The Devil of Nanking (39 page)

Everything I thought I believed has fled – in my heart there is a hole as naked and rotten as in the body of the child outside the factory, and all I can think about is what this occupation has really cost us. It means the end of a China that I haven’t valued for years. It is the death of all belief – the end of dialects, temples, moon cakes in the autumn and cormorant fishing at the feet of our mountains. It is the death of lovely bridges spreading over lotus ponds, the yellow stone reflected in the silent evening water. Shujin and I are the last links in the chain. We stand on the cliff-face, holding China back from a long fall into nothing and sometimes I startle, as if I’ve been awakened from a dream, thinking that I am falling and that all of China – the plains, the mountains, the deserts, the ancient tombs, the festivals of Pure Brightness and Corn Rain, the pagodas, the white dolphins in the Yangtze, and the Temple of Heaven – everything is falling with me.

Less than ten minutes after old Liu left our house, even before I’d found a way to tell Shujin we were leaving, the terrible screaming of motorcycle engines came from a street somewhere to the right of the house.

I went into the hall and grabbed the iron bar, positioning myself behind the spirit screen, my feet wide, the bar ready over my head. Shujin came from the kitchen to stand next to me, silently searching my face for answers. We stayed that way, my trembling arms raised, Shujin’s eyes locked on mine, as the dreadful thunder of engines funnelled up the alley outside. The noise grew and grew, until it was so loud that the engine seemed to be almost inside our heads. Then, just as I thought it might drive straight through the door and into the house, there came a choked rattle, and it began to diminish.

Shujin and I stared at each other. The sound headed away to the south, gradually faded into the distance, and silence fell. Now the only thing disturbing the quiet was the unearthly echo of our own breathing, hard and hollow.

‘What . . . ?’ Shujin mouthed. ‘What was that?’

‘Ssh.’ I gestured to her. ‘Stay back.’

I stepped round the spirit screen and put my ear to the barricaded front door. The engines had faded, but I could hear something else in the distance – something faint but unmistakable: the pop and spit of fire. The
yanwangye
is going about his diabolical work, I thought. Somewhere, in one of the streets not far away, something was burning.

‘Wait there. Don’t go near the door.’ I went up to the next storey, climbing two stairs at a time, still carrying the iron bar. In the front room I ripped away a loose slat of wood and peered out into the alley. The sky above the houses opposite was red: snarling flames leaping twenty and thirty feet into the air. Little black flecks floated down, pitted and scarred like black moths. The
yanwangye
must have come very close to our house.

‘What is it?’ Shujin asked. She had come up the stairs and was standing behind me, her eyes wide. ‘What’s happening?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said distantly, my eyes fixed on the falling snow. The flakes were speckled with greasy soot and, riding on the tide of black smoke, came the smell again. The smell of meat cooking. The smell that had been haunting me for days. Earlier we’d filled our stomach with buckwheat noodles, but there had been no protein in the meal, no
cai
to balance the
fan
of the noodle, and I still craved meat. I drew in a lavish lungful of the smell, my mouth watering hopelessly. It was so much stronger this time – it coiled round the house, getting into everything, so pungent that it almost overpowered the smell of burning timbers.

‘I don’t understand,’ I murmured. ‘It can’t be possible.’

‘What can’t be possible?’

‘Someone’s cooking.’ I turned to her. ‘How can this be? There’s no one left in the neighbourhood – even the Lius don’t have any meat to cook . . .’ The words died in my mouth. The black smoke hung directly over the alley where Liu’s house was. I stared at it in a trance, not speaking, not moving, hardly daring to breathe as a dreadful, unspeakable suspicion crawled into my throat.

When I got to the club that evening the crystal lift wasn’t at street level: it was up on the fiftieth floor. I stood for a while in the empty socket it left, my handbag tucked up under my arm, staring up, waiting for it to come down. It was a long time before I noticed a sign printed on A4 paper and taped to the wall.

I went to the phone box opposite and dialled the number. As I waited for an answer I stared up at the club, watching snowflakes piling up on the front edge of Marilyn’s extended leg. They built into a little ledge, until, every tenth swing or so, the movement dislodged them and they tumbled down, lit by the neon bubbles, glittering the way I imagined children’s play snow did as it fell from Santa’s sleigh.

‘
Moshi moshi?
’

‘Who’s that?’

