Men shout: out, out, who are you, what are you doing? I find the secure tag I need, smile brightly at them, give a half bow, and leave them to their nudity, and by the time one of them has put on his dressing gown and sandals and waddled to reception to complain, he has already forgotten.
With the security tag in hand, I head towards Prometheus.
Preparation, preparation, preparation.
This was the sacred tenet of a jewel thief I once shared cocktails with on the coast of Croatia. He’d run with the Pink Panthers, back before the younger generation stepped in and things got sloppy. “Preparation!” he exclaimed, sucking alcoholic juices out of a slice of orange. “This new generation, they have no craft. They break into any old place, wave their guns around, grab the first thing to come to hand, maybe ten, twenty thousand dollars’ worth at most, not worth it, just not worth it.”
And again, lying in Luca Evard’s arms that night in Hong Kong, letting his breathing push my head up and down as it lay on his chest, the happiest I think I’d ever been, the happiest I can remember ever being.
I’d asked… something… his skin pressing against mine. I was scared that when we stopped talking, he would sleep, and when he slept, he would forget, and this moment would be lost.
Now.
And now.
And gone.
So I’d made him talk, and he’d said: “A thief breaks the law once, something small, and it was easy, you got away with it, you feel great, this is easy, no harm done. The next time, easy again, and the next and the next and the next until it becomes habit. Just a thing you do. And then one day, you need something more — a new car, perhaps, or a new house — and someone has it, and you don’t, but that’s okay, because you know how to get it, and also that you deserve it, because this is not just the thing you do, it’s who you are. And the next day you have a gun, and you’re not going to use it, but it becomes familiar in your hand, comfortable, and when the first person dies perhaps you’re scared, but perhaps you’re okay, because you’ve been carrying a gun around for so long that it was natural. Inevitable. Who you are. It’s people like that who scare me, the ones who aren’t doing a job, but becoming the job. The ones who don’t know where they’ll stop.”
“Don’t coppers do the same thing? Become the job?”
He thought about it for a second, then gave a half laugh, a thing from the back of the throat. “Maybe they do. There is a certain pressure that comes on you when you are, for example, trying to trace a murderer. You know he’s out there, ready to kill, you have the family of his latest victim downstairs and you think… do I have the right to go home at five p.m., knowing this? Can I really take a weekend off, when he’s out there? It is sometimes hard to be a good policeman and anything else.”
“What about the woman at Hung Hom? Is she a killer?”
“Who knows? Maybe one day.”
Silence a while, but he was still awake, eyes white in the half light of the hotel room, mind elsewhere. I kiss his neck, keep him awake, keep this moment for ever, him, now, me, now, this remembrance, this us, a thing I had almost never said, an us together, a me and someone else who is a part of me, this present tense.
And a little while later, he said, “I never said Hung Hom Pier.”
“What?”
“You said the woman at Hung Hom, but I never mentioned it.”
He was wide awake, but I was getting drowsy.
“Sure you did,” I replied. “Of course you did.”
“I don’t think so.”
Silence between us. He was alert now, four thirty a.m. and the city stirring, sunrise across the sea, watching me, and the thing that had been, the moment that should have been for ever, was fading.
Now.
I felt it rush away.
Becoming memory, only my memory, only a thing for me, and somehow unreal in its solitude, as if perhaps I had imagined this whole thing, a fantasy of a night with Luca Evard, a passing dream.
And now.
Gone. Broken like a spider’s web, trailing in the breeze.
And I said, “I’m going to get a drink of water; do you want anything?”
“No.”
And I went to the bathroom, and I locked myself in, and I sat with the light off and my head in my hands for five hundred breaths, and when I let myself out again, he had forgotten, and he was asleep, and it was over.
Preparation, preparation, preparation.
I stole Mr Kaneko’s security tag from a gym, his thumbprint from a wine glass.
I stole a silk suit and a large briefcase from a department store, gutted the briefcase and put it back together again with what I needed inside.
I stole a collapsible nightstick and a can of pepper spray from the back of a police car. Fact: Japanese policemen must all study judo.
I stole a set of mini screwdrivers, a tiny electric drill, a torch, a pack of candles, a bottle of lighter fluid, a pair of safety goggles. I timed how long each candle took to burn, cut the remainder down to size.
The lockpicks I bought online. The tub of plain yoghurt was remarkably expensive, but this was Japan. My hotel handed out matches, and I took them. The firecrackers were hanging by the temple gate, but it felt like sacrilege, so I bought them from the shop across the road.
I stole codes and keys, careful now, fast towards the end — everything had to be stolen close enough to the day of the robbery that credentials wouldn’t be deactivated, codes wouldn’t be changed.
I gained access to the front-line computers at Prometheus’ reception desk by stealing the email ID of an IT man on the eleventh floor, and sending an attachment in his name entitled, “Vital Security Upgrade” to the receptionists, who opened it, and every keystroke they made from there on in became mine.
I purchased the services of whoever coded behind the name of OsumiWasAPterodactyl and ten minutes before I walked through the front door of Prometheus, she broke into the reception desk webcams and froze the feed from ten seconds before my arrival to ten seconds after; my face never logged.
I walked in through the front door, and no one stopped me.
This was my sixth time in the offices of Prometheus.
Gauguin would be nearby. How had he come to Tokyo? Perhaps he pulled footage of the plane from Sharm el-Sheikh, trying to find me, and instead found himself, holding a knife on a woman he couldn’t remember. Perhaps he hadn’t been able to invent a convincing story for how he had recovered the diamonds, my luggage, my passports. A man like Gauguin struck me as an individual who took pride in his memory, and so, of course, he had come to Tokyo because Filipa had eaten with a woman she could not remember, and Tokyo was where Perfection was.
He would be watching, but that was fine. I counted security cameras, walked fifteen steps towards the elevators, hugging the left-hand wall, took a sharp right turn on the sixteenth, counted seven steps across the hall, took a hard left, shuffled eight more steps with my back pressed into the wall, and avoided the first two cameras.
A sharp left back across the hall for eight steps, a sharp right, twenty-two paces took me to the entrance to the men’s toilet. The entrance to the ladies was visible to a camera perched high and to the right; men didn’t merit the same interest.
In the toilet I opened up my briefcase, and changed into a cleaner’s tabard and blue slacks. I pushed my hair into a baseball cap, took a bucket on wheels from a cupboard by the sinks, put a plastic bag containing my tools and tub of yoghurt inside it, balanced the mop on top.
I walked at a cleaner’s shuffle to the elevators, head down, turned a little to the left, avoiding the angle of the camera on my face, and summoned the lift.