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.