Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America

by Brian Francis Slattery

  Two days later the Lucky Sun glides, freighterless, into Osaka Bay. It’s night on the water fifty miles off the coast, but as they near the city, it’s like they’re sailing into the sun, the city’s hundreds of towers building a wall of light that bounces off the wrinkled waves. The Lucky Sun passes beneath the giant arms of cranes, the bridges lancing over the Yodo; approaches piers blazing with electricity and bleary with steam, looking like noon at two in the morning. A slim car is waiting at the end of the pier, bright yellow with teeth painted on the hood, windows stained black enough to be reflective. The door swings open and a man who recognizes Hideo from the deck of the Lucky Sun raises his hand, though not a muscle on his face moves. Captain Saloon bows; bids farewell to his baby; walks with Zeke, Carolyn, and Hideo to the car, which slides through the streets into downtown Osaka, a canyon of electricity glittering over canals of green and gray. The streets and alleys are tangled with people, the agents of global commerce, men and women in expensive suits and raincoats speaking into cell phones, a melange of English, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, for there’s trade to be done in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, London, Milan, Frankfurt; they bark out huge numbers that are lost and found again in the noise of trucks shiftinggears, idling outside stores, blocking the roads, delivering silver and yellow fish packed between cubes filled with liquid nitrogen. Delivery boys with headlamps tied to their helmets dodge through the crowd on bicycles and mopeds outlined with glow sticks. Overhead, glued to the side of a building by suction cups, utility workers in yellow jumpsuits are fixing an antenna. They’re shouting at each other because the men inside the offices are shouting at them; every second that passes, the company loses seven million yen.

  They cross the corner of Americatown, where the signs blossom into katakana and English, advertising used books, pirated Hollywood movies from ten years ago, photographs of major cities and celebrities. A man in a baseball cap sells hot dogs from a cart advertising, in kanji, a brand of soap. Behind him is the James and Sons Smokehouse, a green-and-blue apartment building converted into a barbecue joint; a tall metal chimney jutting from the roof, spilling the smell of smoked ribs onto the people walking below. Mr. James himself is from Topeka, and the expats say his ribs are damn good, though not as good as what you could get at Gates in Kansas City.

  Zeke hasn’t been to Osaka in years, and he’s forgotten what it’s like, the way the light makes him think he’s inside, that over him is not a sky but a ceiling, painted a flat gray and lit from behind, a moon projected onto its surface. At any moment, he thinks, the image could change; the moon could be two smiling schoolgirls flashing V-for-Victory fingers. A pink flounder. A large white pig upside down, a pomegranate in its mouth.

  They approach the colossus of the Sanwa-Sumitomo complex, columns of plastic and glass tapering toward the clouds. In the side of the central tower is a small wooden door sized for a ten-year-old, stamped with the insignia of a dog’s long face, two fangs curled over the lower lip. Hideo knocks with both hands, two measures of a five-on-four polyrhythm, and then stands back. Behind them, an electric bus hisses to a stop amidrising steam. A woman calls from a mochi cart, waving her hand in slow motion, as if she’s getting her picture taken by a thousand photographers. The door opens to reveal a man in a long tan raincoat that doesn’t conceal the gun at his waist crouching there, looking out.

  “Takahashi-san,” he says.

  “Hai,” Hideo says. There is a quick exchange in Japanese that Zeke can’t follow, though it appears that Hideo is vouching for his, Carolyn’s, and the captain’s grooviness. No trouble from us, sir. The man with the gun glares at them, and steps aside. They all must bow to enter; the door shuts behind them. They’re on the shore of a rock garden, shaped to mimic the coast of southern Kyushu, where Inu Kimura was raised. How the son of a restaurant owner became a yakuza lord and financier for a major bank, Hideo has never been able to figure out, and Kimura has never cared to reveal. Kimura believes that the only things worth telling about a life are how many times it turns, how sharp the turn is; even after Hideo became a confidant, when they each knew enough about what the other had done to send the other to jail for several lifetimes, Kimura talked about his past only as a series of decisions and epiphanies, his memory focused on precise moments of realization, the years between them inconsequential, unworthy of commentary. The decision to become yakuza was equated with eating barbecued beef in a restaurant near the harbor in Kobe. The understanding that he was one of the wealthiest men in Japan, and thus in the world, arose from a moment on a train speeding north from Tokyo, his hands folded over the handle of a brown briefcase. My memories of myself are just sparks in dark places, Kimura said. Yet he never seems to forget anything about anyone else.

