The Blue Jungle (3)
A noir novella in 10 chapters. “A Japanese girl has gone missing in Los Angeles.”
Welcome to THE BLUE JUNGLE, a noir novella by Jamie Dibs.
Naomi is a struggling reporter in LA. Gangsters kidnap her because their boss thinks only Naomi knows what happened to his daughter.
He may be right: Naomi covers the porn industry, where all secrets lead to the king of sleaze, Bobby Feathers.
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And now…
THE BLUE JUNGLE: CHAPTER THREE
NAOMI
She watched the traffic on Interstate 5 stall around her, wondering if she should roll down her window and scream for help.
They called themselves Mr. Mittsu and Mr. Yattsu. Mr. Three and Mr. Eight, using an old-fashioned version of Japanese numerals, as if they had been numbered by the Emperor himself. Bug Eyes was Three, or Mittsu, and his burly companion was Eight, Yattsu.
“Is that some kind of new yakuza thing, calling yourself by numbers?” She was scared to ask, but she was even more scared to let her mind imagine what these two wanted.
Bug Eyes, at the wheel of her car, laughed. “Us, yakuza?”
“Not us,” Big Eight growled from the rear, where his bulk crushed her against the door, the low ceiling displacing his hair’s plateau.
“But you’re gangsters,” she said. “You’re kidnapping me.”
“We’re missionaries,” said Bug Eyes.
“And you’re our countryman,” the sumo wrestler added. “Your country needs you, Sato.”
“We’d hate to cut your tits off and make you eat them,” Bug Eyes said from the front.
She had been determined not to show fear, but she couldn’t help it, and she wiped a tear.
“You made her cry,” Sumo mockingly disparaged his colleague. “I read a study. Apparently women respond to empathy, not violence.”
Bug Eyes turned onto an exit ramp to Saticoy Street, back to Burbank. “They all respond to cock.”
Naomi forced herself to steady her breathing. They made for Vineland, townhouses, prefabs, anodyne office and warehouses – Anywheres, L.A. Bug Eyes abruptly turned off the highway and crisscrossed onto smaller streets and then to an alleyway running behind a block of low-rise storage facilities. They threaded a corridor of yellow brick walls and heavy steel gates covered with bulbous grafitti.
If they want to rape you, they’ll do it here. And she began to shake.
“Beautiful day for a drive,” said Sumo beside her.
“Lovely scenery,” the other said, his distended eyeballs taking in the garbage dumpsters.
“Any movie stars around here?” Sumo asked.
“There goes Robert De Niro,” Bug Eyes said, pulling over in the middle of the alley. “Hey look, Sato’s crying again.”
“Please don’t hurt me,” she blubbered, hating herself for it but too frightened to control her words.
The men laughed.
“Get out,” Bug Eyes commanded.
They marched her through a back door into a dark corridor cluttered with mops and buckets. Then they were inside a vast, barren expanse of cold concrete and high steel beams. The only furnishings: a dilapidated orange sofa, bursting springs, which faced a flat-screen television incongruously new and sleek.
“Sit down,” Sumo said. She obeyed. Bug Eyes removed a small remote from his jacket pocket and turned the screen on. Another zap and a video began:
A normal street scene in a Japanese city. People bicycled down a narrow lane beneath a bland sunless sky, past a row of garishly lit vending machines. Then a movie title appeared in Japanese: “Ripe Pussy Debut”. Naomi felt a twinge of unease as the camera waited for a young woman to approach: she was as nondescript as the street, just another young lady in a raincoat and boots. The next credit identified her as “Risa Nakamura”, and that’s when Naomi wept again – different kind of tears, deeper, more miserable.
Risa Nakamura rings the bell of a small apartment building. She identifies herself and is buzzed up, and the camera follows her inside. She walks upstairs, the camera keeping up with her boots, and is met inside by a male voice.
The scene cuts to Risa sitting inside, enjoying a cup of tea. She has taken off the coat and is wearing a turtleneck sweater. She is being interviewed.
“My name is Risa Nakamura. I am nineteen years old, and stand one hundred and seventy centimeters tall. My measurements are eighty, sixty-two, eighty-three.”
