As he splashed tepid water on his face, the rustle of Egyptian cotton sheets and a tiny moan of pleasure or dismay came from the bedroom, announcing Momoko’s return from fairyland. Grabbing a towel, Johnny leaned in the doorway wiping his face and observing Momoko’s dreamlike beauty, as pale and unblemished as a perfect moonflower. Her narrow high-cheeked face wrapped in a punkish bramble patch of raven-black hair rested amid a tumble of oversized pillows. A long supple neck descended to angular shoulders. The ragged line of the bedsheet dissected her body at waist height, leaving her torso bare. Her small conical breasts confronted him like twin interstellar ray guns.
One almond-shaped eye opened and fixated on him.
“Don’t you ever sleep?” Momoko asked.
“Time waits for no man,” Johnny said with a harsh snicker.
“Come back to bed and fuck me to oblivion,” she pleaded.
“You’re making it awfully hard for me to go to work.”
Johnny smiled but remained resolute, dressing quickly in jeans, Converse All Star lo-tops, a Ting Tings T-shirt, and black pigskin leather jacket. The sleek German coffee machine on the kitchen counter spat out a double espresso thick enough to stand on its own two feet. Johnny downed it in two sips. The caffeine hit his blood like a typhoon. Seconds later he stepped into the elevator and plummeted the thirty-seven floors to street level.
At 4:00 a.m., darkness still draped the high-rise core of Tokyo’s Shinjuku neighborhood. A half hour away, the summer dawn waited in the wings. The air was thick with humidity and cancerous particulates.
The chrome-encrusted navy blue Cadillac Eldorado Baritz convertible circa 1959 that Johnny had rescued from an El Paso, Texas, used car lot hummed at the curb. The white canvas top was new; the blue and cream leather seats still the original. When he saw it parked like this, the word shark always came into Johnny’s head. Or Batman.
Swarthy complexioned Tio Tepo, also from El Paso, hunched behind the wheel, his rough-hewn hands calmly in control of the supercharged V-8 engine. He had been Johnny Ito’s driver for the last three years, ever since Johnny returned from an around-the-world tour and opened the Silverado Country-Western Sushi Bar on the trendiest street in Roppongi. It was a lot safer way to make a living than running dope from Ciudad Juarez.
Across the street a group of citizens moved in slow motion accord, hypnotically acting out an inscrutable array of tai chi movements designed to reduce the stress and high blood pressure of life in a megalopolis of 35 million highly competitive gooks.
Johnny eased into the passenger seat. He and Tio Tepo exchanged a resounding high five.
“Let’s go get us a big fat bluefin,” Johnny said.
“You got it, amigo.”
Tio Tepo stomped the gas pedal, and the Eldorado leaped away from the curb like an enraged water buffalo in high lust. They sped through the almost empty predawn streets, dazzled by a silent display of flashing, spiraling, and skittering neon signs.
As the Caddy squealed around a corner, Johnny retrieved his iPhone from the front pocket of his jeans and dialed Otani-san.
“Mushi-mushi,” came Mr. Otani’s oily voice.
“What have you got for me?” Johnny asked.
“Times are very bleak,” Mr. Otani lamented. “Not like the old days. The giant bluefins are disappearing. Eating whale is considered barbaric.”
“Don’t give me a history lesson,” Johnny said. “Jack Nicholson’s throwing a private party at my place. I need the finest tuna money can buy.”
“There is only one fresh tuna worth buying today,” Mr. Otani said. “But the price is too high; over a hundred thousand dollars.”
“Buy it.”
Johnny deep-sixed the call to his wholesaler and, leaning back in the cream-colored leather seats and closing his eyes, watched a rerun of Momoko lying in bed masturbating while he dressed.
In minutes the Eldorado entered an underground garage on the edge of the vast Tsukiji Fish Market. Mr. Otani waited for them at a small coffee bar just outside the main auction hall. The smell of the sea and its denizens pervaded everything, wood, cement, tile, clothing, skin, like a thick oil.
They exchanged obligatory bows. Tiny porcelain cups of steaming coffee and shots of Yamazaki single malt whiskey sat on the oak bar. Johnny picked up one of the shot glasses; sniffed; then drank its contents in one gulp.
