The 47th Samurai

by Stephen Hunter

  He shadowed for a while from across the street, and eventually Nii took the little date into a nice apartment building and upstairs. Quickly enough Nick dashed across the street and sited himself a little to the oblique so he could see two sides of the structure. He prayed that Sir Lancelot Nii’s place was on one of these two sides, and indeed, within a few minutes, a light on the fifteenth floor came on. Nick counted windows, establishing how far from the corner the apartment was, so that he could get into it tomorrow.

  Nick got there early. He was wearing a wig, a dark mop, because it occurred to him that it wouldn’t do to let the world on to the fact that a blond-haired man much too old for blond hair was stalking a well-known yakuza killer.

  It didn’t take long; a Mercedes pulled up, a black S-Class limo, and Nii, crisply dressed for work, and the girl, looking as if she’d had her brains fucked out and couldn’t even comb her hair, stepped into it and it sped away.

  Nick had a little thrill. Was Kondo in that car? It was unlikely Kondo would pick up his own crew. More likely he hired a limo service to round the boys up and bring them where they would do that day’s business.

  Nick crossed the road, went to the apartment’s foyer, flashed a credential at the doorman. It was quite an impressive piece of paper, signifying him to be a representative of the Domestic Appropriations committee of the Diet. It was entirely authentic, in its original owner’s name, and a Kabukicho forgery expert had expertly glued Nick’s picture on it.

  “I’m taking depositions on the land scandal,” Nick said. “Mr. Ono,” that being the first name he’d cross-referenced with a phone number listed to that address.

  “I shall buzz him, sir.”

  “Not if you want to keep your job, you won’t.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “And you won’t tell the houseboy either. I know how these places work. You call the houseboy, tip him, and he gets to Ono before I do, Ono has time to destroy incriminating documents, Ono gives the houseboy a huge tip, and he splits it with you. I’m not stupid.”

  “Sir, Joji’s on fourteen; he won’t be involved.”

  “You make sure Joji stays on fourteen.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Nick knew Ono lived on seventeen and so he took the elevator up to that floor, got out, and took the stairway down to fifteen. He quickly established the door that had to lead to Nii’s and went down to fourteen. He found the houseman, a dull-looking Korean, smoking a cigarette in a closet on break.

  “Oh, there you are, Joji,” he said. “Dammit, I do this twice a week! I locked myself out of my apartment. Can you let me in?”

  Joji looked at him dully, trying to place him.

  “It’s me, Nii, fifteen-oh-four, come on, Joji, I’m late.”

  If Joji hesitated it was only to secure a bigger tip; Nick slipped him a 5,000-yen note, and they went upstairs. Joji used his house key and headed back to his cigarette.

  Nick was alone in the apartment. Very nice. Had Nii gone so far as to hire a decorator? The place was very much your modern yakuza, without frill or kitsch. No books, but one whole wall given over to a sound system and just about every western rock or rap CD ever cut, a shelf or two of Shogun AV’s teacher-blows-Koichi—and oh, say, naughty, naughty, even a few black-market items involving young girls. Nii, you’ve got some sick bugs in you. There was also, of course, a TV screen big enough to land a jet on.

  Skipping through the apartment, Nick counted clichés: the furniture was black leather and chrome with a few modernist gewgaws here and there, crystal sculptures signifying crystal sculpture, a horrible and therefore priceless piece of modern art on the big wall.

  Another room was the workout palace, which explained Nii’s new body. The space was half dojo; a wall rack held a batch of swords, some wood, some steel, for cutting. In the corner lay a pile of tatami mats.

  The bedroom had its own special sort of cliché: the mirror on the ceiling threw back the image of the devastated bed, sodden and twisted and wrecked. Stains and the smell of sweat were everywhere. Handcuffs, lined with soothing foam, still attached to the bedpost, suggested the way the night had gone. Also a coil of rope lay on the bottom half of the bed, so Nii had probably done some tying too. He must have had that Japanese thing for a well-tied knot. As an aphrodisiac, the form of the beautiful young girl, bound and helpless before him, had done wonders for Nii: three discarded, half-full rubbers lay like squashed snakes on the hardwood floor. Nick thought, Oh, to be twenty-five again!

