The Devil of Nanking (32 page)

First we delivered the dumplings to Shujin, then the three of us left the alley. We went through the early-morning streets, keeping a vigilant eye on all the barricaded doors. Nanking, I thought, you are a ghost town. Where are your citizens? Cowering in silence, tucked away inside the shuttered houses? Hiding in animal pens and under floors? The snow fell silently on us, settling on our caps and jackets, floating softly down to flake and lie yellow over the old goat dung in the gutters. We didn’t see another soul.

‘Look at this.’ Within ten minutes we had reached a side road that led to Zhongyang Road. The boy held out his hand and indicated a row of blackened houses. They must have been burned recently because smoke still rose from them. ‘This is him. The
yanwangye
. This is what he does when he’s searching.’

Liu and I exchanged a look. ‘Searching?’

‘For women. That’s his habit.’

We opened our mouths to speak, but he silenced us with a finger to his lips. ‘Not now.’

He crept off then, leading us further down the street, eventually stopping outside a factory’s industrial double doors, its galvanized tin roof higher than two houses. I’ve walked past that building a hundred times and never troubled before to wonder what it was. We gathered around, stamping our feet and slapping our hands together to bring the blood back, casting wary glances up the street.

The boy held his finger to his lips again. ‘This is where he lives,’ he whispered. ‘This is his home.’ He pushed the door open a crack. In the cold building beyond I could make out a few shadowy things, the edge of a piece of machinery, damp concrete walls, a conveyor-belt. A pile of old-fashioned reed baskets was stacked against the facing wall.

‘What is this?’ Liu whispered, and I could tell from his voice that, like me, he did not want to step through the door. The texture of the air coming from the factory reminded me of one of the slaughterhouses on the outskirts of the city. ‘What have you brought us here for?’

‘You wanted to know why the woman was screaming.’

We hesitated, looking at the door.

‘Don’t worry.’ The boy saw our expressions and bent his head towards ours. ‘It’s safe. He’s not here now.’

He pushed the door open a little further. A frightful screeching noise echoed through the cavernous building, then the boy slipped through the crack and was gone. Liu and I looked at each other. My eyes were watering with fear: irrational, I told myself, because there is no such thing as the devil. Nevertheless it took me a long time to work up the courage to push open the door and step inside. Liu followed and we stood for a moment, our eyes getting used to the light.

The building must have been a silk factory: I could see a vat for boiling cocoons, four or five industrial-sized looms and dozens of hexagonal silk bobbins. The boy was standing in the corner, next to a small door, beckoning us. We went to him, our footsteps hollow and lonely-sounding in this high-ceilinged industrial cathedral. He pushed open the door and stood, fingers resting on the doorhandle, showing us into what must have been the manager’s office. We came to stand behind him. When I saw what was in there I put my hand over my mouth and groped for the wall, trying to stop my knees buckling.

‘Old Father Heaven,’ Liu whispered, ‘what happens in here? What happens in here?’

Some things are more terrible, more awful than you can imagine. It was in the car on the way to Fuyuki’s party that I remembered what
oshaka
meant. Where I’d read it. I sat up straight, breathing deeply to stop myself shaking. I should have stopped the driver. I should have opened the door and stepped right out of the moving car, but I was paralysed, the awful idea crawling through me. When I arrived at the apartment complex there was a faint glaze of sweat on the nape of my neck and in the hollows at the back of my knees.

My car had been the last in the convoy, and by the time I got upstairs people had already been seated to dine. It was chilly outside – the pool was freezing, crammed with reflected stars – so we were shown into a low-ceilinged dining room overlooking the pool. Tokyo Tower, on the other side, was so close that its red and white candy-cane light bathed the large round dining-tables.

I stood for a moment, surveying the scene. It all seemed so unthreatening. Fuyuki, tiny and skeletal and dressed in a red racing-driver’s jacket emblazoned with the word ‘
BUD
’, was in his wheelchair at the head of the top table, smoking a cigar and nodding genially at his guests. There were only a few spaces left at the table near the window. I slipped into a seat, nodding tightly to my neighbours, two elderly men, grabbed a napkin and pretended to be absorbed in unfolding it.