‘Mama Strawberry. Who’s that? Grey-san?’

‘Yes.’

‘Strawberry’s sending the lift down now.’

On the fiftieth floor I got out cautiously. The hat-check girl, in her dinky yellow and black dress, was cheerful, but as soon as I got through the aluminium doors I knew something was very wrong. The heating was so low that the few girls dotted around the tables were shivering in their cocktail dresses and the flowers were suffering, drooping pitifully in the cold, the water in the vases smelling. All the customers were po-faced, and Strawberry was sitting hunched at her desk, dressed in a slim, calf-length white fur coat, a bottle of tequila at her elbow, staring distractedly at a list of hostesses’ names. Under the little 1950s diamanté reading glasses, her makeup was blurred. She looked as if she’d been drinking for hours.

‘What’s going on?’

She blinked up at me. ‘Some customers banned from this club.
Banned
. Understand, lady?’

‘Who’s banned?’

‘Miss Ogawa.’ She slammed a hand on the table, making the bottle jump and all the waiters and hostesses turn to look. ‘I
tell
you, didn’t I? What I say, huh?’ She pointed her finger up at me, making an angry spitting sound behind her teeth. ‘Remember I tell you Miss Ogawa have a
chin chin
in her panties, yes? Well, Grey-san, bad news! She got tail in back too. You take off Miss Ogawa panties and first—’ She threw her knees apart and jabbed a finger between her legs. ‘First, you gonna see a
chin chin
here. And round
here
,’ turning her hips sideways in the chair she slapped her buttocks, ‘you gonna see a tail. Because she
animal
. Simple. Ogawa,
animal
.’ Her voice might have continued spiralling upwards, if something hadn’t made her stop. She put down her pen, pulled the glasses to the end of her nose and peered at me over them. ‘Your face? What happened to your face?’

‘Strawberry, listen, Jason won’t be coming to work. And the Russians too. They told me to say they’ve left. Gone somewhere, I don’t know where.’

‘My God.’ Her eyes locked on my bruise. ‘Now, tell Strawberry truth.’ She checked that no one was listening. Then she leaned forward and said, ‘Ogawa come to Grey-san too, didn’t she?’

I blinked. ‘Too?’

She poured another tequila and downed it in one. Her face was very pink under the makeup. ‘Okay,’ she said, patting her mouth with a lace handkerchief. ‘Time to straight talk. Sit down. Sit down.’ She motioned to the chair, flapping her hand bossily. I drew it back and sat, feeling numb, my feet together, clutching my bag on my knees. ‘Grey-san, look around.’ She raised her hand to indicate the empty tables. ‘Look at Strawberry club. So many of my girls not here! You wanna know why, lady? Hmm? You wanna know why? Because they at home! Crying!’ She held up the list of names, shaking it angrily at me, as if I was responsible for their absence. ‘Every girl who go to Fuyuki party last night wake in middle of night, and look what they see – Miss Ogawa or one of Fuyuki’s gorillas in the house. You the only girl who go to last night party and come to work tonight.’

‘But . . .’ I drifted off. I couldn’t keep everything straight in my head. My thoughts and images were getting jumbled and coming out in a strange order. ‘You have to explain things to me,’ I said quietly. ‘You have to explain them very slowly. What do you mean? It wasn’t only our house, it wasn’t only Jason—?’

‘I told you! Ogawa
animal
,’ she hissed, shooting her face forward at me. ‘She go to
everyone
at party last night. Maybe she think she Santa Claus.’

‘But . . . why? What did she want?’

‘Strawberry don’t know.’ She picked up the old-fashioned pink and gold pedestal phone that sat on the desk and dialled a number. She held her hand across the mouthpiece and hissed to me, ‘All evening I been trying to find out.’

At about ten o’clock that night, a flock of crows, blown off course, was flung against the club window by a gust of wind. I still think about those crows, even to this day. It was too late for them to be away from their roost, and it was one of those happenings that you count yourself too sensible to consider a sign. One hit the plate glass so hard that almost everyone in the club jumped. I didn’t: I had been sitting in silence, vaguely watching the birds’ course across the sky, wondering just who in Fuyuki’s past might have had the transforming power that Shi Chongming had talked about. I must have been the only person in the club who wasn’t shocked when the bird hit, and dropped from the air like a bullet.

