Year of the Demon

by Steve Bein

  At last Bullet woke the laptop, turned it toward her, and fired up its media player. What followed was a silent video feed from what looked like a closed-circuit security camera. It took Mariko a moment to recognize the room, since she hadn’t seen it from the camera’s perspective before, but soon enough she identified it as the salesman’s office from the packing and shipping company that she and Han had raided the night before.

  A cop walked into the frame wearing full SWAT armor, including helmet, goggles, and Nomex mask. No part of his face was visible. He walked with a bit of a limp—not from a recent injury, Mariko guessed. He wasn’t hobbling; he just had a rolling gait. He took something off the shelf that Mariko remembered well, the one with the eclectic collection of antiques and trinkets. The feed was just clear enough that Mariko could make out a mask-shaped blob in the SWAT cop’s hands.

  It was the most brazen theft she’d ever heard of. Stealing from the Kamaguchi-gumi was suicidal, and doing it in the middle of an active crime scene was a whole new level of crazy. Or maybe not, she thought. It was only crazy if you thought anyone was going to see you. If you were a modern-day ninja—the sort of person who could steal a huge sword from a seventeenth-floor apartment, for instance, even with all the doors and windows locked from the inside—then you could probably pull it off. She hit the PLAY button again, and watched a grainy image of the thief who, if her hunch was right, had also stolen Glorious Victory Unsought.

  “You let those idiots take my stuff,” said Kamaguchi. “Now you’re going to get it back.”

  Mariko ignored him and closed the media player, the better to look at a PDF that Kamaguchi had open in another window. It was an insurance appraisal—a big one, over two hundred pages long, but the page that was displayed showed a familiar antique half mask. Its rust-brown skin was pitted with age, and the blacksmith who forged it clearly had a gift, for the mask was astonishingly expressive, its anger as genuine as any living creature’s. Seen up close, its stubby horns looked cruel. Unlike the sketch in Yamada’s notebook, Kamaguchi’s mask had one broken fang, its tip sheared off in a perfectly straight line. Otherwise Yamada’s sketch was a pretty good likeness—though unlike the sketch, the PDF also included the mask’s appraised value. It was more than Mariko would make in the next ten years.

  She tried to remember what Yamada’s notes said about her sword and the mask. They were related somehow. The mask had a connection to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, one of Japan’s founding fathers, but Glorious Victory did not. That cold, sullen fear wouldn’t let her remember any more than that. It wanted her undistracted.

  “Hey!” Kamaguchi said. “Are you listening to me?”

  “Sort of.” She was provoking him and she knew it. “Who are ‘those idiots’?”

  “Huh?”

  “You said we let ‘those idiots’ steal your mask. That means you’re assuming the guy in the video isn’t a cop, neh? Why? He doesn’t look coplike enough to you?”

  Kamaguchi chuckled. “Heh. You guys aren’t dumb enough to take my shit. No, this was those religious pansies.”

  “Who?”

  “Cult types. Nut jobs. They’re the only ones who could have stolen it.”

  “So why coming whining to me?” Mariko said, feeling her false bravado fade away, gradually being replaced by the real thing. It felt good to stand up to this guy. “Go kick their asses. Get your toy back.”

  “You don’t want me to do that. I lost my patience with these sissies a long time ago. I go after them now, there’s going to be blood.”

  He was bullshitting her and she knew it. Kamaguchi Hanzo wasn’t the type to shrink away from a little bloodshed. He was hiding something, but she wasn’t sure what yet.

  So she took a gamble and headed for the door. “I’ve got things to do. You want to start talking straight, be my guest. Otherwise I’m—”

  “Don’t be so touchy,” the Bulldog said. “No wonder Fuchida-san felt like killing you. Fucking women, neh?”

  “Yeah. Women. Have a nice day.”

  “Look, those cult types, they’re the ones who wanted to buy the mask. That’s what the dope was for. Get it? Last night was all because of the mask.”

  Mariko came back and sat on her stool. “Keep going.”

