Kamikaze (3 page)

Blondes are big in Japan.

Hollywood South and Hollywood North are magnets for buxom young actresses desperate to break into films. Fluent in English, Kazuya knew L.A. and Vancouver as well as he did the head of his cock. A couple of times a year, he flew to both to scout for undiscovered talent willing to perform “comfort work” on the casting couch between screen tests for Asian films.

He figured that’s why they’d assigned him this job.

Because he spoke English.

And because he knew Vancouver.

The yak who met him at Tokyo’s airport was his uncle. He could tell from the squint of the old guy’s eyes that he was none too pleased. His uncle was one of the old-school yaks with the full-body tattoos; he’d been recruited by the
gurentai
hoods who had sprung up after the war, back in the days when Genjo Tokuda ruled the Ginza district. Originally, yaks had inked tattoos to boast about their crimes: a black ring was added to the arm for every offense committed. Later, tats became both a test of enduring pain and the mark of the misfit who refused to adapt. His uncle Makoto’s inking—a mural of dragons, gang insignias, flowers, and Noh masks—covered his torso, front and back,
both arms to below the elbow, and his legs to mid-calf. Also, his pinky was gone.

“What went wrong?” Makoto asked.

“I lost control of the car.”

“Were you speeding?”

“So they say.”

“Who?”

“Vancouver police.”

“Did they charge you?”

“A traffic ticket. I paid the fine.”

“How late were you?”

“An hour,” Kazuya replied. “There was no one by the figurehead when I arrived.”

“Fool,” his uncle said, ushering him to the car. “You shamed yourself. And you shamed
me.
”

The instructions had been simple. He was to fly to Vancouver, just as he did to scout blondes, and drive around Stanley Park to the
Empress of Japan
’s
figurehead, which was mounted on the seawall walk alongside the harbor. There, moments after the boom of the Nine O’Clock Gun, he would be met by a man with the code name Kamikaze. The stranger would hand him a vial of blood to smuggle into Japan.

But with time to kill before the meeting, Kazuya had indulged his passion for blondes and fast cars. He was a good-looking guy, if he said so himself, and he liked to use the bedroom to collect his finder’s fee from the blondes he selected for Japan. Blondes like the one he’d met over a drink in a bar that afternoon. Japan was a crowded
country—not like Canada—so Kazuya had rented a fast car to enjoy the wide-open spaces with the sexy blonde. Unfortunately, the yak had spun out on his way back into town. And that was why he’d failed to meet Kamikaze.

The Ginza district is the Times Square of Tokyo. Destroyed by bombing during the war—only the Wako Building, with its clock tower, and a few structures in the side streets survived—it was now, by day, the swankiest shopping spot in Japan and, by night, a dazzling, neon-lit fantasy of restaurants, clubs, and bars.

The club where the car stopped occupied the upper floor of a two-story building that fronted a towering skyscraper of sun-splashed glass. The stubby structure had once been the headquarters of Genjo Tokuda, back when he was the most feared hood in Tokyo. It was now a private club for fossils like Makoto, old-time thugs who were quickly giving way to slick yaks like Kazuya.

Clang ...

Clang ...

Clang ...

Relentless clanging filled the pachinko parlor on the floor below the club. Walking through the gambling den, Makoto and Kazuya passed by rows upon rows of people whose eyes were locked on the tiny chrome balls of the pachinko machines. An elevator at the back wall ascended to the top floor, but the doors wouldn’t slide open until Makoto fed an electronic card into a slot.

Smoke swirled through the air of the private upstairs club. Here, the game was
cho ka han ka,
“odds or evens.” The player shook a pair of dice in a black bamboo cup, then set the cup down on a mat. Compared with the pachinko parlor, the private club was deathly quiet. The gamblers surrounding the table, their drinks held by comfort women, slapped cash onto the mat and bet “odds” or “evens.” Because all the men were yakuza, ten thousand dollars was bet on a single play.

“That’s all,” said the dice man.

The thugs withdrew their hands from the cash mat.

“Play,” said the dice man.

Opening the cup, he looked inside and declared, “Evens.”

In the far corner of the club, a sumo-sized man was being fawned over by bowing underlings who reacted to every order he gave with
“Hai! Hai!”
“Yes! Yes!” The comfort women massaging his shoulders were young enough to be his granddaughters. Both wore unbuttoned white blouses over short, pleated schoolgirls’ skirts and knee socks. The girls covered their mouths and giggled at something the old yakuza said, and feigned surprise when he ran his fat hands up their thighs. On spying Makoto and Kazuya, he dispersed his hangers-on with a brusque wave of his hand.

