‘Crouch?’ A crouch-style execution. Why?
‘On the ground. A – how do you say? – foetus position.’
Why bother? Dead is dead.
‘You should crouch for your own safety,’ my killer insists.
I mangle a stillborn huff which Leatherjacket interprets as a no.
Leatherjacket primes his gun. ‘Well, I warned you.’
So many stars. What are they for?
Tuna, abalone, yellowtail, salmon roe, bonito, egg tofu, human earlobe. The sushi is piled high. The wasabi is mixed in with the soy to kill any impurities in the raw fish. It clots the soy, sticky blood. I must stop thinking about the bowling alley. I must. We have driven across the night since the dogs, it seems, but the clock here says only 22:14. Little over a hundred minutes to go, I tell myself, but I find it hard to believe in anything good. I am in the grip of a cold that will get much worse before it will get any better. I get some water down my throat; it bloats my stomach. Even breathing is hard. We have the restaurant to ourselves. A family was here, but they shuffled out the moment they saw us. The old waitress stays cool, but the chef stays out back, lying low. I would if I could. Frankenstein lobs a sausage at me. ‘Why the starchfart face, cub scout? Anyone would think you lost your parents.’ Lizard smears wasabi in the soy. ‘Maybe he realized the mastiff I shot back at Goichi’s was his long-lost papa.’ Morino flicks his cigar-tip at me. ‘Grin and bear it! Remember your heritage! You’re a Japanese law-abiding straight! You grin and bear it until your Zimmer frame buckles and your drinking water is mercury oxide, and our whole country is one coast-to-coast parking lot. I’m not knocking Japan. I love it. In most places the muscle is at the beck and call of the masters. In Japan, we, the muscle,
are
the masters. Japan is
our
gig. So grin. Bear it.’ I may have to bear it, but no way am I grinning about being dragged into a turf war between wolves with rabies. The only thing I can grin about is that until we leave this restaurant nothing can get worse. Lizard points to a corner of the room. ‘Father!’ Saliva-shiny sushi-cud. ‘See what I spy with my little eye – they got a karaoke machine!’
‘Joy of joys.’ Morino looks at Frankenstein. ‘Let loose the wings of song.’ Frankenstein sings a song in English with a chorus that goes ‘I can’t liiiiiiiiive, if living is without yoo-ooo-ooo, I can’t giiiiiiiiive, I can’t take any moooooore’. The horn players bay along with the vowels. The noise is so bad I watch for the sushi to sprout maggots. Leatherjacket sips a glass of milk in the corner. He doesn’t seem to belong here either. Morino calls over the elderly waitress who has been nervously serving us. ‘Sing.’ Without arguing she performs an enka number called ‘Cherry Blossoms of the Inland Sea’, about a mah-jong gambler who dies to honour a gambling debt, but only after ninety-nine verses. Lizard sings a song called ‘Electrode Incest’ by a band of the same name. It contains no verses, choruses or chord changes. The horn players clap wildly as Lizard does a turkey dance on the table and wanks the microphone. Finally the song is over and Morino gestures me up.
‘No,’ I say flatly. ‘I don’t sing.’
A hail of sushi slaps my face. The horn players boo.
‘I don’t like music.’
‘Bollocks,’ says Morino. ‘My pet investigator said you have twenty CDs, loads by that Beatle who got snuffed, a file of sheet music and a guitar.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Nightmares do their homework.’
I swab rice off my face. ‘You had my room broken into?’
Morino holds his glass for the waitress to fill. ‘If I thought you had touched my baby girl, you virtual-orphan brat, I would have had
you
broken into. So be grateful.’
‘I hate karaoke and I’m not going to sing.’
Lizard does a squitty imitation.
‘I hate karaoke and I’m not going to sing
.’ Then his fist fills my eye and the table becomes the ceiling.
I pick myself up. My eye sort of sings, throbbing up.
‘I wanted to do that all day.’ Lizard examines his knuckles. ‘Father told you to sing.’
I should be afraid, but I shake my head. There is no blood.
Frankenstein places a chopstick over his index and ring fingers, belches, and snaps the chopstick with his middle finger. ‘I say Miyake is in danger of a breach of contract, Father.’
Morino wags his finger. ‘You have to make allowances. He was never the same after his sister drowned. They had their own little country. Fuck, they had their own language. What a pity he buggered off to Kagoshima the day she died, selfish fuck that he is. Hey!’ He clicks his fingers at the waitress. ‘More edamame beans!’ Drugged with cold germs as I am, I can’t guess whether Morino has a gift for inspired guesses or a skeleton key to the basements of minds. Either way, I want to spike his eye with my chopstick. I imagine myself doing it. Squirt. His wart throbs. I swear, the thing is watching me.