Naomi said, “Turn it off.”
“No, I like this chick,” Bug Eyes replied.
The video’s male voice: “What size is your bust?”
Risa Nakamura: “I’m not big, just a C-cup. Like a normal girl.”
Male voice: “They’re splendid breasts.” Risa smiles. “The area from your lower back down along your hip line is a little big. Do you have tender hips?”
Risa Nakamura: “Sometimes they feel tender.”
Male voice: “You’re shy! Shy but very sexy. That is an amazing combination in a woman. Tell me, when was your first sexual experience?”
Risa Nakamura: “When I was a fourth-year high school student.”
Male voice: “You’re so young, that must have been…”
Risa Nakamura: “Last year.”
Male voice: “How many men have you been with?”
Risa, blushing: “Just the one.”
Sumo leaned in, like a hovering zeppelin. “This part is boring. Fast forward.”
“No, the interview is my favorite part,” Bug Eyes said. “There’s nothing like learning about these ordinary girls, how they like to do it, what they’d like to try.”
Naomi wiped her wet face against her arm. “You’ve made your point.”
“Fast forward,” Sumo growled.
The interview with Risa Nakamura proceeded in a procession of mute stills that seemed to capture the ugliest aspects of the girl’s face: eyes closed, mouth open, a crooked tooth, a look of stupification. Then Risa was in the bedroom removing her clothes. A man was sucking her nipples, and then she was on hands and knees as he…
“Risa Nakamura, hunh?” Sumo said to Naomi. “Why that name?”
“It was just a name,” she sniffled.
Bug Eyes said, “Go to the part where he fingers the shit out of her standing up. I love that.”
Sumo looked at his watch. “Time for the boss.” Bug Eyes clicked the remote and the screw scene was replaced by a live video feed. There was a little boxed screen in which Naomi could see herself, sitting on that ugly orange sofa, face red, wet and ugly. The main vista revealed a man at a table in a corporate-looking boardroom, dressed in a three-piece suit. He looked to be in his fifties and he was completely bald, but his graying eyebrows were thick and long like lashes.
“Sato Naomi,” the man said. His voice was a growling baritone, spoken softly but with such confidence and authority that it filled the space around her – even a giant, echoy warehouse of concrete, steel and aluminum located more than five thousand miles away.
She didn’t even nod. Whatever this was, it wasn’t a kidnapping. Which meant it was something worse.
“A Japanese girl has gone missing in Los Angeles,” he told her.
Naomi could guess where this was headed. With a foot in both the Japanese and American porn industries, she had become auntie to the girls doing the rounds in L.A., serving as chaperone and translator, and sometimes telling them to stop being idiots and get back on the airplane. None of them had the sense or the money to fulfill their halfbaked Hollywood dreams.
He continued, “Six weeks ago you were approached by a girl named Eriko.”
Naomi nodded. “Yes.” Young Eriko Tamaki was gorgeous, haughty, shameless – but Eriko had problems. Eriko had been a mess. Naomi had a sudden flash: B.F. talking about the Japanese jailbait he said Naomi had sent his way.
Better not go there. She said to the man, “Eriko wanted to party. I tried to keep her out of trouble. But she had a way of getting what she wanted.”
The man agreed: “Yes. She is ruthless and manipulative. Eriko did not return to Japan. Her last known whereabouts was spending a weekend in Los Angeles six weeks ago…with you.”
“Sir, I have no idea where she went,” Naomi said, using her politest Japanese. “She didn’t say anything about not going back to Japan. She went back to Director Taro and that was the last I heard of her.”
“You will know where to look. Three and Eight will assist you, if you require help. They will also ensure that you find Eriko, and that you keep all of this a secret. You too have secrets, Sato.” He folded his hands on the boardroom table and leaned a little closer. “You would not want those videos being distributed to your parents, and to the parents of your schoolmates.”
“No,” she said in a small voice.
“You will be rewarded for delivering Eriko to me. I am a reasonable man.”
She paused, wondering how wise it would be to continue. She thought of Val Benson and the way the writer had found an inner courage when men like this were arrayed against her.
