Belka, Why Don't You Bark?

by Hideo Furukawa

  It was all over.

  Each dealt differently with this new reality.

  The nameless island had been set adrift in zero time. It was like the end of the world, or the cradle of the world’s imminent creation. Ferocious downpours daily spattered the earth. The howling wind never let up, and yet the fog never dispersed. Yellow flowers blooming among the grasses were the only flecks of brightness. The Japanese had left enough food for the dogs to last a few weeks. During squalls, the dogs hid in the trenches. On the white island.

  On the foggy island.

  Reddish-purple thistles bloomed.

  Bouts of heavy shelling seemed to proclaim that the world had ended. Day in and day out the Americans persevered in their pointless raids, unaware that the Japanese were already gone. The flying corps showered the island with leaflets urging surrender. In all, one hundred thousand of these scraps of paper were dropped. The dogs raised their heads to watch as they rained from the sky.

  Rain, leaflets, bombs. Slicing through fog.

  Bombs dropped, blasted the earth.

  And in the midst of it all, the world was beginning. A new world hatching from the egg of zero time. This world. Some of the dogs sensed its coming. They had no human keepers now—they had their liberty. Four muscular dogs with exceptionally keen senses, trained to withstand the cold, living on a nameless island. Free.

  Explosion was a bitch. Kita, Masao, and Katsu were male. Explosion and Masao mated. Ordinarily military dogs’ reproductive activities were rigorously controlled, but here they were unsupervised. Explosion acquiesced to Masao’s advances, let him straddle her. They were both purebred German shepherds—perhaps that sparked their romance. Kita, the Hokkaido, often romped with Explosion and Masao, but he never approached Explosion.

  The other German shepherd, Katsu, kept to himself. He didn’t relish his freedom. He realized that he had been abandoned on the island, that his masters would never return, but still he stayed close to the antiaircraft guns his army unit had operated, making the area his home and spending the better part of every day there.

  He knew it was all over, but he refused to accept it.

  Explosion, Masao, and Kita ran wild through the fields.

  Frolicking, barking.

  Finally the Americans decided to stage a large-scale offensive. They stopped this zero time. The island was to be given its old name back: Kiska. Their forces landed on August 15, 1943. Some fifty-three hundred Canadian troops joined the operation, forming a combined force of thirty-five thousand men. Soldiers entered the Japanese camp. There was no one there. From August 18 to 22, as many as thirty-five thousand troops combed the island in search of the enemy.

  They captured three dogs.

  Explosion understood. For the first time in more than a year, the soldiers she saw walking toward her were her old masters—Americans! “C’mon, boy!” someone yelled, and she dashed off ecstatically in his direction. Masao and Kita followed. They replied to the American soldiers’ calls with wagging tails. True, these were the very men they had been warned to be cautious of, trained to attack. Battle targets. But they had been released from these notions. What did they care? The men were beckoning to them, why not go? The dogs knew their days on the nameless island were over. This was Kiska again. And apparently they were going to be taken in.

  They had been abandoned, freed from time. Now they were being welcomed back.

  Three dogs, together, whimpered at the troops. FINALLY, they said. YOU’VE RETURNED.

  The fourth dog, too, was ecstatic in his own way. Katsu lay in wait for the landing forces in his den. His masters might not have returned, but the enemy had come. He was overjoyed. He waited for the Americans by the antiaircraft guns, where he belonged, and counterattacked. NO REASON TO LOSE HOPE! I STILL HAVE WORK TO DO! When one of the Americans wandered obliviously into range, Katsu sank his teeth into his leg, then ran into a clearing that had been sewn with land mines. A few soldiers gave chase, determined to “grab that Japanese dog,” and triggered the mines. Katsu, too, had carried out a banzai attack. Katsu, like the Japanese soldiers who were his masters, sacrificed his life for the cause.

  Explosion, Masao, and Kita, however, didn’t die.

  They were fed, cared for. All three were American dogs now. They belonged to the American military. And their numbers increased. After nine weeks’ gestation, Explosion gave birth. It was October on Kiska Island. As a rule dogs give birth easily, but the harshness of the environment made this birth unexpectedly difficult. The soldiers called in a military surgeon to operate, and the mother and several of her pups were saved. Of nine puppies, five lived.

  There were eight dogs in 1943, including Explosion’s puppies.

  Eight dogs, still on Kiska Island.

  “Nighty-Night, Vor.”

  The mansion was surrounded by a wall. The wall itself was perhaps two and a half meters high, but it was topped by loops of wire. The wire wasn’t barbed. It was electrified. Security cameras had been installed at intervals, approximately eight meters apart. They were aimed outward, naturally. Out over the wall.

  One of the lenses had been shattered.

  The compound lay under a thick silence. It seemed, somehow, unnaturally still, as though something that should have been there wasn’t.

  Patches of snow dotted the garden, and there was a drift in the corner where two walls met, blown higher by the wind, untouched. Here and there small footprints scarred the mud. No, not footprints: paw prints. Four or five pads. Animal tracks. Traces.

