Year of the Talking Dog: A Hana Walker Mystery (The Hana Walker Mysteries Book 2) (14 page)

It was the number tattooed on her wrist. She had tried to hide it when she had taken our order. That must mean something. But when she pointed, she didn’t realise I could see beneath her sleeve. Unless she had wanted us to see her tattoo. But I think that’s unlikely. Some actions are instinctive. But I feel myself getting confused.

Firefly is staring intensely at his napkin. I watch his face, trying to read what he can see before him. His eyes are darting about like when Aunt Tanaka can’t remember whether she has put enough garlic in the ramen soup and so puts in a little, but not a lot, just in case she causes the customer to choke on his soup.

But Firefly is not in the least interested in his kimchee. He only had eyes for his calculations. His pen is darting up and down. He’s drawing weird symbols, neither Japanese, nor English. Nor Korean, as far as I can tell.

The lights go down and the karaoke backing track goes up. We are the only ones in the room. Firefly has filled an entire side of his napkin with calculations.    

He’s beaming. He turns the napkin over and unfolds it to its full size. He gets to work dividing the number and calculating. He has come alive. His breathing is faster and he’s rocking around in his chair. His cheeks are flushed and he says, “No!” and slams his hand on the table. 

Numbers have a way of making me fall asleep. I know it’s wrong of me. I know that there are beautiful patterns in numbers, but I can’t see them. I stare at the calendar. The numbers are as meaningless as the scribble down the side of the mountain or the words of the song playing on the speakers.

I have a sip of my soup of the day. It’s spicy, very spicy, and there is another flavour there, too, like lamb. But with more of a bite.

I look over at Firefly.

He sits back in his chair with a cheeky grin on his face. But he looks defeated.

He nods and shows me his workings-out.

I don’t get it. Lots of scribbles. Some crossings out and numbers stacked up in triangles. I shrug.

“DON’T KNOW WHAT 1159 MEANS.”

I nod, I’m about to agree, but I have an idea. I take his napkin and show him the number.

“What if it’s three numbers, like a date of birth or a code? Like 11, 5, 9 or 1, 15, 9? Or what if the numbers stand for letters, like 1 is A and 2 is B, 3 is…”

And then I get it. 1, 15, 9 is A, O, I if that was the right code. But I don’t get it. I think about it some more and I come to two conclusions. One: The waitress has something to do with Steve’s disappearance; and Two: I prefer kisses to algorithms after all.

I wave at the waitress. She seems irritated to have to come back to the table.

“I was wondering if I could...” but before I can finish, I raise my hand up but catch my soup spoon, sending it flying onto her fancy, traditional dress.

“Oh, no, I’m sorry. Aunt Tanaka always said I was clumsy!” And I grab Firefly’s napkin and rub it over the wet patch that is covering her breast where the dog soup has hit.

My rubbing has caused the little spot to spread in an embarrassing stain across her chest

“Oh, look what I’ve done.”

She smacks my hand away and storms off toward the toilets at the front of the room. I throw the napkin down and nod at the toilets. Firefly doesn’t seem to care about what I’m up to, but he’s glad to get the napkin back and to work on filling the rest of the blank spaces with numbers and squiggles.

When I step into the toilets she’s adjusting her clothes and staring at her reflection in the mirror. She composes her face, she’s toying with lipstick on the counter. Whatever she does to her lips, she won’t be able to remove the sneer on her lips from spreading. I want to question her, but don’t have a language in common.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

That has no impact.

I snatch her lipstick from her hand and scrawl 1159 across the mirror.

“What does this number mean?” 

She says nothing.

“You must know.”

I grab her wrist and turn it over. The number is raw and undeniable, accompanied by a symbol that I can’t decipher. 

Her face tightens. She takes out a cloth from her sleeve and soaks it under a tap before squeezing it out and wiping the number off the mirror. And she says something. It sounds like she’s calling for the angel of death to strike me down, but she might have been explaining how difficult it’s to clean lipstick off a mirror with only a damp cloth and no cleaning agent. 

Agent.

“Are you a North Korean agent? Do you understand English? You sure don’t know anything about waiting on tables.”

She laughs, coldly.

“Do you know anything about the disappearance of a girl, Aoi Ishihara? Ishihara Aoi?”

She looks around her, but says nothing.

