Tokyo Year Zero by David Peace Page A

want now?’ spits Kai. ‘We told them to wait until tomorrow. They shouldn’t be here…’
    I have skimmed the evidence and statements in the files. Ihave seen the hopes and fears in their eyes. I say, ‘Let them look.’
    ‘They can wait,’ says Kai. ‘Until after the autopsies…’
    ‘Why not just let these five look? It might help us…’
    ‘Why?’ he says. ‘They’ll either be lucky or late.’
    ‘Let them look before the autopsy,’ I say again.
    ‘No.’
    ‘What if it was your daughter that was missing?’ I ask him. ‘Would you want to see her after an autopsy?’
    Inspector Kai stops in the corridor now. Inspector Kai says, ‘My daughter is dead. My daughter burned to death in an air-raid shelter. My daughter had no autopsy…’
    Now I shut up. Now I remember. Now it’s too late. Now I say, ‘I am sorry. I’m really sorry…’
    But Kai is away from me now and away from the five mothers, already half-way down the corridor. Down the narrow corridor to the service elevator. To push the elevator button. To wait. To watch the elevator doors open. To step inside. For me to follow him. To push another button. To watch the elevator doors close –
    There are no electric light bulbs in here, for the sake of economy one of the orderlies tells us, and so we ride down in an elevator so dark that I cannot see my hand before my face –
    I think about her all the time
…
    I cannot see the body on the gurney beside me. The body on the gurney parked up against my leg. The body that smells –
    That smells of fruit, that smells of rotten apricots
…
    The elevator stops. The elevator doors open –
    The light returns.
The half-light
. The basement not much brighter than the elevator.
Half-things move in the half-light
. People and insects drawn like magnets towards the few naked bulbs there are.
Half-things
. The people working in their shirtsleeves or their undershirts; the insects feasting on their sweat and their skin, their flesh and their bone.
In the half-light
. This labyrinth of corridors and rooms.
Here where the dead come
. The tiled walls of sinks, of drains.
Where the dead live
. The written warnings of cuts, of punctures.
Here in the half-light
. The orderlies washing and rinsing their hands and their forearms, again and again.
Here. Down here
…
    The autopsy room is along the corridor to the right, beyond the mortuary. There are slippers waiting for our feet, the room itself back beyond a set of glass doors, bomb tape still upon the glass –
    She is coming now. She is coming
…
    Dr. Nakadate is waiting for us outside the autopsy room, before the glass doors, before the tape. Nakadate is finishing his cigarette, smoking it right down to the stub –
    A familiar face, a familiar place
…
    Dr. Nakadate glances up at us. He greets us with a smile. ‘Good morning, detectives.’
    ‘Good morning,’ we reply. ‘We are very sorry we are late.’
    ‘There are no clocks down here,’ says Dr. Nakadate –
    He puts out his cigarette and opens the glass doors to the autopsy room where five junior medical examiners in grubby grey laboratory coats are already gathered round the three autopsy tables and two smaller dissecting tables; the three autopsy tables which stand on the concrete floor in the centre of the room, three elongated octagonal tables made of white marble and of German design, slanted for drainage with raised edges to prevent leakage –
    I itch and I scratch.
Gari-gari
…
    She is coming
…
    The glass doors open again. The first body is brought in from the mortuary under a grey sheet on old wheels. The grey sheet is removed. The body lifted from the gurney –
    In the half-light, she is here
…
    The naked body of the first woman lain out on the table –
    Here where half-things move in the half-light
…
    Her body seems longer, paler. Eyes open, mouth ajar –
    ‘And I am here because of you,’ she says
…
    Her sex is noted. Her age estimated at eighteen –
    ‘Here where there