“What is it, Nephew?”
“You don’t belong to either side.”
“Let us drink a fourth time.”
“Na zdorovye!”
“Delicious.”
“Delicious indeed.”
“It’s best not to probe too deeply, wouldn’t you say? I’m helping you, yes, but only because you’re valuable to me. Those articles you print stir things up. I would advise you, for instance, not to call me inappropriate nicknames. That would be dangerous. You mustn’t ask me what sort of nickname I have in mind. You understand? Take care. I’m warning you. I’ve bought you. Don’t ever forget that.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“And why not?”
“Because I value my life.”
“And?”
“And?”
“It boosts sales.”
“It certainly does! Good ol’ capitalism! Ha ha ha!”
“You have a charming smile.”
“And this is a marvelous restaurant, isn’t it?”
“Nice and loud?”
“Conveniently loud. So conveniently.”
“Sometimes it’s quiet.”
“Quiet? Is it?”
“A rumor for you.”
“Yes?”
“People have seen yakuza here.”
“Yakuza? The Japanese mafia?”
“Yes. They’re here to foster international cooperation. The Russian mafia is stronger at the moment, right? This month they’re pushing back at the Chechens. What do you make of that? Balance is more important than anything, right? And then—this is simply a rumor, of course—the yakuza turn up. What happens next? Here’s a prophecy for you. I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole Far East turns into an enormous powder keg.”
“If you’re right, we’ll change the name of our newspaper.”
“Change it? No more Freedom Daily?”
“That’s right…to Terror Daily. Na zdorovye!”
Three days later. Same restaurant. Unusual sounds mixed in with the Russian. A conversation in Japanese. Jeering, tongue-clicking, raucous laughter, a ribald exchange. Hey, dick, is this the best champagne they got? What the fuck’s up with this sweet shit? It’s from Moldova, Boss. Mol…what? Where the fuck is that? Whatever, forget it. Is it me or does this shit taste exactly the fucking fuck like those vitamin drinks back home? Am I right or what?
Everyone in the circle laughs.
Zoom in on the man at the head of the circle.
The Boss, they call him. Long black hair swept back over his head, a mustache, a double-breasted suit, pot belly. Can’t be more than forty. His eyes roam restlessly, like a reptile’s.
Boss, here’s something new.
Ah. Cognac?
From Armenia.
This is better. Get some caviar too. Good stuff, from the Caspian. Enough for everyone.
The Boss pauses, then continues. Not a bad place, huh? Officially recognized casino and everything. Not bad. Got one up on us in that respect, here. These Russians.
All at once, he gets a different sort of look in his eyes. He turns to the next table.
“So what’d you do today?” he asks.
The person sitting there looks completely out of place. She’s a Japanese girl, not yet in her teens. Eleven, maybe twelve. On the verge of puberty. “Rode the tram,” she says coldly.
“I took her around,” adds the handsome young Slavic woman seated beside her, speaking in Japanese.
“Have a nice time?”
“Yeah, great,” the girl tells her father, her tone even icier.
She is peculiarly plump. Certain areas of her body seem bloated out of proportion. She isn’t obese, but her face and her chin are flabby. Her hands too. She gives the impression, somehow, of an infant who was inflated, some days ago, to this enormous size.
The table where the girl and the Russian woman sit is littered with an odd chaos of dishes: pineapple cake, apple kudzu tea, reindeer steaks, piroshki…Everything, from the desserts to the meat dishes, has been picked at and left unfinished.
“Ah,” her father says. “Anyway, have Sonya take you around again tomorrow.”
With that, this Japanese mafioso, hefty like his daughter, turns his gaze toward the entrance, his eyes assuming their former steeliness. Two Georgian guards stand just inside. They’re built like professional athletes. The Russians furnished these two men as protection for the group of “businessmen.” Georgians had always blended perfectly into the Russian mafia, ever since the early days of the Russian Federation. They seemed perfectly at home in this world, with its peculiar customs and the Vors as its unquestioned leaders.
Nice outfits, huh? says the girl’s father, The Boss, as they call him. They’re raking it in, you can see that. Every one of those fucking guys we saw today, they all had on Italian suits. You notice that?
Gold necklaces, gold rings. Gold bracelets.
No gold nose rings, though, huh? one of the men in the circle says.
