Man with No Name: A Nanashi Novella

by Laird Barron

  This was the internationally renowned Susan Stucky in person, or in a dream that felt too close to reality for comfort. Lacking her customary pancake makeup and award-winning cinematography it had taken him a moment to place her. Shorter and thinner than he remembered, her blonde hair much darker and flung loose over her shoulder in a way she’d never worn it on celluloid; naked except for a pearl chain around her hips. Her flesh gleamed alabaster, pallid from shock or the soft low light that illuminated the passage.

  Behind her lay a spacious living room decorated with wood and leather and stone. Moonlight dripped from the scalloped ceiling. A deep, steady growl emanated from the shadows, and a giant white and gray Akita swaggered into view, stiff-legged, hackles bunched. Heart-shaped tags jingled from its spiked collar as it slouched forward.

  Nanashi smiled weakly at the brute and said, “Good doggie. Good boy.” He said it in English. He liked dogs. He gripped the butt of his revolver anyway.

  But neither the dog nor the woman were reacting to his presence. Muzaki stood in the doorway of the bathroom. The wrestler loomed larger than life, clothing shredded, blood coursing from a dozen vicious cuts and gashes. Part of his face was crushed into butcher meat. His left arm was gone, hacked away near the elbow to match the stump of his left leg. He smiled through a mouthful of pulverized teeth. Gore slopped from his lips. He winked his one good eye and toppled backward and the door flew shut.

  Nanashi heard Goodbye, goodbye, love, as a rustle of dry leaves in his brain.

  Now woman and dog finally registered Nanashi’s presence. She patted the dog’s head. Her expression lost its animating dismay and smoothed to ice. She inclined her chin toward the front of the house. “Company coming.”

  He almost asked who, and held his tongue. He knew exactly who. Word had traveled along the wire to Yokohama. Killers from the Heron would be en route. Possibly for murder, possibly for kidnapping. Either way it would be a routine clearing of accounts after the debacle with Muzaki, and lovely Susan Stucky wasn’t long for the world. Her future consisted of ropes, knives, and a shallow grave. He found his cigarettes, lighted two. He crossed the floor and gave her one of the cigarettes, which she accepted wordlessly. She stared at him and her eyes were cold enough to burn. He studied the ceiling.

  “You are remarkably composed,” he said.

  “So are you.”

  “Believe me. I’m shitting a brick.”

  “You must be a heavy.”

  “Oh yeah.” He cracked his knuckles and loosened his tie.

  She blew smoke. “Are you with me or against me?” No lipstick, no inflection except impersonal curiosity. Her scent was coconut lotion and sex.

  “That’s a tough decision.”

  “What’s the difficulty? I’ve got money if that’s the hangup.”

  “I don’t want your money. May not need it, either, depending on how this goes.”

  “It’s going to go shittily if past is prologue. You’re not stupid, not with that suit. What’s the real problem?”

  “I’m a lunatic or this is a dream.”

  “Oh? Transcendental meditation? A bad trip on some funky ‘shrooms?”

  He considered, shrugged. “Well, this scene doesn’t seem possible. Maybe I’m a ghost. Maybe I’m an astral projection.”

  She casually reached up and slapped him. She’d had practice. “Nope, no silver cord. You’re here for reals, as the kids say. Get your game face on, bitch.”

  He rubbed his mouth and smiled.

  “Wes always said this moment would come. You’re a Heron. I expected one of ours at least.” Her gaze lingered on his open collar, the needlework. That she could read its fragment impressed him. “So, are you man or mouse? Friend or foe?”

  The dizziness receded and Nanashi’s legs steadied. His instinct took over now: balls retracted, adrenaline flowed, higher brain functions reduced to static. Fear made an ecstatic of him. “I’m a rabbit, apparently.” His voice cracked. His gun was in his hand like magic. He moved past her into the living room, toward the main entrance, and gods it was a gorgeous home, opulent and cozy. He noted the decorative stones of a fountain, small busts of copper and bronze and jade, scarlet hangings and reed screens inlaid with onyx and gold calligraphy, bearskin rugs cast about haphazardly, and crossed polearms with tassels and pieces of samurai armor on stands and racks. So many wonderful things to kill with.

