Her Nightly Embrace Read online

  In less than three hours of tracking her online footprints, I had a profile ready.

  If developmental psychology had been my field, I could have written a paper about how kids grew up using pop culture to explore and moderate their identities, and how comics and cartoons from Japan had been used by kids to navigate and come to terms with their gender identities and sexuality. That was what I noticed when I was teaching secondary school. Of course, at Golden Sentinels, Roger wasn’t always interested in the hows or whys, merely the results.

  “Shazia Ibrahim is a lesbian,” I said. “That’s a major reason for her doing a runner from her traditional arranged marriage.”

  “Are you positive?” Cheryl asked. “She could just be experimenting. She’s still young enough to be fluid.”

  “Normally, I’d be more cautious about my conclusions, but it all adds up: She’s a big fan of science fiction and fantasy books and shows that featured prominent gay and lesbian characters. She’s a big fan of the Sailor Moon manga and anime, and that series has a big following among lesbian fans because two of the heroines in it are a couple. She’s also a fan of Rose of Versailles, a historical manga set in pre-revolutionary France whose heroine is a cross-dresser who commands the palace guards and is admired by both men and women. Her blog likes to talk about anime and manga that feature lesbian characters. She’s huge on yuri, which is manga about love stories between girls. When we looked at her Facebook and her Instagram account, the photos were of her with a lot of female friends, and several of them were lesbians and members of the LGBT community. She’s a member of several LGBT fan groups for science fiction, fantasy, and anime. One woman is in more photos than the others, and often posing with her. Adelaide Robertson. My bet is Adelaide Robertson is her girlfriend. They’re in love, and wherever Shazia’s run off to, it’s with Adelaide. Adelaide is probably paying the way for both of them.”

  “So what we have here is The Case of the Runaway Lesbian Otaku?” Benjamin said.

  “Oh, please!” Olivia said. “A female otaku is called a fujoshi.”

  Off our blank looks, Olivia rolled her eyes.

  “It’s Japanese slang for ‘dirty girl.’ Female nerds.”

  Yup, Roger really did hire us for our specialized knowledge.

  “Right, then,” Olivia said. “I’ll start checking for air tickets under both their names.”

  “Do we tell her parents she’s gay?” I asked.

  “I strongly advise,” Roger said, “that we refrain from mentioning that to them.”

  THREE

  We looked at Adelaide Robertson’s social media footprints, as well, to find out who she was and what she was like. She was twenty-five, Australian, a few years older than Shazia, came from Melbourne. She was an academic specializing in Japanese literature. She met Shazia on a yuri fan site where they discussed the nuances of Japanese high school honorifics and etiquette. This went on for three years and they must have taken their conversations to email and private chats. They fell in love. You could tell just from the way they spoke to each other on the public forums as they discussed the latest manga and anime. We cross-referenced the other members of the message board they spoke to, determined which ones they were friends with. Found their Instagram accounts where we saw the same photos they took with Shazia at the anime conventions. Olivia dug up all their addresses. Half of them lived in campus dorms. Most of the others lived with their parents. They could have provided support to Shazia and Adelaide when they decided to run away. We decided to find Adelaide’s address but found out that she had given up her flat and left a few days after Shazia’s disappearance.

  Olivia found two one-way air tickets bound for Tokyo issued to Adelaide Robertson and Shazia Ibrahim. I won’t go into detail how Olivia got that information, since it involved hacking, which was, I shouldn’t need to say this, illegal.

  Mark and I presented our findings to Roger and Cheryl.

  “I shall tell the Ibrahims of this,” Roger said sagely, smug in his certainty that his boys and girls would have results. “What next?”

  “It’s been five days, and they haven’t left Japan. We haven’t found any plane tickets for leaving. Adelaide is there for a literature conference. Benjamin also did a search and found that this week was also Comiket, the biggest comic convention in Tokyo. Shazia and Adelaide are very likely to be there.”

