End of the World Blues (5 page)

“You all right?” asked Neku.

“Drugs.” He said it without thinking. “I’ve got a…” Kit looked at the dead body, and then from the
cos-play
to the black cat who’d just appeared behind her. “Is this for real?” he said. “I mean, is any of this happening?”

Neku shrugged. “It’s as real as anything else on this planet.”

When Kit looked again the girl was gone and so was her cat. The body, however, was very definitely still there.

“Oh fuck,” said Kit, a fairly useless thing to say.

Picking up his watch, Kit threaded his wrist through its metal strap and managed to click the catch on his third attempt. It was ten minutes after midnight, which meant it was actually fifteen, because the watch could be guaranteed to lose five minutes in a day. Apart from a splatter pattern, his wallet looked fine, so Kit pocketed that too, having first wiped it on the dead man’s jacket.

If this was shock…

A hot night wind, a dead body, and the shakes.

I should call the police,
thought Kit, only what would he say?
I was about to be shot when a
cos-play
saved me. No, I don’t know why.
Actually, he didn’t know why he had been getting mugged either. His clothes were cheap, his fake Rolex out of sight, and there had to be better targets out there.

He’d seen bodies before, of course. Watched the living die through the cross-hairs of a sniper rifle, each hit walled off in an area of his mind Kit no longer visited. Before that there was Josh, looking neater than he’d ever looked when alive, hair combed and shoes shined, wearing a tweed jacket he’d have hated.

Getting mugged, that was also shocking. And yet, it was the ease with which the
cos-play
turned the homeless man to meat…A spike through the ear and a blade to his side, before victim or Kit even knew it had happened.

That was the real shock.

He should leave before someone saw him standing next to a body and called the police anyway. In the time it took Kit to think this, he put a dozen paces between himself and the dead man, only to turn back. Had the girl been wearing gloves? Most
cos-play-zoku
did. Long black gloves that went up to their elbows, white-lace mittens, or some atrocity of chain mail and steel. What if her gloves had been fingerless? Some of the kids wore those. She’d have left fingerprints.

The drunken conversation Kit had with himself halted him on the edge of flight. In the end he went back, if only because if he decided to leave he’d waste more time frozen to the spot, worrying it was the wrong choice.

Kit knew himself well.

Trying to look as if he’d only just stumbled over the body, Kit touched a hand to the man’s throat and then reached for the knife, but it refused to move. Eventually he remembered to twist its handle and the blade slid free with a sucking sound.

“Nouveau-san…”

Kit turned at his name and found himself staring into the worried eyes of Mr. Ito, who still carried his rickety home-made brush. The man bowed and, after a second, Kit remembered his own manners and bowed back.

Sweeping the cemetery might actually be Mr. Ito’s job. Although it seemed more likely that the old man did it from respect or out of love for his dead wife. Whichever, he was there most hours of the day, dressed in a traditional jacket and wearing wooden clogs that were down at the heel.

“A thief,” said Kit.

The old man looked at the corpse.

“I didn’t kill him,” Kit added, wanting to make this clear. The old man glanced from the dead mugger to the thin blade in Kit’s hand.

“It was someone else,” said Kit.

“Ahh.” The man nodded, something clicking into place behind his eyes. “It was someone else. I understand.”

“It
was
someone else.”

“Hai.”
A little bow. “Yes, I understand. Someone else.” Glancing anxiously at the blade in Kit’s hand, he asked, “Did I see this someone?”

Kit sighed. “I’m going now,” he said. “You might want to call the police.”

The man thought about that. “Might I?” he asked finally. “Only they were here again…” He paused. “Apparently, I didn’t see them either.”

An
uyoku
van blocked the steps to Pirate Mary’s parking lot.
Revere the throne. Expel the barbarian,
announced lettering down both sides. Unlike most such vans, which were black with a gold chrysanthemum, this one was gold with the imperial chrysanthemum picked out in black. It still had a revolving fog-horn though, bolted to the cabin roof, ready to harangue people on all sides.

The van was empty, all its doors locked.

