Mo Hayder - The Devil of Nanking aka Tokyo

Strawberry had helped me cover my bruise with makeup and had sent me out to the tables. I sat in a daze, not listening to anything, not speaking, only stirring if food arrived at the table. Then I would eat everything I could, very neatly and intently, holding a napkin to my mouth so nobody could see quite how fast I was eating. There was only a little money left after I’d paid my fares to Shi Chongming’s, and all I’d eaten in twenty-four hours was a nibble of shabu shabu and a bowl of cheap noodles at a stand-up bar in Shinjuku.

There was a tense atmosphere in the club. A lot of the customers, even the regulars, felt it and didn’t stay for long. Odd, icy silences seemed to flit round and at times it became so quiet that I could hear the squeak of the pulley system in Marilyn’s swing. I was sure it wasn’t just that so many of the hostesses were missing. I was sure that the stories of last night were getting round and making everyone anxious.

Strawberry spent most of the night on the phone, trawling her contacts for news. I thought of the strings of police officers who sometimes came into the club last thing at night – everyone knew she was well connected. But for long hours she seemed to be getting no information about what was happening, what had prompted the Nurse’s attacks. It ended up being me who was the first person in the club to learn anything new.

It was the kanji that caught my eye, blazing out from the video screen on the opposite building. I recognized them immediately. Satsujin-jiken. A murder inquiry. Next to the characters was a blurred still of a familiar face: Bison smiling broadly into the night sky.

I stood up so quickly that I knocked over a glass. My customer jumped back in his chair, trying to dodge the whisky that rolled off the table on to his trousers. I didn’t stop to give him a napkin. I stepped away from the table and walked in a trance to the plate-glass window where a youthful Bison, thinner and with more hair, was singing, his arm outstretched to the camera. Under the footage more kanji were superimposed. It took a long time for me to work them out, but eventually I understood: Bai-san had died at 8.30 p.m. Only a couple of hours ago. The cause? Serious internal injuries.

I put my hands on the glass, breath steaming in the cold air. The snow fell silently, catching the colours of the screen, which was dissolving into library pictures of Bison, one of him leaving a courthouse, another showing him as he’d been in his heyday – lean face above a microphone, ruffled shirt and good American teeth. Then a picture of a hospital appeared, a doctor addressing a crowd of reporters, the photographers’ flashes reflecting off the smoked-glass doors. I watched with my mouth open, picking up the occasional kanji here and there. Singer – heart-throb – forty-seven years old – toured with the Spyders – number one in the Oricon charts – Bob Hope golf-club scandal. I put my head on one side. Bison? I thought. Murdered? And Fuyuki’s men paid a visit to all the girls at the party last night…

Behind me a phone rang. I jumped. I hadn’t noticed how silent the club had become, but when I looked over my shoulder there was no chatter, no conversation: every eye in the place was fixed on the video screen. Strawberry had got to her feet and was standing not far from me, staring out in silence, all the lights reflected in her face. For a moment she didn’t notice the phone – it rang three times before her trance snapped and she went back to her desk. She snatched up the receiver and barked, ‘ Moshi moshi?’

Every eye in the club was on her as she listened. Sometimes you can almost read the words a person is hearing from the way their expression tightens. It took her a long time to speak, and when she did her voice was blank and monotone. ‘Are you sure?’ she said. ‘Are you sure?’

She listened a little longer, then dropped the receiver into the cradle, all the colour leaving her face. She put both hands on the table, as if she was trying to get her balance. Then she rubbed her temples wearily, unlocked a drawer in her desk, opened the cash tray and pulled out a wad of notes, which she stuffed into her pocket. I was about to move from the window when she straightened and clipped across the club towards me, so quickly that the white fur coat swung round her like a bell. There was a dramatic grey tinge round her mouth, a smudge of lipstick on the coat collar.

‘This way.’ Without missing a step she took my arm and pulled me away from the window, past all the tables, the staring faces. ‘What’s she done?’ I heard a customer mutter. I was taken through the aluminium doors, where the hat-check girl was standing on tiptoe behind the desk, trying to see what was going on in the club. Strawberry guided me into the corridor that led to the stores and the toilets. She led me past the men’s, where someone had tried to disguise the smell of vomit with a hopeful squirt of bleach, and into the little cloakroom we used to put on makeup. Then she drew the door shut behind her and we stood, face to face. She was trembling, breathing so heavily that her shoulders rose and fell under the white coat.

‘Listen to me, lady.’

‘What?’

‘You got to get out.’

‘What?’

‘Get out of here.’ She gripped my arm. ‘You and Jason get out your house. Get out Tokyo. Don’t speak to the police. Just go. Strawberry don’t want to know where.’

‘No,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘No, no. I’m not going anywhere.’

‘Grey-san, this very important. Something bad happening in Tokyo. And something bad spreading – spreading.’ She paused, studying my face curiously. ‘Grey-san? You understand what’s happening? You know the news?’

I glanced over my shoulder at the closed door. ‘You mean Bai-san. You mean what happened to him.’ A long shiver went up and down my arms. I was thinking about the kanji. Internal injuries. ‘It was Ogawa, wasn’t it?’

‘Ssht!’ She spoke in a rapid, low monologue: ‘Listen to me. Bai-san got a visit. He was put into hospital, but he talked to police before he died. Maybe he crazy, talking to the police, or maybe he know he gonna die anyway…’

‘A visit from Ogawa?’

She took off her glasses. ‘Grey-san, at Mr Fuyuki’s party last night there a thief.’

‘A thief?’

‘That why Ogawa going crazy. A worm go into Mr Fuyuki’s house last night and now he not happy.’

A strange feeling washed over me. I had the uncanny sensation that some awful revelation was crouched just out of view, beyond the skyscrapers, Godzilla-like. ‘What was taken?’

‘What you think, Grey?’ She dropped her chin to her chest and looked up at me from under knowing lids. ‘Hmmm? What you think? Can’t you guess?’

‘Oh,’ I whispered, all the colour draining from my face.

She nodded. ‘Yes. Someone stole Fuyuki’s medicine.’

I sat down on the nearest chair, all the breath forced out of me at once. ‘Oh… no. This is – this is… It isn’t what I expected.’

‘And listen.’ Strawberry leaned very close to me. I could smell the tequila mingling with her lemony perfume. ‘The thief is someone at the party last night. The Nurse went to everybody’s house last night, she look everywhere, but Bai-san tell police he think she still don’t find her sagashimono. The thing she is looking for.’ She licked her fingers, patted her hair, and glanced over her shoulder, as if someone might have come in behind us. ‘You know,’ she said, very quietly, bending even closer, her face pointing in the same direction as mine, so our cheeks were touching and I could look down and see her red mouth moving close to my own, ‘if I Ogawa, and I hear what come out of your big mouth sometimes…’ Somewhere, fifty floors below, a siren wailed. ‘… I’m gonna think, Grey-san, I’m gonna think you the thief…’