Kamikaze

by Michael Slade

  He had to be kamikaze.

  He had to be ready to die.

  For Kamikaze, it would be enough to be accepted for who he was. The yakuza don’t care where you come from—your color, your country, your class—because they initiate the misfits of society. All they require is that you pride yourself on the code of bushido, the Way of the Warrior. Giri—a strong sense of duty and obligation to other members—is also essential. Nothing in life can be more important than your gang. And yakuza must show sympathy for the weak and for people ground down by the powers that be. Violent death in a struggle against the tyranny of oppressors: that is a most poetic, tragic, honorable fate.

  Your boss becomes your father.

  Your gang members become your bothers.

  That alone would be enough for Kamikaze.

  But his fate—it seemed to him—was to be more than that. For his oyabun was destined to be the kumicho himself. If the link Kamikaze had discovered in some old British colonial records was correct, then Genjo Tokuda would be both father figure and actual father to him.

  According to his watch, it was time to go. So the would-be yakuza in his ninja black followed the densely shadowed path north from the cenotaph to a vantage point near the dragon-like figurehead of the Empress of Japan. Its fanged jaws seemed to snarl fearsomely at the humped mass of mountains beyond the moon-streaked harbor.

  At five minutes to nine, a black limousine rounded the lighthouse at Brockton Point and stopped at the curb directly in front of the figurehead, as instructed.

  Kamikaze crouched in the dark.

  No one got out of the idling limousine.

  Boom! The Nine O’Clock Gun, just around the point and out of sight, blasted south toward the towers of the downtown core. Its reverberations echoed back at the park. Before that phantom battery fell silent for another day, the far rear door of the limousine opened. A featureless figure strode quickly to the base of the figurehead, and Kamikaze abandoned his hiding place on the opposite side of the road. Reaching the seawall, he walked east toward the limo and engaged the waiting man.

  “I’m Kamikaze.”

  “Call me the Claw. Get in,” the bodyguard ordered, indicating the yawning rear door.

  So stocky was the Claw that his body seemed fit for a gorilla. He was balding and had a prominent mole on his cheek. Not a word escaped his lips as they drove through the peninsular park. The fact that Kamikaze wasn’t on the floor with a sack pulled over his head meant that this was either the first day of the rest of his yakuza life or the beginning of a one-way ride.

  So be it, he thought.

  No turning back.

  From the dragon figurehead, Stanley Park Drive ran parallel to the seawall, along the south shore of the harbor. On the inland side loomed Lumberman’s Arch, a huge, wonky structure that resembled a lopsided torii gate to a Shinto shrine. Ahead, the Lions Gate Bridge, with its necklace of lights dipping from the dual supports, spanned First Narrows and landed at the foot of the mountains.

  The limo zigzagged to the crest of Prospect Point and drove onto the causeway bisecting the park. As the car bridged the neck of ocean joining the outer bay to the inner harbor, the harvest moon peered into the tinted windows like a pudgy-faced groupie at a rock concert.

  The end of the bridge saw Marine Drive branch left and right. The left fork conveyed them into West Vancouver, the richest municipality in Canada. No sooner had they entered than they turned up Taylor Way, the road that climbed Hollyburn Mountain to the British Properties. Up, up, up they snaked to the crown of the city. The irony was not lost on Kamikaze.

  During the Depression, the Guinness family of Ireland, brewers of good beer, had purchased this side of the mountain to create an exclusive community. To populate the British Properties, they built the Lions Gate Bridge in 1938. Then, to make sure the properties stayed British, they sold the lots with covenants that restricted ethnic Asians.

  Times, of course, had changed, and tonight the limo drove into the multi-car garage of a magnificent mansion that had been bought with money laundered by Genjo Tokuda’s yakuza.

  The garage closed automatically.

  “Get out,” said the Claw.

