“Always.”
“I hope. Now wash floor of dojo. Scrub, water hot. Wash down all surfaces. Go to kitchen, assist my mother. Then cut wood.”
Okada was surprisingly agreeable. She left Tokyo early the next morning and rammed her RX-8 into Kyoto in about five hours, arriving at noon. She parked out front, and Bob, who’d been washing dishes under Doshu’s mother’s stern eye, saw her arrive, in her neat suit, her beautiful legs taut, her eyes wise and calm behind her glasses, her hair drawn up into a smooth complexity of pins and stays, tight like everything about her.
She came in, having replaced her heels with slippers, and was greeted by a child, then led into the dojo. She didn’t even look at Swagger; instead, she bowed to the approaching Doshu.
“Hi,” Bob said, “thanks for coming.”
She turned. “Oh, this ought to be really good.”
Then she turned back to Doshu and they talked briskly. She asked questions, he answered. She asked more questions. They laughed. They talked gravely. He made policy statements, she gently disagreed, and he defended his position. Swagger could hear the rhythm of discussion, the rise of agreement, the fall of disagreement, the evenness of consensus.
Finally, she turned to Bob.
“You got it all?” he asked. “He says I’m a moron and I ought to be kicked out. I thought I did pretty well yesterday. I beat a ten-year-old girl.”
“That ten-year-old girl is Sueko Mori, the prodigy. She’s famous. She won the All Japan Kendo Association for twenty-one-unders a week ago. She’s a star. If you beat her, you did okay.”
“That little kid?”
“That little kid could beat most men in this country. Are you ready?”
His annoyance tamed by this information, Bob nodded.
“Doshu says you learn fast. You are athletic. You are strong, with quite a bit of stamina. Your left side is stronger than your right side, and your rising diagonal is stronger than your falling diagonal. He does not know the explanation.”
“Tell him I spent a summer swinging a scythe, low to high, left to right. Those muscles are stretched and overly developed.”
“Well, he really doesn’t care. Next, he says you have good character and work habits. He worked you like a dog. If you had a weak character or bad work habits you would not have stood for the grueling ordeal and the humiliation. He was very impressed with that aspect of your behavior. He thought, after the first day, you might make a swordsman. Your mind was right. Untrained but right.”
“Well, thank him.”
“He doesn’t require thanks. He’s not congratulating you, he’s telling you what is.”
“Sure.”
“But, he says, it is possible to be too athletic, too strong, too hardworking. The hard worker tends to oversegment, the athlete to trust reflex and muscle. So, though you picked up the moves very quickly, you had trouble integrating.”
“He said ‘integrating’?”
“He said ‘becoming one timing.’ I said integrating.”
“Okay.”
“He says that yesterday, finally, under pressure of the match with Sueko Mori, you integrated. Your learning curve in that match was extraordinary. You went in a nobody, you came out a swordsman. You must learn to develop that feeling, that sensibility; it is your only hope.”
“So he thinks I’m okay?”
“Well, that’s where he goes a little opaque on me. He stops well short of declaring you the next Musashi. He says you still have problems. But he says you have advantages too. Thus he has an idea of what you can or can’t do, and how you must operate.”
“Please, go ahead.”
“He says you are not Tom Cruise. There is no Tom Cruise. No one can learn the sword in days or weeks, except in movies. He hated that movie, by the way. However, you have done a great deal more than most.”
“Okay.”
“You must know your weaknesses and strengths and maneuver accordingly. That is strategy. You have not become a great swordsman. You have become an almost proficient swordsman. You will lose to any proficient yakuza swordsman. You will only win under one circumstance: against someone younger, who hasn’t been in a fight and will panic at the sight of his own blood. You’re a warrior, you’ve seen blood, others’ and your own. Blood doesn’t scare you, turn you to jelly. Thus, you know that in a fight you will be cut, you will bleed. Your opponent may not. He will see blood, his own or even yours, and he will tighten, lose his rhythm, his concentration. He will die; you will survive.
