The Drowning City (Tokyo Noir Book 1) Read online

  He watches as a thin tail of light arcs its way higher and higher in the night sky and then erupts with a dull crack in a starburst of color before slowly fading to black again. From somewhere to his other side, he hears his baby sister start crying, but he’s too transfixed to look in her direction.

  “Pretty cool, isn’t it?” his father asks from right next to him.

  “Yeah! The colors are so bright, just like your tattoos!”

  “Well …,” his father says.

  Satoshi realizes that some of the other families are moving back away from them after hearing that. He doesn’t know why. But he’s suddenly starting to realize that something is wrong. Something feels off about this memory.

  He looks around in the darkness, and suddenly the dark makes him afraid. As he watches the world through his younger self’s eyes, he’s jolted by a realization.

  This is one of the last times he ever saw his father. His dad disappeared soon after. His mother refused to talk about it after this, through her haze of tears.

  At some level, six-year-old Satoshi is watching a horsetail firecracker explode above and trail down in a hissing crackle of glittering light. But at the same time, he is watching this with the knowledge possessed by the man he will become. The sense of loss he feels upon seeing this scene again intermingles with his childlike joy from the moment. Suddenly it’s hard for him to breathe. Now the light above seems to be growing dimmer, the darkness deepening.

  “Where did you go, Daddy?” Satoshi suddenly asks through the mouth of his younger self.

  “Ha-ha! I haven’t gone anywhere, chibi! I’m right here with you.”

  “But you will leave,” Satoshi says. “You’ll leave us, and it will break Mom’s heart.”

  His father looks at him now, and the look in his eyes is a sad one. He starts to speak once or twice but either loses the thread or reconsiders his words. Periodic bursts of color and light from above briefly illuminate his face before it all fades back to nothingness again.

  “Well, son, you don’t know this about your old man yet. But I walk the Path.”

  This isn’t right. He never said these things to Satoshi. Did he?

  “It’s a difficult road, and a dangerous one. And it’s easy to get knocked down, run over, or fall off it completely.”

  “Why, Daddy? Why do it, then?”

  “Well, son, because for some of us, the Path is the only way there is. You’ll understand this when you’re older. When you’re walking the Path yourself.” His father is crying now. Silently, stoically, but crying nonetheless. Satoshi can see bursts of red, and yellow, and orange reflected in the tears rimming his eyes as he stares at his father in the dark.

  “I don’t want to walk the Path. Can’t I go a different direction?”

  His father shakes his head. “No, son, not all of us get a choice. And for us, this is the only way there is.”

  Satoshi wants to argue this, wants to tell his dad that he’ll find a different way for both of them. He wants to tell his dad that he doesn’t have to go away, but something is stopping him. Someone is pulling him from the other side. The hands are so small and the tugging so weak that it must be his baby sister, grabbing onto him from his mother’s grasp. He remembers this part now, how his baby sister distracted him while he was talking to his dad.

  But when he turns around, instead of his baby sister he sees Hisoka, his girlfriend of the last two years. Before he can register his surprise, she collapses into his arms sobbing.

  “I was so scared!” she heaves into his chest. She’s crying so hard at times she can barely breathe. “I was so worried about how you would take it that I was afraid to tell you! After my last boyfriend … how he … how I had to … how he made me end it, I … I couldn’t do it again!”

  “It’s alright, it’s alright, I’m here now,” he says, wrapping her tighter in his arms.

  He’s terrified at the thought of having a child, wants to tell her that someone in his line of work shouldn’t have kids, that it’s not safe. But he can’t do it. He feels her pain with each convulsive sob and he just wants her to feel safe, protected. He hugs her tighter, feeling foolish because it’s the only thing he can do to comfort her.

  “We’ll do this together.”

  But wait, he thinks, that’s not right. This conversation happened three months ago, right after he got slashed during a collection gone wrong. He looks down to see the newly wrapped bandage he had on his arm at the time. Fresh crimson blood is still seeping out from under the snow-white gauze. His arm is that of a fully grown adult, not the tiny stick arms that belonged to the young boy seeing the fireworks for the first time with his father.

