Daughter of the Sword: A Novel of the Fated Blades

by Steve Bein

  “Coincidence.”

  “Is it? I told you already: there are only three swords of this kind in private hands. One is in a place no one can steal it. I am holding the second. The third slew a woman in Kamakura, and the man who killed with that one intends to own this one as well.”

  Mariko frowned. “This is the third time you’ve spoken of these crimes that way. You’re much too familiar with what’s going on to be an innocent bystander. Tell me how you know so much about the Kurihara murder.”

  “You’re dodging the issue, Sergeant Oshiro. Only three swords of their kind, and your work has led you across the paths of two of them. What you call coincidence is indistinguishable from destiny. And what’s more, you believe in the power of the sword now. Destiny brought you to me just as it brought the sword to me. It’s brought you and the sword together.”

  No, Mariko thought. It was a fluke, a random convergence. But even as she thought it, she could not deny that for that one moment she truly believed there was more to Yamada’s blade than molecules. Even if only for a moment, she was certain it gave him the power of second sight.

  Even now she found the thought as unsettling as an earthquake. What did she have if not a rational mind that relied on logic and data? What would be left of her if she let those go? Her father died because Takemata Plastec was willing to cover up the facts of its gas leak and sugarcoat the truth about its effects. Mariko’s career as a detective was born out of a desire to uncover the facts and expose the truth. There was no room for magic in her worldview. To change that now would be to change who she was.

  As much to change the subject as to get an answer, she said, “I just figured it out. You keep talking about the one who wants to steal your sword as if he’s not here. None of these guys are the one. There’s somebody else, isn’t there?”

  “I wonder when your colleagues will get here,” Yamada said. “Would they consider it tampering with evidence if I clean my blade?”

  “Now who’s dodging the issue? You know who he is, don’t you?”

  Yamada shuffled, sword in hand, back to the staircase, his feet feeling their way around the dead body whose blood had irreparably stained his tatami floor. Once his hand found the banister he said, “My cleaning kit is upstairs. Will you excuse me?”

  “Don’t. It is tampering with evidence, to answer your earlier question. Now answer one of mine. Tell me who he is, Doctor.”

  Yamada’s feet went on, finding one step after the next.

  “This conversation isn’t over,” Mariko said. But she had a feeling it was.

  24

  The moment he saw Mariko, Lieutenant Ko asked, “What are you doing in my station? Aren’t you supposed to be off tonight?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, already bristling at his tone. Most cops would be praised for coming in on an off night, but for Mariko there was only abuse. She watched her fingers tighten on the armrest of her plastic office chair, then channeled her frustration into that hand so it would not take residence in her voice. “I’m here to offer testimony, sir.”

  Ko brightened at that. “Done something wrong, have you?”

  “No, sir. I witnessed a breakin and an attempted murder.”

  “Really? Just watched it happen? Didn’t try to stop it?”

  Mariko offered a thin smile. “Actually, I fought like hell to stay alive, sir. Maybe I forgot to mention: I was in the victim’s house at the time of the breakin. And I brought in that great big son of a bitch, if that’s worth anything.”

  She nodded toward the giant who had jumped her in Yamada’s sitting room. She would have pointed, but every time she moved her left arm she received riotous complaint from her ribs. Sooner or later she’d have to get them X-rayed.

  The perp was sitting, thumbs still zip-tied behind his back, on the edge of a steel desk. None of the office chairs would accommodate him. He reminded her of Konishiki, the famed sumo wrestler, but with a thinning buzz cut instead of a topknot, and a policeman taking photos of the tattoos on his massive arms. In truth the perp was probably only half Konishiki’s size, but even at half size he was still a beast. Gamera had fought smaller monsters. Mariko could see already that Ko had no intention of believing she’d collared him.

  “We’ll see about this,” he said, frowning. “I want an incident report on my desk in twenty minutes.”

  Mariko closed her eyes and told herself not to call him a slimy son of a bitch. Done right, the report would take the better part of an hour. If she didn’t do it right, he’d be justified in accusing her of a slapdash job. There was no winning with him.

