Strawberry spent most of the night on the phone, trawling her contacts for news. I thought of the strings of police officers who sometimes came into the club last thing at night – everyone knew she was well connected. But for long hours she seemed to be getting no information about what was happening, what had prompted the Nurse’s attacks. It ended up being me who was the first person in the club to learn anything new.
It was the kanji that caught my eye, blazing out from the video screen on the opposite building. I recognized them immediately. Satsujin-jiken. A murder inquiry. Next to the characters was a blurred still of a familiar face: Bison smiling broadly into the night sky.
I stood up so quickly that I knocked over a glass. My customer jumped back in his chair, trying to dodge the whisky that rolled off the table on to his trousers. I didn’t stop to give him a napkin. I stepped away from the table and walked in a trance to the plate-glass window where a youthful Bison, thinner and with more hair, was singing, his arm outstretched to the camera. Under the footage more kanji were superimposed. It took a long time for me to work them out, but eventually I understood: Bai-san had died at 8.30 p.m. Only a couple of hours ago. The cause? Serious internal injuries.
I put my hands on the glass, breath steaming in the cold air. The snow fell silently, catching the colours of the screen, which was dissolving into library pictures of Bison, one of him leaving a courthouse, another showing him as he’d been in his heyday – lean face above a microphone, ruffled shirt and good American teeth. Then a picture of a hospital appeared, a doctor addressing a crowd of reporters, the photographers’ flashes reflecting off the smoked-glass doors. I watched with my mouth open, picking up the occasional kanji here and there. Singer – heart-throb – forty-seven years old – toured with the Spyders – number one in the Oricon charts – Bob Hope golf-club scandal. I put my head on one side. Bison? I thought. Murdered? And Fuyuki’s men paid a visit to all the girls at the party last night . . .
Behind me a phone rang. I jumped. I hadn’t noticed how silent the club had become, but when I looked over my shoulder there was no chatter, no conversation: every eye in the place was fixed on the video screen. Strawberry had got to her feet and was standing not far from me, staring out in silence, all the lights reflected in her face. For a moment she didn’t notice the phone – it rang three times before her trance snapped and she went back to her desk. She snatched up the receiver and barked, ‘Moshi moshi?’
Every eye in the club was on her as she listened. Sometimes you can almost read the words a person is hearing from the way their expression tightens. It took her a long time to speak, and when she did her voice was blank and monotone. ‘Are you sure?’ she said. ‘Are you sure?’
She listened a little longer, then dropped the receiver into the cradle, all the colour leaving her face. She put both hands on the table, as if she was trying to get her balance. Then she rubbed her temples wearily, unlocked a drawer in her desk, opened the cash tray and pulled out a wad of notes, which she stuffed into her pocket. I was about to move from the window when she straightened and clipped across the club towards me, so quickly that the white fur coat swung round her like a bell. There was a dramatic grey tinge round her mouth, a smudge of lipstick on the coat collar.
‘This way.’ Without missing a step she took my arm and pulled me away from the window, past all the tables, the staring faces. ‘What’s she done?’ I heard a customer mutter. I was taken through the aluminium doors, where the hat-check girl was standing on tiptoe behind the desk, trying to see what was going on in the club. Strawberry guided me into the corridor that led to the stores and the toilets. She led me past the men’s, where someone had tried to disguise the smell of vomit with a hopeful squirt of bleach, and into the little cloakroom we used to put on makeup. Then she drew the door shut behind her and we stood, face to face. She was trembling, breathing so heavily that her shoulders rose and fell under the white coat.
‘Listen to me, lady.’
‘What?’
‘You got to get out.’
‘What?’
‘Get out of here.’ She gripped my arm. ‘You and Jason get out your house. Get out Tokyo. Don’t speak to the police. Just go. Strawberry don’t want to know where.’
‘No,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘No, no. I’m not going anywhere.’
‘Greysan, this very important. Something bad happening in Tokyo. And something bad spreading – spreading.’ She paused, studying my face curiously. ‘Greysan? You understand what’s happening? You know the news?’
I glanced over my shoulder at the closed door. ‘You mean Baisan. You mean what happened to him.’ A long shiver went up and down my arms. I was thinking about the kanji. Internal injuries. ‘It was Ogawa, wasn’t it?’
‘Ssht!’ She spoke in a rapid, low monologue: ‘Listen to me. Baisan got a visit. He was put into hospital, but he talked to police before he died. Maybe he crazy, talking to the police, or maybe he know he gonna die anyway . . .’
‘A visit from Ogawa?’
She took off her glasses. ‘Greysan, at Mr Fuyuki’s party last night there a thief.’
‘A thief?’
‘That why Ogawa going crazy. A worm go into Mr Fuyuki’s house last night and now he not happy.’
A strange feeling washed over me. I had the uncanny sensation that some awful revelation was crouched just out of view, beyond the skyscrapers, Godzilla-like. ‘What was taken?’
