Non-Stop Till Tokyo (43 page)

“We did it.” I wasn’t too sure what we’d done, but whatever it was, it was a family thing.

“Wow,” Yoshi repeated. “What happens now?”

That was a good question. We had no idea if someone was going to come after us, and if so who, and the atmosphere in Taka’s place was like a siege at first. But we didn’t want to move Chanko, and in fact we were all, I think, shell-shocked. I know I couldn’t have handled another escape, and Minachan and Sonja made it very clear they weren’t going anywhere without backup, preferably armed.

I left them talking about it and went up to sit with Chanko.

I thought he was asleep when I slipped into the darkened room, but after a few moments he rumbled, “Hey, Butterfly.”

“Hiya. You should be sleeping.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Can’t you sleep? Does it hurt? Do you want some pills?”

“Not right now. ’S okay. I’ve had worse.” He frowned. “Did I break a rib or something?”

“No, you got shot in the shoulder and the chest, but nothing’s broken.”

“That’s okay then,” he said with apparent satisfaction. “You going to come over here, babe?”

“Oh, right,
I
have to get up.” I jumped up from the single futon. “You lazy sod.”

It was kind of hard to find a position, but I managed to curl up to his right and snuggled there, taking comfort in his warmth. “You’re going to be fine,” I told him.

“Pretty fine right now.”

He’d got his uninjured arm round my shoulders, and I burrowed in closer. “Seriously, how do you feel?”

“Bit of an ache.”

“Bit of an ache? You got shot!”

He sighed. “Alright, it feels like I had a damn elephant land on top of me. Happy?”

“Yeah, well. What goes around comes around.”

He chuckled, then winced. “Don’t make me laugh, okay?”

“Sorry.” I inhaled deeply, running my hand over his smooth chest. “God, Chanko. I thought you were dead. He was going to kill me and torture me, and then you came in—and he shot you—and—”

“Butterfly? Are you crying?”

“Of course I’m bloody crying,” I managed to choke. “I’ve done nothing but bloody cry.”

He held on to me, and I turned my painfully bruised face into his side and sobbed, at first trying to hold back, and then just giving myself up to the grief and relief and slackened tension. It seemed to go on for a very long time. There was a lot to cry for.

“Hey,” he said finally. “You done there?”

“Maybe.” I sniffed. “I’m not promising.”

“You better. I could drown.”

“That’s the least of your worries.” I got a grip and sat up, scrubbing at my eyes. “Do you mind if I call Sonja to have a look at you?”

“Sonja?”

“She trained as a nurse, believe it or not.”

“No way. I bet Taka hopes she kept the uniform.”

Sonja gave Chanko her qualified semiprofessional approval, and a handful of antibiotics and painkillers the doctor had left us, and he was asleep again about five minutes later.

“That man has the constitution of a—a buffalo,” she said. “I swear, my fag burns are hurting more than his bullet holes. Or I just bitch more.”

Minachan was also revealing a useful skill: hairdressing. Taka dug out some old clippers, and she set to work, shaving Sonja’s torn and tufty scalp completely so that the hair could grow back evenly. She had a beautifully shaped head on a long neck, and I thought the bald head gave her an air of slightly alien elegance.

“I look like a cancer patient,” she grumbled.

Minachan told her to stop moaning and go get Yoshi, she couldn’t stand the sight of him any longer.

Minachan got him looking pretty dapper, and we were all admiring her handiwork when Taka came in, looking serious.

“I think you should see this,” he said.

We’d missed the TV newsflash, but the report was also on the channel’s website. Taka produced a laptop that Oguya had missed, and we clustered round it in silence and watched the jerky video images again and again.

Two men had been arrested for the brutal assault on an OL that had shocked Tokyo at the weekend. They had not yet been named, but both men were ex-members of the Mitsuyoshi-kai yakuza family—they had been expelled for misbehaviour some time previously, it said—and both were currently in hospital with very severe injuries, incurred prior to arrest, the newsreader was at pains to state. They had been transferred to a secure hospital until they were sufficiently recovered to stand trial. DNA testing was ongoing but the police were said to be confident they had their culprits. They were also investigating a link to the murder of another woman, as yet unnamed.