  She pulled the report and went to work anyway. Now and then she glanced up to see Ko speaking quietly with her giant tattooed rikishi. Getting his side of the story, no doubt, and gathering ammunition to shoot her down.

  Nineteen and a half minutes later, he was still talking to her perp when she handed him the best she could do with the report. She wanted to dare him to find any cop in the department who could have done better. She also wanted to ask what he and a yakuza hit man had so much to talk about, but that shit-eating grin of his shut her up. Her blood was at a full boil, and she was afraid that if she opened her mouth, she’d get herself fired.

  Ko lit a new cigarette and smirked. “Sloppy police work, Oshiro.” He hadn’t even started reading the damn thing.

  “Your officer does you great credit,” said a reedy voice behind her.

  She turned to see Professor Yamada exiting an interview room, escorted by one of the few officers in the station at this time of night, a tall cop she didn’t know by name. “Had she not been there,” Yamada said, “I should surely be dead now.”

  The tall policeman nodded appreciatively. At first Mariko could not understand why; she knew she had the respect of a lot of her coworkers, but almost none of them were willing to show it publicly. Then she realized the giant with the tattooed arms was behind her, directly in the tall cop’s line of sight, and that the tall cop was not half as impressed with saving Yamada’s life as he was with the fact that Mariko had kayoed a suspect three times her size.

  That was good, she supposed, since she certainly hadn’t rescued Yamada. If anything, it had been the reverse. Had four assailants caught her alone in that house, she didn’t foresee it ending well for her.

  Ko, his cigarette dangling loosely from overlarge lips, nodded at the officer escorting Yamada. “Let’s see the difference between a job done right and Oshiro’s way of doing things.” His beckoning finger gestured at the manila folder in the tall cop’s folded fingers. A lanky arm handed it over and, as Ko leafed through it, the taller officer thanked Yamada for his time and excused himself.

  Lieutenant Ko frowned at the papers reflecting in his glasses. Mariko considered explaining the difference between interviewing a witness and filing a complete and detailed incident report, but thought better of it.

  As soon as Ko opened his mouth, she regretted her decision. “Three DOAs? One arrest? That’s not the way we do things, Oshiro. Perhaps you’d feel more at home if I transferred you to Chicago or Detroit.”

  The at home comment was a deliberate dig; he might just as well have called her a gaijin. “With all due respect,” she began, telling herself the man wasn’t due any respect at all, “I had nothing to do with those deaths. Professor Yamada killed two in self-defense. The third died because he was stupid.”

  “Is that so?”

  “A man with a deep leg wound shouldn’t try driving a car. If he hadn’t fled, maybe I could have got him to an ambulance. But he drove off, and my best guess is that he passed out behind the wheel. I didn’t put his car through that woman’s concrete garden wall, sir. That was his own fault.”

  Ko didn’t bother looking up from the crime report. “And whose fault was the dead man’s deep leg wound?”

  “Mine,” said Yamada. “Or it would be, if I should be held at fault for it. In any case, I’m the one that cut him.”

  “With a sword, it says here.” At last the dots
connected in Ko’s mind. “You’re the Yamada that reported an attempted breakin last week. I assigned Oshiro to your case. Oshiro, what were you doing there on your night off?”

  Mariko couldn’t answer. She certainly couldn’t admit she’d been looking into the Kurihara murder. That was none of her business, a matter for Yokohama PD to worry about. And Ko was looking for any breach of protocol to pin on her, anything at all. As Ko had happily told her himself, even an allegation would be enough. She could find nothing to say.

  “She gave me her card,” Yamada said. “I was told I should call if I remembered anything else about the case. I’m afraid I didn’t know Sergeant Oshiro’s work schedule. It’s all right that I called, isn’t it?”

  Lieutenant Ko looked at her, then at Dr. Yamada. “Yes,” he said at length, his jaw tight. “We’re always happy to serve.”

