Three shots.
No, four shots.
Then, without so much as a glance at the body, he grabbed his stomach and moaned.
The incident had taken place in a closed room. The Boss’s office at headquarters was totally soundproof, bulletproof, constructed so that it would be safe even if people smashed their way into the building—or, conversely, even if his boys were working some bastard over, torturing him. The Boss took three or four small bottles of medicine out of a cabinet, grabbing at them like straws, and gulped them down. Digestive tonics. He rocked his head back and forth a few times, trying to reset himself. He rubbed his hands down his front where the esophagus was, to make sure the medicine was on its way. Phew, he sighed. The gastric acid in his breath stung, but not so much he couldn’t bear it.
He dropped himself into a leather chair.
He picked up the remote control on the table. This one worked both the TV and the video deck. The TV was positioned in front of him. He turned it on. The screen flashed white for a second, then faded to black. The video player was already going. There was already a tape in the deck. He rewound it for a while, then pressed PLAY.
His daughter appeared.
My darling.
She sat in a cold-looking room with a dog, glaring into the camera. Glaring, that is, through the screen at him. At the man they called the Boss, her father, him, himself. A fucking hostage video. The client in Russia sent them at regular intervals. This was the latest. Nothing had changed. The girl still cursed at her father. The same foul-mouthed harangue. “Fucking dick,” she spat. The only thing that had changed was the dog. The dog looked like he was guarding her. He’d been a puppy the first time he appeared in a video, but in no time he had grown into an adolescent, and now he could have been called a young dog. The dog, too, glared into the camera.
A girl and a dog, staring, unblinking, straight at the lens.
Fact is, they looked creepy.
They looked heartless.
C’mon, the dog too? the Boss thought. Even the dog looks at me like that!
What, are you sizing me up? Seeing how much weight I carry?
Darling, the man thought again. My darling by my first wife. Fucking little brat. He stared at the screen, transfixed, unable to tear his eyes away. He remained slumped in the leather chair as if in a trance. “All the shit I’ve been through for this brat…” he said, aloud this time. All the men I’ve sacrificed, he continued voicelessly, in his mind. Then, once again, he spoke aloud. “My child…my own child. You think I fucking love you? Damn you!”
The second he’d said those words, the floodgates broke. Okay, it’s true, it was my fault. I’m the one who forged that fucking parasite’s death certificate to make it look like she’d been sick. I would never have married that dumb bitch if my uncle hadn’t forced me. What was I gonna do, he would have made me chop off a finger. Besides, I needed someone like her if I was gonna set up my own organization, starting so late in the game, in my thirties already. Except that she was fucking useless. She was a totally hard-core fucking stupid dumbass bitch. So I popped her. Dirtied my fucking hands with her. That was good, though, because that way I was able to make my woman official, make her my woman. The Boss’s second wife was only twenty-three. She was tough. She looked after the young guys in the organization real well. The boys. They looked up to her, the Boss’s woman. They called her Big Sister. She gave me a daughter too, another daughter, bound to me by blood. A year-and-a-half old. The half sister of that one there…that one.
I hate her. The Boss admitted it. He hated that darling in the videos. But even I couldn’t bring myself to pop my own daughter. We’re father and daughter, after all, so I let you live, as if I had no alternative. Even after I killed that stupid bitch mother, which I could do because she was nothing to me. And just look what happened! The way she glares at me, that girl. The way she glares at her stepmother. Who did she think she was? And then she started swelling, getting so fat it was like someone put a hex on her. As if her dead mother’s deadweight shifted to her. Her face got pudgy. She was in elementary school, but you could hardly believe it. Her wrists bulged, bulged more. My god, I thought, she looks like a fucking fat infant! What, is she fucking imitating her newborn sister…her half sister? Man, is she creepy. And ugly. And the way she looks at me, revulsion in her eyes. And demanding. I want this, that, that. I WANT IT! She screamed, and I bought the shit. Bought everything, no matter what. Everyone has it, so buy me one! That was never her game. She told me, ordered me, to buy things no one had. Forced me.
Buy me Gucci so people don’t fucking piss around with me.
Tokyo Disneyland is for middle-class fucks. Take me to Florida.
