Non-Stop Till Tokyo (6 page)

He hung up. I stared at my lovely slim phone and wondered what he was talking about. They couldn’t trace mobile calls, could they?

I’d been checking around me as we spoke, looking for goons, and though I’d seen none, I was feeling very cold and small and numb all over. I headed over to the temple, Zenkoji, which was crowded with tourists even in this unpromising season. I dare say it’s very nice; I wasn’t really in the mood for sightseeing. I went to the shrine, and threw in five hundred yen and clapped my hands to get the gods’ attention, but I couldn’t think of anything to say to them.

I’d been sitting in the sharp wind with Noriko’s luck gripped in my hand, staring at the fluttering white flags for some time, when my mobile rang. It was Yoshi again.

“Listen, I’ve been thinking,” I said before he could begin. “Mama-san said not to go to the police, but surely they can’t expect to keep this quiet. I’m going to call. Tell them about Kelly and Noriko and the old man.” I’d doubtless get kicked out of the country afterwards under the moral turpitude laws, not to mention a few others, and I’d need to warn the Primrose Path girls, but the idea of those goons and Noriko, and of them getting away with it unpunished, was like a ball of acid in my gut.

“Don’t be stupid.” Yoshi’s voice was urgent. “If they aren’t saying the old man was murdered, it’ll be a nightmare to make anyone listen to you. Think about it. Kelly’s not around, the family will be denying anything wrong, you’d have to spend hours in a police station telling your story over and over, and how long do you think it would take the family to find out where you were?”

“Oh, come on,” I said uneasily. “It’s not the fifties any more—”

“
Dead yakuza boss
.” Yoshi stressed every syllable hard. “You think the family won’t be calling in every favour from every dodgy cop in town? If your name shows up on any database— You can’t risk it. Just stay out of sight till this gets sorted out, Kechan. It can’t be long.”

“But Noriko—”

“Going to the police won’t help her now. When she’s better, when you’re safe, then we’ll talk about it.”

I knew what that meant. “We’re going to keep quiet? Let them get away with this?”

“Well, what are we going to do about it?” he snapped. “Tell the police we think yakuza attacked Noriko because her illegal friend’s gaijin hostess colleague might have killed someone whose death hasn’t been reported as a murder? Hope they do DNA tests on the whole Mitsuyoshi-kai on our say-so? What have we
got
?”

“But—”

“Damn it, Kechan. If you grass them up now, you’re not only telling them where you are, you’re giving them more reason to go after you.” Yoshi wasn’t letting me get a word in. “They’ll want you twice as much. You
cannot
let the police know who or where you are. You can’t trust anyone. Understand?”

“So what the hell do I do then?”

“Just stay calm. Listen, I’ve talked to Taka—”

“Oh, bloody hell!”

I should have known. I’d had to stop myself calling Taka, even knowing that he was a dangerous nutcase. Yoshi had hero-worshipped him since they’d ended up sitting next to each other at school, after Yoshi had been moved up two classes because he was so bright, and Taka had been forced to repeat a year after failing to turn up for any exams. Yoshi was shy, reserved and painfully correct, and he looked with awe on Taka’s disregard for convention or manners or basic safety precautions. He’d have turned to him without thinking.

Yoshi knew exactly how I felt about Taka. “I’m staying at his place,” he said, a bit defensively. “While this is all going on.”

“Why?”

“I’m your personal contact, Kechan. You have me down in the bar records as the person to call in case of problems. I thought they might come to me.”

I felt sick. “Oh, no. Oh, Yoshi, I’m so sorry—”

“Taka’s sending someone to help you. You need to do what he says and stay out of sight. Okay? The word is
chanko
.”

“The what?”

“The word. The password, maybe? I don’t know, that’s what he said.”

“I don’t have time for Taka’s shit right now!”

“Ssh. He says you should go to Matsumoto, be there tomorrow morning by ten thirty. Wait by the bridge at the castle entrance.”

