Mo Hayder - The Devil of Nanking aka Tokyo

‘ Nobody knows I was asking questions,’ I hissed, turning my eyes up to hers. ‘Only you.’

She straightened and raised her eyebrows sarcastically. ‘Really? Really, Grey? That true?’

I stared at her, suddenly very cold. I remembered how defensive Fuyuki had been when I wanted to look round his apartment. I remembered the Nurse coming down the corridor. She’d caught me trying to slip away when Fuyuki was having his choking attack. When you look back at the things you do, sometimes you can’t believe that you were ever so brazen or stupid. ‘Yes,’ I said tremulously. ‘Yes. I mean I-’ I put my hand distractedly to my head. ‘Nobody knows. I’m – I’m sure.’

‘Grey-san, listen, Miss Ogawa going crazy. She gonna go back to every house again until she find the thief. Every single house. And this time she not gonna be so kind.’

‘But I…’ I stared blankly at the lipstick on Strawberry’s collar. It made me think of blood, of animals being trapped, of the foxes that would come screaming past my parents’ back door in the hunting season. I thought of how silently the Nurse had crept into our house. I thought of the hand with the watch sticking out of the car boot. I rubbed my arms because goosebumps were breaking out on my skin. ‘I can’t leave Tokyo. I can’t. You don’t understand-’

‘Strawberry telling you now. You leave Tokyo. You fired. Hear? You fired. Don’t come back.’ She reached into her pocket, pulled out the wad of money and held it under my nose with her index and middle finger. ‘This goodbye from Strawberry. Give some to Jason too.’ I reached for it, but the moment my fingers were on it she tightened her grip. ‘Grey-san.’ Her eyes met mine and I could see my face reflected in the ice-blue contact lenses. When she spoke it was in Japanese, a very musical Japanese that would have sounded beautiful under different circumstances. ‘You understand me when I speak Japanese?’

‘Yes.’

‘Make me a promise, will you? Promise me that one day I’ll get a letter from you. A nice letter, telling me how happy you are. Written by you, safe in another country-’ She broke off and studied my reaction. ‘Promise?’

I didn’t answer.

‘Yes,’ she said, still staring at me intently, as if she was reading my mind. ‘I think you promise.’ She released the money and held open the door for me. ‘Now go on. Get out. Get your coat and leave. And, Grey…’

‘Yes?’

‘Don’t take the glass lift. It’s better you use the one at the back.’

Nanking, 20 December 1937

The fire didn’t take long to die, its furious dragon-like glow drifting away across the sky. Almost immediately the snow came back, angelic and forgiving, drifting drowsily past me as I stood bedraggled and weak outside the remains of Liu Runde’s house, a handkerchief to my mouth, tears in my eyes. The fire had eaten everything in its path, leaving only smouldering rubble, a terrible skeleton of blackened timbers. Now it was finished the inferno had dropped with a whimper, dwindling to nothing but a small steady flame, very straight and controlled, on the floor in the centre of the building.

The alley was silent. I was the only soul who had come to look at these charred remains. Maybe Shujin and I are the only two souls left in Nanking.

The scent of kerosene lingered, the yanwangye must have doused the house before he torched it, but there was the other smell too – the smell that had been lingering in our alley, tantalizing me all these days, the smell that I now recognized with a sinking heart. I wiped the tears from my face and picked my way round to the side of the house. The Lius must still be in there, I thought. If they had managed to escape we would know – they would have come straight to our house. They must have been trapped inside: the yanwangye would have made sure of it.

A breath of smoke floated across the house, obscuring it for a short time. When it cleared I saw them. Two objects, lined up like blackened tree-trunks after a forest fire, their human shapes melted down so that they had no recognizable angles, only the charred silhouettes of hooded figures. They were upright, huddled in the little vestibule behind the back door as if they’d been trying to escape. One was large, one small. I didn’t have to look too closely to know it was Liu and his son. I recognized the buttons on the burned zhongshan jacket. Liu’s wife wouldn’t be there – she would have been taken from the house for the yanwangye ’s own purposes.

I pushed the handkerchief into my nostrils and stepped forward for a closer look. The smell was stronger, unbearable for the craving it started in me. Under the bodies puddles of fat had collected, already growing a thin white skin on the surface where it was cooling, like the fat I sometimes see cooling in the wok when Shujin has been preparing meat. I pushed the handkerchief harder into my nose and knew I would, from that moment on, be eternally afraid of one thing: I knew I would always be afraid of what I am eating. Swallowing will never again be comfortable for me.

Now, only an hour later, here I sit and shiver on the bed, clutching in one hand my pen, and in the other all I dared take of Liu Runde: a scrap of his hair, which came crisp away in my hand when I bent to touch his cooling body. It was still so hot that it burned all the way through my glove and left a scorchmark on my palm. And yet curiously the hair remains intact – eerily perfect.

I put a shaky hand to my head, my whole body trembling. ‘What is it?’ whispers Shujin, but I cannot answer because I am recalling, time and time again, the smell of Liu and his son burning. From nowhere a picture comes to me of a Japanese officer’s face, grinning dimly by the firelight in the camp at night. The officer’s face is greasy from army-issue amphetamines and some nameless meat. I think about the flesh taken from the little girl next to the factory. As a trophy, I’d imagined, or are there other reasons to remove human flesh? But the Imperial Army is well fed – fed and muscled and nourished. They’ve no reason to peck and scavenge like the bearded vultures of the Gobi. And something else is on my mind – something about the medicine bottles in the silk factory…

Enough. For now it’s enough to ponder. Here I sit, my journal on my knee, Shujin watching me wordlessly with the eyes that blame me for everything. The time has come. The time has come to tell her what will happen next.

‘Shujin.’ I finished the entry and set down the quill, pushed aside the ink stone and crawled across the bed to where she sat. Her face was white and expressionless, the candlelight flickering on it. She hadn’t asked about old Liu, but I am sure she knew – from my face, and from the smell of him on my clothes. I knelt facing her, only a few inches away, my hands on my knees. ‘Shujin?’ Tentatively I put my hand to her hair – it was as rough, as heavy as bark against my palm.

She didn’t recoil. She met my eyes steadily. ‘What do you want to say to me, Chongming?’

I want to say that I love you, I want to talk to you the way men talk to their wives in Europe. I want to say I’m sorry. I want to take the hands of the clock and wind them backwards.

‘Please don’t look at me like that.’ She tried to move my hand away. ‘What do you want to say?’

‘I…’

‘Yes?’

I sighed and dropped my hand, lowering my eyes. ‘Shujin.’ My voice was hushed. ‘Shujin. You were right. We should have left Nanking a long time ago. I am sorry.’

‘I see.’

‘And…’ I hesitated ‘… and I think that now we should do our best. We should try to escape.’