  He turns back but sees that it’s dark behind him. It’s too dark to see. He calls out for his father, to know that he’s still there. He’s afraid that he’s left again, left all too soon without saying goodbye. There’s no answer.

  When the next explosion blankets the sky with light, he can see that his father isn’t there anymore. They’re all gone, not just his family, but everyone who had been on the hillside watching the fireworks. Now it’s just the two of them.

  “Promise?”

  “What?”

  He turns back around again to Hisoka.

  “Promise me you won’t leave?” she asks. Another burst of light reveals the glimmer in her eyes and down her cheeks. The light is reflected a brilliant orange and red in her tears, shimmering like liquid light.

  “I promise, I won’t leave you.”

  Satoshi holds her in both arms now. She hugs him so tight that he can’t breathe.

  “Then you’ve got to swim, baby,” she says, her voice and eyes both pleading with him.

  “What?”

  “Up there,” she says, pointing upwards.

  He looks up to see that the sky above them is on fire, with waves of flame dancing and whirling in every direction. He’s transfixed by the ribbons of liquid flame propagating outward and dissipating like ripples on a pond. It’s beautiful. So beautiful it presses on his chest, leaving him unable to breathe. His lungs burn.

  “Swim!”

  And when she yells at him, the spell is broken, and Satoshi is suddenly back in the present, where he’s drowning.

  Frantically, he kicked off the fisherman’s jacket weighing him down and began struggling to reach the surface. He used his arms to scoop water down below him with as much force as his oxygen-starved muscles could muster. When he broke through the surface, he found himself mere feet from the flaming wreckage of the ship.

  He greedily gulped air into his burning lungs in great, ragged gasps while trying not to inhale the water running down from the top of his head. An intense heat was radiating off to his side in waves, and he realized that he was right by the capsized wreckage of the burning ship. He quickly dove underwater and swam away from the flaming boat, surfacing again farther out.

  Satoshi became aware of moaning off in the water to his left and paddled over in that direction. He found the diver he had spoken to earlier clinging to an errant life jacket, staring at the burning ship.

  “Hey!”

  No response.

  “Hey!”

  This time he turned and looked at Satoshi.

  “What happened?” Satoshi yelled.

  “There was an explosion. When we were unpacking the gear.”

  “Were we hit by something? Onshore, maybe?”

  “No, it was the cargo. Something in the cargo blew up.”

  “What was in there? Anything flammable?”

  “I don’t know, they don’t tell us. Anyone else survive?”

  Satoshi didn’t know. He paddled through the water around the wreckage but didn’t see anyone still alive.

  “I think it’s just you and me,” he said, swimming back to the diver. “Come on, let’s get to shore. Can you swim?”

  “I can’t feel my legs,” the other man said. His teeth chattered and his lips looked blue in the light from the burning ship. “I can’t feel my
legs.”

  “Can you swim?” Satoshi shouted at him again.

  “I don’t … I don’t think so.”

  “Come on, then,” Satoshi said.

  He grabbed the man from behind in an awkward hold with one arm and used the other to paddle them to shore.

  “That way,” the man said, pointing to the lights on the shore behind them. “That shore is closer.”

  Satoshi turned them around and began paddling in that direction. He wasn’t a good swimmer under the best of circumstances. But now that he could only use one arm to stroke while the other gripped the wounded diver, their progress was slowed considerably. After a few minutes, he was breathing hard from the exertion, but still he tried to keep the man talking. For his own sake.

  “You still with me?” he yelled.

  “I can’t feel my legs … I can’t feel my legs …”

  After an hour he thought he could see other boats surrounding the vessel from a distance. But they missed the two swimmers bobbing away in the darkness. By now his companion had grown quiet, most likely in shock. But he was still breathing, so Satoshi kept dragging him through the water.

  Dawn was beginning to break and the sky had grown lighter by the time they washed up on a small shore recessed beneath a roadway. When his hand scraped the sandy bottom, Satoshi staggered to his feet amongst the waves lapping at the shore. With the last of his strength, he dragged the man onto the small beach area. He collapsed just beyond him and rolled over onto his back, gasping.

