by KJ Charles
“Oh.”
“Used to do it all the time when I did tag-team stuff with my brother, keep the crowd interested. Not that hard when you’re used to it. Plus, my girlfriend was on me for money, and I was pissed at the whole system, and mostly, you would not believe what an asshole I was.”
“So what happened?”
“People knew. Comment here, comment there. Racial stuff. Drinking a lot. One guy too many said something, and I threw him through a wall.”
“You what?”
“Wood and paper, obviously. Still hurt him pretty bad, damaged his back, and of course that was it. The stable kicked me out.”
“And the girl?”
“Yeah, well. Turned out she had a thing for rikishi, not for fat unemployed guys.”
The suppressed fury rolling out of everything he said was making my nerves jangle. “When was all this?” I demanded, propping myself up on an elbow again.
“Five years back, more or less.”
“Five? But— So what happened next?”
“Oh, well. Now we’re getting to the good bit.” He had a thick forearm resting over his eyes. “So. Thrown away my career. Pretty much unemployable, illiterate in Japanese. Dumped, stupid, broke, and a big, mean son of a bitch. Pretty obvious what you do next.”
I shut my eyes. I’d have liked to shut my ears.
“Worked for an associate of a family. Going around to bars when there was trouble, hauling out drunks and making sure they didn’t come back. Got myself a rep. And then the family offered me a place as a jun-kosei-in, a junior, obviously, but soldier work. Acting up.”
My stomach was roiling, nauseous. I hadn’t realised how much I’d been clinging on to a fragile thread of hope that there would be another explanation. Something better, something different, some It’s not how it looks that would make things okay. But there wasn’t.
“And?”
“And I signed up. Did a bunch of stuff for them. Six months, eight, whatever. Junk work, dirty work. A lot of it was just sitting around shooting shit. Some pretty good guys, believe it or not. Harada-san…hell, best boss I ever had.”
“So then what?”
He glanced at me, very briefly. “So this company wanted some land and the owner wouldn’t sell. They needed to knock down his place, build a skyscraper or something, and he wouldn’t shift, so they paid the yakuza to get them the land, and I got sent to lean on him.”
“That’s despicable.”
“Nice house, old. Cat on the roof, cherry trees outside. He had a couple of bonsai, real nice ones. An umbrella pine. He was doing something to it, pruning, and I was watching him, and he looked up at me—I guess he must have known, some big bastard standing there staring at him—but he didn’t say anything. Just looked at me for a bit and went back to pruning his tree. And I thought, what the fuck am I doing, taking this away from the guy so some banker can build a parking lot?
“So I went back to the guy who gave me the job, told him to forget it. He said, you want to be in this family, you obey orders. I said fine, I quit. He got mad. We own you, he said, we can do what the hell we like with you, and you don’t quit ’less we say you can.”
“How did that work out?”
“Not so well,” he said reflectively. “Lost my temper. Lit out for the south pretty damn quick after that, and that was when I really started drinking. This all sounds great, doesn’t it? Lost a couple years. Bouncing jobs, construction work, keeping on the move. Shoulda left Japan, but there was nowhere I wanted to go. Drifting, drinking, feeling pretty much like crap most of the time.” He had his eyes open again, but they weren’t looking at much. “Stupid. Really stupid. One big, long waste.”
“So what happened?”
He shrugged. “Pulled myself together. Quit drinking, started getting myself back in shape. Taka calls me, says can I help him out because some chick he knows is up to her ass in trouble, and here we are.”
“Excuse me? You skipped a bit there, didn’t you?”
“Never talked so much in my life.”
“No, but what happened? You just woke up and thought, I know, I’ll get my life in order?”
He looked up then, but it was a thousand-yard stare.
“Not quite,” he said softly, and I got the feeling he was even less ready to talk about this part. “It was a few things. Some time in the mountains. My brother. He’s doing eight years for manslaughter. You want a guy who really can’t keep his temper, that’s Eli. And I met this guy, kind of a Shinto priest, and…anyway, I didn’t much like myself, made some changes. That’s all.”