The door beside the fat yak’s chair opened into a backroom. Not a word was uttered as the three men crossed the threshold and the door closed behind them. Two knives and two lengths of string lay on a table scarred by hundreds of gouges. Without hesitation, Makoto went straight to the chopping block, picked up one string and clenched it
between his teeth, then wound a tourniquet around the pinky of his good hand to cut off circulation. Having numbed the finger and reduced its flow of blood, he grabbed the nearer knife and whacked it down like a headsman’s ax.
Yubi o tobasu.
He “made his finger fly.”

Yubitsume,
“finger cutting,” went back to the days of the samurai. It’s how a warrior made amends for misdeeds to his boss. When a samurai sword is held properly, most of the strength in the grip is applied by the pinky finger. Without that finger, a samurai was weaker in battle and more dependent on his master for protection. Old yaks thought they were modern samurai, so they stuck to that tradition.

But not Kazuya.

There’d be none of that shit for him.

The pain must have been excruciating, yet no sign of it showed on Makoto’s face. The fat yak passed him a towel to bandage his hand and a sheet of paper in which to wrap the severed finger. An old fridge stood against one wall. Back when Genjo Tokuda had ruled with an iron grip, that fridge was where he was rumored to store the fingers his men had chopped off to quell his wrath.

Crazy fuckers, Kazuya thought.

Come into the modern age.

The modern trend was to do away with
yubitsume.
When yaks went under cover, missing pinkies stood out. The funniest story Kazuya had ever heard was about a yakuza boss who wanted to stop finger cutting among his thugs. He gave the order to his middle men to eliminate the
practice. When one of those underlings made a wayward thug mutilate himself for some infraction, the boss was furious. So what did the middle man do to atone for infringing the no
yubitsume
order? He performed
yubitsume
on himself!

Crazy fuckers.

Putting a pearl in your penis:
that
Kazuya could understand. When his uncle Makoto had gone to prison—that record was why he couldn’t make the trip to Vancouver—he’d cut into the skin at the tip of his cock and inserted a pearl to create a bulge in his manhood. A pearl for every year he was in jail. That, they say, gives women pleasure when you fuck them, so it makes up for the time a yak has spent away from his sexual partner.

A ladies’ man like Kazuya could see the logic in that. But when it came to fingers,
that
seemed stupid. He required all the fingers he had to keep the ladies happy.

Because Makoto wasn’t directly responsible for the mishap in Vancouver, the finger on the table was an
iki yubi.
A “living finger.”

What these old-school yaks really wanted was a
shinu yubi.
A “dead finger” from the one who was directly responsible—namely, Kazuya.

“No,” Kazuya said.

“Fool,” his uncle snapped.

The door at the rear of the room accessed an elevator that took them up the face of the skyscraper backing the two-story building. The city of Tokyo bowed down at their feet while they were carried all the way up to the top floor.
There, the doors were opened by someone who controlled a ring fence of security devices—metal detectors, bomb-sniffing sensors, hidden cameras, Taser darts, knockout gas jets.

The doors slid open.

The three stepped out.

And Kazuya got the shock of his yakuza life.

So sunlit was the penthouse that he might have been in heaven. In front of them, a man was seated on an ornate chair. He appeared to have samurai warriors guarding him. The suits of ancient armor were genuine and belonged in a museum, as did the thirteenth-century Mongol War antiques that were on display for this modern shogun’s exclusive pleasure. Traditional Japanese instruments—a banjo-like
koto
and a wood flute—played soft music. Two samurai swords hung in a rack on a foot table set before this octogenarian. Adorned with the crest of his family, a
tanto
knife slung through its belt, his kimono was gray, in keeping with his dignified age.

Tokuda! thought Kazuya.

The
kumicho
—the supreme boss of the post-war yakuza—had lived in seclusion for so long that he’d taken on a mythic status. But here he was in the flesh, the burned half of his face an ugly scar. The old yaks on either side of Kazuya were moving toward their master, heads bowed and thumbs tucked under their palms as a sign of respect, so the young yak approached too. The thumb was the most important finger, the last to be cut off by a disgraced underling.

Suddenly, Kazuya found himself sweating.

“A vial of blood?” he’d said to his uncle back in the car. “How important can that be?”

More important, it now appeared, than he could have imagined.

Important to Tokuda!

