Bargaining Posture

“ARE YOU INSANE?”

I realized I was grabbing Kanamaru’s collar. He was bigger than me, but not big enough to be that threatening. Kanamaru didn’t seem too bothered by this.

Selling contraband TV tuners in the south indirectly was a kooky scheme, but it wasn’t illegal, at least by the laws of the Republic. Actually traveling to the North to smuggle them in changed that calculus from kooky to suicidal. Southerners couldn’t even get entry permits anymore, so smuggling them through a border checkpoint wasn’t an option even if it would have been a very stupid option. The only way to get them in would be to sneak across the border. That was insanity.

“Afraid not, freshman. Why do you think they go for such a high price? If we could just mail these things across, everyone would be doing it. Now, if you could please let go of me, we can talk-”

I let go of him, but I wasn’t about to accept his deflection. I should have been walking away by now. This wasn’t like a normal Kanamaru scheme. This was actively dangerous. It would have been less dangerous for him to just be selling something illegal like drugs. At least in the South, if you got arrested, you’d get a trial- and hopefully a fair sentence. In the North, they might just shoot you. They didn’t call the little gully between the wall and the chain-link fence that marked the actual border the “Death Strip” for nothing.

“No, this is crazy. Even for you. They’d shoot us the second they found out. How would we even get over there!? You want to climb over the wall loaded down with all this junk!?”

Why was I questioning the logic of his plan? He’d clearly gone off the deep end already. The smart thing to do would just be to walk away and never talk to him again. I was being pulled by some unknown force to analyze his crackpot get-rich-quick scheme seriously. There wasn’t any need to argue with him. So why? Why was I doing that?

“A rat tunnel’s opened up in the south, by the bay. My contact meets me at a place in the old industrial district in Fukugawa. Right up close to the border. We won’t be in the North more than 20 minutes, give or take. It’s perfectly safe if you know what you’re doing.”

Kanamaru had dropped any of the pretense of charm he had been dripping with earlier. He was dead serious about this. If he had been like this more often, maybe the 1st year homeroom teachers wouldn’t be constantly warning their classes not to get involved with him.

“20 minutes is still long enough to get shot. You seriously want me to dodge machine gun fire just so you can offload more of this 30 year old crap for a measly-”

I stopped. 270,000 yen wasn’t exactly deserving of the word “measly.” It was an entire summer’s worth of menial work at a fast food place or convenience store compressed into 20 minutes. 20 very exciting minutes.

“-for only 270,000 yen?”

That sly smile was back on Kanamaru’s face. He was winning, and he knew it. There’s an old quote about a man asking a woman to sleep with him for a million dollars. She thinks about it a while, and with a show of calculated reluctance, agrees. Instead of paying her, he asks if she’ll do it for 5 dollars. She asks him what kind of woman he thinks she is. He tells her: “We’ve already established that. Now we’re haggling over the price.” The very fact that I was qualifying walking into bullets for only a summer’s worth of paychecks meant that Kanamaru already had me- I was just bargaining for a better share.

No. That’s not right. I was leading myself into this. Kanamaru was just working with what I had freely given to him.

“That’s just your cut. Freshie. Ten percent. If I did my math right. Never was good at it. Why do you think I’m still here?”

Hosoya and Ootake chuckled at this. Those two had stopped playing their games and were watching the conversation now. Were they being entertained by Kanamaru getting me to squirm? Or maybe they just enjoyed me calling him names? He did seem to be the type of boss the lackeys would complain about when he wasn’t in the room. Wait, did he say 10 percent? 270,000 was only 10 percent of profit? Was he really expecting to make 2.7 million out of this deal?

“Fifteen.”

“No can do, freshman. That’s a rate I reserve for experienced tradesmen.” Kanamaru waved his hand in the general direction of Hosoya and Ootake.

“Experienced? You’ve done this before?”

Kanamaru’s smile widened to that awful grin for a third time. He’d been waiting for me to ask that question, hadn’t he? He had some kind of proof to make this more than just an insane thought experiment.

Kanamaru pulled a large clump of bills from his uniform pocket. Was it a trick? No, it couldn’t be. Those were all 10,000 yen notes. He had just pulled more cash than the average blue collar worker made in a year from his pocket like it was nothing. Kanamaru was really, truly, honestly-

Filthy rich.

“Me and my colleagues have done this before. Eight times. And now, I’m giving you a chance to be a part of this.”

It was working. Whatever conscience I had was eroding before the power of the massive stacks Kanamaru was now waving around as a fan in the late spring heat. I struggled to come up with a rational reason to refuse. Oh yeah, the bullets. That was a rational reason not to go along with this.

