Haiku

by Andrew Vachss

  “Ho! Know! Ho! Know!” Target erupted, not only introducing a new pattern to his outbursts, but speaking softly, too.

  I centered myself, realizing that our plan would put something far more precious than money at stake.

  To gain trust, one must give trust.

  “A true ninja would be as a true samurai, Lamont. As you said, life is not a movie. Both ninja and samurai have this in common: they serve a master. Their sword is for hire. They train until a level of skill is reached, then they seek employment with the family of their fathers. In Japan, the concept of loyalty is always the same: the servant, by whatever name, is loyal to the master. In ancient times, if the master were to die, it was expected that his servants respond in order of rank. A maid would seek other employment. A samurai would commit seppuku … ritual suicide.”

  “Damn.”

  “But a highly skilled assassin is also highly employable. Instead of choosing seppuku, many became ronin … unattached to any master. Some might search for another to serve. But others would serve only themselves.

  “If you see a parallel between this and organized criminal enterprises all around the world, you would be correct. In Japan, however, the concept extended to every level of society. A ‘salaryman’ would be called such because he would be expected to start with a company as a young man, and never leave. His life is secure. However, were he to be caught even inquiring about working for another company, he would be disgraced. Shunned. As the Indians have their ‘untouchables,’ so the Japanese would regard a salaryman who had strayed.”

  “So, if some big company went bankrupt, what were these guys supposed to do, jump off a bridge?”

  “Many did,” I told him. “There will always be those who place security above freedom. When that security—their master, and all he represents—is gone, they commit the final act of what they believe to be loyalty. It would not matter whether their master was a shogun or a business executive.

  “But those times have passed. The pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. The one-way loyalty of the past has been replaced by the one-way loyalty of today.”

  “Me first,” Lamont said.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s why you’re always saying we need each other, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So it doesn’t matter, labels,” Lamont said, dragging deeply on his cigarette. “Once, I was a poet—”

  He raised his hand to prevent me from interrupting as I was about to, then continued. “What I mean is, when people called me a poet, I called myself a poet. When they stopped, I stopped. But, like you told me a long time ago, I’m what I always was.”

  “A man may possess the tools to build a house, yet allow them to rust on the ground he sleeps on.”

  “You are what you do,” Lamont said, almost reverently.

  “Hai!”

  “I was a lot of things. Now I’m not any of them. But I can still use what I learned from being those things, like how I’m setting up this job. Hell, like I was saying about Mercy. That’s what you’re saying, right, Ho?”

  “No.”

  “No!? Then what the—?”

  “Possessions take their value from how we value them. Brewster’s library may have some commercial value, but he would not sell it for any sum of money. Ranger treasures the compass you obtained for him far beyond its cash value. And you ask me to use my skills, Lamont. Not to gain something for myself, but to protect one of our own.”

  “You wouldn’t do it for yourself anyway, Ho.”

  “I would not,” I agreed, thinking of what Levi had taught me. “I will return to … a place in my past, so that our … our family can continue. I do not consider this a sacrifice; it is my duty. What, then, is yours?”

  “Mine? This whole thing is mine, Ho. I’m going back, too.”

  “You are not,” I told him. “There is but one way for you to go back, yet you refuse to walk that path.”

  “What do you want me to do, brother? Start writing again?” he said, as if describing an impossibility.

  “Where else are you, Lamont? Where is your true self?”

  “I gave up—”

  “As a youth, you engaged in battle many times. Did you ever consider surrendering to the enemy?”

  “Man …”

  “Your true self was a warlord then. Later, your true self became a poet. What else is abandoning your true self but surrendering?”

  I reached inside my coat. My fingers found what I had carried with me for many years. My precious notebook, survivor of flames. I handed it to my friend.

  Lamont opened the notebook. On its first page was my haiku.

  I gently took the book from his hands, tore out that first page, and handed the newly virginal book back to its rightful owner.

  94

  “What did they wear those suits for, anyway?” Lamont asked me the next evening.

  I could tell he was talking to calm himself. Lamont had abstained from liquor for many days. His initial tremors had passed, but so had his usual calm, ironic demeanor. None of us had commented on this.

  “Who?”

  “Ninjas, man. I mean, they did have those costumes and all, for real, right?”

  “Camouflage is a weapon. If one becomes the darkness …”

  “And I’m the one who’s always saying they never see us.” Lamont reached into his inside pocket and withdrew the leather notebook. Without taking his eyes off the street, he quickly scribbled some words with a soft-pointed pen. I could see tiny blue sparks as his hand crackled with the power of what it was recording.

  95

  Two nights later, we were in position. Lamont saw the black sedan before I did. “Game time,” he said, an unmistakable lilt of happiness in his whispered voice.

  “Go back,” I said to Target. He opened his mouth to clang. I held my finger to my lips. “Now!” I said.

  Still Target would not move. “We will come back to our home,” I promised. “Very soon. You must wait for us.”

  The woman Lamont called Mercy stepped out of the shadows. She strode purposefully to the curb, switching her hips as if testing her balance. She made some fluttering gesture with her left hand.