  Kimura is waiting for them in an iron pagoda rising from the middle of the rock garden. He makes an expansive gesture, and the man with the gun ushers them forward. They take off their shoes and enter.

  “Hideo. Zeke. Carolyn, of course.” He doesn’t even register the captain. “You all look unwell. Perhaps something to eat?”

  “No, Inu,” Hideo says. “We are not hungry.” A lie.

  “The last time I heard of you was before the collapse,” Kimura says. “You two had gone to Los Angeles, and you had gone to Monaco. Out of the trade, they said, forever.”

  “It seemed that way at the time,” Carolyn says.

  “So it is with final decisions,” Kimura says. “They are never final. But here I am assuming that you are entering the trade again.”

  “We are,” Zeke says.

  Kimura’s eyes move across each of them, and he sees everything. Zeke’s quickening pulse. Carolyn’s serenity. Hideo’s hesitation. My disciple doesn’t want this, Kimura thinks.

  “I am convinced you’re unwell,” he says, and whistles three ascending notes.

  “Inu—” Hideo says.

  “—No, I insist. You will hurt my feelings if you don’t eat. Now, what have you come to see me about?”

  “A plan,” says Hideo, “of large proportions.”

  “Having to do with the Aardvark and the slave trade,” says Zeke.

  “You want to usurp it,” Kimura says.

  “More like dismantle it.”

  Kimura laughs. “You cannot dismantle the slave trade. True, there are revolts now—haven’t you heard?—but the trade will return. It exists because you have no laws against it. It exists because you have no workable laws at all.”

  “What if we bring back the law?” Zeke says.

  “…

  “Your plan is much bigger than I was thinking,” Kimura says. “This is not a heist. This is a revolution.”

  “It is only a difference of scale,” Hideo says.

  “But you are only the Slick Six. Not an army.”

  “Not if we have your help.”

  Servants are bringing in trays of food: marinated fish, stewed vegetables, strips of sashimi and Kobe beef, plates of okonomiyaki wavering with seasoning. Hideo slips into Japanese and pulls out a scrap of yellow paper, on which he draws a very accurate silhouette of the former United States of America. A dotted line runs from California to the middle of the country. Then he dots a line from Wisconsin to Texas. Kimura leans over, nods, grunts. Hideo circles the place where the lines intersect, gesticulates with his chopsticks as Kimura takes a quick bite of squid, keeps nodding and grunting with tentacles hanging out of his mouth. Hideo draws another line, from the circle in the middle of the country to New York, makes a gesture suggesting decapitation.

  “How much do you need?” Kimura says.

  Carolyn says a very, very large number, and doesn’t blink. She understood everything, Zeke realizes.

  “Hai,” Hideo says.

  Kimura chews. Swallows.

  “Both the risk and the expense of this are ridiculous,” he says. “I am surprised you think I can liquidate such money on such short notice.”

  “You can do it,” Zeke says. “I’ve seen your records.”

  “What do
I get? In return?”

  “Half of the island.”

  Captain Saloon’s eyebrows rise.

  “The southern half,” Kimura says.

  “You’ll have to—”

  “—The southern half,” Kimura says, and Zeke imagines him pumping their stomachs until they vomit up his food, then beating them all on the head with a pipe.

  “Deal,” says Zeke. The other two look at him. He looks back, and if it’s possible for eyes to shrug, his do. He turns to Kimura. “Just out of curiosity, where are you going to get six hundred billion yen?”

  The Vibe enters Kimura and shows him the neatness of it all, a circle closing. He giggles like a two-year-old.

  “I will get it. But I need a few days. Is that acceptable?”

  “Do we have a choice?” Zeke says.

  Kimura smiles.

  “Eat,” he says, then nods to Hideo. “Please come with me for a moment.”

  They walk out of the pagoda and across the rock garden to an elevator that conveys them without sound to the top of the central Sanwa-Sumitomo building. Osaka is an ocean of light that stretches to the horizon; corporate towers and the spindles of telephone antennae rise through the glow of neon and sulfur. The sky sparks with aircraft that disappear behind the underlit buildings nearby; the bellies of helicopters leave greasy red streaks of light in the air. Up here, all of the sounds of the metropolis, the voices and snippets of songs from cell phones, the screams of machinery, words intoned from loudspeakers, music blaring from convenience stores, dogs yipping and barking as men stand outside bars encouraging people to enter, girls calling across sidewalks searching for each other, the aquatic blasts from boats moving off into the night; all of this resolves into a rushing hum, the expectant static of a microphone poised before the planet’s mouth, waiting for it to speak. At one corner of the roof are a table and two chairs, a bottle of sake, two cups. Inu Kimura and Hideo sit, drink, regard the strings of lights on the bridges over the river, the dark line of the bay.