The floorboards were thick wooden planks that had been laid down to squeak as they were trod upon. A nightingale floor like the singing of birds. A shogun was always in peril because the man who assassinated the shogun could become shogun himself. The same was true for the
kumicho.
A nightingale floor was constructed so no one could sneak up on the shogun, and that’s what gave rise to the legend that ninja assassins were able to walk on the walls and the ceiling. To get close enough to kill the shogun, an assassin would have to find a way to bypass the boards.

The three men ceased treading when they reached a white sheet that had been spread on the floor. From dips in the cloth, Kazuya knew it covered some kind of grate. Skirting around his side of the white mat, the fat yak placed the paper containing Makoto’s bloody finger on the table at Tokuda’s feet.

The
kumicho
said nothing.

He stared at the offering, then stared at Makoto’s bandaged hand, then nodded his head.

Never had Kazuya seen a glare as menacing as the one that fell on him. Tokuda’s eyes locked onto the slick yak’s hands. His lips moved as if he was counting fingers.

“You dare to dishonor me?” he snarled.

“I—” began Kazuya.

“Shut up!” Makoto whispered.

Tokuda beckoned his injured henchman to approach, then reached down and lifted the battle sword off the rack in front of him.

Makoto took it.

“You dishonor yourself,” Tokuda said, sneering at Kazuya.

Grabbing the short sword from the rack, the
kumicho
passed it to the sumo-sized yak.

Both men bowed away from their master, careful not to turn their backs on him, and returned to their original positions flanking Kazuya.

“Sit,” Makoto said, indicating the white sheet on top of the grate.

When Kazuya hesitated, he was shoved to the floor.

Behind him, the young yak heard the long sword slip free of its sheath. He began to tremble when the fat yak laid the short sword on the mat in front of him, a white cloth wrapped around half of its shining blade.

“Redeem your honor,” Tokuda ordered.

Still refusing to believe that his failure in Vancouver had come to this, the dumbstruck yak made his most serious—and final—error by shaking his head at the
kumicho.

Shhhhewwww!

The last sound Kazuya heard was the Divine Wind.

Yubitsume

Vancouver, British Columbia

October 30, Now

It wasn’t hard to spot them. Though a deluge of tourists came surging out of the chute from customs clearance at Vancouver International Airport, the two jumbo jets they’d arrived on had come from Asia. So not only were Joe and Chuck Hett two of few Caucasians in a mass of non-white faces, but father and son were also both a head taller than most of those around them.

“Hi Red. Hi Dad.” Jackie greeted the two men from the sidelines.

“How’s my favorite granddaughter?” Joe Hett replied, leaning over the waist-high Plexiglas fence that separated those deplaning from those waiting for them and wrapping his arm about her shoulders to cinch her into a hug.

“I’m your
only
granddaughter.”

“That’s why you’re my favorite.”

“Good flight?”

“Terrible. I got better service in bombers during the war. Look at these guys,” the octogenarian said, sweeping his arm wide to encompass the crowd. “All the way from Japan, I’ll bet they got super-service. On a hop, skip, and jump from New Mexico, I got a cup of dishwater and the chance to
buy
a snack.”

“How ’bout you, Dad?”

“Terrible,” echoed Chuck Hett, joining the three-generation family hug. “I had to listen to Red grouse most of the way.”

“Music to your ears, son.”

“So you think, old man.”

“Hey!” Joe protested as he was shoved from behind. The man who’d pushed him into Jackie was a tough-looking bodyguard clearing a path for his boss, a well-protected Japanese mogul surrounded by a posse of goons. Though now in his eighties, Joe was the sort of Pacific War vet who never backed down from a fight, so he came off the Plexiglas fence like a boxer absorbing a punch. Grabbing hold of the offending hand and wrenching it aside, he surprised himself, his son, and his granddaughter with the force of his counterattack. The eldest Hett literally tore the pinky finger off the bodyguard’s palm.

“I’m
standing
here!” Joe snarled, stabbing his finger at the ground and directing his challenge toward the hub of the entourage. “Tell him to back off!”

“Easy, Red,” Chuck said soothingly. “You gotta give a speech. You want to be in a wheelchair with stitches in your face?”

“I’m waiting!” Joe persisted, refusing to give an inch.

From her vantage point on the other side of the barrier, Jackie suddenly saw what was really at the heart of this confrontation. The Japanese mogul was also in his eighties, so these two had faced off—at least figuratively—in the Pacific War. With half his face an ugly scar, the elderly Asian looked even tougher than Joe. If the scar dated back to the war, that was gasoline on this fire. And because he was the boss of the goon who’d given Joe the shove, her granddad was blaming his old enemy for the new insult.

