Non-Stop Till Tokyo (3 page)

That was Kelly all over. She had what another of the American girls described as a sense of entitlement. “Because I’m worth it” was her theme song. She wanted to keep her name, no matter if it was bad for me and the business and even her customers, so she did. She was a shocking miser too. The money flowed in at the bar, and the rest of us spent accordingly, buying presents and exchanging clothes and treating one another to dinners and drinking sessions, but I don’t think Kelly ever bought a round. She almost never came out and hardly spoke to anyone, partly because her Japanese was so awful (which didn’t stop her laughing at the other girls’ English), partly because she was a miserable bitch. She stiffed the cleaners on their tips and made twice as much mess as anyone else. And she was absolutely, utterly arrogant. She looked down on the rest of us, and her customers, and she swanned around as though she were the mama-san herself, until Minachan, a hostess with a wicked turn of phrase, dubbed her “Wagamama-san”—Miss Selfish.

She was stupid enough to think herself clever, and she was greedy and manipulative, and she thought the rest of the world was just like her. I remember the row when Yukie, another hostess, found her dragging an extension lead into the bathroom so she could use her electric straightening tongs in the bath, and tried to stop her. Kelly stood there naked and shrieking that Yukie was a jealous bitch who was trying to sabotage her beauty regime, while Jun ran to pull the plug before Kelly dropped the tongs onto the soaking floor of the wet-room.

She was a problem in the bar too. She flirted too much, too seriously with the clientele. The tips started to look like deposits to secure possession, and we all saw she would soon have to make good on her promises or move on to another bar a long way off. Jun, Mama-san’s driver and factotum, was running a small pool on when she would start to sell it, and who to, and I put two thousand yen on a rich and heavily married guy from Seito department store. Minachan thought she’d cut and run.

None of us imagined she’d be fool enough to move on a yakuza.

As I say, you can tell yakuza a mile off once you know what you’re looking for. Mama-san’s rule was hard and fast: if yakuza come in, you smile, you excuse yourself politely and you get management. You aren’t rude or unfriendly, but you let Mama-san do the talking. They run the sex trade—strip clubs and soaplands, lingerie bars and whorehouses—and if they come into a hostess bar they don’t own, you should smell trouble and you stay the hell out of it.

Kelly saw Mitsuyoshi-san walk in and all she smelled was money.

I tried to stay away from it all at first. I heard Mama-san heaping imprecations on Kelly’s unrepentant head after the first night—she had talked to him for two hours, she had charmed him, he would come back every night, she hoped Kelly was prepared to put out if that was what Mitsuyoshi-san wanted, because she was not going to have a boss of the Mitsuyoshi-kai yakuza family upset by one of her girls. And so on. Kelly didn’t care: she had him hooked and he was spending.

After the first few days—this was about three weeks ago now—she asked me to come and translate for her, since his English was as lousy as her Japanese. I told her to go to hell—why should I lose my own earnings for her benefit? We settled on a fee amounting to forty per cent of her tips. That was absurdly high, since I didn’t want to oblige her, and I didn’t see why someone so grasping would let that money go when she could have found another translator. But, as Mama-san said, you have to speculate to accumulate, and once she got properly talking to Mitsuyoshi-san in the way you only can with a really good interpreter, the money picked up even more, so I supposed it was an investment. She tried to deduct the amount he tipped me directly from what she owed me on her tips, though. Bitch.

She got me to come over a lot. Mitsuyoshi-san was about a hundred and as wizened as a turtle, and the rest of us made rude comparisons to another pneumatic American blonde who’d married an incredibly old billionaire. Kelly cooed and purred, and I smiled and interpreted, and between us Mitsuyoshi-san chuckled and pawed, and behind us the bodyguards sat and stared, their hard gazes making my spine itch. He didn’t let them sit at the table or even look directly at him—they had to be behind us, he insisted, so he could feel like a normal man courting a beautiful girl. Or as close to that as an octogenarian gangster and a greedy bitch who couldn’t speak each other’s language were likely to get.

That was all there was to it, as far as I knew. Stupid Kelly was going to end up sleeping with that horrible old crime boss, and hopefully she’d be more careful in the future, or maybe he’d sweep her off to be his mistress and she’d screw him into his coffin and that would be it.