“Other than that, stay away. If you fight others, you will die. You are not strong enough to cover all the sectors of defense. The longer you go, the slower you will get. A good swordsman will play you out, waiting for your sword to still or drop, for your concentration to falter, and then he will kill you. In fights, you must win quickly, one, two blows, or you will die. The longer you fight, the larger the chance that you will die. You survive not merely on your sword, but on your guile in fighting only those you can beat and never those you cannot beat. A great swordsman will kill you in a split second.”
“He knows,” Bob said. “He sees where this is going. He’s telling me I cannot fight Kondo.”
Doshu heard the name and turned to Bob.
“Swagger-san,” he said, with something almost but not quite like affection. “Kondo: death.”
They roared through the Japanese night in her Mazda, the rush of the wind so intense it precluded conversation. Maybe there wasn’t much to say, anyway. Kyoto was a blur of light behind them, Tokyo not yet a blur of light ahead of them. She kept the red sportster up well over eighty miles an hour, driving with calm deliberation, all intensity and concentration.
But after a couple of hours, it began to rain. She pulled over to the shoulder. A car, too close behind, screeched and honked.
“What’s his problem?” Bob said.
“He was too close. I should have signaled. Can you latch the top?”
“Sure.”
She pressed a button and the rubberized roof came out of its compartment, unfolding on an ingenious structure until it covered the cockpit. He got it latched without trouble, though the mechanism, clever and Japanese, was new to him.
“Do you want me to drive? You must be exhausted. Now it’s raining.”
“I’m fine. I’m a big girl. Anyway, you’re just as tired as I am.”
“No, I didn’t get much sleep there, that’s for sure. That old guy worked me to the bone. ‘Eight cuts! Eight cuts!’ I haven’t worked that hard in years.”
“You are a hardworking guy,” she said. “Believe me, I know plenty who aren’t. My supervisor likes to cultivate ‘the big picture,’ which means I do the work and he’s out on the links chatting up businessmen. But I guess it’s okay that he’s lazy, because he’s so stupid if he worked hard he could really screw up.”
“Amazing how full the world is of assholes,” he said. “Anyway, have you heard from Nick yet?”
“No, nothing. I checked my phone and e-mail before we left. I’ll check again.”
She flipped open the little jointed piece of plastic, worked it over, its bright glow illuminating her grave face, and then announced, “No, nothing yet.”
“Okay.”
“What are your plans? You have to tell me, Swagger. I’m so afraid, now that you think you’re Yojimbo, you’ll go out on your own.”
“No, I told you I’d clear everything through you and I will. I’d hoped to hear from Nick, that’s all.”
“Suppose you don’t.”
“Then I’ll try and find a private investigator, a guy with yakuza connections, maybe an ex-cop, and we’ll turn him loose on the case. Maybe I should have done that already. I didn’t think of it. I was just thinking of how to keep that old man from whacking me black and blue.”
“A private eye won’t work. If Kondo doesn’t want to be found, the PI will know it and he will just take your money and conveniently come up with nothing. Nick’s got the guts to ask around; I doubt anybody else does.”
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“Then I’ll go to Kabukicho and start kicking in doors on yakuza joints and asking loud, impolite questions about Kondo. That should get me noticed.”
“That should get your head delivered to the embassy by Black Cat Courier by Monday.”
“Then I don’t know. Maybe I am overmatched on this one.”
“On the other hand, you’ve learned stuff—”
Her cell phone rang. She checked the number ID and said, “It’s Nick.”
She hit talk.
“Hello, Nick, what is—”
But then she was quiet.
“Oh, hell,” she said.
“What?”
“It was Nick. But he said ‘Susan, I fed the dragon.’”
“‘Fed the dragon’? What the hell could that mean?”
“I don’t know. But it was also his voice. It was full of fear. Real, ugly fear.”
“Oh, Christ,” Bob said.
She dialed Nick’s number. There was no answer.
