Free The Devil of Nanking by Mo Hayder

was summoned, discreetly, along with the Russians and three Japanese hostesses, and sent to a table next to the panoramic window, where we stood formally with our hands resting lightly on the chair backs waiting for the men to cross the polished parquet floor. I copied the others, stepping agitatedly from foot to foot, wishing I could tug my skirt down. A string of waiters appeared from nowhere, hurriedly setting the table with piles of snowy white linen, a silver candlestick, gleaming glasses, finishing just as the men arrived and seated themselves, pulling back chairs and unbuttoning jackets.
    ‘ Irasshaimase ,’ said the Japanese girls, bowing, and sliding into the chairs, taking hot towels from the bamboo dish that appeared on the table.
    ‘Welcome,’ I mumbled, taking my cue from the others.
    A bottle of champagne and some Scotch appeared. I shuffled my chair forward and sat, glancing at everyone, waiting to see what to do next. The girls were slitting the hot towels from their wrappers, unfolding them into the men’s waiting hands, so I quickly copied, dropping one into the hands of the man on my left. He didn’t acknowledge me. He took the towel, wiped his hands, dropped it carelessly on the table in front of me, and turned away to speak to the hostess on his other side. The rules were clear: my job was to light cigarettes, pour whisky, feed the men finger food and entertain them. No sex. Just conversation and flattery. It was all printed out for the new girls to read on a laminated card. ‘Better you say something funny,’ Mama Strawberry had whispered to me. ‘Strawberry’s customers want to relax.’
    ‘Hallo,’ Svetlana said boldly, settling her bottom into one of the seats, dwarfing the men, moving from side to side like a broody hen so that everyone had to make room. She picked up a glass from the centre of the table and chimed it against the bottle. ‘Shampansky, darlink. So nice!’ She unloaded the entire bottle into four glasses then waggled the empty bottle above her head to summon the waiter for more.
    The men seemed to like the twins, they kept singing tunes to them that must have been from TV or radio because I didn’t recognize them: ‘“Double the pleasure, double the fun . . . Give me that little LIFT . Come and get you SOME !”’ Everyone would laugh and applaud and the conversation, in a mixture of Japanese and broken English, would take off again. The twins got drunk very quickly. Svetlana’s eye makeup was smudged and Irina kept jumping up to light the men’s cigarettes with a disposable Thai Air lighter, leaning across the table, knocking over the little bowls of seaweed and dried cuttlefish. ‘Don’t make me laugh,’ she squealed, when someone told a joke. She was flushed and slurring. ‘Make me laugh some more and I explode !’
    I sat quietly, not drawing attention to myself, pretending that this was all normal, that I’d done this a thousand times and really didn’t care that nobody was talking to me, that I didn’t get the jokes, didn’t recognize the songs. At about nine o’clock, just when I thought I could keep quiet all night long, and maybe they’d forget I was there, someone suddenly said, ‘And what about you?’
    Silence fell at the table. I looked up and found everyone halted in mid-conversation, staring at me curiously. ‘What about you?’ someone repeated. ‘What do you think?’
    What did I think? I had no idea. I’d been drifting off somewhere, wondering if these men’s fathers, their uncles, their grandfathers had been in China. I wondered if they had any sense of what their lives were built on. I tried to picture their faces in the tall collars of the IJA uniform, in the snowy streets of Nanking, one of them raising a glinting katana sword . . .
    ‘What about you?’
    ‘What about me?’
    They exchanged glances, unaccustomed to this rudeness. Someone kicked me under the table. I looked up and found Irina making a face at me, nodding at