She rolls up her left sleeve and pulls out something.
 

“What are you doing?”

I back away from her, but I’m too slow. In a moment, I feel pain shooting up from my thigh. I reach down and I grab what was in her hand and is now in me: a syringe. There’s a syringe sticking out of my side, and the plunger is down. My heart is beating to bursting. She runs out the door.

I follow her, but the pain is intense. I look into the mirror and the girl I see staring back at me is not me, she’s a stranger. She’s dressed like me and looks like me, except her eyes are glassy. My head is spinning. I close my eyes and crumple to the floor. I pull the syringe out and have sense enough to put my finger over the wound that is dripping blood down my leg.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I don’t know what the waitress has injected into me, but I know I’m done for if I do nothing. I force myself to open my eyes and then to stand. I pocket the syringe. Maybe Firefly will know what to do with it. But if I lose the girl, I’ll lose the link to Steve. I splash my face with water from the sink and hobble out to the dining room.

“Firefly, the waitress?”

She disappears behind the counter and through a backdoor. Firefly notices me limping and says something, but I stumble forward and push him back. I point to the door. “The waitress!”

He gets it. We push our way through the door. We are in a kitchen. Inside are half a dozen men smoking cigarettes. The oldest one, wearing a chef’s bandana, shouts at us in Japanese, then Korean and finally English: “Can’t come. No here.”

There is silence. But a back door slams shut from somewhere on the other side of the kitchen. I hobble through the kitchen, knocking over a plate of kimchee. A man with a meat cleaver bars my way. Though he looks more skilled at stabbing a person than dicing vegetables.

Firefly nods at me. Like he wants me to say something. Like there is some way I can get us out of this situation and continue the chase. But I can’t see a way past these men. And the waitress is long gone through the backdoor onto the backstreets of Shibuya.

“Sorry for the misunderstanding. We’re going,” I say.

We pile down the steps, with me leaning on Firefly, and make it out of the front door without anyone following us. I look for a side entrance. We hurry around the block. Next door are a couple of shuttered shops. But there are no side entrances in the whole block. So the back door in the kitchen leads into one of these buildings. Or there is a secret entrance.

“Thanks for looking after me, Firefly.”

Maybe he doesn’t know what I’m saying, but I squeeze his hand, and hope he can figure it out. He holds out his phone to translate a comment and it gives me an idea.

I click on the map application, and see the blinking dot where we are. The shuttered building in front of us is a Korean supermarket according to the map. Above it’s a Korean language school and next to it a Korean community centre. It seems odd to have a little Korea here in Shibuya. The subway entrance is two blocks behind the building according to the map. That seems the most likely place to go if you want to escape.

“Let’s take the subway” I hear myself saying. It’s possible she’s there; it’s possible she’s anywhere. But I have to find out. And that means going underground again. Steve had always complained there was no point in having the world’s best transport system if I didn’t use it. He’d be happy now. But I knew a few more things he didn’t. The number of suicides for 2010 is 211. They’re death machines.
 
I vowed on my father’s death that I would never ride a train again. And yet now I find myself once again heading down the steps into the earth.

My palms are sweating and my legs don’t want to move; my left leg is seizing up around where I was jabbed. But I don’t have time to worry about that right now. I push myself forward. Firefly is striding ahead. I try to think of something else, anything else, but as I lurch toward the blue-and-white sign for the Metro, I feel the hot stale air blasting through gratings in the pavement. I can hear the screams of the train’s brakes and I think I can hear the screams of someone else. Just my imagination. Has to be the train is screaming. I’m crouching now. I count the cracks in the pavement.

Firefly strides ahead and is down the stairs without even looking back. I’m not sure if he’s brave or stupid. Doesn’t he know that 211 Japanese killed themselves in 2010 by jumping in front of trains? I try to regain control of myself. The answer to Aoi’s disappearance is on the wrist of the girl who could well be down there. I have to get up. I can’t let her slip away.

