End of the World Blues (11 page)

The suit helped with that. He’d found it the night before, in the second of the leather cases, and it had been the only thing he’d kept, apart from a black tee-shirt and the shoes obviously. The rest he’d sold—including the cases—to the transvestite behind the counter at Moonlight Venus, getting what Kit thought was a good price; until he saw the suit for sale in a Mitsukoshi window and realised he’d probably just been robbed blind.

Having tried Pachinko Paradise, Kit stuck his head through the entrance of a couple of noodle bars on Gaien-higashi-dori, before walking south towards the Family Mart on the corner, where Micki worked. His plan to leave a note for No Neck was unnecessary, because the man was already there, his bulbous body stuffed into a white tee-shirt and jeans. Even his tattoos looked stretched.

No Neck was busy examining a brightly coloured bubble pack that included Day-Glo dark glasses, a water bottle, and a bush hat, with a clip-on sun flap at the back.

Have a Happy Summer,
announced a banner.
Buy Our Holiday Beachside Set.
From the way the man was examining the packet, No Neck seemed about to take the banner at its word. He was wearing dark glasses of his own…large ones, presumably to hide the purple bruising around his eyes.

“No Neck,” said Kit.

The other man said nothing, what could he realistically say? No Neck might be sorry at Yoshi’s death but she still fired him and had him beaten up by the Tokyo police. So Kit picked up a beach set of his own and turned it over, wondering what he was missing. “You really interested in this?”

“I’ve got a granddaughter,” said No Neck. “It’s her birthday soon.”

“When?”

“Don’t know. They won’t tell me.” He looked at Kit, then glanced at the bubble pack in his own hand. “I send the presents to her grandma.”

“And she sends them on?”

“Maybe…Never had a letter back.” No Neck kept his gaze on the beach set, until Kit finally realised this was because the biker was close to tears and doing his best to hide that fact.

“Need a razor,” said Kit, “back in a second.”

Shit happened and then everyone pretended it hadn’t. Life was easier that way. Yoshi’s death. No Neck’s family. Kit’s mother. All that shit in Iraq…A month or so before the incident with the truck, Kit took shrapnel below one knee. The cut was nothing, six inches of bone showing where metal split flesh.

When a medic arrived Kit had stood to salute and went down sideways. It was instinct that made him stand, nothing more. The reptilian bit of his brain still firing after everything more intelligent went into shock.

The medic told her Major, who told the Colonel. Since this was better than the reports he usually got, about squaddies drunk on cheap beer and boredom, flogging bits of uniform on eBay to sad fucks back home, the old man came to see Kit for himself, dragging some obedient hack behind him like a shadow.

Having told Kit not to stand this time, he shook Kit’s hand and stamped out again. The picture made the front of the
Sun,
page two in the
Mail,
page five of the
Daily Telegraph,
and page seven of the
Mirror
.

That was when he got the first postcard.
Saw the photograph. Sorry you were injured. Look after yourself. All the best. Mary.
So many hollow spaces between so few words.

He wrote back but got no reply.

Picking out the cheapest razor, Kit carried it to the checkout and was collecting his change when No Neck joined the queue, still clutching a Beachside Fun Set.

“I didn’t do it,” said No Neck, the moment they got outside. “Okay? And I’m genuinely sorry about…” He stopped before he could tell Kit what, though they both knew.

“You didn’t do what?”

“Bomb Pirate Mary’s. You know me. I wouldn’t do something like that. We’re friends.” The huge man was close to tears again.

“No one bombed the bar,” said Kit. “It was a gas explosion. I’ve read the…”

No Neck shook his head. “You seen what’s left of your bar?”

“Not yet…”

“A right fucking mess,” said No Neck. “You did time in Iraq, right? It’s okay,” he added quickly. “Been there, done that, got my own tattoo…” Pulling up his sleeve, he flashed a faded dagger inside a wreath. “Shit, you know how it goes.”

Yeah, Kit did.

“Someone wanted a job done,” said No Neck. “Take a look at the wreckage if you don’t believe me…Phosphorous and plastique. A really nasty mixture.”

Only most of the wreckage was gone and a truck was hauling away the last of the rubble, leaving charred timbers and a Dumpster full of earth when Kit and No Neck reached the site where Pirate Mary’s had been. The only bit of actual building still standing was a far corner, at the bottom of the slope. Most of this was fire-blackened concrete but a single jagged post stuck defiantly into the air.

