That’s all the boys were talking about. It was like a war was going to break out, and maybe it was, as both Imperial and Shogunate AV had their powerful sponsors in the business. Maybe the streets would run red with blood as the two porn giants tried to dominate and set the future.
“Nah. The porn people may have yak money in them, and yak influence, but they don’t like to go to the blades. They’d rather sue or try to ruin each other with unsubstantiated rumors. They’d never kill. They get too much pussy. If you get a lot of pussy, you don’t see the point in cutting someone’s head off, especially when it might get you your head cut off.”
“Maybe Kondo is signing up with one of those outfits just as a threat, a hint of future difficulties,” Nick said to this source, a detective on the Organized Crime Squad, who knew.
“He’s above that crap. His thing is the elegant, perfect hit. He’s not going into alleys with hoods and start madly hacking off heads. It’s too common. He picks his jobs, that’s all. He’d never get involved with porn. He’s old school. He’s like all the stiffs who hate Miwa for making millions off pussy.”
“Sure,” said Nick. He slid over ten 10,000-yen notes.
“Wow,” said the cop, “that’s a nice tip. You won’t tell anybody I talked to you?”
“You bet I won’t,” said Nick, “and you won’t tell anybody I talked to you?”
“You think I want to spend my last eight seconds bleeding out in an alley?”
Finally, only Kabukicho was left. He was well known there, and it made him feel a little vulnerable. But he had no choice. He knew this was dangerous and Kabukicho was Otani’s and clearly Kondo had an Otani connection. The wires in Kabukicho would be direct; any questions he asked would get to the wrong people fast.
He knew he ought to hire somebody to do the asking for him, somebody from out of town so it wouldn’t get back that it was Nick Yamamoto, the Tokyo Flash, the Clark Kent of the Tokyo tabloid scene, on the trail.
But he couldn’t resist. He had that reporter gene. He wasn’t an elegant writer, he wasn’t ambitious for power, fame, or money, but he just had to know a little bit more, a little bit sooner. That’s what drove him. It was such a high-it got you much higher than the White Girl, which is why he was able to walk away from the White Girl for personal use, though he didn’t mind making a buck or two off her once in a while-to hear something first. There was that moment when you knew what nobody else knew. God, what a buzz, what a jolt.
He began casually, with people he knew were so minor they were probably unconnected to anything big.
“Anything going on? I’m thinking some kind of realignment. A certain guy who’s worked with Otani on some delicate matters now working with someone else, someone big, someone from a little outside? Hear anything?”
“I think I know who you’re talking about, but I don’t ever discuss him. It’s not healthy. He’d cut off my arm and make me eat my tattoos.”
He went everywhere, Queen Bee, the S-M Club, Mysteria Purity, Le Grand Bleu, MoMo Iro, everywhere, talking to anyone, whores, image club performers, trannies, enforcers, bouncers, cutters, the odd Chinaman, the odd Korean, the odd African, impersonators, pickpockets, and everywhere it was the same.
Nothing. Nothing.
It was the nothing that had him tantalized. There was usually something, but the talk about the upcoming election for presidency of AJVS and its implications on the issue Imperial versus Shogunate AV had become so loud that nothing else was being talked about. It was as if an anvil had been laid across Kabukicho gossip lines. But then finally…oh, it was so small. It was so nothing. It was a wisp, a leaf in the wind.
He was in a small club closed to strangers, so late it was early. Scotch was the drink of choice, blues the music and the lighting scheme, smoke the preferred atmosphere. You could hardly see across the room. Nick threw down another Scotch and water, turned to the barkeep, and said, “Another for me, another for Dad here.”
Dad was a bouncer at Prin Prin, an image club that catered to the fantasy life of the Japanese male, including student-teacher, airline hostess, office lady, kimono. It even had a whole set built to resemble a subway car for those who just had to grope. But even in such a kingdom of the dream cum true, trouble sometimes broke out and thus a fast big man with good hands was needed. His specialty was the “soft punch” by which he deflated the overly amorous with a thunder blow to the midriff, yet left no scars, no bruises, nothing but a powerful sense of ill-being.
“You didn’t hear this from me,” the thunder-puncher said.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
“Swear to god, not from me.”
“Swear to god twice.”
“I have a bitch. She’s half Korean, supervises a shift at one of the hand-job joints. Tough little gal. Pretty, but tough.”
“Yeah.”
“She says all the Korean sex workers are nervous because one of their own got disappeared a few months ago.”
“I didn’t hear a thing.”
“That’s just it: you weren’t supposed to. Just here one day, gone the next. But here’s what my girlfriend knows that nobody else knows and she didn’t even figure it out till she thought about it. The next morning on the way to work, she saw a guy named Nii, some minor hood who somehow got into a good crew and is now off the street-”
“Nii.”
“Nii. She saw him stagger out of a bar where he’d clearly been for hours, go into an alley, and puke his guts out. Just puke. She swears that when he bent over, his jacket fell open and the bottom half of his white shirt was drenched in red.”
“Lord.”
“Like he’d been at some brutal hacking. So who had Nii hacked? The woman? Why would he hack some nothing Korean whore and then make it go away?”
“Maybe he’s screwy that way. Jack the Ripper, that sort of thing. Or maybe it’s just Kabukicho. The odd whore gets disappeared once in a while. Life goes on. Boo fucking hoo.”
“Sure. But there’s something weird here. What was weird, this Korean whore thing, it was somehow set up, all the Korean girls were talking about it for weeks. Her boss kept the gal late so she didn’t go to Shinjuku station with the others. She went later, by herself, and somewhere along the walk to the station, real early in the morning, she met up with somebody and just vanished. The Nii thing suggests she was cut.”
“Hmmm. Doesn’t have to be Eight-Nine-Three Brotherhood.”
“Yeah, it does. Because the thing was planned. Somebody with juice got it set up so that this gal could be, you know, cut from the herd, held for a certain time, then released to go off and be chopped, diced, spindled, mutilated in private. No cops, no witnesses; it was all planned out. And poor Nii had the cleanup job. He wouldn’t have the juice to set it up. He’s nothing, a servant, a cleanup kid. But he’s working for somebody with juice and somebody who likes to cut.”
Nick saw it then: sure, it fit.
Nii would have to work for Kondo. Kondo wanted to cut something. It was all arranged via Boss Otani. But why?
“Do you remember the date?”
“Only that it was just after that soldier-hero and his family got burned up. Remember that? God, that was sad.”
“It was sad,” said Nick.
But his mind was already racing. Kondo had cut the shit out of someone and Nii had helped. Nii was Kondo’s boy. So if he wanted to find out what Kondo was up to, he had to find out what Nii was up to.
The police records were easy enough to obtain. Nii, Takashi “Joe.” The photo showed a squat face under long Beatle-style hair, the eyes gleamless with a lack of intelligence or purpose. The photo was taken when he was eighteen, old enough to be arrested the first time. Rap sheet: impressive but hardly incredible. Breaking-entering, time in juvie, assault, robbery, carrying a wakizashi, a footloose punk hunting thrills and his own death in the alleyways of Kabukicho. He ran with a street gang called the Diamondbacks. That meant, among other things, he probably had tattoos of diamonds on his back. With his pals, he raised minor hell. Eventually, he did two years hard time for beating a shop owner half to death. He clearly was a guy trying to attract yak attention, and failing. Yet two years ago…he disappeared.