Taki fumbles in his sport coat’s side pocket, coming up with a crumpled pack of Casters. Offers her one.
“No, thank you.”
“Keiko sends?” He puts a Caster between his lips and leaves it there, unlit.
“A photograph.” She’s glad she can’t see her own smile; it must be ghastly.
“Give me Keiko photo!” The Caster, having been plucked from his mouth for this, is returned. It trembles.
“Taki, Keiko tells me that you’ve discovered something. A number. Hidden in the footage. Is this true?”
His eyes narrow. Not a wince but suspicion, or so she reads it. “You are footage lady?”
“Yes.”
“Keiko like footage?”
Now she’s into improv, as she can’t remember what Parkaboy and Musashi have been telling him.
“Keiko is very kind. Very kind to me. She likes to help me with my hobby.”
“You like Keiko very much?”
“Yes!” Nodding and smiling.
“You like . . . Anne-of-Green-Gable?”
Cayce starts to open her mouth but nothing comes out.
“My sister like Anne-of-Green-Gable, but Keiko . . . does not know Anne-of-Green-Gable.” The Caster is dead still now, and the eyes behind the dandruff-flecked lenses seem calculating. Have Parkaboy and Musashi blown it, somehow, in their attempt to generate a believable Japanese girl-persona? If Keiko were real, would she necessarily have to like Anne of Green Gables? And anything Cayce might ever have known about the Anne of Green Gables cult in Japan has just gone up in a puff of synaptic mist.
Then Taki smiles, for the first time, and removes the Caster. “Keiko modern girl.” He nods. “Body-con!”
“Yes! Very! Very modern.” Body-con, she knows, means body-conscious: Japanese for buff.
The Caster, its tan faux-cork filter glittering wetly, goes back between his lips. He roots through his pockets in turn, produces a Hello Kitty! lighter, and lights his cigarette. Not a plastic disposable but a chromed Zippo, or clone thereof. Cayce feels as though the lighter has followed her here from Kiddyland, a spy for the Hello Kitty! group mind. She smells benzene. He puts it away. “Number . . . very hard.”
“Keiko told me that you were very clever, to find the number.”
He nods. Seems pleased perhaps. Smokes. Taps ash into an Asahi ashtray. There’s a small, cheap-looking television behind the bar, just at the periphery of Cayce’s vision. It’s made of transparent plastic and shaped something like a football helmet. On its six-inch screen she sees a screaming human face attempting to thrust itself through a sheet of very thin latex, then a quick clip of the South Tower collapsing, then four green melons, perfectly round, rolling along on a flat white surface.
“Keiko told me that you would give me the number.” Forcing the smile again. “Keiko says you are very kind.”
Taki’s face darkens. She hopes it’s a deeper level of embarrassment kicking in, or something to do with that specific alcohol-processing enzyme the Japanese lack, and not anger. He suddenly whips a Palm from his inside jacket pocket and pokes its infrared slit at her.
He wants to beam her the number.
“I don’t have one,” she tells him.
He frowns, fumbles out a fat, retro-looking pen. She’s ready for this, slipping him the napkin she’d drawn her Roppongi map on. He frowns, scrolls on his Palm, then copies a number on the edge of the folded napkin.
She watches as he copies three groups of four numbers each, the pen’s felt tip blurring in the coarse weave of the paper. Upside down: 8304 6805 2235. Like a FedEx waybill number.
She takes it as he closes his pen.
She quickly reaches down into the Luggage Label bag, which she’s surreptitiously unzipped against just this eventuality, and comes up with the envelope containing the Judy image. “She wants you to have this,” she tells him.
She’s afraid he’ll tear it, as he fumbles the envelope open. His hands are trembling. But then he gets it out, has a look, and she sees his eyes are wet with tears.
She can’t handle this at all.
“Excuse me, Taki,” gesturing in what she hopes will be the direction of the toilet, “I’ll be right back.” She leaves her Rickson’s and the laptop bag hanging on her chair and gets up. She still has the napkin in her hand. Sign language with the barman gets her down a tiny hallway and into the least salubrious Japanese toilet she’s seen in a while, one of those concrete hole-in-the-floor jobs from the old days. It reeks of disinfectant and, she supposes, urine, but it has a door she can get between herself and Taki.