I felt like I was being tested, so I did everything she asked. It got so I thought she was always silently asking me, You wouldn’t, by any chance, happen to have popped my mother?
She couldn’t have guessed, there was no way. And yet…
It’s just my imagination.
And every time I gave her anything, the brat got fatter. Creepily obese.
And then, finally, when I was going to Russia for a business talk, she ordered me to take her along, take her where ordinary fucks, laymen, couldn’t go. And we were attacked, and she was taken hostage.
By the client.
“I’ve had enough,” the Boss said. “I’m gonna end this with my own hands.”
He stopped the video. He stood up. For the first time, he looked long and hard at the body of the messenger from the main branch, this new Buddha, lying in the corner. Oh shit, he said. But his tone was cheery. How old am I? Thirty-…nine, that’s right. Still in my prime. Pecker’s still in working order. If you think I’m gonna be a pawn in someone else’s game, fucking think again. He pushed open the door to his office. Walked out into the hall. Went in to say hi to the boys in the main office. His expression was bright, relaxed.
“Gather the soldiers,” he said. “All of ’em.”
You mean…all of them? they asked.
“Yup. We’re crossing the Japan Sea. It’s war.”
What the hell, why not set up an organization in Russia? Take over Siberia, maybe, the Boss thought with a chuckle. A hacking sort of chuckle: Kekh kekh kekh kekh. He hadn’t noticed, but his stomach wasn’t hurting anywhere near as bad. He briefly explained the situation to the guy in charge of the boys and gave instructions for disposing of the body, told him to find someone to take care of the slime, say some hothead got out of control or something, find a way to buy some time.
But, uh, Boss…what are we going to do then? someone asked.
“Hmm? We’re gonna pray. Pray for the fucking main branch once it’s fucking dead. But first, we’re gonna take some Russian mafia heads to the Chechens as a souvenir.”
After that, the Boss flew to the Primorsky Krai, taking twenty-seven men along. He set up an unmarked office in the city there, in the Russian Far East, at a cost of about twenty million yen. Japanese yen. There was no longer any need to scramble searching for non-yakuza recruits. Because he had ditched the middleman: he and his men were the bullets now. They were the stormtroopers. Two days after they arrived in Siberia, they had already killed the target, acting on information from the client, and confirmed with the local police that he had indeed been a bigwig in the Russian mafia. It had cost about five hundred thousand yen to establish a pipeline to a certain faction within the police. He blew another two hundred thousand yen on the cover-up, to make sure the attack wouldn’t be traced to them. They went to pay their respects to the Chechen mafia, taking along the bigwig’s head and a gift of thirty thousand dollars. US dollars.
Things were going even better than the Boss had expected. And for good reason: the bullets he had been sending in, one after the other, had turned the region into a sort of fucked-up war zone. The Chechens and the Russi
ans were both weakened. The two main organizations were practically bleeding each other to death, and the power vacuum this had created attracted all sorts of little dipshit crime rings from the rest of the country. And the local underworld was internationalizing too. Heroin was streaming in from the Korean continent. Rumor was the North Korean secret service was bringing it in with help from the Koryo-saram—common knowledge among the criminal class. Amphetamines and a nice selection of coca-derived drugs were shipped in from China. And there was traffic in the other direction too: Russian prostitutes sent off to Macao, Beijing, Shanghai. The Triad had a monopoly over this “trade.” At the same time, mafia organizations based in Central Asian countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States were trying to grab a slice of the pie by providing higher quality drugs. Minor interorganizational battles were popping up.
The Boss was puzzled by the situation on the ground. Can the bullets I’ve been sending be responsible for all this shit? As it happened, the penetration of various East Asian criminal organizations had rendered the Japanese bullets’ presence much less noticeable. They had draped the bullets in a cloak of invisibility, as it were.
