18. H O N G O

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She holds a chilled can of vending-machine tonic water against the bump. Most of a pack of Kleenex-analog, splashed with tonic, has been used to sponge her forehead.

The cab negotiates a narrow lane. The back of a concrete apartment building, bristling unevenly with dozens of air conditioners. Motorcycles shrouded under gray fabric.

Boone Chu saying something in Japanese, but not to the driver. Speaking to his cellular headset. He looks back, through the cab's rear window. More Japanese.

"Have they found them?" she asks.

No.

"Where did Taki go?"

"Up the street, walking fast. Hung a left. He was the guy with the number?"

She resists the urge to check the palm of the hand holding the sweating can. What if the ink is running? "When did you get here?" Meaning Japan.

"Right behind you. I was in coach."

"Why?"

"We were followed, when we left the restaurant in Camden Town."

She looks at him.

"Young guy, brown hair, black jacket. Followed us to the canal. Watched us from up on the locks. With either a camera or a small pair of binoculars. Then he walked us back to the tube and stuck with me. Lost him in Covent Garden. He didn't make the lift."

This makes her think of the first time she'd read Sherlock Holmes. A one-legged Lascar seaman.

"Then you followed me?"

He says something in Japanese, into his headset. "I thought it would be a good idea to establish some kind of baseline in terms of what we've got here. Start from scratch. We're working for Bigend. Are the people following us working for Bigend? If not… ?"

"And?"

"No idea, so far. I coasted past our two here, last night, and they were speaking Italian. That was when you were on your way to the pink zone."

"What were they saying?"

"I don't speak Italian."

She lowers the tonic water. "Where are we going now?"

"The bike is following us, to make sure nobody else is. When we're positive of that, we'll go to a friend's apartment."

"They didn't find those men?"

"No. The one you head-butted is probably in a clinic now, getting his nose taped back into shape." He creases his forehead. "You didn't learn that studying marketing, did you?"

No.

"They might be Blue Ant, for all we know. You might have just broken the nose of a junior creative director."

"The next junior creative director who tries to mug you, you might break his nose too. But Italians who work in Tokyo ad agencies don't wear Albanian Prada knockoffs."

The cab is on some kind of metropolitan freeway now, curving past woods and ancient walls: the Palace. She remembers the paths she'd imagined, that morning, looking down from her room. She turns and looks back, trying to see the scooter, and discovers that her neck is painfully stiff. The walls and trees are beautiful but blank, concealing a mystery.

"They were trying to get your bag? The laptop from Blue Ant?"

"My purse is in there, my phone."

As if on cue, the Blue Ant phone starts to ring. She digs it out. "Hello?"

"Parkaboy. Remember me?"

"Things got complicated."

She hears him sigh, in Chicago. "It's okay. I live for fatigue poisons."

"We did meet," she tells him, wondering if Boone Chu can hear his side of the conversation. She's left the volume cranked, against Tokyo street noise, and regrets it.

"No doubt about that. He hasn't even waited to get back home. Straight into an Internet cafe and pouring out his heart to Keiko."

"I want to talk, but it has to be later. I'm sorry."

"He told Keiko he'd given it to you, so I wasn't too worried. E-mail me." Click.

"Friend?" Boone Chu takes the tonic water and helps himself to a sip.

"Footagehead. Chicago. He and his friend found Taki."

"You did get the number?"

No getting around it, now. Either she lies to him because she doesn't trust him, or tells him, because, relatively speaking, she does.

She shows him her palm, the numerals in blue fiber tip.

"And you didn't enter it in the laptop? E-mail it to anyone?"

"No."

"That's good."

"Why?"

"Because I need to have a look at that laptop."

H E has the driver stop in what he tells her is Hongo, near Tokyo University. He pays, they get out, and as the cab pulls away, the silver scooter arrives.

"I'd like my jacket back, please."

Boone says something in Japanese to the passenger, who unzips and removes Cayce's Rickson's without getting off the scooter. He tosses it to her and grins, unreassuringly, beneath the lowered visor of the flaming-eye helmet. Boone takes a white envelope from the waistband of his black jeans and passes it to the driver, who nods and stuffs it into the pocket of the fishtail parka. The scooter whines and they're gone.

The Rickson's smells faintly of Tiger Balm. She slides the tonic can into a convenient recyc canister and follows Boone, her forehead aching.

A minute later she's staring up at a three-story clapboard structure that seems to float above the narrow street, dilapidated and impossibly flimsy-looking. Clapboard doesn't quite describe it; the silvered wooden planks look as though they might be the blades of a giant Venetian blind. She's almost never seen anything genuinely old, in Tokyo, let alone in this state of casual disrepair.

Ragged, browning palms lean on either side of an entrance ornately roofed with Japanese tiles, echoed by a pair of decaying stucco columns supporting nothing at all. One of these seems to have had its top gnawed off by something enormous. Turning to him. "What is it?"

"A prewar apartment building. Most of them went in the firebombing. Seventy units in this one. Communal toilets. Public bathhouse a block away."

The balconies, she guesses, following him, are racks for airing bedding. They pass a dense low shrubbery of bicycles, climb three broad concrete steps, and enter a tiny foyer floored with shiny turquoise vinyl. Cooking smells she can't identify.

Up a poorly lit flight of bare wooden stairs and along a corridor so narrow that she has to walk behind him. A single fluorescent tube flickers, somewhere ahead. He stops and she hears the rattle of keys. He opens a door, reaches for a light switch, and steps aside. Cayce steps in and finds herself trying to remember Win's clever neurological explanation of deja vu.

Strange but somehow familiar, the lighting consists of a few clear glass bulbs with dim, faintly orange filaments: reproduction Edison bulbs. Their light is inefficient, magical. Furniture low and somehow like the building itself: worn, strangely comforting, still in use.

He comes in behind her and closes the door, which is featureless and modern and white. She sees his little reddish-brown suitcase open on a low central table, his phones set out beside it and the laptop's screen up but dark. "Who lives here?"

"Marisa. A friend of mine. She designs fabrics. She's in Madrid now." He crosses to a crowded kitchen alcove and flicks on a much brighter, whiter sort of light. She sees a pink Sanyo rice cooker on a small counter, and a narrow white plastic freestanding appliance connected to transparent tubing. A dishwasher? "I'll make tea." Filling a kettle from a bottle of water.

She walks to one of two sliding paper windows inset with central panes of partially frosted glass. Through the clear sections she looks out at gently sloping rooftops that seem, impossibly, to be partially covered in knee-deep moss, but then she sees that this is something like the kudzu on Win's farm in Tennessee. No, she corrects herself, it probably is kudzu. Kudzu where it comes from. Kudzu at home.

The rooftops, in the light from surrounding windows, are corrugated iron, rusted a rich and uneven brown. A large tan insect strobes through the communal patch of light, vanishes. "This is an amazing place," she says.