The Blue Jungle (5)
A noir novella in 10 chapters. "What's fate, do you think?"
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 FIVE
MEREDITH
Another sliver of Meredith’s life, wrung out along California asphalt.
Back from Naomi’s snipe hunt, Meredith looked at her desk, her notes, her article with its gaping Swiss cheese holes, and despaired. If she hadn’t let herself get sucked into Naomi’s schemes, she could have been finished, relaxing back home, toking up to Toby Keith tunes. Instead she was here. Again.
And without Naomi to help quick-edit her stuff.
The day died with her at her desk, finishing her half-baked profiles and trying to figure out what Naomi was up to. Best guess: Naomi, for once in her life, had actually hooked up and was now crazy desperate for more with this Eriko honey.
Gradually Meredith realized that the trip out to B.F.’s hadn’t been a total waste. So Feathers was in Thailand for some kind of business trip. Maybe it was just an excuse to use company expenses to lay Asian chicks – didn’t the women out there do that thing with the pingpong balls? – but Meredith figured she could use that to spruce up her otherwise bloodless profile.
She went through her records on Explicit Videos, and did another online search. Nothing about any international business connections. So this was business news, a real exclusive. How come Naomi wasn’t chasing it for the X-tra website? Didn’t add up.
Meredith looked up Pimples’ cell number. No one called him James or Exeter, but she called him Jimmy, and usually added a little husk to her voice, because it was more likely to make him cough up a phone number or a nugget of information. “Jimmy, that you? It’s Meredith.”
“Nh…”
“It’s Meredith?”
He sounded stoned. “Time is it?”
“Uh, like, seven, man.”
“…Morning here…” Pimples wasn’t stoned; he was jetlagged.
“Oh jeez, man, I didn’t know you were actually, like, in Asia,” she lied. “But that’s what I was calling you about, and I’m thinking we should like get a drink or something when you’re back.” That ought to wake him up.
“Meredith? Where are you calling from?”
“L.A., Jimmy, where else? I’ve got this article on your boss ready to go, and just needed to put in something about his new international business venture in Bangkok. You know, just some color. Who’s he meeting over there?”
“How do you know where we are?”
“Everybody’s talking about it, Jimmy. But I was hoping to, you know, be first to write about it. It’s great press for B.F. and…” She dropped an octave. “I’d be super grateful to you.”
“Damn, Meredith, I don’t know what I can tell you.”
“Name of a studio he’s meeting over there? Distribution partners?”
“You know I can’t talk about that stuff.”
“Of course, and this would be strictly off the record, man, your name would never show up, and, you know, I’d be in your debt.”
A long pause. He wasn’t biting.
“Maybe we could, you know, meet up when you’re back.”
“That’s what you said last time.”
Hmm. That was true. “You know what it’s like when I’m on deadline, Jimmy.”
“Who told you we’re here?”
“Naomi.”
“Who’s Naomi?”
“Naomi Sato, you know, Japanese girl who works with me.”
“Oh yeah, her. The one who came by the other day. Look, it’s dawn and my head’s killing me. Don’t call this number again.”
“Jimmy, Jimmy,” she said too quickly. “So Naomi was asking about some other Japanese girl who’s with you. Eriko.”
“You’re waking me up to ask me about…that?”
“Want some gossip? Not official, not to be repeated, but I think the two of them had some lezzie thing.”
“Seriously, Meredith, I’m hanging up.”
“Come on, Jimmy! I’m on the level, man. I’ve got tickets to get into Avalon next Thursday. I need a date, you know? Help me out.”
“You…you really mean it?”
Meredith smiled and threw some more sand into her voice. “I know the bouncers so we won’t have to even wait in line.”
“So what do you want to know?”
“What’s the plan, is Explicit doing something international, some new business venture I can put into this feature…all totally on background, of course, no names.”
“Jesus, Meredith…all right…” He was awake now. “Mr. Feathers is a visionary who is going to bring the best of Asian content to America and put it into a format that will appeal to a certain sophisticated, high-margin business segment. Enough?”
“That’s awesome,” Meredith said, scribbling notes. “Local partners?”
