Shinjuku, forty-seventh floor of the Keio Plaza Hotel. The presidential suite.
The room was wrecked.
Dark brown stains soaked the hand-woven Persian wool carpet. Bottles of Romanée-Conti, each worth over a hundred thousand yen, lay smashed among shards of crystal flutes on the basalt tiles.
The twenty-nine-inch color TV played on mute. A late-night variety show flashed frantically in the dim suite, its colors flickering across the oil paintings on the walls.
"Where's the woman?! I paid a million! Why isn't the escort here yet?!"
Matsuura was shirtless, his chest a mass of fat and inked with a Kansai dragon tattoo. He yanked the telephone cord and roared into the receiver, spit flecking the black plastic.
"If you don't send someone in five minutes, I'll burn your place down!"
Click! He slammed the receiver hard enough to crack the casing. Snatching a stack of ten-thousand-yen bills from the coffee table, he hurled them into the air like trash.
"I've got money! Money!!!"
The green bills printed with Fukuzawa Yukichi's face fluttered down. A few landed squarely on Kudo's face.
The former section chief sat sprawled among broken glass and food scraps. He'd tied his silk tie — that old middle-class badge — around his forehead like a drunken headband. His bare feet, filthy from back-alley grime, rested on the expensive carpet.
He clutched a handful of sea urchin flown in from Hokkaido and shoved it into his mouth. Orange-yellow juice ran down his chin and soaked his open collar, stinking of the sea.
"Hahahaha! Eat! I've never had roe this expensive in my life!" Kudo cackled as he chewed, tears cutting tracks through the dirt on his face. "Five million in company funds? Gone! Tonight I'm burning the entire expense account!"
He grabbed a champagne bottle from the table and dumped it over his head. The icy liquid ran through his thinning hair and made him shudder.
"Refreshing! Being a dead man with no debts is fucking refreshing!"
Katayama slumped in the armchair by the floor-to-ceiling window. He'd ripped off his bandages and left the pale bone of his right hand exposed. With his good left hand, he used his teeth to pry the cork from a bottle of high-proof vodka.
He raised it in a mock toast to the city sprawling beyond the glass.
"Forty thousand points? Let it climb! Let all of Tokyo blow up with it!"
He tipped his head back and poured most of the liquor over his scalp. The vodka mixed with mud as it ran down, seeping into the wound where his finger had been cut off. The alcohol burned like fire.
Katayama's face twisted, but his laughter only turned shriller.
He stood, unsteady, and pressed the mangled stump of his right hand against the cold glass.
Screeeech—
Blood dragged across the pane with a sound that set teeth on edge.
Stroke by stroke, he wrote crooked Greek letters. He was using his own blood to re-derive the model that had cost him everything.
"Delta… Gamma… Theta…" Katayama muttered, tracing the blood-red symbols. "All the math was right… everything was in range… but Wall Street pulled the plug… Hahahaha!"
Bang!
The suite's heavy door kicked open without warning and slammed against the wall buffer. Cold air from the hallway rushed in, killing the smell of liquor.
The noise stopped dead.
Matsuura quit shouting. Kudo stopped chewing. Katayama froze with his bloody finger on the glass. All three turned toward the entrance.
A woman stumbled through the doorway onto the thick carpet.
Her fitted, dark Chanel tweed suit was stained with vomit and alcohol. In her right hand she clutched a half-finished martini. Her red-soled heels wobbled on the soft wool.
She was blind drunk, eyes unfocused, with no idea whose room she'd walked into.
Matsuura's bloodshot eyes lit up. He scrambled to his feet on all fours.
Drunk past reason, he took one look at her — disheveled but still carrying that cold, elegant aura — and assumed she was the high-end escort the hotel had sent up.
"Hahahaha! Finally!" Matsuura lumbered toward her. He yanked a crumpled wad of ten-thousand-yen notes from his pocket and threw them in her face. "Come drink with me! I'm booking you all night!"
The bills snapped against her pale cheeks and scattered like green snow across the entryway.
