End of the World Blues (30 page)

“Take these,” he said, giving the lot to Charlie.

A cheap laptop in the hut fired up the moment Kit turned it on and proceeded to download pages from
Asahi Shimbun,
news from BBC Asia, and half a dozen e-mails, mostly from Micki.

Stand off continues in Roppongi…Civil matter, says Tokyo’s new mayor…Opposition demands use of riot police…Dear Neku, No Neck and Tetsuo and Micki say hi…

A lift-up latch had let Kit into the hut and the latch still worked. There was no sign of anyone trying to force the door.

“What are you trying to find?” demanded Charlie.

“It’s what I’m hoping not to find.”

Charlie stared at him.

“Blood,” said Kit. “Torn clothes, broken fingernails, ripped hair, signs of a struggle…” He bent to pick up a bead from the boards. Blue, not threaded but held on a short length of silver wire by a complicated knot that allowed the bead to shift within a mesh cage without allowing it to fall free. It was the first sign that Neku had put up a struggle. At least that was what Kit thought, until Charlie told him otherwise.

“I don’t remember Neku wearing a bracelet,” said Kit, considering.

“It broke. She said you gave her the beads back.”

“I thought those came from her wedding gown,” Kit said, and found himself explaining about
cos-play
and how Neku used to dress.

“She hangs them from her phone,” Charlie said. “Only they fall off…she said so,” he added, when Kit looked doubtful. “Shouldn’t we open the parcel?”

“In a moment,” said Kit.

No one packed a box that big with something so light unless they were making a point. Taking a kitchen knife, Kit sliced away one side of the box, ignoring the tape holding the package shut.

“It might be a trigger,” he said, answering Charlie’s unspoken question.

Inside the box was crumpled paper, pages from a South London free sheet, and in the middle of these was an envelope. The envelope contained a photograph and Neku’s flat key. She was standing against a red brick wall in the picture, dressed in her jeans and black jersey and her eyes were open.

“Good,” said Kit.

“How can you say that?” asked Charlie, then stopped. “Oh fuck,” he said. “What were you expecting?”

Neku naked. Neku dead. Neku in chains.

“Nothing specific,” said Kit. “But I can think of half a dozen shots that would be infinitely worse.”

The message on the back was simple, a telephone number and a time. A handful of words warned Kit what would happen if he went to the police. “Are you planning to go home?” Kit asked Charlie, who stared at him.

“How can I leave now?”

“Good,” said Kit, “because I need you here.” Someone had to be around to answer the phone and keep Kate at bay. “But are you meant to be somewhere else?”

Charlie shook his head. “My mob are in Italy. Mum might call the house, but she’ll be cool if I’m not around to answer. She’ll just call my mobile to find out where I am.”

“And you’ll lie?”

“Obviously.”

“Right,” Kit said, stripping off his shirt, choosing a new one, and shrugging himself into one of Ben Flyte’s old jackets. “Keep the flat door locked. Don’t answer the buzzer, and if Kate O’Mally calls back tell her Neku and I have gone shopping.”

“That’s what I told her last time.”

“Well, tell her again.”

It was hot, the air was sour, and London stank of fried onions, too much aftershave, diesel, and dog shit, maybe it always did. Saturday morning shoppers filled Oxford Street, mostly tourists and teenage girls, every second one of whom reminded him of Neku.

Men in jeans and black tee-shirts crowded a table on Dean Street, talking into their phones, checking their mail and skimming the headlines in that day’s papers. The sun was out and people were smiling, as the city changed into something more relaxed and less English, which it always did at any pretence of good weather.

Tomorrow would bring thunderstorms or smog to send everyone back to their shells, but most Londoners had grown blasé about the meteorological equivalent of mood swings, though that hadn’t stopped a newsagent running his own news board for last Wednesday’s
Standard
that simply read,
Weather Buggered
.

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.