Jon Grimwood - End of the World Blues

Kit could understand how that might make him nervous.

“Was he small, this man…smaller than you?”

Mr. Ito shook his head.

“Are you sure?”

“He was big,” said Mr. Ito. “Like a Russian, and broad here.” He touched his shoulders, indicating width…“That’s the truth,” Mr. Ito added, seeing the doubt on Kit’s face.

“Japanese?”

Mr. Ito appeared to think about that. Although it turned out he was considering, not whether the man was Japanese but what kind of foreigner he might be.

“Like me?” Kit asked.

A shake of Mr. Ito’s head.

“What then?”

“Maybe half Korean,” Mr. Ito said finally. “But dark.”

No one Kit knew came close to fitting both parts of that description. “You’re certain about this?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Ito. “Broad, bear-like, half Korean…” His words were loud enough to disturb the ex-Sumo behind the counter, who glanced across, considered things carefully, and went back to dicing tofu.

Oh well…

“Thank you,” said Kit, pushing back his stool. “Let me buy you a beer before I leave.” He waited for the huge ex-Sumo to sweep diced scallions into his bubbling pot and reach for a note pad.

Seven beers, two bowls of chanko-nabe —the seaweed crackers obviously came free. Sliding 5,000 yen onto a small white tray, Kit took his change. It was as he turned to go that Mr. Ito looked up from his final beer.

“The other man was Japanese,” Ito-san said.

Kit sat down again.

“What other man?”

“The one in the car.” Mr. Ito thought about it some more. “Three men,” he said finally. “Two in the car, one outside.”

“The big man, he got back in the car?”

Mr. Ito shook his head. “No,” he said. “He arrived in the car and then the car drove away. This was in the afternoon, before…”

“What were the two like?”

“One was young,” said Mr. Ito. “A chimpira .” He used the expression with disgust, as if things had been different in his day, which they probably were. Baby gangsters didn’t dress like cut-price Hollywood stars for a start.

“And the other?” Small, neatly dressed, somehow amused?

“Swept back hair, expensive watch,” said Mr. Ito. “You know the type. Almost a yanqi, but older. Pale suit. Quite tall.”

Pale suit?

“This man,” said Kit. “Did you get a good look at him?”

Mr. Ito nodded. “I see most things,” he said. “Sometimes I see more things than exist, often many more things.” Sitting back, he shook his head, as if aware he probably shouldn’t have said that.

“Cats talk,” said Kit. “Girls disappear into thin air. For the last five days I’ve been throwing dice that don’t exist, waiting for a winning number. I look into shop windows and see the reflection of someone else…”

“Ahh,” said Mr. Ito.

“I’m going to describe someone,” said Kit. “He’s tall, quite thin, and has high cheekbones, a pointed chin, and dyes his hair, which is swept back and slightly grey at the temples. He’s Okinawan, so his skin is dark.”

“Is this man real?”

“Yes,” said Kit.

“Good,” Mr. Ito said, “because he sounds like the man in the car.”

It took Kit five days to decide he should call Amy, ten minutes to argue himself out of that idea, and another three days to conclude his first decision had been right. In that time he changed hotels, followed the bozozoku stand off in Roppongi, and worked his way through Neku’s translations of the original police papers, which she hid behind a site supposedly dedicated to a history of Emily Strange.

Neku wrote him e-mails, which Kit stopped collecting when he remembered Brigadier Miles and her comment about how Kit’s name first came up on an international database. No one in England had his new number and he’d locked number display/caller ID before phoning No Neck that first time, but Kit still changed his phone twice, dumping the second of three phones in the bin without having used it once. It didn’t make much sense to him either.

The city looked the same and Kit looked different. The changes from London had rubbed off on him, his clothes were less formal, and he found himself looking at Tokyo through the eyes of someone who’d forgotten how to belong.

So much of how he defined himself had relied on Yoshi. With Yoshi gone, he’d begun to re-define himself, without even realising it. He checked into three different hotels and was taken for a tourist in each. At the Akasaka Prince he bought a hotel yukata, using it at the Shinjuku Hilton when he discovered the only thing on offer was a fluffy white robe. He might be assimilating, but things hadn’t yet gone that far.

As he sat in the executive lounge on the thirty-seventh floor of the Hilton, looking out over one of the greatest night views in the world, while an Australian girl and her boyfriend huddled in front of a blaring laptop to watch children’s films and polite middle-class Japanese families talked quietly, Kit decided he really needed to know why Amy had gone to bed with him. Maybe it just happened without reason.

Since a sign on his table banned the use of phones, Kit took himself out of the executive lounge and then, as an afterthought, out of the hotel altogether and into a taxi that was waiting at the door.

It was the day the BBC’s news site announced that the Metropolitan police had issued an arrest warrant for Benjamin Flyte, a society drug dealer and ex-advertising executive. Mr. Flyte was wanted for the murder of Armand de Valois, whose exact profession was left unspecified.

An ex-chief from intelligence was quoted saying she doubted Mr. Flyte would ever be caught. Apparently, Brigadier Miles was allowed to say this, because she’d retired five years earlier. All her counterpart at the Met was prepared to say was he couldn’t comment on individual cases, particularly when the question was speculative.

Evening in Tokyo translated as lunchtime in London and Amy was at her desk. Kit only knew this because he could hear the clatter of printers and the rattle of a train through an open window.

“Amy Avenden,” she announced, and Kit realised his phone still had its ID lock in place. When Kit kept silence, Amy repeated her name, slightly more forcefully.

“It’s me,” he said.

She was about to ask who the fuck me was, because Kit could hear her draw breath and then she knew. It said something for her discretion that she didn’t immediately say his name, although she did ask the obvious.

“Where are you?”

“In Tokyo,” said Kit, wondering if it was wise to answer. Although anyone who understood street noise would know he was in Japan from the sing-song jingle activated every time someone walked past a shop door. And anyone who understood jingles could tell he was outside a shop in Akihabara, Tokyo’s electric town, where Kit intended to replace his phone the moment this conversation was done.

“Yes,” Amy said. “That’s where Kate said you’d be.”

“Kate?”

“She called, to see if we’d heard from you. Apparently the kid’s worried.”

Kit took a deep breath.

“Things have changed at this end,” said Amy. “The Brigadier…”

“Did a deal,” Kit said, finishing the sentence for Amy, then wondering if he was right. “I read about the warrant,” he added. “It’s why I called.”

Silence, then more silence. He’d offended her, again. “It’s not my only reason,” said Kit. “But I do have a couple of questions. Are the police going to be waiting for me if I come back to the UK?”

“You deserted,” said Amy. “What do you think?”