by Steve Bein
Kusama was on the phone, but he surprised her with a polite smile and motioned her toward one of the chairs in front of his desk. It was the same one she’d sat in when he’d held her maimed hand, the same one she’d fallen back into after he stripped her of her rank.
Mariko sat in the other chair and waited for him to finish his call. She’d forgotten how handsome he was. Of course, it wasn’t easy to remember the good things about the man who had taken a hatchet to her career.
“Detective Oshiro,” he said, nesting the phone back in its cradle. “You look tired, if you’ll pardon me for saying so. Let me get you a drink. Coffee? Tea?”
“Thank you, sir, but no.”
“Nonsense. Here, I’ll have one myself.” He rang his secretary, who materialized as if by magic with two coffees. Mariko’s was black, one sugar, just how she liked it. She knew Kusama kept tabs on her, and even on her sister’s progress in rehab, but she hadn’t guessed his notes went all the way down to how she took her morning coffee.
“All right, Detective. Let’s get down to business. I’d like to know which reporters you’ve been talking to, and why you thought it was a good idea to start doing my job as well as your own.”
“Sir?”
“Forgive me. You look so tired; perhaps you didn’t notice this on your way in.” He slid a copy of the Daily Yomiuri across the broad, polished surface of his desk.
It was clear that he was trying to keep Mariko off-balance. Forcing her to accept the cup of coffee was old-school alpha male bullshit. Switching between the nice guy stuff and the personal attacks was a newer tactic, but it wasn’t new to Mariko. She used it herself in questioning a suspect. She knew the right way to respond, too: don’t get flustered. Pick a point on the table and stare at it. Talk to it, not to the person asking the questions. Stay distant.
She knew that was what she was supposed to do, but even so, she blanched when she saw the headline. TMPD INSIDER: JEMAAH ISLAMIYAH CONNECTION “TOTALLY BASELESS.”
“I seem to remember a certain conversation,” Kusama said. He spoke in that tone parents took in public with their misbehaving kids: quiet, clipped, each word boiling over with anger. “A private conversation with a very small audience. Only four of us. Back in a dark, secluded corner of Terminal 2. Do you remember it?”
“Yes, sir.” It was a hard one to forget; she’d regained her sergeant’s bars, only to lose them again a few minutes later.
“We discussed Jemaah Islamiyah. I told you I had dropped that name to the reporters. Do you remember what you told me?”
Mariko swallowed. “I, uh …”
“Go ahead.” His voice seethed with anger. “Say it.”
“I … I told you that if you tried to pin this on Islamic extremists, Joko Daishi would use that to destroy our credibility. I said you should take everything else off the table and accuse the Divine Wind outright.”
“So you did. Would you like to tell me ‘I told you so’?”
“No, sir.”
“But you did, neh? You did tell me so.”
There was no safe way to answer that. Fortunately, if there was one thing she’d learned from him, it was that if she didn’t say anything, she wouldn’t have to wait long for him to fill the silence.
He stood up and walked to his enormous floor-to-ceiling windows. With his hands folded behind his back, posed against the dramatic backdrop of the cityscape, he looked more like a prime minister than a police captain. “It’s not yet seven o’clock, and so far this morning I have spoken with the editors in chief of two newspapers and four television news programs. I know these men personally. I’ve been playing golf with one of them for over thirty years. All six of them called to give me fair warning that they would be running exposés on the police cover-up of the Haneda bombing and the false accusation against Islamic extremists. All because someone talked.”
Mariko said nothing.
“There were four of us in that conversation,” said Kusama. “Only four people could have leaked this information about Jemaah Islamiyah to the Yomiuri. Was it you?”
“No, sir.”
“I remind you, these editors are friends of mine. If they press their reporters for sources, someone will talk. If I should find incontrovertible evidence that you were the one who spoke of Jemaah Islamiyah to the press, I will see to it that you’ll never find a job as a policewoman ever again. Or you can tell me the truth right now and I won’t fire you, because I’ll be too busy carrying out my normal duties—namely, protecting the good name of the TMPD. So with that in mind, do you have anything to tell me?”
