Chapter Eight #3
As he waited, he took his first really good look at Taro, and what he saw shocked him.
Taro was still wearing the casual clothes he’d traveled in, which were rumpled and creased.
That was highly unusual, as his brother was usually immaculately dressed; some might even call him vain.
Even when he traveled, he always made sure he looked perfect, not a hair out of place when he arrived at his destination.
He was also sporting a five o’clock shadow.
His luxurious hair, normally slicked back and styled flawlessly, was wildly tousled as if he’d been running his hands through it all night.
Jiro knew the trip would’ve been taxing—it was a twelve-hour flight to Stockholm, and then another two-hour hop by plane up to Lule?, with at least a couple of hours’ layover at the airport.
But the long hours of traveling weren’t the only thing showing on Taro’s face.
Jiro had never seen his older brother look so haggard, so stressed.
He was always so sure of himself. Always larger than life.
Nothing seemed to faze Taro; no problem was too hard or too big to overcome.
He was always animated and full of energy.
He also had a quick temper, which’d caused more than a few problems between the two brothers.
But none of those attributes were apparent right now.
“At the beginning, huh?” Taro finally said, furrowing his brow.
He sat a little straighter in the chair, shaking his arms out as if lifting an invisible blanket from his shoulders.
“I guess I may as well tell you everything if you’re going to help me protect Papa.
Protect us all.” That sounded a little ominous, but Jiro kept his mouth shut and listened.
“Okay.” Taro paused as if still unsure how to start.
“As you probably know, Japan has some of the strictest gun control laws in the world.”
“Yep.” This was a very random place to start a conversation, but his guts began to roil at the mention of guns.
“And the rigorous government rules are an attempt to try and control the deadly Yakuza gangs, I’m sure you’ve heard of all that too,” Taro continued.
Of course he had. While he and his brother had never lived in Japan, both of them being born in America, they’d heard snippets and rumors from their father and other Japanese relatives about certain underground illegal activities, as well as what they saw in the media.
Contrary to popular belief, the Yakuza was not one large entity, but rather a conglomeration of smaller criminal gangs, each with their own agenda and principles, coming together under the umbrella of the Yakuza, much like the American Mafia, who operated within different families.
“What does that have to do with anything?” Jiro asked, but he had a sneaking suspicion he knew. He’d suspected Taro was up to something illegal all along. But the Yakuza… well, that was just a different league altogether.
“A man named Hiroshi Kiyota approached me one night about four years ago while I was sitting at my local bar enjoying a quiet drink. He said he knew I’d started up a new business, and he was impressed with how quickly I’d turned it into a profitable enterprise.
He said he knew a way in which I could increase my profit, double or triple it with no extra work on my part.
At first, I told him to take a hike. I wanted to have nothing to do with him, because what he was saying was obviously too good to be true.
But he kept talking, and he was very persuasive.
” Taro looked up at Jiro, meeting his gaze for the first time since he’d started speaking, his gaze pleading for understanding.
Jiro knew it’d been the money that’d been the persuasive factor, because Taro had always been driven by money.
Always needing more, always wanting better, bigger, having to keep up with the Joneses.
Was that flaw in Taro’s character in part their father’s fault?
He’d definitely instilled in both of them a drive to succeed, to excel.
Status was important to Kenichi, and in his mind, the best way to achieve status was by increasing his wealth.
If you were rich, you were important. Kenichi’s second-hand furniture business had always done very well, and their family had never wanted for anything.
A lot of people would’ve considered them rich.
But in the end, Jiro had rejected that way of life as being too shallow.
He valued intrinsic things more, wanting to help save the planet, not destroy it with greed and avarice.
But Taro had followed his father’s teachings, deciding that money was definitely the key to happiness.
But had his quest for endless happiness in fact been the harbinger of his downfall?
