Number 9 dream Page 0,84

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,