  No bakuto had ever tried a gamble as daring as this. Those dice men and card sharps who had worked the towns and highways of medieval Japan would have been proud of him. When he found his wartime birth record in colonial government papers, Kamikaze mailed a copy to Genjo Tokuda’s headquarters in Tokyo’s Ginza district, along with an offer to provide a blood sample for DNA tests. At the firing of the Nine O’Clock Gun on October 25, he wrote, he would be waiting near the figurehead of the Empress of Japan in Vancouver’s Stanley Park. There, he would introduce himself as Kamikaze to the man Tokuda sent to meet him, and then would hand over the genetic fingerprint that would prove they were father and son.

  The no-show five days ago had prompted Kamikaze to courier a follow-up letter to Japan:

  Father, you dishonor me. I wish to become a yakuza. What I can offer you for that honor is set out below. The timing is such that we must move quickly, so again I will be waiting near the figurehead of the Empress of Japan when the Nine O’Clock Gun fires on October 30.

  So there he had been tonight, and here he was now, being ushered into an aerie of glass with a view all the way south to the U.S. border. He was about to lay his cards on the table in the hope that Genjo Tokuda would accept his ya, his ku, and his sa as a “bad hand” worthy of respect.

  Tokuda was in Vancouver. Kamikaze knew that.

  He had watched the kumicho and his gang exit the customs area at the airport earlier today.

  By the glow of the moon, the only illumination in the eagle’s nest, an old man entered and sat down on an ornate chair. In a wooden rack on a coffee table in front of him was his daisho of samurai swords.

  Smuggled in? Kamikaze wondered.

  A rebel spirit and a willingness to commit crime, that’s all it takes to join today’s weak yakuza. So low have recruiting standards sunk that most new members are bosozoku, street punks notorious for racing motorbikes. Such riffraff are an insult to how it was in the days when Tokuda’s samurai prided themselves on their ancestral ties to bushido.

  With that in mind, Kamikaze knew what to do.

  With one arm outstretched and his other crooked behind his back, he bowed in deference to the old kumicho and introduced himself.

  Tokuda had only half a face, thanks to the scar, but he studied his putative son with eyes that seemed to pierce like laser beams to his genetic core.

  “Speak,” said the Claw. “I’ll translate.”

  So Kamikaze addressed Tokuda from his heart.

  An hour later, father and son, in kimonos adorned with the family crest, sat face to face on ceremonial mats. The father’s kimono was gray. The son’s was white. Custom said that Kamikaze required a guarantor, but the only guarantee Tokuda had needed was the sight of his own features in his son’s mixed-race face.

  The ceremony that father and son were about to undergo would solidify their blood connection. Tonight, the blood was symbolized by sake, which the Claw mixed with salt and fish scales, then carefully poured into cups. Because Tokuda was both kumicho and oyabun, his cup was filled to the brim. As kobun, Kamikaze got less.

  Both men drank a bit, then exchanged cups.

  To seal their blood connection, which in their case was real as well as symbolic, each man drank from the other’s cup.

  Having made his commitment to the yakuza, Kamikaze followed Tokuda and the Claw out to the moonlit deck, where the three gangsters gazed down at Vancouver.

  “There,” said Kamikaze, pointing to the south shore of the harbor. “That’s the target.”

  The Last Frontier

  The Mad Dog’s baritone belted out the bottom end of “Happy Birthday” as Brit, his sexy ex-stripper, ex-hooker wife, exited from the kitchen with a candlelit cake in her hands and sang the upper vocals like the heavenly angel she surely wasn’t. Had a Peeping Tom been lu
rking out there tonight, the sight of Brittany Starr, plunging neckline and all, would have lured him over the white picket fence and across to the dining-room window of the sage green bungalow. Inside, he’d see a cheery fire blazing in the hearth and, on the mantel, an eagle feather that had been given to the hostess with the mostest and her testosterone-poisoned husband at their recent wedding. One look at that Neanderthal would probably convince Tom to beat a fast retreat, rather than chance a beating at the hands of the muscle-bound Mountie.

  Too bad.

  As an expert in such matters, Tom would have correctly deduced that the happy couple screwed night and day.

  “Make a wish,” Brit said, setting the lazy-dazy cake down in front of their guest.