Naomi rolled the dice.
“Eriko told me her family name is Tamaki. But is your daughter’s family name really Tamaki-san?”
The man stared at her as though she were insane.
She added: “If you want me to find your daughter, I need to know what name she might use.”
“Okada,” the man growled.
“Thank you,” she squeaked.
“Shut up. Eight will give you a mobile phone. There is only one telephone number in its memory. Once you have Eriko, call that number, and Three and Eight will come to you. And if you fail, Sato, or if anyone hears my name in connection with Eriko, Three and Eight will return you to the warehouse you are in, and on this screen you will watch as Two, Six and Nine gangrape your father and your grandmother, your high-school teacher Mrs. Ito, and your three young cousins, Mikoko, Emi and Hiro.” He smiled, almost grandfatherly. “And then it will be your turn.”
Six weeks ago, mid Feb, Naomi got a call from one of her local Japanese contacts, a guy named Kenichi Oba. In the U.S., people called Oba-san “Obi-wan”, and Kenichi became Kenobi, even growing his salty little beard to perfect the Jedi master’s moniker. It helped him fit in with Americans. His company produced low-budget TV commercials, but also had a lucrative side business providing technical support to visiting Japanese pornography directors.
Obi-wan Kenobi told Naomi a couple of girls were in town and asked if she would show them around for a day. The director, who had also flown in for the shoot, would pay her a cash bonus for the trouble of taking the girls off his hands.
Naomi didn’t enjoy shepherding these young women, but she had just had the, uh, pleasure of interviewing a porn magnate named Bobby Feathers for the first time. That encounter had been so degrading that it had made her hate everything about California. Perhaps some company with Japanese people would help distract her from the urge to take another shower.
Besides, such services kept her in the good books with the adult-video industry bigwigs in Osaka – who expected her to say yes anyway. Naomi had become Americanized enough to do it just for the cash, but remained Japanese enough to know better than to insult them by declining the job.
She picked the visitors up at a tatty three-star hotel in Little Tokyo. Eriko and her colleague Aoi were both straight out of high school. Eriko was spending the summer before her first year of university doing A.V. films; Aoi was a wanna-be actress trying to start a career via adult video.
They were waiting for Naomi when she pulled up in her crappy Sentra. Naomi rolled down the window and introduced herself. The taller girl, Aoi, wearing jeans and a hoodie, looked as ordinary as her clothes: the girl-next-door. She slid into the backseat.
Eriko didn’t follow. She wore knee-high boots and a plaid miniskirt that flashed hints of her white panties, and a light sweater that emphasized her breasts. She had highlights in her hair, a 1980s retro curl. Teenybopper kogal slut. “Hey, I’m Eriko Tamaki,” she said in impolite Japanese. “Can I sit in front?”
Naomi stifled her surprise at the girl’s choice of words. There were many ways to say the same thing in Japanese, depending to whom you were talking, and Eriko was addressing her as a pal instead of an elder. “If you like,” Naomi said.
Eriko jumped in. “This is so cool!”
“So where do you want to go first?”
“Shopping,” Aoi said. “Beverly Hills.”
Eriko turned in the passenger seat and put her hand on Naomi’s arm. A very un-Japanese thing to do, but there was something commanding in the way she did it, and it made Naomi face her directly. The girl was no traditional beauty, with a large, almost Western nose and a small chin, but there was something extraordinary about her forward demeanor that put an ache in Naomi’s chest.
“Where can we score drugs?”
That floored her. “I – I don’t know.”
Eriko wasn’t giving up. “I’m going to party whether you want to or not, Sato-san. Wouldn’t it be better if you knew how to keep things safe?”
Where did this girl get off? Naomi was too stunned to know what to say.
Then Eriko turned on the charm, soft eyes and inviting smile, head tilted at just the right angle. “Please, Sato-san, this is our first time in the U.S. Oba said you would take care of things. I just thought, you know…”
“We’ll see,” Naomi mumbled, confused by the girl’s aggression and insouciant allure.
