document wallet in the Cadillac is all yours. Yes. Father keeps his word. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to appreciate your hard-earned information because you’ll be dead as a fucking dodo. I brought you along just in case Nagasaki wheeled your father out of retirement. I credited the cretin with too much cunning, so it seems we have one witness too many to the night’s entertainment, instead of a possible bargaining chip. Mr Suhbataar has asked to put the bullet through your head, and as he is the chief architect of my master plan, how could I say no? Goodbye. If it makes you feel any better, you were a totally forgettable boy who would have lived a bored, stifled, colourless life. And yeah, your father is a meaningless jerk too. Sweet dreams.’
Why bother? Dead is dead.
‘You should crouch for your own safety,’ my killer insists.
My fear mangles my response to a stillborn huff.
‘No?’ Leatherjacket primes his gun. ‘Well, I warned you.’
In his hand is not his gun but his mobile telephone. He enters a number, leans over the parapet, points down at the Cadillacs, and crouches.
The night rips open its guts, I am knocked over by a sheer wall of noise, the bridge shakes, a metallic, stony hail falls, I glimpse a flaming piece of car arcing overhead, and the document wallet containing my father is cinders. The night rezips. The echo sonic-booms off the mountains. Gravel presses into my cheekbone. I sort of stand – to my surprise, my body still works. Smoke pours upward from the craters where the Cadillacs were parked.
Leatherjacket enters another number into his mobile phone. I crouch, wondering what could be left to blow up – is he a walking bomb who explodes his own evidence? – but this time the mobile phone is only a mobile phone. ‘Mr Tsuru? Suhbataar. Your wishes regarding Mr Nagasaki and Mr Morino have been realized. Indeed, Mr Tsuru. Just as they sowed, they reaped.’ He puts his phone away and looks at me.
Burning and crackling.
My lip is bleeding where I bit it. ‘Are you going to kill me?’
‘I am thinking about it. Are you afraid?’
‘I am very, very afraid.’
‘Fear is not necessarily a weakness. I disdain weakness, but I disdain waste. To survive, you must persuade yourself that tonight was another man’s nightmare into which you accidentally strayed. Find a place to hide by daybreak, and stay hidden for many days. If you assist the police in any way, you will be killed immediately. Do you understand?’
I nod, and sneeze. When I look up, smoke swallows up the night.
Five
STUDY OF TALES
MARGINS
Goatwriter peered out at the starless night. His breath misted up the windscreen. First frost floated a wafer of ice on eidelweiss wine. Goatwriter counted three noises. The candle spluttering on his writing bureau; Mrs Comb battling in her sleep, ‘Don’t care was made to care, Amaryllis Broomhead!’; and Pithecanthropus, snoring in his undercarriage hammock. The fourth noise, the whisperings which Goatwriter was waiting for, was still a way away, so Goatwriter rummaged for his respectable spectacles to leaf through a book of poems composed by Princess Nukada in the ninth century. Goatwriter unearthed this volume one thundery Thursday in Delhi. Since midsummer, every night went the same. The venerable coach parked, Goatwriter woke, and nothing would make him sleep again. One, two, three hours later the whisperings came. Goatwriter told nobody about his insomnia, not even Pithecanthropus, and certainly not Mrs Comb, who was sure to prescribe a ghastly ‘curative’ worse than the complaint. In the beginning, Goatwriter believed the whisperings were the local Aberdeen waterfalls, but this theory was scotched when the whisperings followed to other locations. Goatwriter’s second theory was that he was insane. But with no other mental faculty affected, Goatwriter had come to believe that the whisperings had their origins in his fountain pen – the selfsame pen Lady Shonagon wrote her pillow book with, over thirteen thousand crescent moons ago. Goatwriter heard a hush, a rustle, and his heart raced faster. He slid Princess Nukada back on the shelf and pressed his ear against the pen shaft. Yes, he thought, here they come. But tonight, the words were more distinct – listen! A ‘queer’ here, a ‘pear’ there, an ‘ebony mare’ everywhere. Goatwriter picked up the fountain pen and began to write, slowly at first, as the words spattered singly, but soon sentences flowed, filled and overspilled.
‘Oh, sir, this is the giddy limit!’ Mrs Comb opened the morning curtains. ‘If