Man with No Name: A Nanashi Novella (7 page)

Crack, crack, crack went the popgun automatics accompanied by tiny spurts of flame from behind a potted plant and an overturned sofa where the yakuza had taken refuge. A bullet kicked loose carpeting near Nanashi’s polished shoe. Another bullet burnt past his ear and pinged through the metal drapery. Nanashi flung the revolver and palmed the stiletto he kept under his armpit. The guy behind the sofa was on empty and Nanashi vaulted it, knelt and one! two! piston-fast, stabbed the gangster in the throat as he struggled to reload. The guy kept fumbling with the cartridge and swatting at the blood pouring down the front of his suit, until his movements were slow motion. Nanashi forgot him and kept going, scuttling on all fours toward the miniature banyan tree in its wicker pot and directly for the gangster ridiculously exposed as he cowered there. The gangster was a kid, hard and cruel, his face already nicked and scarred. The kid lined up the barrel of his nickel-plated automatic and uncapped however many rounds he had left as Nanashi floated toward him, moving with the rock and sway of a hominid torn from a primordial hunting ground and projected across time and space into that ruined living room--

I don’t recognize this place, Nanashi said. The beach continued to unreel. The landscape warped and refracted black and white, a negative. The ocean was blinding white.

This is the Maze, Muzaki said. His face shimmered a dull ivory and suggested that while the wounds had sealed he remained a bloodless, shambling thing that should not be. What is that? He pointed toward the shivering black spot that drew ever closer.

Nanashi strained to see and when he did he understood that a heavy stone had been rolled aside to reveal a secret nest that should’ve remained hidden. He fell to his knees and began to shriek, pop-eyed and insane.

Muzaki said, Don’t be afraid, my nameless friend. You’ve done well and I’m here. I’m here for you. I’ve always been.

--goon number six was too frightened to aim straight and his shots went wherever errant shots go and then Nanashi slammed a knee into his chin and there went teeth, tongue, a yolk of blood and spit. The kid sprawled and Nanashi kicked him in the neck and again in the base of the spine. Bone crunched and the kid became still.

Nanashi straightened and breathed hard. He wiped his face with his sleeve.

“Are you finished?” Susan Stucky hadn’t moved from her position in the hallway. She dropped her cigarette butt and carefully negotiated the battlefield to the record player and yanked the cord out of the wall. A man who’d survived his horrible injuries groaned where he lay in the fetal position in a thickening pool of blood. Otherwise the house was quiet. The actress was alone at last, or so Nanashi surmised. Lost to her Hollywood cliques, the tabloids no longer bothered to mention her, an alien in alien land and doubly estranged by her own wealth, her princess-style investiture at Castle Muzaki. She went over and peered at the wounded man who stirred and raised his bloodied hand to her in supplication. She stepped back and gave Nanashi a look.

He retrieved his pistol and reloaded it without thinking; his mind sprinted ahead, calculating avenues of escape, vectors of pursuit, safe-houses, odds of prolonged survival. Violence, its preparation and aftermath, was his meditation. He didn’t waste another bullet, simply hefted the fractured jade bust of some ancient dead god of the sea and smashed the gangster’s skull with such force the man’s glazed eyes started from their sockets and splashed against Nanashi’s shoe. When Nanashi turned, he saw Susan Stucky kneeling by her dead dog and stroking its fur.

“All right,” she said with dull satisfaction at the mess he’d made of her enemies. “These poor saps never stood a chance, huh? Good for us that they trusted you. You jumped across that line awfully quick.”

There was a psychedelic moment where he relived every slashed throat, every gouged eye, every severed finger, every beating he’d administered purely upon orders from his Sworn Family for reasons he seldom understood. He’d once ripped a businessman’s tongue free with pliers and fed it to him. He’d skinned a rival underboss alive with the edge of a trowel. He’d shoved a prostitute from a high rise roof knowing she was pregnant. And worse. Worse, always worse. He said, “Long time coming.”

She straightened and regarded him. “You gangster boys are in a shooting war. The shit is going to hit the fan in a major way when news breaks of what happened to my beloved husband.”

“We can’t hang around.” He snapped his fingers. “Gather what you need and come on. Two minutes. I won’t wait longer.”

“Just bring the car around, rabbit.” She mockingly snapped her fingers behind her head as she turned away.