27
THE SAMURAI
Nick had it, or most of it. He sat in his kitchen under a bright lamp, looked at his notes, an outline, a time line, charts of consequences, phone numbers, the whole thing: amazing how it came together, how quickly.
The tattoo artist, Big Ozu, had told him of Nii’s bragging about easy street from now on, and how he could afford to have his back finished and the horrible, crude diamonds hidden in an abstract of classical Japanese shape and color and the kanji inscription, “Samurai forever.”
It took some doing and a mighty investment in the world’s best sake, but Nick finally got Ozu to reveal the darkest secret: the name of the man to whom Nii, through Kondo, was now pledged. It was as if Kondo’s clan had found a new daimyo, its connection to the ruling powers was now so much more powerful.
It was a name he already knew: Miwa.
Miwa, the shogun of Shogunate AV and head of AJVS, at that very moment stuck in a power struggle with Imperial to maintain command of Big Porn, trying to keep it Japanese against Imperial’s hunger to Americanize the industry and bring white women in.
Now, what could Kondo do for this man, and of what meaning would a sword, a special, important, historical sword be?
Nick could have left it there: the man just wanted the sword because he was a collector, this was the mother of all swords, to add it to his collection would be—
But then why didn’t he just buy it from Yano? And why were Yano and his family wiped out, why were certain suggestions given so that the unfortunate tragedy of the Yanos was not pursued with alacrity and instead allowed to drift? It hadn’t even been assigned to a senior investigator.
So Nick began to look at Miwa. It turned out there was quite a lot of data: Miwa’s career was storied, publicized, even self-publicized. It was the tale of a poor boy, going from nothing to something and conquering Japan in a way few men had since the shogun, an irony in itself. Miwa lived in luxury with houses everywhere in Japan, seven in Tokyo, two in Europe, one in Vail, one in Hollywood, one in New York. He traveled by private jet, he consorted with millionaires and movie stars, his amorous adventures were legendary.
How could such a man want one thing more?
And Nick realized that it wasn’t “one thing more”—it was simple survival. He saw now how a sword could help Miwa and establish his line forever.
Against that, the deaths of the Yanos was nothing. Really, what was it? A mother, a father, four children? You could cut them down and leave them. That, simply, was the eternal order of the universe. Who were they next to greatness? What were they? Compared to the fabulousness of Miwa and the scope of his ambitions, what did they weigh? Who cared for them? No samurai would rise to their defense. They must yield to the inevitability of it all, and cease to impede Miwa in his march to glory.
Nick needed a drink. He went to the refrigerator and got out a bottle of sake. He struggled with the plasticized cap and finally, in frustration, got out a small kitchen knife, sliced the plastic off, and poured himself a drink.
Ah. The taste of sake, so utterly Japanese. He set the knife down on the table and sat back. He allowed himself to take some pleasure.
Nick saw a golden life before him, where it would all go: his scoop would shock the world, an arrest would follow, Japan’s foundations would be shaken, the world’s journalists pouring in upon him as the scandal reached epidemic proportions, his own redemption.
He would be back after his various misadventures with Lady Kokain. It would be—
Nick heard something, a strange sound, he didn’t know what it was, then realized it was some heavy object being laid against his doorjamb, and in the next second he heard the crash of wood splintering, of the door giving, and the sound of footsteps.
Nick knew immediately.
He scooped his notes up and stuffed them in a manila envelope.
He had seconds.
He fought panic.
Then he saw where he could hide them.
He raced to that spot, rolled them up, and shoved them in.
Then he picked up his cell, punched Susan Okada’s number, worried about being tapped, tried to think of some unique way to reach her, a suggestion, a code even, that she and she alone would recognize.
“Susan,” he said when she answered, “I fed the dragon.”
Then he turned and saw his old friend Nii advancing on him with a pugnacious look and a wakizashi in his hand; behind him came Kondo, and Nick had the biggest scoop of his life.
Now he knew who Kondo was.
