agency. She could hear Jun’s quiet footsteps as he followed her—just as she had known he would—but she didn’t want him to see the tears in her eyes.

  She was proud of what she had achieved over the last few years, putting Brian and then the terrible events in Romania behind her, carefully building up her little business, cultivating a small but loyal client base.

  Now Jun had come out of nowhere, crashing back into her life like a burning, fracturing meteorite.

  It couldn’t end well. Jun was on a one-man mission of self-destruction, desperate to find an enemy who would always be too strong for him, and she would always be hanging on to a dream that could never work out because of one small thing:

  Her name wasn’t Akane Yamaguchi.

  5

  Park leaves the labour camp

  They beat him before they let him out, a skewed goodbye present and a reminder that, even after twelve years, he should count himself lucky.

  Lee Park saw the grim, rocky road outside the hard labour camp through two black eyes. The pack slung over his back containing the scraps of sacking that had been his spare clothes rested against the welts where the guards had held him down and beat him with sticks, laughing with each blow like vicious children battering an old dog to death.

  Only he wasn’t an old dog. And one day he’d have them killed, every last one.

  He sat by the roadside in silent contemplation for an hour or more, listening to the hum of the electrical wires behind him. The camp itself was eerily silent; spread over several square miles of rocky hillside on two sides of a cascading stream, the cool water of which had made his stay at times bearable. The people were spread over arid farmland and hidden away in quarries and mines, almost ten thousand of them, living, working, and dying in hushed voices while scowling guards walked among them with guns and whips. While incarcerated he had grown a beard to hide his face and gone by a number to mask his identity. Many of his fellow prisoners had been born in their camps, condemned to suffer for their grandparents’ sins, there were many others who had been imprisoned on his order. Even in a place where gatherings of three people or more were an offense punishable by firing squad, there were those whose own death would have been ameliorated by the blood of former government minister Lee Park on their hands.

  It had been twelve long years of secrecy and suffering, but he had served his term and he was out.

  Eventually a truck came puffing and choking past, stopping to pick up Park and a few other prisoners who had been released the same day and who had wandered further up the road. Park paid for his passage with a lump of bread he had saved from his last rations, and the truck began its bumpy journey back down through the foothills. A couple of men with nothing to barter for passage were left stranded by the roadside, probably to die of exposure in the woods once the night temperatures started to drop to sub-zero. He had heard of some prisoners banging on the gates to be let back in.

  After an hour the truck stopped at a little shack in the shade of a stand of wind-battered trees, and the passengers got out to stretch their legs and take a drink from a freshwater spring gurgling out of the ground at the building’s rear. An old woman with a scrunched face offered them stringy boiled mountain vegetables in exchange for scraps of clothing. Park exchanged a pair of holey gloves for a couple of pockets full of radishes. They were the first he had seen in more than decade, and the tough, bitter flesh was almost sweet.

  The truck rumbled on. One older man chose to stay behind at the shack, heading inside with barely a word. The woman’s lips stretched back over toothless gums in an expression of glee, and as the bus pulled away Park saw ten years fall from her delighted eyes.

  By nightfall they had reached what was called a town in these parts, two lines of squat brick houses on either side of a potholed road. The truck pulled up at a gravel-covered space with a sign saying “Bus Station” outside and the driver ushered all the passengers off. Some stood around looking lost. Others wandered towards the windowless office standing in a corner. Still others wandered off towards the group of people loitering by the parking area entrance, holding up signs as though they didn’t all speak the same language, offering simple rooms for more bartered goods.

  Park was running out of things to trade, but there was only one thing he needed to do.

  He went into the bus station office and bartered an old silver watch that had long ago stopped working for a five minute telephone call.

  Then he went out to find somewhere to sleep.

  He was sleeping when the car arrived, but the clean-sounding, well maintained engine easily woke him. He pushed aside the woman—he had traded his last spare clothes for her offer of sex simply because it had been so long—and climbed out of the dirty old bed. She rolled over, pulling the blanket up around her as he pulled on his dirty prison clothes and left.

  A thin man in sunglasses was holding open the back door of a sedan. In the darkness the glare of the headlights was almost blinding as it lit up most of the town. Park said nothing as he climbed into the back. The car smelt musty and damp as if it had been stuck in a garage for some time. Park sat in silence as the
driver climbed in, put his sunglasses down on the passenger seat, and tuned the radio to a state-approved station playing instrumental jazz music.

  A clock on the dashboard told Park it was a little after three in the morning. As the driver steered them wordlessly through the town and out into open country where the only thing to see was the stretch of potholed highway in front of them, Park leaned back on the seat and closed his eyes.

  He thought of many things, not least of all his years in the work camp, of the switch on his back and the constant aching of his muscles from the days upon days of drilling, breaking and carrying of the aggregate rock out of the quarry where he had been assigned. Such labour would have made him strong were it not for the meagre diet of corn and gruel which had left him with gaps where teeth had once been.

  Dawn was breaking when they reached the larger border town, passing through a military checkpoint, the palms of the soldiers greased and their eyes averted by bank notes from Park’s private accounts. He wondered briefly if there was much left; there were likely those who’d never expected him to get out.

  The car pulled up outside an unmarked two-storey building that looked little different from any other in the town. The driver got out and opened the door for Park, who headed straight inside without looking around. As he closed the door behind him, he heard the car driving off.

  ‘It’s been a long time.’

  A man stepped out of the shadows, and at the sight of the old, weatherworn face, Park smiled his first real smile since leaving the work camp as he pulled the man into an embrace.

  ‘Mr. Dal, how pleased I am—’

  The older man pulled away and smiled. ‘Later. Get cleaned up and changed. We don’t have much time.’ He pointed to another door. ‘There’s a shower room that way. I found you clothing, although I couldn’t be sure of your size.’

  Park patted his waist. His ribs jutted out like the blunt ends of spears. His mind drifted back to the camp, and his voice turned wistful. ‘It’s true what they say about those places. All of it.’