Next is a floor dedicated to furs, some of them apparently not from vats, but flayed off of real animals, with bits of animals still attached, and the inert, flopping heads and leathery paws seem shamanic, or perhaps barbaric, though most of the shoppers here are stick-thin, rich-looking women, and his heart lurches at the sight of a fur so brilliantly blue-white that it looks like falling snow. I’m sorry, he thinks, remembering Akemi’s limp helplessness, her blood staining the pillowcase, and he wonders if she’s still alive, if she missed him, if there was ever a moment when he could actually have helped. She’s just a woman, he tells himself, and as such replaceable, and she hasn’t spoken to him in a long time, and he’s a soldier now, or nearly, and above caring. Maybe one day he’ll ask Hiro but for now he should just forget her.
He tries a jab-jab-elbow combination in the mirror in a luggage store to see how his moves look in the suit, and it looks good, really good, like something in a movie, and when he really snaps the punches the sleeves make a noise like a whip cracking, and he starts shadowboxing, getting into it, dancing a little like the early Ali until a Chinese dad leading his pink-frocked little girl by the hand pumps his fist and says, “Jai-yow!” at which Kern strides away with his hands in his pockets.
He’d intended to spend money if only just to see what it felt like but the sheer profusion of things leaves him drained of all desire and he wanders dazedly past the storefronts wanting nothing but to make it to the top, and it occurs to him that, in the same way that heaven lacks a shape, the lives of the blessed dead lack any apparent purpose, not counting the singing of hymns, which would get old in about a minute, but then it’s obvious—what you do in heaven is keep on going up.
The atrium culminates in a disc of translucent blue glass, high overhead and as wide as an ordinary rooftop, and as he gets closer he sees that the pale blue is marred by the shadows of people standing on the other side, and he wants to stand there with them, feel what they’re feeling, but the last escalator brings him to a sort of abandoned plaza, and there’s a doorman by doors of frosted white glass through which he sees stairs, and the sign on the door reads Club Cielo in an intricate curlicued script.
With the suit it’s worth trying to bluster his way in but the doorman moves just perceptibly into his way and says, “Pardon me, sir, are you a member?” but so politely, like he doesn’t already know. Kern could lie but can see it’s useless so he just says, “No,” and the doorman says, “I’m very sorry, sir, but the Club Cielo is members-only, so, for now, our doors are closed.”
*
In his suite he finds a bottle of brandy sealed with wax and an ice bucket with two black bottles of champagne called Cristal and there’s a black plastic briefcase inside of which is a foam bed holding what looks like a compact machine-gun from the future and a note in Hiro’s crabbed handwriting reads, For you. The latest Heckler-Koch Bullpup, for when you absolutely, positively have to kill every motherfucker in the room. Technically a capital crime to have this in the New Territories so be discreet, please. He’s always been a street fighter rather than a gunman but as he brandishes the weapon in the mirror he feels a rush of pleasure and a sense of power so intense that it shames him, and then he hears voices from the behind the closed bedroom door.
As he eases the door open it occurs to him that he doesn’t know if the gun is loaded, or how to turn off the safety, but in fact there are no assassins, just two naked Chinese girls sitting on his bed, one clipping the other’s nails as they gabble away, having a good heart-to-heart about something, and they look up in shock as he puts the gun down on the floor and when he looks up again they’re smiling as they come toward him.
*
Flowers of orange flame bloom from the barrel of the machine-gun on the widescreen, the color staining Hiro’s face and the fluid in his glass and Kern’s own hands. The suite’s blinds are closed though they’re up so high that only aircraft could see in. Hiro doesn’t look away from the movie as he raises a brandy bottle and says, “Drink?”
“No, thank you,” says Kern, annoyed at his own formality but unable to control it. “It kills endurance.”
“I honor your scruple, but that will pass. Either that or you’re the king hell number one zen motherfucker of all time, which is, I grant, a possibility, but, generally speaking, the life requires outlets.”
Kern sips ice water, says nothing, though he badly wants to know what happens next, if there’s initiation, training, gearing up, what they’re actually going to do, because everything else in his life is gone, and until he finds out he’s nothing much at all, but Hiro seems to want only to drink his way through the minibar and watch movies.
In the movie the Yakuza are holed up in a beach house doing nothing but wasting time, having fake sumo matches on the sand and shooting soda cans off of logs. Kern’s eyes start to close.
He jumps when Hiro says, “They never wore suits like that,” and he sounds like he’s speaking from the bottom of a well, and for the first time Kern registers the Yakuza’s outfits, striking Cold War period pieces, though all of them except for the protagonist look like a nickel’s worth of gangster in ten dollars’ worth of suit. “Real Yakuza looked like shit,” Hiro says. “The kind of people who chain-smoke for exercise. They could always spot the undercovers because they weren’t hacking up a lung. More Bugs Bunny tracksuits than bespoke Armani. It’s a twentieth-century comedian slash auteur’s dream of what a gangster ought to be.”
“So what should a gangster be, these days?”
“Ah. Well. That’s the question, and one that has no answer, because the truth is that gangsters have no essence. The movies are always about the code, but there is no code, no tradition, no honor, no anything—really it’s just random thugs scrabbling after fleeting advantages. Organized crime is like a vacuum, filling the gaps in the legitimate markets, and it arises spontaneously, everywhere, all the time. Wherever two or more of you dumb punks are gathered together in my name …
“The irony is, they try to figure out who they are by watching movies. In the cartel, some of them copy westerns, bosses’ sons who went to the London School of Economics priding themselves on having cow shit on their boots. Even I’m prone to that, and I know better.
“The deeper irony is that, just as gangsters copy movies, movies copy gangsters. Two closely coupled forms of nothing in particular.” Hiro pauses, then says, “Ever seen an Antonio Loera movie? Sweeping cartel epics. Mexico’s own not-quite Takeshi Kitano. He was born upper class, went to art school, learned about the narcos from books and movies.
“I guess he must have wanted to see the real thing, because one night he showed up uninvited at the gates of my late employer’s ranch. It’s an incautious move, by any standard, though less outright crazy than it might at first appear—they both traveled in political circles, and I think they’d met socially. If Loera thought his fame would be his shield, well, that’s where he was right, and in fact Don Victor turned out to be a fan, welcomed him graciously and sat him at his right hand at the table.