As for the fingerless man, he was ready to let Joe have it. The way his good hand was flattened, it would be a karate chop. So Jackie’s hand hovered by her holster, just in case.

For a moment, the standoff was frozen in time.

Jackie eyed the bodyguard.

The bodyguard eyed Joe.

Joe eyed the bodyguard’s boss.

And the boss eyed Jackie’s uniform.

A command in Japanese. No more than a single word. That’s all it took to defuse the powder keg. Reeled in by the mogul, the fingerless thug backed away from Joe. On a cue from their boss, the Japanese gangsters turned their backs dismissively on the American vet and headed for the exit.

“Man,” Joe fumed. “I fought a war for
this?
”

Still grasping the prosthetic finger, he pushed it from between the knuckles of his fist, flashing the fuck-you finger at his insulters as they left.

“I think our pit bull’s hungry,” Chuck said to his daughter. “What shall we eat?”

“Sushi?” Jackie suggested.

From the airport on Sea Island, in the mouth of the Fraser River, the three Hetts drove north across the bridge toward downtown Vancouver, stopping at a White Spot Restaurant for lunch.

“So this is where all the draft dodgers went?” observed Joe as they parked the car and walked from the lot. Typically for late autumn, the sky threatened rain.

“The wet ones,” Jackie replied.

The Hetts were one of America’s warrior families. Their bellicose bloodline went back to the Revolution, when Jerome Hett had fought the redcoats at the Battle of Cowpens. Since then, every generation of Hetts had engaged in war—Joe in the Pacific Theater of the Second World War and Chuck in Vietnam. Only with Jackie had the cycle been broken, and the irony was that now she wore red serge.

“I blame you,” Joe said as they were ushered to a restaurant booth and handed menus.

“Blame me for what?” Chuck asked.

“Turning my only granddaughter into an ex-pat.”

“I’m not an ex-pat, Red,” Jackie corrected. “I was born here. I have dual citizenship.”

“Maybe,” Joe said. “But you’re a Yank at heart. If your dad hadn’t taken your mom on that tour of NORAD bases, she wouldn’t have gone into premature labor in the Arctic,
and I wouldn’t have a Canuck redcoat as my heir.”

“
I
’
m
your heir,” Chuck said.

“You wish,” Joe chortled, winking at Jackie.

On her suggestion, all three ordered the same meal: a hamburger, no fries, with a vanilla milkshake.

“Triple-O?” the waitress asked.

“Yes,” said Jackie, answering for the men.

“What does that mean?” Joe asked. “Some sort of Canuck code?”

“You’ll see, Red.”

“He sees red all the time, our pit bull,” Chuck goaded.

Actually, Red was a nickname that could apply to any of the three Hetts seated in the booth. With her flaming red hair and emerald green eyes—not to mention the uniform she donned for special occasions—Jackie was the best candidate for the sobriquet. Today, she sported the working uniform of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police: a blue forage cap with a yellow band and the bison-head crest of the force just above the peak; a blue, waist-length Gortex jacket over a gray shirt and blue tie, with the words “RCMP GRC Police” on both shoulders and zippered slits along both sides to give her easy access to her handcuffs and gun; blue pants with a yellow side-stripe; and black ankle boots.

There was still red in Chuck’s hair, though it was overpowered by a lot of gray. Today, he wore a turtleneck with a bomber jacket. Raised in the shadow of a flamboyant father, Chuck had been relegated to the role of straight man. But within their family, he gave as good as he got. Joe had helped set the Rising Sun in the east, but Chuck—in his
post-Vietnam years with Strategic Air Command—had been the Hett who’d run the hammer and sickle down the flagpole. Recently, he’d retired to the Hetts’ adopted state of New Mexico, where Joe had owned a ranch in his years with the 509th.

Red, however, had been Joe’s nickname for so long that neither Chuck nor Jackie had ever called him anything else. He wasn’t Dad or Granddad. He was simply Red. Always had been, and always would be. Red’s hair might now be white, but his personality still teetered on the edge of conflagration, ready to flare up at any moment. His face was crinkled and leathery from his decades in the Southwest’s sun, and probably permanently tanned by the Big Hot One he’d witnessed during the war. Thin-blooded from life in the desert, today Joe was bundled up as if he were flying to Siberia.

The food arrived.