Then the day before yesterday, Kelly came up to me, looking a little bit shifty, perhaps, in retrospect, but with a smile. She had this great idea, she told me. We had the same name, blonde hair and blue eyes, and my taste for very high heels meant I was nearly as tall as her (she exaggerated there, but not by too much). Why didn’t we dress up the same tomorrow? It would be a great joke for our clients. She’d even bought two dresses the same. I stared at that, since she was so miserly, but she explained she’d bought a size too small in the sale, and she couldn’t return it, so why didn’t I have it, and here was lipstick to go with, and she knew I had just the right shoes…

I didn’t know. I had no idea. I actually thought she was trying to be nice. I even asked her where there was a sale on. What a fool.

And she didn’t bloody turn up. There I was, teetering around the dark, smoky bar with pink heels and pink dress and pink lipstick, looking like Hostess Barbie for no reason in the world. I was mentally preparing a little speech for Kelly on the topic of pointless and feeble practical jokes when Jun grabbed my arm and dragged me into Mama-san’s office.

She bowed low when she saw me. That wasn’t right, and the first thing I thought of was a death.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You have to leave Tokyo. I’ve sent the boy to buy a ticket on the first bullet train. Jun-san will drive you around, collect your ticket, drop you off when it’s time. Call your friends now and tell them to pack you a bag. Don’t go home. I’m sorry.”

I don’t know if I said anything. I stared at her.

Mama-san looked back at me, before her strained, fearful eyes flicked away. “Mitsuyoshi-san has been assaulted,” she said. “He was hit on the head. In a love hotel. He went there with a blonde girl in a pink dress, from this bar. Kerry-chan, there are yakuza outside. They want to take you to their family to ask questions.”

“What? But—”

“Just go. Mitsuyoshi-san is very badly hurt. They don’t want explanations, they want someone to blame. There is no time to talk now. Get out of Tokyo and hide. Come back later, when it’s safe. Go, Kerry-chan.”

She bowed again, too deeply for her fat frame, and I felt Jun’s hand on my arm, steering me out.

Then it was a nightmare of panicked phone calls. Jun said not to ring my home phone, and Noriko’s mobile was switched off, so I had to call Yoshi, who was, thank God, still awake, working on some urgent project, and get him to go over to the flat I shared with Noriko to give her instructions. I remember sitting in the car for what seemed like forever, waiting for my phone to ring, driving slowly around the huge city, neon lines leaving garish trails in my vision against the darkness. When Noriko finally called back, we’d somehow ended up over to the east side of Tokyo, and I sat there chewing on my lip, trying not to scream at Jun as we drove well below speed limits through the still-busy roads to the flat. I remember Noriko’s white face as she waited with my bag on the corner we’d arranged, and her leaning into the car, asking me in a shaking voice what was happening, did I need money, what could she do? She’d obviously put on her work clothes to come down, a black skirt and jacket, and something in her bearing made me think of how she’d looked at her father’s funeral last year.

“I’m fine, Nori-chan,” I told her. “It’s just a misunderstanding. It’ll be sorted out soon.”

“Be careful.” She thrust something into my hand. “Oh, Kechan, be careful.”

There was no time to say goodbye. Jun put his foot down, and I skewed my body around to look back at her, small and alone on the empty pavement, then looked at what she’d given me. It was a battered little blue cloth pouch, worn threadbare from being carried around in bags and pockets for years, embroidered in red with the image of one of the more menacing Buddhist deities. I’d seen it before. It was a charm, the kind of thing you pick up in a temple for a few hundred yen, in the hope of exam success or road safety or many children. The kanji on it said “Good fortune”.

Noriko had given me her luck.

I was still looking at it when Jun’s pager bleeped and informed him that the yakuza knew I was heading to Ueno station.

And that’s how I ended up on the run.

Chapter Two

Auntie was telling me about a complicated scandal involving her next-door neighbour’s niece and a flower-arranging night class when my phone went off. I stared at it with wide eyes, jolted out of my numbness by the sharp sound drilling through the air.

Auntie tutted, and I mumbled an apology as I grabbed it from my handbag. I didn’t recognise the number, and a shiver of sudden fear rippled over me even as I answered it.

“
Moshi-moshi?
” I whispered.

