Chapter Eleven:
Robert nearly spat his coffee out onto the table when the man uttered Misaki’s name. The tattoos told him all he needed to know and his fear regarding the situation was multiplying by the second. Did Takami know that Misaki had Yakuza connections? Had the impeccable man made a gross mistake? The man beside him was eyeing him closely, angling to unsettle him as much as possible no doubt. Robert looked to Quinn and saw that her hands were shaking in her lap. He felt intensely sorry for the girl, but he had no idea how to help her. The Starbucks was packed with people and that knowledge gave him courage.
“I’m sorry…? What was your name?” He spoke in English so that it would be more difficult for other people in the cafe to follow their conversation.
“Where is my sister?”
“I don’t know where she is. But I don’t know you so why would I talk to you about anything at all?” Robert glared at the young man, his pulse thumping in his ears. He was gambling that Misaki’s brother didn’t know that she had been kidnapped, merely that she wasn’t answering her phone. “Now, I am in the middle of a meeting with this young artist and look how you have scared her!” The Yakuza looked at Quinn as though seeing her for the first time. He bowed his head slightly and uttered an apology. “How might I contact you if I hear from her?” Robert made this last question in Japanese so that there was no confusion.
The man was not intimidated by Robert, not that he should have been, but he stood without speaking and dropped a scrap of card onto the table with a phone number written on it in black marker. His face was a glare of attitude that scared Robert, but the man stepped backwards gracefully and waved a hand above his head. Four other young men broke away from their careful resting positions around the room and followed him out down the escalator.
The other patrons didn’t seem to notice the discussion, their voices continued like white noise in the thrum that filled the space. Robert’s ears filled with the sounds. For a second while his eyes had met with Misaki’s brother’s nothing else had existed.
He was in a lot of trouble.
“Come on,” he said and held out his hand to Quinn whose eyes were filled with uncertainty. “I’ll try to explain while we walk, but I don’t want to stay here.”
The girl’s hand felt tiny in his, her fingers delicately thin, almost spindly. Her nails were still painted pink from the night before, not a single chip on them. She stood and he felt her grip tighten and her weight shift as though her legs didn’t quite support her. He smiled at her, trying to adopt a mask of reassurance, but he didn’t think that she bought it. Quinn was a little too worldly to accept something so simple after what she had just seen.
Outside in the heat, Robert lead her towards Roppongi, expounding on his surprise that Misaki had Yakuza connections that he didn’t know about. He wasn’t sure if the girl believed him, but she listened. After a hundred metres or so he stopped when he noticed that Quinn was struggling to keep up with his pace. She looked at him sadly and apologised for being too slow. Over her shoulder he noticed a caucasian man step behind a wall in a movement that filled him with dread.
“Are you unwell?” he asked even though he knew that she was. He wanted to give the girl the chance to talk about what was wrong with her. He wanted to know why she was so important to Takami.
“No, no…” Quinn said quietly. She gave him a hooded expression, peering through her eye-lashes at him in a way that made her look unexpectedly, and probably unintentionally, seductive and yet infinitely fragile. “I… I get tired easy. That’s all. Let’s keep going. How far is…? Where are we heading?”
“The Mori. It’s about 3 k’s. That okay?”
“Yes…” She smiled weakly and started to walk again. He fell in beside her, matching her steps and pretending to be interested in the traffic.
The sun beat down on them from above, pushing on their heads and shoulders like a weight. Robert regretted wearing long-pants, but he didn’t feel right meeting up with the girl in something as informal as shorts. He could feel the sweat building up beneath his arms and he ignored it as best he could. Quinn walked at a reasonable pace, but certainly slower than what he had been aiming for. She didn’t appear visibly sick to him – her skin was pale but consistently coloured and bore no afflictions that he could discern. She was very thin though – her arms looked almost brittle in the harsh light, and he could see her collar-bones protruding at the base of her neck. While they walked she removed a piece of elastic from her purse and tied her hair back. When she raised her arms he noticed a scar on her shoulder that resembled a star.
“Where did you go to school, Quinn?”
“Oh, I– I went to Brisbane Girls Grammar.”
“And did you like it there?” He wanted to get her talking in the hope that he might learn something of use. The girl was a victim on so many levels that he didn’t want to be the one to deliver her into the hands of some unknown quantity.
But he needed to save Misaki.
“It was okay… I don’t miss it, if that’s what you mean. I… I was just never really interested in it…” she trailed off.
“Not interested in school or not interested in the people?”
“Well, I actually quite liked school. I mean, I learnt some really great stuff there. But, yeah, I mean the other girls in my year level are pretty easy to forget… I didn’t really know anyone until I was nearly finished. I just, kind of, attended – if you know what I mean? Yeah, there were lots of things that I couldn’t really get involved in after I was… After my dad died.” Quinn flashed a look at him, but he kept his eyes forwards.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to bring up–”
“No, it’s okay. I was really close with my dad. He was just this really interesting guy, yeah? He used to take me to his work and let me look at all the things he was working on.”
Robert stretched his back as Quinn spoke, and he took the opportunity to glance behind them. A long way back, a pair of figures were moving in their direction – deliberately slow, pacing themselves.
“He was in genetics, right? And he had our whole family – himself, and mum, and me – all sequenced when I was like eleven or twelve. I remember sitting on his lap while he took me through this big chart of… What did he call it?” she asked herself.