  It was twilight now, but the compound was bathed in light. Lamps glared high overhead, carefully positioned to eliminate all shadows. The darkness lay beyond the walls. There were a few lit windows in the high-rise apartment buildings off to the left, if you were facing the compound’s main entrance to the northeast. Those buildings, the “projects,” had gone up in the 1970s. The buildings to the right of the compound were mere silhouettes. Rooflines. They had once housed factories. Once upon a time, those factories had operated late into the night. But that was years ago, back when this was still the USSR. The factories filled orders from the Ministry of Defense, churning out tanks and automatic rifles—not that anyone had known. It wasn’t public information. Mechanical plants whirring at full capacity, amassing huge stockpiles of munitions. There was no demand for that stuff anymore. The new Russian capitalism had not been good for this sector.

  It favored a different sort of market.

  The black market.

  Money poured in here, for instance. Inside these walls, into this compound.

  The owner of the mansion was coming home after sunset. His two cars drew up outside the front gate. A Volvo and a BMW. The BMW had tinted windows. The man in the guardhouse glanced at the cars, then pushed a button. The gate lurched into motion.

  When it had opened all the way, the two cars entered. The gate glided closed.

  The cars rolled slowly up the cobblestone drive toward the roundabout and the front door. After twenty seconds one of the Volvo’s front wheels hit something. Something that stuck up from the drive. A clank. The device had been planted right out in the open, disguised so that it looked like just another cobblestone. Very bold. It had been tripped. The driver of the Volvo felt it. It felt like he had driven full speed onto a road full of potholes or…maybe he’d run up against—

  That was the end of the thought. The driver was blown up, straight up into the air, still in his seat. The hood of the car, flying.

  The BMW slammed to a halt.

  Three men sprang from the car: one from the front passenger seat, two from the back. Kicking open the doors, they jumped out, dispersing. One wore a shapka with the earflaps raised, the others were bareheaded and had crew cuts. The first wore a fur coat; the other two had on expensive dark suits. Neither the coat nor the suit jackets
were buttoned. They never were. The men had their hands thrust under their lapels. The fur coat took out a submachine gun, the suits whipped their pistols from their holsters, and they stood still, ready to fire.

  Two men tumbled out of the Volvo’s unexploded back seat, alive. Bloody, screaming. They crawled away from the car.

  The BMW’s driver seemed to have come to his senses, because all of a sudden he threw the car into reverse. He had to get the hell out of here, to get his boss, sitting there in the back seat, in the middle, away from this vision of hell in the mansion’s front garden.

  Suddenly, all the lights in the building crashed.

  As if a fuse had blown. The building, visible a second ago, was gone.

  There had been a small pop inside, but it wasn’t audible out front.

  The darkness unnerved the men even more.

  One of the men from the BMW broke into a run, though he had no idea whom he ought to be attacking. It was just a reflex. He jumped off the drive, zigzagging as he ran, heading for the porch, searching for an assailant. His left foot felt something. He had been a wrestler and had an impressive physique—that’s how he ended up in this job, working as a bodyguard. Shit, it’s a feint, he thought, recalling the single worst blunder he had made as a wrestler. His hair stood on end. Just then, his left ankle was pulling the wire. About ten centimeters above the ground. A booby trap. The wire had tripped it. Something flew at him from one side. Searing pain.

  Not just in one place. Everywhere on his body.

  The submachine gun in his hand fired at random, senselessly, as his muscles contracted. He was in agony. An agonizing death.

  One of the men crawling on the driveway took a bullet.

  The BMW reached the gate, backward. The driver lowered his window, yelled at the guard, “Open up! Open the fuck up!” But the guard didn’t answer. He was prostrate on the floor of the guardhouse. A line drawn across his throat.

  One clean horizontal line.

  It looked to the driver as if the guard wasn’t there. He considered getting out and opening the gate himself, but at the sound of gunfire he instinctively hit the gas. He rammed the bumper back into the gate, then shifted gears and screeched forward.

  The lamps illuminating the garden were going out now, one after another. Each time one went out, there was a crash. Somehow they were being smashed. The rest of the compound joined the mansion in its darkened invisibility. There was hardly light at all, anywhere.

  A single, precise gunshot.

  A second.

  A third. A fourth…a seventh.

  The sound of a new magazine snapping into place. Someone tossing aside the old magazine, even though it still had a few bullets left, swapping it out for another. A fresh, full cartridge. The BMW swerved wildly, searching for a way out. The gunman watched the car go, then sprang into action. He was fast, yes. But he was also a step ahead of them. He saw where things were going.

  Another series of gunshots. One bullet shattered the BMW’s windshield and lodged itself in the driver’s forehead; another buried itself in the hip of the man who tumbled out of the car’s back seat as it hit a tree. Soon after, a third bullet entered his head.

  Silence.

  Only one man moving. A pistol in each hand. The BMW’s headlights were still burning, and their faint light revealed his face. His profile. His hair was pure white. White the way an old man’s hair is white, when it has lost its color. Two weeks ago, he had been holed up deep in the forest. Living in a hunter’s shack like a hermit. The guns in his gloved hands weren’t hunting rifles, though. They were army weapons: 9mm machine pistols.