Kit shrugged. He was drunk, tired, and stank of someone else’s wife; which was probably just as well, at least being drunk was, because had Kit been sober he’d be terrified. Not about the fascist van, but about the dead man behind him and the
cos-play
’s blade hanging heavy in his pocket.

Three Suzuki cruisers, all chopped beyond recognition, blocked the truck’s access to the alley. So its driver would need to climb two flights of stairs to Pirate Mary’s, track down three drunk
bozozoku
bikers, and persuade them to let him out. The faithful-sword-to-the-throne was going to require all the luck he could get.

Kit knew he should go in. And yet…

From habit, he reached into his back pocket for a multitool, flipped out the flat-blade screwdriver, and began to re-fix Pirate Mary’s history to the alley wall. Someone was forever trying to steal it. Towards the end of the 1500s a single figure controlled the seas around Ireland—Gráinne Ni Mhaille, known to Elizabeth Tudor, the Queen of England, as Grace O’Malley and to Elizabeth’s government as
a wicked director of thieves and murderers
.

She held hostage Elizabeth’s ships, raided villages on the English mainland, stole cattle, and forced Elizabeth to the negotiating table. Máirín Ni Mhaille was Grace O’Malley’s eldest daughter, better known as Pirate Mary. Some reports said she ended on the gallows in Dublin, others that she took James Stuart’s offer of a small castle on the Connemara coast. A revisionist version, recorded by the Bishop of Santiago, had her repenting of her sins and living out her final years as a nun in Spain.

About half of that was true. The rest Kit had invented after he bought the narrow wooden building in Roppongi and begun fitting out its second floor as an Irish pub. Such is the nature of history that Máirín ending her days at a Spanish convent now featured as fact in a TV documentary examining the links between Ireland and Spain.

Buying the house had been Yoshi’s idea. Cold and brilliant Yoshi, who blew into Kit’s life and left him standing, because unlike her other lovers he let her blow right through him. He’d asked Yoshi once, near the beginning, if something terrible had happened in her childhood and she’d given a smile both slight and mocking.

“So simplistic,” she said.

A day later she asked him if that was his excuse. Kit intended to tell her about his mother, but talked about being a sniper instead.

“A
rurouni,
” said Yoshi, at the end of it. “A
hitokiri
and a
rurouni
…A killer and a traveller with no destination.”

It took her three days to make the
Kawakami Gensai
sequence, a series of twelve pots in shades of desert yellow, slashed across the sides with quick flicks of a knife. The sequence sold within hours of going on display in Mitsukoshi, the majority going to private collectors, although one ended up in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

It had taken two years to repair the wreck of a building, but they’d done it eventually. Another six months were lost in creating a bar, installing the bathrooms and white-washing wooden walls. The sign came last, painted by a small Vietnamese woman who owned a tattoo parlour behind the Almond coffee shop. She did it from a tatty snapshot of Mary O’Mally and a postcard showing the Disney version of Captain Hook.

Pirate Mary’s—Tokyo’s Best Irish Bar.
No one but Kit knew where Máirín Ni Mhaille got her face.

“Dozo…”

The
bozozoku
glanced round, ready to take offence, recognised his host, and decided to move aside, albeit reluctantly and without bothering to take his hand from the panties of a girl in a tartan skirt.

Oh well,
thought Kit,
it gives the place colour.
Dope thickened the stairs around him and a snatch of jig, ripped from an old
Riverdance
DVD, ran on a wall screen outside the bar.

Without thinking about it, Kit tucked the
cos-play
’s knife above the lintel, where he usually left a spare key. Then he took a deep breath and pushed open the pub door. The room stank of warm beer and too much skunk. Someone had ripped a chrome grill off the juke box in the hope of making it louder, and two
bozozoku
in leathers and replica WW2 helmets had crashed a table of art students and were coming on to the girls. No Neck was meant to be having a word with his friends about that.

“Kit, mate. Over here…”

People began calling before Kit even shut the door. Yoshi was still here, working the Guinness pumps, a job she hated. No Neck was definitely missing and the food cabinet was entirely empty.

“Listen…” It was Gaz, an Englishman who ran a studio by day, with a sideline in “portfolios” by night. Every would-be hostess who staggered off a plane at Narita already knew she was selling her breast size, hair colour, and smile. When Gaz suggested life could be better as a model most were happy to believe it.