The woman blinked, sluggish. Her gaze drifted from the money on the floor to Matsuura's bulk, then to Kudo rolling on the ground, then to Katayama's blood-smeared hands.
Five seconds passed.
The pride of a senior manager at a foreign investment bank, the prestige of an Ivy League degree, the poise she'd used to command rooms from Midtown skyscrapers — the "elite self-respect" that had carried her half her life — shattered when she saw the cash and these men who looked like animals.
Her shoulders started to shake.
"Haha… Hahahaha!" She broke into manic, self-destructive laughter. Tears sprang to her eyes from the force of it.
She kicked her right foot back hard.
Thud.
Her expensive heel hit the entryway paneling.
Barefoot, she stepped over the scattered bills and wove her way to the coffee table. She dropped onto the leather sofa, not caring that grease and alcohol stained her skirt.
She grabbed a fresh bottle of whiskey.
Tipping it slightly, she poured the amber liquor into the crystal glass Matsuura had been using.
"Boss, your drink."
She lifted the glass and gave Matsuura a bright, completely hollow corporate smile. She'd accepted the absurd role. On a night built for ruin, status meant nothing.
Katayama leaned against the window, vodka frozen halfway to his mouth.
On the glass, half a blood-red Sigma — Σ — remained.
He squinted at the woman's ruined makeup and the remnants of her business suit. When the light caught her profile, the madness in his eyes gave way to awful clarity.
"Hahahaha! Look! Everyone look!"
Katayama pointed at her, laughing until he doubled over. A coughing fit broke his laughter. He clutched his stomach, caught his breath, and sneered in a shrill voice.
"A senior client manager at Salomon Brothers! Ms. Zaki!"
He dragged his feet toward the sofa, eyes lit with sick excitement and contempt.
"Cover girl for last month's *Toyo Keizai*… 'Wall Street's most beautiful spokeswoman in Tokyo.' Ha… I went to your recruiting talk at Keio University! You were on stage teaching us how to use leverage to move the world…"
He stood over the coffee table, looking down at Zaki, laughing until tears ran down his face.
"An investment bank VP, pouring drinks for a contractor and a construction foreman!"
"Hey, lady! Your hidden leverage blew up too, right? The client funds you were holding vanished without a sound? You're trash with nothing left! You're just like us!"
Zaki listened to his grating laughter.
She gripped the martini bottle, fingertips tracing the glass.
"Heh… hehe."
She tipped her head back and gave a self-mocking laugh thick with alcohol. She looked at Katayama with that same flirtatious, ruined smile, like she didn't care that he'd ripped her cover off.
"Yeah… I'm trash."
She laughed and drank straight from the bottle.
The liquor burned down her throat.
As she swallowed, the smile cracked. It peeled away from the corners of her eyes, piece by piece.
Tears mixed with smeared mascara and cut two black tracks down her pale cheeks.
"The Tokin financial product," Zaki's voice went calm, and it killed Katayama's laughter instantly. "The underlying assets blew up. The executives cut the capital guarantees and flew to Hawaii with the cash."
She looked down at her hands, trembling from the alcohol.
"They left my signature. All the authorization forms… they have my name."
Zaki's lips pulled into a joyless, bitter smile.
"Tomorrow morning, the Special Investigation Department issues the arrest warrant. My photo will be front page, local news."
She turned her head, eyes passing over Matsuura with his empty glass, Kudo with his muddy face, landing finally on Katayama's mutilated hand.
"Hundreds of clients' principal… turned to ash."
Her voice dropped, a tremor underneath.
"I pushed my parents' pension and my high school teacher's retirement into the fire myself."
Zaki's confession was like a bucket of ice water. It doused every last bit of frenzy in the suite.
That's right. We're just wreckage. Why haven't we died yet?
The comedian on TV kept falling and getting up in silence.
But the air in the room hit absolute zero.
Matsuura froze with his glass midair. The fat on his face twitched. He stared blankly at Zaki.
