delicate matters now working with someone else, someone big, someone from a little outside? Hear anything?”
“I think I know who you’re talking about, but I don’t ever discuss him. It’s not healthy. He’d cut off my arm and make me eat my tattoos.”
He went everywhere, Queen Bee, the S-M Club, Mysteria Purity, Le Grand Bleu, MoMo Iro, everywhere, talking to anyone, whores, image club performers, trannies, enforcers, bouncers, cutters, the odd Chinaman, the odd Korean, the odd African, impersonators, pickpockets, and everywhere it was the same.
Nothing. Nothing.
It was the nothing that had him tantalized. There was usually something, but the talk about the upcoming election for presidency of AJVS and its implications on the issue Imperial versus Shogunate AV had become so loud that nothing else was being talked about. It was as if an anvil had been laid across Kabukicho gossip lines. But then finally…oh, it was so small. It was so nothing. It was a wisp, a leaf in the wind.
He was in a small club closed to strangers, so late it was early. Scotch was the drink of choice, blues the music and the lighting scheme, smoke the preferred atmosphere. You could hardly see across the room. Nick threw down another Scotch and water, turned to the barkeep, and said, “Another for me, another for Dad here.”
Dad was a bouncer at Prin Prin, an image club that catered to the fantasy life of the Japanese male, including student-teacher, airline hostess, office lady, kimono. It even had a whole set built to resemble a subway car for those who just had to grope. But even in such a kingdom of the dream cum true, trouble sometimes broke out and thus a fast big man with good hands was needed. His specialty was the “soft punch” by which he deflated the overly amorous with a thunder blow to the midriff, yet left no scars, no bruises, nothing but a powerful sense of ill- being.
“You didn’t hear this from me,” the thunder-puncher said.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
“Swear to god, not from me.”
“Swear to god twice.”
“I have a bitch. She’s half Korean, supervises a shift at one of the hand-job joints. Tough little gal. Pretty, but tough.”
“Yeah.”
“She says all the Korean sex workers are nervous because one of their own got disappeared a few months ago.”
“I didn’t hear a thing.”
“That’s just it: you weren’t supposed to. Just here one day, gone the next. But here’s what my girlfriend knows that nobody else knows and she didn’t even figure it out till she thought about it. The next morning on the way to work, she saw a guy named Nii, some minor hood who somehow got into a good crew and is now off the street-”
“Nii.”
“Nii. She saw him stagger out of a bar where he’d clearly been for hours, go into an alley, and puke his guts out. Just puke. She swears that when he bent over, his jacket fell open and the bottom half of his white shirt was drenched in red.”
“Lord.”
“Like he’d been at some brutal hacking. So who had Nii hacked? The woman? Why would he hack some nothing Korean whore and then make it go away?”
“Maybe he’s screwy that way. Jack the Ripper, that sort of thing. Or maybe it’s just Kabukicho. The odd whore gets disappeared once in a while. Life goes on. Boo fucking hoo.”
“Sure. But there’s something weird here. What was weird, this Korean whore thing, it was somehow set up, all the Korean girls were talking about it for weeks. Her boss kept the gal late so she didn’t go to Shinjuku station with the others. She went later, by herself, and somewhere along the walk to the station, real early in the morning, she met up with somebody and just vanished. The Nii thing suggests she was cut.”
“Hmmm. Doesn’t have to be Eight-Nine-Three Brotherhood.”
“Yeah, it does. Because the thing was planned. Somebody with juice got it set up so that this gal could be, you know, cut from the herd, held for a certain time, then released to go off and be chopped, diced, spindled, mutilated in private. No cops, no witnesses; it was all planned out. And poor Nii had the cleanup job. He wouldn’t have the juice to set it up. He’s nothing, a servant, a cleanup kid. But he’s working for somebody with juice and somebody who likes to cut.”
Nick saw it then: sure, it fit.
Nii would have to work for Kondo. Kondo wanted to cut something. It was all arranged via Boss Otani. But why?
“Do you remember the date?”
“Only that it was just after that soldier-hero and his family got burned up. Remember that? God, that was sad.”
“It was sad,” said Nick.
But his mind was already racing. Kondo had cut the shit out of someone and Nii had helped. Nii was Kondo’s boy. So if he wanted to find out what Kondo was up to, he had to find out what Nii was up to.
The police records were easy enough to obtain. Nii, Takashi “Joe.” The photo showed a squat face under long Beatle-style hair, the eyes gleamless with a lack of intelligence or purpose. The photo was taken when he was eighteen, old enough to be arrested the first time. Rap sheet: impressive but hardly incredible. Breaking-entering, time in juvie, assault, robbery, carrying a wakizashi, a footloose punk hunting thrills and his own death in the alleyways of Kabukicho. He ran with a street gang called the Diamondbacks. That meant, among other things, he probably had tattoos of diamonds on his back. With his pals, he raised minor hell. Eventually, he did two years hard time for beating a shop owner half to death. He clearly was a guy trying to attract yak attention, and failing. Yet two years ago…he disappeared.
Has Mr. Nii turned a corner and become a model citizen? Is he now selling life insurance, Popeye’s chicken, Nikes, porn? It doesn’t seem likely. Far more likely: he’s made that dream contact, he’s been taken in by somebody, cleaned up, spiffed up, given a haircut, he’s put on a suit and a pair of expensive Italian pointed-toe black shoes, he’s learned how to tie a tie and cut his nails, and now he moves discreetly and invisibly through the world of yak crime, violent when necessary but not spastically violent, pointlessly violent, the violence of sudden rage. No, now it’s controlled and deployed by a much wiser boss.
Nii? You see Nii? Any word of Nii? Where’s Nii hang? Remember Nii? That kid, Nii, always gets in trouble, ran with the Diamondbacks. Funny you should mention the Diamondbacks as I think the new bouncer at the Milk was a Diamondback for a while.
Nii? Oh, yeah, Nii. Okay guy, I guess, don’t know what happened to him. Not that you’d notice him. He was what you call your averagelooking guy, nothing about him stood out. Oh, one thing I remember, yeah, he used to like to go to a bar called Celtic Warrior. He always had a samurai thing. He saw himself as the last of the Toshiro Mifunes. Yeah, Celtic Warrior, it’s in Nishi Azabu.
Which is how come Nick found himself sitting in Celtic Warrior in Nishi Azabu on a Thursday night, alone at the bar, nursing a bourbon and water and a headache, trying to maintain his sanity as a bad multiracial goth band played heavily Japanese-influenced Celtic war melodies, an assault on the ears almost too intense to be described, much less endured. The joint was typical plastic shit, with shields and those ridiculous western knight swords like the old kings used hanging crosswise all over the place, and big mock-metallic triangles everywhere, crap out of Black Shield of Falworth, all Hollywood phony, all plastic. Some mooseheads and deer hung on the walls too, and there was even a stained-glass window behind the bar. It was so Camelot, or a Japanese version of an American version of a story that had never been true in the first place.
And that’s when he saw Nii.
It would have been so easy to miss him. It was only the sullenness in the eyes, their lack of dynamism that clued Nick in. The guy had bulked up considerably, and cleaned up; he now wore a neat crew cut moussed to an inch and a half of vertical, a white shirt, a dark suit, a tie. He could have been any salaryman unless you looked carefully at the fastidious way in which the collar of the jacket fitted the broad neck so perfectly, the way the suit hung with just the faintest dapple to it, picking up a sheen, the razor-vivid line of the trousers crease, their