  Muzaki had owned several such homes in Japan and others in the United States and Canada, and mistresses accompanied each. Truly a blessed man. Truly a cursed man.

  Artificial fire flickered in the hearth. Rainbows of exotic fish shifted within tiered aquariums. These rainbows undulated across the woman and the dog as they silently watched him rush to drop the metallic drapes on the windows. The rainbow pattern splayed over the blinds, sealing off his glimpse of the front yard and the outer darkness that pressed just past the porch lights.

  “Where are we?” he said.

  “Near Yamagata,” she said.

  Yamagata lay many kilometers north of where he’d left his companions minutes ago. Before the blinds dropped he’d gotten an impression of big rocks and trees and assumed the property lay beyond the city limits. Several feet away the oak finish of a wet bar shone like true love and abutting it a cherry-panel turntable emitted its classic rock music. He opened a drawer and fixed himself a tall glass of Okuhida, tossed it back and poured another for himself and a fresh glass for the lady. She accepted the drink without comment. Confidence restored, he stared at her and downed his liquor. Neither of them blinked.

  The dog whined uneasily. Its teeth were daggers.

  Sweat trickled into the seams of Nanashi’s forehead and seeped along his cheeks. He felt stirrings of power, the surging vitality of a gorilla, a shark, a tiger. Fire kindled in the center of him, his flesh tingled and tightened and his asshole contracted to a marble. The sweet-bitter tastes of adrenaline cut with vodka prickled his tongue. A ferocious recklessness built within him not unlike the approaching climax of a sex act. He yawned, not quite ready, not quite there, but close.

  “Oh, I like you,” she said without sounding as if she really did.

  “Muzaki-san said the same.” The player clunked and a new record began to spin. Hair of the Dog, by Nazareth. He threw back his head and laughed from the belly. A roar. He realized she’d been dancing in the nude to the classic rock of her homeland when he and the grotesque phantom of her husband intruded so dramatically. He’d seen her dance onscreen, an erotic Dance of the Seven Veils routine for her Mafioso husband that caused audiences and critics to salivate. The Academy tossed her an Oscar nomination as a reward.

  A bell gonged, twice. The front door came off its hinges.

  Nanashi knew the one in charge, a slim man with a shaved head and blond goatee by the name of Kada. Kada the Sadist, some muttered. Kada the Brave. Kada the Handsome. Kada, second son of the Chairman himself, so Kada the Favored. A playboy, even by yakuza standards. He’d tittered behind his hand when Nanashi lost a piece of his finger that fateful night long ago. Nanashi didn’t recognize the other five. Dead men but for the formalities.

  Kada dressed in white. His minions wore black suits and slick sunglasses despite the hour, each standing with stick-up-the-ass rigidity. A despised lieutenant and five brothers Nanashi had never met. Both facts made everything much easier. Not that it would’ve been particularly hard on him in the first place. The Heron Clan had always treated him more as a favored dog than beloved family. His contempt and fear and the pulsing vodka flames helped. The smoldering disdain in the actress’s eyes helped even more.

  Kada appraised the situation with the imperious demeanor of a visiting Daimyo, his own sunglasses held between thumb and forefinger, tapping against his thigh. He raised an eyebrow. “I am surprised to see you here, little brother.”

  “How many more are outside?” Nanashi said, bowing curtly; a dip that barely satisfied protocol but allowed him to keep his eyes on the Sadist.

  “There were
a couple of guys in the yard. We took care of them. The Dragons are punks. Has this bitch given you any trouble?”

  “No. I meant how many more men do you have?”

  The blond hesitated, studying the room more closely. He slipped on his shades. “Just us. I don’t need an army to collect a woman.”

  Nanashi raised the gun and shot him in the face.

  Who taught you to fight? Muzaki said. He and Nanashi were on a beach in the gray light of dawn. Surf packed the sand and glazed it with pebbles and dead starfish. A frigid breeze blew from the water. Muzaki wore an old, elegant suit. He was whole again. The shine in his eyes seemed too lustrous. The curve of his smile too wide. Who trained you to kill?

  Nobody, Nanashi said. In the distance, amid the driftwood and the swirling ebb and flow of the tide lay a dark blot.

