Gaijin Cowgirl (12): Sayonara

Her last night in Japan. For how long? This was it. He was it.

(Previous chapter or start at the beginning.)

They went back to Simon’s hotel room, a box of molded plastic little bigger than the bed, both feeling sheepish but knowing. Simon was in the middle of another kickboxing story. Once the door closed behind them, Suki told him to just shut up and kiss her, and they twinned into a frantic make-out.

As clothes were coming off, Suki’s mobile sang. “Shit,” she said, knowing she’d better look. And just as well: it was Val, with her plea from the American embassy. Suki pushed past Simon into the bathroom and closed to door to talk. She listened to Val’s instructions, about the bank, then Tokyo Station, where Suki would find a particular locker containing a Brazilian woman’s passport and a ticket for the Narita Express.

Suki emerged from the bathroom, her thoughts befuddled with the next day’s impossible task, only to be reminded that a man named Simon Newby was sitting in the chair by the tiny desk beside the bed. The room was too small for him to busy himself. There was nowhere else to sit or stand, except right outside the bathroom door, and he had given her what privacy he could. Her last night in Japan. For how long? This was it. He was it.

“What’s wrong?”

How much to tell him? How to tell it?

“I have to go to the airport tomorrow,” she said. “I have to go to Hong Kong. And then I’ll be going to Thailand.”

“Fantastic! Holiday?”

“Not really.”

“You look…sad,” he said.

“I need to ask a favor.”

“Orright.”

“I’m in danger.”

She didn’t tell him about Cowboy, but she mentioned how she and Val had come across a map from an old man who had been in the war, and about how a lot of people – yakuza, police, American criminals – seemed to want it for themselves, no matter what.

“That’s unbelievable,” he said.

“And Val thinks the gold may be in Thailand,” she said. “I had to tell someone. I had to tell you.”

“I’ll take you to the airport if you want.”

The clock read 4-something.

“What I want right now is…” She stripped out of what remained.

Tearing motors. Not just traffic outside.

“Sounds like a Hell’s Angels convention down there,” he said, rolling over.

She scooted to the edge of the bed and peeked through the curtains. A knot of teenagers on motorcycles circled in the street below, and Suki felt her guts tighten. White banners with slogans written in black fluttered from aerials. Many of the youths, dressed in military-style overalls, drove while swinging baseball bats or lead pipes, their driving acrobatics leaving black curls of tire marks along the narrow street.

“Bosozoku,” she hissed.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Worse than ghosts. Motorcycle gang. Very bad.”

“Very loud.”

“We saw so many men on motorcycles today.”

“Well they’re down there and we’re in here.” He clutched her and she tried to resume their lovemaking but recalled how their stroll around Omote-sando had been constantly punctured by the rudeness of bikers, young men sporting World War II-style imperial rising sun flags. By black vans sporting black banners with angry white characters and disgorging hate over loudspeakers. And that youth with the spiky red hair, whose bike had cut directly across their path and come to a halt – the youth with the brown soldier’s uniform from the 1930s, who launched a wad of spittle before them, before revving his engine and vanishing into the traffic.

A hysterical young man’s voice pierced the room. Simon lifted his head and muttered something but it was lost in the din. Shrill calls through a bullhorn shook the very walls.

“Do you know what they’re saying?” she said, having to shout.

He shook his head, eager to finish what they had begun.

So stupid of her, not to have realized the threat. Not last night on their way out of Starbucks when a lone teenager had nearly run them down. Or the harassment today in Omote-sando, which she now knew was not random. Yakuza exploited biker gangs, extorting them, encouraging them toward petty crime, protecting them from rival gangs, making them do their bidding. The gangs did the yakuza’s dirty work.

“They’re saying my name,” she said. “Yamauchi, come out, come out, Yamauchi.”

Simon peeked out the window. She threw off her robe and reached for her clothes. “Where’re you going?”

“I don’t know,” she said, pulling on her boots, “but they’re going to come in here. They’re going to come in here!”

“What, charge the hotel?”

They heard the rocks striking the hotel’s glass door, and both looked out to see one of the kids pull a wheelie on his bike and hurtle toward the entrance. The doors were hidden beneath an awning but they heard an explosion of glass. The other bikers raised a cheer.

“Oh fuck,” he said. “Hang on, Suki.”

They rushed through a fire exit, but as they headed down, the stairwell was flooded with the shouts of men from below, the clang of pipes, the clocks of bats.

“Follow me,” he said, grabbing her arm and leading her back up. They rushed past his room around the corner to Lotdorn’s. Simon banged on the door. “Lotdorn, it’s me, let me in, hurry up.”

A door opened further along the corridor. It was Chatri wearing a yakuta robe, hair comically awry around his weathered face.

“Khru Chatri,” Simon said, “please let us come inside. We’re in trouble.”

“Who girl?”

“Uh, oh, this is Suki, uh…”

Down the corridor, Lotdorn opened his door. Bikers stormed into the corridor, waving banners, screaming at the top of their lungs, brandishing their weapons. Chatri whisked Simon and Suki inside his room and slammed the door shut. It was made of wood. The blow of steel pipes began punching knots into it.