  Next, the closet: ten black silk suits, each with a swanky Italian tailor’s label, three pairs of black oxfords, twenty pairs of almost-new Nikes, and a pile of neatly ironed and folded white silk shirts.

  Nick sat at the desk and began to work through it very carefully. One drawer had a collection of sports magazines, another bank statements, which showed the guy was indeed doing very well, and other bills: dry cleaning mainly, rent, and…well, well, well, here we have something very interesting.

  It was a series of drawings: three diamonds, crude and amateurish, in the first. In the second, the diamonds had begun to be subsumed by superior imagery, as the new forms obscured the crudity of the original pattern. In the third, the imagery, drawn by a master, had triumphed, and no trace of the diamond remained. The third, a kind of design proposal, had been signed with a name from a tattoo parlor in Shinjuku, Big Ozu. Nick had once done a story for the rag on Big Ozu, favorite skin artist of the yakuza. He was your man for snake scales, imitation Kuniyoshi faces, lions, tigers, and bears, as well as fans, scrolls, bamboo, and kanji, all popular yakuza motifs. He still tattooed the traditional way: not by electric needle, but more slowly, more painfully by bamboo sliver. So now that he was in the bucks, Nii had hired Ozu to craft a design to absorb his no-class street-gang origins, as if obliterating his sordid past.

  The big guy owed Nick a favor, for his piece had driven Ozu’s customer list through the roof, including some movie stars and rock singers. And he also knew that men tell their tattooists what they don’t tell their wives, bitches, shrinks, and buddies.

  26

  KATA

  “I am not going to strike a child,” Bob said.

  “Probably true. But she strike you, often,” said Doshu. He spoke quickly to the girl, who began to carefully assemble her kendo armor.

  “This interesting,” Doshu said. “My pupil Sueko. She will be safe from your blow and armed with a bokken. As she short, bokken long. When she strikes, much pain. You wear no armor. On the other hand, with a shinai, even your strongest blows will not affect her, that is, if you are even able to strike her. Also, as you long, shinai short. Yet you must defeat her.”

  “Sir, you don’t understand. I cannot strike a child.”

  “Do not look and see form. Look at what is close as if distant and distant as if close.”

  Bob dropped the shinai on the floor.

  “No, sir. I come from a father whose father beat him terribly when he was a child. He never struck me and he made me understand, one does not strike a child.”

  “Then you must go.” Doshu pointed to the door. “You do not know enough yet. Your mind is soft. You will die quickly if you stay. Go back to America, drink and eat and forget. You are not swordsman. You will never be swordsman.”

  Bob saw how cleverly Doshu had penetrated him. The man had put him in a situation where his strength and speed were meaningless; he could not use them against a child, even if he had wanted to. Something deep in his fiber would prevent him. On the other hand, he had to win. If he didn’t win, he’d failed. He would not be a swordsman.

  So how could he win? He had to find some way to fight soft. He had to anticipate, move, parry at a level higher than he’d ever been, much higher, and when he saw his opening, he’d have to take it but willfully disconnect from those things that made him a man—his strength, his speed. He had to take command of his subconscious and will it to govern him to a smoothness he didn’t have, a quickness no one had. He was trapped.

 
“I will fight,” he said. “But if I hurt her, I will hurt you. Those are the stakes here, sir. You understand that. You can’t put her in jeopardy without risking your own ass. And don’t think you can go aikido on me. I know that stuff too. I’ve been in a few dustups. Here, look, goddammit.”

  Bob yanked down the corner of his little stupid jacket and showed the old man a few places where hot metal had tried to interrupt his life span. They were puckers, frozen stars of raised flesh, long gashes, healed but never quite vanished, relics of a forgotten war.

  “I have seen much blood, my own and others’. I can fight, don’t you forget it.”

  Doshu was not impressed.

  “Maybe then you be good against little girl. But I think she whip ass.”