“No, sir.”
“It was not you who spoke to the press about Jemaah Islamiyah? You’re quite sure?”
“Absolutely, sir.”
“Lieutenant Sakakibara, then.”
“I doubt it, sir. I doubt that very much.”
“As do I. That leaves me and your erstwhile partner—a man who is known for ethical improprieties, as I recall. Which one of us is the leak, Detective?”
There was no safe answer to that one, either. If she accused Han, Kusama would eat him alive. If she accused Kusama, she could expect the same fate herself.
But to Mariko’s mind, he’d offered a false dilemma. “There’s someone else who knows the Divine Wind carried out the attack.”
“Oh? Who, pray tell?”
“Joko Daishi, sir. He also knows what Akahata Daisuke was doing in Korakuen station with a giant barrel of high explosives. He could have leaked everything in these stories himself.”
Kusama began to pace in front of the windows that afforded him his magnificent view of the city. “I see. Once again, the man you accuse is the one you happen to know more about than anyone else in the department. Convenient, isn’t it?”
“Begging your pardon, sir, but I wouldn’t describe four traffic fatalities, twenty-three ricin fatalities, and the hundred and twelve at Haneda as ‘convenient.’”
“But you do want to work the Joko Daishi case, neh?”
“Damn right, sir.”
Kusama grunted and winced. “Perhaps it is your … oh, let’s call it enthusiasm for this case that makes you speak to me this way, as if we are teammates on a softball team and not officers of the law. Look at my uniform, Detective Oshiro, and look at yours. You will note there are no jersey numbers.”
Mariko quickly found a knot on his cherrywood desk and resolved to speak to it, not to Kusama. “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
“Enthusiasm is too forgiving a word to describe your antics. You ignored my orders and you have tied up valuable department resources that could have been used to aid in the Haneda investigation.”
“Sir?”
“Do not be coy with me, Detective. I am well aware of your extracurricular activities. I know all about the hours you’ve wasted watching traffic camera footage.”
Mariko was surprised to feel a great swell of relief. Only now did she realize that she had spent the last few days waiting for the hammer to fall. She knew exactly how Captain Kusama had come to learn of her efforts to track the woman in white. Someone had tipped him off. The same someone had been stalking her electronically for almost a week. Two days ago her stalker had tipped his hand. Deliberately. When she discovered the underground command center below the Blind Spot, she found a step-by-step report of her search for the woman in white. Dates, times, camera locations, informant files accessed, warrants requested, incident reports in various stages of completion. All of it.
Now her stalker must have delivered that report to Captain Kusama. Mariko had foreseen that possibility from the moment she and Han discovered the report. Since that day, she hadn’t had a good night’s sleep. But now the hammer was finally falling—right on her head, but at least the waiting was over. Kusama would do his worst, and then Mariko wouldn’t have to imagine what the worst might look like.
“I assigned a few officers from Internal Affairs to study your traffic camera feed. They could find no connection to any of the narcotics cases
you’re supposed to be working.”
“We nailed Lee Jin Bao on a buy-bust at the Sour Plum—”
“Unless you want to lose your detective assignment and spend the rest of your career as a meter maid, you will not interrupt me again. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir,” she told the knot of cherry wood.
“No connection. That’s what they told me. And since I assigned you specifically to work only narcotics cases, I now have no choice but to reprimand you.”
That was bullshit and Mariko knew it. A captain in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department had enormous power over the system. He could do more or less whatever he wanted. But Mariko chose to keep this to herself.
“As of this moment you are relieved of duty,” Kusama said. “I think two weeks without pay is a good start. I may extend that if Internal Affairs requests more time to investigate your indiscretions. Any questions?”
Just one, Mariko thought. Who gave you that list? It was that person, not Kusama, who had forced the issue of her suspension. Kusama was jerking around at the end of someone else’s string.
