Tokyo (37 page)

‘Moshi moshi?’

‘Who’s that?’

‘Mama Strawberry. Who’s that? Grey-san?’

‘Yes.’

‘Strawberry’s sending the lift down now.’

On the fiftieth floor I got out cautiously. The hat-check girl, in her dinky yellow and black dress, was cheerful, but as soon as I got through the aluminium doors I knew something was very

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wrong. The heating was so low that the few girls dotted around the tables were shivering in their cocktail dresses and the flowers were suffering, drooping pitifully in the cold, the water in the vases smelling. All the customers were po-faced, and Strawberry was sitting hunched at her desk, dressed in a slim, calf-length white fur coat, a bottle of tequila at her elbow, staring distractedly at a list of hostesses’ names. Under the little 1950s diamante reading glasses, her makeup was blurred. She looked as if she’d been drinking for hours.

‘What’s going on?’

She blinked up at me. ‘Some customers banned from this club. Banned. Understand, lady?’

‘Who’s banned?’

‘Miss Ogawa.’ She slammed a hand on the table, making the bottle jump and all the waiters and hostesses turn to look. ‘I tell you, didn’t I? What I say, huh?’ She pointed her finger up at me, making an angry spitting sound behind her teeth. ‘Remember I tell you Miss Ogawa have a chin chin in her panties, yes? Well, Grey-san, bad news! She got tail in back too. You take off Miss Ogawa panties and first—’ She threw her knees apart and jabbed a finger between her legs. ‘First, you gonna see a chin chin here. And round here,’ turning her hips sideways in the chair she slapped her buttocks, ‘you gonna see a tail. Because she animal. Simple. Ogawa, animal.’ Her voice might have continued spiralling upwards, if something hadn’t made her stop. She put down her pen, pulled the glasses to the end of her nose and peered at me over them. ‘Your face? What happened to your face?’

‘Strawberry, listen, Jason won’t be coming to work. And the Russians too. They told me to say they’ve left. Gone somewhere, I don’t know where.’

‘My God.’ Her eyes locked on my bruise. ‘Now, tell Strawberry truth.’ She checked that no one was listening. Then she leaned forward and said, ‘Ogawa come to Grey-san too, didn’t she?’

I blinked. Too?’

She poured another tequila and downed it in one. Her face was very pink under the makeup. ‘Okay,’ she said, patting her mouth with a lace handkerchief. ‘Time to straight talk. Sit down. Sit

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down.’ She motioned to the chair, flapping her hand bossily. I drew it back and sat, feeling numb, my feet together, clutching my bag on my knees. ‘Grey-san, look around.’ She raised her hand to indicate the empty tables. ‘Look at Strawberry club. So many of my girls not here! You wanna know why, lady? Hmm? You wanna know why? Because they at home! Crying!’ She held up the list of names, shaking it angrily at me, as if I was responsible for their absence. ‘Every girl who go to Fuyuki party last night wake in middle of night, and look what they see - Miss Ogawa or one of Fuyuki’s gorillas in the house. You the only girl who go to last night party and come to work tonight.’

‘But…’ I drifted off. I couldn’t keep everything straight in my head. My thoughts and images were getting jumbled and coming out in a strange order. ‘You have to explain things to me,’ I said quietly. ‘You have to explain them very slowly. What do you mean? It wasn’t only our house, it wasn’t only Jason—?’

‘I told you! Ogawa animal,’ she hissed, shooting her face forward at me. ‘She go to everyone at party last night. Maybe she think she Santa Claus.’

‘But… why? What did she want?’

‘Strawberry don’t know.’ She picked up the old-fashioned pink and gold pedestal phone that sat on the desk and dialled a number. She held her hand across the mouthpiece and hissed to me, ‘All evening I been trying to find out.’

At about ten o’clock that night, a flock of crows, blown off course, was flung against the club window by a gust of wind. I still think about those crows, even to this day. It was too late for them to be away from their roost, and it was one of those happenings that you count yourself too sensible to consider a sign. One hit the plate glass so hard that almost everyone in the club jumped. I didn’t: I had been sitting in silence, vaguely watching the birds’ course across the sky, wondering just who in Fuyuki’s past might have had the transforming power that Shi Chongming had talked about. I must have been the only person in the club who wasn’t shocked when the bird hit, and dropped from the air like a bullet.