And then I see him. The man with the mask. He’s on the other side of the street striding towards the entrance. My neck is drenched in sweat and I stay on the ground, willing myself to seem as small as possible. I don’t think he has seen me. He might not even be after me at all; he’s focused on the entrance to the subway. He has a phone in his hand, but isn’t Tweeting or phoning anyone, he’s using it as a map to locate something, or someone. Has he been watching Firefly and me? Or someone else? The waitress? There is no way of knowing. Unless I follow him. I take a deep breath and stumble forward to the entrance. The masked man is heaving his way down to the bottom of the stairs and is going through the gates on to the station platform. He’s carrying a stick. I see Firefly ahead, but he doesn’t see the masked man. My heart beats faster.

Firefly walks straight past him on the crowded platform. The masked man isn’t looking at anyone’s faces, he’s looking at his phone. And then he stops at the end of the platform and turns with his back to me. Next to him is the waitress, but I can’t make all of her out behind his bulk. I have a sinking feeling about what’s going to happen next.

The train lights are coming. I scream to Firefly to look, but he can’t hear me, no one can as the brakes squeal and a wall of hot air rushes out of the tunnel towards me. One moment the waitress is standing on the platform, looking around. She notices the man in the mask behind her. Their eyes meet. The waitress’ lips move, but if the man in the mask noticed her or said anything in reply, I have no idea.

But the next moment she’s gone. The train brakes squeal and people close to me shout. The masked man looks up and down the platform, puts his phone back in his pocket and walks back the way he came.

The train stops halfway along the platform, not in the right places for the doors to open and so there’s general confusion when the doors don’t open.

The masked man is coming straight for me. Firefly runs the length of the platform towards me, over the yellow pock-marked paving stones for blind people on the edge of the platform. The only thing to do is run. But where? I turn and see the yellow exit signs but I don’t have the strength to run up the stairs. That leaves only one other direction — down a passenger tunnel that crosses under the tracks to the platform on the other side. I shudder, but push myself on. Warning tape in black and yellow is wrapped around the low-hanging beams. I have to duck my head to go under the tracks. The vibrations from the train coming from the other direction above my head makes me feel like I’m being trampled to death. I turn to see if the masked man is following me. I can’t be sure. Everyone is wearing a mask. Men and women scurry back and forth through the tunnel trying to get to the other side. I can’t make any sense of the sights and sounds in this tiny space. I’m not really here, my spirit’s trying to get out, that I can’t be here, but at the same time it’s like a coffin and I somehow belong here, no matter how much half of me protests, the other half says otherwise. I think of Dad. Was this the feeling he had as the train barrelled down on him? The last moment of consciousness, when he knew what was going to happen? There is no fear, just an understanding that this is it. This is the end. So be it. I turn again and look over my shoulder. A man in a mask is striding behind me. Smack. Pain in my head and then nothing.

My head is aching and I can’t feel my legs. I’m blacking out, my chest is tight and the echoes of voices are mingling and mixing into one.

Then rapid fire, like corn popping in a pan until there are just one or two kernels left. I don’t know where I am. Or what my eyes are telling me. I’m in a tunnel. I’m lying down, maybe I’m looking up at the ceiling or maybe I’m on the ceiling, looking down at the ground far below. Yellow and black. The colours of a stinging insect. People around me, talking, but I can’t make out what they’re saying. I try to hold on to the moment, but my mind is drifting. I’m hot, the air is bad. I have a bad feeling, a feeling of loss, but what has gone, I don’t know. Something bad. And it’s my fault. But I’m helpless to change it. The waitress. She said something and then she went. Under the train? Pushed or jumped? I try to remember the movement of her lips. I try to get my head round hers for just that moment, bridging the divide between us. I’m under the tracks. I’m with her for a moment. I mouth the shape her lips made. I will the sounds to come out, I try and, in this moment, my mind is clear, a voice in my head tells me I’m close to something. Is it Japanese? English? Korean? I can see her lips purse together and roll out from her mouth making a p- or b- sound. But her chest doesn’t move so it must be a b-, then her mouth forms into a smile or a grimace like she’s imitating the sound of an airplane with her tongue — nnnn — as she puckers her lips and makes an o shape with her mouth, holding her face quizzically — o. Bi-nnnn-oooo. Bingo? She’s playing bingo? It can’t be. But if it was not English or Japanese? Bing-du? I practise saying it in my mouth, trying to imagine I’m a Korean pop star. Bing-du? Ping-gu? A cartoon penguin? This is the last word she says. Her final words. Because I know inside that she’s dead. The masked man killed the waitress. Why? Why hasn’t he killed me?