Floating City by Eric van Lustbader

Author:Eric van Lustbader [Lustbader, Eric van]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781784080358
Publisher: Head Of Zeus
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Blue smoke like mist.

Copper shadows curling toward the ceiling, stirred by music from the semicircle of matte black speakers surmounting a mammoth karaoke machine. The computerized machine was fitted with a chromium grille so that it looked like the front end of an old American car. Its aggressively retro look was currently the rage in Japan. In three months that all-important look would change, out would go this karaoke machine, in would come a new one.

A small man in a business suit was attempting to sing “Be My Love” as he ran the flat of his hand along his temples to sleek his silver-streaked hair back like that of the moving image of Jerry Vale behind him.

As Nicholas and Tachi entered Ningyo-ro, the ultramodern nightclub in Kyoto that V. I. Pavlov had visited, they were engulfed by the tremoloed sounds blasting from the karaoke’s speakers. They stood, transfixed for a moment by the shimmering atmosphere, tangible as the cacophony of a construction site at full bore. The combination of dark colors and chrome rails and seatbacks, all lit by a thousand pin-spots, gave the room its own outré form of shadow and light. Beyond the main room was a smaller counterpart lit with black light. Shades of the seventies.

Ningyo-ro, the Doll Pavilion, was crowded, filled with smoke and gimlet-eyed Japanese all cross-referencing their contacts in industry, government, the bureaucracy, and the Yakuza. All these sectors were inextricably entwined in an elaborate institutional dance of favors met and payoffs proffered, intimidation exerted and face saved, that invariably bewildered any Westerner exposed to even a small part of it.

Nicholas and Tachi moved slowly through the crowd, making their way to the bar at the far end of the room. It was constructed of frosted glass, lit from below by tubes of fluorescent light, which threw into high relief the carvings of female No figures seen through a forest of bubbles not unlike those in old-fashioned Christmas lights or sixties Wurlitzer jukeboxes.

As they neared this deliberate film-noir artifact, Nicholas watched a slender waitress as she delivered drinks to a table of thickset Japanese businessmen. She looked like a doll in traditional white makeup. They turned their sweat-streaked faces toward her briefly, laughing among themselves. One reached for a beer, and Nicholas saw a thick swath of elaborate irizumi, the tattoos favored by Yakuza.

Nicholas and Tachi ordered Sapporo beers. Another foolish Japanese businessman was trying out his awful Elvis impersonation singing “Viva Las Vegas.” Try as he might, he couldn’t get the hip swivel. It was really quite laughable.

Tachi grunted. “It’s a big ‘if’ as to whether this Zao is here at all.”

“I don’t think so,” Nicholas said. “The Russian was fastidious with his accounting. He kept a receipt for this place. That means if he stayed overnight in Kyoto, he didn’t pay for it.”

“Maybe Zao put him up.”

Nicholas nodded. “Right. It makes sense.”

“But how are we going to find him in this din? It would be like looking in a haystack for a plastic needle.

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