“That’ll knock your socks off,” he said. Johnny was a cognoscente when it came to American hardboiled slang. “So what’s the deal?”
“Razu Takizawa wants the prize bluefin.”
“That yakuza asshole?”
“The same.”
“But you bought it, right?”
“Yes. Legally, the tuna belongs to you. But…”
“Then fuck him!” Johnny inhaled another whiskey; then spun around and gripped Mr. Otani around the shoulders, drawing him close. He could feel Mr. Otani cringe under this personal contact. “Okay, pal. Show me this fish that’s costing me a fucking fortune.”
Crossing an alley they entered the auction hall. The reek of decomposing fish grew instantly stronger. In the vaulted warehouse space, rows of frozen tuna carcasses displayed on wooden pallets competed for the attention of restaurant owners, wholesalers, and the digital cameras of meandering tourists. Fish market workers in overalls and knee-high rubber boots, cigarettes hanging from their lips, watched the passing scene with hostile eyes. The dissonant clanging of a handheld bell announced the beginning of the new auction.
Mr. Otani led the way into a quieter room where the corpse of the exquisite giant bluefin lay in a coffin-shaped wooden crate. Even in the spare industrial light the fish’s silver-blue skin shimmered and coruscated, calling to mind some wondrous mechanical creature that had crossed over from a realm beyond human imagination. Its mouth gaped in a silent scream of protest for its ignominious fate. A single white sightless eye stared at Johnny with all the animosity of things of the deep for those who live on dry land.
As Johnny Ito gazed at the once grand creature, a tear crept into the corner of his eye. He brushed it away.
At that moment a short, powerfully built man in black trousers and T-shirt emerged from the shadows. His arms were covered in garish tattoos depicting the highlights of his yakuza career: kidnappings, extortion, gangbangs, murders, beheadings.
Behind him stepped two longshoremen thugs. One, in a bloodstained sweatshirt bearing the words University of Tokyo, held by his side an evil-looking steel hook used for lugging fish carcasses hither and yon. The other maggot, his head as bald as a beach swept by a tsunami, rhythmically slapped a wooden bat against the calloused palm of his other hand.
“It’s been a while, Johnny,” said the man in black, his eyes glinting like two rough-cut rubies lit from within. “I heard you were back in Tokyo.”
“Razu. How the fuck’ve you been?”
For a moment their eyes meshed, wrestling for position.
“I’ll pay you seventy-five thousand for the fish.”
“Your offer’s way below fair market price.”
“Fair market price is in the eye of the beholder. Besides I’m letting you live.”
“But I’m not selling.”
In the same instant, Johnny’s Converse clad foot slammed into the crotch of the hook-wielding sleezeball. The gangbanger’s brain short-circuited from the sudden intense pain, his eyes rolled up, and he collapsed to the floor, moaning.
Tio Tepo rested the barrel of his nickel-finished Colt Python against the cheekbone of the other head-butter, who froze instantly. The only sounds were the ratcheting noise of the Python’s firing hammer being drawn back and the clatter of the wooden bat hitting the floor.
Johnny blinked.
“Sorry, pal. But I need this fish to make a very important client happy.”
“It’s my mother’s birthday,” Razu said. “She’ll be very disappointed.”
“She’ll get over it.”
Razu spread his hands in a gesture of equanimity.
“I’ll see you later, Johnny.”
He turned his back and walked away.
“Not if I see you first,” Johnny called after him. Then twisted around to find Mr. Otani, who had been trying vainly to fade into oblivion. “Get some guys to put the tuna in the back seat of my Caddy,” Johnny said to him. “I’ll take it to the restaurant myself.”
As it turned out, the bluefin was too big to fit crosswise on the back seat of the Eldorado. Instead they put down the convertible top and set the coffin-like box upright jammed against the transmission hump. Driving into the Tokyo dawn, it was as if the bluefin was leaping into the air in a last desperate attempt to escape. A ray of sunlight glinted off the fish’s gunmetal hide in a biblical moment.
“Razu will be back,” said Tio Tepo.
As he spoke, a pair of Subarus, one red, one silver, separated from the curb and swam behind them like two moray eels. The streets were still relatively empty, though delivery trucks were starting to take up curb space, guys with hand trucks carting crates and boxes and bales through storefront doorways. The overhead expressways were jammed; traffic moved like dark sluggish rivers.
