"Yes! Very! Very modern." Body-con, she knows, means body-conscious: Japanese for buff.
The Caster, its tan faux-cork filter glittering wetly, goes back between his lips. He roots through his pockets in turn, produces a Hello Kitty! lighter, and lights his cigarette. Not a plastic disposable but a chromed Zippo, or clone thereof. Cayce feels as though the lighter has followed her here from Kiddyland, a spy for the Hello Kitty! group mind. She smells benzene. He puts it away. "Number… very hard."
"Keiko told me that you were very clever, to find the number."
He nods. Seems pleased perhaps. Smokes. Taps ash into an Asahi ashtray. There's a small, cheap-looking television behind the bar, just at the periphery of Cayce's vision. It's made of transparent plastic and shaped something like a football helmet. On its six-inch screen she sees a screaming human face attempting to thrust itself through a sheet of very thin latex, then a quick clip of the South Tower collapsing, then four green melons, perfectly round, rolling along on a flat white surface.
"Keiko told me that you would give me the number." Forcing the smile again. "Keiko says you are very kind."
Taki's face darkens. She hopes it's a deeper level of embarrassment kicking in, or something to do with that specific alcohol-processing enzyme the Japanese lack, and not anger. He suddenly whips a Palm from his inside jacket pocket and pokes its infrared slit at her.
He wants to beam her the number.
"I don't have one," she tells him.
He frowns, fumbles out a fat, retro-looking pen. She's ready for this, slipping him the napkin she'd drawn her Roppongi map on. He frowns, scrolls on his Palm, then copies a number on the edge of the folded napkin.
She watches as he copies three groups of four numbers each, the pen's felt tip blurring in the coarse weave of the paper. Upside down: 8304 6805 2235. Like a FedEx waybill number.
She takes it as he closes his pen.
She quickly reaches down into the Luggage Label bag, which she's surreptitiously unzipped against just this eventuality, and comes up with the envelope containing the Judy image. "She wants you to have this," she tells him.
She's afraid he'll tear it, as he fumbles the envelope open. His hands are trembling. But then he gets it out, has a look, and she sees his eyes are wet with tears.
She can't handle this at all.
"Excuse me, Taki," gesturing in what she hopes will be the direction of the toilet, "I'll be right back." She leaves her Rickson's and the laptop bag hanging on her chair and gets up. She still has the napkin in her hand. Sign language with the barman gets her down a tiny hallway and into the least salubrious Japanese toilet she's seen in a while, one of those concrete hole-in-the-floor jobs from the old days. It reeks of disinfectant and, she supposes, urine, but it has a door she can get between herself and Taki.
She takes
She copies the number on the palm of her left hand, puts the pen back on the dryer, wads the napkin up, and tosses it into the depression in the center of the floor. Then, since she's there, she decides to pee. It won't be the first time she's used one of these, but it could quite happily be the last.
He's gone, when she returns to the table, two crumpled pieces of paper money beside the empty beer bottle, her half-empty glass, the ashtray, and the torn envelope. She looks over at the barman, who scarcely seems to register her presence at all.
On the red television, insectoid superheroes on streamlined motorcycles buzz through a cartoon cityscape.
"He took a duck in the face," she says to the barman, shrugging into the Rickson's and slipping the Luggage Label over her head.
The barman, glumly, nods.
Outside, there is no sign of Taki, though she hasn't really expected any. She looks both ways, wondering where she might more easily hail a cab back to the Hyatt.
"Do you know this bar?"
Looking up into a smooth, tanned, evidently European face that she somehow doesn't like at all. She takes in the rest of him. A Prada clone: black leather and shiny nylon, shoes with those toes she hates.
Hands grab her, from behind, hard, just above the elbows, pinning her arms at her sides.
There's something that's supposed to happen now, she thinks. Something that's supposed to happen—
When she'd first moved to New York her father had insisted that she take lessons in self-defense from a small, fastidious, slightly portly Scotsman called Bunny. Cayce had argued that New York was no longer as dangerous as Win remembered it, which was true, but it had been easier to visit Bunny six times than to argue with Win.
