Headhunters

Chapter Eleven

Shoko had arranged to meet him at Kozue, a restaurant elevated above the bustle of the city on the fortieth floor of the Park Hyatt. The girl had expensive taste, and Ziggy had sold several lists of credit card details in order to afford their various rendezvous. This place, in particular, had proven to be one of her favourites.

She was waiting for him at the same table that they had been given before. It was at the window, with a vast view of the western hills. It had been daytime the last time they had visited and they had been rewarded then with a clear view of majestic Mount Fuji, its cone silhouetted in the distance. Tonight, it was dark, and there was just the suggestion of a dark mass beyond the glow of the neon that leached into the night.

Ziggy went across to her. “Hello, Shoko.”

She was wearing a crop top and a pair of fitted jeans. Her hair had been coloured a vivid red and she bore that striking hue as if it were a badge to denote that she wouldn’t be like other Japanese women her age. She never bowed, and her voice was natural and confident and without the high pitch that was a common affectation of local girls in the company of strangers. Ziggy looked at her. She was extraordinarily attractive.

“Have you been here long?”

She ignored his question. “Well?”

Straight to business today, he thought. Very romantic. “Yes. I got it. It’s done.”

“Where is it?”

“In the usual place.”

Finally, she smiled for him. Her face, which had a tendency towards the stern, temporarily lit up. For that moment, basking in the glow of her beauty, he forgot just how foolish this whole scheme was. She reached across the table and laid a hand across his, and, as easily as that, his reservations became irrelevant.

“Very good, Ziggy. It was okay?”

He dismissed the suggestion that it might have been anything other than easy for him. “Simple.”

“You are talented man,” she said.

He felt his cheeks redden; she rarely praised him.

The waiter arrived. Ziggy took up the menu and searched through it as Shoko ordered sweetfish and matsutake mushrooms. He had shabu-shabu of marbled beef from premium wagyu cattle. He knew that the bill would be high, especially with the sake that he wanted to drink, but he didn’t care about that. He had inflated his credit card limit to an obscene amount and he would just go into the bank’s systems and reset the balance to zero when they were done.

He looked across the table at his date. She was young and headstrong, beautiful, with a disdainful curl of her lip that somehow made her even more attractive to him. Their first meeting had been difficult. He had known that she was out of his league and that, unless he did something to change the way she looked at him, she wouldn’t be interested in seeing him again. She had mentioned in their online correspondence that she was interested in technology and, seizing that as a dying man seizes a lifebelt, Ziggy had begun to show off. He had been working on hacks to exploit the loopholes in car security for several months. Not because he was interested in stealing cars, but because he liked to challenge himself. He had demonstrated his software to her, thinking that his ingenuity would be a good way to woo her. He had been right. She had watched agog as he started the engine of her BMW from the window of the restaurant, and her reticence had — temporarily, at least — melted away.

He knew why now, of course. His talents and the opportunities she was interested in exploiting were a fortuitous combination. But it had bought him time, and her favour. She had pretended to show interest. Unfortunately, although Ziggy wasn’t stupid and had known that she was stringing him along, he had allowed his lust to blind him. He should have disengaged there and then, before anything had the chance to develop. But he hadn’t. He had stuck around, trying to develop a relationship with her even when he had known that it was a bad, bad idea. By the time he finally listened to his doubts, it was too late. She had settled on the notion that they were going to work together, and that was that.

The hacking software wasn’t something that he would have followed up in a professional capacity, but she had been impressed enough that, when they met for their third date, she had a proposition. She had grown distant from him in the days preceding her visit, ignoring his emails and texts, but she promised that this offer would be a chance for them to become more intimate. They would develop a business relationship that could, she promised, be extremely lucrative for them both. Ziggy’s instincts screamed at him to politely decline, to leave and then never speak to her again. His lust, though, would not be dissuaded. She said that a business relationship could lead to something else… and he was sold.

Shoko explained that her brother was involved in buying and selling cars. He would supply the details of vehicles that he knew he could sell; Ziggy would “acquire” them, and he would be paid generously for his efforts.

And, like the worst fool, he had agreed.