A sign on the alley wall announced
Pirate Mary’s—Tokyo’s Best Irish Bar
and pointed to a building that wasn’t there.

Vomit soured Kit’s throat.

It wasn’t the sight of the blackened ruins nor the fact Yoshi had died here. A fact made infinitely more real by being there. It was the smell. The stink of charcoal and death. Yoshi’s body was gone, but other things had died here, rats or birds, mice and other rodents. He could smell the corruption, that unmistakable, utterly cloying signature of dead flesh.

“Fuck,” said Kit, swallowing sourness.

“You okay?” No Neck shook his head. “Shit, sorry…Of course you’re not okay.”

“It’s the smell,” said Kit, spitting.

No Neck looked at him. “What smell?” he asked.

A thick-set man in a hard hat tried to wave Kit away as he approached two Brazilians busy loading chunks of concrete into a fresh Dumpster. “Please stay back,” he said. “We’re working.”

“Yeah?” said No Neck. “Well we’re…”

Kit stepped between them. “This was my bar,” he said. “My wife died here.”

Whatever the foreman saw in Kit’s eyes was enough for him to order the Brazilians to stop working. “We’re going to take a break,” he said. “We’ll be back in ten minutes…” Left unspoken was the fact this was all the time Kit would get.

“I thought you owned this place,” said No Neck, as he watched the crew head uphill towards Roppongi’s main drag.

“Yeah,” said Kit.

“So you’ve just sold it, right?”

Kit shook his head. “I know nothing about this,” he said. He looked around at the scattered rubble, the half-filled Dumpster and a silent pneumatic drill. “No one’s mentioned this at all.”

At 5.30 am a man in the next capsule coughed himself awake, flicked down the video screen in his roof, and began to drum his nails as he waited for the news.

Japan’s biggest fraud trial collapses, CEO Osamu Nakamura too ill to give evidence. File closes on Kitagawa family suicide. Washington, London, Moscow ramp up their war on narco-terrorism.

And then Kit heard Yoshi’s name.

At Christie’s in New York an example of work by Ms. Yoshi Tanaka sells for an unprecedented sum…

Ten minutes later the same man began to shave with a loud and erratic razor. About half an hour after this, a woman on the female-only floor farted loudly and spent the next five minutes chuckling to herself.

By 7.30 am, the sole guest at Executive Start Capsule Hotel was Kit, and he’d been awake all night, trying to work out why Yuko wouldn’t take his calls. So he rolled up the blind covering his glass door and scrambled out, maneuvering himself over the lip; the capsules stacked two deep along a corridor and he’d chosen an upper one.

Of course, Kit could have taken a room at the Tokyo Hilton, on the far side of Shinjuku station, about half a mile west of where he was. He still had Mr. Oniji’s money, mostly untouched. But in his own way Kit was saying goodbye to a city that had been saying goodbye to itself for as long as he could remember. A trial separation from Tokyo felt as lonely as leaving a lover.

It was only as he sweated out last night’s beer in a communal sauna that Kit realised he’d obviously taken Mr. Oniji’s advice to heart. Until then, he’d have said he had no intention of going anywhere. Kit was still wondering about that as he showered. And then, when he’d put it off for as long as possible, he shaved carefully, dressed, and checked himself in the mirror.

Hollow eyes stared back. Other than that, he’d do.

The sub-manager at Kyoto Credit Bank was apologetic. Ms. Tanaka’s sister and brother-in-law had closed her account a week earlier and emptied the strong box Ms. Tanaka had been renting. The joint account Mr. Nouveau held with Ms. Tanaka still existed. Unfortunately, under Japanese law, it was now frozen until a certificate of probate was filed at the ward office. He believed from what Ms. Tanaka’s brother-in-law said that this would be very soon.

On his way to the door, not just of his office but the bank itself, the sub-manager added his profound regret at the incalculable loss of an Important Intangible Cultural Property and so much of her work. When Kit told him that most of Yoshi’s recent pieces were on tour in New York, the man looked almost relieved.

“A tragic loss never the less.”

Nodding, Kit shook hands, bowed briefly, and cut across the road, headed for No Neck’s waiting Speedmaster. It was either that or kick the shit out of KCB’s sub-manager.

“Okay,” said No Neck, after Kit told him what had happened. “Next stop, her lawyers.”