  Had Bob “Ghost Keeper” George not been an honorable friend, and the Mad Dog his blood brother, he might have wished for Brit. Instead, he wished for a week off to go hunting and sweat-lodging in the Nahanni’s Headless Valley.

  Pheeew!

  The inspector blew out the candles.

  “I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house down,” Brit said as she scraped up the candlewax from a table setting even Martha Stewart would have admired.

  “Sorry.”

  “Must be all that puffing on your peace pipe, Tonto,” said the Mad Dog.

  “Eddie? The gift,” Brit prompted, while slicing the cake.

  “Now?” he asked.

  “Uh-huh. I can’t wait.”

  A full-blooded Plains Cree from Duck Lake, Saskatchewan, Ghost Keeper had been raised in a one-room shack on a Native reserve. His mom had struggled to provide him with the necessities of life, and there hadn’t been five cents left over to spend on the white man’s material baggage. Instead, she had guided him through timeless traditions, sending the boy out on spirit quests so he would be forced to face up to himself and nature.

  His journey from there to here would fill a series of novels.

  “Open it,” said Brit as the Cree gazed down at the present the Mad Dog set before him.

  Unwrapping the gift as meticulously as he had exhibits back when he’d worked in the forensic lab, Ghost Keeper bared a square box with a lift-up lid.

  “Brace yourself,” the Mad Dog cautioned.

  “Whoa!” the Cree exclaimed.

  “You’re looking at the Rolls-Royce of nine mils, pal. Y’ever seen a Europellet popper like that? Even unmodified out of the box, the P210 will shoot sub-two-inch clusters at twenty-five yards. When accuracy is paramount, it’s the closest thing to perfection in a pistol. That’s why it’s a fixture at European prize shoots. One thing about the Swiss, they know their precision engineering. Hey, it’s a SIG. What more do I need to say? Reach in, pick it up, and heft it in your hand.”

  Ghost Keeper did just that.

  “I polished it,” Brit said, “especially for you.”

  The blue gunmetal gleamed, as did the wooden grips.

  “It’s a beauty,” the Cree said, “but I can’t take it. Who knows how many grand this set you back.”

  “You must take it,” Brit pressed, “so I can sleep. How many times have you saved Eddie’s life? If it comes to that again, I want you to have the best sharpshooter around.”

  “But the cost ...”

  “Are we friends?” the Mad Dog asked.

  “No question.”

  “It’s a miracle, considering my dad. He did his damnedest to make me into a racist like him. And until I met you, he’d succeeded. When he died, I inherited some cash he’d squirreled away. You don’t spend much when you’re a trapper in the Yukon woods. My dad’s money bought that gun, and that makes me feel good. You can’t deny me the satisfaction of righting that wrong.”

  “Explain it to me,” Joe said over a late dinner in Chinatown. “I fought a war so my offspring would have America to call home. We Hetts have fought wars for that since the Revolution. I think it’s damned ironic that my only grandkid now swears allegiance to the Crown.”

  “That depends,” Jackie said, “on how you see the Revolution.”

  “How do you see it?”

  “As a western. The British got in the way of America’s yearning to tame the wild frontier.”

  “That’s not how I learned it.”

  “Sorry, Red, but I don’t believe in the cherry tree. It’s one of those lies they feed us in school.”

  Joe took a mouthful of chicken chow mein and slurped up a loose noodle. Then he turned and wagged a chopstick at Chuck like a schoolmarm about to rap a troublemaker’s knuckles with a ruler. “See what happens when your kid’s born here?”

  “You’re the one who bought the ranch and taught her to ride. She loves horses. Don’t blame me.”

  Joe turned back to Jackie, who was munching on a spring roll. “So be a Texas Ranger and live near us.”

  “There’s not much left of them but the hat, the belt, and the boots. A hundred Texas Rangers—that’s hardly the last frontier. But umpteen thousand Mounties all the way to the North Pole? Besides, I look damn good in the uniform.”

  “So what’s wrong with the cherry tree?”

  “It didn’t happen, Red. ‘George,’ said his father to young George Washington, ‘do you know who killed that beautiful little cherry tree yonder in the garden?’ ‘I cannot tell a lie, Pa,’ George confessed. ‘You know I cannot tell a lie. I did it with my hatchet.’”