Ever since she got mugged, Mariko had been trying to figure out who the puppet master was. The woman in white had been her best lead—her only lead, in fact, and she’d already followed it as far as it would go. Getting suspended was almost a blessing; if she couldn’t continue the investigation, she couldn’t fail at it day after day.
“Good,” the captain said, misinterpreting her silence. “You have one hour to make all the necessary arrangements. After that, you will have no further access to departmental resources.”
Fine, Mariko thought. I haven’t accomplished anything with them anyway.
She left Kusama’s office as gracefully as she could. The “necessary arrangements” he’d spoken of were few. She had to check in her badge and she had to inform Lieutenant Sakakibara just how far the captain had kicked his boot up her ass. Her service weapon was already locked up, leaving Mariko to wonder what she’d do if she suddenly found she needed a gun. If her electronic stalker decided to do some physical stalking, she could only hope he preferred a sword fight to a drive-by.
Sakakibara wasn’t in, which was the first stroke of luck she’d had all week. She’d send him the news via e-mail and avoid the verbal curb-stomping he’d have dished out if she’d told him face-to-face. Agonizing over just how to phrase it took about seven minutes. Aborting that plan and just blurting everything that needed to be said took less than two minutes. Kusama had given her an hour to leave the building, of which she had fifty-one minutes left to find the Wind.
But how? She had Google and her own two feet, and beyond that her search capabilities were limited. The department had many more tools at its disposal, but Mariko had exhausted them already. She’d identified the man who owned the strip club that sat atop the underground command center. He paid weekly protection money to the local boryokudan strongman, but that was his only illegal activity. According to public records, the command center didn’t even exist. Mariko had gone so far as to track down which electrical cables supplied the strip club and which supplied the command center, and followed up on who was paying the command center’s bills. She learned that the bills were extraordinarily high, they were paid directly from an online checking account, and the bank of record had no idea who held the account. When Mariko tried the same trick with the Internet service, she found more or less the same thing: a big empty hole where its electronic footprint was supposed to be. The place had the bandwidth and computing power of the whole TMPD, yet somehow it was entirely off the books.
The worst part was that she’d done all of that legwork fully expecting it to fail. These people had created a blind spot in a citywide surveillance system; they weren’t going to pay their electric bill by personal check. She’d dug up all the leads she could find, and she’d followed them as far as they would go. Every last one of them fizzled out.
Fifty-one minutes to do something meaningful, when the last five days hadn’t been enough to make a single step forward.
“Fuck it,” she said, and she opened her departmental e-mail one last time.
To Whom It May Concern:
If you found this message, then you are who I think you are. I know it was you who gave me the iron demon mask. I know it was you who tracked me tracking you. Your printout was a cute trick, but I don’t believe you left it there in order to scare me off. I think you left it to tell me that you know I’m onto you. I hear your message loud and clear: you’ll let me find you, but only on your own terms.
Now hear my message: I don’t care about your terms. If you want to talk to me, you know where I live. Ring the doorbell. I’m not playing your stupid game anymore.
She saved the message in her Drafts folder without specifying a sender. Then she closed everything down and went to the pistol range. Forty-nine minutes. Plenty of time to unload a bunch of rounds and pretend the target was Captain Kusama’s pretty office furniture.
22
Mariko didn’t have to wait long for someone to ring her doorbell.
After the pistol range she went straight to the dojo, where Hosokawa-sensei begrudgingly admitted her into the morning class, which wasn’t a part of her monthly membership and which she hadn’t registered for in advance. He routinely allowed male students to drop in like this, but he was of the old-school belief that women had no place in kenjutsu. He didn’t understand why Mariko, already twenty-seven years old, wasn’t at home minding her children. A woman who was more interested in martial arts than marital arts made no more sense to him than a fish riding a bicycle.