In front of them, a string of green lights blinked on in receding succession, an impromptu runway cleared for takeoff.
Tio Tepo went for it, pushing the Eldorado’s speedometer past 80, screaming around a half-ton noodle delivery truck that backed suddenly into the street, leaving the Subarus in the proverbial noodle dust. To avoid slamming into the delivery truck on whose side appeared the smiling face of a typical Tokyo housewife happily slurping from a bowl of noodles and fish broth, the driver of the silver WRX steered sideways and crashed the customized street racer into the curb, destroying the right front wheel and axel. By the time the red WRX squeezed past the noodle truck, the navy blue Caddy with the dead tuna in the backseat had made three turns and was nowhere to be seen except by an orbiting civilian spy satellite or the ever watchful eyes of the yakuza’s network of street informants.
Razu, sitting in the deep leather backseat of a spit-polished midnight-black Mercedes the length of half a city block, signed into his account with GeckoGraphic, owners of a civilian spy satellite network. Even as GeckoGraphic’s Asian area satellite located Johnny Ito’s speeding Batmobile wannabe on a street grid beamed to Razu’s iPhone, a small-time heroin dealer visiting a customer at a corner steamed-dumpling-and-coffee joint called Pop Eye’s dialed Razu’s iPhone to report the identical location of Johnny Ito, Tio Tepo, and the sacred bluefin.
Tio Tepo glanced sideways at Johnny.
“Wish that tuna could talk,” he said. “Hard to imagine what kind of stories it would tell. Wild stuff, I’m sure.”
“You’re not getting sentimental on me, are you?” asked Johnny. “Twelve hours from now that baby is going to be nothing but sashimi garnished with a perilla leaf and a side of shredded turnip.”
Tio Tepo gestured wildly in the direction ahead.
“If we live that long.”
Ahead a gargantuan waste management vehicle painted to look like a giant squid burbled from a side street, turned, and bore down on them at ever-increasing speed. Twenty tons of inexorable steel driven by an apeshit yakuza samurai.
“Yikes!” Johnny shouted.
To the right a stone stairway descended a small hillside to an ancient and serene Shinto temple, its hand-hewn columns and eaves painted in exotic colors. Tio Tepo headed for the staircase. They pitched and yawed and bounced down the wide but shallow steps. Johnny’s teeth and organs shook as if caught up in the long-predicted giant quake. Blood oozed from a cut lip. He grabbed the tuna’s coffin, which was showing signs of wanting to fly into the bushes.
Hang in there, fish, he thought. We need you. I can think of a lot worse fates than ending up as Jack Nicholson’s dinner.
When the waste management truck started down the stairs, it instantly destroyed a stone banister, several prewar street lamps, and a small shrine honoring the woodland deity guarding the temple. As the stairs ended and the Eldorado ripped pell-mell across the greensward in front of the temple, Johnny looked back in time to see the garbage truck plow into a bronze lion seated halfway up the steps.
The lion, no match for the full-throttle 20-ton waste management vehicle, exploded into a dozen jagged pieces. At the same time the garbage truck became airborne. Listing to one side it flipped ass over elbow into a punishing barrel roll. The driver’s head penetrated the front windshield and instantly turned to mush. The passenger, catapulted through an open side window, was impaled on a brass lawn ornament, and bled to death. The giant squid rolled to a halt in a bamboo thicket. The woodland deity smiled.
“Thank you, fish!” Tio Tepo said.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Johnny retorted. “The fish had nothing to do with it. The yakuza asshole behind the wheel had no fucking idea how to drive that thing.”
Tio Tepo stopped the Caddy and waited while Johnny ran up the steps of the temple and emptied his pockets of coins and bills in front of the altar. He even took off and left as an offering a diamond pinky ring Momoko had given him.
Over the rising blare of sirens, a numbers runner standing at the top of the steps relayed to Razu’s iPhone the gory details.
“Fuck! Fuck!! Fuck!!! Why is it I always end up having to do every fuckin’ thing myself?”
“I don’t know, boss,” said the bald-headed driver with shoulders twice as wide as Elizabeth Taylor’s ass.