What do you do with a pair of teenaged adult video starlets? She took them to Sushi Gen because Aoi wanted Japanese food, but once there, Eriko declared a desire for Mexican and so Naomi took them to a taquería dive off Wilshire. While Naomi went to use the bathroom, Eriko ordered margaritas, claiming ignorance of the drinking age. When the waitress asked for I.D., Eriko insisted Naomi order the drinks.
Naomi said no, at which point Eriko declared, “My father sent me to the most expensive boarding school in Japan. Do you know how much it costs a year?”
“No.”
“Fifty million yen.”
“You’re making it up,” Aoi said.
“No school costs that much,” Naomi agreed, “not for one year.”
“This one does. They would have expelled me, but they’re too afraid of my father. That and I gave the vice principal a blow job.”
“Then how come you’re selling it?” Aoi asked.
Eriko shrugged. “My father’s a miser. Doesn’t give me a single yen. Of course…” That heartbreaking smile. “I love my daddy.”
Naomi, sensing they should leave the restaurant before Eriko made a scene over drinking, suggested they drive to the ocean and check out Venice Beach. Maybe the parade of weirdness would keep Eriko distracted, and Naomi could sneak off to Albert Kinney for a quiet cappuccino.
The freak show at Venice Beach didn’t disappoint. Eriko’s eyes, already wide, threatened to pop at the torrent of hustlers and addicts, skate punks and troubadors.
Eriko’s next demand: rollerblades.
Naomi paid the deposit with Obi-wan’s advance and agreed to meet them back there by five p.m. She checked everybody had each other’s cell phone numbers. As the girls careened off, Naomi couldn’t resist admiring Eriko’s legs and round little rear, skirt lifting to reveal her panties. Then the girl was gone. Officially on break, Naomi walked into the hills toward the quiet cafes of Albert Kinney Street.
Venice Beach was carnivalling as usual when she returned later in the day. The sun was taking its time and the ocean hummed blue. The fake Italianate shop fronts, the graffiti, the overcrowded bistros were all in place. So was Aoi, sitting cross-legged on the cement in front of the roller blade kiosk, her face downcast.
“Where’s Eriko?”
Aoi shrugged. “I haven’t seen her for an hour.”
Great. “Where did you leave her?”
“She left me. We were somewhere that way, having a coffee, and she was talking to all these guys.”
“Guys? What guys?”
“I don’t know. Weird guys with tattoos and beards and nose rings.”
“Americans?”
“I don’t know. I guess so. They were all kinds of colors.”
“Eriko spoke English?”
“I guess. A little.”
“She had an entire conversation in English?”
“I think she can talk to anyone for hours, as long as it’s a guy.”
“And then what?”
Aoi seemed dazed by Venice Beach. “Then she said she’d go with them for a drink and that I could either come along or do whatever I wanted.”
“Shit,” Naomi said in English, dialing Eriko’s number. No reply.
“She hasn’t answered her phone,” Aoi said.
Naomi texted Obi-wan, letting him know Eriko had gone missing. “We’ve got to find her.”
“How?” Aoi regarded the chaos of Venice Beach. “She’s just late.”
“You wait here, and call me if she turns up.”
“Where are you going?” Aoi didn’t look like an adult video actress. She looked like a frightened adolescent.
“I should have never let you out of my sight. If I don’t find her…”
Naomi set off at a jog in the direction the two girls had drifted. She didn’t have a plan other than to hope somewhere along the beach she’d stumble on Eriko, or that the girl would appear.
But…a lone wild child, flirting with a bunch of random guys, desperate to taste a new kind of freedom…not good.
The sun listed like a torpedoed ship. Naomi went back to Aoi sans Eriko. She had covered the extent of Venice Beach and Pacific Avenue twice and wanted to get back while light remained in the sky. Obi-wan had showed up, dressed in his usual hep-cat black and flat cap. “Oba-san, I’ve been looking for hours.”
“You’ve put me in a bad situation,” he growled.
“She insisted on rollerblading.” That didn’t impress Obi-wan. “I’m sorry. Should we call the police?”