“That won’t keep them out for long,” Simon said.

The telephone in Chatri’s room rang. It was one of the other boxers; Chatri spoke in rapid Thai and hung up. “Everyone scare.”

“Sorry, Khun Chatri, they’re after her. I had no idea about any of this—”

The phone rang again. “Chai…” Chatri said. “Khao jai.” He turned to Simon. “Lotdorn in trouble.” His eyes fell on Suki with disapproval. “She go.”

“Yes,” Simon said. “I’m helping her.”

Chatri nodded, adjusted the knot around his robe, and opened the door.

Lotdorn had set upon the bikers attacking his master’s room but they were too many; they were grappling his arms and legs, but bikers were bleeding, there were bits of teeth stuck to the corridor wall, suspended in a scarlet streak that held them like plaster. Bikers swung bats at Chatri.

Chatri had fought nearly 90 matches at Lumphini Stadium in Bangkok. He had won 68 of them.

The old fighter dodged the bat; the surprised teenager ate hard knuckles while Chatri pulverized his friend’s jaw with an elbow. Five more of Thailand’s up-and-coming muay thai fighters, aroused from sleep and seeing their master under assault, joined the fray.

Simon dragged her through the maelstrom. They glimpsed Lotdorn upright but spread-eagled, four bikers grasping for a limb apiece. The Thai practically threw off the youth on one arm, his fist arcing, flashing Simon a thumbs-up before completing the turn in a blow to biker’s head. Then he was lost behind a thicket of bats and pipes.

They took another stairway down and emerged in the lobby of the hotel, its glass doors shattered. A pair of night managers, old and frail, sat away from the desk, one of them with his tie askew and a bleeding lip. A single teenager sat beside them on his bike, its wheel upturned onto the lobby’s single couch, keeping an eye on the managers and tapping a lead pipe on his palm.

The biker wasn’t prepared, and by the time he was bringing his pipe up to swing, Simon clipped him with his shoulder, spilling him off his seat and dragging the bike down with him. Then Simon and Suki were through the broken doors, running down steps, glass crunching beneath their shoes.

They ran, heedless of direction. The neon lights had gone dark, the traffic was gone, the wide boulevards empty.

Tire squeals, angry shouts.

Engines whined closer.

They kept running. Her lungs burned.

The rumble of engines turned to a scream as two bikes rounded a corner several blocks behind them, then, spying their quarry, accelerated.

“This way,” Suki panted, veering down an alley.

“Where we going?”

“Tsukiji.”

A warehouse loomed, gray and severe, but with a ground floor bathed in a welcoming yellow glow and silhouettes of wee-morning civilization.

They smelled it before they saw it: fish, mountains of fish that made the streets stink of the sea. They were headed for a giant pre-dawn wet market, where the morning’s catch was delivered and sold.

But then one sensory experience overpowered another as the shriek of motorcycles reverberated through the alley.

They entered a massive hangar, dashing through a warren of stalls and a riot of color. The whole area was refrigerated, and as they ran, their exhalations turned to icy mist. Two-man teams of jobbers, rubber boots and rubber gloves, heavy dungarees, noses red from the cold, were shifting giant tuna onto wooden platforms, cutting them up with huge saws, pinning price tags into the fresh bodies. Fishmongers filled tubs of water with live catch, they nailed writhing eels to hanging boards and filleted them alive. The ground was slick with water and the runoff of flayed fish; the harsh lighting made the blood and guck look even more raw.

The two motorcycles exploded out from the alleyway behind them, their tires throwing up clouds of water. Panic gripped the market as jobbers and customers scrambled out of the way.

Suki lost her footing on the slick surface. Two bikers hurtled toward her as she fell, one rider gripping a baseball bat, the other a sword.

Simon doubled back to her. “Suki!”

He reached her in time to make the biker swerve but the blow of the bat sent him spinning. The bike pivoted with a terrifying rubber scream, the back wheel slamming into a stall of lobsters. “Simon!” A torrent of red crustaceans flooded the ground.

The biker leapt forward.

She scrambled on hands and knees, the concrete floor slippery amid the ick and gore of dismembered fish. She saw Simon collapse into a tub of squid. As if the bikers weren’t enough, an enraged jobber set upon him with a wooden plank, yelling curses. Simon scrambled out of the morass of writhing tentacles as the biker with the sword turned to make another run. There was a mechanical roar and the other biker was between them, charging her. Suki slipped and slid her way toward a series of wooden steps set against a wall, covered with squat metal buckets. There was a narrow gap between two of the low-slung bleachers: she crawled through. The biker came after her, thrusting his front wheel at her feet, forcing Suki back against the tiny triangles of space between the wall and the steps.

The biker couldn’t advance into the gap any further, so he kicked back. She heard only the raging engine of the thug on the other side of the steps, but the metal tubs blocked her vision.