I looked at nothing. Chanko looked at me from under hooded lids.
“I’m not sure what to say,” I said finally.
“Worse than you thought?”
“Yes. Maybe. I just—I didn’t think you were that kind of person. That you’d do those things.”
“No.” He shrugged. “I got no excuses.”
I breathed in and out, calming myself down. “Can you really just walk out on the yakuza? Don’t you get in trouble?”
“Some.”
“They said they’d kill you. Harada said they’d kill you unless—”
“He’s full of shit.”
Silence for a few more minutes. I finally broke it.
“The girl. Is that why you were being such a bastard when we met?”
He raised a shoulder. “I guess.”
I couldn’t stop myself asking. “Do I look like her?”
“What? No. Asian, that’s about it. The please-protect-me girly thing…that reminded me of her, yeah. Only with her I didn’t realise it wasn’t real.”
We lay there for a bit in silence. I was listening to him breathe and wishing that either the lump in my chest would go away or that I could cry for all the damaged people out there, starting in here.
“I’m sorry,” he said, after a while. “I wish I could say I was a better guy, but I’m not.”
“You don’t have to apologise to me,” I said. “I owe you my life about three times over. And I’ve got no right to judge.”
“Yeah, you do.”
“I really don’t. What happened to the guy with the house?”
“Don’t know. I guess they sent someone else.”
I swallowed. “Have you ever killed anyone?”
“Made a damn good impression here, haven’t I? No.”
I wasn’t in any position at all to judge him, then.
“And it was the Mitsuyoshi-kai you worked for?”
“Junior branch, based in Himeji. I guess that was why they didn’t make me straight off. That asshole in the love hotel, Soseki, he must have recognised me.”
“Soseki,” I said. “He’s one of the people who attacked Noriko, and I have a feeling I know who the other one is. Assuming Harada was telling the truth about that. Is he trustworthy?”
“Harada? Straight down the line. I mean, gangster, but he’s an old-style stand-up guy. Got his code. No time for psychos like Soseki.”
“So he probably wasn’t full of shit when he said they’d kill you unless you gave me up.”
Chanko opened his mouth, stopped and glared at me. “Well, I walked right into that. Look, I got myself some standards, about fucking time. Don’t get any big ideas.”
“I won’t. But…you could have given me up and you didn’t. That’s all.”
“Yeah, well, that’s me. Wasting opportunities.”
We got up after that. I had a long shower, letting the noise of the water drown out any thoughts, and by the time I was dressed, Yoshi was back in the study. Unless he’d been there all night which, given the way he looked, was entirely possible.
“Ohayō. How’s it going?”
“Terrible.” Yoshi stared at the screen. “Which is great, because you wouldn’t encrypt a party mix CD like this, so there has to be something worth having on it, but we can’t seem to crack it. I ran a dictionary attack all last night, got nowhere. We’ll just have to force it, which is probably going to take a
while.” He drummed his fingers on the desk. “The seventy-two-hour thing isn’t up till this time tomorrow, if that means anything any more, so we’ve got time in hand, but it’ll come down to how robust the algorithms are.”
“Well, I hope they’re good and strong.”
“No.”
“I hope they’re weak. Yoshi, I think I know the people who attacked Noriko.”
He spun round on his swivel chair, mouth open.
“Not personally,” I said hastily. “I know who they are. One of them was a guy who attacked us in Kanazawa. Chanko broke a couple of his ribs. The other one, I think, is a psycho who’s hanging round the Primrose Path, and I need to talk to the girls about him.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know yet. But I’m not planning to let them get away with it. Just so you know.”
“No. No.” He chewed his lip. “Okay. I really need to get on with this now. But, Kechan…”
“What?”
“You will be careful, won’t you?”
“That, coming from you. Of course I will, sweetie. I’m not going anywhere near the bar or the yakuza, okay?”
He gave me a look. “I wasn’t talking about the yakuza.”