She takes a deep breath, regrets it, and looks at the number on the napkin. The ink is spreading into the weave and there’s a chance it will soon be illegible. But then she sees a blue plastic pen, left atop some kind of wall-mounted hand dryer. When she picks it up it leaves a shiny chrome print in a layer of gritty dust. She tests it on the yellowed, graffiti-free wall, getting a thin line of blue.
She copies the number on the palm of her left hand, puts the pen back on the dryer, wads the napkin up, and tosses it into the depression in the center of the floor. Then, since she’s there, she decides to pee. It won’t be the first time she’s used one of these, but it could quite happily be the last.
He’s gone, when she returns to the table, two crumpled pieces of paper money beside the empty beer bottle, her half-empty glass, the ashtray, and the torn envelope. She looks over at the barman, who scarcely seems to register her presence at all.
On the red television, insectoid superheroes on streamlined motorcycles buzz through a cartoon cityscape.
“He took a duck in the face,” she says to the barman, shrugging into the Rickson’s and slipping the Luggage Label over her head.
The barman, glumly, nods.
Outside, there is no sign of Taki, though she hasn’t really expected any. She looks both ways, wondering where she might more easily hail a cab back to the Hyatt.
“Do you know this bar?”
Looking up into a smooth, tanned, evidently European face that she somehow doesn’t like at all. She takes in the rest of him. A Prada clone: black leather and shiny nylon, shoes with those toes she hates.
Hands grab her, from behind, hard, just above the elbows, pinning her arms at her sides.
There’s something that’s supposed to happen now, she thinks. Something that’s supposed to happen—
When she’d first moved to New York her father had insisted that she take lessons in self-defense from a small, fastidious, slightly portly Scotsman called Bunny. Cayce had argued that New York was no longer as dangerous as Win remembered it, which was true, but it had been easier to visit Bunny six times than to argue with Win.
Bunny, her father had told her, had been an SAS man, but when she’d asked Bunny about this he’d said that he had always been too fat for the SAS, and had in fact been a medic. Bunny favored cardigans and tattersall shirts, was very nearly her father’s age, and told her that he would teach her how “hard men” fought in pubs. She’d nodded gravely, thinking that if she were ever set upon by literary types in the White Horse she would at least be able to hold her own. So, while some of her friends explored Thai kickboxing, she’d been schooled in no more than half a dozen moves most often practiced in the maximum-security wings of British prisons.
Bunny’s preferred term for this was “making mayhem,” which he always pronounced with a certain satisfaction, raising his pale sandy eyebrows. And, in the way of things, Cayce had never, that she knew of, come even remotely close to requiring Bunny’s mayhem in Manhattan.
With the Prada clone’s fingers scrabbling to undo the Velcro fastening between her breasts, trying to free her bag, it comes to her that what’s supposed to happen now, in the Bunny plan of things, is this: She shoves her arms suddenly forward, just far enough to grab the glove-thin leather of both his lapels. And as the second assailant inadvertently co-operates, yanking her arms back, her hands buried in Prada’s lapels, she pulls with all her might and smashes her fo
rehead as hard as she can into Prada’s nose.
Never having actually followed through on this move before, Bunny not having had a nose to spare, she’s unprepared both for the pain it causes her and the extraordinarily intimate sound of cartilage being crushed against her forehead.
His dead weight, as he abruptly collapses, pulls his lapels from her hands, reminding her to step back, off-balancing whoever is behind her, look down between her legs (a man’s shoe, black, with that same horrible squared-off toe), and stamp as hard as she can, with her heel, on the revealed instep, producing a remarkably shrill scream from very close behind her left ear.
Pull loose and run.
“And run” was invariably the footnote to any Bunny lesson. She tries to, the laptop banging painfully against her hip as she bolts for the end of this alley and the lights of a brighter Roppongi.