The Ferrari was the third car that he had stolen for her. There had been a Lexus and a Range Rover before that. He had brought them to the underground lot and left them there. Each time, she had made fresh promises to him, and he would be dragged just a little bit deeper under the surface.

Their food arrived and he watched her as she ate. She was stunning, and the haughtiness made her even more appealing. The fact that she was prepared to spend time with him was something that he couldn’t quite understand. He knew it was the cars and the money he was making for her brother. The opportunities he was providing were the only reasons she tolerated his presence. But, on other occasions, when he allowed himself the luxury of dreaming, he wondered whether, just perhaps, there could be something else. He allowed himself that luxury now. That small bud of hope, so unlikely when set against all the rational evidence — the possibility that she might be attracted to him — drew him back, time and time again, like a moth to a flame.

He tried to engage her in small talk, but her replies were crisp and clipped and discouraging. He told her about a new hack he was perfecting, one that would allow him to infect a computer using ultrahigh-frequency sound waves, but she didn’t seem particularly interested and he quickly gave it up. He resumed watching her as discreetly as he could, but she still noticed. She gave him a flat little smile and then looked past him into the restaurant. It was as if she were dining alone.

Ziggy was finishing his steak as he noticed a man enter the restaurant, pause next to the maître d’, and then head toward them. He passed all the other tables that he might have stopped at until there was no doubt that he could only be headed for them.

Ziggy felt his stomach flip. “Shoko?”

“Relax.”

“Who is this?”

“It is my brother.” The man took an empty seat from the adjacent table and placed it next to theirs, between Ziggy and Shoko. “Ziggy,” Shoko said, “this is Kazuki.”

“I said I would only work with you,” he protested.

The man sat. “I know what you said. But you knew my sister was working with me.”

“That’s not the point.”

“I like to know with whom I am working. We are sending a lot of work your way. It is reasonable that I assure myself that you are trustworthy.”

“But it isn’t what we agreed.”

Ziggy started to rise. He would walk to the door and take the elevator down to the street. He would ignore Shoko, pretend that he had never met her. He would—

“Stay there, please.”

Ziggy stopped. Kazuki was holding up a single finger.

“No. I’m going. I’m done.”

As Ziggy paused, Kazuki wagged his finger from side to side. “You are not done. You stay. I want to talk to you.”

“I’ve had enough,” Ziggy said. “Your car is in the usual place. A quarter of a million dollars. Give me my money and we’ll call it quits. No hard feelings, we all move on.”

“No. We will not do that. I would like to talk to you. Somewhere else.”

He knew he couldn’t say no. They took him to Roppongi in a BMW that was waiting in the street below. They parked the car and walked the rest of the way. The district was thronged with high-rises and drenched in neon, with vast electronic billboards projecting gigantic figures onto the flanks of the buildings. It was a sleek and futuristic cityscape that, nevertheless, did not obscure the area’s sleazy underbelly. In just the last few weeks, a famous singer had been busted for supplying drugs to a groupie that led to her death, and two sumo wrestlers were disgraced after they tried to buy weed from undercover cops. The area was one of the main draws for foreigners, and their presence and the promise of their money drew in local prostitutes and illicit traders all looking to make a quick buck at their expense. Ziggy watched as a Lexus pulled up to the side of the road and a salon-tanned beauty in vertiginous high heels stepped out onto the pavement, her hands smoothing down her short skirt and just barely maintaining her modesty. A Westerner in a sharp suit slid out of the driver’s seat and she anchored herself to him, clinging to his arm in a fashion that struck Ziggy as almost comically proprietorial. They passed a balding Westerner who was clearly drunk, his fly undone, leching after a local girl who, Ziggy assessed, could have only been legal by a few months if she was legal at all. He passed a karaoke bar, a Western salaryman slurring out the words to “Sex on Fire” while grinding his crotch against a waitress too jaded by the relentlessness of it all to give it even a moment of disgust.

Ziggy looked left and right, taking it all in, and moved on. It was a warm night, and the frantic buzz of activity that made Tokyo so special seemed as if it had been amped up a little by the heat and the humidity. The streets were busy with revellers passing between the area’s bars and clubs. Ziggy was cautious. He scanned the faces of the men and women around him and saw no one that he recognised. He knew that he had to tread carefully. Recent events had reminded him that it was foolish to think that you could ever be too careful. He still felt the ache of the injury that he had suffered during his first trip to New Orleans, and he still remembered the beating he had been given during his second. Both served to remind him that bad things happened when he lowered his guard.