“It was a rhetorical question, asswipe.”
Razu squeezed out a glop of imported French hand cream and began rubbing his hands together.
“Let’s meet them at the Silverado.” Then he added: “And make it snappy.” A line he’d heard in some gaijin gangster flick.
Meanwhile Tio Tepo found a back entrance to the shrine, drove back onto the street and turned in the direction of the pleasure district of Roppongi. From the backseat, the bluefin gazed cross the flared blue-and-chrome fins of the Eldorado at the passing scene.
Johnny Ito’s mother lived in a two-bedroom apartment on the second floor across the street from the Silverado Country-Western Sushi Bar. When she opened the steel apartment door, Razu pushed past her into the apartment. Following behind him his driver quickly subdued, bound, and gagged Mrs. Ito. Razu opened a front window. Across the narrow street and up a little bit the Silverado’s awning hung over the sidewalk. He checked his Heckler & Koch 9mm semi-automatic. Then told his driver to wait in the alley and be ready to grab the bluefin.
Moments later Tio Tepo pulled the Eldorado up to the front door of the Silverado. Razu started firing. Tio Tepo and Johnny crouched in their seats. Tio Tepo returned fire.
Unbeknownst to Razu or his driver, Mrs. Ito had been a famous escape artist. She had once even opened for David Copperfield in Vegas. In seconds she made mincemeat out of Razu’s driver’s tie-up job.
As Razu leaned out the window blasting away, Mrs. Ito charged into the living room and rammed a mop up Razu’s ass. Even as he squeezed off another shot, Razu, thrown wildly off balance by this ass attack, pitched out the window, rolled across a narrow awning and fell to the street.
The last bullet Razu fired was dead on, hitting Tio Tepo in the upper chest, but missing his heart. Thrown backward, Tio Tepo’s foot, caught at an odd angle under the dashboard, drove the gas pedal to the floor. At the same moment his hands mesmerically shifted the automobile into reverse. The Cadillac shot backward like a bat out of Hell.
Razu struggled to his feet, shaking the stars from his head. His pistol was nowhere to be seen. He turned and started to lope toward the alley. He was ten feet from the entrance when the blue fin of the Eldorado pinned him to the wall, crushing him like a bug. Seconds later the Caddy burst into flames.
Johnny Ito escaped the inferno with minor burns. Momoko came to visit him in the hospital and immediately took off her clothes and leaped into Johnny’s bed. Tio Tepo was also pulled to safety. His bullet wound not fatal. But the magical giant bluefin was broiled to a fare-thee-wel
l.
What the Fuck Was That?
When I leaned down into the bathroom sink to slurp a drink of water from the tap, this black nightmarish thing slithered out of the faucet and right up my nose.
It happened in a flash, even as the cool rush of water spilled over my parched lips, and I gazed blurrily at my distorted image in the bathroom mirror. My nose was maybe half an inch from the faucet mouth, my maw agape, sucking at the stream of ice-cold agua.
Next instant, this low-slung mat-black outer space insect creature emerged like a mini stealth bomber from the end of the nozzle and launched itself across the gap. Grappling onto the longish hairs protruding from my proboscis, which I systematically neglected to clip to my wife’s eternal disgust, it bolted like a gun shot up my nasal passage.
I jerked backward, a trail horse shying from a coiled canebrake rattler. My fingers grabbed onto my nose, I snorted wildly.
“What the fuck was that?!”
Was I hallucinating? A psilocybin flashback harking back to my misspent youth? Or had an errant dust mote momentarily settled across my eye’s cornea, creating the illusion of an invading alien slug? Or was it only the fragmentary residue of the nightmare that moments before had roiled me from the depths of my afternoon nap?
I ran a finger down each side of my nose, feeling for some irregularity or protuberance where the thing had lodged itself inside. Nothing.
But when I sniffed, one nostril felt clogged as though someone using a Popsicle stick had jammed a cotton ball as far as possible up the passageway.
Pinching my nose between thumb and forefinger, I leaned over the sink and blew fiercely. Nothing happened. The left nostril still felt blocked. Had the little bugger used its razor-sharp teeth to attach itself like a lamprey to the soft membranous tissue of the nasal wall? A wave of panic susurrated across my nerve endings.
Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem Page 16