  Kamaguchi’s knife dealt the finishing blow to a long, slender zucchini and tore into the next one. “They wanted the mask. Wanted it right fucking now. Offered me way more than it was worth. So I okayed it. But then they told me you assholes were coming to crash the party, so they wanted to hurry things up. I told them to fuck off. But no, they show up anyway, and then everything goes to shit. Heh. I don’t need to tell you that, neh? You’re the ones who made it go to shit. And right after you’re done, right in the middle of your cleanup operation, their boy walks right in, takes my property, and walks out. Right under your goddamn noses.”

  “So?”

  “So get it back. It’s your fault.”

  Mariko smirked. “Let me get this straight. TMPD’s to blame because you went through with a dope deal, didn’t pay up, and then your supplier came by to get what you said you’d pay him?”

  Kamaguchi chopped into a pineapple, angry enough that his blade banging on the countertop made Mariko’s ears hurt. “I don’t owe them shit. I told them not to deliver. They delivered anyway, and then you showed up to seize it all. No. I don’t owe them a damn thing.”

  “Yeah,” Mariko said, “you’re right. Poor you. Nobody ever gives you what you want.”

  “Heh.” Again the knife cut through the pineapple with a bang. “Look at you, giving me shit in my own place. You think you’re pretty gokudo, don’t you?”

  Mariko smirked. She had to admit she was feeling quite the badass at the moment. It made her feel powerful, sparring with this man, getting him to open up about his business dealings. Han had been exactly right in his assessment: if she could figure out a way to make this a regular occurrence, Kamaguchi Hanzo could prove to be one of the most valuable informants she’d ever find. That was assuming he didn’t go through with having her killed, but that too was empowering. Better to confront him head-on than to look in every shadow waiting for his hit man to strike.

  “Well, maybe I could use some gokudo,” he said. Again the knife cut through the pineapple with a bang. “Besides, I got an in with you. You get the mask, I call off the hit. Deal?”

  Mariko ignored that. She wasn’t about to start trusting a contract killer. “What is this mask anyway?”

  “Nothing. Some antique. I collect that stuff.”

  “You shouldn’t. You’ve got shit for taste.”

  “Heh.” Kamaguchi motioned toward the living room/observation deck with the tip of his knife. “In my line of work you want things that’ll appreciate in value, neh? Art. Real estate. That kind of thing.”

  “Because it’s handy for laundering money?”

  “Bingo.”

  Mariko was begrudgingly impressed. It took guts to talk business so openly with a cop. And the Bulldog wasn’t done. “So I got my front companies. A chemical supply place down by the harbor. A couple of travel agencies. That packing company whose door you knocked in.”

  “Let me guess,” said Mariko. “You decorate every office with your art collection.”

  “Heh. See, Bullet? We got her thinking like a criminal already.”

  Idiot, she thought. Thinking like a criminal was in her job description. It was how she knew the mask thief was also the one who had stolen her sword. Kamaguchi’s mask wasn’t the only antique on that shelf. If the thief had been in it for the money, he’d have stolen everything valuable. And since he didn’t, the mask had special significance for him.

  “There’s more going on here. Your friends—what did you call them? Pansies? They wanted the mask for a reason. You bought it for a reason. What was it?”

  “Who knows? Sometimes I go on streaks. For a while there I was collecting samurai shit. Armor. Weapons. Your kind of thing, neh?”

  Mariko didn’t care to be reminde
d of her samurai showdown. “That isn’t a mempo,” she said, pointing at the demon mask glowering back at her from the screen of his laptop.

  “Huh?”

  “Mempo. Face mask. As in armored. The samurai used to wear them. I thought you said you were a collector.”

  He shrugged. Mariko shrugged back, aping him. She wouldn’t have been surprised if he had a wine cellar somewhere with a few hundred bottles whose names he couldn’t pronounce and whose nuances he couldn’t distinguish from a cheap lager. “This mask you bought is decorative,” she said. “Maybe for kabuki or something. It’s useless for combat.”

  Another shrug. “I don’t give a shit what it is. I just want to know when you’re going to get it back for me.”

