Once again that loosener of limbs, Love,
bittersweet and inescapable, crawling thing, seizes me
Sappho's Lyre by Diane J. Rayor
Fujiko Mine was born into a family that did not consider itself poor, on account of they could afford to eat meat every week (for one meal, at least), unlike some families they knew who couldn't afford it at all. Those were poor families, her mother would have said, not us.
Of course, they had been poor. They had been dirt poor. They had been secondhand shoes bought three sizes too big so you can grow into them, get slapped for breaking a dish at dinner, too-proud-to-beg poor. Whatever warm family feelings they might have had for each other were strained to the point of fraying by the time Fujiko entered middle school. It's expensive to be poor.
At age 12, Fujiko had looked around herself at the world—at the shining elegant faces in advertisements, at the delicate patisseries where it would have cost as much for one cake as her mother spent on dinner for all four of them, at the sneering faces of girls who had the dumb fortune of being born to a better class of family—and Fujiko Mine had come to a conclusion. Her conclusion was thus: the world was demonstrably not fair. And if the world was not fair, then what was the point in playing fair while the other side went on cheating?
Dumb luck might have given other girls family connections, money, and an easy life, but Fujiko had something most of them didn't.
Fujiko was beautiful.
At age 14, she measured her bust religiously, noting the centimeters of growth and calculating the pressure on her seams. She searched her face for imperfections and rationed out dollops of pale foundation as if the cream was gold. She walked tall, wore her hair short, and stood on tip-toe when she couldn't wedge rags into her shoes to make her taller. Men had already started to notice her years ago, but the extra help never went astray.
People like beautiful people. She watched the way that teachers spoke to her younger sister, who had a crooked mouth and watery eyes. There was a coldness. Entreaties to be reasonable. But when Fujiko begged for an extension on her sister's test on her behalf, twisting her fingers and pouting prettily, her wish was granted. Every request was a little more reasonable when Fujiko requested it. Her sister loved and loathed and resented her.
One day, on her way to school, there had been a man waiting for her a few blocks away. He explained that if she would come to dinner with him, he would buy her a beautiful new jacket for the winter, so that she wouldn't have to wear that old ratty one with the patches.
Of course, she said yes.
He was a very nice man, as far as such men went. He took her shopping. He told her she was beautiful.
"You probably expect a story like that to end in tragedy," Fujiko said, examining her cigarette with vague contempt. "Poor dumb little girl walking into the spider's parlor. What was he hiding, what did he do, how did he hurt her? Well it was fine. Nothing happened. After a few weeks he went back to his sad little housewife in Kanto and lived a normal life, probably never thought about Fujiko Mine again. But I had the jacket."
It had been pale wool, the color of vanilla ice cream, with three big buttons down the front and a ruff of rabbit fur. She twirled over and over in the mirror, feeling like something out of an American magazine, like the wife of their Prime Minister, so elegant and powerful.
There's an impermeable barrier that separates the poor from the rich, and it's all quantified in clothes. The better you dress, the more people believe that you belong. A ragged slob off the street would be turned out of a high-end store before she even knew what was happening, for fear that she'd pocket something nice with her greedy nasty little hands. But the same girl, dressed in a nice coat that obviously cost a salaryman quite a lot of money? Oh, why would she steal? She's obviously doing just fine. So come in, come in, if you have money to spend.
"I worked my way up," she said, and took a drag. Her elegant red nails alighted only delicately on anything she touched. "Shirts first, then dresses. Just slightly above my class. Once you have slightly nicer down, you can shift another class up. But people notice if your shoes are wrong, it's one of the first things to give you away when you don't belong. Shoes are expensive. They're hard to fit in your sleeve. So I worked at the hostess club for months to afford a pair of new leather shoes."
At the hostess club, she met a lot of new types of men. She was too young to work at an above-board club, so she worked at a shadier one instead, the kind where touching was alright. At least up to a point. Some of the girls would call security on a handsy drunk, but Fujiko didn't want their help—she'd deal with it herself, on her own terms. Anyway, a man who was busy grabbing a breast was probably not paying attention to his wallet. And he probably wouldn't remember how much he spent, either.
She'd bought the shoes. She'd thought about quitting. And then she stayed anyway.
"I was good at getting men to buy me drinks," she said, "and I had a system for swapping out empty glasses with half-drunk glasses. I used to hide them in the corner of the cushions. Or under my skirt. I was very good at getting other people to drink."
She ashed her cigarette with a careless flick, her nails like quick shining beetles taking off.
"But it turned out one of those men I'd been getting to drink was a Yakuza mid-boss, the ambitious type, you know? And so, one day this asshole pulls me aside as I'm leaving work—"
Sunglasses at night, that's mostly what she remembered. Long jacket, with the sleeves pushed up to show the edges of tattoos. He'd smiled at her like a tiger on a diet, ever so polite, banked hunger and a tough rolling accent. And he'd explained that a lot of people wanted her client dead.
"I took the job, of course," Fujiko said. "It wasn't like I was attached to the guy, or anything. I let him take me home after a shift a few nights later, and when I had him alone and naked, I opened the door for the man who shot him. The trouble is," and here, she contemplated the glowing cherry between her fingers, "once you've taken blood money, you can never really go back. You know how it is. There were always more men in sunglasses, always more jobs, always more money, and always more things to hide."
She finished off the cigarette with a long, contemplative drag.
"One day you look up, and you realize that little by little, without noticing it, you've become someone who can't go home."