  “Then we can probably find them there.”

  “Hold on, boss,” Mark said. “Over half a million people go to Comiket. And in a space the size of several football stadiums. That’s assuming Shazia isn’t wearing a costume or a mask. Sure, a Pakistani and a white girl will stick out there, but it’s still a tall order if you don’t know where they’re going to be. It’s a massive hall.”

  “There’s also the fact that Mark and I, being non-Japanese, will stick out on the streets of Tokyo outside of the convention, and if Shazia is on the lookout for people her parents might send to find her, she’ll see us coming. And if she sees me, a fellow South Asian, coming near her where there are hardly any of us, it’ll likely set off her alarm bells that her family have sent us after her. She’d be right.”

  “Are the Ibrahims willing to spare no expense on this, boss?”

  “They said they were,” Roger ventured, cautiously.

  “Even so,” Cheryl said. “I don’t think we should throw good money after bad. We don’t want to waste our time sending people over.”

  Mark leaned his head out Roger’s door.

  “Sorry, Benjamin!” he cried. “You’re not going to Tokyo!”

  “Aw!” Benjamin cried in disappointment. He was hoping to stop by Akihabara and stock up on tech toys, surveillance equipment, and hentai Blu-Rays.

  “Call Golden Sentinels Tokyo,” Roger said. “See if Takeshi Ito is available and have his people do the legwork.”

  Yes, Roger had set up an office in Tokyo. Technically, it was more like a franchise or subsidy deal. Takeshi Ito was already a PI over there, and he and Roger went way back. Roger with his silver tongue charmed Ito-san into agreeing to become a partner in the Golden Sentinels brand, which enabled Roger to have another office in his international network and for Ito-san to not have to deal with the tedious tax paperwork while also expanding into a full-on upscale firm.

  “Right, then,” Mark said. “Looks like I’ll be either staying up late or waking up early to phone Tokyo.”

  Since Mark was the primary on this case, I could leave it to him and get on with the rest of my life.

  FOUR

  I found Lord Vishnu and Lord Shiva reenacting their fight from The Mahabharata outside the hospital. It was a show for my benefit. They didn’t transform, merely charged at each other and wrestled, throwing each other across the car park.

  Julia, of course, didn’t see them. As long as I didn’t react, she wouldn’t know they were there.

  They looked like two blokes from a council estate having a scrap, except they were, well, gods, blue skin and all. Vishnu in denim and jeans, Shiva in a bomber jacket and track pants. At least they didn’t transform into their various avatars. They kept the fight totally street.

  As I recall, in one version of this fight, Shiva lost on purpose. He did it so that he could absolve himself of burdens and responsibilities he had grown weary of. In return, he granted Vishnu boons for helping him save face.

  Why this story? Why now?

  My dad had told me this story when I was a kid. He had reminded me again when I was doing my religious studies.

  I kept walking, did my best not to look at the gods, even if they were staging this fight for me. I really did not want to interact. First, Kali calling me about laundry, now this. I didn’t know what was worse, getting cryptic messages and clues or being told outright what they were getting at.

  Christ, I hoped this wasn’t a sign that my dad was dead. I popped a pill as we walked into the hospital. Julia knew right then that I was seeing gods again.

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “They’re ju
st being drama queens.”

  Dad was out of surgery but still heavily sedated.

  I saw Buddha standing over Dad’s sleeping form while we sat around him making bad jokes. Buddha was awfully chill, wearing denim, checking his phone as he watched over my dad. Mum took an instant liking to Julia and spent the evening grilling her to get the dirt on me. That took her attention away from Sanjita, so the two of them weren’t bickering for once. We didn’t talk about her wedding. We didn’t need to. It was inevitable at this point, especially when I had the loan shark debt to prove it. I couldn’t help comparing our situation with Shazia Ibrahim’s. Vivek continued to ask me about my job and my dealings with the great and the good.