  A frown beset Ko’s face; his wide lips, large glasses, and the lines around his mouth made Mariko think of a carp. “So you’ve got a good handle on this case, have you, Oshiro?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. Then we won’t be hearing any more of this Narcotics nonsense, will we?”

  He gave her a triumphant smile, or as close to one as his fish lips could manage. Then he stubbed out his cigarette in a nearby ashtray, lit a new one, and closed himself in his office.

  “Well,” Mariko told Yamada, “I guess I’m stuck with you now.”

  Yamada winked. “Destiny.”

  “Uh-huh. How about you tell me what you know about these people who tried to steal your sword? These guys tonight seem like hired hands, and not just to me. You know who sent them. Tell me his name.”

  Yamada held his wristwatch a thumb’s length from his eye. “It’s late,” he said. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  “I can book you for obstructing justice, you know.”

  “I suppose that’s true.”

  “I’m trying to help you, Dr. Yamada, and I don’t appreciate you interfering with how I do my job. Why won’t you give me his name?”

  Yamada’s face darkened, as if a shadow passed over him. “Fuchida,” he said at last. “Fuchida Shūzō.”

  Mariko felt a thrill run up her spine. At last a real lead. “There,” she said, “was that so hard?”

  Yamada’s face grew darker. “Harder than you know.”

  “He lives here in Tokyo?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What does he do? Does he have a day job? Has he got a record?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on, you’ve got to give me something.”

  Frown lines deepened in Yamada’s face. “I’ve given all I can give you tonight. Please, Inspector, let me go home.”

  Mariko felt her face flush. The thrill of the hunt had overwhelmed her; only now did she notice how much this conversation had hurt Yamada. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll do a little looking into this Fuchida. We’ll talk later, all right?”

  Yamada nodded, his usual vitality completely drained. “Until then, Inspector. Good night.”

  25

  Throbbing bass quivered the bones in Fuchida’s chest. It was American rap music, the lyrics much too fast for Fuchida to make them out, but he’d heard the song before. A lot of the girls requested it. They liked to dance to it.

  They were dancing now, eight of them, the others being either on break, drinking with customers, or up in the champagne room. The eight on stage danced in cones of color, the light from the spots seemingly solid with all the cigarette smoke suspended in it. The club was warm with the heat of the Friday night crowd, but not so warm for the girls; Fuchida could see the erect nipples crowning the shadows of their breasts, swaying in the semisolid light.

  The bartender nodded to Fuchida as he walked in, already reaching for a bottle of Maker’s Mark. Fuchida threaded through the crowd and up the stairs to the club’s upper deck, where customers rarely came except on their way to the champagne room. The second floor overlooked the first, but it was too far from the stage for most customers’ liking, and the first floor was more than roomy enough.

  Naoko, one of the dancers, brought Fuchida his drink. She wore low heels, an electric-blue thong, and a baby-doll T-shirt that read “Nice Claup” in romaji. She sat on his lap as he sipped at the whiskey, but only briefly. “I can’t stay,” she said, her lips close to his ear so as not to shout. “My set’s up next.”

  He sipped again from his Maker’s Mark and watched the men gawk at her as she made her way through them. They knew better than to touch her. That happened a lot at the Kabukichō clubs, but not here, not even the drunks.

  The black faux leather creaked under him as he settled into the booth to watch the clientele. He recognized a group of them. Friday night regulars. They were stockbrokers, he thought, or something like that, anyway. He wasn’t a hundred percent sure what the difference was between a stockbroker and a trader and an investment banker, but whatever these guys were, they were the kind of useless that needed to pay to see a naked pair of tits. They’d be here until the trains started running again at five or six in the morning, laughing at their boss’s jokes, drinking themselves legless just because he said so.

  If there was a worse fate for a man, Fuchida didn’t know what it was.