  “Right. Because it was stolen by those mean boys you were playing with after school, neh?”

  Kamaguchi finished off his pineapple, his hands and blade sticky with the juice. He licked one of his knuckles clean with his too-fat tongue. “Look at the balls on you. I ought to make you drop your pants. Make sure you’re a chick.”

  Mariko hopped off her stool and headed for the door. “Have a nice day, Kamaguchi-san.”

  “All sass, no patience. You’re a chick, all right.”

  She heard his knife drop on the countertop, felt his heavy footfalls behind her. Without so much as a glance over her shoulder, she stabbed the elevator’s down button with the stub that had once been her right forefinger. But her left hand was ready to reach for her gun.

  “Okay, fine, you win,” the Bulldog said. When he saw her turn away from the elevator, his shoulders sagged in relief. “I ought to put you on my payroll. That way you’d have to listen to me.”

  Mariko gave him her most insolent smile. “You couldn’t afford me. Now, you want me to look into these people, you’ll have to give me something.”

  “I don’t have to give you shit. This is my house, girl.”

  “Well, then you’re out of luck, because you don’t know where these guys are, and neither do I.”

  “What makes you think I don’t—?”

  “Please. If you knew where to find the people you’re looking for, would you be talking to me? No. So you lost them. So start talking.”

  Kamaguchi frowned, exaggerating his underbite and making his lower teeth stick out. “You’re an annoying little—”

  “We can start with why they were so insistent on getting the mask last night. Why did they risk showing up when they knew we were going to launch a raid?”

  “Who knows? We’re talking religious nuts here, not businessmen.”

  “What makes you say they’re religious?”

  “Heh.” He shook his head in disgust and licked off another finger. “They call themselves the Divine Wind, for one thing. Sounds pretty gokudo at first, naming themselves after kamikaze dive-bombers, but with these guys you get the feeling it’s more about the divinity and less about the ‘fuck it, let’s go down fighting’ thing.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “You want to tell me you can’t tell the difference between some guy ringing your doorbell and some missionary ringing it? It’s the way they dress, the way they talk—all this ‘there is no place the wind cannot reach’ horseshit. Why can’t they just threaten you like a normal criminal? I swear, this is the last time I’m doing business with a bunch of cultists.”

  Mariko wasn’t a fan of making assessments based on others’ gut feelings—especially not people with nicknames like “the Bulldog”—but in this case she guessed he was probably right about the mask thief being religious. For one thing, anyone who deliberately crossed the Kamaguchi-gumi would have to be pretty optimistic about the afterlife. For another, walking through an active crime scene dressed as a SWAT operative took a certain kind of lunatic fearlessness, one Mariko thought she was more likely to find among religious extremists than the dope slinger set.

  And then there was the mask itself: an expensive trinket, yes, but the street value of the speed seizure was more than double what Kamaguchi’s insurance assessment said the mask was worth. Apart from religious fanaticism, Mariko couldn’t imagine what could tempt anyone to pay double its value and risk being caught in a police raid. It was a sure bet that the cops wouldn’t have seized the mask. It wasn’t contraband. The only reason Mariko had noticed it at all was that she’d half remembered that sketch of it in Yamada’s notebook.

  So why not wait a few days to steal it? Someone could have recognized the perp wasn’t SWAT. He might have been masked and armored, but that limping, rolling gait was distinctive. It only made sense for the thief to come for the mask if he had to have it right then, at that appointed time for some appointed purpose, and that suggested a very weird belief set. Very weird, very specific, very strongly held—all of it pointed to a cult.

  It pointed to the break-in at her apartment too. Centuries ago, the mask had some kind of connection to Inazuma steel. Last night, Kamaguchi’s mask and Mariko’s sword were stolen within hours of each other. It couldn’t be coincidence.

  Now that Mariko thought about it, she wondered how the perp had stolen authentic SWAT armor too. Apart from the military, only SWAT could legally own fully automatic weapons, and so to say they kept their gear under lock and key was a gross understatement. Better to say it should have been as easy to steal a tank as to steal a bulletproof vest with SWAT’s label on it. Yet somehow this perp had the full getup.