She was much more animated when she spoke of her father. Robert thought she looked more alive, as though there was an energy in her memories that gave her hope for the future. It made him sad to think of her like that, as though she was beyond help in a place where hope only existed as fantasy or memory. But what could he do for her? He had no obligation to her. He didn’t even know her. She was just a girl who was important to some shadowy figure who had kidnapped Misaki. There was no real contest in his head.
Quinn or Misaki?
There was no contest at all.
But that didn’t mean that he didn’t hate himself.
“There were ‘genetic predispositions’,” the girl continued, “which are like the likeliness that you’ll inherit brown eyes, or baldness, or heart disease from your parents – and then there were these other ones which referred to what they had managed to work out over the years as… I can’t remember the word he used. But they’re like, the secret things within your genes which make you who you are. They’d only worked out a few of them. Like, this particular line of a sequence would mean that a person was prone to migraine headaches. That kind of stuff…”
“He sounds like he was a good dad,” Robert said without looking at her.
“He was… But he got really sad maybe a year or two before the heart attack. I can’t quite remember. It was around that time that…” She stopped and looked at him squarely, her eyes searching for something in his face.
They were heading into the tunnel that passed under the Aoyama Gakuin College. On either side of them were concrete walls covered in artistic graffiti that made Quinn’s sad eyes luminous with colour. Robert took her hand, using the moment of her surprise to quickly glance back at the men who appeared to be following them. They had stopped near the top of the hill and one of them was smoking a cigarette.
Traffic was banked up beside them, the car’s bumpers all unnecessarily close to one another, and the smell of exhaust was thick in the air. Robert considered jumping the barrier that protected the pedestrians from the cars and climbing into a taxi just to see what the figures behind them would do. But the opportunity disappeared as the vehicles started to move again. He pushed the thought from his mind and turned his attention back to Quinn.
“You were saying that your dad was sad? Did something happen?” He prodded as politely as he could, giving her fingers a squeeze and starting to walk towards the light at the far end of the tunnel.
“He…” Robert felt her grip tighten on his. “I’m not well, Robert… I didn’t want to tell you. I mean, I didn’t think I’d ever meet you! I just… I– When I saw you last night it was kind of like a dream for me…” Robert felt his face flush with blood and he was glad that she wouldn’t be able to see him in the dark. “Not that I’m, like, in love with you or anything… I just… Your work speaks to me and I’ve found a lot of– I don’t know – safety? comfort? – in what it says… I didn’t want you to think of me as weak and helpless and pity me like everyone else seems to– and now I’m telling you all this shit and that’s exactly what will happen!”
She pulled her hand from his and pushed it into her face, kneading the skin beneath her fingers. Her left arm was across her stomach, her hand pressed into her hip. Robert could feel his throat constricting with self-loathing. What kind of monster was he?
“I didn’t mean to faint! I was just shocked is all… Everyone thinks it’s the end of the fucking world!” She stopped walking again and leant against the wall, the headlights of a passing car giving Robert a glimpse of her that made him ache inside. “It’s not! It really isn’t! I’m just me, you know? I am what I fucking am… People just need to stop worrying all the time.” Quinn’s eyes met his and he could see the tears welling at their edges. “My mum’s got my best friend sending her secret updates about how I’m doing over here. She has been getting blood samples analysed, and tested, and I don’t even know what – all because she’s trying to find some kind of cure for me. But there isn’t one! No one knows how to deal with any of it! No one even knows what the fuck I’ve got! If my dad was here I’d bet he could get it sorted out. He’d be able to explain it all and everything would be better!”
She let out a little sob and covered her face in a frustrated gesture. The artist raised his hand to grip her shoulder, but stopped halfway there, unsure of how he should proceed knowing everything that he knew.
“Hey…” he said softly, his urge to comfort her overpowering his sense of internal contradiction.
“Don’t!” Quinn shouted and he froze. “I don’t want your sympathy. I just wanted to see your show. To see your work with my own eyes so that I could go home and dream through the memories and that I would have had the chance to do something by my own fucking volition for once!”
The girl knocked her head backwards against the concrete wall of the tunnel and Robert cringed, gritting his teeth, as the sound resonated in his ears.
“This isn’t sympathy, Quinn… It’s me trying to offer you some comfort…”
What if Takami could heal her…? But what would he want from her in return?
Robert took the girl in his arms. He felt her body stiffen for a moment as his hand cradled her head, then she relaxed and leant into him. He could feel her shaking and her breath came out in hiccups accompanied by tears. He clenched his jaw, his stomach churning with his uncertainty.
What do they want from her? How could he know if he was doing the right thing? Where had they taken Misaki? If he didn’t deliver the girl, how would he save her?
He felt sick in his bones. Over the girl’s shoulder he could see the caucasian figures taking an interest in some graffiti at the edge of the tunnel, just outside of the shadows.
“Do you want to see where I work?” he asked the question while trying to fight off the vomit that threatened the pit of his stomach. The lie made him feel revolting, but even the slightest chance that Takami might save her seemed like enough. It was the only option that could possibly result in some kind of valuable future. Quinn safe and being healed, and Misaki safe and back with Robert.
Quinn sniffed loudly and opened her purse to find a tissue to blow her nose. Through tear-red eyes, she smiled up at him and gave a small nod.
“I would love to, Robert…” He felt his heart breaking. His mouth ached with nervous and frustrated anxiety.
What if he was wrong? What if it was all wrong?
