Belka, Why Don't You Bark? (5 page)

“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 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.

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 government.
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…

The Pacific Ocean.

History.

And the dogs.

Yes, even the dogs.

Seventeen dogs with no sense of how they were being used. Their fates might intersect
in the most mysterious ways, there on the Korean Peninsula, on the site of a proxy
war between East and West, part of the broader Cold War, but they would never know.
It was the season for war. The twentieth century, a century of war dogs. The dogs
were played with, toyed with, exploited. As the fighting intensified, dragged on,
devolved into a quagmire, UN forces began procuring dogs from closer by. In January
1952, America’s Far East Air Force purchased its first dogs from Japan: sixty German
shepherds. They had been selected from a group of more than two hundred dogs brought
to Ueno Park from throughout the Kantō region. More than a third had passed the first
battery of inspections and tests, which included height and overall physical condition,
the ability to remain calm in the presence of close-range gunfire, the willingness
to attack people clad in protective gear, and the absence of filariasis. Both the
commissioned officer in charge of the Far East Air Force’s dogs and the veterinarian
were surprised that so many animals passed the test, but given their ancestry it shouldn’t
have been a surprise. These were the descendants of war dogs that had not only lived
during
but also
through
the Fifteen Years’ War, which included both the Second Sino-Japanese War and the
Pacific War. And, of course, they were purebred German shepherds. Purebred
Japanese
German shepherds.

There were no dogs left in Tokyo in the immediate wake of the defeat. There were no
dogs in Osaka either. Or in Hakata, Nagoya, Kanazawa—zero. In the two years leading
up to the surrender, dogs had disappeared from Japan’s cities. There was nothing to
feed them. With the food situation as dire as it was for humans, fretting over dogs
was out of the picture. War dogs were the only exception—they had rations. But they
were destined for the battlefield. And then, toward the end of the war, citizens were
ordered to turn in their dogs. These weren’t war dogs, just ordinary pets. They weren’t
deployed as reinforcements. They were procured as military
supplies
. They were valued, now, for their fur. Dogs from all across Japan were offered up
for the Japanese military to kill and skin. Between ten and twenty percent of Japan’s
civilian dogs survived. These lucky dogs lived in rural areas where their owners could
feed them.

As for the war dogs, only those strong enough, fierce enough, lucky enough to escape
death on the battlefield, not just once but time after time, survived.

By and large, the dogs that gathered in Ueno Park in January 1952 were descended from
the second of these two groups.

Something rather amazing happened as a result. American dogs ended up fighting on
the front lines and living in the camps with these formerly Japanese dogs, newly incorporated
into the UN forces. And among the Japanese dogs were some that, if you traced their
lineage, had as their great-great-grandfather the same German shepherd who had sired
Katsu. Katsu, the dog that had served in the army garrison manning the Kiska/Narukami
antiaircraft battery. The same German shepherd that had kept his distance from the
three other dogs left behind on the island, that had ultimately sacrificed himself
in a banzai attack, leading the American soldiers into a minefield. And that wasn’t
all. There were, in addition, a few dogs descended on their mother’s side from Masao.
Yes, that same Masao—Bad News’s father, the grandfather of those seventeen dogs sent
into South Korea. But so what? Brought together in this unexpected place by the purest
of coincidences, the dogs themselves remained oblivious.

The dogs’ owners kept breed registries, but the dogs didn’t. They knew nothing about
their pedigrees, their history.

The very uneventfulness of the dogs’ reunion marked their subjection to their destiny.

To the tense dynamic playing out between the US and the Soviet Union. Or, perhaps,
to Truman’s and Stalin’s intense
personal
hatred of each other.

The hand of fate played in its fickle way with Bad News’s children elsewhere too,
not only on the Korean Peninsula.

In autumn 1951, in the suburbs of Chicago, Illinois, a female dog started giving birth
to puppies that would have a shot at the top. Her name was Sumer, and she was a sister
by the same mother of Gospel and Jubilee, then fighting on the Korean Peninsula. Sumer
had never been sent to the front. She wasn’t an elite dog—in fact, she wasn’t even
a war dog. She was tested when she was six months old, and she had failed. Naturally
each puppy in a litter has its own character and abilities, even though it and its
siblings are born of the same seed. By the close of 1949, Bad News had fathered some
277 puppies; of that total no more than 150 were judged appropriate for military use—though
among those who were, a good half proved to be extraordinarily capable on the battlefield.
Most of the pups that were rejected—on the grounds that they were too friendly, say,
or too excitable—were given away for free to ordinary households, or sometimes sold
for a small sum. And there were buyers. These were purebred German shepherds, after
all. They might not have been suited for war, but they were certified purebreds. And
they were pups, and they were adorable.

So that’s how it was. The puppies scattered. They left the training center kennels
behind and went out into the great wide world to live their lives as ordinary pets.

Sumer, however, ended up in another large kennel like the one she had left. Caged.

Her owner was a young woman who maintained the kennel at her own expense. She was
a breeder, though more often she referred to herself as a handler. She brought her
dogs to shows, walked them around the ring. Held their leashes, handled them. The
“shows” were, of course, dog shows. She was a regular at venues all across the United
States, an up-and-coming breeder whose dogs took, and continued to take, prize after
prize.

She had first become interested in the puppies that didn’t make the grade as war dogs—second-generation
rejects, so to speak—two years earlier, and by now she had acquired twenty-four by
this route. She treasured them. These
rejects
might not have had what it took to succeed as war dogs, but they came from an extremely
attractive lineage; they might have been tossed out as failures in the world of military
breeding, but they were ideally suited to dog shows that were focused, above all,
on bodily form. When the military breeders branded these dogs as “standard but useless,”
they were in fact certifying that they possessed the fine external appearance that
was most valued in the dog shows, and that was, more than anything, what it took to
make a dog a king.

Unmistakably pure, perfectly proportioned.

Unadulterated formal beauty.

Of the twenty-four puppies the woman acquired, half were Bad News’s children. Sumer
was by far the most beautiful. She was hopeless as a war dog, true, but she was outstanding
as a plaything, a pet.
Such a gorgeous coat
, the handler murmured.
Just look at how perfect her bite is.
At the same time, the handler had also spotted her weaknesses. She had been doing
this ever since she graduated from high school, an up-and-coming breeder, a twenty-five-year-old
pro. She entered Sumer in several local shows, to see how she would do, but the best
she ever placed was third in her group.
No surprise there
, the handler thought.
She needs a bit more pizzazz, a sort of a sensuousness, something to catch the judge’s
eyes.
If only the handler could bring that out, she would have a perfect champion dog.

She would have, that is, a brand.

Just one more step.

In order to bring out what she needed, the handler started breeding Sumer. If only
this last step could be achieved with this bitch, the next generation would be able
to take the grand prize at any dog show in the land. And so Sumer began giving birth
to litter after litter by different fathers, twice every year. She was given all the
care she needed so she could focus on raising her children.

The dogs who straddled Sumer over the next five years were all certified purebred
German shepherds. She had intercourse with seven different dogs, but every one of
the puppies that emerged from her womb belonged to the same breed.