Mo Hayder - The Devil of Nanking aka Tokyo

Shujin and I stared at each other. The sound headed away to the south, gradually faded into the distance, and silence fell. Now the only thing disturbing the quiet was the unearthly echo of our own breathing, hard and hollow.

‘What…?’ Shujin mouthed. ‘What was that?’

‘Ssh.’ I gestured to her. ‘Stay back.’

I stepped round the spirit screen and put my ear to the barricaded front door. The engines had faded, but I could hear something else in the distance – something faint but unmistakable: the pop and spit of fire. The yanwangye is going about his diabolical work, I thought. Somewhere, in one of the streets not far away, something was burning.

‘Wait there. Don’t go near the door.’ I went up to the next storey, climbing two stairs at a time, still carrying the iron bar. In the front room I ripped away a loose slat of wood and peered out into the alley. The sky above the houses opposite was red: snarling flames leaping twenty and thirty feet into the air. Little black flecks floated down, pitted and scarred like black moths. The yanwangye must have come very close to our house.

‘What is it?’ Shujin asked. She had come up the stairs and was standing behind me, her eyes wide. ‘What’s happening?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said distantly, my eyes fixed on the falling snow. The flakes were speckled with greasy soot and, riding on the tide of black smoke, came the smell again. The smell of meat cooking. The smell that had been haunting me for days. Earlier we’d filled our stomach with buckwheat noodles, but there had been no protein in the meal, no cai to balance the fan of the noodle, and I still craved meat. I drew in a lavish lungful of the smell, my mouth watering hopelessly. It was so much stronger this time – it coiled round the house, getting into everything, so pungent that it almost overpowered the smell of burning timbers.

‘I don’t understand,’ I murmured. ‘It can’t be possible.’

‘What can’t be possible?’

‘Someone’s cooking.’ I turned to her. ‘How can this be? There’s no one left in the neighbourhood – even the Lius don’t have any meat to cook…’ The words died in my mouth. The black smoke hung directly over the alley where Liu’s house was. I stared at it in a trance, not speaking, not moving, hardly daring to breathe as a dreadful, unspeakable suspicion crawled into my throat.

When I got to the club that evening the crystal lift wasn’t at street level: it was up on the fiftieth floor. I stood for a while in the empty socket it left, my handbag tucked up under my arm, staring up, waiting for it to come down. It was a long time before I noticed a sign printed on A4 paper and taped to the wall.

Some Like It Hot is open!!!!! We’re waiting to see you!!!! Please call this number for access.

I went to the phone box opposite and dialled the number. As I waited for an answer I stared up at the club, watching snowflakes piling up on the front edge of Marilyn’s extended leg. They built into a little ledge, until, every tenth swing or so, the movement dislodged them and they tumbled down, lit by the neon bubbles, glittering the way I imagined children’s play snow did as it fell from Santa’s sleigh.

‘ Moshi moshi? ’

‘Who’s that?’

‘Mama Strawberry. Who’s that? Grey-san?’

‘Yes.’

‘Strawberry’s sending the lift down now.’

On the fiftieth floor I got out cautiously. The hat-check girl, in her dinky yellow and black dress, was cheerful, but as soon as I got through the aluminium doors I knew something was very wrong. The heating was so low that the few girls dotted around the tables were shivering in their cocktail dresses and the flowers were suffering, drooping pitifully in the cold, the water in the vases smelling. All the customers were po-faced, and Strawberry was sitting hunched at her desk, dressed in a slim, calf-length white fur coat, a bottle of tequila at her elbow, staring distractedly at a list of hostesses’ names. Under the little 1950s diamanté reading glasses, her makeup was blurred. She looked as if she’d been drinking for hours.

‘What’s going on?’

She blinked up at me. ‘Some customers banned from this club. Banned. Understand, lady?’

‘Who’s banned?’

‘Miss Ogawa.’ She slammed a hand on the table, making the bottle jump and all the waiters and hostesses turn to look. ‘I tell you, didn’t I? What I say, huh?’ She pointed her finger up at me, making an angry spitting sound behind her teeth. ‘Remember I tell you Miss Ogawa have a chin chin in her panties, yes? Well, Grey-san, bad news! She got tail in back too. You take off Miss Ogawa panties and first-’ She threw her knees apart and jabbed a finger between her legs. ‘First, you gonna see a chin chin here. And round here,’ turning her hips sideways in the chair she slapped her buttocks, ‘you gonna see a tail. Because she animal. Simple. Ogawa, animal.’ Her voice might have continued spiralling upwards, if something hadn’t made her stop. She put down her pen, pulled the glasses to the end of her nose and peered at me over them. ‘Your face? What happened to your face?’

‘Strawberry, listen, Jason won’t be coming to work. And the Russians too. They told me to say they’ve left. Gone somewhere, I don’t know where.’

‘My God.’ Her eyes locked on my bruise. ‘Now, tell Strawberry truth.’ She checked that no one was listening. Then she leaned forward and said, ‘Ogawa come to Grey-san too, didn’t she?’

I blinked. ‘Too?’

She poured another tequila and downed it in one. Her face was very pink under the makeup. ‘Okay,’ she said, patting her mouth with a lace handkerchief. ‘Time to straight talk. Sit down. Sit down.’ She motioned to the chair, flapping her hand bossily. I drew it back and sat, feeling numb, my feet together, clutching my bag on my knees. ‘Grey-san, look around.’ She raised her hand to indicate the empty tables. ‘Look at Strawberry club. So many of my girls not here! You wanna know why, lady? Hmm? You wanna know why? Because they at home! Crying!’ She held up the list of names, shaking it angrily at me, as if I was responsible for their absence. ‘Every girl who go to Fuyuki party last night wake in middle of night, and look what they see – Miss Ogawa or one of Fuyuki’s gorillas in the house. You the only girl who go to last night party and come to work tonight.’

‘But…’ I drifted off. I couldn’t keep everything straight in my head. My thoughts and images were getting jumbled and coming out in a strange order. ‘You have to explain things to me,’ I said quietly. ‘You have to explain them very slowly. What do you mean? It wasn’t only our house, it wasn’t only Jason-?’

‘I told you! Ogawa animal,’ she hissed, shooting her face forward at me. ‘She go to everyone at party last night. Maybe she think she Santa Claus.’

‘But… why? What did she want?’

‘Strawberry don’t know.’ She picked up the old-fashioned pink and gold pedestal phone that sat on the desk and dialled a number. She held her hand across the mouthpiece and hissed to me, ‘All evening I been trying to find out.’

At about ten o’clock that night, a flock of crows, blown off course, was flung against the club window by a gust of wind. I still think about those crows, even to this day. It was too late for them to be away from their roost, and it was one of those happenings that you count yourself too sensible to consider a sign. One hit the plate glass so hard that almost everyone in the club jumped. I didn’t: I had been sitting in silence, vaguely watching the birds’ course across the sky, wondering just who in Fuyuki’s past might have had the transforming power that Shi Chongming had talked about. I must have been the only person in the club who wasn’t shocked when the bird hit, and dropped from the air like a bullet.