  “I don’t really see much great or good about the clients. They’re mainly just rich,” I said.

  Buddha tapped away serenely on his phone. I didn’t want to know what the gods tweeted about me.

  FIVE

  Mark was practically living in the office, receiving updates from Ito-san in Tokyo. His people had found the hotel Adelaide Robertson and Shazia Ibrahim had been staying at for her conference. They made a pilgrimage to Akihabara, went around the city doing the tourist thing, and most of all, they went to Comiket, where Adelaide and Shazia posed for photos with cosplayers dressed as their favorite characters. Ito-san’s people even managed to film them on their phones and send the footage to our servers in London for review. They just looked like two people from the West doing the otaku tour. Ito-san’s people even managed to get a list of the manga they bought, having gotten right next to them in line at the convention. Ito-san’s people were geeks themselves, so they didn’t have to pretend to be undercover. They even got friendly with Adelaide and Shazia and took photos with them.

  “They seem like very nice girls,” Ito-san and his people kept saying.

  Mark told them to continue watching them, and not to confront them or talk to them about Shazia’s parents wanting her back. We needed to know where they were going next after they left Tokyo.

  Ito-san had his own IT guy, some kid named Kawashita, who created a private page on the popular otaku message board Baka-chan and managed to crowdsource their surveillance of Adelaide and Shazia to a few hundred eager forum members. For the next few days, members of Baka-chan followed them and posted photos of the two of them as they went on another shopping trip for doujin manga in Akihabara, took a day trip to Roppongi, and enjoyed their holiday, totally oblivious to the hundreds of otaku discreetly filming and photographing them on their phones and posting their findings online for us to review.

  “Baka means ‘idiot’ in Japanese,” Olivia said, helpfully.

  “Of course it does.” Mark smiled.

  Olivia kept tabs on Adelaide’s credit cards and pinged a pair of tickets from Tokyo to Amsterdam. She had already hacked Adelaide’s email and found correspondence with a Dutch landlord for a short lease on a flat there to begin at the start of the month. That date, just a few days away, coincided with Adelaide and Shazia’s flight to Amsterdam.

  “Cheryl,” Mark said. “Can you book us some tickets to Amsterdam, please?”

  Easy as that.

  It wasn’t very often that we got a heads-up on what our subjects were planning or where they were going, so we had an edge. Mark took me, Julia, Ken, and Clive to Amsterdam to wait for Adelaide and Shazia to show up in town.

  So we found Shazia Ibrahim in rude health and even ruder sex. Or rather, Julia did. Shazia was living with Adelaide Robertson in a modest flat in Westerpark. Julia shadowed them for a bit, took turns with Ken and Clive. They all wore cams that Benjamin had given them so Mark and I could watch on our phones from our hotel room. We’d decided I shouldn’t be the one to follow Adelaide and Shazia because she might think I was someone her parents had sent to come after her and run off.

  “Alelaide has been showing Shazia the sights, especially the LGBT side. Shazia’s taken to it like a fish to water. I overheard them discussing wedding plans,” Julia said.

  Ken and Clive posed as a gay couple on holiday, with Julia as their friend. It was funny, since Ken and Clive would never even express their relationship in public back home in the UK. They made a joke at the Sexmuseum. Shazia blushed and laughed, and started hanging out from there, holidaymakers making friends.

  “God, they’re really so normal,” Julia said.

  Back at our hotel, I could see Julia, Ken, and Clive were on the wrong foot. They’d been so used to tailing awful people that to come across a pair of women we usually thought of as “civilians” made them uneasy. We reported our progress to Roger, but Mark was unusually circumspect.

  “How shall we go about this?” he asked.

  “Her parents are longtime clients,” Roger said. “So spare no expense. They want her back.”

  Mark drew up his plan, unusually quiet and without a quip or glee.

