“No,” I said. No point lying.
“No,” he agreed. “Two different energies have attached themselves to the boy. I’m guessing his mother and father.”
His father too?
“But you, I only see one. Angrier and more potent. If I’m to be perfectly honest with you, I’m surprised you’re still alive.”
“I get that a lot.”
He smiled.
“Is she…” Words escaped me. The wires in my brain had become so entangled that I didn’t even know what I wanted to ask. “Is she here because of him? If we can, I dunno, cleanse the boy, will she go away?” I felt stupid. Like a ten-year-old begging his father for money for a secret project that he absolutely would not approve of, but he just didn’t know how cool it was yet. If he would just give me the money and not ask any questions, then everything would work out fine!
“Cleanse the boy?” Kenji said. “No, it’s not the boy that keeps her here. It’s you.”
“Me?”
He gave me the once over again. “I’m going to be honest with you… I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”
“Yoshifumi.” There I was, that ten-year-old boy again. The name the workers at the orphanage used to berate me for not following the rules, or the teachers said slowly to make a point about how stupid I was.
“Yoshifumi. Now, don’t take this the wrong way, but…”
My heart pounded. When he prefaced it like that, how could I take it any other way?
“…I’m not sure I can be of much help.”
“What?”
He scratched his chin and searched the air for something. “The curse of a mother is the strongest of all. The boy is under the protection of his father, and that’s the only reason his mother has yet to warp him. But you…”
“…Have no such protection?”
The priest shook his head. “No, that’s not it. You have protection. Strong protection, if the fact that you’re still alive is anything to go by.”
I forced a smile. Yeah. That makes me feel so much better. Thanks.
“How best to describe it…” He pondered for a minute. “Let’s say that the boy has a white light. You can imagine that, yes?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. That white light is his spirit. His energy. His protection. His mother is there; there are wisps of black, but she can’t harm him. Does that make any sense?”
“I guess…”
“But you,” he continued, “that white has been overwhelmed. All I can see is flashes of red and black. Darkness and rage.”
“Great…” So I was going to die and there was nothing he or anyone else could do about it. Amazing.
“How you are even still alive is… astounding.”
I sighed. “So, you’re telling me there’s nothing you can do for me?”
He looked down at the boy and then up at me again. His features softened and his eyes turned apologetic. “Have you made arrangements to take care of the boy?”
I grimaced.
“Thank you for your time, sir…”
23
I pulled up in front of Serenity and stopped to gather my thoughts. The boy’s mother wouldn’t stop until all of us were dead. Her mark was upon me, and it wasn’t a matter of “if” but “when.” I couldn’t be helped. The head Shinto priest could do nothing. If he thought it was futile, then what chance did I have?
“You hungry?” I asked the boy. He nodded. “Come on, then. Let’s go see what Aunt Kazumi has for us.”
I knocked on the door three times and waited. A few moments later a smiling face greeted us. Opening wasn’t for several more hours, and yet Kazumi worked diligently to prepare for the night’s work.
“Your hair looks nice like that,” I said before I could stop myself. She had pinned it up to keep it out of her face while she cleaned and prepared, and it struck a different chord to her usual elegance. She blushed and cast her eyes down to the boy, unable to hide the smile on her face.
“Rai! What brings you back here, sweetie?”
He grinned and held up a picture for her to see. The masterpiece he’d been working on in the car.
“Is this for me? You shouldn’t have. Come, come inside.”
We followed her in, and she turned to me. “It’s a bit early for a visit, isn’t it? Something up?”
As always, she knew me better than I knew myself.
“I need you to watch the boy for a few hours. I hate to do this to you again, but there’s something urgent I need to take care of.”
She ruffled the boy’s hair and smiled. “Of course! We’re going to have lots of fun together, aren’t we?” She turned back to me, her expression turning serious. “Is everything okay?”
“I went to see your friend, Kenji.”
She raised her eyebrows. “And?” I shook my head. She set her jaw. “I see.”
I didn’t know what else to say, so I patted the boy on the shoulder. “You be good for Aunt Kazumi, okay?” He nodded. A myriad of emotions ran through Kazumi’s eyes. “I’ll be back soon. I promise.”
“What? Yes, of course. Sorry.”
“Kazumi.”
“Hmm?”
I pulled her into my arms. The smell of her hair took me back to happier, more carefree times, and she melted into me. “It’ll be okay. I’ll figure something out.”
She nodded against my chest. When she pulled back, she forced a smile. “You are the Tiger of Rakucho, after all.”
“Don’t call me that…”
“Go,” she said, pushing me away. “Go deal with your business. Rai and I will be fine. We’ll be right here, eating some delicious food, won’t we?”
The boy grinned and nodded. They’d be okay. I couldn’t say the same for myself.
Rakucho. In a few hours, night would fall and she’d come alive. Signs would turn neon, revellers would fill the streets, and business would begin. Restaurants, snack bars, host and hostess clubs, massage parlours, arcades, movie theatres, and internet cafes. I’d watched her grow as much as she’d watched me grow. A tiny, sickly child with no family and no home. A tall but thin teenager with more guts than brains. An adult who towered over his peers and finally had the muscle to back up his lack of brains. Rakucho was a cesspool when I found her, and she was a cesspool now, but she was my cesspool. My home. I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.
