“Do you know what it is?”

The young man shook his head, but he was lying. Hiroshi Sato knew all right.

What now? wondered Kit.

The box was packed with straw made from a flat-bladed grass. The choice of material was probably significant, almost everything in Tokyo was. Thrusting his hands into the straw, Kit closed his fingers around something and began to pull.

“Nouveau-san!”

So real was the young man’s horror that Kit let go of whatever he held and began to unpack the straw instead.

“What’s in there?” demanded Kate, curiosity having finally forced her to abandon her place near the window.

“How would I know?” Kit asked.

Handful after handful of dried grass piled up on a glass table until Kit could finally see what Mr. Oniji had sent after him. A small bowl, twisted very slightly along one edge where gravity had touched the rim. Flame blackened its inside, but the underneath was fired to the colour of ash. A smudge had been fixed by heat into its base, Yoshi’s fingerprint fossilised like an ancient shell into rock.

“Fuck,” he said.

Looking round, Kit realised the entire lounge had come to a standstill. Middle-aged men, well-dressed women, complete strangers, even Kate O’Mally; all of them reduced to awed silence.

“It’s beautiful,” said Kit, speaking entirely to himself.

The young man nodded. “Her best work,” he said. “Unlike anything before it. It has…” He hesitated, searching for the right words. “A quality we believe only great artists achieve. Mr. Oniji is at a loss to know how it survived the fire.”

“In a cake tin,” Kit said flatly.

Hiroshi Sato stared at him.

“I put it in a ceramic cake tin.”

The young man considered this. “Still,” he said, “its survival is unusual. When the museum at Kobe was destroyed by an inferno many thousands of priceless ceramics cracked in the flames.”

A woman behind him began nodding.

“The bowl was unfired,” said Kit, deciding this would make a difference. “And covered with a damp cloth…” Now Kit came to look, he could see the blackness inside the bowl carried a weave where cotton had smouldered and fallen to ash.

“Who found it?” Kit demanded.

Mr. Sato looked embarrassed. “No one seems to know,” he said, shuffling immaculately shined shoes. “It was left with a note on the doorstep of a small town house in Akasaka.”

“This house, did it belong to someone known to Mr. Oniji?”

Hiroshi Sato’s nod was so slight as to be almost invisible.

So beautiful. Cold and beautiful and fragile and able to survive the ruining of his life, the bowl had Kit’s attention and held his gaze. Everything he’d loved and respected about Yoshi was represented in that bowl. As was everything he’d feared and failed to understand.

“You take it,” he told Hiroshi Sato.

The man opened his mouth.

“Return it with my heart-felt thanks. Ask Mr. Oniji to keep the bowl safe.”

Very carefully, as if suddenly aware he might drop it, Hiroshi Sato took the bowl from Kit and put it back in the noodle box. Then he began to pack the box with thin-bladed straw, while all the passengers and both of the women from behind the desk continued to watch in silence.

CHAPTER 24 — Friday, 22 June

The battle began at dawn, in a blaze of outrage, long-focus lenses, and electronic flash. A couple of police vans pulled up, blocking the road south from Roppongi’s main drag. Having arrived, they proceeded to do nothing. Which was fine with the bozozoku, because it let them concentrate on one enemy at a time.

A row of bikes had been positioned to face away from the road, as if the owners planned to ride straight into Pirate Mary’s cinder-block parking area. At five minutes before noon, as baseball-bat-wielding chimpira entered the narrow road that ran along the lower edge of the graveyard, a girl carrying a cat slipped between two bikes and headed away from the coming confrontation. A second later, another girl followed. Although she went unwillingly, still complaining and almost in tears.

“They should…” Micki said.

But the ranks had already closed. Namiko left first because of the cat and because no one really knew why she was there in the first place. Micki went, under extreme protest, because her brother Tetsuo felt girls shouldn’t fight.

Micki had her own opinions on that. Which she was fucked if she was going to keep to herself.

“Go,” said Tetsuo. “This is going to get ugly.”

She went, low-level Yakuza thugs with clubs parting under the eye of the cameras to let her through.

“Wait up,” Micki said.

Namiko kept going.

“Wait,” demanded Micki, then added, “Out of my way…” But she was talking to a photographer who’d decided to get close and much too personal. Small, male, and not her favourite person, the man fired his flash right in Micki’s face.

“Fuck off,” said Micki, using up most of her English.

Gaz Maguire, erstwhile provider of portfolios to would-be models, grinned, stepped sideways to block Micki’s path again, and snapped another shot at the exact moment Micki stuck one finger up and scowled at the camera. “Perfect,” he said. “Thank you.”

Gaz was about to say something else when Namiko shoved him aside, grabbed Micki by the shoulder, and dragged her away from the photographers that had begun to gather around her.

“That’s enough,” said Namiko crossly, passing the cat to Micki. “Come on, we need to get out of here.”

“What’s going to happen?”

Namiko snorted. “They’ll fight,” she said, stepping around a vast stone torii near the entrance to the graveyard. Gravel crunched underfoot as they walked towards an old man leaning on a broom.

“Konichiwa,” said the old man.

“Konichiwa,” Micki and Namiko said together. Everyone bowed. After names had been exchanged, Mr. Ito made space for them by moving a pile of prayer sticks he’d leaned against a moss-covered tomb. “Big fight,” he said. “But over soon.”

“How do you know?” asked Micki.

“Bozozoku,” said Mr. Ito, appearing to weigh the word in one hand. “Little monkeys…” He juggled his hands slightly, before finding the first heavier. “As long as the police stay quiet this will be quick.”

Mr. Ito was right. As a first wave of yelling chimpira charged towards the bikes, the bozozoku fired up their engines, blipped the throttles, and hit switches crudely wired to the handle bars.

Micki grinned. “Afterburners,” she said, as flame lanced from each bike and a chimpira dropped his bat and began clutching his ankle.

“Clever,” Mr. Ito said. “Also inventive.”

What was most interesting was that the police continued to do nothing.

True, they’d left their vans. But that was the only movement they made, apart from securing both ends of the street and moving the press back slightly. And yet, in their black-visored riot helmets, body armour, and studded gauntlets they looked easily the most frightening of the three groups gathered at the site of Kit’s old bar.

“When it’s over,” said Mr. Ito. “That’s when they’ll move.”

Micki looked at him.

“I lived through the sixties,” he said, with a smile. “You watch. They’ll arrest the losers…”

Ito-san’s prophesy probably explained why the police eventually climbed back into their riot vehicles, having done little more than watch, keep casual spectators off the street, and stop the photographers from getting themselves hurt. Because when the battle ended, everything was pretty much as it had been.

Paramedics treated five chimpira with burns, but since all the burns were below the knee, the journalists were refusing to take the injuries seriously. A couple of bozozoku had broken heads and one chimpira had been carried away unconscious, his colleagues angrily refusing offers of medical help.