Jon Grimwood - End of the World Blues

Neku naked. Neku dead. Neku in chains.

“Nothing specific,” said Kit. “But I can think of half a dozen shots that would be infinitely worse.”

The message on the back was simple, a telephone number and a time. A handful of words warned Kit what would happen if he went to the police. “Are you planning to go home?” Kit asked Charlie, who stared at him.

“How can I leave now?”

“Good,” said Kit, “because I need you here.” Someone had to be around to answer the phone and keep Kate at bay. “But are you meant to be somewhere else?”

Charlie shook his head. “My mob are in Italy. Mum might call the house, but she’ll be cool if I’m not around to answer. She’ll just call my mobile to find out where I am.”

“And you’ll lie?”

“Obviously.”

“Right,” Kit said, stripping off his shirt, choosing a new one, and shrugging himself into one of Ben Flyte’s old jackets. “Keep the flat door locked. Don’t answer the buzzer, and if Kate O’Mally calls back tell her Neku and I have gone shopping.”

“That’s what I told her last time.”

“Well, tell her again.”

It was hot, the air was sour, and London stank of fried onions, too much aftershave, diesel, and dog shit, maybe it always did. Saturday morning shoppers filled Oxford Street, mostly tourists and teenage girls, every second one of whom reminded him of Neku.

Men in jeans and black tee-shirts crowded a table on Dean Street, talking into their phones, checking their mail and skimming the headlines in that day’s papers. The sun was out and people were smiling, as the city changed into something more relaxed and less English, which it always did at any pretence of good weather.

Tomorrow would bring thunderstorms or smog to send everyone back to their shells, but most Londoners had grown blasé about the meteorological equivalent of mood swings, though that hadn’t stopped a newsagent running his own news board for last Wednesday’s Standard that simply read, Weather Buggered .

Kit was walking the streets in search of answers. He was looking for them inside his head, in the eyes of those coming the other way on crowded pavements, even in the mirrored world he could see in shop windows. So far he’d collected enough wrong answers to make him believe it was only a matter of time before he stumbled over one that was right.

According to Charlie, a mathematician at Cambridge once said that if people saw only the one-in-a-hundred answers that proved correct, then the answer obviously looked extraordinary, because the ninety-nine failures went unseen. It was like videoing yourself throwing four dice, and editing the result to retain only the times when every number came up six.

Kit had a feeling the boy meant to be supportive. In the three hours Kit had to waste before he could make the call, he stamped an unconscious pattern of anxiety into crowded streets from Euston Road in the north to Leicester Square and Piccadilly in the south, throwing dice in his head, making deals with God, wondering what he could offer in return for Neku’s safety.

George Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf had both lived in the same house in Fitzroy Square, just at different times. An Englishman was once briefly King of Corsica. The dining club founded by artist Joshua Reynolds was now Blacks, a drinking den for journalists. Soho got its name from the Duke of Monmouth’s habit of calling So-Ho when hunting. In between the dice and deal making, Kit learned back history from heritage plaques on the walls.

Every plan that came to his mind got dismissed for one reason or another. Yoshi always insisted that ideas, like everything else, followed a path made from tiny steps that looked obvious only in retrospect.

Every bowl she made was the result of a hundred bowls she chose not to make. It followed that every act, whether the finding of a new proof for a complex mathematical problem or a twist of vision that turned one school of art into another was a result of endless failure. It was the unconscious editing of the process that made the outcome look clever, not the process itself.

It also followed, at least it did to Yoshi, that every problem, no matter how intricate, could be broken into smaller pieces. How these pieces fit provided one with the answer.

Try as Kit might, he couldn’t make it work. He had the problem, he had a willingness to shuffle endless permutations of what might be behind Neku’s kidnapping, but he couldn’t make his pieces fit. Who was he threatening by asking questions about Mary? Nobody, at least nobody Kit could see. So he tried to tie Neku’s disappearance to what had happened to his bar in Tokyo, but that made even less sense than before.

Outside the French Protestant Church on Soho Square, while still worrying about what he should do, Kit realised it was after twelve and he was five minutes late making his call.

“It’s me,” he said. “I got your note.”

“Ahh…At last, my friend. You’re a difficult man to find. Where are you now?”

“In Soho.” Silence followed. Maybe this was meant to make Kit nervous. If so, it worked. All the same, Kit made himself wait.

“I was sorry to hear about Mary,” said the man. “She was a nice girl. Still, you seem to have found yourself someone else.”

“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.