“Castle? Bridge?”

“You’ll find it,” Yoshi said. “Kechan, please. I know you’re a bit annoyed with Taka, but he knows how to deal with this sort of situation.”

Yoshi sounded exhausted. I bit my tongue against the words I wanted to say and asked instead, “Are you okay?”

“Fine, sure, yes. No. No, not really. I lost my job.”

“What?”

“That big project, remember? I didn’t turn up today because I was in the hospital with Nori-chan, and I didn’t call till lunchtime, and then I rang to say I couldn’t go in tomorrow—because I’m scared, Kechan, I’m scared they’re looking for me too to get to you, I’m scared they know where I live and where I work. And—and they fired me.”

“They can’t do that.”

“Yes, they can. Short-term contract. And this project—we missed a deadline today because I wasn’t there. I let everyone down.”

“No. You had to be with Noriko—”

“I needed to be with her this morning when they did those things to her. I let her down, and then I let my company down, and— Just go to Matsumoto and let Taka’s friend help you. Please.”

“I’ll go,” I said.

A small part of my brain was wondering just how bad an idea this would be. Matsumoto was the place with the airport; if they were watching at all, it would be there. And God alone knew what Taka would be sending my way. He was involved in the amphetamine trade, which meant he kept some pretty odd company. His friends might not be yakuza, but I still wouldn’t want to owe them any favours.

The rest of my thoughts, flinching away from Noriko, were on Yoshi. He’d loved that job, even with the horrible hours and no time off, even when they put everyone on short-term contracts, in a country where the corporation is still supposed to be a family. To have let colleagues down, made them miss a deadline, wasn’t a work screw-up like it is in the West. It was a betrayal of some of the closest people in his life. It was the kind of thing people used to commit suicide over. That was how his voice had sounded.

Yoshi loved his job, and he loved Noriko, and he loved me. I had to make sure he didn’t lose all of us in one day.

Chapter Three

There was a goon waiting at the bus station. He was standing with a policeman.

The yakuza guy stood out like a sore trigger finger. He favoured the business-suit style, like a salaryman but just a bit too flashy, and if he had the tattoos he was keeping them under wraps, but he had the look. He stood by the big timetable, arms folded, and people leaned away from him as they hurried past.

He was exchanging a few words with the uniformed man next to him. Maybe the cop was working with him, maybe he was warning him off. Maybe they had met here by pure coincidence. I didn’t plan to find out. From now on I was going to assume the worst.

I didn’t go anywhere near either of them. There were paper timetables in the information office, so I took a few of those, as well as a list of local hotels and B&Bs, and wandered casually away, feeling my spine twitch under the pressure of the goon’s imagined gaze, although he was nowhere near me.

It was half past four now and getting colder. It would be twilight within the hour, and dark glasses would become attention-grabbing, so I’d have to stay out of sight as best I could. I knew that logically they couldn’t watch every hotel in town, but the way my luck was running, I’d probably walk into the place they were staying. And wouldn’t a student booking a business hotel room be too noticeable? Or I could go OL again…but I had another idea.

I made my way back to the shopping mall and scrutinised the bus timetable in the toilets, where I was spending more time than I liked. What I needed was for the provincial bus services to be lousy. The odds were against me—this was Japan, after all—but I finally found a destination to which the last bus departed at quarter to seven. Risky, but not impossible.

It was miserable waiting. I wandered around the mall, and lurked in the bathrooms, and thought of poor Yoshi, and poor Noriko, and the guilt choked me. I had brought this on them both, and it did no good to say that it wasn’t my fault, because if they hadn’t known me, this wouldn’t have happened to them.

If I had told Noriko not to go back home last night—it was so obvious they’d have gone to my address, why hadn’t I thought of it? If I hadn’t reassured her—why, Christ, why had I said that, why? To make her feel better?