  Downstairs, a boy came in from the street. He was skinny as a bamboo pole, maybe twenty or twenty-one. He wore his hair the way they did these days, an hour spent carefully arranging it to look the same as it would right after a good postshower toweling. The kid’s grandfather was tight with Fuchida’s dad, and so the family had made sure the kid had a job. For now he was Fuchida’s errand boy, but the kid was smart, and Fuchida predicted he’d make his way up the ladder.

  The boy scanned the club, his eyes probably still adjusting to the dark, and when he spotted Fuchida he scurried up to the upstairs booth. “Boss,” the kid said, “the cops nailed Kaneda.”

  Fuchida looked the boy in the eye. “They have him now?”

  “Yeah. I hear it was a lady cop who brought him in.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope.”

  Stupid fat fucker. “Begging for help, is he?”

  “He wants a lawyer, yeah.”

  “All right.” Fuchida returned his gaze to the dance floor. “Go home; get a good night’s sleep. When you wake up, find yourself a good suit. Tone your hair down; make yourself look like a lawyer. Then go see Kaneda and tell him he gets a real attorney when he manages to actually win a fight against an eighty-seven-year-old cripple. Until then, tell him he can put his fat ass on the cot in his cell and sit there until he’s skinny enough to slide between the bars.”

  “You got it.”

  “Get out of here.”

  One of the drunk stockbrokers was waggling his nose in Naoko’s muff. Fuchida had a mind to walk down there and smash a shot glass or two with the guy’s forehead. It wasn’t a matter of being territorial; he just wanted to break something. Four men. Four men against a blind man old enough to remember when Fuji was just a molehill. How could so much have gone so wrong?

  Twice now he’d made an attempt on the sword. The first time he’d gone himself, and he would have broken in too if it hadn’t been for the song. It was his beautiful singer with her high, crooning cry, serenading him to fight, to kill, to prove himself to her. He knew better than to indulge her. Give in to her now and only madness could follow—madness, and then death. So he’d sent Kaneda and the others instead. And now this.

  He was poised to carve out his place in history, and now the universe conspired to delay him. Becoming the first to own two Inazuma blades was just the first step in creating his legacy. Even that would pale when he parlayed the old man’s sword into the creation of his new empire. He would not compete with the bosses of the Kamaguchi-gumi, but neither would he settle for leading his father’s life. Fuchida had no interest in being the underworld equivalent of those useless drunk stockbrokers. He would not live in thrall. He would take the reins of his own destiny
, and to do that all he needed was to get his hands on that sly old bastard’s sword.

  His phone rumbled in his pocket. He knew who it was without looking; only one person would call this number at two thirty in the morning. He walked quickly for the door to the manager’s office and let himself in. The bass still thumped through the door behind him, but quiet was a relative thing in a strip club.

  “Mr. Travis,” Fuchida said in English, the v giving him trouble. Differentiating v from b had always eluded him. “How are things in California?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  The reply came in Japanese, and from a woman. Fuchida looked at the phone. The caller ID said HOSPITAL WEST, followed by a number Fuchida didn’t recognize. “Who is this?” he said.

  “My name is Ichikawa Junko,” the woman said. “I am the night nurse in palliative care at St. Luke’s International. Begging your pardon, but I was given this number as an emergency contact for a Fuchida Tatsuya-sama. Have I misdialed?”

  Fuchida blinked hard. He wished he’d brought his drink with him. “No. You called the right number.”

  “I’m so sorry, sir, but Fuchida-sama has taken a turn for the worse. The file we have for him instructs me to call should anything change in his condition. I’m terribly sorry to be calling so late.”

  “Just get to the point, will you?” Fuchida opened one drawer after the next in the manager’s black sheet-steel desk, looking for a tumbler and something to fill it with. “What’s going on with my dad?”

  “I’m so sorry, sir, but his breathing has become quite irregular. His oncologist fears he may not survive the night.”

  A double beep overrode the nurse’s next obsequious apology. Fuchida looked at the phone’s little screen again. PRIVATE NAME, the caller ID said, and below it, PRIVATE NUMBER. He looked at the phone, almost said something into it, looked at it again. Then he hit the green CALL button and switched to the other line.