The silk of her dressing gown fluttered translucent and pink against her thigh as she stood. The wide high window glowed verdant with morning over a garden that several men worked quietly and invisibly each week to maintain. It wasn't her house, of course. But the view was nice. She stood in front of the glass, staring out, motionless except for the restless flicking of her fingers at her side. Her shoulders tensed, a cat watching a bird just out of reach.
Blood money. Men in sunglasses who practically spit when they handed over the bag. Derision. Sneers.
Then, of course, there had been Poon. He hadn't called her beautiful. He'd called her clever. Deadly. He'd admired that she was ruthless. He'd opened his hand, his portfolio, his heart, and offered her the chance to be more than set dressing. To take partnership in the business where for so long she'd been only pawn. He was teacher, lover, friend—escape, ensnarement, she had wanted to be him, and yet she had wanted to be more than him. Everything she had was his, and the worst part was that he held nothing back. He gave and gave, and the more he gave the less she had.
They'd been unstoppable. They'd been a cataclysm. They'd been the golden pair. And when he died, he'd gutted her of everything he'd given.
"I liked killing less than the hostess work," she told the window. "But the hours were better."
And then she turned, and smiled a wicked, insouciant smile.
"Of course, those days are long behind me," she purred. "I'm a good girl now."
She dripped like water across the lounge, graceful legs and trailing silk, to climb into the lap of the man who meant to hire her.
"Silly me, how I'm going on. I'm afraid I've quite lost my head around you, Mister…?"
"Lupin," the man said, and his eyes reluctantly tore up from the place where her breasts were pressed to his jacket. "The Third."
"How distinguished," she said, like it meant anything to her. She drew her fingers up along the length of his neck, grazing his ear. His pupils dilated. It didn't matter what she'd said, really; he wasn't listening. Men like him never did.
She'd met him at a dinner party; she'd known immediately he didn't belong. It was his shoes. That's the main thing that gave her pause: the once-expensive, broken shoes.
Easy money, she thought. I'll have him chewed up in a week.
"So what was that job you wanted me for?" she asked.
See, you might not know this, but the blue Fiat was Fujiko's to begin with.
Back then, Lupin the Third was still driving the Mercedes-Benz SSK, the car of tyrants and kings—two-seater, murder in a straight line. It was all class and old school elegance, a flashy stand-out calling card. Yellow chassis, blood red accents. Only a handful ever made. Thirty years out of date, souped up engine—is he good enough to get away? He'll do it with style, or he won't do it at all.
Back then Fujiko drove a blue Fiat. She drank champagne like water, she kited checks over Rome and dove like Aphrodite into the sea. Expensive. Free. Thugs and goons and the man who'd almost loved her to death—she outran them all. If you imagined her up in her penthouse apartment, draped in silks, admiring a diamond as big as her fist under the silvery moonlight, and then compared the car tucked inconspicuously in the corner of the parking garage below, well... a common little thing like that just didn't seem to fit. Fujiko spent money like it was burning, bought cashmere when cotton would do, wore her Prada shoes to the beach. Nonetheless, the Fiat was hers.
Reliable. Hairpin turn radius, not much for racing a straight line, but indomitable on a curve. Sedan, four seater. Family car.
They'd been married once, a long long time ago. Back at the beginning. Before the others came along, before the Third was a household name, even before the Benz. Six weeks of a whirlwind romance, a first conversation on a French balcony in Japanese, and promises—they'd both been so young then, and mean. Ambitious kids with the fingers of the world between their teeth, ready to bite down. He'd killed a man for her, and it wasn't nearly his first. He ran with assassins, kept company with killers. There was so much to prove, and every hour burned down with the desperation of youth, half believing the future would never come. Anyone who'd known him then could tell you he'd been crueler, quicker to anger, unreliable and petty. He asked her to marry him on a whim. He'd stolen her a wedding ring from the hand of Monsieur le Dictator's mistress. She'd made him feel like a king.
He'd known even then that she was running from something, although he didn't know what. He'd thought he was better than that, whatever it was. Murder in a straight line, engine roaring, he could outrun anything, beat anything, be anything. He never missed what he aimed for.
The first mistake every man makes with Fujiko: she's not an accessory. She's a crime.
She'd left him bleeding out on the beach of a private island, her shape dark against the stars as the rope ladder rose away. But she'd thrown down the first aid kit from the helicopter, rusty metal spraying up the sand, and that was how he'd known for the first time he loved her. He loved her, and she was still running, and if he couldn't keep up, he was going to fall behind every time.
He found her in Morocco, and they spent the night in desperate, resentful reunion. Three weeks later, her ring arrived with the mail. The setting, anyway—empty 14 karat fittings and lipstick on an envelope.
Sometimes he thinks it's him she's running from. But she'd been running a long time before they met. Maybe now she's just running to run, dust in the wind, for the joy of flight and fear of landing.
Lupin doesn't dwell on the past. What's done is done, what's over is over. The first time Jigen met her, Lupin thinks he might have said, that's Fujiko Mine, we were married once. Isn't she a dream.
Once you know someone like that, you can never really un-know them. He hadn't known she loved him until the divorce papers in the mail, delivered in a scented envelope with a kiss-mark on the seal.
Nearly ten years later, he'd dump the SSK and pile everything he loved into her Fiat on a side street in Tokyo, with the sirens wailing and lights flashing a quarter mile behind them—Jigen in the front seat, Goemon in the backseat with him, nothing but shoes in the trunk—she would hit the gas and take them all with her, as she made her escape. Indomitable on a curve, smaller than the clearance of an alley way, quick and light and inconspicuous in a crowd.
Four seater. Family car.
When it came time to buy himself a new one, a lifetime and a continent away from the garage where he'd first found the SSK, Lupin got himself a Fiat.
In yellow.