The woman behind the desk at Yamanoto & Co was so embarrassed at Kit’s arrival that she sat frozen at her desk, repeating Yoshi’s name to herself, while she fretted about what to do next. She was still glitching when a young woman in a dark suit stopped to listen, overheard Yoshi’s name, and introduced herself.

“Suzuki,” she said, offering her hand. “Ako Suzuki. Mr. Togo’s senior assistant.”

“Suzuki-san…”

“Perhaps,” said the young woman, “it might be best if we used Mr. Togo’s office?” She gestured to a cherry-wood door behind her.

“I’ll see you outside,” said No Neck.

Having turned down the offer of both tea and coffee, Kit accepted a glass of water, because turning this down would only have produced the offer of fruit juice or something else. When his water finally arrived, brought by the receptionist, it came in a glass, with ice and a slice of lemon, and Kit and Ms. Suzuki had just agreed it was a pity Mr. Togo was not here himself, that the spring blossom around Inokashira Pond had been spectacular, and the weather was surprisingly humid, even for June.

Only when Kit had sipped from his glass did Mr. Togo’s assistant put both her hands on the table and bow, very slightly. “We are sorry,” she said, “for your loss.” The language Ms. Suzuki used was so formal that Kit barely understood what she said. He waited for her to add something about Yoshi’s work or the fact Ms. Tanaka was the best potter of her generation. Instead she just reached across the desk for a desk diary.

“Mr. Togo had the meeting on Tuesday with Mr. Tamagusuku,” she said, flicking back a couple of pages. “Ms. Tanaka’s brother-in-law said he would update you on what was said. I imagine he’s been in touch?”

Kit shook his head.

“Ahh…” Ms. Suzuki considered the diary in front of her very carefully. As if it might explain why. “That is unfortunate.”

She shuffled a few pages and then shuffled back again, got up and went to a filing cabinet, only to turn round and come back again. Although young, Ms. Suzuki did not look like the kind of woman who got flustered.

“There was a will,” she said. “We gave it to Mr. Tamagusuku.” Of course there was. Of course they did.

Artists in the West were meant to be untidy and driven by inner demons. Yoshi had demons, all right. Only she’d probably kept their details filed in the order in which they first appeared.

“You had more than one copy,” Kit stated.

Ms. Suzuki stared at him.

“I know Yoshi,” said Kit. “She’d have asked Mr. Togo to notarise two copies, then she’d have filed another with her bank, kept a spare at home, and for all I know, given a final copy to Yuko…”

He caught Ms. Suzuki’s glance and thought about what he’d said.

“Okay, maybe not that last one,” admitted Kit, because then Yuko’s husband wouldn’t have been in such a hurry to collect the original.

“Forgive me for asking,” she said. “How long were…” Ms. Suzuki caught herself. “How long did you and Yoshi live together?”

“Ten years.”

Ms. Suzuki made notes on a piece of paper. “No children?”

Kit shook his head.

“Probably for the best.”

When Kit looked surprised, he got a short lecture on single mothers and Japanese inheritance law, followed by a longer lecture on probate for childless couples, both married and unmarried. As Yoshi’s parents were dead, Kit would have inherited three quarters, with Yuko sharing the rest. Unfortunately, the situation with unmarried couples was not nearly so favourable…

Which raised a whole new set of questions. Such as, if Yoshi was really so organised, why had she filed multiple copies of her will while failing to register their marriage at the ward office as she’d promised she would?

“Guinness or Caffrey’s?” No Neck asked.

Kit nodded, without thinking, and reached the last free table in Paddy’s Tavern a second or so before three Australian backpackers who took one look at No Neck’s tattoos and the bleakness in Kit’s face and decided they’d rather stand at the bar.

No Neck sighed. “I’ll get Guinness,” he said.

Slitting open a buff envelope, Kit shook its contents onto the rickety table in front of him. It was just before 1 pm, two days after Kit met Ms. Suzuki and the promised copy of Yoshi’s will had finally been cleared with Mr. Togo himself for collecting.

Getting the beers while Kit read the will was No Neck’s idea of tact. A gesture No Neck promptly ruined by banging two pints of Guinness onto the table and demanding to know exactly what the will said.

“Nothing good,” said Kit, killing half of his pint in one go. Having skimmed the document, he read it again more carefully. Ms. Suzuki had kindly included a notarised English translation, but Kit felt he should read the original. It was handwritten and the writing was Yoshi’s own. There was something harsh about knowing this was probably the last piece of her writing he’d see.