  The black sedan slowly glided to a stop.

  The passenger-side window slid down.

  Mercy walked toward the sedan, presenting herself as an expensive piece of jewelry to a valued customer.

  As she bent forward, Lamont stumbled into her, doing his Bowery-bum act. He bumped Mercy aside, saying, “Help a brother out, player.” I reached through the opened window on the driver’s side and stabbed a nerve block into the pimp’s exposed neck with two fingers as I rolled my thumb to the junction point on his spine.

  I climbed inside and pushed the unconscious pimp up against the passenger door, my eyes on the street. I caught a brief glimpse of Mercy as she scurried back into the darkness.

  Lamont slipped behind the wheel, as relaxed as if the car was his own. As we pulled away, the passenger-side window closed silently. The glass was deeply tinted.

  96

  We reached the underpass without incident, in even less time than Lamont had promised.

  “Got to shake it now, bro.”

  “The police—?”

  “Down here? Nah. But this ride, it’s a body lying out on the desert. Take a little time for the vultures to make sure it’s safe to make their move, but they’re gonna be circling pretty soon. Come on.”

  As Lamont went through the pimp’s clothing, I opened the glove compartment. It was empty except for a cell phone, some papers, and a small pearl-handled pistol.

  “Pimp piece,” Lamont said, looking up from his work. “Probably a punk-ass twenty-five. But it could be worth something. Snatch it, Ho. But don’t touch that cell—it could be on some cop’s track list.”

  Lamont removed a good deal of jewelry, including a very large wristwatch and several chains, before he extracted a thick roll of bills, wrapped in an elastic band.

 
“Meet you back at the spot,” he said, my cue to exit the car. We had previously agreed to return separately, by different routes. Although it was highly unlikely our crime would have been reported by a bystander, should this have occurred, the police would be looking for a two-person team. I had asked if we were not also putting Mercy in danger, but Lamont only laughed. “Only trace they gonna find of that blonde is a wig in an alley.”

  97

  When I returned to the dugout, Lamont was already there. Sitting with his back to a wooden beam, Target very close to him.

  Michael and Ranger were also there, but they were quite obviously giving Lamont a wide berth.

  I approached. Lamont would not look up. I sat across from him. I regret that, for a moment, I thought he had celebrated our success by getting drunk. But when he met my eyes, I saw only pain.

  “I thought I still knew the game, Ho. I thought I was still with it.”

  “What is wrong, Lamont?”

  “Me, that’s what’s wrong,” he said, in a voice too full of sorrow for mere sobs to express.

  “But we were—”

  “Oh, we pulled it off, all right,” he said, bitterly. “Only what I thought was a player on his way up was nothing but an all-front, two-bit simp.”

  “Why would that—?”

  For answer, Lamont tossed the roll of bills he had taken from the pimp’s unconscious body into my lap.

  “That’s a Kansas City bankroll you’re holding, Ho. Go on, pull the cover off.”

  I removed the elastic band. The first three bills were hundreds; the remainder were all fives and singles.

  “You see this?” Lamont said, holding up the gold chains. “Probably ten-K … or even plate. That car … it’s probably a fucking rental the punk slapped some rims on. That little pistol you got? That was probably our biggest fucking score.”

  “All of this …?”

  “With the cash, maybe five yards, total,” Lamont said, his voice threatening to break. “I thought we’d clear a few thou, easy.”

  “You can never be sure—” Michael started to say, until a look from Lamont froze his words. Whether Michael was attempting to comfort Lamont or philosophize about gambling did not matter—either would have been a dangerous error.

  “I’m old, Ho,” Lamont said.

  “Old! Cold! Bold! Told!”

  “Target speaks the truth,” I said, without inflection. “Your knowledge and skills have not deserted you, my brother. The world around you has changed—you are what you always have been.”

  “Yeah? Back in the day—”

  “Which day, Lamont? The day when you were a gang leader? Or the day you discovered you were a poet?”

  “You wrote a fucking book, man!” Ranger said.

  I nodded in Ranger’s direction, grateful for his support. “How many could say such?” I asked Lamont. “But that, too, is meaningless … compared with the book you have yet to write.”

  “You’re old enough to be my fucking grandfather, Ho. But you can still—”

  “I can still do what is in me, Lamont.”

  Lamont buried his face in his hands. Target moved close to him. So close their shoulders were touching.

  98

  I was awake before sunrise to find Lamont sitting next to me.

  “Give me the piece, Ho.”

  “The pistol?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It is gone,” I told him, deliberately looking out over the water where Michael had seen the white woman in the white mink coat climb out of the white Rolls-Royce and throw what he believed was our “mortal lock” into the river.

  “Are you nuts?” Lamont said, indignantly. “I already said we could get some money for it.”

  “You did not want it to sell.”

  Lamont went silent.

  Target joined us.

  “How did you know?” Lamont finally said.

  “I learned from you,” I told my brother. “You once explained that selling a firearm was insane, because it might have been used in crimes. If the purchaser were to be captured with it, fear of prosecution would immediately make him identify whoever he bought it from.”