  “Your point?” said Joe.

  “That tale’s pure fiction. It was made up by a guy named Parson Weems.”

  “So?”

  “So if it’s a lie—and we know it’s a lie—why’s that bullshit fed to every kid in grammar school?”

  “For the moral.”

  “What moral? That lying is okay? Seems pretty strange to me that a lie is used to tout a tale that decries lying.”

  Chuck laughed.

  Joe joined him. “Ya got me, kid. So tell me why the Revolution is a western.”

  “‘Go west, young man, and grow up with the country.’ Isn’t that the story of America? Europeans crowded onto shrinking land set sail for the New World and the freedom of the West. Unfortunately for those of us in the Thirteen Colonies, the French and their Indian allies held all the land from Quebec down the Ohio Country to Louisiana. That’s why we fought the French and Indian War—so we English Americans could push west. But no sooner had Britain won the Battle of Quebec than King George gave the Indians all the land to the west in the Proclamation of 1763, thus closing the frontier to colonial expansion. The only way to press west was to overthrow the king, and the Crown’s taxing of us to pay for the French and Indian War provided a righteous excuse. The upshot? The American Revolution. And that, dear Granddad, is how the West was won.”

  “I don’t see,” Joe said, “why that makes you a Mountie.”

  “Three hundred-some million Americans,” Jackie said. “Now we have too many people crowded onto shrinking land. Thirty-some million Canadians have a country bigger than the States. That’s why Dances with Wolves, Unforgiven, and Brokeback Mountain were shot here. To experience the real West in the twenty-first century, you gotta venture north to the last frontier.”

  “Benedict Arnold,” said Joe.

  “I’m no traitor. As you said this morning, I’m still an American at heart. But hey, this dual citizenship thing is cool. I’m like Zorro and the Lone Ranger, the heroes of those westerns Dad grew up on. Corporal Jackie Hett of the Mounted is my secret identity.”

  After dropping off Chuck and Joe at the convention hotel, Jackie headed home to her apartment overlooking English Bay. It felt good to have her dad and Red here with her; it was the first time the three of them had gathered together in Vancouver. Chuck had flown up several times, but without her grandfather. As Jackie drove through dwindling nighttime traffic, she recalled her excited phone call to her dad in New Mexico late last year.

  “Hello?”

  “Guess who’s talking?”

  “I know your voice, Jackie.”

  “It’s Corporal Jackie now
, dear old Dad.”

  “Congratulations, Corporal! Climbing the ranks, huh? And ‘dear’ is good enough. Let’s can the ‘old,’ shall we?”

  “Guess what?”

  “There’s more?”

  “I’m now in Special X. That’s the big enchilada, Dad. The Special External Section. Not only do I get to travel for cases with links outside the country, but Special X goes after all our home-bred serial killers too. Not bad, huh?”

  “Are you going to switch to ‘eh’? I wish your mom were still alive to share the pride I feel.”

  “And there’s more.”

  “When it rains, it pours,” her dad said. “Though not very often here.”

  “There’s gonna be a Red Serge Ball next month. Will you be my date?”

  Chuck laughed. “Me? Dear old Dad? I’m sure there’s some young buck who’ll gladly take you.”

  “Sure,” said Jackie. “But that’s not what I want. I want you to see who I am.”

  No dance is more formal than the Red Serge Ball, so as soon as Chuck’s plane landed, they went to rent him a tuxedo. Her dad told the shop to outfit him in duds “as classic as James Bond wears,” and he soon preened before her, dressed to kill in formal black. Tall and taut from a constant can-do fight against middle-age spread, with a handsome face that time and sun had creased to ruggedness, Chuck mugged for the mirror with a sketchy British voice—“Hett. Chuck Hett.”—while the fitter fluttered around him to make adjustments here and there.

  Finally, the store owner sidled in to close the deal and, like a valet addressing his lord and master, told Chuck, “I don’t know what affair you’re attending, sir, but I guarantee you’ll be the best-dressed person there.”