Which is instantly blocked, with a squeal of brakes, by a silver scooter and its silver-helmeted rider. Who flips up his mirrored visor.
It’s Boone Chu.
She seems to inhabit some fluid, crystalline medium. Pure adrenal dream.
Boone Chu’s mouth is open, moving, but she can’t hear him. Hitching up her skirt, all in the logic of dream, she straddles the scooter behind him and sees his hand do something that throws them forward, yanking the two black-clad men suddenly out of frame and leaving her with a sculpturally confused image of the one trying to hop, one-legged, as he tries to pull the other, the one she’s head-butted, to his feet.
In front of her the RAF roundel on the back of Boone Chu’s parka as she grabs him around the waist to keep from being thrown off, realizing simultaneously that it had been him she’d seen from the Starbucks clone earlier, and him in Kabukicho the night before, and now very fast, between two lines of cars waiting at the intersection, their polished doors gleaming like jellyfish in a neon sea.
Out into the crossing before the lights can change. A left that reminds her she has to lean with him when he turns, and that she’s never liked motorcycles, and then he’s bombing down a more upscale alley, past, she sees, something called Sugarheel Bondage Bar.
He passes her back a metallic blue helmet with flaming eyes painted on it. She manages to fumble this on, but can’t fasten the strap, one-handed. It smells of cigarettes.
Her forehead throbs.
Slowing slightly, he turns left into another alley, this one too narrow to admit cars. It’s one of those Tokyo residential corridors, lined with what she assumes are tiny houses, and punctuated with glowing clusters of vending machines. Billy Prion’s paralyzed grin on one, proffering a bottle of Bikkle.
She’s never seen a scooter driven this fast, down one of these, and wonders if it’s illegal.
He stops where the alley intersects a wider, car-capable one, slams down the kickstand and swings off, removing his helmet. A pair of tough-eyed Japanese kids throw down cigarettes as he hands one of them his helmet and unzips his parka.
“What are you doing here?” Cayce asks him, sounding as if nothing very remarkable has happened, as she dismounts and tugs her skirt down. Boone removes her helmet and hands it to the second kid.
“Give him your jacket.”
Cayce looks down at the Rickson’s, sees the tape peeling where Dorotea burned it. She pulls the Rickson’s off and hands it to the boy now fastening the strap of the blue helmet. Noticing a missing finger joint there against a flaming-eye decal. The boy puts the Rickson’s on, zips it up, and hops on the scooter behind his partner, who’s wearing Boone’s helmet and parka. This one snaps the mirrored visor down, returns Boone’s thumbs-up, and then they are gone.
“You’ve got blood on your forehead,” Boone tells her.
“It’s not mine,” she says, touching it, feeling stickiness smear beneath her fingertips. Then: “I think I’m concussed. I might throw up. Or faint.”
“It’s okay. I’m here.”
“Where did they go, with the bike?” The metal column of a traffic light, across the alley, furred with weird municipal techno-kipple, twins itself, dances, then comes together again.
“Back to see where those two are.”
“They look like us.”
“That’s the idea.”
“What if those men catch them?”
“The idea was that they might wish they hadn’t. But after what you did to them, they might not be up to much.”
“Boone?”
“Yes?”
“What are you doing here?”
“Watching them watch you.”
“Who are they?”
“I don’t know yet. I think they’re Italian. Did you get the number? Is it in the laptop?”
She doesn’t answer.
18.
HONGO
She holds a chilled can of vending-machine tonic water against the bump. Most of a pack of Kleenex-analog, splashed with tonic, has been used to sponge her forehead.
The cab negotiates a narrow lane. The back of a concrete apartment building, bristling unevenly with dozens of air conditioners. Motorcycles shrouded under gray fabric.
Boone Chu saying something in Japanese, but not to the driver. Speaking to his cellular headset. He looks back, through the cab’s rear window. More Japanese.
“Have they found them?” she asks.
“No.”
“Where did Taki go?”
“Up the street, walking fast. Hung a left. He was the guy with the number?”
She resists the urge to check the palm of the hand holding the sweating can. What if the ink is running? “When did you get here?” Meaning Japan.