  “Why don’t you like the plan?” Inu Kimura says in casual Japanese.

  “I do like the plan,” Hideo says.

  “No you don’t.”

  “Do you think it won’t work?”

  “I think it may work.”

  “So why don’t you like it?”

  “Because I don’t want to return to the trade.”

  “Ah.”

  “…”

  “When you worked for me, I knew you had such talent,” Inu Kimura says. “You understood so well how to move in the cracks in the world. But I always wondered if you wanted the life, the life you saw me living. When you left me, I assumed it was to do something legitimate.”

  “I thought about it,” Hideo says.

  “Instead, you created the Slick Six.”

  “Yes.”

  “You could just walk away,” Inu Kimura says. “Why don’t you?”

  “Because I am a slave. To that captain. To the Aardvark. So the plan must be seen through before I walk away. And I want to take Kari with me.”

  “She is very smart. And charming. And beautiful, when she lets you remember what she looks like. I understand why you want to keep her.”

  “We haven’t spoken in years,” Inu Kimura says. “But you know that I’ve always been very proud of you, the work you’ve done. You know that the silence between us was nothing personal. We just lost touch with each other.”

  “I know.”

  “I could sabotage the plan if you want. Kill the captain, kill the Aardvark. I could even kill Marco, I think.”

  “Don’t. It’s important that the plan work. The plan is important.”

  Inu Kimura laughs.

  “You haven’t grown a conscience, have you?” he says.

  “Maybe,” Hideo says. “But I also want to be able to walk away from it afterward. The plan, the Slick Six. All of it.”

  Inu Kimura takes a sip of sake, leaves the cup at his lips for a second.

  “I understand,” he says. “You made the Slick Six. So you feel, maybe, that you have to unmake it.”

  “Maybe.”

  “When do you think you’ll do it?”

  “The moment I can do so without jeopardizing the plan.”

  “…”

  “Don’t worry,” Hideo says. “I’ll make sure the risk you’re taking pays off.”

  Inu Kimura smiles.

  “You were waiting for me to say that, weren’t you?” Hideo says.

  “Only in the sense that I knew you would.”

  At first the rest of their talk is of the details of the scheme, the dividing of assets, the movement of funds, but soon it’s easy and cool, of women and men in jail, in government, people who died years ago from poison and bad luck; until the sake runs out and Hideo slips to his feet, excuses himself, for he remembers that his people must be waiting.

  Inu Kimura waits until the elevator is gone, then looks over his city, starts to do the numbers, adds up the capital that brought slavery howling back to the United States plus the five to eleven percent interest strained from the slaves’ blood, their lives turned into money. The Aardvark has it—Inu Kimura knows he does, has been making sure of it for months. Kimura will collect what he is owed, and when the Aardvark is deposed Kimura will take his island too. If the Aardvark survives what’s coming, when he’s wandering the earth in ragged robes a decade from now, his caravan of a family in tow, his imperial days will seem like a dream. I ruled New York once. A mighty country ate from my hand. But Inu Kimura is almost certain the Aardvark will not survive it, won’t want to, and the world will descend upon what he leaves behind. There will be calls for laws, Kimura knows, for the balance has tipped toofar toward disorder, the brutal rules of wealth and poverty; but the framers of the new regime will rig the laws to keep the spoils flowing, make sure they’re downhill when they do. Property and money will flit from hand to hand; there will be rushes for empty government offices, the country reborn in a tangle of advantage and vendetta, blind and beautiful optimism, luck and circumstance. Former bureaucrats will be bureaucrats again; mayors made paupers and paupers mayors; lawyers called back to work, maybe even to the same offices, as though the legal system were just holding its breath for five years, plunging underwater just to see how long it could stay down there. For the New Sioux, the wealth will transform their lives. They’ll wake after heavy revelry as new people, redeemed at last, the land beneath their feet theirs again. They’ll marvel that they have so much. But it will be nothing compared to what Inu Kimura takes. Another giggle wriggles from his throat when he thinks of it, for the Sioux will be getting less than half the interest from the Aardvark’s repayment of his debt. Kimura will walk away with the other half, and the principal besides; and then, as the land’s value multiplies, he’ll sell it off piece by piece, the largest haul anyone has seen on a real estate deal in fifty years. He’ll profit from it all, the death of an empire and the pangs of a new country’s birth; and it will all be done before anyone even sees what’s going on. It’ll be the greatest heist since the wreck of communism, the price America pays to regain its soul, and nobody will even know he did it.