“I’m going to get dressed,” I said, and fled.
I texted Sonja, but I didn’t think I could call till eleven or so, since she’d have been working last night. In the meantime, I borrowed a laptop, perched by the worktop and surfed the net for reports about Noriko.
Chanko came down to make coffee and glanced over my shoulder. “What’s that?”
“Noriko. News reports. Is it weird, not being able to read?”
“You get used to it. What are you looking for?”
“Me. I want to see if the police have found my name. They’re asking for Noriko’s flatmate to come forward urgently, but there’s nothing to suggest they know who I am.”
He frowned. “I was wondering about that. You’re not on any of the bills? Or the rent?”
“No. Well, you know, dodgy visa status, best not.”
“But you must have mail coming in. Bank statements, junk mail? Police can’t find you on any databases for the address? Cellphone statements?”
“I do everything electronically. And I always tick the ‘no junk’ box.”
“What about your passport?”
“I keep it hidden. I guess they didn’t find it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, it’s pretty lucky,” I said. “If the police knew who I was, I’d have two sets of people looking for me.” Of course, if they had known who I was already, I’d have had that much less choice about going to them, that much more chance of telling a story and getting it believed before something happened to me. I couldn’t decide if that would have been good.
Chanko was looking steadily at me.
“What?” I said.
“Are you hiding from someone?”
“Um, the yakuza?”
“Someone else. Someone first.”
“Why would I be hiding? Honestly, you’re getting paranoid. Isn’t the family enough?”
“Are you hiding from someone?”
“You already asked that. Are you making coffee?”
“Jesus,” he said. “Fine, you’re not telling me direct lies, so it doesn’t count. Forget it.”
He stalked over to the coffee machine. I felt the red creeping up into my face.
“Look, it’s not important,” I told his back. “I don’t exist at that address, and the police haven’t found anything to prove otherwise, that’s all. That means I can duck beneath the radar; it also means there’s nothing that makes going to the cops any less of a death wish. The rest doesn’t matter.”
“Sure.”
“It’s irrelevant, okay?”
“You said.”
“Fine,” I muttered, and went back to my surfing.
I called Sonja at ten. She wasn’t impressed.
“This is really important,” I interrupted. “Listen. That guy, the one who’s been picking on our friend—”
“The sadistic psycho skinhead bastard? That one? Did you hear what he did?”
“Does he have a thick neck, noticeably? Like bull-necked?”
“Yeah, totally, it’s virtually wider than his head.”
“Would you call him pampered, at all?”
“What? He’s a thug, not a male model. He’s not short of cash, if that’s what you mean. Very nice suits, and wears them like an orang-utan. Why?”
“I think he’s the one. He attacked our friend.”
There was a pause. Then Sonja said, “Shit.”
“Yeah. You have to—”
“I’m going to kill him. Son of a fucking bitch. I’m going to—”
“For God’s sake, don’t do anything!” I shouted. “Christ, Sonja, if he’s the guy I think, he’s dangerous. You have to stay the hell away, and make sure the other girls do. Get Yukie—damn—get her away from him. Make her run if you have to. He’s dangerous, you understand?”
I could hear her breathing hard down the line. “We’ve got to do something. We can’t just let him walk away.”
“He won’t. One way or another.”
“Good,” she said. “Make it hurt. And make it quick, because I don’t want to be in a room with him any longer than I have to.”
“Just make sure you don’t give anything away, okay? Watch yourself. And the little one.”
“Yeah. Okay. If there’s anything I can do—”
“I’ll call. Keep your mouth shut.”
I turned the phone off, feeling extremely worried, to see Chanko leaning on the worktop.
“Sonja?”
“Yeah. I had to tell her about that bastard Oguya—I think that’s the other one who attacked Noriko. Minachan said she’d been picking a fight with him, and…what is it?”
He was staring at me. “What was that name?”
“Oguya. Oguya Hiroyuki. Why?”