And to top it all off, the yakuza’s killing of Russian mafia bigwigs and others with vested interests in their doings had been rather fancifully interpreted as an expression of the honorable Yakuza Way. Everyone knew that members of a Japanese organization had visited this city for important business talks with the Russian mafia, only to suffer a fatal attack at a hotel restaurant. Immediately after that, the yakuza had cut all ties with the Russians. And then the assassinations began. No doubt that’s how they do things, those yakuza. So people imagined. Yakuza don’t listen to excuses, they adhere absolutely to…something. It was revenge, with rage thrown in for good measure. Honorable conduct, in other words. So people believed, mistakenly. The rest of the criminal underworld found the yakuza kind of creepy. Not that they couldn’t understand their point of view. Their method of gaining satisfaction was, after all, not unlike the Chechen’s krovnaya mest, blood revenge.
So when the Boss showed up on the Chechen mafia’s doorstep with the head of an enemy boss and thirty thousand dollars as an icebreaker, they were willing to form an alliance. They responded right away to the yakuza’s money and strength. Even if it was a creepy kamikaze sort of strength. The Boss wasn’t entirely pleased by their success, though. No repeat performance of that hacking laugh: Kekh kekh kekh kekh. Things were only tilted to their advantage now because someone was running the game. That was why the Chechens were so eager to jump at any cash that came their way, because this constant battle was wearing them down.
Yeah. All this shit, it was all the client’s doing. He was orchestrating it all. I’m going to smash that fucker, the Boss thought. He’d made up his mind. He shelled out seven hundred thousand yen to develop a relationship with a group of retired veterans of the Soviet-Afghan War. This got him a free pass to a market where you could get all kinds of old Soviet firearms. You could buy anything there, dirt cheap, even antiaircraft missiles. In three days, all twenty-seven of his boys were heavily armed. It cost him about sixty thousand yen per man. Cheap. He expended another 1.4 million yen on weaponry for his own use, including four trench mortars and cases of cartridges. He had the Chechens introduce him to a “launderer” free of charge. He had the guy figure out the stops the last payment made after the client wired it, for popping the bigwig, backtracking from the unlicensed bank in Japan where it ended up. The money had only been wired the day before, so there were still plenty of clues to go by. He told the launderer he’d cover unlimited expenses and give him a bonus of five million yen if he succeeded. Two days later, the launderer requested that he bring in a micro-organization specializing in technocrime. The Boss had to pay that group three hundred thousand yen just to get acquainted.
Russia produced the best hackers in the world. It kept the twentieth-century international underworld well stocked with sophisticated techies. For two million yen the Boss got the undivided attention of a rare specialist in the illegal use of computer systems for a half day. That night, he ended up paying the launderer a total of 7.5 million yen, but he had the tracks he was after. They led to the city’s old Communist Party headquarters—to a particular room in the building, in fact. They led to a statue of Lenin that had somehow remained standing, and to a secret meeting that had taken place at its base. The Boss then got in touch with four former KGB officers whom he hired for between five hundred thousand to six hundred thousand yen each to assemble the last few pieces of the puzzle.
See there? the Boss said. Just like the movies. You want pounded rice? Buy it at the fucking pounded-rice store.
When I’ve grabbed the tiger’s tail, I don’t let go.
He spent 1.9 million yen on a covered military truck. This wasn’t from the black market. It had been sold off by a private company, and he bought it more or less legally. All twenty-eight of the yakuza, including the Boss, piled inside. Four men sat up front; everyone else went in the rear. They wore fur coats and felt boots, and were armed not only with guns but also with items that seemed appropriate for an interorganizational war. They left the city at daybreak, heading west. Grasslands sailed by the windows. Then wetlands. Then grasslands again, and a graveyard for old cars. The heaped-up bodies had been stripped of their parts, left as mere shells. After that came a stretch of houses. A suburban farming town, apparently. They kept pigs. The grasslands changed into plowed fields. It wasn’t clear what they were growing, but whatever it was there was a lot of it. The roads had been sprinkled with sand. Plenty of sand, to keep the pavement from icing over. Clouds of sand billowed in the truck’s wake like smoke from a signal fire. Once again they plunged into an expanse of uncultivated grasslands, and then, four hours after they had set out, they caught sight of the dense dark taiga ahead, outlined against the horizon.