I found what I was looking for. A man in a bright purple suit fixed his sleeves as he stepped out of a massage parlour. A cigarette hung from his mouth and he grinned as the man behind him flicked through several notes. I recognised his face. One of the Toyotomi lieutenants. Which meant he would recognise mine as well. I had to work quickly.
I parked the car and followed him around the corner. Rare for a lieutenant to be alone, but perhaps he was off the clock. It didn’t matter. He turned as he heard my footsteps and I slammed his head into the wall. He crumpled at my feet.
“What the fuck, man?” he groaned, a shaky hand reaching for the blood pouring down his temple.
“Shut the fuck up and listen.” I grabbed the front of his shirt and yanked him to his feet. His eyes grew wide.
“The T-Tiger…”
“Listen to me, and listen closely. I’m only going to say this once, and if you fuck this up, we’re all dead.”
“What—”
“Shut up and listen. The boss has got it out for you.”
“Me? What did I—”
“I said shut the fuck up.” I slammed him against the wall once more for good measure. Air burst free from his lungs and he groaned. “I really need you to just listen. It’s not just your life on the line here, you get me?”
His eyes grew fearful, and he nodded through the pain.
“Good. Now, I’m going to take you back to HQ right now.”
His eyes grew wide again, and he struggled. A quick slam against the wall ended that.
“You know, I’m just as happy to find someone else who’s going to put up less of a fight. We’re all dea
d anyway unless we find a way to stop this.”
He calmed down. I sighed.
“Look, several of our men died recently. The boss is convinced you guys did it.”
He shook his head. “What? No! Why would we—”
“It doesn’t matter. The point is, he believes you did. I know you didn’t.”
His eyes softened, then narrowed in confusion.
“Then who—”
“Stop talking. Listen. The boss wants your heads. All of you. He’s willing to start a war over this. He thinks you already have. It doesn’t matter how, but I know you didn’t do it. So just, calm the fuck down.”
I let go of him and he brushed his shirt clean of wrinkles.
“Okay… So what, then?”
“I need you to convince Harada that there is no gang war brewing. That you had nothing to do with this.”
“I don’t even know what the fuck you’re talking about, and there’s no way I’m going with you! That’s a death sentence! You might as well kill me now!”
“I know you don’t, and the less you know, the better. That’ll work to your advantage in convincing him you didn’t do this. And I guarantee your safety. On my honour.”
“…Didn’t do what?”
Talking to the brick wall behind him would have been easier. I took a deep breath.
“Okay. I’ll make this simple. We’re going back to HQ together. You’re going to speak to Harada and convince him that the Toyotomi didn’t kill any of our men. You do that, no gang war. Got it?”
“But we didn’t kill anyone…”
“I know! That’s why we’re going to talk to him! Are you simple or something?”
He puffed his chest out, taking offence at that. “That’s a bit rich coming from you, Mr ‘Tiger of Rakucho’.”
I gripped the front of his shirt, lifted him from his feet, and tossed him in the trash. He landed in a pile of old food cartons and restaurant waste with a loud crash. Bending down over him, I connected with a solid punch to the nose. He screamed out in pain and grabbed his face.
“Alright, we’re done talking.” I yanked him to his feet and shoved him towards the car.
“Hey, I didn’t agree to—”
“Get in.”
“I’m not—”
“You can sit in the back or you can sit in the boot. Your choice.”
He looked up and down the street for a moment, perhaps weighing his escape options, and took off running to the left. I caught the back of his shirt and tugged, pulling him off balance and sending him crashing to the ground. His head bounced off the concrete.
“Fine. Boot it is.”
He groaned as I popped the boot open and threw him in. It still smelt of the last Toyotomi member who had soiled it. People filed down the street, their eyes everywhere but us.
Rakucho. She was like no other.
24
The man lay prostrate before Harada on his expensive rug. “I swear, sir, we had nothing to do with this. I didn’t even know anything about any deaths until you told me just now!”
Harada stepped on his left hand and the man cried. “I’m sure you can see how I find that a little difficult to believe, yes? Toyotomi has always had it out for me, but now he’s gone too far.”
“It wasn’t… us…” the man groaned. Harada removed his boot and paced before him.
“Okay. Let’s entertain the notion that you didn’t kill several of my men. That you didn’t come into this very compound to kill one, shoving so much toilet paper down his throat that they’re still pulling it out of his stomach.”
I grimaced. Nobody had made me aware of that little factoid.
“Then… who?”
The man sat up on his knees, resting his hands on his thighs as he watched Harada pace in front of him. “T-That I can’t say, sir, but it wasn’t us.”
“Wasn’t us, or wasn’t you?”
The man frantically shook his head. “Definitely not me, sir. Like I said, I had no idea. I have no beef with you. With any of you. I just do what the boss says, and—”
“—and clearly he told someone to kill my men.” Harada placed his boot on the man’s chest and pushed, sending him tumbling over. “So, if I have to sit here and pull every single fingernail from your body, and thereafter cut off every single finger and toe until I find out, then so be it.”
