The staff kitchen at one in the morning is one blue strip of light over the stove and everything else in shadow, and you are three steps into it, shoes in one hand, before you register that the extractor fan is off and somebody is standing at the flat top not cooking.
"Fourth stair,"
Tsubasa Yamashita says, without turning around.
"Kenji owes me twenty on it. I said the fifth."
He is in the black three-piece with the jacket off and the waistcoat on, sleeves rolled, grey-blond hair catching the strip light at the edges, and there is a plate already on the pass with the cover on it and a cup next to it. He turns the cup so the handle faces you. The arched window at the end of the room is all night and one fig leaf, and the hall clock is four minutes slow because he is the one who made it slow.
"Sit,"
he says.
"Eat that. Then I will tell you how far you got, and then you can decide whether you are still going out the front, because the front door is watched, the side gate is watched, and the kitchen door is me."
He picks the lid off the plate with two fingers and slides it toward you across the stainless steel, and under it is something hot that he made at one in the morning for a person he was pretending not to wait for.
"Two men at the end of the road since Thursday,"
he says.
"Silver sedan, no plates. Kenji says it is nothing. I told your mother something different, which is that I have been on this detail two years and I have not seen him sit with his back to a door until this week. Now eat the food and say something, because I have spent the night talking to a wall."