“Kerry-chan?”

“Oh, I’m so glad—can you hold on a moment?” I scrambled out of my seat, past Auntie, muttering an excuse about work, and hurried through the sliding door into the end space of the carriage. The toilet was empty and I began to go in, then hesitated. If I went in, I couldn’t see who was listening outside. In the standing space, at least I could be sure of who was overhearing or approaching me. The goons had surely got off the train earlier, at the Oomiya stop a few minutes back, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

I dare say it was paranoid. But they were actually out to get me.

“Yukie-chan,” I said, clutching the phone. “Chan” is an affectionate diminutive, a verbal hug. I needed the human contact desperately, and the raw sound in Yukie’s voice suggested she felt the same. “Yukie-chan, can you talk? Where are you?”

“Shinjuku station. At a payphone. Jun-san said not to use my phone—”

I told her briefly what I thought of Jun. “He threw me out of the car, I had to go through Ameyokoch
ō
.”

“I know. But they knew you were going to Ueno to take the Shinkansen, they would only have caught you both.”

“How did they know where I was going?”

It was a demand of the gods rather than a question that I expected her to answer, but her long indrawn breath and hesitation were the clearest giveaways possible.

“Yukie-chan? How did they know?”

“Ah—I’m sorry—”

“Yukie!”

“Mama-san,” said Yukie, in a voice little more than a child’s whisper. “Mama-san told them.”

I sagged against the side of the train, feeling my knees buckle. “Mama-san? But why?”

“Oh, Kerry-chan, I’m sorry, but she had to. She tried to help, but she had to give them something—they hit her, all of us—and she waited as long as she could, and she hasn’t yet—” Her voice had become completely inaudible under the rushing of the train at my end and the roar of Shinjuku at hers.

“Yet what? Talk louder please.”

Yukie swallowed; I heard the gulp down the line. She pushed the receiver closer to her mouth rather than raising her voice, so that it buzzed and distorted in my ear.

“She will have to tell them you aren’t really blonde or Western. She hasn’t yet, but soon she will have to give them something else. She’ll tell them about the way you gaijin up—”

“But why? You know this wasn’t my fault!” I heard the wail in my voice and lowered my volume. “This is ridiculous. I had nothing to do with it. Surely the old man will say—”

“The old man is dead,” said Yukie. “He died a couple of hours ago. He never regained consciousness.”

My knees gave way completely, and I had to grab onto the windowsill to stop myself falling to the floor. Hell. All the while Auntie had been chattering, I’d been hanging on to one thing: when Mitsuyoshi-san woke up, he would tell his goons who had attacked him, clear my name, and I could go home. I’d almost convinced myself that he would have woken by now, that there might even be a little something in the way of an apology—

Shit.

“Tell me everything, please. From the start.”

Yukie leaned into the phone and poured out what she knew. She wasn’t the brightest of girls, and her words were falling over themselves in panic, and the more scared she got as she went over last night’s events, the quieter she became. I stuffed my finger in my other ear and stitched together her broken phrases and subjectless sentences into a coherent whole.

Last evening, a couple of hours before the bar opened, Mitsuyoshi-san had gone to a love hotel. These places are the natural product of a crowded country where the walls are thin—hotels where you can rent rooms for sex, by the hour or two hours or night. They’re reasonably respectable, clean and extremely private. Some are completely automatic and card-operated; even in the unmodernised ones, you don’t see or speak to the cashier, who sits behind a curtain or smoked glass with only his hands visible; and the entrance and exit are separate so you never have to encounter other clients.

So Mitsuyoshi-san arrived at Dogenzaka, Love Hotel Hill, tottered in to the particularly plush establishment he’d decided to honour with his patronage to meet his gaijin girlfriend, and left his bodyguards outside to wait for him. They waited as per instructions, and waited, and some time later, when he still hadn’t emerged, they stopped making lewd jokes and began to worry. He should have come out half an hour ago to head off to an important meeting. And although they agreed they’d forget about meetings too if they were slipping it to the foreign tart, she would also doubtless be more of a strain on his heart than Mitsuyoshi-san’s wife had ever been. Was he asleep? Should they check? What if they interrupted at a crucial moment? The old man would kill them. But what if they let him miss the meeting?