“What do you want from me?” Kit demanded.
“Ben, come on. Let’s not make this harder than it need be.”
“I’m not…” Common sense kicked in a split second ahead of Kit telling the man he wasn’t Ben Flyte. Common sense, and sudden hollowness in his gut. Life had just got very messy indeed.
“You know,” said the voice. “You and Sergeant Samson have to be stupid to keep jerking me around. Very stupid.”
The accent was foreign. East European, maybe.
“No one’s jerking you around,” said Kit. “Tell me what you want and I’ll do it.” He heard muffled voices and an unexpected shriek of feedback, followed by a sharp command. The noise fell silent and inside the silence was music, a vacuum cleaner, and the sound of glasses being stacked.
He was being called from a bar or club, somewhere with a sound system and an open mic. Not a huge surprise. In Kit’s experience clubs were ideal for laundering money and fronting less legit enterprises. Drugs could be confiscated and recycled, girls hired as dancers and then required to diversify, protection rackets marketed as concern for the local good.
Always the first industry to embrace global opportunities, crime had taken the remains of the Soviet Union and created modern Russia, introduced the Balkans to free market values, plus bullets. Whole governments in Central America owed their existence to its patronage, and it worked so seamlessly alongside religion and commerce that most barely noted its existence. Half of Japan still couldn’t tell the difference between crime and politics.
“Mr. Flyte, I want my consignment back. Otherwise…”
Yes, Kit knew about that bit. “Let me talk to the kid.”
“She’s sleeping,” said the man. It was the first thing he’d said Kit didn’t believe.
“This consignment,” said Kit. “What if it’s not all there?”
“Then we kill her anyway,” said the voice. “Call me when it’s ready. You have twenty-four hours.”
“Wait,” Kit demanded. “Please…”
“Why?”
“It’s going to take longer.” Kit needed time, more time than this man was going to give him. Much more. “I need two days,” he said. “What you want is hidden. It will take me two days to recover it.”
“Thirty-six hours,” the man said. “Maximum.” A click told Kit the conversation was over. After a minute or so he remembered to close his phone.
The South London Gazette covered an area of fifty square miles in total, from Lambeth, through Southwark, and across to Lewisham. It was a free sheet, delivered weekly to over 150,000 households. Kit knew, he’d talked to its advertising manager, a woman who sounded as if she habitually worked Saturdays and had been slightly displeased that Kit might think otherwise.
The paper used a basic flatplan, she told him, with the facility to swap stories at a local level. The version in which Kit was interested covered an area of 12,000 households on the Lambeth/Southwark borders. And yes, she’d be happy to e-mail him a distribution map.
Focus, Kit told himself. Find yourself a plan.
He might actually have intended to return to the Queen’s Head, an old pub in the shadow of the Telecom Tower, or it might have been an accident, his feet following a path so faded he only remembered the local landmarks when he saw them. Mary O’Mally had taken him here. It had been the O’Mallys’ local before Kate moved the family out of London.
At the till two members of staff were discussing a third. “Plus,” said the man, “he fucks anything that moves.”
“And you don’t?”
“Well, nothing that goes baa, moo, or Mummy.”
The woman laughed. “When I was a kid in Sydney,” she said. “We fucked but that was just pretending to be grown-up. It wasn’t like we really liked them or anything…”
Speak for yourself, thought Kit.
Cutting between tourists, he chose a table that let him sit with his back to the wall, then took a long look around the pub. No one was smoking. Half of the clientele were drinking Diet Coke or wine. The locals he remembered inhabiting the place had been reduced to a hardcore cluster of old men near the bar.
London wasn’t a city Kit recognised anymore.
Flipping open Neku’s laptop, Kit logged into his mail. Anti-ageing drugs, Chinese porn, a note from the consigliore of a Brazilian crime family offering unspecified riches in return for borrowing Kit’s bank account.
The note from Hiroshi Sato was brief.
A single link to an English-language news story on Tokyo Today. No Neck, Micki, Tetsuo, and half a dozen others had been arrested and unexpectedly released. A teenager had been killed in a battle to retake the site, but since he was bozozoku no one was making much of a fuss. A second note, from Micki, told the same tale in rather more breathless prose. What should Tommy and his friends do if things got really ugly? she wanted to know.
Well, No Neck wanted to know, really.
“Nothing.” His first reply seemed too abrupt, so Kit sipped his brandy and thought about it. What should No Neck do? More to the point, what could No Neck do? Other than marry Micki, find himself a proper job, and walk away from his friendship with Kit…
“There was an uyoku van,” Kit wrote finally. “Gold sides, with the imperial mon picked out in black. See what you can find out about it.” Still too bald, so Kit added, “And take care of yourself…”
The last e-mail Kit opened contained a map showing a tight jumble of streets in the shadow of a new overpass. Layers of history in a muddle of names, as Napier and Maffeking, old generals and battles intersected with Nelson Mandela Drive. Somewhere in that jumble of streets was the bar where Neku was being held. All Kit had to do was find it.
He was aware just how absurd that sounded.
Clubs and pubs needed to be licenced. A place with live music probably needed a different type of licence again. Someone would have that list. It’s all about small steps, Kit reminded himself.
Calling the police station where Amy worked, Kit hit his next problem—no one had heard of her. “You say she claimed to work here?” The Inspector on the other end was more interested in this than anything else Kit had to say.
“Yes,” said Kit.
“And you’re definitely not a journalist?” The Inspector was tapping away at a keyboard, so he had to be checking on Amy, unless he was simply getting on with his own work.
“I’m a friend.”
“Right,” said the man. “Give me a number and I’ll call you back.” Five minutes stretched into ten and then into twenty; when this became half an hour, Kit stopped bothering to watch the time and began watching people instead.
A Saturday crowd came and went, deals were done, four girls went to the bathroom together and came out looking much happier. Money or drugs seemed the obvious answer to what Kit was expected to produce. A bar in South London was the where. In Japan, kidnapping was the preserve of hardcore criminals. Over here, Kit wasn’t sure, maybe amateurs got in on the act as well. He needed someone who would know.
When his mobile buzzed he got her.
“You’ve been looking for me?” It was Amy, her voice guarded enough to give Kit pause.
“Look,” said Kit, “I need some help.”
“Yes,” Amy said. “I enjoyed supper too.”
I enjoyed?
In the background behind Amy, a printer was clattering and half a dozen men discussed flack jackets, raising their voices to be heard above the noise. It sounded like any office, apart from the number of times Guv, Ma’am, and Boss got dropped into the conversation. A conversation that stumbled when Amy said, “No, there’s nothing I need to tell you…”