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Strawberry had helped me cover my bruise with makeup and had sent me out to the tables. I sat in a daze, not listening to anything, not speaking, only stirring if food arrived at the table. Then I would eat everything I could, very neatly and intently, holding a napkin to my mouth so nobody could see quite how fast I was eating. There was only a little money left after I’d paid my fares to Shi Chongming’s, and all I’d eaten in twenty-four hours was a nibble of shabu shabu and a bowl of cheap noodles at a standup bar in Shinjuku.

There was a tense atmosphere in the club. A lot of the customers, even the regulars, felt it and didn’t stay for long. Odd, icy silences seemed to flit round and at times it became so quiet that I could hear the squeak of the pulley system in Marilyn’s swing. I was sure it wasn’t just that so many of the hostesses were missing. I was sure that the stories of last night were getting round and making everyone anxious.

Strawberry spent most of the night on the phone, trawling her contacts for news. I thought of the strings of police officers who sometimes came into the club last thing at night - everyone knew she was well connected. But for long hours she seemed to be getting no information about what was happening, what had prompted the Nurse’s attacks. It ended up being me who was the first person in the club to learn anything new.

It was the kanji that caught my eye, blazing out from the video screen on the opposite building. I recognized them immediately. Satsujin-jiken. A murder inquiry. Next to the characters was a blurred still of a familiar face: Bison smiling broadly into the night sky.

I stood up so quickly that I knocked over a glass. My customer jumped back in his chair, trying to dodge the whisky that rolled off the table on to his trousers. I didn’t stop to give him a napkin. I stepped away from the table and walked in a trance to the plate glass window where a youthful Bison, thinner and with more hair, was singing, his arm outstretched to the camera. Under the footage more kanji were superimposed. It took a long time for me to work them out, but eventually I understood: Bai-san had died at 8.30 p.m. Only a couple of hours ago. The cause? Serious internal injuries.

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I put my hands on the glass, breath steaming in the cold air. The snow fell silently, catching the colours of the screen, which was dissolving into library pictures of Bison, one of him leaving a courthouse, another showing him as he’d been in his heyday lean face above a microphone, ruffled shirt and good American teeth. Then a picture of a hospital appeared, a doctor addressing a crowd of reporters, the photographers’ flashes reflecting off the smoked-glass doors. I watched with my mouth open, picking up the occasional kanji here and there. Singer - heart-throb - forty-seven years old - toured with the Spyders - number one in the Oricon charts - Bob Hope golf-club scandal. I put my head on one side. Bison? I thought. Murdered? And Fuyuki’s men paid a visit to all the girls at the party last night …

Behind me a phone rang. I jumped. I hadn’t noticed how silent the club had become, but when I looked over my shoulder there was no chatter, no conversation: every eye in the place was fixed on the video screen. Strawberry had got to her feet and was standing not far from me, staring out in silence, all the lights reflected in her face. For a moment she didn’t notice the phone - it rang three times before her trance snapped and she went back to her desk. She snatched up the receiver and barked, ‘Moshi mosbiT

Every eye in the club was on her as she listened. Sometimes you can almost read the words a person is hearing from the way their expression tightens. It took her a long time to speak, and when she did her voice was blank and monotone. ‘Are you sure?’ she said. ‘Are you sure?’

She listened a little longer, then dropped the receiver into the cradle, all the colour leaving her face. She put both hands on the table, as if she was trying to get her balance. Then she rubbed her temples wearily, unlocked a drawer in her desk, opened the cash tray and pulled out a wad of notes, which she stuffed into her pocket. I was about to move from the window when she straightened and clipped across the club towards me, so quickly that the white fur coat swung round her like a bell. There was a dramatic grey tinge round her mouth, a smudge of lipstick on the coat collar.

‘This way.’ Without missing a step she took my arm and pulled me away from the window, past all the tables, the staring faces.

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‘What’s she done?’ I heard a customer mutter. I was taken through the aluminium doors, where the hat-check girl was standing on tiptoe behind the desk, trying to see what was going on in the club. Strawberry guided me into the corridor that led to the stores and the toilets. She led me past the men’s, where someone had tried to disguise the smell of vomit with a hopeful squirt of bleach, and into the little cloakroom we used to put on makeup. Then she drew the door shut behind her and we stood, face to face. She was trembling, breathing so heavily that her shoulders rose and fell under the white coat.

‘Listen to me, lady.’