Mariko was well aware of his views. He’d acquired them during the war years and showed no sign of surrendering them. On her first day he tried to persuade her to give up. On her second day he explained that the woman’s weapon was the naginata, and that Tokyo was home to several excellent naginata dojos. But when Mariko proved too stubborn to quit, Hosokawa-sensei had no choice but to capitulate. He and Mariko had a sensei in common: Yamada Yasuo. Hosokawa was one of Yamada-sensei’s first students and Mariko was his last. The fact that Yamada had spent his final days with Mariko, not with his more established students, made her important in a way that Hosokawa’s seventh-degree black belt could not trump.
So Hosokawa-sensei had to put up with her, and if he wanted to persist in his bullheaded attempt to drum her out, Mariko would show him the meaning of bullheadedness. On this particular morning she needed someone to put her through her paces. She knew he’d work her twice as hard as everyone else, hoping she’d quit the art out of sheer physical misery. Today that was just what she needed.
By the end of class she felt her arms might fall out of their sockets. But at least her head was clear. All the nervous energy Captain Kusama had worked up in her was utterly spent. The only downside was that her fingers barely had the strength to button her blouse.
Her phone rumbled in her pocket. Fishing it out, she was surprised to see the caller ID said OSHIRO MARIKO.
“Huh,” she said. She couldn’t remember bumping the phone, and she didn’t even know it was possible to call herself. She idly wondered which button she’d hit, then hung up on herself.
The phone buzzed again almost instantly. ANSWER YOUR PHONE, said the caller ID.
A chill ran down her spine. This couldn’t get any weirder if it was Morpheus from The Matrix calling her. Then she remembered: she did have a Morpheus of sorts, an observer keeping tabs on her using methods she couldn’t understand.
As if on cue, the caller ID changed to ANSWER YOUR PHONE NOW. Who the hell were these people?
There was only one way to find out.
“Hello?”
“Detective Oshiro,” a man’s voice said. “We should meet.”
“Who are you?”
“I am To Whom It May Concern. You left a note for me to find.”
Holy shit, Mariko thought, they found that thing already? Her e-mail draft wasn’t three hours old. She managed not to say any of that aloud.
“I want a name.”
“I’ll give you one: Yamada Yasuo. He was an old acquaintance of mine.”
That was the last name she expected to hear. Yamada-sensei was never far from her thoughts, least of all when she was in the dojo. Her morning meeting with Captain Kusama had her wondering what advice her sensei might have given on coping with an obstinate commanding officer. She hardly imagined one of Yamada’s old pals would ring her up.
“How do I know you’re not conning me?”
“You’re the one who invited me, Detective. Now, would you like a fresh change of clothes, or shall I pick you up from the dojo?”
She looked around furtively, then realized that was a forehead-smackingly stupid thing to do. She was holding a cell phone. A phone company tech on his first day could triangulate her location. These people could probably tell her which pocket she’d pulled the phone from and how much lint was in the pocket.
“I’ll go home and change.” After a moment’s thought she added, “Do me a favor and don’t watch me while I’m in the shower.”
“Very droll, Detective Oshiro. When you are ready, go downstairs. A man will be waiting for you. You’ll have no trouble recognizing him, as he’ll be carrying a baseball bat.”
“You’re kidding. I figured you guys for the silenced Walther PPK types.”
“Never in public, Detective Oshiro.”
The line went dead. Mariko caught herself studying her phone as if it were a piece of alien technology she’d never seen before. On a hunch she checked her recent call history, and sure enough, there was no record of the call.
“Oh, what the hell,” she said, and she took the next train home.
*
The order of events was eat; shower; change; find favorite purse for undercover work; find cigarette case used for undercover work; hide Pikachu in cigarette case; hide Cheetah in purse’s concealed pocket; toss cigarette case, cigarette lighter, tampons, gum, wallet, phone, keys, pepper spray, peppermints, compact, pack of tissues, second pack of tissues, little detective’s notebook, pen, lipstick, lip balm, hand towel, hand lotion, hand sanitizer, and boot knife in the purse, all in plain sight; and go downstairs.