“What about the guard towers and machine guns? How do you deal with that?”

Kanamaru laughed. My checkmate was only an easily-escaped check. He had found a way around that already, obviously. Neither he nor Ootake nor Hosoya looked like they had been shot recently.

“Freshie, freshie, freshie,” he continued, now in an obnoxiously patronizing tone, “That? You see all that? The concrete, the watchtowers, the silver-plated Kalashnikovs? That’s all just for show. Uncle Yoshi just keeps all that up there so we all think he still wears the pants in this relationship. There’s plenty of cracks for rats like us to get in and out. No sweat.”

Hosoya interrupted with a joke.

“The only pants Uncle Yoshi still wears are adult diapers.”

Ootake cracked up at this. Kanamaru shushed both of them again. Hosoya’s joke at the expense of the North’s shriveled-up nonagenarian leader might have been something worth laughing at if he had told it 5 minutes ago. Now it was just noise.

“Look, freshman. The route is safe. I’ve done it before with these two bozos at least 6 times and never saw another soul ‘til we got to the drop-off point. Worst case-”

He pulled out 4 of his 10,000 yen bills and held them up.

“-this much is enough to bribe your way out of murder with the CitPols. As a one-time bonus for a new colleague, I will cover your ‘safety fee’ out of the goodness-”

He placed his hand over his chest, feigning solemnity.

“-of my own heart.”

“I want fifteen percent.”

Kanamaru flung his arm around me, almost putting me in a chokehold. He dragged me a little bit away from where Hosoya and Ootake were sitting.

“Freshie. I like you. You’re perceptive. Bold. Slender. You won’t get stuck in any drain pipes while carrying product around. But…”

He trailed off. It was intentional. He knew exactly what he was going to say to me. He was just doing this for the drama of it now.

“...as a newbie in this business, I just can’t go around trusting you on your first run. What if you rat me out to the cops? What if you’re a Northern spy?”

It was all rhetoric. He’d have shut up ages ago if he thought I was either. Kanamaru was at least that smart.

“So, freshie, here’s what I’m gonna do. Ten percent on the first run, and I cover your get-out-of-jail free card.”

He flashed the 40,000 yen in my face again.

“Then, if I like you, and you listen to what I say, and you don’t cause me or my partners any trouble… on the next run, I’ll bump you up to fifteen percent. Just like Ootake and Hosoya here are getting.”

That settled it. Some logical part of my brain was still screaming that this was a terrible, life-ruining idea. It wasn’t screaming loud enough. I’d earn an entire summer’s worth in one 20 minute run. If it went well, I’d be on track to earn an entire youth’s worth of wages in one summer. I could fool around as much as I wanted after that.

It was all wishful thinking, of course. But the beginning of summer is always a time for wishful thinking.

“Give me some time to think.” But Kanamaru had already won the battle. I was just delaying the inevitable. The gleam in Kanamaru’s eye told me that he knew just as well.

“Friday night. 10pm, the old war memorial park in Chuo. If you’re late, I go without you. If you rat me out, I make your life a living hell. If you don’t come, don’t bother coming back to me- none of this ever happened.”

Satisfied, he trotted out of the room. Hosoya and Ootake followed him at a brisk pace. I was alone in the 4th year classroom. The shades were still drawn open, the sky was now a bright orange. The smokestacks of the Northern factories were lit up with pulsating red beacons. Below, the guards on the wall continued their lazy march back and forth between the towers.

Was this really okay? My rational mind had fought with all its might to close off this possibility, but Kanamaru had baited me one-by-one into all his traps. He wasn’t just a two-bit con artist- he was worth at least 32-bits.

No, that wasn’t quite right. I had seen all of his traps coming, and I had…just walked into them? What was I expecting? Was there some unconscious part of me that was excited by this, some part that wanted to go north, just to see what it was like for her?

For her. That must have been the crux of it.

Some students were still filing out of the concrete courtyard at the Northern school. She probably wasn’t among them, but it was too far to tell. Even from the 4th story of the annex, I wasn’t up high enough to get more than a few degrees of angle to peek into the edge of their courtyard. All I could tell was that they were done, and they were going home. That was it. That was all I really knew about how she lived outside of that one hour in the afternoon that we had class opposite each other.

I left the classroom. No further point in thinking about any of this now. There would be more chances to collect my thoughts and give a better refusal to Kanamaru.

A voice called out to me as I left the room.

“You know, you really shouldn’t be getting mixed up with that 4th year.”

No matter how much you might want to, it’s hard to ignore a scolding by your ex-girlfriend.