He charged them camera use, studio time, the use of cheap clothes, and the services of a bad makeup artist. Model cards came extra.
Cards
being the best shot printed up with the model’s name, age, and vital statistics.

These lied as often as Gaz did.

Kit didn’t really dislike him. He was just one of those people…one of a thousand expats who’d dragged their unhappiness to the other side of the world, expecting everything to be different, and never quite got over the fact it felt the same. At least Kit had arrived with no such expectations.

“Sweet fuck,” said Gaz, cancelling what he was about to say. “You look wrecked.”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “Tough night, catch you later…”

Until Micki appeared, Kit really thought he might make it across the smoky room without being stopped. She looked about twelve but then she also looked like a boy. Her twenty-first birthday had been at Pirate Mary’s, courtesy of her friends in the
bozozoku
.

“I’m so sorry,” said Micki, bowing. “My fault…”

“What is?”

“Everything,” she said, and promptly burst into tears.

Kit took a deep breath. “What happened?”

“Yoshi-san fired No Neck.”

“She what…?”

“When he wouldn’t leave, she called the police.” Tears were streaming down the Japanese girl’s face. “They hit No Neck with sticks,” she said, “very hard…”

“The police?”

Micki nodded, her mouth a tight butterfly of misery. Tommy No Neck had been chapter leader with the Rebels, Australia’s most notorious gang of bikers. And he was the only foreigner Kit knew who rode with the
bozozoku,
Japan’s very own speed tribe.

“Yoshi…”

Looking up from her pump, Yoshi glanced back long enough to check a glass was full and slapped the lever, delivering a pint of Caffrey’s to the counter with a slight bang. For Yoshi, this counted as full-on rage.

“Kit,” she said, just his name.

“About No Neck…”

“Leave it,” said Yoshi. “I’m not having this discussion.”

“He’s my best friend.”

“That’s why he sells drugs, drinks beer without paying for it, and steals money from the till…”

“Small change,” Kit said.

“Also packets of cigarettes, whole boxes of condoms, whisky from the cabinet. He treats this pub like he owns it.”

“Okay,” said Kit, “we’ll discuss this later.”

Shaking her head, Yoshi said, “No, we won’t. There’s nothing to discuss.” She glanced at her watch. Almost an hour after midnight. Officially the bar shut at 11 pm. In practise, because his clientele were mostly foreign and the
bozozoku
fought only among themselves, the police overlooked the fact he stayed open late. Whether that arrangement would last beyond their arrest of No Neck was another matter.

“You want me to ring the bell?”

Yoshi shrugged.

“Last call,” Kit shouted at the noisy crowd. Ten minutes after this, he rang the bell for
drinking up
and ten minutes after that he called
time,
simultaneously turning up all the house lights. Calling time was tradition, and tradition was what Tokyo’s Irish pubs sold.

It was as he hooked back the doors and began to herd his customers towards the stairwell that Kit finally heard the furious howl of a police siren, coming closer by the second. Mr. Ito, it seemed, had left the body for someone else to find.

Yoshi and he cleaned the bar together, Kit taking four trays on which newly pulled pints were placed and tipping their slops into a bucket. He collected up the glasses and emptied the ashtrays into a plastic bag, tying it tightly. Yoshi wanted to say something. It was the way she stood, with one foot forward and her arms awkward at her sides.

“You were late,” she said.

“Yes,” said Kit, “I know. Something happened…”

“I was meant to see Yuko tonight.”

Yuko and Yoshi, the Tanaka twins. Yuko was a few minutes younger, and had married Tek Tamagusuku, a well-known property developer. Yoshi was famous, so famous that complete strangers turned up begging Yoshi to sell her pots to them. It had taken Kit years to work out what she wanted from him and why they were still together: he kept her family away, apart from Yuko.

“You were meant to…?”

“I told you,”
Yoshi said. “Tamagusuku-san’s in London. So Yuko invited me to supper. I was meant to stay the night. I even bought the baby presents.” This wasn’t as big a commitment as it sounded. Yoshi spent her life buying presents for Yuko’s children.