According to the Cadillac clock we enter the reclaimed land perimeter road at 23:04. Thirty minutes later we are still driving. Military band music pumps through the car and a fever pumps through me, or maybe the fever is in the car and the military music in me. Millimetres away from being a killer, I was. I am. Can a chance difference in spin and angle really make me not guilty? I threw. I had to. But I threw. One more hour and the document wallet will be mine. Plus a magnificent black eye. I was expecting the pretender to the Yakuza throne of Tokyo to be joined by fleets of armoured personnel, but no. Just these two Cadillacs. My nose streams uncontrollably, and my neck feels clamped in some sort of truss. Maybe some code of honour binds the two factions to non-violence. Or, please no, maybe this is a suicide mission. I tell myself if Morino was the kamikaze type he wouldn’t have made it to his age, or even his body weight, but I no longer know what to think. Nobody says much. Morino calls Mama-san, at Queen of Spades, I guess. ‘Is Miriam at work yet? I called her place. Tell her to call my mobile the moment she gets in.’ Lizard and Frankenstein smoke their Camels, Morino his cigar. I am too ill to want to smoke. Popsicle whimpers in her narcotic sleep. The sea is calm enough to walk on and the sky is stars, acre after acre. The full moon is a thirty watt bulb no more than several inches away. Morino makes another call, but nobody answers. ‘Suicides tend to check themselves out when the moon is full, a nurse once told me. Suicides, and, for some reason, horses.’ Finally we slow to a halt, parked at a strategic angle to the horn players’ Cadillac, I guess. I get out. My cramped muscles hurt. Yet another building site. Tokyo suburbs are demolition dumps or building sites. The giant terminus building is still a giant foundation. Flat as a pool table, the reclaimed land extends all the way to the mountains. A bridge, with the central section missing, rises on either side of where we stand. I can hear the lazy sea a short distance over the embankment. ‘Say, Miyake.’ His lighter flame dances. ‘You can monkey up that bridge.’ I wonder what the catch is. ‘Nagasaki is the opposition, and you don’t fit the image. I don’t want anyone thinking I’m recruiting from kindergarten.’ Lizard snickers.
‘Will you give me the document wallet?’
‘You are boring me! Not until after fucking midnight! Go!’
I walk several paces, when Leatherjacket, standing on a mound of boulders, whistles. I thought it was to me but it wasn’t. ‘Our friends are coming. Nine vehicles.’
‘Nine.’ Frankenstein shrugs. ‘I had hoped for more, but nine is not bad.’
I begin running up the slope. The bridge is the nearest thing to a safe haven. On the other hand, it is a perfect cell to keep me in. I get within a few metres of the top. I guess I am thirty metres up – high enough for vertigo to clamp my lungs and make my balls retract. I peer over the parapet and watch Nagasaki’s cars draw up. They park semicircling Morino’s two Cadillacs and flick their beams on full. They kill their engines. Four men in each vehicle file out, each with combat jackets, helmets and an automatic rifle, and take up firing positions. Not for the first time today, I feel I have strayed into an action movie. Morino and his men put on sunglasses. No guns, no night vision. Morino holds his megaphone in one hand and keeps the other in his pocket. Thirty-six heavily armed men to seven. A man in a white suit climbs out at leisure, flanked by two bodyguards. I wait for the order to fire. No document wallet. It was all for nothing. Morino’s voice reverbs over the reclaimed land as if his megaphone is a pinhole for the night to talk through. ‘Jun Nagasaki. Do you have any final requests?’
‘I stand here frankly amazed, Morino. Have you really sunk so low so quickly? Rumours of your demise appear to be under-exaggerated. Five tired goons, one ex-arms dealer – I shall kill you myself, Suhbataar, so painfully that even you will be impressed – and an unarmed catamite hiding up a bridge.’ So much for my safe haven. ‘
This
is your comeback squad? Do you have an aircraft carrier waiting offshore? Are you hoping to kill me by sheer anticlimax?’
‘I summoned you here to deliver my verdict.’
‘Are you a tertiary syphilitic? Are you Ultraman?’
‘I’ll allow you to apologize with honour. You may kill yourself.’