A whimper escaped the man’s lips and Harada kicked him again. “Three of my men! Why? Who did it?”
I couldn’t remember the last time I saw Harada get his hands dirty. That was our job. Nothing could ever be traced back to Harada because he never did it. It always went through a chain long enough that someone else would take the fall long before he did. He was pissed. Really pissed.
“I don’t know!” the man cried. “I’m telling you the truth! I don’t know!”
“Who?” Harada kicked him again, this time connecting with his face. Blood splattered all over his expensive boots and the man grabbed his nose.
“Sir…” My voice cracked, having been silent for so long. Harada showed no signs that he heard me. “Sir!” I said louder.
“What?” He turned to me in anger.
“Sir, I guaranteed his life…”
Harada stepped towards me, the top of his head meeting my nose, and looked up. “And?”
“And? And I guaranteed his life. Sir.”
“Did I tell you to do that?”
“No, but—”
“Then shut the fuck up and let me do my job. Clearly none of you are capable of it.”
He returned to the crying man on the floor, kicked him in the stomach, and then stood on his fingers once more. “Now, I’m going to ask you one last time. When I say something, I mean it. Surely even you must understand that by now.”
The man nodded, blood dripping to the expensive rug beneath him from his nose.
“Okay. Good. Now. Who killed my men? Why?”
The man clenched his jaw tight against the pain and shook his head. “I-I don’t know, sir. It wasn’t—”
A loud bang filled the room, and I jumped. Harada stood over the now still man, a gun in his hands. My heart threatened to beat out of my chest and a mix of anger and fear rushed through my blood.
“I guaranteed his life!” I screamed. My word was my honour. That was something Harada himself taught me. What was a yakuza without honour? Just a petty thug, like all those colour gangs that were taking over the city again. You don’t want to be a petty thug. Petty thugs end up in jail, and they’ll degrade themselves for any material gain. We’re not like that. We have honour. We have morals. And we have principles. “I guaranteed it!” I screamed again, letting the anger wash over me.
Harada placed the gun on his desk and a chill fell over the room. “Get him out of here,” he said, ignoring me.
“No.”
He turned slowly. “What?”
“I said no.”
My head spun. With fear. With anger. With confusion. Harada picked up the gun from the desk, stepped over the dead man’s body and poked me in the chest with it.
“Say it again. One more time.”
“I guaranteed his life, sir. You had no right to do that.”
A smile threatened to form on the edge of his lips. Whether it was amusement or something more sinister, I couldn’t tell, but the beating of my heart grew so wild that I feared it would explode all over the room, adding me to the growing list of people who had died in there over the last few days.
“I’m sorry, Yotchan, but that’s not my problem now, is it? I never told you to make any promise. You did that yourself, and considering the situation, perhaps you should have thought things through a little better first, hmm? A yakuza always keeps his promises, yes, but he doesn’t go around making them willy-nilly when he knows he can’t keep them.”
Harada flipped the gun around and placed it in my hands. Now my fingerprints were on it as well.
“Dump the body somewhere the Toyotomi will find it,” he said, moving around the body
and back to his desk. “A river, a field, their parking lot, I don’t give a shit.”
“Sir—”
“Silence. If they want a war, well, now they’re going to get one. Dump the body and come back here immediately. And Yotchan?”
The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. “Yes, sir?”
“I’ve been meaning to ask, what did you do with the boy?”
“T-The boy?”
Harada pulled some papers out of his desk and started scribbling. That was all he ever did nowadays. Scribble in his papers. Important contracts for important contacts. Nothing mattered but the money and the prestige that came with it.
“Yes, the boy. I haven’t seen anything in the news about it, so I was wondering.” He looked up and grinned. “What did you do with him?”
Did he know? Was he playing another game? No. If he knew, I wouldn’t be standing. I’d be dead on the floor next to the Toyotomi lieutenant he wanted me to dump somewhere public.
“I took care of it, sir.”
“Yes, I know. So well that there’s been no news of it. Impressive. So tell me, how did you do it?”
I swallowed. Creating a lie on the spot was never my forte. Harada himself taught me to always speak the truth. Men respected the truth. Only petty thugs got themselves involved in falsehoods, and if you couldn’t stand behind your words, then you couldn’t stand behind anything.
“I dumped him in the bay, sir.”
Harada burst out laughing. “The bay?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You drove all that way to dump a tiny child’s body?”
It took all I had to keep my face impassive. “Yes, sir. Shouldn’t I have?”
Harada shook his head. “No, no, I just didn’t expect that of you. It’s a very… old-school way of dealing with things.”
I said nothing. Harada considered me a moment, something running through his head that I couldn’t quite discern. Did he believe me? Or was he biding his time?
“Yotchan.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Don’t dump this one in the bay. I want them to know.”
“…Yes, sir.”
War was now inevitable unless I found a way to stop it. A darkness melted into the wall behind Harada and my breath caught in my throat. If someone else didn’t get to us first, of course…
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