  Did these Divine Wind guys have an inside man? Was that how they’d known the raid was coming in advance? Or were they really modern-day ninja? Had they stolen the SWAT gear just as they’d stolen her sword? By passing through walls? It was impossible, and Mariko didn’t believe in the impossible. She was a detective; she believed what the evidence led her to believe. And faced with evidence of the impossible, a detective’s only choice was to reconsider what she meant by “possible.” In this case, that might mean a ninja clan operating in twenty-first-century Tokyo.

  But that was something she’d have to sort out later. For now, she had a yakuza hit man bullshitting her. “So let’s pretend you don’t know why they want the mask,” she said.

  “I’m telling you—”

  “Never mind. How did they find out you have it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on. If you were an art collector, then yeah, maybe they’d come looking for you specifically. But you’re not. You just like to buy expensive toys that make you feel like you’re actually upper class instead of just pretending to be.”

  “This is my house,” he said, slapping his chef’s knife down on the counter. “I’m not going to stand here and listen to—”

  “Sure you are. You don’t know where to find the guys you’re looking for. You need me, neh? To save face. You lost your little plaything, and you’d better get it back before the street finds out you lost a mountain of speed too. As soon as word gets out that the Bulldog can’t protect his own doghouse . . . well, how long have you got before someone puts you to sleep?”

  He glared at her with a raw, animalistic fury she’d only seen once before—in the eyes of his enforcer, Fuchida Shuzo, as Fuchida was trying to hack her to pieces. Kamaguchi would have strangled her then and there if he didn’t need her. She had no doubt of that. What she did have doubts about was his capacity for anger management. If she pushed him too far, he might kill her and figure out how to fix that little problem afterward. But backing down wasn’t a great option either. For bulldogs and yakuzas alike, fighting was all about posturing. To back down was to invite an immediate attack.

  So Mariko took a gamble and just glared back at him.

  If anything, he got angrier. “You’re walking pretty fucking close to the edge, girl.”

  “You want to be gokudo, that’s where you walk.”

  For a moment she thought she pushed him too far. He inhaled noisily, deeply, expanding his broad shoulders—maybe fueling up for a short but deadly fight that would cost Mariko her life. Then hung his head back and laughed. “You got some
fire in you, that’s for sure. I can’t tell if I want to fight you or fuck you.”

  “I can tell you what happens if you try either one. Now what’s it going to be? Are you going to tell me what I need to know?”

  18

  “They played him,” Mariko said. “The light’s green, by the way.”

  “Who played him?” said Han. “What the hell happened up there?”

  “Green means go,” she said.

  At last he managed to direct some of his concentration away from her and back to driving. “Mariko, come on.”

  “I told you already: those cult fanatics. The Divine Wind.”

  “I thought you said he played them.”

  “That’s what Kamaguchi thinks. He says a buyer approached him maybe six months ago through one of his front companies, some chemical supply place down in Odaiba. The buyer was a front man for this Divine Wind. The guy’s been buying hexamine by the barrel, making payment in Daishi. Kamaguchi says he conned the guy into paying double the volume he should have. But I think the buyer marked him as the owner of the mask from the beginning and wanted to play dumb.”

  “Wait a minute,” Han said. “Did you say hexamine?”

  “Yep.”

  “So our buyer’s making MDA?”

  “Looks like it,” said Mariko, happy to hear Han was thinking along the same lines. A boutique amphetamine like MDA fit in perfectly with Mariko’s mental profile of the cultist fanatic clientele. They were more likely to go for stimulants than depressants. MDA was both an upper and a hallucinogen, a religious experience in tablet form. Hexamine might have had a hundred industrial uses Mariko had never heard of, but in narcotics circles it was only known as a key ingredient in MDA.

  “So his buyer’s got to be a hell of a cook,” said Han. “MDA’s rare, but this Daishi is something else. It’s not just the best speed on the street; it’s also cheap enough that these dudes can afford to sling it around by the truckload.”