They reached the broad avenue of Gaien Higashi Dori. He saw groups of predatory local girls looking for prey, a raucous stag party, a drunken man who had been separated from his friends and now could only maintain his balance by clinging to a lamp post. An elderly woman leaned against the doorway of a building, trying to tempt tourists with Photoshopped pictures of girls in a laminated brochure. Drug dealers loitered on corners, their business transacted in darkened alleyways. He saw gorgeous Western women who, having failed at whatever it was that they had come to Tokyo to do, now made ends meet by offering conversation and sometimes more to the local salarymen who were enchanted by their long legs and foreign beauty.

Kazuki and Shoko stopped as they reached their destination. Womb was a well-known dance club and there was already a queue of youngsters waiting to get inside. Shoko made her way to the front of the line and told the bouncer that she had a reservation, and the man stepped aside so that they could get into the building.

The club offered non-stop performances by a cohort of up-and-coming DJs seeking their first breaks and jaded veterans who played for the free bar and wide-eyed groupies they could enjoy in return. It was a dark space on the second floor of an office block, accessed by an unreliable shoebox lift. As he stepped out of the lift into the steamy atmosphere of the darkened room, he saw that the place was jammed, the atmosphere soupy with humidity and the low ceiling dripping with moisture. Electronic dance music throbbed out of the big speakers, enough to rattle the unattended glasses on the table.

There was a hostess waiting at a lectern just inside the entrance. She had a louche, haughty beauty to her, her face perfectly made up and with a pair of discreet plugs nestled in her ears. She looked at Shoko and then Kazuki, and then him. As she regarded him, her expression changed to one of mild disgust. Shoko spoke to her. She nodded her satisfaction and, without a word, beckoned to another woman who was waiting inside the club. The hostess turned away without another look, as if the effort of looking at Ziggy was as much as she could stand. Ziggy had a momentary feeling of inadequacy and, self-consciously, looked down at the clothes he was wearing. He didn’t normally care what he looked like, but now he realised that his moderately expensive jeans and shirt looked cheap compared to the outfits sported by the revellers inside the club. The hostess must have pegged him as someone without the means to be worth her time.

Well, Ziggy thought, she was wrong about that.

Never mind.

They followed the second girl, with Ziggy limping along at the back. Their table was on a raised area at the back of the room, access restricted by a rope. The woman unhooked the rope and wordlessly gestured to the table before leaving him to make his way to it.

He sat and looked out over the club. Strobes flashed, lasers swung across the room, the dance floor swayed and pulsed in time with the bass that throbbed out over everything.

Shoko and Kazuki sat down opposite him. The girl looked at him with a combination of disgust and amusement. Her brother’s expression was more guarded, more difficult to read.

“I get you a drink, Ziggy?” he asked.

“No. I’m fine.”

“You must relax.”

“Just say what you have to say. I’ll listen, and then I’m going to go home. It’s late and I’m tired.”

“You must not be so suspicious of me, my friend. We have been working well together, have we not?”

“I told Shoko I would only deal with her.”

“Yes, I know. And I am sorry to have to change that arrangement. But, Ziggy, we have made excellent money, haven’t we?”

“Yes, we have. But I’m through with it now. I don’t want to do it any more.”

“And I do not want to work with someone who does not want to work with me. That would be bad business. We can agree on that, at least. Yes?”

“Yes,” he answered nervously.

“So we will part ways, as you suggest.”

He knew that there was something else to come. “But it’s not going to be as easy as that.”

Kazuki smiled. “It will be easy. We do one more job together, and then we can stop. It is simple, just as tonight. Nothing beyond you and your clever software.”

“What is it?”

“Another car. I will provide you with the details. What it is, where it can be found, everything that you will need. And, because this will be the last time that we work together, I will make it even more profitable for you. We will split the proceeds sixty-forty in your favour.”

“Why would you do something like that?”

“Because I am a fair businessman. And perhaps, when you see that, you will reconsider your decision.”

“I won’t,” he replied quickly.