  In the street below, two women in business suits and pigtails accost Captain Saloon, but he doesn’t even see them; he only has eyes for his honey.

  “Do you think he can get the money?” Captain Saloon says.

  “He says he can get it,” Zeke says.

  “Do you believe him?”

  Carolyn watches Hideo open his mouth, and knows whathe’ll say. I never believe anything. Every day that I wake up and do not find the planet breaking apart, the crust lifting off into space, is a small miracle. She puts her hand over his mouth.

  “Yes,” she says.

  Captain Saloon smiles. “Excellent. We must proceed to New York at once, then.”

  “But so many things must happen first,” Hideo says.

  “Not really. The prices on your heads have gone up. I own three of the most valuable fugitives in the w
orld. So I figure, we must get to New York as fast as possible. And either I get an island, or enough money from the Aardvark to keep the Lucky Sun running for a decade. Good plan, no?”

  “How long will it take to get to New York?” Carolyn says.

  “Three weeks at the most.”

  Marco, Zeke thinks. You’d better hurry, wherever you are.

  The red-and-white sign for Dillon’s Food Market on the road out of McPherson still gets power, though nobody’s in the aisles. The half-empty counter at the deli reeks with rotting potato salad. Marco and Dayneesha find a box of doughnuts, three cans of Clamato, start walking the road north to Salina. The line of the highway hops from hill to hill, shoots straight across deserted fields thick with tall grass and straggling saplings with crooked branches, fringes of leaves. Telephone poles tilt at strained angles; power lines hang dead from their spars. Once this road roared with trucks on their way to Interstate 135 while people pulled grain from the fields around them; in another few years, Dayneesha thinks, the fields will be forests and meadows, the stray livestock that survived long enough to go feral will come to graze and shelter themselves in the shade. Marco and Dayneesha just happen to be here for its fallow period. The road drops in front of them for a mile, dips and bends over the crest of the next hill; a lone tree claws into the skyline, and Marco is taken back to Mongolia, before the Slick Six, after his childhood days of blood and gunfire in South America.

  He had eight tattoos then, long strands of color running along his limbs, flashes of paint on his back and chest, a tendril of fire curling from his ear across his cheek. You will have to erase all of that, said Red Kwon, his mentor. It will do you no good to be memorable. I’ll never get rid of them, Marco said. Red Kwon just smiled; the light that flashed off his teeth said, You angry, stupid young man. But I did not pick you for your brain, now, did I?

  For as long as he can remember, Marco has always been fighting. First it was in the ring of slums around La Paz; then in a camp in the jungle near the Brazilian border. At the age of eight, he could explode an orange with a Kalashnikov at a hundred yards, couldn’t see the crucial difference between fruit and people. He fought first in Bolivia against men in uniforms who hesitated before they shot at him, didn’t understand that Marco wouldn’t return the favor. In Peru, he killed more men in camouflage, a few in suits and ties, one of whom he met on a crowded Lima street and gutted with a bayonet. In Colombia, he razed villages, shot anyone who fought, anyone who ran. By then he was twelve years old and thought he was in the official army until his commander abandoned him in Guatemala City out of fear, because Marco was getting very good at killing people, and it was getting harder to make him stop. But he was still a twelve-year-old, and he cried like one when four teenagers tried to pry out his gold teeth with a pair of pliers while a fifth held a semiautomatic pistol to his head. He was yelping and kicking, a stray dog beaten with a stick; then a shock ran through his brain and he was standing in the middle of the street, four of the kids dead around him, the fifth dying against the stop sign on the corner, a policeman sitting on the curb screaming and clutching the remains of his legs, two other officers stumbling away, unspooling long streaks of blood behind them, begging, Please let me go, I’ll do anything if you just let me go. Red Kwon stood beside him, his hand on Marco’s shoulder. You are squandering your gift, he said.