She heard a screech and a squeal; shouts. Simon! She peeked through the gap, thought she saw a piece of black machinery skid past somewhere but it was too fast and then the spinning wheel leapt for her, forcing her back behind the steps.

Now the biker changed tack and slowly drove up the bleachers, shaking the wooden planks. Suki shrunk against the hard wall, not comprehending the biker’s intent until it was too late and his tire nudged one of the metal buckets, the one just above her. He revved the bike up suddenly, the force of the advance spinning the bucket around and tipping it over. She screamed as the shower of bloody fish entrails drenched her.

Something made the biker retreat. She thought she heard Simon shouting, but then came more engine revs and the echoing protests of the fishmongers. The biker was gone for the moment, and she peeked back around the corner. There he stood – her brave, beautiful Simon, his jacket sleeve torn, but a baseball bat in his hands. That bat had belonged to the other biker, and now Simon had it, and was swinging it! The biker flashed past and Simon ducked, and then straightened, and the upper half of the bat clattered to the floor. The biker’s sword had divided it clean in half.

“Simon!” She clambered out of her hiding spot, dripping fish innards. His nostrils tightened. She must have reeked.

“Get outta here,” he snapped.

Suki saw the first biker, the one who had once owned the bat, lying prone on the ground, near his fallen bike. Simon’s work. “I’m staying with you.”

The remaining biker pulled another wheelie and leapt forward.

The sword came up. Simon put himself in front of her.

The biker halted, reversed, and peeled away.

Then they heard the sirens and saw the policemen swarming out from the back alleys toward them.

“No police,” Suki said. “No police, Simon!”

“Right,” he said, pulling her toward the first kid’s crashed motorcycle. Its engine was still going, its wheel still spinning. It was heavy and the whole thing nearly launched out of his hands as Simon righted it. “Get on,” he said.

The policemen were nearly there.

Suki swung her leg over and clutched his chest.

They were gone.

* * *

It was impossible to eliminate the stench of fish, no matter how many times she tried to in a public washroom. Department stores opened early, giving her a crack at finding a change of clothes to take into the lavatory. The salesgirls, immaculate in their white gloves and pressed uniforms, looked at her with open disgust.

The next stop was the bank. Despite her new outfit – a very short red plaid skirt, flats, and a white turtleneck – the teller smelled her before she saw her.

Suki entered the vault to retrieve the contents of the safety deposit box, while Simon waited on the street, too reeking of crustaceans to be allowed inside. She stared into the metal locker. It was all there: the cash, the map. She paused to study it for the first time. The wax paper trembled in her hands.

She thought of Simon, loitering unshaven in yesterday’s clothes outside, nursing a huge purple bruise on his arm and cuts along his hands. She thought of his thick brow and his shaven head, and the roughness of his thick fingers on her body. Suki opened her eyes. The map no longer quivered in her grasp.

They took the subway – they had ditched the bike almost immediately – to Tokyo Station. Machinations arranged by Val that Suki did not understand had left an orange locker key hidden in the toilet roll of the third stall of the ladies’ room outside the ticket office.

With Simon by her side, she located the locker and inside it she found one ticket for the Narita Express to the airport, another for a Cathay Pacific flight to Hong Kong with the name Sakoko Mita on it, and an Brazilian passport with the same name. The passport photo was of an ethnic Japanese woman, heavyset, with long black hair.

Simon insisted on going with her, but when they checked at the ticket office, the next express train was sold out.

“It’s all assigned seating,” she said. “You’ve already done so much for me. I can’t say thank you in a way that really means it.”

“Yes you can,” he said, cupping her chin so she would look him in the eye. They kissed, a long, sweet minute.

He said, “If you don’t come to Bangkok, I’m going to Hong Kong, or wherever it is you’ll be.”

“Promise me you’ll be waiting.”

She slept for most of the hour-long ride to Narita. The automated announcement of their arrival woke her. She looked out at the green hills of Chiba prefecture and the concrete maze heading into the airport. This was it, this was her last look at her homeland. She whispered her goodbye: “Sayonara, Nippon.”

Her stomach was alive with butterflies when she checked in. There was no way this was going to work. The photo burned a hole through her attempt to stay cool. She couldn’t bear to look at the immigration official. There seemed to be policemen everywhere.

Think of Simon. Think of his hands, and being in his arms, and the way he got her out of that hotel.

“I promise,” he had said.

The stamp hammered her passport like a judge’s gavel, declaring her free.

Suki crossed to the other side. She was through.

There was a stirring behind her, and she saw Val walking briskly toward the wall of immigration officials. She was accompanied by an older man in a handsome blazer with a thick hatch of white hair, whom Suki took to be the Congressman.

The police moved in.

Yoshino, wearing his blue trench coat, stepped forward. Val’s face remained granite while her father did the talking, gesturing wildly and flashing his credentials.

Yoshino glared at Val with murder in his eyes. He watched her hurry through the diplomat’s channel, and then his gaze found Suki. He smirked. In Japan, a cop was still a cop, even if corrupt. All Yoshino had to do was leave the country, and then he’d be free.

(Next chapter.)