lights in Pearl Harbor. Depression turns Outdoors indoors. Dying in here.
Werewolf was at reception by the time I'd eaten and wandered back to Hotel Aloha. The scarlet carnation in the semen-cloudy vase had rotted to tampon maroon. My last-but-onc 'light, so I had little to lose by getting out your photo and telling Werewolf I had a couple of questions. My hairy hotelier squinted. 'So that Jap's why you're hanging around like a wedged turd. Well, ain't got nothing to say about him, 'cept I wish to sweet God he'd ended his misery in someone else's hotel. The paperwork he cost me! The favors I had to call in to hush it up.' My request that Werewolf hand over those possessions which he'd 'forgotten' to give to the police produced a row of browned fangs. 'What're you saying?' Theft from a suicide is still theft is what I'm saying; that I knew about the knife; that I wanted it back. Werewolf chose a lookey here, asshole voice. 'If I had anything belonging to that faggoty half Jap'-he flicked your photo and I fought an urge to ram a pencil up his nostril and through his brain-'I'd probably drop it down the nearest sewer.' I held his gaze but explained that your relatives would pay a reasonable sum for the knife's safe return. It has no monetary value, but it was a family heirloom. Werewolf went all oh? 'A `family heirloom'? Well, bless my bleeding heart, that changes everything. Then I'd definitely drop it down the nearest sewer. Will you tell Faggoty Jap's relatives that from me, during this dark and difficult time?'
The pyramid of mirror letters in 404 had faded away. Logic administered bromides: staying in a hotel where you died just two weeks ago, searching for another suicide's blade, wedding just around the comer… little wonder I was this wired up. I hadn'thaven't-gotten over what you did. Disbelief was my first reaction. You'd just closed a deal worth as much as Princess Diana's damaged diamond Rolex, second hand forever twitching on 8:17. More than the telegraph pole James Dean drove into. Mishima's knife would make us both wealthy for two or three years. You were the newest member of a balloonist's syndicate. Please, not a suicide. But the policewoman talked me through the coroner's verdict: the message on your mirror, going down going down going down, confirmed as yours by the state graphologist, to your prints on the wire cutter used to access the roof, ten other proofs, left little room for doubt. Nervous collapse? Compounded by your Mishima complex? But no. Doubt grows into counterfact in the tiniest crack.
'Give it back!' Percussive, savage, desperate. My limbs were sticky from sleeping in clothes. The shouter had been quiet for a few nights. I thought he'd left. 'Give it back!' I called back, 'Who are you? Are you okay?' No answer. I listened, I listened, I listened. I got up, crept outside and pressed my ear against 403. Silence. Against 405. Silence. Lights off in both rooms. On not quite a whim, I crept up to Wei's room and pressed my ear against her room. Her breathing? Or my own? Why did I feel that sense of being watched? Hotel Aloha has no CCTV A black moth hinged its wings. Uneasy, I went back to my room and turned on the TV with the sound right down.
Saturday evening's Runaway Horses was fuggy with laughter, booming reggae and Asian-American youth in bloom. In my last clean Gucci shirt I took the very last seat at the bar and Shingo slid me my nearly last Sapporo in Waikiki. This time tomorrow, I'd be back in Yerbas Buenas with a business to try to rebuild. The Yukio Mishima Knife Book would be a bad passage in a disastrous chapter, but the main narrative would go on. A woman right by me cleared her throat and said, 'I never thought you were marine. You're too stick-insect. They'd throw you out.' Well, thank you very much, I smiled at the Filipina from Bar Wardrobe. She stepped over my irony. 'I drank too many the other day, okay? Spoke too many too. What you learned, shush, is secret, please.' Therapeutic to spill your guts occasionally, I assured her, and promised I'd never repeat a word. But my silence could be bought only by her name. Grace, she told me, and Grace took my Sapporo Black so I ordered another. Some loud Aussies across the bar shot me looks: rebuttees, I guessed. 'So you live on Oahu?, asked Grace. 'You a businessman or a tourist or what?' I surrendered to the seductive quasi-truth and told her I run a special business, one that never advertises, which obtains singular artifacts that are otherwise unobtainable. Grace was sharp. She asked how we got clients. Introduction only, I told her, unable to resist giving her a business card. She read, ''What You Do Not Know You Want.' That all?' I nodded, and told her I was on Oahu trying to locate a historic weapon for a wealthy client. Grace was fascinated. 'Is all legal, your business?' I told her, 'If we exercise discretion, the question doesn't apply.' My codealer, I explained, had apparently entrusted this item to the exowner of Runaway Horses… Who,' Grace filled in the blank, 'is Runaway Barman now. Is hilarious joke, yes?' Hilarious, yes.