  --Once it began, Nanashi committed to his art with the dispassion and precision of clockwork machinery. He was all gears turning and springs uncoiling as he half crouched, free hand at midsection level, poised in a claw, gun arm stabbing forward. He swung the revolver, swung his entire body with pendulum smoothness and drilled the pair flanking their fallen leader. Three bullets, three down, but he missed with the fourth, while the fifth only clipped a man’s shoulder and the survivors dove for cover. Two had pistols and the last wielded a sawed-off shotgun--

  They don’t teach you to kill in the dojo. Not in modern times.

  Nobody taught me.

  You burst whole from Jupiter’s aching skull. A prodigy. A shark.

  One day I picked up a knife. Later, I picked up a gun. I was also pretty quick to learn to peddle a bike and quite handy with a tit. They kept walking without stretching their legs and the distant blot squirmed and grew.

  Muzaki said, I was lost as a young man during a shipwreck, out there. I suppose you know the story. Ring announcers have told it for decades.

  --the shotgun gave Nanashi anxiety. He decided to kill that enemy next. The Akita had the same idea. It pounced on the guy, jaws locking onto his abdomen, shaggy body wrenching side to side in a frenzy that went straight back to the days of caves and saber tooth cats. The shotgun boomed and guts unspooled everywhere--dog guts, man guts, a jet of commingled guts, a sluice of seared blood and viscera. The man fired again, screaming in terror and agony, then he stopped screaming and the dog stopped growling. Shotgun guy was the one Nanashi had clipped and now he wondered if the slug had severed something important because the end came too quickly. Oh, but who was he to argue with the gods of death? A pall of smoke rolled over the room and Nazareth kept saying now somebody was messing with a sonofabitch. The house stank of burning hair, of burning blood, of scorched silk.

  Crack, crack, crack went the popgun automatics accompanied by tiny spurts of flame from behind a potted plant and an overturned sofa where the yakuza had taken refuge. A bullet kicked loose carpeting near Nanashi’s polished shoe. Another bullet burnt past his ear and pinged through the metal drapery. Nanashi flung the revolver and palmed the stiletto he kept under his armpit. The guy behind the sofa was on empty and Nanashi vaulted it, knelt and one! two! piston-fast, stabbed the gangster in the throat as he struggled to reload. The guy kept fumbling with the cartridge and swatting at the blood pouring down the front of his suit, until his movements were slow motion. Nanashi forgot him and kept going, scuttling on all fours toward the miniature banyan tree in its wicker pot and directly for the gangster ridiculously exposed as he cowered there. The gangster was a kid, hard and cruel, his face already nicked and scarred. The kid lined up the barrel of his nickel-plated automatic and uncapped however many rounds he had left as Nanashi floated toward him, moving with the rock and sway of a hominid torn from a primordial hunting ground and projected across time and space into that ruined living room--

  I don’t recognize this place, Nanashi said. The beach continued to unreel. The landscape warped and refracted black and white, a negative. The ocean was blinding white.

  This is the Maze, Muzaki said. His face shimmered a dull ivory and suggested that while the wounds had sealed he remained a bloodless, shambling thing that should not be. What is that? He pointed toward the shivering black spot that drew ever closer.

  Nanashi strained to see and when he did he understood that a heavy stone had been rolled aside to reveal a secret nest that should’ve remained hidden. He fell to his knees and began to shriek, pop-eyed and insane.

  Muzaki said, Don’t be afraid, my nameless friend. You’ve done well and I’m here. I’m here for you. I’ve always been.

  --goon number six was too frightened to aim straight and his shots went wherever errant shots go and then Nanashi slammed a knee into his chin and there went teeth, tongue, a yolk of blood and spit. The kid sprawled and Nanashi kicked him in the neck and again in the base of the spine. Bone crunched and the kid became still.

  Nanashi straightened and breathed hard. He wiped his face with his sleeve.

  “Are you finished?” Susan Stucky hadn’t moved from her position in the hallway. She dropped her cigarette butt and carefully negotiated the battlefield to the record player and yanked the cord out of the wall. A man who’d survived his horrible injuries groaned where he lay in the fetal position in a thickening pool of blood. Otherwise the house was quiet. The actress was alone at last, or so Nanashi surmised. Lost to her Hollywood cliques, the tabloids no longer bothered to mention her, an alien in alien land and doubly estranged by her own wealth, her princess-style investiture at Castle Muzaki. She went over and peered at the wounded man who stirred and raised his bloodied hand to her in supplication. She stepped back and gave Nanashi a look.