“The long and the short of it is that Hiroshi had ties to a group called the Kyodo-kai. I later found out that this is a splinter Yakuza group situated in Hiroshima. They are warring with the Yamaguchi Federation, one of the bigger groups, and so needed guns to help fight their war. Which is where I came in.”
“So you’re smuggling guns into Japan for a Yakuza group?” Jiro could barely believe the words that came out of his mouth.
Taro had the grace to hang his head. “In a nutshell, I guess so. At first, it was good, exactly as Hiroshi explained. One small crate of handguns stashed in the back of an empty sea container now and then—I usually send them empty over to Japan and bring them back full. It wasn’t every shipment, and I had nothing to do with any of the illegal parts.
Hiroshi carried out all the dirty work. They paid extremely well.
It was like taking candy from a baby.” He lifted his head and stared out the window, his knee beginning to jiggle up and down in agitation.
“Soon it was two crates, this time guns and ammunition. Then it became four.” Taro shrugged.
“You can guess how it went from there. After a couple of years, they were asking for more and more. Now, every shipment I made contained something illegal. I think recently they were also shipping drugs, but I can’t confirm that. ”
Jiro was almost speechless. When he finally found his voice, he asked, “Weren’t you ever worried you were going to get caught by the police?” He was flabbergasted at how easy it all seemed. And perhaps that was why Taro had become complacent about the whole thing.
“At first, yes. But Hiroshi made it sound so commonplace, as if I were doing nothing wrong. I was shipping empty containers to Japan so I could fill them with antiques and bring them back to my stores here in America. What was the problem if one or two of those containers had a bit of extra cargo in them? It was no skin off my nose. I never touched one of the guns, never even saw them. Hiroshi saw to everything, including paying off the dock security to make sure nothing untoward was ever found.”
“Wow,” Jiro breathed, finding this extremely hard to process.
Maybe it was a good thing Aurora hadn’t been here to listen to all this.
What would she have done with the information?
Would she have been duty-bound to report it?
The criminal activity was taking place in a foreign country and well out of her jurisdiction.
But he guessed the Swedish police force would communicate this kind of information back to their American counterparts, especially something this big.
“Yeah, wow,” Taro repeated. He stood and paced over to the window, staring out at the dark landscape below but without really seeing it.
“About a year ago I started to have severe misgivings about the whole thing. Thalia was pregnant with Ren, and she had really bad preeclampsia. She was admitted to the hospital, and the doctor said it was serious; she could even lose the baby if she didn’t take care. ”
“Shit, sorry, bro, I didn’t know.” Jiro felt a rush of shame that it’d got to the stage where he and his brother led such completely separate lives that Taro wouldn’t even confide in him about something as intimate as this.
Ren was Taro’s second child, a boy born in June this year.
Jiro had gone to visit about a month after the birth, to see his new nephew, and reacquaint himself with Taro’s first born, Hana.
She was three years old now, and cute as a button.
And he’d only been to see her three times over her lifetime.
Another source of guilt as he thought about what a bad uncle he had been.
“We didn’t tell many people, so don’t beat yourself up too much.
” Taro lifted a wry eyebrow in Jiro’s direction.
“She spent about a week in hospital, then was allowed to come home, but had to be on bed rest most of the time.” Taro waved a hand as if to dismiss any more discussion.
“The point is, it made me think a lot about her and my kids. I was really stressed at work, and also by Hiroshi’s increasing demands, and I knew I was taking that stress out on Thalia.
We were fighting all the time, and I was worried that perhaps I was the cause of her high blood pressure.
The fact that we could lose our little baby was a huge shock.
It made me take stock of myself and my entire life. ”
Again, Jiro was hit with a new rush of guilt.
His brother might be a greedy asshole sometimes, but he was still human, with very human emotions and feelings, and he was also Jiro’s flesh and blood.
He should have been more understanding, perhaps tried to talk to Taro instead of always assuming that his brother was fine.
Taro’s hard outer shell was a facade, a face he showed to everyone that made him seem invincible.
But Jiro should know better; he wasn’t indestructible.