“Where are the poor people now?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Tokyo too expensive for them. Leave city; go somewhere cheap. Hard, hard. Can’t get work in cheap places. Can’t live in expensive ones. No way up.”
She held up the skirt with sudden triumph and declared, “What you think of this?”
I examined the offending garment — not mine — a thing of grey wool woven with a light blue chequer pattern. “It’s all right,” I said with a shrug.
“It skirt of club dancer! She tear it with nail while stripping! She nice girl, very nice girl, wanted to be computer scientist but didn’t get grades. Now she owns club; always tips, sometimes brings sweet buns because I’m widow. Always way, yes? People say must do one thing, but world says must be another.”
She cackled brightly at her wit, and I thanked her in English and Japanese, and left to the sound of her merriment.
Discipline.
A run.
A walk.
A talk.
Back straight.
Eyes forward.
Head up.
Shake hand.
Wash face.
Study target.
Prepare plan.
My life is a machine.
I am a machine, living my life.
Click click click, the gears turn, and I live.
I live.
Chapter 39
In the middle of the night, I woke, and found that I was missing Byron14.
Missing Gauguin, even.
Missing people who missed me.
I thought of Luca Evard, and found myself by my laptop, wondering what crime I could commit to bring him to Tokyo.
I went out into the streets, dressed too thinly for the cold and the dark.
Found a man in a bar.
He was tipsy, but alcohol made him sentimental, childish, an affectionate drunk.
Found a room in a love hotel, booked it for two hours, was done in twenty minutes, left him snoring in a stupor, went back to the hotel room, back to the hotel bed, could have been anywhere in the world. Electric life, electric key, electric footprint in a digital age. CO2 emissions I have created, things I have consumed, windows broken, surfaces scratched, I am the mark my life leaves behind, I am a number in a system, I am the smell on a drunk man’s lips when he wakes, naked, in the love hotel, which he washes off in the morning.
I am destruction.
I slept badly, and brief.
The third time I met Luca Evard, I went looking for him.
The job had been in Kunming; the exchange was in Hong Kong. Arriving for the swap, jewels for cash at Hung Hom Ferry Pier, I found three men instead of the expected one, and when I went to leave, a fourth stopped me, gun in hand, sunglasses and slicked-back hair, shining with gel used in so much profusion that pale blue beads clung to his temples. He seemed unperturbed by the few late-night commuters waiting for the ferry to North Point, his only concession to their presence being to gently turn his body until it was between them and us, pushing me back against the wall, hiding the gun. He signalled with a tilt of his head to his colleagues, who formed a tight pack, blocking air, light, sound, and then, in a surreal twist of camouflage, proceeded to chat loudly and cheerfully about their favourite pop group and how hard it was finding a place to live cheaply these days.
Against this babble of merry noise, my assailant leant in gently, his breath meeting mine, and whispered in flawless, private-school-precision English, “You match the description I have been given.”
Words remain in people’s minds, even if my face does not. Dark skinned, dark haired, hair twisted into long ropes down my back, a runner’s body, a woman waiting for the ferry who is all these things — there were only so many candidates. I gave it my best stab regardless, whispering, “Not me, not me, I don’t know—”
“If it’s not you,” he breathed, “there’s no reason not to shoot.”
His gun was a.22, and the sound — while noticeable — wouldn’t be as great as it could be if fired directly into my belly. Even if the noise disturbed people, it is easier to dismiss a loud bang as an engine or a firecracker, rather than an act of murder happening not ten yards from where you stand. The payoff was that a.22 bullet might not kill me; but a perforated stomach or a collapsed lung had long-term implications, especially given my condition. What would happen if my surgeon needed to pee during a life-saving operation?
Blood vessels in the stomach: inferior vena cava, celiac trunk, renal veins and arteries, gondal vein and artery, common iliac vein and artery, leading to the great saphenous vein and femoral artery. Someone cut in the femoral artery can bleed out in less than two minutes; first aid requires the first-responder to stand with all their weight on the injury to prevent this.
“I’m not alone,” I lied, as the man with the gun began to search me, fingers against my skin, pulling at my clothes, touching, prodding, gripping, words I didn’t want to find, probing, fondling, more than just the gun a threat, more than just death. “You do this and there’ll be consequences.”
He shrugged; he was a crook in Hong Kong, he’d met consequences before and didn’t think much of them. Men had died, women had died, and still he stood so what the hell did it matter?
His fingers wrapped round my shoulder bag, eased it down my arm. He pressed it against his own body, then pushed his body against mine, so I was squeezed further into the wall, our combined shapes supporting the bag between us. With one hand he opened the zip, rummaged within.
His fingers closed round the brown jiffy bag where I’d stashed the jewels. Emeralds, paid in tribute by the kings of Thailand to a Chinese emperor, the tribute system, buying peace, China, 
, the Middle Kingdom, centre of the world, rivers flow from its heart, the world is the sea, the emperor, the mountain, 
, 
, the job had taken less than four minutes to complete from entering the museum grounds to exiting with my prize. A buyer on the darknet, a collector in Hong Kong, drug man, money man, trafficker, killer, but he loved all things Thai, the food, the art, the jewels, he had built temples, buying his way to heaven, good karma, should never have taken the deal.
A moment. The man with the gun could feel something in the jiffy bag, but he wasn’t sure. A glance down, his eyes briefly turned from me, checking, he needs to see, needs to verify that I haven’t planted a dummy in my bag. I hit him, my right hand across his face, simultaneously my left pushing the gun to one side. I stepped to the right and his finger jerked around the trigger on automatic pilot, I heard it hit the wall behind me, felt the passage of the bullet tug at my clothes, the bag which had been supported between us fell.
The three friends, three would-be murderers, kids hoping to impress their boss with their killing, looked to their employer. One made a lunge for me, and I hit him blindly, panicked, with the side of my elbow, having no room to move, no space to get a decent punch. He looked barely seventeen years old, but put his hands up to protect himself as my arm turned. His fingers bounced back with my strike, hitting himself in the face, and as he recoiled, more bewildered than wounded, I pushed past him and ran.
The gunshots were definitely gunshots now. The idiot with the.22 shot wildly, catching the boy with the bruised jaw in the shoulder. The few passengers in the terminal began to run; not screaming, not shouting or crying for mercy, but rather as sparrows turn in the sky, a single silent consensus to move.