Non-Stop Till Tokyo (33 page)

“That’s boring,” pouted Taka. “And still not fast enough.” He hit a button and picked the rainbow-silver disc out of the CD slot, twisting it to catch the light. “This is a weapon. It’s a knife at the Mitsuyoshi-kai’s throat. We can use it.”

“No, it’s a grenade, and it’s going to blow us up. We get rid of it.”

“It’s a grenade all right,” I agreed. “And we use it to blow up the yakuza before it explodes in our hands.” I looked over at Chanko, who was resting his back against the wall, eyes shut. “What do you think?”

“You guys sort out something to eat,” he said. “I need a word with Taka.”

Whatever they talked about, it resulted in Taka leaving the house in a hurry. Yoshi and I settled down at the table, trying to work out a strategy. Hand the disc back, give it to the police, find some kind of deal, round and round in circles, and getting nowhere. Chanko moved around quietly, bolting doors and windows, setting the alarm I didn’t even know Taka had.

“You’re making me nervous.”

“I’m nervous.” Chanko didn’t sound it. “Might as well take precautions.”

“I want to do something,” I muttered.

“No rushing into anything.”

“What do you think, Chanko-san?” asked Yoshi abruptly, looking up. “Send the disc to someone, send it to the family, bargain with them, what?”

“Not my decision.”

“Yes it is. It’s all of our decisions, all four of us.”

Chanko looked at him for a second, acknowledging the concession, then shook his head. “You two are the ones in danger. You decide what you want. Find the easiest way out of this or hit back at the family, there’s consequences either way. It’s up to you which ones you want. Taka—well, you know how he works, so don’t listen to him. Make your own choices.”

“And what about you?”

“I just look after Kerry.”

“But you must have some ideas on what you think we should do,” Yoshi persisted. “I’d like to know.”

“Nope,” Chanko told him. “You really wouldn’t.”

That pretty much killed the conversation, and shortly afterwards Yoshi headed up to bed. It was only about ten, but he looked exhausted. I was tired too, but twitchy.

“I’m going to bed,” I said to Chanko. “You?”

“Might wait up for Taka.” He was in his usual position, leaning against the wall and watching the news with the sound off.

“Oh. Okay. Don’t you need to sleep?”

“Catch up later.”

“You look tired. Are you worried about Taka? What’s he doing?”

“Finding out about the Mitsuyoshi-kai and the situation with the Koreans. See if it’s common knowledge or whatever. We need information before we make any decisions.”

“Who’s he talking to?”

“Bunch of people he deals with.”

“Deals.
Yā bā?
” I guessed.

“Yeah. If he comes back with a faceful of speed, I’ll break his goddamned nose.”

“Why didn’t you go with him?”

“Someone’s gotta stay with you two.”

“I’m not arguing with that. Do you think he’ll be okay though?”

“Sure. He can look after himself. Everyone in Tokyo owes him a favour anyway.”

“I know. Do you have any idea how long I spent avoiding letting him do me favours?”

“You’re in hock now.”

“Tell me about it. I’ll be living in fear. ‘Kerry! Do you mind just interpreting on a three-way deal between me, the Korean mob and the Cosa Nostra? And then maybe pop over to Moscow for me, impersonate the Grand Duchess Anastasia and pick up a Fabergé egg?’”

“You could always say no.” He knew perfectly well I couldn’t. Or rather, that saying no would forever cut me out of Taka’s in-group, the charmed circle of dodgy visas and illicit information, free meals and discount furs, and help that came, without question or judgement, when you were facing two goons in a back alley somewhere.

“So if you aren’t worried, why do you need to stay up for him?” I asked.

“How the hell come you get to ask all the questions you want and I don’t get to ask you a thing?”

That shut me up. I stared at my hands. “If you’re talking about what we were talking about earlier, it’s not—”

“Relevant. I heard you the first couple times.” He held up a hand. “Forget I asked. Not my business.”

I could have told him he was right about that, and God knows I wanted to. This wasn’t a memory I took out and looked at, not ever.

But he’d told me things I’d never have told anyone, whether they needed to know or not. I owed him my life. I probably owed him some kind of answer.

“Okay,” I said. “I had a bad experience. I didn’t deal with it that well, and I ended up with a fairly aggressive stalker. I thought getting out of Britain would deal with him, but it didn’t. So I don’t have an email address in my name, and I don’t put my name on anything that has my real address on. It’s just paranoia, okay? I haven’t seen or heard from him in a couple of years.”

Not since I’d taken my details off any websites that had ever had them, and changed my email so that none of my old friends could pass it on, and changed my numbers, and never, ever gave out my address, and threw away any post to my accommodation address that looked like it might have come from him.

“What’s his name?”

“It’s not worth it, Chanko.”

“Aggressive. What does that mean?”

“Pictures I didn’t want. Packages with things that weren’t very nice. Calls. He turned up a few times when I was at boarding school, and at university.”

“You get a restraining order?”

I laughed without amusement. “Hardly. That would have played into his hands. He blames me for a lot of stuff…it was easier to leave.”

“Easier to move to Japan than deal with it?”

“Well, I notice you’re not back in the States right now.”

“True.”

Silence fell. The TV flickered soundlessly. Chanko wasn’t asking, but he wasn’t moving either. I shifted uncomfortably.

“I don’t really want to talk about this.”

“You don’t have to.”

The TV switched to a late-night game show, the set painted a hideous combination of acid greens and pinks and yellows. A man in a purple suit bounded around, making jokes that were subtitled on the screen in big cartoon kanji.

I took a deep breath.