“Don’t know yet.”
“Thai? Japanese – connection with Eriko?”
“She’s some kind of rich kid who ran away. Goes around blabbing about her father. Some kind of badass godfather in Japan.”
“No way.”
“Yeah, he’s like famous. One of those mafia types who never seems to get locked up. Look, I’ve got to get some sleep. You mean it, we’re going clubbing when I get back?”
Meredith had a feeling she’d be on a very tough deadline when that time approached. “I can’t wait.”
She had become friends with Naomi out of circumstance. They had nothing in common, but the Japanese chick had seemed ice-cold cool, which Meredith respected. Later she came to see Naomi was lost. Fate: Meredith had said it was fate that had brought them together, and maybe it would be fate that let them make good things happen.
What was it Naomi had said back when they first bonded – that yes she believed in fate, but that fate was static, unchanging – that only Americans believed in some linear progress where fate was concerned?
Yeah, Meredith had replied, but aren’t we in America?
Tonight Meredith recalled that old conversation with renewed annoyance. Let Naomi stew in her predetermined crap. The girl was manipulating her, lying to her, losing it around her. But the Eriko/Naomi angle, now that was a juicy twist. Telling Meredith to forget about it? No way.
Obi-wan Kenobi, that was the guy Naomi had mentioned. Meredith didn’t know him, just that he made the kind of commercials that played on late-night cable. Meredith couldn’t remember his real name, so she moved to Naomi’s desk. It was a warzone of Post-it Notes, printouts of rival trade news’ stories and a smattering of business cards.
To one side lay a book with a yellow note bookmarking a page. She picked it up. Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia. Naomi’s deep side, that silent part of her personality that Meredith could never access. Meredith turned to the page, where Naomi had underlined a passage: “The mystique of the femme fatale cannot be perfectly translated into male terms.”
No wonder the girl wasn’t getting any. Always overthinking things. Meredith set the book down and turned to the mess of business cards. She went through these carefully, occasionally glancing around the office to make sure no one was paying attention. It was now getting towards seven and only Stu and one of the production guys were left.
She booted the computer, which demanded a password. Meredith’s own password was “Password”, a miracle of I.T. department ingenuity, so she typed that in and behold! The faithful would be rewarded.
Meredith found the database where Naomi kept her contacts. It wasn’t very long; the girl definitely lacked sources. But there it was, Oba Kenichi. She picked up the phone and dialed his number.
“Hello,” said a low, mellow voice.
“Is this Mr. Oba? As in Obi-wan?”
“Oba Studios, yes, this is Obi-wan Kenobi.”
Guy really called himself that. Amazing. “My name’s Meredith Pepper and I’m a friend of Naomi’s. You know, Naomi Sato?”
“Yes, I know her. What is this about?”
“It’s actually about Eriko. Eriko Tamaki.”
There was a pause, then a long hissy exhalation. “Go on.”
“I need some information about her. I think I know where she’s gone.”
“Is Naomi with you?”
“No, she’s not here.”
“Why don’t we meet?”
This was easier than she’d hoped. “Um, yeah, sounds great, Obi-wan. How about tomorrow afternoon? I could swing by your neighborhood.”
“Actually I would like to discuss this now.”
“…Um, okay.” She checked her watch. “I have to file some stories first. It’s going to be another couple of hours.”
“Where are you? I will pick you up, and we can talk.”
She frowned. “Is there a reason why you’re in such a hurry? I mean, tomorrow’s cool, right?”
“I have a full schedule tomorrow, Miss Pepper. Tomorrow is really out of the question. Tell me where to find you, or where you’d like to meet, and I will see you there in two hours.”
She met him at a twenty-four-hour Cuban diner two exits down the Interstate. He was already there, waiting in a booth along a wall of mirrors, a trim but powerfully built middle-aged man with a hip beard and square glasses, wearing a flat cap, black like all of his clothes. He hadn’t touched his glass of water.
Starving, she told him she’d have to order something. She ordered the pulled pork special with plantains and a Negro Modal. He said, in his self-contained way, that he had already eaten.
