Non-Stop Till Tokyo (5 page)

I didn’t want to think about what they would be doing to Kelly until she told them the truth.

Stupid bitch. Greedy, manipulative, murderous bitch.

Poor bitch.

Nagano is probably quite nice if you’re not in fear for your life. I wouldn’t know. It was done up for the Winter Olympics and it’s a “gateway to the Alps” skiing town, but I wasn’t here to ski and it was getting towards spring and, frankly, I didn’t give a damn what it looked like. I had to go shopping, and for that I needed money.

I stuck with the crowd as I got off the train, and let it carry me along to a shopping area with cashpoints. I knew my current account was looking okay, but the next few days weren’t going to be cheap and I’d need a lot of liquid cash. Luckily, I had it. I’d set up a panic fund some time ago, after an evening turned nasty and Sonja, a fellow hostess, didn’t have money for bribes or, later, bail. Hostesses exist on the fringes of society as it is, and you never know when you might need to cut and run, so I’d made sure there was always enough to run with.

Or had I?

A horrible thought flashed into my consciousness. Taka.

If this mess had happened a year ago, I’d have been on the phone to Taka right now. I couldn’t think of anyone better qualified to get me out of trouble. Except that he’d been getting steadily more unreliable, his drug-fuelled eccentricities more and more alarming, his already shady morals more and more flexible. The Karaoke Incident had crossed the fine line between eccentricity and insanity, and accelerated away into the distance, and the sequel to that had made me stop talking to him for good.

After the Incident, the manager of the karaoke box place had been seriously pissed off, audibly debating with himself whether to call the police or just have someone break Taka’s legs. Yoshi had intervened on his behalf, as he’d been doing for years, pleading with me to help him out from the panic fund. Reluctantly, I’d paid up and given Taka my bank details so he could return the money, and he had, and then a month after that I’d needed a bit of extra cash, got declined at the cashpoint, and discovered that, God alone knows how, he’d emptied my account completely.

He’d needed the money urgently for a big deal that would get him back on his feet financially, he’d explained in injured tones as I screamed abuse at him. And of course he hadn’t asked me—what would have been the point? I’d just have said no.

He had, to be fair, paid me back in full two days later, and promised not to do it again, as though that meant anything, and I had promptly changed all my account details. I also hadn’t spoken to him since. And after a couple of months, I’d stopped obsessively checking my balance.

What if he’d found a way to get at it again?

In the time it took me to type my PIN into the keypad, I’d already imagined the scenario in full. Stranded in rural Japan, current account empty, nowhere to go as the yakuza closed in…

I was mentally damning his ancestors when the healthy balance flashed up on the screen. The relief was overwhelming, and it set off a hopeful little voice in my head.

Maybe he has cleaned up, like Yoshi says
, it said.
Maybe you should call him. Maybe he could get you a passport.

Maybe I was in quite enough trouble already.

Someone was waiting behind me for the machine. I got out a wodge of ten-thousand-yen notes from my current account and then went on a mission to shop.

I decided on the way that the OL look had probably served its purpose for the time. It had been mostly business people on the train, and OL was the diametric opposite of the hostess look, so they might well guess it was what I was sporting.

In Tokyo I’d have gone Shibuya-style—bought myself an orange fright wig and some blue lipstick, a pair of six-inch glittery platform boots and a skirt shorter than my knickers, and you wouldn’t have been able to tell me from a thousand other girls. Somehow I didn’t think that would work in the provinces. I needed to keep my dark glasses if I was turning Japanese—again, in Tokyo, I could have so easily, so anonymously, bought myself a pair of ready-made dark-tinted contact lenses and made my eyes less of a problem. Could I do that here? No chance.

I hate being out of the city. If I hadn’t panicked, been rushed into leaving, I could have gone to ground in Tokyo effortlessly. Had Mama-san sent me here on that train deliberately?