“Now
that’s
what I call a burger,” Joe announced a few minutes later, Triple-O sauce dribbling down his fingers and his chin.

“Want another?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Dad?”

“Deal me in.”

Beckoning to the waitress, Jackie placed an order for three more Triple-Os.

“Crack the code,” Joe said.

“Triple-O asks for extra relish and mayonnaise. That’s why you’re so messy.”

“He isn’t messy,” Chuck said. “Red’s just old. Back home, he puts on a bib with a drool cup for every meal. After he straps on his geriatric Pampers.”

“Okay, that’s it. Put up or shut up, son.” Joe planted an elbow on the table and held up his hand to arm-wrestle.

“No way.” Chuck grimaced. “Look at the gunk on that paw. I’d be wrestling a greased pig.”

“Speaking of pigs,” Joe said, “what’d you make of that Jap at the airport?”

“Uh ... Red,” Jackie said diplomatically.

“I know, I know. It ain’t PC. That’s why it’s not correct for you to use the word. But I’m too old a dog to learn new tricks. Back in the forties, every newspaper called them Japs. As did the president. So pardon me if that’s what I call the banzai brigade I fought. If it’s any consolation, the ones born after the war aren’t Japs. And you can bet your booty that Jap had a slur for me.”

“You’re a pig, not a dog,” said Chuck.

“And pigs don’t have paws,” countered Joe. He began to suck the relish off his fingers with gusto. “Damn, that’s good. If I’d had some of this Triple-O sauce at the airport, I’d have bitten the remaining digits off that goon, then spat the bones out at the puppet master.”

“You’d be dead now, Red,” said Jackie.

“I’ve whupped his kind before.”

“I doubt he lost that finger in an industrial accident. I suspect that guy’s a yakuza. Offend the boss and that’s the price a Japanese gangster pays.”

“I saw that movie,” Chuck said.

“So did I,” said Joe.

“
Black Rain.
With Michael Douglas.”

“
The Yakuza.
Robert Mitchum.”

“Let’s see your war trophy, Red,” said Jackie.

Joe withdrew the prosthetic finger from his pocket and set it on the table.

“Looks realistic. May I borrow it for a while?”

“Why?” Joe asked.

“To swab it for DNA. If it turns out that those thugs are up to no good, it might come in handy.”

“My granddaughter the cop,” Joe said proudly, speaking to Chuck but nodding at Jackie. “So when do we get a tour of the stables where you work?”

“After lunch.”

The next round of burgers arrived just in time for Joe to mess up his sucked-clean fingers. “What do they call this creation?” he asked as he smacked his lips.

“The Legendary.”

“Gotta be a legend to go with that?”

“Back in the twenties,” Jackie related, “this hustler called Nat started selling hot dogs at Athletic Park, an old baseball stadium. In time, he moved up to selling Triple-O burgers out of his Model T and had carhops running from vehicle to vehicle. They stuck cedar planks across the windows as trays. Nat made a fortune, and over the years his burgers became legendary.”

“That’s how we’ll make our fortune,” Joe advised Chuck. “Corner the Triple-O franchise for the States.”

“Before long, it’d no longer be Legendary, would it?”
Jackie said. “Just super size.”

“I blame you,” Joe groused.

“Blame me for what?” asked Chuck.

“Turning my only granddaughter into an un-American.”

“Your fame precedes you, Red,” Jackie said over coffee. Having cleared the dishes, the waitress had wiped their table. Fetching a newspaper from her briefcase, the Mountie folded it back to a full-page feature, then set it down for the men to see.

“Hell in the Pacific,” trumpeted a big black headline across the top of the page. That was followed by a photo collage and information on the upcoming Veterans of the Pacific Conference, where Colonel Joe “Red” Hett, who’d flown with the 509th Bomb Group, would be the keynote speaker. Introducing him would be his son, Colonel Chuck Hett, who’d recently retired from Strategic Air Command.

“Heed my advice: don’t grow old,” said Joe, thumping his thumb down on a photo of himself as a crinkle-faced cowboy. Bookending Joe were picture arrays that captured the start and the finish of America’s involvement in the Second World War. In the middle of each was a photo of Joe striking back at the Rising Sun.

“Handsome guy,” he said, pointing at the photo of him blasting his pistol at a Zero.

“Is that really how you met Grandma?” Jackie asked.

“Yeah,” Joe replied. “She saw that photo of me in
Life
and wrote to me in the Pacific. We corresponded all through
the war, and the first thing I did after VJ day was travel to Indiana and look her up. We married a month later.”