“No Neck,” said Kit.
The other man said nothing, what could he realistically say? No Neck might be sorry at Yoshi’s death but she still fired him and had him beaten up by the Tokyo police. So Kit picked up a beach set of his own and turned it over, wondering what he was missing. “You really interested in this?”
“I’ve got a granddaughter,” said No Neck. “It’s her birthday soon.”
“When?”
“Don’t know. They won’t tell me.” He looked at Kit, then glanced at the bubble pack in his own hand. “I send the presents to her grandma.”
“And she sends them on?”
“Maybe…Never had a letter back.” No Neck kept his gaze on the beach set, until Kit finally realised this was because the biker was close to tears and doing his best to hide that fact.
“Need a razor,” said Kit, “back in a second.”
Shit happened and then everyone pretended it hadn’t. Life was easier that way. Yoshi’s death. No Neck’s family. Kit’s mother. All that shit in Iraq…A month or so before the incident with the truck, Kit took shrapnel below one knee. The cut was nothing, six inches of bone showing where metal split flesh.
When a medic arrived Kit had stood to salute and went down sideways. It was instinct that made him stand, nothing more. The reptilian bit of his brain still firing after everything more intelligent went into shock.
The medic told her Major, who told the Colonel. Since this was better than the reports he usually got, about squaddies drunk on cheap beer and boredom, flogging bits of uniform on eBay to sad fucks back home, the old man came to see Kit for himself, dragging some obedient hack behind him like a shadow.
Having told Kit not to stand this time, he shook Kit’s hand and stamped out again. The picture made the front of the Sun, page two in the Mail, page five of the Daily Telegraph, and page seven of the Mirror.
That was when he got the first postcard. Saw the photograph. Sorry you were injured. Look after yourself. All the best. Mary. So many hollow spaces between so few words.
He wrote back but got no reply.
Picking out the cheapest razor, Kit carried it to the checkout and was collecting his change when No Neck joined the queue, still clutching a Beachside Fun Set.
“I didn’t do it,” said No Neck, the moment they got outside. “Okay? And I’m genuinely sorry about…” He stopped before he could tell Kit what, though they both knew.
“You didn’t do what?”
“Bomb Pirate Mary’s. You know me. I wouldn’t do something like that. We’re friends.” The huge man was close to tears again.
“No one bombed the bar,” said Kit. “It was a gas explosion. I’ve read the…”
No Neck shook his head. “You seen what’s left of your bar?”
“Not yet…”
“A right fucking mess,” said No Neck. “You did time in Iraq, right? It’s okay,” he added quickly. “Been there, done that, got my own tattoo…” Pulling up his sleeve, he flashed a faded dagger inside a wreath. “Shit, you know how it goes.”
Yeah, Kit did.
“Someone wanted a job done,” said No Neck. “Take a look at the wreckage if you don’t believe me…Phosphorous and plastique. A really nasty mixture.”
Only most of the wreckage was gone and a truck was hauling away the last of the rubble, leaving charred timbers and a Dumpster full of earth when Kit and No Neck reached the site where Pirate Mary’s had been. The only bit of actual building still standing was a far corner, at the bottom of the slope. Most of this was fire-blackened concrete but a single jagged post stuck defiantly into the air.
A sign on the alley wall announced Pirate Mary’s—Tokyo’s Best Irish Bar and pointed to a building that wasn’t there.
Vomit soured Kit’s throat.
It wasn’t the sight of the blackened ruins nor the fact Yoshi had died here. A fact made infinitely more real by being there. It was the smell. The stink of charcoal and death. Yoshi’s body was gone, but other things had died here, rats or birds, mice and other rodents. He could smell the corruption, that unmistakable, utterly cloying signature of dead flesh.
“Fuck,” said Kit, swallowing sourness.
“You okay?” No Neck shook his head. “Shit, sorry…Of course you’re not okay.”
“It’s the smell,” said Kit, spitting.
No Neck looked at him. “What smell?” he asked.
A thick-set man in a hard hat tried to wave Kit away as he approached two Brazilians busy loading chunks of concrete into a fresh Dumpster. “Please stay back,” he said. “We’re working.”
“Yeah?” said No Neck. “Well we’re…”
Kit stepped between them. “This was my bar,” he said. “My wife died here.”
Whatever the foreman saw in Kit’s eyes was enough for him to order the Brazilians to stop working. “We’re going to take a break,” he said. “We’ll be back in ten minutes…” Left unspoken was the fact this was all the time Kit would get.
“I thought you owned this place,” said No Neck, as he watched the crew head uphill towards Roppongi’s main drag.
“Yeah,” said Kit.
“So you’ve just sold it, right?”
Kit shook his head. “I know nothing about this,” he said. He looked around at the scattered rubble, the half-filled Dumpster and a silent pneumatic drill. “No one’s mentioned this at all.”
CHAPTER 17 — Monday, 18 June
At 5.30 am a man in the next capsule coughed himself awake, flicked down the video screen in his roof, and began to drum his nails as he waited for the news.
Japan’s biggest fraud trial collapses, CEO Osamu Nakamura too ill to give evidence. File closes on Kitagawa family suicide. Washington, London, Moscow ramp up their war on narco-terrorism.
And then Kit heard Yoshi’s name.
At Christie’s in New York an example of work by Ms. Yoshi Tanaka sells for an unprecedented sum…
Ten minutes later the same man began to shave with a loud and erratic razor. About half an hour after this, a woman on the female-only floor farted loudly and spent the next five minutes chuckling to herself.
By 7.30 am, the sole guest at Executive Start Capsule Hotel was Kit, and he’d been awake all night, trying to work out why Yuko wouldn’t take his calls. So he rolled up the blind covering his glass door and scrambled out, maneuvering himself over the lip; the capsules stacked two deep along a corridor and he’d chosen an upper one.
Of course, Kit could have taken a room at the Tokyo Hilton, on the far side of Shinjuku station, about half a mile west of where he was. He still had Mr. Oniji’s money, mostly untouched. But in his own way Kit was saying goodbye to a city that had been saying goodbye to itself for as long as he could remember. A trial separation from Tokyo felt as lonely as leaving a lover.
It was only as he sweated out last night’s beer in a communal sauna that Kit realised he’d obviously taken Mr. Oniji’s advice to heart. Until then, he’d have said he had no intention of going anywhere. Kit was still wondering about that as he showered. And then, when he’d put it off for as long as possible, he shaved carefully, dressed, and checked himself in the mirror.
Hollow eyes stared back. Other than that, he’d do.
The sub-manager at Kyoto Credit Bank was apologetic. Ms. Tanaka’s sister and brother-in-law had closed her account a week earlier and emptied the strong box Ms. Tanaka had been renting. The joint account Mr. Nouveau held with Ms. Tanaka still existed. Unfortunately, under Japanese law, it was now frozen until a certificate of probate was filed at the ward office. He believed from what Ms. Tanaka’s brother-in-law said that this would be very soon.