Waiting for the food, he asked her a few casual questions about herself, about working at X-tra. He knew of the publication because of Naomi, and he shared a few harmless anecdotes of her interactions with Japanese productions in California. Naomi’s been a very useful go-between, he said, but Obi-wan disavowed a direct connection to that business. He had a studio in Malibu that he rented out to whoever paid cash, that was all. He had lived here for 24 years, had come here for the surfing all that time ago.
“So tell me about Eriko,” Meredith said, but he didn’t add to anything she already knew.
“Then tell me about her father,” she asked.
“What do you know about him?”
Meredith said she couldn’t tell him, and Obi-wan thanked her for her time and signaled for the waitress, offering to pay the bill. Meredith, tired and increasingly wary of the quiet, physically still man in the booth with her, said she’d pay her own way but he put a couple of twenties on the table and said he insisted. Said it didn’t matter. So the guy was being polite, if a little spacey, but he had come a long way, put up with a lot of traffic, to come buy Meredith a late dinner in which no information was exchanged.
As they walked out of the diner together, he said, “It is like fate, our meeting like this.”
Meredith perked up at the terminology. “What’s fate, do you think?”
She was parked right outside the diner, within just a few feet and a glass wall from a couple of teenagers laughing over their food. The parking lot was full of cars but flooded with cold white lights that cast her shadow in six directions. She kept keys in her pocket on a chain linked to her belt, and she fished these out, ready to take her leave of the Jedi master.
“To learn just a little,” he said, “maybe not enough to illuminate, but just enough to kill you.”
The first hand clamped over her mouth, two more seized her wrists. She screamed against the hand, but it was positioned knowingly, her jaw locked tight, and the scream got nowhere. She kicked at Obi-wan but the men from behind had already dragged her away and Kenobi stood impassively, hands in his pockets, silhouetted by the brightly lit teenagers laughing over their beers.
Training took over from instinct and she aimed her boots at the men behind her. Got one of them square on the foot and he howled, but he didn’t let go. Her next kick missed and a judo move destabilized her other leg and they body-slammed her on the pavement between two SUVs. Someone punched her in the face and the pain was like something else, something too startling to be real. Then she was in a trunk with a fat piece of duct tape wrapped around her mouth. She never got look at what the men looked like, but as a pair of hands wound the tape around her head, adhering to her spiked hair, she noticed the knuckles were covered in black ooze: the blood coming out of her nose.
An eternity later, they parked and opened the trunk. First thing they did when she raised her head was hit her again. Then she was in a dark space, vast and cold. Lights came on. A warehouse, endless concrete floor, a spaceship’s worth of steel beams and spanners, and nothing in that vast interior save a beat-up orange sofa opposite and her tied to a chair. A remote control rested on one arm of the sofa but if there had ever been a TV, it had been taken away.
They sat facing her, two Japanese men in dark suits, the beefy toad with a white shirt and hair raised to a flat top; the gaunt, bug-eyed mantis in a scarlet T-shirt. Obi-wan Kenobi was there too, wiping his glasses with the edge of his black shirt, eyes red. “This will go on either for a very long time or a short time,” he said. “It’s entirely up to you, Miss Pepper.”
So Obi-wan was to serve as translator. The two men wanted to know about Eriko, who told her about her father, who else Naomi had spoken with, who else knew.
“Know what?” she croaked, spitting out another tooth.
The red shirted man removed his belt buckle. They pulled off her shoes and Bug Eyes whipped the soles of her feet, grinning the whole time.
Sumo lifted a sofa cushion. Beneath were cutlery, hardware tools, a fire axe.
Amazing that after all of that screaming, she could still scream some more. After half an hour she was begging them to get it over with and kill her. But the two men who did it all seemed uninterested in what she’d have to offer. Obi-wan had grown pale and looked like he would throw up.
She sat corded to the chair, slumped over in a pool of her blood and urine. “Why?” she whispered. “Why?”
Sumo walked to the orange sofa and returned, holding up a DVD cover. One of Meredith’s eyes had swollen shut but when he held it steady the photo was clear: a Japanese girl, wearing a plaid skirt but topless, with small, boyish breasts, smiling cutely. Meredith knew the photo was old because of the baby fat still visible on Naomi’s face. But she couldn’t quite comprehend what it could possibly mean.