He walked through the main door, keeping his stride brisk yet unhurried. The night air tasted of pine and mineral dampness. As he’d presumed, Kada lied--there were two compact cars parked at the foot of the broad flagstone steps. Two men in the lead car, a driver in the second. The two in front allowed him to approach within spitting distance before the passenger side door flew wide and raucous techno music blasted forth. Stupid kids.

Nanashi gave the emerging gangster a friendly wave and put two rounds into his chest, then ducked low and shot the driver through the open door. The other driver had the presence of mind to throw his car into reverse. Unfortunately for him, he banged into an ornate retaining wall and by the time he’d changed gears and hit the accelerator Nanashi tapped the window with the barrel of his revolver. The man shouted an obscenity or a prayer and then he died with a smoking hole in his cheek. Nanashi toppled the corpse into the driveway, swept aside the frosting of shattered glass and climbed behind the wheel and waited.

*   *   *

Smoke billowed from the house. Red fire twinkled and capered. She’d smashed a few bottles of alcohol and struck a match on her way through the door. “Watch that bitch burn,” she said and buckled in. She’d put on a silver kimono and slippers. Her purse was some sort of designer plastic; bulky and glossy black. She chain-smoked gourmet cigarettes from an enamel case. He couldn’t place them from their odor.

She gave clipped directions that sent them along secondary roads. It surprised him that the route carried them away from the city instead of closer. He drove at risky speeds, trying to keep his thoughts in sight. The slick, narrow blacktop entered mountainous forest--white trees, white flashes of rock, white mist. The oni and the yokai were awake and traveling in parallel. Ghosts of hunger and vengeance cried the cry of night birds.

“There’s a book about a woman whose husband randomly travels through time,” she said. “It’s a tearjerker. Sold a bajillion copies. That’s what tearjerkers do.”

“I haven’t read it,” he said.

“Are gangsters allowed to read chick lit?”

“Who’s going to stop us?”

“Well, this situation with me and Wes is like that sci-fi scenario. Except not really. Also, the romance is dead. Everything is about death with Wes.”

“Okay.” As soon as the yakuza tracked her down, and soon it would likely be, she was definitely dead, although that wouldn’t happen until she’d suffered enough to welcome annihilation.

“He did the paper trick, right? He always does the paper trick. I’m not sure whether that part is bullshit or not. I mean, the loony stuff about government mind control experiments is a red herring, but the pattern itself does pickle your brain all right. Doesn’t require paper, though. He could draw it in the sand or wave his hands in the air. I kinda suspect he could even just use his voice to conjure the effect. What else did he say?”

Nanashi shrugged.

“There was a bit about time and mazes and blah, blah, blah.”

“Blah, blah, blah,” he said.

“Wes doesn’t time travel. Time travel goes against Einstein, thus it’s impossible. Something else very fucked up is going on. Not time travel, though. Did you kill him? Was it you personally?”

He shook his head. The engine purred. Wind snickered through the hole he’d made in the window.

“I want you to thank whoever did it.”

“Send a postcard to the Yokohama office. The guys will appreciate the thought.”  He brushed his hair back; useless in the teeth of the wind. Eventually he sealed the hole with the palm of his hand.

“With Wesley’s death, I am free.”

He grunted.

“I was his slave. That was the price to pay for bringing me back from the underworld. He’s King Pluto, our man Wes.”

“Yeah? Are you certain he’s not Polyphemus?”

“Don’t you dig, killer? All the myths are the same. Geography just changes how we explain the horrors.” She lighted yet another cigarette and smiled a tight, bitter smile. “You’ll figure it out, bad boy. Act Two. Me, I’m beating feet.”

“Where am I taking you, huh?”

“It would be meaningless to say. Fear not -- we’re almost there.”

You slaughtered your brothers. O woe unto thee!
Nanashi could’ve tricked himself into hearing that whisper from Muzaki’s lips instead of the pit of his own subconscious.
Slaughtered sworn brothers for what? This sharp-tongued gaijin with nice legs? Guilt? Your fear of something larger than yourself?
Yes, that last thing felt right. There was his motive. He’d become enmeshed in the action of powerful forces, a leaf in the flood.

“Okay,” he said. “I am at your service.”