Now he knew why some people got to see Kondo and others didn’t.
He also realized they would torture him beyond description to learn what he knew and who he had told and who he was working with.
Nii raced to him but wasn’t in time.
Nick plunged the knife into his own carotid and bled out, smiling, in eight seconds.
28
DRAGONS
They got there by midnight. The traffic in Nick’s neighborhood was normally nonexistent at this hour, but tonight it was terrible. Four blocks from Nick’s, the lanes froze into gridlock; nobody was going anywhere.
“There’s a cop up ahead, trying to get this sorted out,” Susan said.
“I’m going to slip out and see what I can see. If I don’t make it back in time, I’ll meet you at Nick’s.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. Everybody will notice a gaijin. I’ll go. You scoot over and stay with the car.”
She got out; he moved behind the wheel and waited.
Ten minutes later the car hadn’t moved an inch, but Susan was back. As she approached, he could see, from the slowness of her movements and her downcast expression, that the news was very bad. She ducked into the seat.
“They burned it. Like the Yanos’. Burned it to a crisp. Burned the houses on both sides too.”
“Maybe he got out.”
“No,” she said from far away, “he didn’t. The cop said a man was dead. A suicide. He set his house on fire, then he cut his own throat. They carted him away to the morgue an hour ago.”
Swagger tried not to concentrate on Nick, poor Nick. He tried not to feel rage or pain or despair. He remembered Doshu: “Only now.” Only now. Yeah, right, but get me off this goddamned frozen star, the alien place where everybody I talk to gets whacked hard and ugly by men of shadow I have never even seen and the game is nothing I understand.
Only now. Only now. Think it through.
She didn’t say anything but just sat there for the longest time. Her almond eyes seemed unfocused; maybe she was seeing afar with a close-up eye and seeing close-up with a distant eye.
“Poor Nick,” she said at last. “I think he was finally in the clear.”
“Smart guy. Brave guy. The best.”
“Poor guy—”
“Look, I’m not the boss or nothing, but we have to think this through. If Nick cut his own throat, it means Kondo Isami found him and he knew he’d be tortured. He knew these boys. So he went out samura
i.”
“I hate to think of that.”
“Well, ma’am, somebody has to think of that, so I guess I’ll go ahead and be the one.”
“You know, it makes me sick how good at all this you are.”
“I understand that. I make a lot of people sick. I’m a sergeant, it’s my job. We are in a war, people are dying, people are in danger, so let’s just figure out a next move.”
She was silent. Then she said, “I can’t think in this car. We’ll go to a coffee shop. I have to get out of this stupid traffic.”
The place was half-empty. They got coffee at the counter, then found a table at the back. Starbucks. It was like being in Iowa.
“Okay,” Swagger said, “you tell me if I’m right. You’re smart. I only went to high school.”
“New rule: sarcasm not permitted. Sarcasm out of bounds. Get it?” she said angrily.
“I apologize. It was stupid. It won’t happen again. Okay, here’s where we are. Nick found something. We don’t know what. But somehow they heard about it and came after him. He gave you a clue. So somehow he had enough time to hide what he had and to call you. ‘Susan, I fed the dragon.’ Then he cut his own throat, knowing that if they got to him, they’d torture him and he’d give everything up. Little skinny Nick, more samurai than any of those boys. And here’s another thing I have figured out. See if you agree.”
“Okay.”
“They didn’t burn the place for no reason. They figured out he’d learned something, and they were worried he’d left it. They couldn’t find it. They burned the place so that whoever he was working with couldn’t find it either. There’s no point in burning the place otherwise. It just attracts attention and the last thing these people need is attention.”
“That makes as much sense as anything.”
“Okay, so let’s think about the clue Nick gave you. Maybe I’m full of shit, but it can’t be that hard. He cooked it up in two seconds. You said he sounded scared on the phone. He knew they were there. He hid whatever it was fast, he came up with a clue fast, and it was something only you knew.”