'Death isn't some faraway land, okay, at the end of time,' Grace insisted several bottles later. I had no inkling how we got onto the subject. 'Death is the white lines down the highway, okay, in your cutlery drawer, okay, in bottles in bathroom cabinets, inside cells of your body. Death, hey, we're made of the stuff. Death is the pond; we the living are the fish. So to answer your question, yes, of course, the dead are everywhere, and yes, they watch us. Like TV. When we interest them.' Women love being asked if they are clairvoyant, so I did so. 'Men uluuy.r ask that,' frowned Grace, 'but intuition is just seeing and listening, is not being blind because it does not agree with culture or fashion or desires. Intuition is not mystical.' Believing that the dead swarm around the living sounded pretty mystical to me, I suggested, if not morbid. 'Buying and selling suicide weapons of your Japanese writer is not morbid?' Yes, Vulture, loose lips sink ships, but I haven't wanted a woman as much as I wanted Grace since you-know-when. 'Such a knife will only attract devil's eye, no? Is obvious!' I said, Would she consider continuing our discussion in a less public venue? 'Okay, sure, I consider.' But when I got back from the bathroom, Jesus Mary Poppins Christ, her bar stool was straining under a German as big as a grizzly. Gone, shrugged Shingo. Sorry. I ordered a last beer to show those smirking Australians but dealt the bur a series of vicious toe pokes and hoped that Grace intuited each one.
Wei was drawing her self-portrait from a mirror and munching coffee-crusted macadamia nuts. 'No, you can't have the picture,' she said, handing me a piece of paper with a string of digits on it. 'A woman called. Five minutes ago.' The number was unfamiliar. 'Not your Nightingale who sings every evening,' Wei said, making me wonder if she listened in, 'another.' Hadn't the caller left a name? Wei shook her head. 'Didn't you ask what she wanted?' Wei snorted like a sly pony and for one second I wanted to crack all her bony bones like biscuits in bags and see her sly smile then. Back outside, I tapped in the mystery number. Grace answered. She'd made me look pretty stupid in Runaway Horses, I told her. 'You recover okay. Listen, I made one-two phone calls. If you still want that knife, I know someone can maybe help.' Of course I still wanted that knife. Grace was coming to Hotel Aloha now. Through the glass, Wei watched me, fingers twizzling her braided hairband. I knew that look. Female jealousy is rich cream.
'Quicker to walk than to find cab.' Grace led me at a brisk clip down poorly lit backstreets. She swatted away my requests for information, saying only that I was free to turn back anytime I wanted. None of the weak stars were familiar from my childhood astronomy. Was I being led into a trap like that time in Cambodia' Perhaps, perhaps. Through a doorway half-blocked with rusting junk we climbed five concrete flights, lit by lamps swarming with black moths. No view but other housing blocks and washing strung across balconies. Grace stopped before a nameless door. Monkeywrench marks scarred the frame. To my astonishment she kissed me on the lips. Not erotically, not brashly, not shyly. Surely not pityingly? 'What was that for?' Grace pressed the bell and ran back down the stairwell. Jesus Bodysnatched Christ-but before I could call out, a Japanese guy had stepped through into the milked moonlight, uttering my name, with your crucifix-it had to be, there's only one-on his hairless torso. Was I in room 404, dreaming this, or stuck in one of Dwight's fag-queen home movies? Certainly the youth was coffee-advert handsome, ponytailed, judo trousers, but he was stitched and patched from a very recent, pretty serious beating. 'So you're here.' His English was as American as it was Japanese. 'Shingo told me you'd been into Runaway Horses. I, like… meant to call you'-he gingerly indicated his bruises-'but my creditors, like… changed the terms of repayment.' His name came to me and I said it: Nozomu. Nozomu asked how I'd found him. Police sirens wailed from the dark mass under Diamond Head. Grace showed me here, I