She laughed and it wasn’t the melodic timbre of her silver screen personae. This was swift, dark water over rocks, the quick bark of a crow. “Not mine, killer. You belong to a real sonofabitch.” She laughed again. “There, turn there. That’s my exit, stage left.”

He parked in a leaf-strewn lot near a picnic table and a drinking fountain. A small placard indicated it might be a park or preserve -- the lettering was illegible and focusing upon it made his head ache.

Susan Stucky finished her cigarette. She opened her door and climbed out, pausing to lean back in and study him. In the dimness her expression was inscrutable. “Your boys are going to kill you?”

“If they find out that I helped you. Yes.”

“You going to tell them?”

He shrugged.

“The macho honor bit,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“The Dragon?”

“Yeah.” He smiled. “Nobody likes me.”

She smiled back. “Okay, rabbit. Thanks.”

“Wait.”

“What?”

“Where will you go? This is a forest.”

“You’re very observant. Maybe in the next life you should be a detective.” She slammed the door and walked in front of the car and followed the headlight beams. Her kimono shone like the moths milling around her pale hair.  She vanished into the woodwork.

Nanashi smoked a cigarette while the engine idled. He sighed and got out and went after her. The slender trees were slick with dew. Fog dampened the rasp of his breath, his shoes scrabbling among roots and leaves. Illumination from the headlights quickly faded and he felt his way through opaline murk. Ahead, a bluish light infiltrated the forest. Shadows leaped around him as limbs creaked with a puff of wind.

Bushes rustled nearby and the Akita ghosted along, its white fur gone blue as an ice floe. Its eye flickered. Guts trailed from a fist-sized hole where the shotgun slug had torn through. Man and dog regarded one another in passing.

“The hell is this?” Nanashi said in wonderment. He almost expected Muzaki to mutter the answer.
Hell? Oh, yes, rabbit.

The trees thinned and he caught glimpses of the born again dog. Once he could’ve sworn a woman’s voice echoed from the distance. He scrambled down a steep embankment, grasping exposed roots to keep from pitching onto his face. At the bottom was a gully and a fast-moving stream. The water flowed shin deep and cold enough to shock his feet numb. He trudged downstream as the light intensified and set the cloying mist ablaze and forced him to shield his eyes.

The gully widened into a field of short, damp grass. The moon seethed through a low cloudbank, spotlighting a cherry blossom tree in a shaft of blue fire. The tree reared in stately menace where the water cut a delta around its gnarled bole. Empty suits and shoes dangled from the branches. Pieces of jewelry glimmered in knotholes. Thunder rumbled. His mind became so full it blankly mirrored the blue moon and struck him dumb, pinned him to the spot. The moon’s eyelid peeled back and crimson radiance stabbed forth. Where the red light touched, grand black trees silently erupted from the grass like a child’s popup book and from each tree depended the sinister fruit of empty clothing. Chimes tinkled and sang.

A dog howled, or a god. Nanashi ran, slipping and splashing along the ravine, making for the car. He rose and fell and rose again to flee onward. Blue haze before him shivered as it was eaten by the red ray of the moon. One sidelong glance revealed a figure keeping pace, a stumbling, screaming lunatic who much resembled himself, and there were others at intervals between the skinny poplars and pines. Each of them rising, falling, rising.  At his back the dog’s howl deepened to a roar and the roar became a vast ripping sound as of a pavilion torn asunder in a hurricane.

He began to fly.

*   *   *

Dawn refused to break.

Nanashi drove the stolen car
like
it was stolen, drove with the abandon of a dead man. He ignored the scenery and stared directly ahead, afraid to blink lest he find himself catapulted through time and space via the pattern imprinted within his eyelids. He didn’t entertain conscious thought. He focused on the pavement lines, focused on the rhythm of shifting, of pressing the pedal to the floorboard.

It should’ve been light when he finally returned to the mountain lodge, but was not. The staff stared at him. Their terror was the terror of peasants at the mercy of vengeful samurai in times of war. His immaculate hair was disheveled and wild as a bushman’s, his fine clothes spattered in mud and torn at the seams. Dirt and blood ingrained his fingernails. He pointed his revolver at the innkeeper and asked if he’d seen Koma or the others. The Innkeeper shook his head frantically and when Nanashi cocked the hammer the man fell to his knees and blubbered while his wife chanted a prayer and the gaggle of serving boys wrung their hands and moaned.