A Man of Honor.

Chapter 6: This is the Life.

"Once in the racket you're always in it." ~ Al Capone.

After that O-Ushi drove me back to her office and I got a good look at the kind of work I'd be doing. She pointed out which businesses I'd be collecting from and what's more she taught me a code so that if I needed specifics I could call her up.

People in this line of work almost never openly discuss their business on the phone. Too many wiseguys had ended up behind bars because their scrolls were bugged, so if you did talk business on your scroll you used a code. She would sometimes call me and say something like, "go over to Asha's Fish Market, pick me up a tuna steak," that mean she wanted me to collect a thousand Lien from Asha's Fish Market, it was simple but it was hard for any government agents listening to use that as evidence. Personally I'm pretty sure that no criminal investigator ever listened to a word I said over my scroll but a little paranoia is healthy in this line of work.

The rest of the day I borrowed a car and went around the neighborhood making collections. Mostly from businesses like restaurants, shops, strip clubs, and it was easy. I just walked in, came to the front and told the owner that O-Ushi says hi and I'd walk out with the cash. Some even threw in a free meal or drink or something just to show that relations were good.

I can honestly say that in my entire time working for O-Ushi I never once had to threaten a business owner or hurt them for money. As O-Ushi tried telling me the roots "Papa" Hei Xiong had set in Little Mistral ran deep. This was normal for the people here, and it ran even farther back than the clan, this was also the norm for a lot of these people back in Mistral where for many of them the line between legal and illegal is blurred.

Honestly the hardest part about all of this was that I was carrying around a bunch of envelopes stuffed with cash. When you have that kind of dough on you it's almost impossible to stay calm. I never kept it in the car and always made sure that it stayed on my person because if I lost it it was my ass.

After a few days of going to businesses I started to get familiar with a lot of the other business partners O-Ushi had. Bookies, fences, con artists, her many many money launderers. These people were criminals but they weren't a part of the Clan, this was more like outsourcing. Petty hoods that gave a cut of their earnings to operate on O-Ushi's neighborhood. These guys could sometimes be tough customers but for the most part they also coughed up the cash easy. For the most part these were the guys that tried to get out of paying with simple excuses, but as O-Ushi had taught me to say, "fuck you, pay me!"

And usually they did. When they didn't pay me I usually made them agree to pay me next week with interest, and I usually came back with Toshi or other fellow associates so they knew that things could get ugly. It never failed, they all knew that raising their hands to us would mean that the rest of the Clan would send them to the doctor and they'd never be able to work safely in Little Mistral again, bringing backup was a good way to remind them of that.

I was making more money doing this than I was driving cabs, but I wasn't exactly rolling in cash either. I was certainly bringing in more than an average guy working forty hours a week in a dead end job but it wasn't anything impressive. Working for the Clan certainly paid but if anyone wanted to make real money they had to earn it for the clan.

About a week into my job working as a bagman Toshi approached me at a bar and gave me an offer to buy into a racket he was starting. Bootleg dvds, he knew some guys who had all the stuff lined up and I accepted giving him the money so they could set up an operation in the back of a cafe.

We had to clear it with both Tonen and O-Ushi. Whenever you want to start a business in the Clan be it legal or illegal you have to clear it with the bosses. And since Tonen was Toshi's boss and O-Ushi was mine the two of them needed to work out some details. The main thing that O-Ushi and Tonen did as underbosses was ensure that nobody stepped on each other's toes doing business, doing anything without their blessing was a way to wind up in trouble and I wasn't in any rush to get myself in trouble with these people.