  Bob faced the child. She looked like some tiny druid priestess. Her bokken, stout white oak, looked like Excalibur or Beheader of Kira and when she drove it into him, it would bruise to the bone. Her head was encased in a padded helmet, her face covered by a steel cage; the helmet wore two thick pads that flared laterally to cover her neck and shoulders. Her torso was encased in padding, and both arms and wrists as well; she wore heavy gloves; she looked part goaltender, part catcher, part linebacker, and 100 percent pure samurai.

  They moved to the center of the dojo floor, bare feet on bare wood, under the wooden struts that sustained the place, which felt more like temple than gym. Swords hung on the wall, ghosts flitted in the distance.

  She bowed.

  He bowed.

  “Five strikes wins. Also, kendo much head. I have asked Sueko not to hit head unless necessary. Also, war, not kendo. So any killing strike wins, not only kendo targets. Understood?”

  He waited a second, permitting no questions, and then said, “Guard position.”

  Bob stepped back, to segan-kamae, the standard high guard, his sword before him at 45 degrees, both elbows held but not locked, the tip pointing to her eyes. It was a solid defensive position, but you couldn’t do much with it. She, meanwhile, fell to gendan-kame, with her sword held low, pointed down and to the left. It was an offensive position, quick to lead to stunning blows, less efficient for blocking.

  Bob tried to find the rhythm that had sometimes been there for him and sometimes not. He tried not to see “her,” that is, the child; instead he tried to see her bokken, for it was his real enemy.

  Doshu stood between them, raised a hand, and then his hand fell.

  He stepped in fluidly, she countered a little to the left, and suddenly, like quicksilver, she went low to high—“dragon from water”—and he could not get his shinai into a block fast enough by a hair, and she slipped her blade under his guard, screamed “Hai!” with amazing force, and he felt the bitter bite of the white oak edge, classic yokogiri, against his ribs. God, it hurt.

  He realized, I have just been killed by a child. With live blades, she would have cut his guts out.

  “One for Sueko. Swagger nothing.”

  Rage went through him, red and seething. He had an impulse to revert to bully’s strength, flare and howl and race at her, using his bulk to intimidate, but he knew he wasn’t fast enough or smooth enough and that no answers lay in the land of anger. She would coolly destroy him.

  She attacked, he gave ground and parried two of her blows; then, being limber and flexible, she split almost to ground level and swept at his ankles, but somehow the solution came exactly with the attack itself, and he found himself airborne—he knew that leaving the ground was a big mistake, one of the “three aversions,” to be avoided at all times, but in this case unavoidable—to miss the horizontal cut and, as he came down, he tapped her on the thick pad of the shoulder, near the neck, a somewhat uninspired kesagiri.

  “Bad cut, Swagger. But still, you get point. One to one.”

  The next two flurries were in hyperspeed. He could not stay with her for more than three strikes and she seemed to gain speed as he lost it, and each time, “Hai!” the bokken struck him hard, once across the wrist, making him drop the shinai, once on his good hip, a phenomenon known in football as a stinger. Oh, hoochie mama, that one hurt like hell.

  Sweat flooded his eyes and he blinked them free, but they filled with water and the keenness of his vision went.

  He felt fear.

  He had to laugh. I’ve been shot at ten thousand times and hurt bad six times and I am scared of a little girl.

  Was it the fear or the laughter or both? Somehow something began to come through him. Maybe it was his blurred vision, maybe that thing in sports called “second wind,” maybe a final acceptance of the idea that what came before meant nothing, there was only now, and her next kata seemed to announce itself, he took it on the lower third of the blade, ran her sword to ground, recovered a hair faster, and slashed the shinai across her center chest, kesagiri. She didn’t feel it, given the heavy padding, but Doshu’s educated eyes were quick to make note.

  “Hai!” Bob proclaimed.

  “Too late. Must deliver blow and shout in one timing. No point.”