  When he could move again, he tried to rouse the diver at his feet but found him unresponsive. Looking from his pale face and blue lips down the length of his body, Satoshi realized that both of his legs had been blown off below the knee. Too tired to feel much of anything at this point, Satoshi lurched to his feet and began staggering down the beach. He hoped there was a working train line nearby, because right now he wanted to be home more than anything.

  But before that, he had to find a phone and report this. He didn’t look forward to that conversation, but it was his duty to inform the big man of what had happened. He called Jun. While Jun was about as far from a good conversationalist as you could find, Satoshi was glad to be relaying his news to him rather than the big man himself.

  Because Vasili would not be happy when he heard.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Mei, along with Kentaro and a junior detective named Miura, had spent the better part of three hours ensconced in their piece-of-shit surveillance vehicle camped two blocks from Arekusuandaa’s warehouse. The exterior was a nondescript delivery vehicle, meant to blend in and seem inconspicuous. The interior was a claustrophobia-inducing womb of monitors, speakers, headphones, and wires that seemed to grow darker and tighter with each passing hour. Even in the best of cases, being crammed together with other people breathing, sweating, and invading her personal space was enough to set Mei on edge.

  And today was far from the best of cases.

  “What the fuck? They’re walking all over him!” Mei half-mouthed, half-whispered to Kentaro.

  “He can’t rush it. If they suspect anything is up, it’s his life on the line.”

  “Still.”

  Mei understood Kentaro’s logic. But if she had to listen to another lengthy discussion of logistical best practices, or the financing options available to Arekusuandaa, she just might claw her own ears out.

  “He’s hardly said anything!” Mei protested.

  “First time doing police work?” Kentaro shot back.

  Mei glared at him from the corner of her eye, then hunkered down to continue listening.

  “I don’t understand any of this shit!” Miura said. “Why do they talk in English?”

  “Because most cops don’t speak English,” Kentaro said. “So most detectives need to get the International Affairs Department to help them out with their cases, and that can take weeks. They know that, and take advantage of it. That’s why all official Kaisha business is handled in English.”

  “More cases have been lost against the syndicates because of Japan’s shitty English-language education than for any other reason,” Mei added.

  “You speak English?” Miura asked.

  “I can get most of what they’re saying,” Kentaro said. “Her English is pretty good.”

  “Yeah? How’d you learn that?” Miura asked Mei.

  “Cop movies.”

  “Now, Arekusuandaa,” Kameko said, “as you know, we’ve received a number of reports of irregularities: missing cargo, accounting improprieties, occupational safety violations … the list goes on. Now, we’ve contracted V Logic Industries, which is an affiliated auditing agency, to perform an audit …”

  As she was speaking, the words displayed against the wall changed to:

  REMEMBER, STAY QUIET UNLESS PROMPTED!

  I KNOW YOU’RE WIRED

  When Arekusuandaa next looked back, Vasili could see the glint of tears forming in his eyes. He held one ringed, sausage-shaped finger in front of his mouth in a shushing gesture, then pointed back up at the screen.

  “… as for your firm’s accounting practices, the audit results here are equally dire. Deficiencies were found in twelve of seventeen key performance indicators, including …”

  AND I KNOW YOU TRIED TO UNLOAD SOME

  MERCHANDISE BEHIND MY BACK

  As Kameko continued her bland business speak, the image on the screen switched to that of a woman who had been brutally murdered. Her glassy eyes stared off to the side, her face and neck slashed with such violent intensity that her head was nearly hanging off. She was tied to a chair in an apartment that had been ransacked.

  It was hard to tell because of the dark image, but something that looked like a tiny, bloody leg was visible off behind her. If it was in fact a leg, it was far too small to belong to any adult. Vasili’s hand moved from the man’s right shoulder to cover his mouth, just to be sure. He could feel that the man’s face was wet with tears.

  After lingering on this image, the screen switched to more text.

