Belka, Why Don't You Bark - By Hideo Furukawa Page 0,1

what? I have fish too—let me get some. Smoked salmon, how could I have forgotten. Getting old, I guess, not offering you anything with your vodka.” The old man tossed back a glass and stood up. He wandered off toward the cooking area.

The young man rose too. “Please don’t bother,” he said. Please come back to the table. Please. Too many dangerous things over there. That rifle, the axe.

“Stop,” the young man said. “Archbishop.”

His right hand held an Austrian pistol with a polymer frame.

The old man froze in his tracks.

“Hands up,” the young man ordered. “Turn around.”

The old man did as the young man said. His face betrayed no hint of fear; he hadn’t even paled. Though he wasn’t smiling either.

The young man walked over. He grinned.

And then something happened. The young man was no amateur. He had kept his distance, taking care not to get too close. He had held his elbow out to one side, kept the pistol trained on the old man. He hadn’t let down his guard, he was still in his safety zone. Or so he thought. But then, all of a sudden, he couldn’t see. He was stunned. What’s happening?! He smelled alcohol. Vodka. He spat vodka at me. He had it in his mouth.

The young man pulled the trigger.

But by then his knee was broken. His left kneecap had been kicked, bashed in, his leg snapped backward. He felt his body crumbling. One second his right leg was there, perfectly straight, the next it too had been kicked out from under him. His body hung in midair for a split second, then crashed to the floor. A motion so clean it was beautiful. Zero gravity. Then his weight returned. He felt the old man bring his heel down on his spine, then kick his skull. The other foot ground into his palm. The pistol was gone, kicked away.

He felt a pressure on his back.

He felt something knobby slam against his spinal cord.

The old man’s elbow.

He couldn’t move. There was an arm around his neck, his head spun.

And there was a crack. A crack, however, that he didn’t hear.

The young man was dead.

“Sheesh,” the old man sighed, hoisting himself off the body he was straddling, clambering to his feet. “So you found this hideaway. Finally caught the scent,” he crooned. “You have some nose.”

Dogs, he thought. Just like dogs.

But what do you know about real dogs?

The old man crossed the room. Went over to a shelf on the wall where the map of the world was hung, the family pictures, the “founding fathers.” He took the globe in his arms.

“Impostors. You do not know shit about real dogs,” he said. “Never will.”

Suddenly the globe was split in two, top and bottom. He lifted the metal lid from its base. A skull sat inside it. An animal skull. The skull of a medium-sized dog. It was charred, but here and there patches of skin remained. The interior of the globe had been fitted out with protective supports and foam. The globe was a case. The old man gazed tenderly at the skull.

He said he had a friend back in the car. Guess I need to take care of him too.

“It is true, I admit it,” he announced, evidently to the dog’s skull. “I have lost my mind. I want to set them loose. More than anything. All the old powers, before I die. Before my…before our old world disappears forever.”

Is that not right, my darling?

You, you great Soviet hero, the greatest dog ever to live, the only one who deserves this globe.

By then the old man was no longer talking aloud.

Already it had begun.

1943

It was forgotten.

People forgot, for instance, that a foreign power had, in fact, seized American territory during the course of the twentieth century. In an entire century, it happened only once. In the North Pacific, Japanese forces occupied two of the Aleutian Islands. The first was Attu, at the westernmost tip of the archipelago; the second was Kiska, farther to the east. The Japanese army raised the Rising Sun over the islands in June 1942 and gave each a new Japanese name. Henceforth Attu would be called Atsuta; Kiska would be known as Narukami.

The occupation of the two islands was part of a broader strategy to divert American attention from the Japanese offensive on Midway Atoll, in the Central Pacific. On June 4, air attacks were launched against Dutch Harbor on Unalaska Island, in the heart of the Aleutians; the Battle of

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