Strawberry had helped me cover my bruise with makeup and had sent me out to the tables. I sat in a daze, not listening to anything, not speaking, only stirring if food arrived at the table. Then I would eat everything I could, very neatly and intently, holding a napkin to my mouth so nobody could see quite how fast I was eating. There was only a little money left after I’d paid my fares to Shi Chongming’s, and all I’d eaten in twenty-four hours was a nibble of
shabu shabu
and a bowl of cheap noodles at a stand-up bar in Shinjuku.

There was a tense atmosphere in the club. A lot of the customers, even the regulars, felt it and didn’t stay for long. Odd, icy silences seemed to flit round and at times it became so quiet that I could hear the squeak of the pulley system in Marilyn’s swing. I was sure it wasn’t just that so many of the hostesses were missing. I was sure that the stories of last night were getting round and making everyone anxious.

Strawberry spent most of the night on the phone, trawling her contacts for news. I thought of the strings of police officers who sometimes came into the club last thing at night – everyone knew she was well connected. But for long hours she seemed to be getting no information about what was happening, what had prompted the Nurse’s attacks. It ended up being me who was the first person in the club to learn anything new.

It was the
kanji
that caught my eye, blazing out from the video screen on the opposite building. I recognized them immediately.
Satsujin-jiken
. A murder inquiry. Next to the characters was a blurred still of a familiar face: Bison smiling broadly into the night sky.

I stood up so quickly that I knocked over a glass. My customer jumped back in his chair, trying to dodge the whisky that rolled off the table on to his trousers. I didn’t stop to give him a napkin. I stepped away from the table and walked in a trance to the plate-glass window where a youthful Bison, thinner and with more hair, was singing, his arm outstretched to the camera. Under the footage more
kanji
were superimposed. It took a long time for me to work them out, but eventually I understood: Bai-san had died at 8.30 p.m. Only a couple of hours ago. The cause? Serious internal injuries.

I put my hands on the glass, breath steaming in the cold air. The snow fell silently, catching the colours of the screen, which was dissolving into library pictures of Bison, one of him leaving a courthouse, another showing him as he’d been in his heyday – lean face above a microphone, ruffled shirt and good American teeth. Then a picture of a hospital appeared, a doctor addressing a crowd of reporters, the photographers’ flashes reflecting off the smoked-glass doors. I watched with my mouth open, picking up the occasional
kanji
here and there. Singer – heart-throb – forty-seven years old – toured with the Spyders – number one in the Oricon charts – Bob Hope golf-club scandal. I put my head on one side. Bison? I thought. Murdered? And Fuyuki’s men paid a visit to all the girls at the party last night . . .

Behind me a phone rang. I jumped. I hadn’t noticed how silent the club had become, but when I looked over my shoulder there was no chatter, no conversation: every eye in the place was fixed on the video screen. Strawberry had got to her feet and was standing not far from me, staring out in silence, all the lights reflected in her face. For a moment she didn’t notice the phone – it rang three times before her trance snapped and she went back to her desk. She snatched up the receiver and barked, ‘
Moshi moshi
?’

Every eye in the club was on her as she listened. Sometimes you can almost read the words a person is hearing from the way their expression tightens. It took her a long time to speak, and when she did her voice was blank and monotone. ‘Are you sure?’ she said. ‘Are you sure?’

She listened a little longer, then dropped the receiver into the cradle, all the colour leaving her face. She put both hands on the table, as if she was trying to get her balance. Then she rubbed her temples wearily, unlocked a drawer in her desk, opened the cash tray and pulled out a wad of notes, which she stuffed into her pocket. I was about to move from the window when she straightened and clipped across the club towards me, so quickly that the white fur coat swung round her like a bell. There was a dramatic grey tinge round her mouth, a smudge of lipstick on the coat collar.

‘This way.’ Without missing a step she took my arm and pulled me away from the window, past all the tables, the staring faces. ‘What’s
she
done?’ I heard a customer mutter. I was taken through the aluminium doors, where the hat-check girl was standing on tiptoe behind the desk, trying to see what was going on in the club. Strawberry guided me into the corridor that led to the stores and the toilets. She led me past the men’s, where someone had tried to disguise the smell of vomit with a hopeful squirt of bleach, and into the little cloakroom we used to put on makeup. Then she drew the door shut behind her and we stood, face to face. She was trembling, breathing so heavily that her shoulders rose and fell under the white coat.