The Boss erupts into laughter. Then he looks back at the table. So you got three kinds of caviar. The price depends on the size, see? Look at these fuckers. Fucking big, aren’t they? You gotta love seafood. The treasures of the sea, right? The Caspian’s sort of a sea too, you know. And we’re gonna make a business out of this shit, these treasures of the sea. The Boss runs through it all again. Lectures them. They’ll import poached seafood from Russia—shrimp, crab, sea urchin—and export stolen cars from Japan. It’s a fucking two-way Russo-Japanese venture! And we make it all look legal! Man, how fucking lucky are we that Nippon and Russia are neighbors like this, fucking linked up by the fucking Japan Sea! We get a foothold here, and you know what? You know what, you dickheads? It’s not just the little tip of Siberia, is it!
No, because there’s Sakhalin too.
And don’t forget the Kamchatka Peninsula! Feel like I’m gonna bite my tongue every time I fucking try to say that word. You know what I’m talking about, right? Kamchatka, huge peninsula sticking out into the Sea of Okhotsk. Fucking huge.
The Russians are there too?
They got organization. They got a boss. You know. A Vor.
It’s great, getting into this stuff. All in support of Japanese-Russian friendly relations.
The Boss laughs uproariously. He guffaws again. The future is fucking rosy. Think big, you dicks! Think big! he says. He gives them another little lecture, this time about how easy it is to launder dirty money in the new Russia. Japanese-Russian friendship, he says a few times, borrowing the phrase from his underling. Russian mafia and Japanese yakuza unite! How about that, you dicks! Solidarity!
Once again he’s in stitches.
Anyway, he says, losing the grin, we’ve got our first fucking deal.
The main house is gonna like that, huh? one of the men says.
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 C
hechens 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.
The dogs entered the picture right before UN forces retook Seoul. Most of the UN forces were American, and their commander-in-chief was Douglas MacArthur, the same man who, as the supreme commander of the Allied Forces, had headed GHQ in Japan. The dogs came under MacArthur’s command as part of what was known as Operation Chromite, in the Battle of Inchon.
The surprise attack was a success. Seoul was returned to Korea, whose capital it became. But things didn’t end there. The Americans got greedy. All of a sudden, they changed their strategy, decided that now they were going to pursue the military reunification of the peninsula—the same “reunification of the homeland” that the north had wanted, only under a liberalistic gov
ernment. UN forces crossed the 38th parallel, invading North Korea, and immediately took Pyongyang, its capital. Indeed, they kept going north, rapidly approaching the border with China.
But here they made a miscalculation. In October 1950, the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army joined the fight in support of North Korea with 180,000 troops. Their slogan was Kang Mei Yuan Chao: “Resist the US, Aid Korea!”
The People’s Republic of China, popularly known as China, had come into being just one year earlier. It hadn’t simply sprouted up overnight in the wake of Japan’s defeat in 1945. The nationalist Kuomintang and the Communist Party, led by Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong respectively, had fought together during the Second Sino-Japanese War, but the moment they achieved their goal the alliance collapsed. In July 1946, after a year of sporadic fighting during which each side struggled frantically to secure the support of the Americans and the Russians, they plunged into an all-out civil war. In three years, three million people died. Early on, America lent its full support to the Kuomintang, and yet its army still found itself losing. Then, in 1949, the Nationalists finally retreated to Taiwan. Taiwan, by the way, had been a Japanese colony from 1895 until 1943, when the United Kingdom, the United States, and China decided at the so-called Cairo Conference that it would be returned to China. Chiang Kai-shek had participated in the Cairo Conference as China’s representative.
In October 1949, Mao Zedong announced the birth of the People’s Republic of China.
The communist countries immediately recognized it as a state.
America declined to have diplomatic relations with China. Instead, it continued to recognize the Kuomintang government Chiang Kai-shek had reestablished in Taiwan.
In February 1950, Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin signed the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance.
Four months later, the Korean War broke out. Another four months and China joined the fray. Five years after the conclusion of World War II, along the western edge of the Pacific Ocean, the tug-of-war continued. And everything that was happening had its roots in a single dynamic: the tension between the US and the USSR. Harry S. Truman, who was in favor of combating the communist menace with force, was president at the time. Truman detested Stalin. Stalin detested Truman. Who knows, perhaps ultimately the intense personal dislike these two men had for each other was wreaking havoc with…
Belka, Why Don't You Bark? Page 5