“No,” he said. Obi-wan handed her a glossy photo. It was an A.V. promotional shot of Eriko, smiling sweetly in a sailor suit, fingers raised in a V. “Here. We’re going to canvass this entire neighborhood. You go north, I’ll go south.”
“Shouldn’t the police do this instead?”
“Every shop. Every restaurant. Start there, at that one. Ask the bartenders, ask whoever’s minding the store. A girl that foolish will have made an impression somewhere.”
Naomi took the photo and set off down the strip, feeling the entire venture a waste of time. Eriko was old enough to make her own decisions. This didn’t have anything to do with Naomi anymore.
But she knew Obi-wan didn’t think so. She knew that the director, Taro, would blame Obi-wan for the missing girl. And that someone else in Tokyo or Osaka would hold Taro liable. The chain of responsibility would be made clear to those high up in the sordid industry, people that Taro and Obi-wan – and Naomi – didn’t want to disturb, ever.
A couple of guys renting surfboards barely glanced at the photo. A waiter told her to get lost. The Mexican behind the hotdog stand insisted he didn’t speak English. She tried a group of longhaired kids doing skateboard stunts; they all claimed to have seen the “Asian jailbait” and Naomi’s blood quickened, until she realized they were making it all up.
Last shot: she approached a pair of bikini’d white women on rollerblades.
“Helen,” said one, “isn’t that the chick we saw on Muscle Beach?”
The two women squinted at the photo. “There was an Asian girl on blades.”
“Sitting in the sand.”
“Alone.”
“When was this?” Naomi asked.
“Just, like, a few minutes ago.”
Naomi jogged north alongside the beautiful hotels that marked the beginning of Santa Monica. The bodybuilders were still using the gym equipment, swinging from bars, pumping iron. No sign of Eriko. Naomi circled the area twice, drifting toward the ocean to see if Eriko was there.
The girl was gone.
Dejected, Naomi called Obi-wan. “Keep looking,” he hissed.
Her search faded to a listless meander along the beach, the Santa Monica pier’s lights dancing in the distance. She listened to the rumble of the waves. Somewhere beyond the blackness was Japan and her poor hometown, full of nothing but old people and pachinko parlors, the grandma who had raised her, her fisherman father still surviving off of yesterday’s catch…a life where Naomi Sato had been a failure and Risa Nakamura had used her illicit earnings to get the hell out.
Exhausted and depressed, she wandered north toward the pier, showing the now-crumpled photo to attendants at the carnival rides, descending to a new level of despair when she remembered that she had parked miles away. A chilly breeze blew off the Pacific. That got her walking faster. As she left the lights of the pier and walked into the empty beach she saw a figure on its own, by the water. Naomi couldn’t make out anything…but then the figure drifted onwards, gliding like a ghost.
Rollerblades!
The figure fell over. Naomi found Eriko caked in wet sand. She wanted to scream at her in English, Where the fuck have you been? But what came out was just, “Let’s go.” That’s all that Naomi had left in her.
She helped Eriko to her feet. Naomi took her by the hand and half-pulled her back toward the lights of the walkway winding parallel to the surf. Eriko mumbled something. She was out of it, drunk or high, and stumbled along like an agreeably incompetent child.
Under the lamps, she was a mess, but not evidently harmed. Her eyes were bright, the pupils dilated. “What have you taken?” Naomi slapped the girl. “Speed? Meth? What?”
Eriko just shrugged.
Naomi called Obi-wan.
“Oh, you’ve found her?” he said. “That’s good, really good. Is she all right?”
“Well, I think so, but she’s going to need to sleep it off, I think.”
“Thanks, Sato-san. Take care of her tonight.”
“I’ll return her to the hotel.”
“No, take her home with you. It wouldn’t be good for the others to see her if she’s in bad shape. Taro will want her tomorrow after lunch.”
Now I’m running a hotel? “I’m kind of far from my car. Can you pick us up?”
“I’m already home. I dropped Aoi off an hour ago. Just don’t lose her again, all right?”
Already home? A string of obscene expressions in English presented themselves but Naomi resisted her desire to unleash them. She hung up. “We have a long walk.”
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