“Right behind you. I was in coach.”
“Why?”
“We were followed, when we left the restaurant in Camden Town.”
She looks at him.
“Young guy, brown hair, black jacket. Followed us to the canal. Watched us from up on the locks. With either a camera or a small pair of binoculars. Then he walked us back to the tube and stuck with me. Lost him in Covent Garden. He didn’t make the lift.”
This makes her think of the first time she’d read Sherlock Holmes. A one-legged Lascar seaman.
“Then you followed me?”
He says something in Japanese, into his headset. “I thought it would be a good idea to establish some kind of baseline in terms of what we’ve got here. Start from scratch. We’re working for Bigend. Are the people following us working for Bigend? If not . . . ?”
“And?”
“No idea, so far. I coasted past our two here, last night, and they were speaking Italian. That was when you were on your way to the pink zone.”
“What were they saying?”
“I don’t speak Italian.”
She lowers the tonic water. “Where are we going now?”
“The bike is following us, to make sure nobody else is. When we’re positive of that, we’ll go to a friend’s apartment.”
“They didn’t find those men?”
“No. The one you head-butted is probably in a clinic now, getting his nose taped back into shape.” He creases his forehead. “You didn’t learn that studying marketing, did you?”
“No.”
“They might be Blue Ant, for all we know. You might have just broken the nose of a junior creative director.”
“The next junior creative director who tries to mug you, you might break his nose too. But Italians who work in Tokyo ad agencies don’t wear Albanian Prada knockoffs.”
The cab is on some kind of metropolitan freeway now, curving past woods and ancient walls: the Palace. She remembers the paths she’d imagined, that morning, looking down from her room. She turns and looks back, trying to see the scooter, and discovers that her neck is painfully stiff. The walls and trees are beautiful but blank, concealing a mystery.
“They were trying to get your bag? The laptop from Blue Ant?”
“My purse is in there, my phone.”
As if on cue, the Blue Ant phone starts to ring. She digs it out. “Hello?”
“Parkaboy. Remember me?”
“Things got complicated.”
She hears him sigh, in Chicago. “It’s okay. I live for fatigue poisons.”
“We did meet,” she tells him, wondering if Boone Chu can hear his side of the conversation. She’s left the volume cranked, against Tokyo street noise, and regrets it.
“No doubt about that. He hasn’t even waited to get back home. Straight into an Internet café and pouring out his heart to Keiko.”
“I want to talk, but it has to be later. I’m sorry.”
“He told Keiko he’d given it to you, so I wasn’t too worried. E-mail me.” Click.
“Friend?” Boone Chu takes the tonic water and helps himself to a sip.
“Footagehead. Chicago. He and his friend found Taki.”
“You did get the number?”
No getting around it, now. Either she lies to him because she doesn’t trust him, or tells him, because, relatively speaking, she does.
She shows him her palm, the numerals in blue fiber tip.
“And you didn’t enter it in the laptop? E-mail it to anyone?”
“No.”
“That’s good.”
“Why?”
“Because I need to have a look at that laptop.”
HE has the driver stop in what he tells her is Hongo, near Tokyo University. He pays, they get out, and as the cab pulls away, the silver scooter arrives.
“I’d like my jacket back, please.”
Boone says something in Japanese to the passenger, who unzips and removes Cayce’s Rickson’s without getting off the scooter. He tosses it to her and grins, unreassuringly, beneath the lowered visor of the flaming-eye helmet. Boone takes a white envelope from the waistband of his black jeans and passes it to the driver, who nods and stuffs it into the pocket of the fishtail parka. The scooter whines and they’re gone.
The Rickson’s smells faintly of Tiger Balm. She slides the tonic can into a convenient recyc canister and follows Boone, her forehead aching.
A minute later she’s staring up at a three-story clapboard structure that seems to float above the narrow street, dilapidated and impossibly flimsy-looking. Clapboard doesn’t quite describe it; the silvered wooden planks look as though they might be the blades of a giant venetian blind. She’s almost never seen anything genuinely old, in Tokyo, let alone in this state of casual disrepair.