“Expelled?” snarled Yoshi. “When were they expelled? Those lying scum.”

“Retroactively,” I said sourly. “It’s as much as we can expect—more. They’ve been handed over. They’ll stand trial. They’ll get justice.”

“They won’t. They won’t get death.”

“They might,” Taka said. “With the old guys gone, who’s going to pay for a lawyer?”

It put a new complexion on things for us. Minachan phoned one of her clients about the “blackmail” we’d set up. He’d been panicked by her call all right, and all the more when a Mitsuyoshi-kai business card had dropped through his letter box (our doing), but when he’d called his wife’s brother or cousin’s dog or whoever his connection was, it had taken about five minutes to get a grovelling apology and assurance that the rogue elements responsible had been eliminated.

The leadership had changed. The Brothers were dead. Park Sang-do was in charge, and he was cutting losses ruthlessly, getting shot of the whole sorry mess.

We’d got away with it.

Yukie’s death made the next set of headlines. The gutter end of the press called it the Tart in the Tub murder, which made Minachan, Sonja and me incoherently angry. The other two both picked up messages from the police, as fellow hostesses of Yukie, and we had a long debate over what they should do. We really didn’t want to look as though we were reneging on the “no cops” agreement with Park, and Sonja had enough raw skin and burn damage to look very much like some sadistic psycho had had an hour in a room with her, certain to raise a lot of awkward questions.

And I had to stay out of sight. The papers hadn’t carried anything about Kelly or the murdered Brother. (The first murdered Brother, I thought with satisfaction.) If anything emerged about that situation, the balloon was really going to go up. If anybody ID’d me, if Hearn had gone to his embassy about Kelly…

It would definitely save trouble if I stayed underground.

Minachan solved the problem. She went to the police, freely announcing that she’d known both Yukie and Noriko well, then put on a brilliant display of hysteria, stupidity, uselessness and girly flapping about. She wept and wailed and wondered if she could get back the handbag she’d lent Yukie. She definitely knew Noriko’s flatmate—well, hardly a flatmate, some girl from Kyushu province who’d been staying for a while. She couldn’t remember the name, though, and anyway the girl had been gone for weeks, or days, or possibly months. She complained about Yukie’s horrid boyfriend Oguya and how he’d looked at all the women in such a nasty way, including her friend Noriko when she’d come to the bar, and there was that time he’d made a pass at Noriko and she’d turned him down—what date? Last week, last month, last year, whatever. She flirted outrageously with the investigating officers, became ferociously defensive at any question she could interpret as accusatory, and finally had to be removed from the premises, sobbing noisily, having supplied a link between the murdered women, shown total ignorance of any yakuza connections, and put feminism in Japan back by about five years.

When Sonja returned the police phone call, in tearful and dreadful Japanese, denying all knowledge, she didn’t even get asked to come in.

Not that the police weren’t doing their job, but by now they had a watertight story and the culprits on a plate. The tests for DNA left on Noriko and Yukie had come back positive, and Soseki and Oguya were in a secure hospital waiting to get well enough for trial. Since the first Mitsuyoshi-san’s murder hadn’t been reported, and nor, apparently, had Kelly’s disappearance, nobody knew anything about anything else, or at least nobody was talking.

Nobody was coming after us.

It took time for us to believe it, but time was something we had. For one thing, we were all unemployed.

The Primrose Path had lost most of its staff—Kelly and Yukie were gone, Keiko had found another job, Jun had vanished. The Mitsuyoshi-kai had torn the place apart looking for the briefcase, and the Takas had kicked in the remaining doors looking for me, and the customers had been deserting in droves anyway. Mama-san must have decided to cut her losses, because she took out a substantial loan against the property for repairs, and disappeared. That meant the bar was closed, and Sonja, Minachan and I were jobless, as if we’d have considered going back.