“My parents made a will when I was born, putting my godmother as my guardian if anything happened to them, and never bothered to update it. They died when I was fourteen, car crash in Manila, and I got sent to her eventually. It took a bit of time to find her, and some arranging because her husband didn’t want me to come. I thought it was because she hadn’t seen my parents in years, but it turned out she had cancer, long term. She was as kind as she could be, but her husband and son weren’t. They didn’t want some kid in their house, taking up her attention. And the son, Ian… You don’t just dump an unrelated fifteen-year-old girl in a house with a disturbed seventeen-year-old boy and nobody who cares supervising. Unless you’re my parents, of course.”

Chanko’s eyes were very dark as he looked at me.

“He just hit me at first, and then…well, it got worse. I tried to talk to the father and he called me a liar, threatened me. He knew I was telling the truth, I’m sure he did, but he didn’t care. So, there was a lot of money from the insurance, which I wasn’t able to access, but the father was. I told him if he didn’t release the funds for me to go to boarding school for the next two years, I’d go to the police. I meant it, and he wanted me out of the house, so he agreed and I went up to the other end of the country and stayed there, even through the holidays.

“Kerry wrote to me a lot. Why was I boarding, why wouldn’t I come to see her or phone her. She’d always been as good to me as she could, but I didn’t want anything to do with them. I just ignored her. I knew she was dying, and worried about me, but…really, if you want the truth, I wanted to hurt her. Then I got a horrible letter from Ian, with clippings from porn mags and a couple of Polaroids, and I sent it back to the father with a letter saying that I’d go to the police if I ever got another one, tell them what his shitty son had been up to and how he’d ignored it. Kerry opened it.”

I heard Chanko suck in a breath.

“She died a month later. Barely spoke to her husband again. Refused to see Ian. Turned her face to the wall and stopped living. Or at least that’s what Ian said when he turned up at my school screaming about it. And that’s how it started. My school was pretty good, and at least it was a long way away, but once I’d left…he tracked me down at university, sent letters when I was on my year in Japan, all the rest, and it just got worse as he got older. I kept moving but he always managed to find me, even here, until I moved in with Noriko and got the job at the bar and dropped out of sight completely. Which is why the police can’t find me now, so every cloud, silver lining, you know.”

Chanko was silent. I twisted round to look at him, unsure what that meant or what he was thinking. His eyes were shut, his jaw was set so hard the cords in his neck were standing out, and he was breathing through his nose, very deeply and very slowly. I’d have been happier if he were shouting.

“It’s over.” I felt a twitch of alarm. “Really, I haven’t heard from him in two years. He’s probably forgotten about me. And compared to the yakuza…”

“He contacts you again, you tell me,” Chanko said through his teeth.

“It was only post and email since I left France anyway—”

“You tell me.”

“If he turns up in person, I’ll tell you.” Yeah, right. Ian wasn’t worth the murder charge that was written all over Chanko’s face. “I promise, okay?”

He exhaled hard, opened his eyes. “Where the hell were your family while all this was going on?”

“My parents were dead, that was the point. I don’t have any other relatives. Well, presumably I have some in Hong Kong somewhere, but I don’t know them. My father was an only child, and neither of my parents were family types. They liked to travel.”

“No family at all? Hell, Butterfly. What about the school? Didn’t they get the police involved?”

“They offered to, but…” This was the worst bit, the bit I couldn’t live with or think about. The bit I’d never told anyone, not even Yoshi and Noriko.

If he’d asked or pressed, I might have run, but he didn’t. He just sat there, patient as a mountainside, waiting.

“I wanted her to read the letter.” I stared at the magazines on the tabletop. “I knew she might see it and I still sent it. I didn’t address it to her, but deep down, I hoped she’d read it and hate them as much as I did, and I got my wish, and it killed her. I couldn’t face having to stand up in front of a court after that. I felt so guilty, and to have Ian put his side of the story and call me a liar and… I don’t know, probably it wouldn’t have happened like that, but I just couldn’t face it. It was easier to run away.”

“I don’t see you got anything to beat yourself up about. You think other people wouldn’t have wished the same?”

“But she was the one who got hurt. She didn’t deserve it.”

“Nor did you,” he said harshly. “Turn around.”

I didn’t move.

“Come on, Butterfly. Look at me.”

I shifted round, and he gripped my face with his big, calloused hands, his dark gaze steady. He started to say something, and then he said, “Oh, sweetheart,” and then his mouth was on mine, warm and fierce, and he was dragging me to him, and his body was telling me everything he couldn’t find the words for.

He pulled away after a few minutes but kept me snuggled in close, on his lap, stroking my hair. I rested my head on his chest. It felt weird, having told him. There was a raw sensation, like a drawn splinter or the peculiar emptiness in the mouth of a pulled tooth. I wasn’t sure if it was a good feeling.

Chanko was still silent, still running his hand lightly over my hair. “What are you thinking?” I asked.

“Family. You shoulda had family. Shit, even at the worst, there was still me and Ruth and Eli to look out for each other. You shoulda had family.”

I couldn’t think of what to say to that. I held on to as much of him as I could instead, and he moved his hands down, stroking my back. I wriggled round on his lap, running my hands under his shirt and over the warm, smooth skin, until his breathing changed. I could feel him hardening, and my skin prickled responsively. His tongue flicked my earlobe, and I quivered all over.

The hell with the time or the place. There might not be another.

“Are you staying up to meet Taka, or are you taking me to bed?”

“Damn, Butterfly.” He scooped me up effortlessly as he rose to his feet. “You ask the toughest questions.”

It was a long time before we slept. The disc and Ian and Noriko were crowding the back of my mind, but I pushed them away into the place for things I didn’t think about, concentrating on the feel of his hands and mouth and body, and on negotiating my way round his sheer bulk—he had the logistics nailed down, but thank God for those massive muscles taking his weight—and pretty soon I wasn’t thinking about anything at all.