In the corner, behind the display cabinet, was a small galley kitchen where the waiters were busy with trays and glasses. Standing in the middle of the food-preparation area, cool and unflustered by all the activity, was the Nurse. Dressed in her trademark black skirt suit and turned a little away from the room, so that the glossy wig obscured part of her face, she was chopping meat on a large wooden board, her white-powdered hands moving deftly, almost a blur. Jason was watching her from the doorway, one hand raised casually to lean against the frame. A cigarette burned between his fingers, and he moved only to allow a waiter to pass with a plate or a bottle. I tucked the napkin over my lap, my movements wooden, automatic, unable to tear my eyes from the Nurse’s hands. What strange meat, I wondered, were they accustomed to preparing? And how had she removed the insides of a man, a man whose watch hadn’t even been disturbed in the process? The hostesses seated near the kitchen kept shooting her uncomfortable looks. With her holding the knife as she was, her hands moving so rapidly, you couldn’t expect people to act naturally.

A waiter reached into a circular recess at the centre of the table where I sat. He twisted his hand a few times and a sudden blue flame leaped into the air, making some of the hostesses jump and giggle. I watched the waiter as he adjusted the flame, then placed a large stainless steel flask of water over it. Dark pulpy strands of kelp moved at the bottom and, as the first bright bubbles collected like silver stones, ready to rise to the surface, he scraped from a silver platter into the water a pile of chopped carrots, mushroom and cabbage, a handful of tofu squares, creamy as flesh. He stirred the soup once, covered it with a lid and moved to the next table.

I looked down at my place mat. A large linen bib was folded in front of me, next to it miniature bamboo tongs and a small bowl of sauce, gleaming with fat.

‘What’s this? What are we going to eat?’ I asked the man on my right.

He grinned and fastened his bib round his neck. ‘It’s
shabu shabu
. Do you know
shabu shabu
?’

‘
Shabu shabu
?’ The skin round my mouth tingled minutely. ‘Yes. Of course. I know
shabu shabu
.’

Sliced beef. Plain meat, brought raw to the table. Mama Strawberry wouldn’t eat
shabu shabu
here. She wouldn’t eat anything in this apartment because of those stories – the stories of strange meat, served up side by side with the stalls that sold
oshaka
.
Oshaka
. It was an odd word that meant something like second-hand, or discarded belongings, which would have been rare things in a city like post-war Tokyo where nothing that could have been eaten, burned or traded for food would have been discarded. But in the car I’d recalled there had been a more sinister meaning still: the
yakuza
had used a play on the words
osaka
and
shaka
, a reference to the Buddha, to describe very specific ‘discarded’ belongings. When Strawberry said
oshaka
she meant the possessions of the dead.

The waiter took the lid off the flask on the table and the sweet steam rose up in a column. In the boiling water the cubes of tofu bounced and lifted and somersaulted.

The sliced beef came round, cut as fine as a carpaccio, the plate visible through the flesh. I allowed the waiter to place the platter on my left, but I didn’t immediately start rolling the meat on to my tongs as my neighbours were doing. Instead I sat and stared at it, my throat knotted. Everyone was eating, lifting the raw slices of beef, holding them up to the light so the meat was illuminated in its red and white marbling, then plunging it into the boiling water, swishing it back and forward –
swish swish
,
shabu shabu
. Dunk it in the sauce now, and throw back your head. The diners dropped the meat almost whole into their mouths. Pearls of grease collected on their chins.

People would soon notice I wasn’t eating, I thought. I snapped up some meat, dipped it in the sizzling soup and lifted it to my mouth, taking a tiny nibble from the edge. I swallowed hard, not tasting it, thinking suddenly of Shi Chongming and how painful it was for him to eat. I rested the remainder of the meat in the sauce bowl and took a hasty swallow of red wine. Bison, over on Fuyuki’s table, wasn’t eating either. There was a faint look of unease on his face as he studied the Russians, who sat on either side of him, both shovelling the beef enthusiastically into their mouths.
That’s because you know, Bison
, I thought.
You know all about
oshaka
and
zanpan
stew and what Fuyuki thinks makes him immortal. Don’t you? You know the truth
.