‘What?’

‘You got to get out.’

‘What?’

‘Get out of here.’ She gripped my arm. ‘You and Jason get out your house. Get out Tokyo. Don’t speak to the police. Just go. Strawberry don’t want to know where.’

‘No,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘No, no. I’m not going anywhere.’

‘Grey-san, this very important. Something bad happening in Tokyo. And something bad spreading - spreading.’ She paused, studying my face curiously. ‘Grey-san? You understand what’s happening? You know the news?’

I glanced over my shoulder at the closed door. ‘You mean Baisan. You mean what happened to him.’ A long shiver went up and down my arms. I was thinking about the kanji. Internal injuries. ‘It was Ogawa, wasn’t it?’

‘Ssht!’ She spoke in a rapid, low monologue: ‘Listen to me. Baisan got a visit. He was put into hospital, but he talked to police before he died. Maybe he crazy, talking to the police, or maybe he know he gonna die anyway …’

‘A visit from Ogawa?’

She took off her glasses. ‘Grey-san, at Mr Fuyuki’s party last night there a thief.’

‘A thief?’

‘That why Ogawa going crazy. A worm go into Mr Fuyuki’s house last night and now he not happy.’

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A strange feeling washed over me. I had the uncanny sensation that some awful revelation was crouched just out of view, beyond the skyscrapers, Godzilla-like. ‘What was taken?’

‘What you think, Grey?’ She dropped her chin to her chest and looked up at me from under knowing lids. ‘Hmmm? What you think? Can’t you guess?’

‘Oh,’ I whispered, all the colour draining from my face.

She nodded. ‘Yes. Someone stole Fuyuki’s medicine.’

I sat down on the nearest chair, all the breath forced out of me at once. ‘Oh … no. This is - this is … It isn’t what I expected.’

‘And listen.’ Strawberry leaned very close to me. I could smell the tequila mingling with her lemony perfume. ‘The thief is someone at the party last night. The Nurse went to everybody’s house last night, she look everywhere, but Bai-san tell police he think she still don’t find her sagashimono. The thing she is looking for.’ She licked her fingers, patted her hair, and glanced over her shoulder, as if someone might have come in behind us. ‘You know,’ she said, very quietly, bending even closer, her face pointing in the same direction as mine, so our cheeks were touching and I could look down and see her red mouth moving close to my own, ‘if I Ogawa, and I hear what come out of your big mouth sometimes…’ Somewhere, fifty floors below, a siren wailed. ‘… I’m gonna think, Grey-san, I’m gonna think you the thief …’

‘Nobody knows I was asking questions,’ I hissed, turning my eyes up to hers. ‘Only you.’

She straightened and raised her eyebrows sarcastically. ‘Really? Really, Grey? That true?’

I stared at her, suddenly very cold. I remembered how defensive Fuyuki had been when I wanted to look round his apartment. I remembered the Nurse coming down the corridor. She’d caught me trying to slip away when Fuyuki was having his choking attack. When you look back at the things you do, sometimes you can’t believe that you were ever so brazen or stupid. ‘Yes,’ I said tremulously. ‘Yes. I mean I—’ I put my hand distractedly to my head. ‘Nobody knows. I’m - I’m sure.’

‘Grey-san, listen, Miss Ogawa going crazy. She gonna go back

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to every house again until she find the thief. Every single house. And this time she not gonna be so kind.’

‘But!…’! stared blankly at the lipstick on Strawberry’s collar. It made me think of blood, of animals being trapped, of the foxes that would come screaming past my parents’ back door in the hunting season. I thought of how silently the Nurse had crept into our house. I thought of the hand with the watch sticking out of the car boot. I rubbed my arms because goosebumps were breaking out on my skin. ‘I can’t leave Tokyo. I can’t. You don’t understand—’

‘Strawberry telling you now. You leave Tokyo. You fired. Hear? You fired. Don’t come back.’ She reached into her pocket, pulled out the wad of money and held it under my nose with her index and middle finger. ‘This goodbye from Strawberry. Give some to Jason too.’ I reached for it, but the moment my fingers were on it she tightened her grip. ‘Grey-san.’ Her eyes met mine and I could see my face reflected in the ice-blue contact lenses. When she spoke it was in Japanese, a very musical Japanese that would have sounded beautiful under different circumstances. ‘You understand me when I speak Japanese?’