I dug my sharp nails into my palms, wanting the pain. If I had just thought about her instead of myself for a few seconds. If she hadn’t given me her luck. She’d had that charm since she was a little girl; she’d misplaced it (as she did everything) a couple of times, and had been reduced to tears by its loss, and I’d helped her turn the flat upside down searching for it because of her panicked distress. But she’d given it to me when I was in trouble, and I had taken it without a thought.

If I hadn’t taken away her luck…

No. If I had refused to interpret for Kelly. If Yukie had let Kelly use those electric tongs in the bath. If Noriko had never persuaded me into hostess work—no, not that either. If my father had gone to Russia or America instead of Hong Kong and never conceived me in the first place.

Yakubyo-gami
, I thought.
Bringer of evil. Jinx.

I stewed in misery and self-pity for long enough that when I started to call
minshuku
, small B&B places, my voice was convincingly young and tearful.

“Excuse me, but do you have a room for the night? Is it expensive?”

The first two
minshuku
were full, or said they were, and my heart sank, but I lucked out on the third try—an old lady’s voice. She had a room, she said dubiously, but it was too late for her to prepare a meal for me—

Oh, no, that’s no problem. You see, I have missed the last bus back to (wherever it was, some nowheresville that I forgot the name of as soon as I’d said it), and I just need a bed for the night, I was very foolish, no, please don’t go to any trouble, I will eat some noodles before I come to you, oh, well, if you insist, thank you so much.

I had stopped off at a pharmacy earlier, so now I took out my plasters and cotton wool pads and rigged up step two: an eye bandage. Cotton wool over my left eye, secured with strips of neat sticking plaster. It was probably too dark now for people to notice, but if they did, I hoped all they would see was the dressing.

And there was no way in hell the yakuza could have marked every tiny B&B.

I walked to the
minshuku
I’d booked and put my dark glasses on when I got there. The
obāsan
who ran it welcomed me with open arms, and I explained how I had had to visit the hospital and my eyes were very sensitive to light and I would like to lie down quite soon. I spoke in a whisper and kept my head down, knees together and toes pointing inwards, the personification of shyness. She gave me a bowl of curry rice and showed me the bathroom and a small, clean bedroom with the futon all laid out, and there I was.

It was only eight, but I’d been up for thirty hours at this point. I lay down and turned off the light, and my imagination fed me pictures of what had happened to Noriko, and what they might be doing to Kelly right now, and I had to turn the light back on.

The guilt was a solid lump in my chest. I sent Yoshi a text telling him I was okay. I wanted to say that I loved him, but that wasn’t how we spoke.

Let’s not dwell on the dreams I had.

My phone alarm went off at six, and I was out of there by six thirty, and heading for the mall to pick up my bag, and then the bus station. Call me prejudiced, but I didn’t figure yakuza for early risers. I’d decided to keep the bandage for the moment, since the day was very grey still, and the sunglasses wouldn’t look right without it. And if the yakuza saw me, they’d probably think that only an idiot would disguise herself to look really noticeable.

Hmm.

The bus to Matsumoto was pretty busy, and the station itself packed with exhausted commuters, sleepwalking to work. I couldn’t see any obvious goons, and hopefully they couldn’t see me. I bought a ticket at the booth and then hung about, trying not to look interesting, until a serious-looking woman asked for a ticket for Matsumoto.

“Excuse me? I’m very sorry to bother you, but I have to get the bus to Matsumoto too, and my eyes…”

What a nice lady. We had time for a coffee so she got them both and insisted on paying, then helped me carry my bag to the bus and sat next to me. Her name was Ito-san, and she asked me a lot of questions about what was wrong with my eyes, but I’ve been a hostess long enough to direct a conversation and to know what people want to talk about. She had real eye problems, and though she was genuinely interested in me, she was naturally more interested in herself, and that was what we talked about on the long drive to Matsumoto. Or rather she talked, and I used years of practice to look fascinated and ask intelligent questions while I thought about something else entirely.

I had gone to sleep with guilt like an open wound in my heart. When I woke up, the guilt had fermented into anger.