Kazuki leaned back against the chair and spread his hands. “But you will work with me this one more time.”

His tone was rhetorical. It wasn’t a question.

“Once more.”

Kazuki beamed at him. He extended his hand across the table and, as Ziggy hesitated, nodded that he should take it. He did, and the man gripped it firmly. “Very good. I am pleased. Shoko will contact you with the details, just as before.”

Ziggy stood.

To his surprise Shoko stood, too.

“I will come with you,” she said.

She looked down at her brother and exchanged a glance. Ziggy caught it late, and couldn’t discern its meaning, but he didn’t know how to say no to her, even though he knew that he should. She reached down and slipped his hand into hers. It was the first time that she had done that. Her clasp was cold, her skin as smooth as polished ice, and, as she tugged him away from the table, he did not demur.

“We go to your place?”

Ziggy flustered. He didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t go back to his apartment. It was in a shocking mess and, more important even than that, his memories of John Milton made him cautious enough to keep his address to himself. His brain locked and, even as he knew he was acting like a foolish schoolboy, he couldn’t speak. He was about to ignore his reservations and give her the address when she put the car into drive and said, with a cold little smile, “It’s okay. We go to mine.”

She drove them back into Ginza. She didn’t speak, her focus on the road and whatever it was that she was thinking about. Ziggy found himself fraught with nerves. He tried to start several conversations, useless small talk, but he didn’t know what to say and whatever he tried sounded gauche. He let his hands slip down so that they were beside his legs and clenched the edges of the leather seat.

She drove them into a district of concrete apartment buildings, each garlanded by a fringe of Japanese maple trees that had been planted around and between them. The locals jokingly referred to them as mansion apartments, or “man-shi-yons,” a euphemism that had been appropriated to describe this type of faceless concrete behemoth that provided accommodation to millions of people within the bounds of the metropolis. She slotted the car into an empty space in another underground lot before leading Ziggy to an elevator.

Shoko’s place was on the fifth floor. It was a typical space with cramped dimensions. Many of the mansion blocks dated back to the sixties but, in a land that experienced frequent earthquakes, the concept of renovating an old building was alien. The preference was to tear down and start again. Shoko, it seemed, had rebelled. The apartment was divided into two rooms with tatami flooring separated by fusuma sliding paper screens and a Western kitchen. Without a word, Shoko went over to a closet, opened it and took out a futon and blankets. She unfolded the futon and arranged the blankets. Ziggy tried not to think what that might portend.

He looked out of the window instead. He could see the dark shape of Mount Fuji to the west and the glaring neon lights of a “love hotel” to the east.

Shoko took a bottle of Yamazaki Single Malt and poured out two measures. Ziggy was not a connoisseur, but even he knew that the distillery had recently been named as the best in the world, and that its products were correspondingly expensive.

She led him to the futon, which she had placed in front of the wide window. The view was stupendous, but Ziggy narrowed his focus so that he could watch the reflection in the glass: him and, close enough to his right that their legs brushed together, Shoko.

She sipped the malt and, without words, stood up, unbuttoned her top and pulled it over her head. Her stick-thin arms were covered, from the wrists all the way up to her shoulder, with a tattoo that wound its way to her chest and across her back. The design was of a female courtesan, a dagger clenched between her teeth. He had seen it before. It marked her out as connected to the Yakuza. Her brother was Yakuza, too. Ziggy didn’t think he was senior — he was too young for that — but that was scant relief.

“If you want to see me, you must work with my brother. Do you understand?”

See me? He did want to see her, like this, more than anything else.

He said that he did, but that wasn’t what he was thinking. One more time. One more car. That really was his limit, no matter what she said. He had known, of course, that he wasn’t dealing with Boy Scouts. He had been stealing quarter-million-dollar cars to order. He had known that he was being drawn deeper into the underworld, and he had allowed it. It was Shoko. He couldn’t resist her.

“You can trust me,” she said. “You can trust my brother.”

He didn’t answer.

Deeper and deeper and deeper. He knew that he had to get out.

After this last theft, he would stop. He promised himself.

But then Shoko sat down beside him, her skin silken smooth and glowing in the muted light, and he forgot all about promises and intentions. He closed his eyes and allowed himself to be swallowed by the moment.