Except, the Boss says, that from now on, this Russian link is ours.
His voice is lower now. Secretive.
He continues: We’re brothers, now, these Russians and us. So we can make this shit happen, we can go fucking illegal all the way, go for the gold. This country’s the world’s armory! he says. You have any idea how cheap an old 9mm Tokarev pistol is? You know how incredibly fucking easy it is to get your hands on a new model Kalashnikov machine gun with a folding butt? It all sells, he explains, for about a tenth of the going international rate. This shit is fucking gold!
Absolute fucking gold, the men say.
And sooner or later, we’re gonna use this to take over the Hokuriku group.
Nice, nice. The men are now whispering.
The only fucking problem is the Chechens, the Boss says. The Chechen mafia. As far as the Russians are concerned, right, these Chechens are something else. Black eyes, black hair. Black as in blacks. And now these black guys are intruding on their territory. Selling cars in Moscow and out west, making overtures in the Japan Sea, right? You get what I’m fucking saying? Just imagine what’d happen if these Chechen blackies got together with those idiot Chinese in the Triad and exchanged a fucking toast to their joint future… Forget your fucking Russian-Japanese friendship, we’re talking Chechen-Chinese lovefest. CheChi. And what happens to our business interests, huh? Bam. Out the window. You get what I’m saying? The point is, you gotta fucking be prepared. Be ready to drive the fucking Chechens out of this whole region—
Just then, the Japanese businessmen notice that something is wrong. That it’s too quiet. All of a sudden they realize that the kitchen is empty. All the other customers are gone, as are the waiters who have been serving them. A few of them glance simultaneously at the door. They’re looking for the two Georgian guards. One of them is stretched out on the ground. Blood. His larynx has been slashed, or maybe his jugular. The other guy is gone. Missing. Probably dead too, somewhere. Two or three of the younger yakuza spring to their feet, stunned. They’ve whipped out their guns, of course. Brand-new Makarovs, bought at great bargain prices. Suddenly they are distracted by a shrill, piercing noise in the kitchen—a timer has gone off. And now there’s a man in a ski mask standing right behind their table. In his left hand he holds a submachine gun with a silencer; in his right, a knife with a curved blade smeared with blood. In less than a second, the man has shot every man in the ring through the back of his head. The gun makes hardly any sound: pssssht, pssssht, pssssht. The massacre is over almost before it has begun; it’s so simple and quiet it’s beautiful. And now only the Boss—the man they called the Boss—is left at the table. And, at the next table, the girl and the young Russian woman who serves as her translator. The ski-masked attacker walks around, takes up a position directly in front of the Boss’s table. The tip of the silencer is pointed at the Boss’s forehead. It’s about three feet from the gun to the Boss’s head.
The Boss sits very still.
He can’t move.
The young woman, the Russian, is going to move. She’s rising from her chair.
The attacker does something with the knife in his right hand, gives it an odd sort of flick, sends it flying. It buries itself with a soft thud in the woman’s chest. It doesn’t hit her heart. So she doesn’t die—not yet. She is skewered, pinned to the back of her chair. Unh… unh… unh… she says. But she can’t even really say that much. Unh… unh…
Unh.
The submachine gun never wavers. The attacker turns his face—just his face—toward the woman. He looks her over.
And then his eyes land on the girl.
The Japanese girl.
The attacker has on a ski mask, but his eyes are clearly trained on her. The oddly plump girl, decked out from head to toe in famous brands, her hair cut in the very latest fashion, looking too expensively attired for her age, somehow unsettlingly wrong. He stares.
He keeps staring.
And then he turns back to the Boss and lays a card on the table.
A playing card with something written on it in Russian.
It says RUSSIANS ARE BETTER OFF DEAD.
The Boss can’t read it.
Obviously.
“Can’t read that, can you?” the ski-masked attacker says, speaking in Russian even though he knows the yakuza won’t understand. “You don’t even hear what I’m saying, do you? That’s fine. I can’t read Japanese, can’t speak it. We’re even. In a second, I’ll have that woman with the knife interpret for me. We’ve got a while yet before she bleeds to death. I can calculate that much.”
The Boss doesn’t know what to say.
Obviously.
The woman with the knife in her groans. Unh… unh…
“I have to tell you, though,” the attacker says. “You’re really stupid. You’re a yakuza boss, right? What the hell are you thinking, bringing family on a business trip? What the hell were you thinking even having a family? Don’t you consider the dangers that come with being yakuza? Are you Japanese that naïve? In Russia, it’s the rule in the underworld that Vors and combatants don’t take wives or have children. Because, obviously, they make you vulnerable. You understand what I’m saying? Do you not see that? As a yakuza boss, someone in the same business as the Vors? If you don’t get it now, you will. You’ll see what it means to have a hostage taken. You see what I’m saying? I’m not going to kill you, not now. Not ever, maybe. But this vulnerability of yours… your family. It’s gone. I’m taking it with me.”
The attacker turns his gaze once more to the next table. To the girl.
She stares straight back at him.
Ferociously.
“I’ll fucking take one of your fingers, you dick,” she says.
To the man responsible for the noiseless massacre. In Japanese.
In the voice of an eleven- or twelve-year-old.
1950–1956
Dogs, dogs, where are you now?
There were seventeen on the Korean Peninsula. They had landed together in September 1950. American dogs, sent in as reinforcements with the UN “security operations,” members of an elite corps eager to achieve distinction on the battlefield. They were Bad News’s children, siblings by different mothers. Some bore names that marked their paternal lineage, some did not. There was Big News and Hard News. Hot News and Gospel. One named Speculation. Another named Listener. Jubilee, Argonaut, Gehenna. One had “E Venture” written on his collar, with a circle around the E, but was on the books as News News. The other seven were Natural Killer, Fear, Atmosphere, Ogre, Bonaparte, Raisin, and finally News News News. The last went by the nickname Mentallo, also written on his collar.
Obviously the peninsula needed help maintaining security. From the American perspective, that is. And so, without any declaration of war, a war began. On June 25, 1950, the army of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, aka North Korea, rolled into the peninsula’s southern half in Soviet tanks, launching an invasion of the Republic of Korea, aka South Korea, whose goal was to “reunify the homeland” forcibly and to spread communism throughout the peninsula.
Back in 1945, the Korean Peninsula had supposedly been liberated from Japan, which had ruled it since 1910. But the country split in two. No, that’s not right—it didn’t split, it had been split. Divided into two separate states along a temporary buffer at the 38th parallel north. The American military was stationed in the south; Soviet forces occupied the north, where they were working toward the establishment of a communist system. And so, through a mindlessly geometric process, the peninsula was divvied up between America and the USSR. The Republic of Korea came into being first, in 1948, with the proclamation of a liberalistic government in the south, and the US and other capitalist countries promptly recognized it as a legitimate state. Less than a month later, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was established as a communist regime in the north, and it was soon recognized as an independent state by various communist countries, with the USSR at the lead. And within two years, the war to liberate the homeland broke out.