“You figure he’s the guy Harada-san said? The other one who hit Noriko-san?”
“I think so. Do you know him or something?”
“Not personally. Shit. He’s one of the brothers’ grandkids.”
“One of what?”
“The Brothers,” Chanko said, and I could hear the capital this time. “The two top Mitsuyoshi-kai men, the kumi-chō and the waka-gashira, they’re brothers. Like those two British guys…you know, gangsters. There’s a photo. Look like boxers.”
“The Kray twins?”
“That’s it. Same kind of thing. That’s why the family has their name. You know most yakuza groups are ikka, families, right?”
The family is the basic structure of most Japanese groups and organisations. When you join one, you have an in-group, a defined purpose; you know your place in the world. To lose your place is to lose your identity, so you fight for your group, and your place within it, with everything you have, because often it’s all you’ve got.
And, of course, the people outside your group simply aren’t as important as the ones inside. They might even just be collateral.
“So the Mitsuyoshi-kai is a real family too,” Chanko was saying. “And the Brothers…I heard a lot of stories from the sixties, when they did what the hell they liked. Nasty stuff. They’re pretty old now, but still dangerous. Or the live one is, anyway.”
“Ah. Right. No, I don’t suppose Brother One is going to let it go that someone murdered Brother Two, is he?”
“Nope. Point is, the kumi-chō, the top man, Mitsuyoshi Junichiro, he had a few kids, but just the one daughter, his youngest. She married a guy called Oguya, he smacked her around once too often, Mitsuyoshi-san had him beaten for it, he died, and a couple weeks later the daughter killed herself.”
“God. Happy families.”
“So, she left a kid, and the old man took him in and treated him like a prince. Wouldn’t let anyone lay a finger on him, and the kid grew up like you’d expect. Made Tokyo too hot to hold him, so they shipped h
im out to the Himeji branch; by the time I arrived they’d gotten rid of him too, and you couldn’t find anyone with a good word for him. Guy’s a psycho.”
“And that’s Oguya Hiroyuki.”
“Yeah. Which explains why the family aren’t just throwing the guys who did Noriko to the cops. Not if it’s the precious grandkid.”
“No,” I said thoughtfully. “No. Was the guy who died Junichiro or his brother?”
“No idea. Didn’t you know his first name?”
“I always called him Mitsuyoshi-san. Oh, that’s weird.”
“What?”
“I hung out with a yakuza boss. It didn’t really register at the time, but…I was drinking with a killer. And he seemed like such a sweet old man.” Chanko gave me a look. “Only joking. He was a prick. But he tipped like a king.”
It took until well past four o’clock for the boys to get into the disc, and it seemed a lot longer.
I sat and thought. I thought about a lot of things. Vulnerabilities. Pros and cons. It all came down to what was on the disc, and I worked through various scenarios in my head, as if that did any good at all.
I wanted to call Yukie, warn her, make her run, whatever the cost, but every time I reached for the phone I remembered the yakuza opening the door to the Kanazawa love hotel. I couldn’t be sure that was her, but I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t. I didn’t call.
Chanko moved quietly around me, restoring order to the kitchen, producing coffee for the techies upstairs, barely speaking, casually calm, intensely there.
He also dealt with my foot, which was throbbing rather unpleasantly. Under orders, I soaked it in warm water and something antiseptic, then he carefully dried it and set himself to inspecting the wound.
I had my jeans leg rolled up to the knee to avoid getting the hem wet. He was on one knee in front of me as I sat on a floor cushion, other leg bent, with my calf propped on his thigh as he looked at the foot. One big, warm hand supported my heel and ankle, and suddenly sensation was shooting upward, and this time when I bit my lip it wasn’t because of the pain.
“Looking a bit angry, babe,” he said, applying a new dressing. His bruised features were intent, and he was so close, I could see the white lines of old splits that threaded through his thick eyebrow next to the fresh, dark scabbing. “Couldn’t see any glass still in it but God knows what was on the ground there, and you ain’t given it much chance to heal.”