  Bad call. That was kendo; this was war. But you forget bad calls, as every athlete knows, and when she came, he knew it would be from the left, as all her previous attacks had been right to left; in the split second she drew back to strike, he himself unleashed a cut that seemed to come from nowhere, as he had not willed it or planned it; it was his fastest, best cut of the afternoon, maybe even the whole week, and he got his “Hai” out exactly as he brought the shinai tip as smooth and soft as possible across the left side of her head, and felt the bop as it hit her helmet.

  “Kill, Swagger.”

  He dropped back, going again to segan-kamae. He saw what she had that he didn’t. It wasn’t that she was stronger or faster. It was that she got to her maximum concentration so much quicker than he did, and her blows came so fast from the ready position; he could stop the first, the second, maybe the third, but by the fourth, he was behind the curve and he missed it.

  Yet the answer wasn’t in speed.

  Not if you “tried” speed, in the Ooof!-I-must-do-it! way. You could never order yourself to that level of performance.

  What was the answer?

  The little monster, however, had altered her stance. She slid into kami-hasso, issuing from above, the bokken cocked like a bat in a batter’s stance, spiraling in her grip as she would not hold it still because stillness was death.

  She stalked him, sliding toward him, and now that he was tired, he knew that he’d lost much speed and if he struck first, he’d be slow and she’d nail him for the fourth point, then finish him in seconds and it would be over.

  What is the answer? he thought, backpedaling, going through his small bag of tricks, and coming up dry.

  Oh, shit.

  What was—

  He tried to read the eyes, could not see them in the darkness of the helmet; he tried to read her sword, it was a blur; he tried to read her body, it was a mystery. She was just it: death, the enemy, all who’d sought to vanquish him and failed, coming in this time on a surge of adrenaline and serious attitude, sublimely confident, aware that he could do nothing but—

  “The moon in the cold stream like a mirror.”

  Musashi said it four hundred years ago, why did it suddenly appear in his mind?

  Suddenly he knew the answer.

  What is the difference between the moon in the sky and the moon in the water?

  There is no difference.

  They have become one.

  You must become one with your enemy.

  You must not hate him, for in anger is sloppiness. You must become him. And when you are him, you can control him.

  Bob slid into kami-hasso and felt his body begin to mimic hers, to trace and somehow absorb her movement until he felt her and in some strange way knew her. He knew when she would strike for he could feel the same wave building in himself, and, without willing it, struck first with his shorter sword and would have sliced both hands off had there been an edge to his weapon. The sword had done it. The sword sa
w the opening; the sword struck, all in microtime.

  “Strike, Swagger. Three–three.”

  It was like he’d found a magic portal to her brain; the next strike went quicker still, a tap through her defenses to her solar plexus, so soft he couldn’t exactly recall delivering it but just felt the shiver as the split bamboo splines of the shinai bulged to absorb the impact.

  “Hit, Swagger, four–three.”

  She suddenly knew rage. Champions are not supposed to fall behind. He had broken her; she lashed out, issuing from above, yet as fast as she was, he felt tranquillity as the blade dived toward him in perfect shinchokugiri. He turned, again without force, and caught her under the chin, a blow that in a fight would have decapitated her.

  “Match!” yelled Doshu.

  He withdrew, assumed a formal position, and bowed deeply. Becoming her, he now loved her. Becoming her, he felt her pain at defeat. He felt no pride. It wasn’t Miller Time. He felt honored to have fought one so valiant.

  She took off her helmet and reverted to child: the face unlined, unformed, though dappled with adult sweat, the skin smooth, the eyes dark and piercing. She returned the bow.

  She spoke.

  “She say, ‘Gaijin fight well. I feel him learning. I feel his strength and honor. He an honorable opponent.’”

  “Tell her please that I am humbled by her generosity and she has a great talent. It was a privilege to learn from her.”

  They bowed again, then she turned and left and at a certain point skipped, as if she’d been let out of school early.

  “Okay, it worked. I learned something. The moon thing. I got it, finally.”

  “Tomorrow I will speak certain truths to you. I must speak Japanese. No English. You know fluent Japanese speaker?”

  “Yes.”

  “You call. I tell this person some truths, he tell you.”

  “Yes.”

  “I give you truth. Are you strong for truth?”