Kudo stopped chewing. His mouth hung open and a piece of soy-sauce stained raw beef slipped out and hit the carpet.
Katayama dropped the hand he'd been pointing. He stumbled back two steps and collapsed into the armchair. The vodka bottle slipped from his grip, glugging into the carpet fibers.
Four people from four different worlds.
A real-estate mogul who'd controlled two billion in capital. A middle manager clinging to respectability. A self-proclaimed genius grad. A female finance elite who ran in celebrity circles.
They were the same.
Collapsed leverage. Embezzlement. Options burned to zero. Trust scams.
They finally saw it. To the cold financial machine, they weren't even prey. Their "personal tragedies" were just standard outputs of the same scam.
They were drops of used oil, squeezed dry and discarded by the machine.
The room went silent.
No more complaints. No more weeping. No comfort.
A strange, tacit understanding rose between the four of them — the kind that only forms between the dying.
Fighting was pointless.
Their hearts were dead. All that was left was disposing of the bodies.
Zaki took a deep breath.
She opened her diamond-studded handbag and pulled out a bright red Chanel lipstick.
She twisted it up, applied it crookedly while turning toward the entryway.
She bent down and picked up the two red-soled heels she'd kicked off.
The lipstick left a red smear across her face. She didn't care. She tossed it aside and walked with the shoes to the corner by the floor-to-ceiling window.
She set the right shoe against the left, toes pointing out, placed them precisely together.
Kudo slowly got up from the carpet.
He walked to the sofa and picked up his navy custom trench coat, stained with alley mud.
With filthy hands, he smoothed every crease in the collar. He folded it in half, then in half again, edges perfectly aligned.
He walked to Zaki's shoes and laid the folded coat flat on the clean wood floor.
Matsuura ripped off his loose tie and tossed it on the coffee table.
He bent down, pulled off his Italian leather dress shoes, and set them beside the trench coat. Barefoot, he stepped onto the warm wood. His massive frame moved like a black tower toward the window.
Katayama stood from the armchair.
With his left hand, he dug the gold S.T. Dupont lighter from his pocket. He walked to Kudo's coat, bent down, and set the cold metal lighter on top of the fabric.
The four of them had finished their last rites.
Zaki reached the window. She grabbed the heavy metal handle with her right hand and shoved.
Whoosh—
The glass door slid open.
Freezing winter rain and 170-meter-high wind blasted into the suite.
Warmth, alcohol, the smell of people — the gale shredded it all.
Wind whipped Zaki's short hair.
She didn't hesitate. Barefoot, she stepped onto the terrace.
Matsuura, Kudo, and Katayama followed in silence.
Four people.
Lined up.
They stepped onto the rain-slick tiles and stood at the edge of the low wall.
Wind tore at their clothes. Rain streamed down their faces, blurring everything.
Below, bizarre and blazing Tokyo waited like a monster with its mouth open.
"See you in hell, everyone."
Zaki smoothed the hair the wind threw across her temple. Her tone was flat.
"I'll buy the first round down there."
Matsuura's rough voice got eaten by the wind and rain.
"Old man, you got money down there?" Katayama laughed, contemptuous.
Kudo said nothing.
The four of them. At once.
Leaned forward.
Toes left the concrete. Their weight crossed the wall.
Falling.
Weightlessness hollowed their guts. The gale became a shriek in their ears, then eerie silence.
One hundred seventy meters. Four and a half seconds.
Time stretched and collapsed into a long, warped dream.
Building facades blurred into a gray waterfall rushing upward. Below, Shinjuku's neon sea melted on their retinas.
Red, blue, purple halos lost all boundaries. Colors twisted and spun in the black rain, becoming a huge, viscous vortex rushing up at them.
Physical shapes collapsed.
The whole city's lights crushed together in weightlessness, turning into glowing shards flowing up into the sky.
Blinding orbs filled their vision until they swallowed body and mind whole.
…Then silence.
Winter rain kept washing the cold asphalt.