I don’t understand, she tried to say.
The bug-eyed man in red, the one who really seemed to enjoy this, approached with pliers. Meredith tried to kick out of her bonds while her exhausted screams bounced uselessly off the warehouse’s walls.
Sumo extended an arm to stay the man’s approach. There was an argument in Japanese. Bug Eyes shrugged and tossed the pliers besides the other nightmares on the orange sofa.
Obi-wan knelt before her, without touching her. “It’s all right. They believe you now. They understand that you really know nothing more, that you have told them everything you know.”
“Please…” It was a real effort, getting that whisper out.
“Have you ever surfed?” He waited, then took her silence as a no. “There is something about waiting for the right wave. The power of it, that force which bends the ocean and carries you with it. And it is such pleasure to ride it, because of the illusion that you have mastered the power of the sea.” Tears surfed down his face. “But we have mastered nothing except self-deception, because we are masters of nothing. It seems unlikely that riding a wave could kill you because it happens so rarely. But in the end delusion must be stripped away. Our fate, Pepper-san, is knowledge.”
The axe destroyed the side of his head. Bug Eyes had swung it like a homerun hitter. Jedi eyeballs and teeth curled inward, collapsing into the vortex. Obi-wan Kenobi keeled over, still alive but helpless as every muscle danced. Bug Eyes put a shoe on the torso and had to put some back into pulling out the axe. She couldn’t breathe she was so scared. Bug Eyes’s second swing finished the job, Jedi blood everywhere.
Sumo said something harsh. Bug Eyes was indignant. They tested the decibels, gesticulated at the dead man, at her. It was a mistake, things had gotten out of hand, but Bug Eyes was still holding the axe. Meredith took back her pleas for them to get it over with. She wasn’t, she realized with frightening clarity, ready to die.
NAOMI
Time for a late dinner at In’N’Out Burger in downtown Burbank. Too distraught for her usual Protein Burger, she ordered the 3x3, three patties, layers of American cheese, extra onions. Tonight of all nights, in this merciless city, she wanted to feel comfortable.
Naomi was halfway through demolishing the burger when her cell buzzed. She wiped her fingers clean and pulled out the scratched silver Kyocera, courtesy of Okada’s men.
She didn’t want to flip open the clamshell.
Why were they calling her?
But she couldn’t ignore them.
Then what she saw on the screen really freaked her out. The number didn’t belong to the hitmen. It belonged to Meredith’s phone.
She was sending Naomi an image, not a text message. The screen was little bigger than a square inch, and pixels were lighting up slowly, bar by bar.
Naomi put it down and took another bite. Some scientific part of her mind tried to find the logic in Meredith having the number of the Kyocera. She seemed to chew forever and as the image slowly cohered, she decided she had lost her appetite.
She peered at the materializing photo. It looked like a face, distorted by dark splotches.
Meredith.
This can’t be happening.
Meredith as if reflected in a funhouse mirror.
Another image was incoming. 3x3 churned in her stomach. She tried to sip her soda but her hands were shaking so much, she stabbed her nostril on the straw.
How could this be…
A hand with a tattoo.
Third image.
No, please, please please…
Greasy brown beef chunks, half-digested onions, gummy embryos of cheese exploded across the table. She was oblivious to the gawkers and the pissed look on the woman behind the counter who was now going to have to clean up Naomi’s puke. Instead she was hurrying out to her car, anything to unsee what she had just seen.
She raced into traffic and nearly crashed into another car. The third image, that was the keeper. The hand and wrist boasted tattoos shaped like stars. A galaxy painted the length of the arm, all the way to where it ended in a darkened mess of severed sinews and tendons.
At home she ginned up enough willpower to look at the text message that concluded the series. It was in Japanese.
“Your big mouth did this.”
They didn’t have to say what they also meant: find Eriko or you’re next.
She knew where to find the girl: with the sun somewhere over that indigo horizon, ordering room service between rounds of servicing Bobby Feathers in his sumtuous hotel room.
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