  In fact, I had been present when Lamont had disdainfully rejected an offer to buy a pistol for the price of a bottle of liquor, saying, “Fucking thing’s probably got half-a-dozen murders on it, fool!”

  But Lamont had not wanted the pimp’s gun to sell; he had wanted to redeem himself, ignoring all the reasons he had given Brewster for not attempting an armed robbery. Better a warrior’s death, I felt his thoughts inside of me.

  “Yeah,” he said, slowly. “Yeah, I remember. Gotta start listening to my own rap, huh?”

  “Others would listen as well,” I said to my brother, reaching over to touch his heart, tapping the exact spot where he now kept his leather notebook.

  99

  Although I had not precisely spoken an untruth, I had deliberately allowed Lamont to believe that I had removed the pistol from his pocket as he slept and thrown it into the river. Had I told Lamont that I had no idea what could have happened to the pistol, the balance of our band would have been disrupted—perhaps permanently—by any search for it.

  100

  Later that same morning, I went to see Levi. Lamont came with me without stating his reasons; Target came because he had grown accustomed to being with Lamont and myself over the course of the past weeks.

  The receptionist was guardedly polite.

  I asked if I might be allowed to speak with Levi.

  To the receptionist’s series of questions, I responded: “This concerns one of his …” I hesitated, not knowing how those such as Brewster were referred to. Quickly, I decided, and finished with “… cases.”

  “You’re not from another agency,” the receptionist stated, not impolitely, but in a tone that clearly communicated that I would not be permitted access.

  “Kid’s on the verge,” Lamont interjected. “Figured his worker would want to know, but if you all don’t—”

  “Would you please sit over there and wait?” the receptionist said. “I’ll get someone to help you.”

  We were barely seated when the woman who had been introduced to me as Glo entered the room, looked around briefly, then walked directly over to me.

  “Who?” is all she said.

  “We are here about Brewster,” I told her. “I have met with Levi before.”

  “Is that right?” she asked, just as the large black man came up behind her.

  “Came in with him a while back,” the black man said. “Your name, it’s Ho, am I saying it right?”

  “Yes.” I bowed. “And yours is Earl, I believe.”

  A wide smile split his face. “Come on,” he said.

  Lamont and Target rose as one. Earl turned to face them.

  “Anything I can do for you guys?”

  “They are with me,” I explained.

  “Pretty small offices back there,” he said.

  “We don’t take up much room,” Lamont snapped back, deliberately staring at Earl’s massive frame. “And we’re not going to set off any metal detectors.”

  They exchanged looks. Then Earl extended his hand, palm-up. Lamont slapped it. Earl turned and gestured for us to follow.

  This time, he brought us into a much larger room, mostly filled by a large table and a number of mismatched chairs. Following his gesture, we all seated ourselves—including the woman.

  As Earl left the room, the woman said, “I’m Gloria.”

  I rose, bowed, said, “I remember. We have met before. I am Ho. This is Lamont. And this is our friend Target.”

  “And you’re here about Brewster?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I apologize if I am not addressing you correctly; I do not know your title.”

  “We don’t do titles here, Mr. Ho.”

  “Then may I be ‘Ho’?”

  “Sure,” she said, smiling slightly. Her eyes were neither wary nor friendly—not communicators, but measuring instrume
nts.

  Levi and Earl came in together.

  I again introduced each of us. Levi sat directly across from us, while Earl took the chair to our right, and Gloria remained on our left, closest to the door.

  “Brewster has kept to his contract?” I began.

  “You could set your clock by him,” Earl affirmed.

  Gloria nodded in agreement.

  “That what you wanted?” Levi asked me.

  “No,” I said, carefully. “It was but a … prerequisite to my request. If Brewster had not been faithful to his contract, I would have no right to make that request.”

  “Break that down,” Earl said.

  “Ho backed the man’s play,” Lamont answered. “Brewster don’t keep his word, it’s like Ho didn’t keep his. You can’t trust a man’s word, how you gonna deal with him?”

  “Sometimes—” Gloria started to say.

  “Begging your pardon, ma’am,” Lamont interrupted, “but we ain’t no … patients, or clients, or whatever. Ho may be older than sin, but he’s sharp as a razor,” he said, glancing at Earl. “Me, I’m a hardcore alkie, but I ain’t no wet-brain. We’re here about Brewster. If you can’t trust us, ain’t no point in us talking.”

  “What’s up with Brewster?” Levi asked. “You implied that he might be …”

  “I apologize for the ruse,” I said. “Brewster is perhaps not suicidal. But he is facing a crisis. If it is not resolved, his ability to … deal with that would be very doubtful.”

  “He’d stop taking his meds?” Levi asked.

  “No,” I answered. “With all respect, if this crisis is not resolved, I believe the medication would lose its power to stop him.”

  101

  My explanation was lengthy and detailed, interrupted only when I said, “Brewster may live in a … parallel world. But that world has its own code. Brewster would not tell a lie.”

  “Lie! Cry! Die! Try!” Target clanged.

  I could actually see a lightning burst of communication flickering between Gloria, Levi, and Earl. Their faces showed no reaction to Target’s outburst, so I finished my account.