Concentrate, woman. I shopped quickly, keeping the purchases small and unmemorable, including a large bag into which I transferred my goods. I picked up an orange handbag and a decent shoulder bag in dull red leather, and then I went into the toilets at a mall to change, and dump my original bags.

An OL went in to the toilets. A student came out.

The night work and smoke haven’t been kind to my skin, but I don’t sunbathe and I use very expensive moisturiser, so I figured I could knock a few years off my age without it being too obvious. Brown, low-heeled suede boots, big orange cardigan, fussy blouse, floaty scarf, calf-length brown coat, dangly earrings, unflattering pale pink lipstick, big Yoko Ono sunglasses, book poking out of bag. I’d have liked a wig too, but I didn’t want to risk getting one in case they thought to ask at wig shops. My hair was so expensively cut that it was hard to make it look frumpy, but I put a couple of cheap clips in at awkward angles and there I was—an earnest student, probably coming up to her final exams, and dull as ditchwater.

I put the big bag in a storage locker at the mall, packed my shoulder bag and headed out to a public bathhouse.

Almost everyone has their own bathroom now, of course, but the tradition of the public shared bath is still very important in Japan, and any town will offer one. The nicest are built over natural hot springs, and this was one of those. I ducked through the curtains on the women’s side, paid my few hundred yen and went into the changing room.

It was early yet, and there were just a couple of old ladies gossiping, stripped down to their beige support hose and cantilevered bras. I muttered a greeting that went mostly unheard under their gossip, and kept my ears out for local speech as I undressed. I needed to make sure the nasal Tokyo accent didn’t give me away.

I cleaned off the nail polish first, then plonked my newly acquired soap and shampoo into a plastic basin and carried it to one of the many waist-high shower points round the bath that took up most of the tiled room. (You wash yourself thoroughly before you get in the communal bath, which is for soaking and relaxing.) I sat heavily on a plastic stool, realising suddenly how tired my legs were.

God, it was good to wash. I scrubbed and scrubbed, getting the smoke and alcohol, the sweat, the fear and guilt off my skin. I washed my hair twice and rubbed shampoo into my eyebrows to get rid of the mascara, which would inevitably run in the sauna-like heat—I’d redo them after my bath, then get a tint from the pharmacy. What a waste of a bleach job. Once I was clean down to the bone, I lowered myself cautiously into the scorching bath, keeping my eyes down to avoid catching anyone’s gaze, and luxuriated in the heat of the mineral-rich water, letting it soothe my aching muscles. It was too hot for me to fall asleep, but I stood it as long as I could, emptying my mind and letting out the panic and adrenaline before rinsing off the minerals with cold water.

Clean, re-eyebrowed, my hair dried into a thoroughly drab, flat style, I emerged from the bath a new woman, albeit one who still had yakuza after her.

It didn’t feel that bad after a while, probably because I was too tired to panic properly. I found the student hang-out area, where I fitted in so well that someone asked me about lecture times, went to a tiny shack where I stuffed myself on miso ramen with spicy pork and plenty of chilli oil, and wondered if I had really needed to be so paranoid. Would they honestly send some huge team all this way to find someone who probably wasn’t involved? Kelly’s lies could be convincing, I knew, since she had a way of persuading herself something was true, so that there were no telltale giveaways in her body language or tone. I was sure she’d believe by now that she’d never done anything to Mitsuyoshi-san, and maybe that conviction was ringing in her voice and giving the yakuza pause, but hell, she’d been packed to run.

I’d more or less decided that the men on the train had been a precaution and that I wasn’t worth tracking so far when my phone rang.

It was a Tokyo landline number I didn’t recognise. “
Moshi-moshi
.”

“Kechan?”

“Yoshi.” I felt like kissing the phone. “It’s so good to hear you!”

“Are you okay?”

“Yes, fine, but listen—”

“No, Kechan, please listen to me first—”

“Yoshi, just
listen
, will you? Noriko mustn’t go back to the flat.” I started walking across a small square to avoid being overheard. “Mama-san gave those people my address—”

“Kechan—”

“—she could stay with you, maybe, but till this is sorted—”

“Shut up!”