  CROSSING ME HAS ITS COSTS, BUT YOU WILL NOT PAY THEM

  The screen switched back from this to a picture. It took Arekusuandaa only a moment to realize that it was a picture of his sleeping wife in their bed at home. It was taken with some kind of night-vision filter, as everything seemed to be bathed in a pale green light. Then his wife shifted in her sleep, and he realized that it wasn’t a still image he was looking at, but a video being live-streamed.

  “… what I’ve just said. So what do you have to say to that?” Kameko asked all of a sudden.

  Luckily for Arekusuandaa, he didn’t have to think of an answer; one had been provided for him on the screen. The projected image changed to a prompt that told him exactly what to say in response to Kameko’s fake business queries. Soon she went off on another business-related tangent, while the screen went back to imparting the real message.

  BUT I’M GIVING YOU ONE CHANCE TO

  REDEEM YOURSELF AND AVOID THIS

  FATE FOR YOUR FAMILY

  TORCH THE ENTIRE WAREHOUSE

  MAKE SURE IT GOES UP

  THAT BOX BESIDE YOU CONTAINS ENOUGH GASOLINE TO GET STARTED

  I’LL KNOW IF YOUR BODY ISN’T IN THE WRECKAGE

  AND IF IT’S NOT, YOUR WIFE AND CHILDREN

  WILL PAY INSTEAD

  “… when you add it all together, the total costs for the necessary legal counsel, combined with the aforementioned renovations and additions would cost you—let’s see—somewhere in the ballpark of four hundred to five hundred million yen. Which is a substantial burden, to be sure, but we can assist you in securing financing so that it’s not too onerous. So, Mr. Namonai, what do you say to that?”

  As soon as she finished speaking, the screen flashed the following message.

  WHAT IS YOUR ANSWER?

  DO WE HAVE A DEAL?

  There was no prompt this time; this one was up to him. Vasili looked down expectantly. It took Arekusuandaa a few moments before he could compose hims
elf enough to stammer an answer.

  “Y-yes,” he said, tears streaming down his face.

  “Excellent! Kameko has the paperwork here. We’d like you to get started on it right away.”

  As he said this, he tapped the box of gasoline canisters with his finger, while Kameko rustled a few papers nearby for effect. The image on the screen changed back to the live feed from his apartment. Whoever was holding the camera was now leaving the room, switching the feed off once they were outside his door.

  The following message appeared on the warehouse’s wall:

  YOU WERE FAMILY, ALEX

  YOU WERE PART OF SOMETHING BIGGER

  BUT YOU THREW THAT AWAY

  YOU BETRAYED YOUR FAMILY

  AND DISGRACED YOURSELF

  NOW YOU MUST BURN

  Arekusuandaa had to make a special effort not to sob out loud.

  Jun and Kameko adroitly and soundlessly broke down their presentation setup, and the three of them moved towards the door.

  “I know things seem bad now,” Vasili said for the benefit of whoever was listening. “But hang in there. You will see that this was right decision.”

  Arekusuandaa just nodded, still crying quietly.

  “Anyway, we will leave you to it. I’m sure you have much work to do,” Vasili said with a pointed look. “We will await your response.”

  “Alright, yes,” Arekusuandaa said meekly.

  “A pleasure doing business with you!”

  Vasili followed his assistants out the door.

  Once they were gone, the door banged shut.

  Arekusuandaa was left alone in the enormous warehouse with just his regret. Regret, and enough gasoline to make things right.

  “Hey, I think—”

  “Shut up! I’m trying to find the signal again!” Mei hissed, cutting Miura off.

  “I think they’re gone. That’s them leaving.”

  Miura pointed to one of the monitors relaying an image of Vasili’s sleek SUV cruising through the empty streets. “That’s why there’s no more sound.”

  “Dammit,” Mei said. “Vasili and his goons just danced circles around him. We didn’t get anything usable at all!”

  “This guy’s the best.” Kentaro cocked his headphones off to the side of his head. “You’re not going to get him to roll over and incriminate himself.”