  The old man strode over to the body.

  The body of the last man he killed. The body of the owner of the mansion. He worked the shirt down over the corpse’s shoulders, exposing its chest. He inspected each shoulder. The large cross tattooed on the left, the skull on the right.

  The locations of the designs showed that he was indeed a Russian mafia kingpin, that he had been acknowledged as a leader by his fellows.

  He was a boss. The tattoos proved that. Not in one of the new organizations, however. He belonged to the old mafia; he was a product of the Soviet system.

  Having found the proof he wanted, the old man let slip a smile. A smile so subtle his face remained all but expressionless. “Nighty-night, Vor,” he murmured.

  The old man wasted no time. A minute later, he was inside. Not a light in the entire building. Two buff corpses sprawled in the parlor, shot dead in the middle of a card game; on the sofa behind them, the body of a carefully made-up young woman in a flashy dress. These bodies had been there for an hour or so.

  Another body in the hall.

  The old man stepped into the half-hidden security room behind the parlor.

  A young man was waiting inside. Alive. Terrified. Drenched in sweat. Drops fell periodically from his face, his neck. He was sitting on a chair, his posture oddly strained, straight as a rod.

  “If you are hot, why not take off your sweater?” the old man said.

  “I can’t move,” the young man replied.

  “Sure you can, just take it off,” the old man repeated.

  Desperation in his eyes, the young man nodded and stiffly, tensely, stripped the sweater off. Underneath the sweater he had on a paratrooper shirt with horizontal blue stripes.

  The wall behind the young man was completely taken up by ten television monitors. Images from the security cameras were projected on their screens. Or not. Some were blank. From where he sat, the young man could operate the recorder, and he had a microphone that let him respond to communications from outside.

  “You give them the all-clear, like I said?” the old man said.

  “I did exactly as you told me to,” the young man said. “Everything.”

  “Good job,” the old man replied. “You did well.”

  “Don’t kill me!” the young man pleaded. He was perched oddly on his chair. Sort of. There was an object between his butt and the seat, like a little pillow. It was a hand grenade. The pin had been pulled. The young man’s butt was holding the safety lever down. If he shifted his body the slightest bit, if the grenade happened to slip out from under him, it would explode.

  The old man turned to the monitors. He spent a few moments checking the screens, or their blankness. The young man was still sweating. The old man was right beside him, but the young man couldn’t turn to face him. There was a sound by the recorder, like duct tape coming off.

  “Look at all this crap,” the old man muttered. “With all this, you would think…”

  With all this, you would think…what? the young man wondered, terrified.

  “…you could do better.” The old man answered the boy’s unspoken question, his tone crisp. “Amateurs. That is what you are. A bunch of amateurs.”

  A sound the young man had heard once before: a pin being drawn.

  It came again, then a third time.

  Huh? he thought.

  The old man left the security room. On his way out he turned and fired a 9mm bullet into the young man’s head, just like that. The young man jerked backwards, then fell, causing the grenade he was sitting on to explode. A second later the three grenades on the video recorder were going off, one after the next, destroying all evidence.

  Two minutes later, the old man was in the back garden.

  He stood before a low, gray, concrete enclosure. A row of cages with chain-link doors, some open, some closed. He had passed four dead Doberman pinschers on his way here. They had been poisoned. He himself had carefully stirred the poison into their food. There were still some dogs in the kennels, though, alive. He had killed the adults, but not the puppies.

  They were barking. Their young voices. The old man stared at them through the c
hain-link doors.

  He watched them for half a minute, then nodded to himself, opened a door, stepped inside. He scooped up an armful of puppies.

  The attack on the mansion was all over the media the next day. The first reports were vague, mere repetitions of statements issued by the government. That weekend, a fringe newspaper ran a sensational version of the story on its front page. The provocative headline announced OPPOSITION GROUP RESPONSIBLE. The article said an organization “specializing in bomb attacks” had targeted the residence of a “Vor,” the head of a major criminal organization that operated two banks, three hotel chains, and numerous restaurants. The article commented provocatively on the group, which, it said, had sold weapons pilfered from army warehouses. It continued with a lengthy profile of the criminals who were presumed to have killed the Vor, who had, by and large, taken control of this city in the Russian Far East. The article concluded: “At last, the epic battle has arrived on our doorstep, here at the edge of Siberia—a war between the two great forces of the underworld, old and new: the Russian mafia and the Chechen mafia.”

  1944–1947

  Dogs, dogs, where are you now?

  For the first forty days of 1944, they remained on Kiska. There were only seven of them now. On January 2, one dog died. Explosion. This female German shepherd had been too weak, after the surgically aided birth she had undergone, to survive the brutal Aleutian winter. During the first six or seven weeks, while the five puppies born alive were still suckling, she tried her best to raise them. But when the time came to wean them, she lost strength. Finally, shortly before dawn on the second day of the new year, she died.