Yoshi was also unemployed, of course, and with a dismissal and bad reference on his CV, his prospects were pretty poor. That was, until I called his old company, told them I was from the
Asahi Shimbun
, and asked if it was true they’d sacked him for remaining by the side of his friend who, I happened to know, was the OL who’d been so newsworthily attacked. I outlined the sensationalist article I had in mind to the receptionist, then had an extremely enjoyable half hour discussing it with progressively more senior staff members. Before I was off the phone, the managing director had called Yoshi’s mobile, given him a measured apology for the misunderstanding and offered him three months’ pay in lieu of notice and a glowing reference, as long as he didn’t talk to any journalists, particularly not women from the
Asahi Shimbun
.

On the third day, Minachan, Yoshi and I headed off to the hospital to see Noriko. She was still unconscious, still bruised, but her colour was almost normal, and she had her lucky charm clenched in her hand.

“She knows it’s there,” the nurse assured us, although I’m sure she said that kind of thing about all the patients.

I sat for half an hour, talking to her. I don’t know if any of it went in, but I told her everything, more or less, and at least one of us felt better for it afterwards.

The other two stayed; I think they both had cabin fever by then. I went back to Taka’s to sit with Chanko before he went mad. Sonja was supposed to be there to look after him, but I didn’t imagine he was getting a lot of company.

“Dear God, are they still at it?” I demanded as I walked in and the rhythmic thumping shook the wall.

“Third time. I figure they’re training for a record.”

“I’m beginning to think it’s time to move to a country with thicker walls,” I said. “Honestly, the woman’s shameless.”

“Yeah, I was going to say. Where do you get off, flirting with that guy right in front of me?”

“What? Park? Oh, come on, that was hardly flirting. I can’t believe you even remember that.”

“Gave you his number. I shoulda told the guy off.”

I couldn’t smile. “What are we going to do?” I blurted out.

“About Park?”

“No, I mean us. I mean, me, and also you. I mean, you get better, then what?”

He shrugged, wincing slightly at the unwary shoulder movement. “Dunno. What about you? Another hostess job?”

“Don’t know.” I drummed my fingers. What I actually wanted—well, there were lots of things I wanted, but the relevant one was to have a bank account and an address and a real visa for a real job.

I didn’t think I was going to be able to get them in Japan.

I could do something. Taka could maybe get me new ID, I could start building the edifice of a normal life, but the foundations would be as solid as rice paper. I’d been illegal for years; I’d worked in the water trades; I was linked to at least two murders, probably three; I’d screwed with a yakuza family, not to mention Park Sang-do. If I tried to start a new life in Japan, I’d just be setting myself up for disaster, building a house of cards in an earthquake zone.

But I could stay, just keep on drifting. Get translation work, do the odd bit of hostessing perhaps. And maybe I could drift with Chanko, but maybe a man who was trying to make something better of his life didn’t need an aimless bar girl dragging him down.

Or maybe I could try and make something of my own life, for a change, but for that I had to leave.

“I need my passport,” I said, without looking at him. “I need to go back to the flat, pick up anything that’s survived, and get my ID. Then I can decide.”

“The police might have your passport. Or the yaks.”

“Well, the police never released my name, so I guess they didn’t find it. Don’t know about the yakuza. I guess I’ll just go and look.” I don’t suppose I sounded any more enthusiastic than I felt at the idea of setting foot in there again.

“I’ll come with you.”

Admittedly, he was sitting up now and generally looking a lot better. Nevertheless—

“Are you kidding? Sonja would kill you. Stay in bed.”

“Sonja has other things on her mind. I’m fine. You worry too much.”

I stared at my hands. “I don’t need to get it yet. I mean, there’s no hurry.” If I didn’t have my passport, how could I be expected to go anywhere? Even if I ought to.