The waiters had stopped moving in and out of the little galley kitchen, and Jason had slipped inside. He stood quite close to the Nurse for some time, talking to her in a low murmur. Every time I looked up he was there, speaking urgently, trying to convince her of something. She didn’t break off from her work – it was almost as if he wasn’t there. Once he happened to turn and look into the dining room and caught me watching him. I must have looked very white and shocked, sitting so upright at my table. He opened his mouth, seemed about to say something, then swung his eyes to indicate the Nurse, and sent me a private smile, a smile I was supposed to share. He put the tip of his tongue on his bottom lip, pushing against it so that the inside of his mouth was momentarily revealed.

I dropped my eyes to the cooling meat on my chopsticks. A growing skin of congealing fat was whitening on it. My stomach cramped, discomfort raced through me.

At the other table Bison and Fuyuki were discussing a skinny young man with pockmarked skin and dyed-blond, feathered hair. A new recruit, he looked anxious to have been summoned to the table. ‘Step forward,
chimpira
,’ said Fuyuki. ‘Come here,
chimpira
. Come here.’
Chimpira
was a word I hadn’t encountered. It was only months later that I discovered it was a term for a Mafia junior soldier. It meant, literally, ‘little dick’. The
chimpira
came to stand in front of Fuyuki, who turned his wheelchair away from the table and, using his cane, lifted one side of the
chimpira
’s baggy lavender suit to reveal not a shirt but a black T-shirt. ‘Look at this,’ he said to Bison. ‘This is the way they dress today!’ Bison smiled weakly. Fuyuki sucked in his cheeks and shook his head regretfully, dropping the cane. ‘These young ones. What a disgrace.’

He made a gesture to the waiter, who went into the kitchen. Someone brought a chair and the neighbouring guests shuffled away so that the
chimpira
could edge in next to Fuyuki. He sat, nervously wrapping his jacket round the offending T-shirt, his face pale, glancing at the other guests. It was only when the waiter returned hotfoot with a tray from which he unloaded two small, unglazed cups, a jug of
sake
, a sheaf of heavy white paper and three small bowls, containing rice and salt, that the
chimpira
relaxed. A whole fish lay on a platter, its sunken eye on the ceiling. The
chimpira
was looking at all the equipment of the
sakazuki
ritual. It was good news. Fuyuki was welcoming him into the gang. As the ritual began – fish scales scraped into the
sake
, salt pinched into pyramids, oaths pronounced by Fuyuki and the
chimpira
– I realized that every guest in the room had turned their attention to it. Nobody was watching the kitchen, where the Nurse had laid down the kitchen knife and was rinsing her hands at the sink.

I lowered my glass and watched in silence as she wiped her hands on a towel, smoothed her wig – her big hands moving flat down the back of the crown – then removed from a drawer a large fliptop canister. She opened it, plunged her hands inside, moving them round and round. When she removed them they were covered in a fine white powder that might have been talc or flour. She shook them, allowing the excess to fall back into the tin, looked up and spoke one sentence to Jason. I edged forward on my chair, trying to read her lips, but she turned away and, whitened hands extended in front of her in the manner of a doctor entering an operating theatre, put her back to the door at the far end of the kitchen, pushed through it and was gone. No one noticed her leave, nor when Jason put out his cigarette and looked at me, his eyebrows raised, a smile working its way across his face. I held his gaze, my face colouring. He tipped his head in the direction the Nurse had gone and showed me his tongue again, moist above his chipped tooth. He held up his hand and mouthed the word ‘five’, then he was gone through the same door, leaving me sitting in silence, in a cold pool of thought.

Jason was like nothing I’d ever dreamed of. All this time I’d been dealing with something completely outside my understanding. I was meant to follow him. I was meant to wait five minutes then follow, to find him and the Nurse undressing each other. I was probably meant to watch them – the indescribable vignette he had fantasized about, the malformed and the lover. And then I was supposed to join in. I had a sudden, macabre picture of a Japanese dance I’d once heard described performed by the prostitutes in a hot spring: the dance in the stream, it was called. With every step she takes into the river she must raise her kimono a little higher to keep it dry. She is revealed inch by inch. A white calf. Pale, bruised skin. Everyone holding their breath at the promise of more to come. The hem rises a little more – a little more. What would the Nurse look like naked? What would he be thinking when he touched her? And what would she be thinking when she touched him? When she touched living human flesh, how did she separate it from the dead human flesh that she ground up for Fuyuki? Would he whisper to her what he’d whispered to me:
I just love to fuck freaks
 . . .