Pirate Mary’s was described as a biker club house, a bar owing more to Irish myth than any reality, and a soi-disant watering hole for Tokyo’s self-proclaimed anarchic elite. (Battered & Bruised’s travel editor had been refused entry about six months before.) If anyone remembered a woman had died there they forgot to tell their readers.
Having checked the sites, Kit abandoned the protection of a Shinjuku bus shelter and braved the rain for a narrow doorway between electronic screens. Café Rikishi’s windows had been sacrificed for profit, the advertising bringing in almost as much a week as selling beer made in a month. Besides, those who used the café were unlikely to miss daylight; they came for the chanko-nabe stew, the beer, and the memories it brought of a city only they remembered.
If the air outside was hot and wet, the café was worse. So humid was the tiny bar that condensation dripped like rain from its ceiling and ran in rivulets down black-painted walls. An old man in a sodden pork-pie hat sat at a table with five dead Kirin bottles in front of him. When not wiping sweat from his brow or gazing mournfully at his empty bottles, the old man shredded a damp napkin to make perfect paper moths.
“Ito-san,” said Kit, bowing deeply.
Mr. Ito grew up in Shitamachi, a working class area destroyed in the fire bombing of Tokyo, and his generation kept a rigid demarcation between public and private behaviour—his shock at seeing Kit was quickly disguised.
Of course, maybe he was too drunk to recognise Kit at all. It could have been the shock of seeing a rain-soaked foreigner that Ito-san discarded, one brave or stupid enough to invade the sticky gloom of a café under the Shinjuku railway line.
Since Café Rikishi was barely larger than a broom cupboard, its crowd consisted of the owner and Mr. Ito, Kit, and a vast Korean mechanic who was stripping a Yamaha clutch at a table in the corner. When it became obvious he was not required to heave the gaijin back onto the street, the Korean went back to his gears.
“Mr. Ito.”
“Nouveau-san.”
So he had been recognised.
The old man stared at Kit, somewhat owlishly. “You know,” he said, ripping a strip from his paper napkin and rolling it between his fingers. “People said…”
“I’d left Tokyo?”
Mr. Ito twisted off another strip of napkin and folded both strips together, placing a tiny paper rifle on the table. “You’d met with an accident.”
“Hardly,” said Kit. “I’ve been on holiday.”
Mr. Ito allowed himself to look doubtful.
“Let me buy you a beer,” Kit said, ordering two Kirin, and remembering to use enough polite form to make his request acceptable. The ex-Sumo behind the counter glanced at Ito-san, who nodded.
All Sumo learned to cook, as did dervishes from half a world away, Zen and Sufi both considering it no stranger to look for truth in a bubbling pot than anywhere else. Kit had no idea if dervishes ran restaurants, but half the Sumo in Japan opened cafés as soon as the time came for them to hang up their ceremonial aprons.
The bottles of Kirin were so cold that steam from the chanko-nabe condensed across their sides and began to trickle into damp circles. When Mr. Ito returned his bottle to the table, he was careful to place it exactly inside the mark it made.
“Another?” Kit asked.
Mr. Ito nodded. “And maybe food?”
The stew was hot and filling and took the edge off the beer. It tasted of soy, garlic, and rice wine, daikon and shimeji mushroom mixed with burdock root. The chicken and tofu were near perfect, the chrysanthemum leaves still slightly chewy. The udon came separately, in its own tiny bowl.
“Gochisosama deshita.”
Kit’s simple thank you earned him a slight nod from the ex-Sumo, who then swept crude chunks of tofu into boiling broth. Obviously enough, the tofu wasn’t really diced crudely, merely chopped in a fashion designed to look crude.
After a third bottle of Kirin, Mr. Ito decided it was time to face whatever brought the Englishman to this café. So he sat back on his stool and signalled that Kit had his full attention. This involved little more than a slight change of expression and a relaxing of Mr. Ito’s shoulders.
“That night,” said Kit.
Mr. Ito nodded, not needing Kit to specify which one.
“I have a question about the afternoon.” Kit had been thinking hard about this. Look for the money, Mary had told him. Odds on, that’s your motive.
The insurance on Pirate Mary’s was limited to what was required by law. So far as anyone knew he and Yoshi were married; he’d thought so himself. Even gaijin in Japan got to inherit from their partners. The price of Yoshi’s work might have doubled in the week following her death, but most of it was held in trust or owned outright by museums. It seemed a poor motive, assuming her death had been anything other than an accident.
Only the building value of the land made sense. And Kit needed Brigadier Miles to come through with a name on that. In the meantime…Kit had been landing at Narita when he remembered something Ito-san said.
“I was wondering,” said Kit. “About that afternoon. You said you saw a car?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Ito, “and a policeman.”
“In uniform?”
Mr. Ito shook his head. “No, but he said he was police.”
“Can you remember how this man looked?”
Small, neatly dressed, somehow amused? The expression that always came to mind when Kit thought about Oniji-san. The face he’d seen the first time Mr. Oniji walked through the door at the hospital and police officers stepped aside to let the oyaban see the foreigner who’d been fucking his wife.
Mr. Ito leaned back to think. Had he been in a chair this would have been fine. Unfortunately Ito-san sat on a stool, and for a moment Kit thought the old man might topple backwards. All that happened, however, was that Mr. Ito lurched forward again as if on a spring, and finished up with his elbows on the table.
Mr. Ito was drunk and slightly scared, which made Kit remember something else. So far as Ito-san was concerned Kit had knifed a homeless man and left his corpse against a cemetery railing. And that meant Mr. Ito believed his beers were being bought by a killer.
Kit could understand how that might make him nervous.
“Was he small, this man…smaller than you?”
Mr. Ito shook his head.
“Are you sure?”
“He was big,” said Mr. Ito. “Like a Russian, and broad here.” He touched his shoulders, indicating width…“That’s the truth,” Mr. Ito added, seeing the doubt on Kit’s face.
“Japanese?”
Mr. Ito appeared to think about that. Although it turned out he was considering, not whether the man was Japanese but what kind of foreigner he might be.
“Like me?” Kit asked.
A shake of Mr. Ito’s head.
“What then?”
“Maybe half Korean,” Mr. Ito said finally. “But dark.”
No one Kit knew came close to fitting both parts of that description. “You’re certain about this?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Ito. “Broad, bear-like, half Korean…” His words were loud enough to disturb the ex-Sumo behind the counter, who glanced across, considered things carefully, and went back to dicing tofu.
Oh well…
“Thank you,” said Kit, pushing back his stool. “Let me buy you a beer before I leave.” He waited for the huge ex-Sumo to sweep diced scallions into his bubbling pot and reach for a note pad.