Yoshi was never rude. His shout cut my breath off in my throat.

“I’m sorry,” he added more quietly, and I suddenly registered the strain in his voice. “But you have to listen. I— Oh, this is bad, so bad.” He sounded like he was crying.

“Yoshi?”

“It’s Noriko. They got her already.”

It felt like a punch in the stomach. “Got her?”

“I guess they went to your flat. I didn’t think— I went this morning. I found—” He sniffed hard. “They raped her. More than once. Three, four times, maybe. And they hit her head, kicked it. She’s in the hospital, in a coma. They think she probably has brain damage.”

I found that I was sitting on a bench. I couldn’t breathe, and my mouth was pulled open and distorted with the pain.

“Oh, Jesus Christ. Why?
Why?
She didn’t do anything! I didn’t do anything, and all she did was live with me and—oh my God.” It hurt so much. I had my free arm clutching my stomach, and I was rocking back and forth on the bench like a crazy woman.

“What is going on, Kechan?” demanded Yoshi rawly. “Why are the yaks after you?”

“Are you sure it was them who attacked her?” I whispered.

“No, maybe it was just a coincidence! She was unconscious when I found her, and they’d wrecked the place, and nobody saw anything they’re going to tell the police about. It was them.”

I wiped the tears from my eyes with the back of my hand. My throat was painfully constricted, and there were deep, wrenching sobs waiting to come, but not yet.

“It was that bitch Kelly at the bar,” I said, trying to keep control, and I told him briefly what had happened, how Kelly had set me up to confuse her trail.

“So why did she attack the old man?”

“Don’t know. Maybe she agreed a price with him, then couldn’t go through with it—or never planned to. Maybe she always meant to hit him, take the money and run.”

“It must have been an awful lot of money, then,” said Yoshi dubiously. “You couldn’t run far enough after doing that to a yakuza boss. And they’re after you just in case you might be involved?” He sounded incredulous. “They did—that—to Noriko
just in case
?”

I wanted to be sick. “I’m so sorry, Yoshi.”

“It wasn’t you.” His voice was furious. “It wasn’t your fault. Those people. That stupid woman. Kechan, why are you still in Japan? Get out, just go, and—”

“I can’t.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“No, I mean I
can’t
. I don’t have my passport or ID.”

Silence.

“I told Noriko—”

“I know you did.”

“Hell,” said Yoshi explosively. “She’s so
useless
—”

He cut himself off, and I dug my teeth into my lip to keep from weeping. Noriko was indeed useless, absolutely and absurdly useless. In the three minutes it took to make cup noodles, she would forget she’d put them on and order pizza, and before that had time to arrive she’d have heard the
gyoza
van on the street and run down for fresh dumplings instead, then would look adorably confused when the pizza-delivery boy appeared. We’d never understood how she held down a job.

Raped three or four times. Kicked in the head. Coma.

“Maybe I can go to the flat and find your things—” Yoshi began.

“Don’t you dare. Don’t you
dare
do anything so stupid, do you think I can bear to have something happen to you too? I’ll just stay low. It’ll be fine.”

“Where are you?”

“Nagano.”

“Why?”

I told him about the train and Mama-san’s betrayal, and dug my nails into my palms as I spoke. Yoshi was silent for several seconds, and when he spoke it was very slowly and carefully.

“You’ve been there for several hours? In the open? And you answered your phone? Kechan, you idiot, get rid of it, turn it off. Buy another, a pay-as-you-go, and text me the number. You aren’t fit to be out. And where are you going now?”

“I thought I’d stay here. Why should—”

“Stay? Don’t be a fool.”

“Where should I go, then? I’ve made myself look different. I don’t know anywhere and I want to stick to big cities and this is countryside hell!”

“Ssh. You’re shouting. Um. Let me call you back, okay? But go buy another phone.”