  He retrieved his pistol and reloaded it without thinking; his mind sprinted ahead, calculating avenues of escape, vectors of pursuit, safe-houses, odds of prolonged survival. Violence, its preparation and aftermath, was his meditation. He didn’t waste another bullet, simply hefted the fractured jade bust of some ancient dead god of the sea and smashed the gangster’s skull with such force the man’s glazed eyes started from their sockets and splashed against Nanashi’s shoe. When Nanashi turned, he saw Susan Stucky kneeling by her dead dog and stroking its fur.

  “All right,” she said with dull satisfaction at the mess he’d made of her enemies. “These poor saps never stood a chance, huh? Good for us that they trusted you. You jumped across that line awfully quick.”

  There was a psychedelic moment where he relived every slashed throat, every gouged eye, every severed finger, every beating he’d administered purely upon orders from his Sworn Family for reasons he seldom understood. He’d once ripped a businessman’s tongue free with pliers and fed it to him. He’d skinned a rival underboss alive with the edge of a trowel. He’d shoved a prostitute from a high rise roof knowing she was pregnant. And worse. Worse, always worse. He said, “Long time coming.”

  She straightened and regarded him. “You gangster boys are in a shooting war. The shit is going to hit the fan in a major way when news breaks of what happened to my beloved husband.”

  “We can’t hang around.” He snapped his fingers. “Gather what you need and come on. Two minutes. I won’t wait longer.”

  “Just bring the car around, rabbit.” She mockingly snapped her fingers behind her head as she turned away.

  He walked through the main door, keeping his stride brisk yet unhurried. The night air tasted of pine and mineral dampness. As he’d presumed, Kada lied--there were two compact cars parked at the foot of the broad flagstone steps. Two men in the lead car, a driver in the second. The two in front allowed him to approach within spitting distance before the passenger side door flew wide and raucous techno music blasted forth. Stupid kids.

  Nanashi gave the emerging gangster a friendly wave and put two rounds into his chest, then ducked low and shot the driver through the open door. The other driver had the presence of mind to throw his car into reverse. Unfortunately for him, he banged into an ornate retaining wall and by the time he’d changed gears and hit the accelerator Nanashi tapped the window wit
h the barrel of his revolver. The man shouted an obscenity or a prayer and then he died with a smoking hole in his cheek. Nanashi toppled the corpse into the driveway, swept aside the frosting of shattered glass and climbed behind the wheel and waited.

  * * *

  Smoke billowed from the house. Red fire twinkled and capered. She’d smashed a few bottles of alcohol and struck a match on her way through the door. “Watch that bitch burn,” she said and buckled in. She’d put on a silver kimono and slippers. Her purse was some sort of designer plastic; bulky and glossy black. She chain-smoked gourmet cigarettes from an enamel case. He couldn’t place them from their odor.

  She gave clipped directions that sent them along secondary roads. It surprised him that the route carried them away from the city instead of closer. He drove at risky speeds, trying to keep his thoughts in sight. The slick, narrow blacktop entered mountainous forest--white trees, white flashes of rock, white mist. The oni and the yokai were awake and traveling in parallel. Ghosts of hunger and vengeance cried the cry of night birds.

  “There’s a book about a woman whose husband randomly travels through time,” she said. “It’s a tearjerker. Sold a bajillion copies. That’s what tearjerkers do.”

  “I haven’t read it,” he said.

  “Are gangsters allowed to read chick lit?”

  “Who’s going to stop us?”

  “Well, this situation with me and Wes is like that sci-fi scenario. Except not really. Also, the romance is dead. Everything is about death with Wes.”

  “Okay.” As soon as the yakuza tracked her down, and soon it would likely be, she was definitely dead, although that wouldn’t happen until she’d suffered enough to welcome annihilation.

  “He did the paper trick, right? He always does the paper trick. I’m not sure whether that part is bullshit or not. I mean, the loony stuff about government mind control experiments is a red herring, but the pattern itself does pickle your brain all right. Doesn’t require paper, though. He could draw it in the sand or wave his hands in the air. I kinda suspect he could even just use his voice to conjure the effect. What else did he say?”