  Ken and Clive were set to survey the area around Adelaide’s flat for the best snatch points. We could easily score a van with untraceable license plates. Mark didn’t have to bring any drugs; he already knew where to score the right ones locally that would keep her docile for the trip back to London.

  “So we’re a snatch squad now?” I said. “We’re going to abduct a young woman and smuggle her out of the country and back to the UK. It’s not the lawbreaking that I have a problem with here. It’s that we’re ruining this young woman’s life. We’re delivering her into a forced marriage. You don’t have a problem with this?”

  “It’s the job,” muttered Mark without much conviction.

  “And how do we know Shazia won’t end up the victim of an honor killing?” I said. “Once her unhappiness causes her to come out to her family? I don’t know which would be worse, before or after she’s forced to marry. It’s not just a miserable life we’ll be delivering her to, what if a family member or an in-law finds how different she is intolerable and decides to kill her for it? Do we really want to be directly responsible for that?”

  I let that sink in. Nobody said anything for a long time.

  “We ain’t doin’ it,” Ken said, finally.

  “Sorry?” Mark said.

  “These two ain’t a couple of criminals we would happily grab to extradite back to Blighty,” Clive said. “This don’t make us any better than human traffickers.”

  “I’ll warn Shazia if you decide to go ahead with this,” Julia said. “I will personally help them get away if I have to.”

  Bloody hell, we had a full-on mutiny here. I often wondered where they’d draw the line.

  Mark looked at us for a long time. I waited for him to offer a clever comeback. Instead, he just offered a sad smile.

  “Nice one,” he said without irony.

  Then he just got up and walked out of the room.

  SIX

  I found Mark by the canal, working away on his fifth spliff. That was quick.

  “Mark, are you hiding?”

  “Too right. I hit a wall on this one, mate.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just like back when I was on the officer track in the Met. Flying high, golden boy. They pegged me for a future commissioner. Then you get to what they expect you to do to show you’re one of them. Join the boys’ club. Fuck over some civilians and climb over them, get rewarded. That’s why I chucked my promising career and future. Now we’re at a very similar impasse.”

  “You haven’t done anything yet.”

  “That’s coming. And I can’t do it, mate. Why do you think I get myself marinated in Mary Jane all the time? It’s the only thing that makes life in this veil of tears bearable.”

  “You really are a philosopher of despair,” I said. “I would never have pegged you for a copper when I first met you.”

  “If we do our job here, we’re going to fuck up that girl’s life, Ravi. Her heart will be shattered, and we’ll be the ones to watch the shards rain down on the floor before she ends up in a shithole of a marriage.”

  “We could just not approach her, tell Julia, Ken
, and Clive we’re going home. They don’t like this any more than we do,” I said.

  “Then we don’t have a result. It’s a failure. Roger will sack us and hire someone else who has no problems doing the job.”

  Perhaps the worst part of this was that if we did decide to go ahead and snatch Shazia from her new home and her new life and somehow smuggle her across several borders back to London, I had no doubt we would be able to pull it off. In my short time with the agency, we’d dug up dirt on people, pulled dirty tricks that fucked up their lives, their careers, messed up their business deals, but those were people who were already in these wars of attrition the rich and powerful got up to with each other. Shazia wasn’t part of this world. She was an innocent being used as a pawn, and we all knew it.

  “Mark, do you want me to take over as lead? Take responsibility?”

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  “Take the load off you. There may be another angle to play that doesn’t require blowing up Shazia Ibrahim’s life.”

  “What have you got in mind?”

  “Negotiate. Not with the Ibrahims, but with Samir Langhani, the prospective groom.”

  “Think you can pull it off?”

  “I’ll talk to him as one Asian to another. He’s not in love with her. It’s all a business transaction between their families. Maybe I can appeal to his better nature, work something out.”

  “Go on, then.”

  “I’m taking the first flight back to London. Tell everyone to stand by.”

  “This is why I need to be off my face all the time, mate,” Mark said. “Just as well I never moved up to heroin.”