‘This is beyond stupid, Morino, this is rude. Let me get this right. You
seriously
fuck up my opening day at Xanadu. Persuading the press that Ozaki fell by accident has been a logistical hernia. You hurl bowls at my three managers until their skulls are eggshell – original, I grant you, but annoying in the extreme – then you kill two innocent bouncers the old-fashioned way and shoot my finest dog. My dog, Morino, is what really hurts. You
amateur
. No operator of style ever,
ever
harms an animal.’
‘Style? Importing uninspected shitferbeef burgers from the US and killing off Wakayama schoolchildren with O-157, and then getting your Ministry of Agricultural poodles to blame the radish farmers, is this “
style
”? Blackmailing bank executives over the figures you made them cook by refusing to pay back your bubble-economy loans: “
style
”? You call the “pay up, Mr Food Manufacturer, or pay for a razor blade in your baby products” scam “
style
”?’
‘Your failure to grasp the fact that the world has progressed since 1970 is why I inherited and expanded Tsuru’s interests and why you are still drawing your operational revenue on scaring loose change out of Shinjuku bar owners. How, oh
how
, do you suppose you will still be alive in five minutes?’
‘You forgot my two secret weapons.’
‘Did I! I am
ablaze
with curiosity.’
‘The first weapon is your blazing curiosity, Nagasaki. Even in the old days, you spoke before you shot.’
‘Is your second secret weapon as terrifying as your first?’
‘I present to you, ladies’ – it is hard for me to catch the next word – ‘NimQ6.’
‘“Nim – Q – 6”? A magic pissing goblin? A drain unblocker?’
‘A plastic explosive developed by the Israeli secret service.’
‘Never heard of it.’
‘Of course you never heard of it. The Israelis do not advertise in
Time
. But microcells of NimQ6 are imbedded in the triggers of the guns your dumb fucking apes are holding. The casings of your swanky Kevlar helmets are peppered with the stuff. My colleague here, Mr Suhbataar, oversaw the customization of your equipment when he diverted them from his Russian military supplier.’
Some of Nagasaki’s men turn to look at their boss.
Nagasaki folds his arms. ‘In the sad history of sad dumb bluffing fucks with no real cards in their hands, Morino, you are the saddest, dumbest bluffing fuck of them all. Which weapons do you think I used to wipe out Tsuru, for fuck’s sake? If there was a gram of truth in this booby-trap shit we would have found out by now.’
‘You did not find out, because I needed you to bury the Tsuru faction. For this, I thank you—’
‘Thank me when your lying guts are leaking through bullet holes. Now, I have a city to run. Stand away from the motors, you puppy dogs. I ordered those cars myself via our mutual Mongolian and I don’t want to damage the paintwork.’
Morino stubs his cigar out on the paintwork. ‘Shut up and learn. A gram of truth, you said. NimQ6 microcells weigh one twentieth of a gram. A dot on a page. It is a perfectly stable explosive, even under repeat-fire ricochet conditions,
until
– here is the beauty of the piece – it is oscillated by a specific VHF frequency. Then the microcell explodes with a force ample to blow away body parts. The single oscillator east of Syria is built into my mobile phone.’ To me, shivering with cold heat thirty metres up, probably with a sniper aiming at my head, this does not sound overly convincing.
Nagasaki acts bored. ‘Enough of this pseudo-science wank, Morino, I—’
‘Humour me for ten more seconds. NimQ6 is the stuff of the future. I enter the code – I took the precaution of doing this prior to your arrival tonight – and simply press the dial button. Like this—’
Blossoms of explosions boom and flame and thunder.
I duck.
Shock waves scalp the air.
The reboom echoes off the mountains.
Finally I peer over the parapet. Nagasaki’s men are scattered around where they were standing. The men who are out of the glare of the headlights are shadowy piles, but the ones who fell in the light – red as a slaughterhouse floor. Most of the torsos still have their legs attached, but the gun hands are blown away. And their heads – imploded by their combat helmets – are nowhere. I never learned the vocabulary I need to take this in. Only in war movies, horror movies: nightmares. The Cadillac door opens and Popsicle falls on to her knees. She gives a yelp of disgust, as if surprised by a spider in the bath. ‘Yaaa!’ Lizard bounders around. ‘Yaaaaaaaaa! Fucking
yaaaaaaaaa
haaaaaaaaay!’ Nagasaki is still alive – no helmet to remove his skull – and trying to get to his feet. Both arms are shredded stumps after the elbows. Morino struts over and puts the megaphone into his enemy’s ear. ‘Isn’t science wonderful?’
Bang!