‘What you think, Grey?’ She dropped her chin to her chest and looked up at me from under knowing lids. ‘Hmmm? What you think? Can’t you guess?’
‘Oh,’ I whispered, all the colour draining from my face.
She nodded. ‘Yes. Someone stole Fuyuki’s medicine.’
I sat down on the nearest chair, all the breath forced out of me at once. ‘Oh . . . no. This is – this is . . . It isn’t what I expected.’
‘And listen.’ Strawberry leaned very close to me. I could smell the tequila mingling with her lemony perfume. ‘The thief is someone at the party last night. The Nurse went to everybody’s house last night, she look everywhere, but Bai-san tell police he think she still don’t find her sagashimono. The thing she is looking for.’ She licked her fingers, patted her hair, and glanced over her shoulder, as if someone might have come in behind us. ‘You know,’ she said, very quietly, bending even closer, her face pointing in the same direction as mine, so our cheeks were touching and I could look down and see her red mouth moving close to my own, ‘if I Ogawa, and I hear what come out of your big mouth sometimes . . .’ Somewhere, fifty floors below, a siren wailed. ‘. . . I’m gonna think, Greysan, I’m gonna think you the thief . . .’
‘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.’
‘Greysan, 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. ‘Greysan.’ 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.’
52
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.’
She looked at me steadily, and this time I could hide nothing. I stood undisguised, desperate and apologetic, letting her read every ounce of fear in my eyes. Eventually she closed her mouth and reached across the bed, took the candle and snuffed it out. ‘Good,’ she said evenly, putting her hand on mine. ‘Thank you, Chongming, thank you.’ She opened the curtains and swung her legs off the bed. ‘I’ll make guoba and noodles. We’ll eat some now. Then I’ll pack for the journey.’
My heart is heavy. She has forgiven me. And yet I am afraid, mortally afraid, that this will be the last time I write in my journal. I am afraid that I am her murderer. What hope have we got? May the gods protect us. May the gods protect us.
53
Outside it was freezing. The snow was coming fast now, almost a blizzard, and in the short time I’d been in the club it had settled on the pavement, on the roofs of parked cars. I stood in the lee of the building, huddled as close to the lift doors as I could, and peered up and down the street. I could see only about twenty yards into the swirling flakes, but I could tell that the street was unusually quiet. There was no one on the pavements, no cars on the street, only the snow-covered form of the dead crow in the gutter. It was just as if Mama Strawberry was right – as if something bad was creeping through Tokyo.
I fumbled out the money and counted it. My hands were trembling and it took me two goes to get it right, and even then I thought I must be wrong. I stood for a moment, staring down at what was in my hands. It wasn’t the week’s wages I’d expected. Strawberry had given me three hundred thousand yen, five times what she owed me. I looked up fifty floors through the swirling snow, to the club, to where Marilyn swung. I wondered about Strawberry, in her replica Monroe dresses, spending her life among young waiters and gangsters. I realized that I knew absolutely nothing about her. She had a dead mother and a dead husband, but apart from that she could have been all alone in the world, for all I knew.
I had done nothing to make her like me. Maybe you’re never really aware of the ones who are looking out for you until they’re gone.
At the crossroads a car went by cautiously, catching the snow in its headlights, making it appear to swirl faster. I shrank back against the wall, pulling up my collar, wrapping the thin coat tightly round me, shivering. What had Strawberry meant, don’t leave in the glass lift? Did she really think Fuyuki’s men were prowling the streets? The car disappeared behind the buildings and the street was quiet again. I peered out. It was important to think slowly. To think in stages. My passport, all my books and notes were in the alley next to the house. I couldn’t call Jason on the phone – the Nurse had ripped out the wires. I had to go back to the house. Just once.
I hurriedly counted out Strawberry’s money, divided it between my two coat pockets, a hundred and fifty thousand yen in both rolls. Then I pushed my hands into my pockets, and began to walk. I ducked into back-streets to keep from the main routes and found myself moving through a magical world – the snow falling silently on the air-conditioner units, piling on the lacquered bento boxes stacked outside back doors waiting to be collected by the takeaway drivers. I wasn’t dressed properly: my coat was too thin and my stilettos left funny exclamation-mark tracks behind me. I’d never walked in the snow in high heels before.
I went quietly, cutting over the crossing near the Hanazono shrine, with its ghostly red lanterns, and back into the alleys again. I passed lighted windows, steaming heating vents. I heard television sets and conversations, but in all the time I walked I only saw one or two other people. Tokyo seemed to have shut down its doors. Someone in this city, I thought, someone behind one of these doors, had the thing I was searching for. Something not very big. Small enough to fit into a glass tank. Flesh. But not an entire body. So, a piece of a body, maybe? Where would someone hide a piece of flesh? And why? Why would someone steal it? A line from a long-ago book came back to me, Robert Louis Stevenson maybe: ‘The body-snatcher, far from being repelled by natural respect, was attracted by the ease and safety of the task . . .’