Mo Hayder - The Devil of Nanking aka Tokyo

The waiters had stopped moving in and out of the little galley kitchen, and Jason had slipped inside. He stood quite close to the Nurse for some time, talking to her in a low murmur. Every time I looked up he was there, speaking urgently, trying to convince her of something. She didn’t break off from her work – it was almost as if he wasn’t there. Once he happened to turn and look into the dining room and caught me watching him. I must have looked very white and shocked, sitting so upright at my table. He opened his mouth, seemed about to say something, then swung his eyes to indicate the Nurse, and sent me a private smile, a smile I was supposed to share. He put the tip of his tongue on his bottom lip, pushing against it so that the inside of his mouth was momentarily revealed.

I dropped my eyes to the cooling meat on my chopsticks. A growing skin of congealing fat was whitening on it. My stomach cramped, discomfort raced through me.

At the other table Bison and Fuyuki were discussing a skinny young man with pockmarked skin and dyed-blond, feathered hair. A new recruit, he looked anxious to have been summoned to the table. ‘Step forward, chimpira,’ said Fuyuki. ‘Come here, chimpira. Come here.’ Chimpira was a word I hadn’t encountered. It was only months later that I discovered it was a term for a Mafia junior soldier. It meant, literally, ‘little dick’. The chimpira came to stand in front of Fuyuki, who turned his wheelchair away from the table and, using his cane, lifted one side of the chimpira ’s baggy lavender suit to reveal not a shirt but a black T-shirt. ‘Look at this,’ he said to Bison. ‘This is the way they dress today!’ Bison smiled weakly. Fuyuki sucked in his cheeks and shook his head regretfully, dropping the cane. ‘These young ones. What a disgrace.’

He made a gesture to the waiter, who went into the kitchen. Someone brought a chair and the neighbouring guests shuffled away so that the chimpira could edge in next to Fuyuki. He sat, nervously wrapping his jacket round the offending T-shirt, his face pale, glancing at the other guests. It was only when the waiter returned hotfoot with a tray from which he unloaded two small, unglazed cups, a jug of sake, a sheaf of heavy white paper and three small bowls, containing rice and salt, that the chimpira relaxed. A whole fish lay on a platter, its sunken eye on the ceiling. The chimpira was looking at all the equipment of the sakazuki ritual. It was good news. Fuyuki was welcoming him into the gang. As the ritual began – fish scales scraped into the sake, salt pinched into pyramids, oaths pronounced by Fuyuki and the chimpira – I realized that every guest in the room had turned their attention to it. Nobody was watching the kitchen, where the Nurse had laid down the kitchen knife and was rinsing her hands at the sink.

I lowered my glass and watched in silence as she wiped her hands on a towel, smoothed her wig – her big hands moving flat down the back of the crown – then removed from a drawer a large fliptop canister. She opened it, plunged her hands inside, moving them round and round. When she removed them they were covered in a fine white powder that might have been talc or flour. She shook them, allowing the excess to fall back into the tin, looked up and spoke one sentence to Jason. I edged forward on my chair, trying to read her lips, but she turned away and, whitened hands extended in front of her in the manner of a doctor entering an operating theatre, put her back to the door at the far end of the kitchen, pushed through it and was gone. No one noticed her leave, nor when Jason put out his cigarette and looked at me, his eyebrows raised, a smile working its way across his face. I held his gaze, my face colouring. He tipped his head in the direction the Nurse had gone and showed me his tongue again, moist above his chipped tooth. He held up his hand and mouthed the word ‘five’, then he was gone through the same door, leaving me sitting in silence, in a cold pool of thought.

Jason was like nothing I’d ever dreamed of. All this time I’d been dealing with something completely outside my understanding. I was meant to follow him. I was meant to wait five minutes then follow, to find him and the Nurse undressing each other. I was probably meant to watch them – the indescribable vignette he had fantasized about, the malformed and the lover. And then I was supposed to join in. I had a sudden, macabre picture of a Japanese dance I’d once heard described performed by the prostitutes in a hot spring: the dance in the stream, it was called. With every step she takes into the river she must raise her kimono a little higher to keep it dry. She is revealed inch by inch. A white calf. Pale, bruised skin. Everyone holding their breath at the promise of more to come. The hem rises a little more – a little more. What would the Nurse look like naked? What would he be thinking when he touched her? And what would she be thinking when she touched him? When she touched living human flesh, how did she separate it from the dead human flesh that she ground up for Fuyuki? Would he whisper to her what he’d whispered to me: I just love to fuck freaks…

I lit a cigarette, pushed back my chair with a sharp squeal and went to the glass doors that led to the swimming-pool. They were ajar, and the poolside was still and eerily silent – apart from the bluk-bluk-bluk of the pool filter and the muffled traffic coming from the Number One Expressway. Only my pupils narrowed. The rest of me was quite still. Noiseless. Slowly, moving like a snake, my focus stretched out into the corridors around me, slowly, slowly, moving sinuously across the courtyard. Small lamps were placed at intervals around the pool. I put my fingers on the glass pane. The lamps reminded me of the small Buddhist lamps that were burned next to a corpse.

Where had Jason and the Nurse gone? Wherever they were, it left the rest of the apartment empty, unguarded. This was the irony: Jason couldn’t know how he had helped me. I imagined the rooms below me, as if a floorplan was drawn on the window in front of me. I saw myself, or my ghost, walking down the plush corridors, turning into the room under the pool. I saw myself bending over a glass tank, lifting something in both hands…

I glanced over my shoulder. Fuyuki and the chimpira were eating shabu shabu, Bison was on his feet, bent over a chair, talking to a hostess in a strapless dress. No one was looking at me. I pushed the glass doors open a fraction more and took a step into the damp night. The room under the pool where I’d seen the glass tank was in darkness. I took a breath and stepped forward, my heels metallic on the cold marble. I was about to push away from the doors when, in the room behind me, someone began to cough loudly.

I turned. The chimpira was patting Fuyuki on the back, his head bent in concern, muttering to him in a low voice. The wheelchair had been pushed back from the table, and Fuyuki was positioned with his head and shoulders pushed forward, his feet in the expensive designer shoes sticking out starkly in front of him, his body describing a hairpin. All the conversations in the room faltered, all eyes were on him as he clawed at his throat. The chimpira scraped his chair back and stood up, waving his hands uselessly, looking quickly from one door to the other as if expecting someone to come and help. Fuyuki’s mouth opened, almost in slow motion, his head curled back, then – in a sudden spring – his arms shot out and his chest bent backwards as taut as a bow.

Everyone in the room moved at once. They leaped from their chairs, rushed to him. Someone was shouting orders, someone else knocked over a vase of flowers, glasses were dropped, the waiter slammed his hand on an emergency button. Above me the red light on the wall flashed silently on and off. Fuyuki was trying to stand now, rocking violently from side to side in his wheelchair, his hands flailing in panic. Next to him stood a hostess, making odd little sounds of distress, shadowing his moves, bobbing up and down, trying to hit him on the back.