CHAPTER 57 — Monday Morning, 2 July
All of the rooms at Herberg Statholder had double beds, their own glass-topped vanity tables, satellite television, discreet minibars, music systems, and wireless internet. Laptops were provided for guests who forgot to bring their own.
Meals could be served at any time of day or night and in any place, although the sky café apparently offered unrivalled views across the slate roofs of Amsterdam, and all guests got preferential booking at a Michelin-starred brasserie less than three minutes’ walk from the hotel.
The Herberg Statholder had money. It had money because its guests had money and matching expectations. Herberg Statholder pulled off that difficult trick of offering the expensively shabby and casually exclusive. Although a wooden panel in the lift was cracked, the brass fittings were hand-polished and the lift’s single picture was signed and numbered and came from one of Chagall’s shorter runs.
Kit took the lift alone because Sophie refused to accompany him, her anger so obvious that he began to wonder if it was with Mary rather than him.
Room 12.
Herberg Statholder avoided numbering its rooms according to floor. With only twelve bedrooms such fussiness was irrelevant. The narrow corridor onto which Kit’s lift opened led to the Sky Café in one direction, and to three bedrooms in the other: servants’ quarters, made fashionable by their rooftop view and the tectonic shifts of history.
“Come in…”
He would have known the voice anywhere. Kit was still wondering what to say when Mary pulled herself up and adjusted the pillows behind her head.
“Long time,” she said.
He nodded.
“I didn’t mean you to find me,” said Mary, then added, “Sophie called me, while you were on the way up. You read more into my card than was there.”
“No,” Kit said. “I didn’t.”
She looked at him.
“Why send it then?” demanded Kit. “At least, why that card and those words?”
“To hurt you,” Mary said. “So you knew what really happened. I was tying up my life’s loose ends and you were one of them.” Her window was open on the other side of the bed, a vase of orchids stood on the vanity table and an open copy of Vanity Fair lay discarded on the floor. It made no difference. The room reeked of illness.
“Sit down,” said Mary, and that was when Kit realised he was still standing in her doorway.
“What is it?” he asked.
“A mistake, we shared needles. Ben was in remission and I didn’t even know he was ill. I came apart in a matter of months.” She nodded towards a chair. “Sit,” she said.
A child could be heard outside, chattering excitedly about nothing very much. A bicycle went past in need of oiling. A woman talked to herself, or on the phone. “You hear all that?” said Mary, indicating her open window.
He nodded.
“It’s called life. That’s what I’m leaving behind.”
“I don’t suppose,” said Kit, when he’d listened some more to the noises outside and seen Mary smile, “there’s much point in my asking why you staged a fake suicide?”
“You don’t know?”
“How would I?”
“Because you always boasted you knew me better than I knew myself.”
Kit shrugged. “I must have been lying.”
Mary’s laugh was thin. “Take a guess,” she said.
“You were escaping Armand de Valois.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because the man wanted his heroin back.”
“My choice had nothing to do with Ben,” she said, sitting back. “Or that dealer of his. Anyway, I couldn’t have told de Valois where his drugs were because I didn’t bloody know.”
“If Ben wasn’t the reason?”
“Oh God,” said Mary, “work it out.”
Sitting on a chair, beside a bed in a room in the attic of an absurdly over-priced hotel in Amsterdam, Kit did. It was a very Mary reason.
“You couldn’t stand Pat and Kate watching you die.”
She nodded.
“You wanted to spare them the pain.”
Mary laughed, hard enough to set her coughing again. When Kit patted her back he felt mostly bone. “Oh God,” she said, catching her breath. “All that black leather and cynicism and fucked-up back history. And you’ve still got a heart of pure marshmallow. You’ve seen how my father is. You’ve seen how my mother fusses. I wanted to spare me the pain.”
They sat in silence, with a warm wind carrying sounds and a slight sourness from the canal through Mary’s open window. The orchids were new, the paper open on her bed was that day’s issue. Someone was obviously looking after her.
“Anyway,” said Mary, into the silence. “Enough about me. Tell me about you. Are you married? What’s Tokyo like as a place to live? Do you have kids?”
There was no easy answer to any of those. So Kit told her about Neku instead. About how cos-play dressed and how his bar had been a drinking club for bozozoku. And how he’d finally worked out the reason he liked Tokyo so much was that everyone spent most of their time pretending to be someone else.
“You met this child on the street?”
“In a Roppongi doorway. I gave her coffee. She cried.”
“And now you’ve got her at the flat in London?”
“It’s not like that,” said Kit, explaining what it was like, as Mary listened intently or asked the occasional question, until she had what she needed to know.
“So you’re using this girl to repay a debt you owe me?”
Kit nodded.
“I can live with that,” she said.
The metal tub in Mary’s bathroom had clawed feet and stood in the middle of the room, on boards that had been sanded back to bare wood and then painted white, very crudely. A single curtain-less window looked up at sky.
“Not too hot,” said Mary, smiling when Kit tested the water with his elbow, as he’d once seen Yoshi do before bathing her nephew. Mary was far thinner than he remembered, her vertebrae sharp beneath his fingers as he soaped her back.
“Wash me thoroughly,” she said, kneeling up.
Kit did his best.
By the time he finished, the bath water was tepid and every inch of Mary’s body had been soaped and scrubbed clean. As a final gesture, he let the water drain away and used a hand showerhead to rinse her body. After that, he dried her carefully.
“Thank you,” she said. “I can’t persuade Sophie to do that.”
“Why not?”
“Too invasive,” said Mary. “We’re lovers,” she added, when Kit looked puzzled. “Well, we’re meant to be. It’s been a while…”
After he’d helped Mary back to bed, Kit spoke more about Neku and then about Tokyo, and he found himself telling her about the stand off at the building site in Roppongi. Somehow that led to him telling her about Yoshi and the fire, not really being married, and the night Neku killed a man.
“No one fights like that,” said Mary. “Unless it’s what they know.” Her voice was tired and her lips trembled, but she spoke with the certainty of someone facing death and refusing to look away. “She comes from where I come from,” Mary said, before Kit could ask how she knew. It was the only time he could remember her mentioning Kate’s profession.
“Ask yourself who really gains,” said Mary. “Ask yourself how many of the things you believe to be true are lies. Find out what really happened that night…”
“I’m sorry,” said Kit.
“Yes,” said Mary. “Me too.”
Neither was talking about her family, Japan, or the fact Mary was dying. “About the bath,” she said. “Don’t tell Sophie.”