Up ahead, the Boss saw. He gripped a map in his hands. A map on which the location of a town that wasn’t on any map had been drawn in, precisely, by hand. The map had cost him twelve million yen. There it was. A closed city, left over from the Soviet era. There he was. The client. All of a sudden, the Boss felt like he might, at last, be able to laugh again. You want pounded rice? Buy it at the fucking pounded-rice store indeed, he laughed. No one beats us yakuza when it comes to a scrap.
Man-made structures came into view over the taiga, in silhouette, high above the treetops. Observation towers. Not one, not two, but four. Set at intervals. Then a sliver of land belonging to the town, enclosed by a concrete wall. We’re here, at long last, the end of the road, the Boss thought. Beyond it, a world within walls.
“Looks like a prison,” the Boss said. Fucking jaily sort of place, isn’t it? he thought with a chuckle.
“We’ll fucking make this day go down in history,” he said. “Fucking Independence Day.”
The truck stopped a hundred yards short of the wall. A young yakuza sprang out of the covered cargo bay. He carried a mortar, pre-loaded with a 51mm high-explosive grenade. He squatted down close to the ground and hoisted the weapon up. He wasn’t using the angled aiming device, he just fired straight in, level with the ground. Straight into the doors. The gate, the entrance, the way into the town unmarked on any map.
In a flash, the two doors were destroyed. Blown to hell by a force ten times stronger than a hand grenade. The next second, the truck was moving again. Charging in. The young guy who had fired the mortar jumped in as it passed. And on they went, into the world they had forcibly opened—liberated. They raced ahead a few dozen meters. Paved roads divided the town into fairly regular blocks. There were a lot of potholes, though. Big depressions. One of back wheels slammed down into a hole and the truck ground to a halt.
The Boss and his twenty-seven men, giddy with the excitement of war, immediately jumped out of the truck, all at once, even though no one had given any sort of signal. A total of twenty-eight yakuza, armed to the te
eth with three million yen worth of firearms. They scattered. A few held back, staying near the truck to manage the mortars, which they aimed out in four directions. They had the whole town in their sights. The Boss wasn’t one of them. He had no intention of staying in the safety zone, giving the others orders while the youngsters protected him with the mortars. He dashed out with a new-model Kalashnikov in his hand. He was in this too! He felt something snap in his head. YESSSSS! he thought. I’m fuckin’ over the game! He had a young yakuza on either side, watching out for him, but he felt like he’d come out punching, ready to kick ass, all on his own.
“In fifteen minutes sharp, I want to know the lay of this place!” he yelled. “Take anyone you can. Don’t hesitate. Kill. Go!” he ordered. The Boss was raging, wild. He barreled past a cluster of white buildings, bellowing something that sounded like Ghuuuoogh! Things weren’t yet heating up, though, in terms of actual military action. Because there was no one there. The town kind of looked abandoned. In fact, it was abandoned. The official residents were gone. As for unofficial residents…well, there were perhaps some…just a few…
Then, suddenly, something was coming.
Dogs.
Here they came. And a little more than ten minutes later it was all over. Things didn’t go quite the way the Boss had imagined. First, he heard three shrieks. Then he heard seven more. For the first few minutes he had no idea what was going on. Because the dogs didn’t bark. Fifty dogs had fanned out around them, and not one so much as whined. Silence, too, was a weapon. The dogs attacked. Killed without a sound. They moved in formation. Two dogs would take aim at each yakuza, tear into his throat—their victims left with gaping holes under their chins—and then run off with his submachine gun, automatic rifle, or pistol. Six highly trained members of the posse attacked the truck, with its four-mortar guard. It fell in no time. The mortars had been aimed out in four directions, yes, but there were six dogs, and none of them was running less than forty miles per hour. Two of the mortars did go off, but randomly; one grenade plowed into the ground and the other ended up hitting an observation tower. Which was half-destroyed. The tower tilted, toppled, creaked, fell. It exploded onto the ground with a mighty whabang. That, it seemed, was taken by some to be a sign. Shots were fired into the air throughout the town, in different areas. Some yakuza shot out of fear, some didn’t shoot but screamed “I’ll fucking blast you! I’ll fucking blast you!” It wasn’t clear how effective shouting at the dogs in Japanese was. They were clearly unfazed by gunfire. They kept calm.
Belka, Why Don't You Bark? Page 17