Daughter of the Sword: A Novel of the Fated Blades

by Steve Bein

  Mariko blew a breath out her nose. “But you called someone in my department.”

  “No.”

  “Fine. The mayor’s office, maybe?”

  “No.”

  “You know the answer I’m looking for. I’m just not asking the right questions.”

  Yamada nodded. “You’re a good detective, Oshiro-san.”

  “And you better get in the mood to tell me how high up the ladder this goes.” Mariko felt her shoulders stiffen and her jaws clench. “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you, Sensei?”

  “A very good detective indeed, Oshiro-san.”

  “Come on. This isn’t fair.”

  “You’d rather not know. You’d look at me differently.”

  “I won’t,” she said. “I swear I won’t.”

  “You’re not the type to make promises you can’t keep, Oshiro-san. Don’t start now.”

  Mariko sighed. “You’re really not going to tell me, are you?”

  Yamada laughed. “Good night, Inspector.”

  44

  Fuchida watched as a small, slender woman walked down Yamada’s front stairs. Her hair was short, cropped even shorter on the back of her head, and there the hair stood in dark, sweat-slicked spikes. The sweat gave fuel to doubts in Fuchida’s mind. When he’d seen the woman enter, he figured her for the Oshiro woman, the one who had arrested Kaneda. (It seemed improbable—Kaneda was three times her size—but the biggest man and the smallest man had the same response to pepper spray.) But now the sweat was throwing him off. Had she given the old codger a fuck? No, not while the house was under surveillance. But if she wasn’t a whore, who was she? What other sort of woman would go in there for two hours and come out sweating? A masseuse would have brought her tools of the trade, as would an in-home nurse. Yamada had always been meticulously neat; no way this could be a maid. But if it was the lady cop, what could explain the sweat?

  He shifted his position in the bucket seat of his rented Nissan Versa, which was parked a block and a half from the old man’s house. Staking out a stakeout was boring, joint-stiffening work, and risky besides. The Versa was parked facing away from the house, the better to make a quick departure, its dashboard monitor wired to a Sony Handycam poised on a GorillaPod to face out the back window on maximum zoom. Without the camera Fuchida could never have got close enough to see the woman’s sweat, nor even to clearly see her face. With the camera, Fuchida ran the risk of someone spying the dashboard display, and therefore had to maintain constant vigilance over every passerby.

  Even so, he was glad he’d thought to call his man in the TMPD about the surveillance. If running surveillance on a police sting was risky, at least it was better than walking blindly into one. Fuchida had almost done it too. Whenever he had his beautiful singer in his hands, he wanted nothing more than to put her to use. Even now she called to him; he’d had no choice but to lock her in the back, or else drive himself mad listing all the reasons why he shouldn’t go right up the street and show all those cops why stun guns and batons and even their puny pistols were no match for a sword.

  His phone buzzed in his pocket like a cicada. Fuchida cursed the distraction. Then he saw the caller ID. “Hello, Mr. Travis.”

  “My favorite samurai. How’s it hanging?”

  Fuchida didn’t understand the question. That was hardly a problem, since the American left him no time to answer it. “Listen,” he said, “I want to see my sword. Send me a picture of it.”

  Fuchida glanced in the rearview mirror, to the damnable house of the damnable man who still had the damnable sword. “So sorry,” said Fuchida. “I do not have picture.”

  “So make one. You’re in the birthplace of the camera phone, right?”

  “So sorry, Mr. Travis. I do not have camera phone.”

  “So buy one.”

  Fuchida held his thumb over the receiver for a moment, the better to mask a sigh of frustration. “It is not advisable, Mr. Travis. The flash is bad for…nan to iu ka na? The paint. On the wood.”

  “The lacquer,” said the American. “On the scabbard. And I don’t give a fuck. It’s my sword now, and I’ll tell you what’s good and bad for it. Right now what’s good for it is me showing it to my girlfriend. She wants to know what I’m flying all the way to Japan to get.”

  Fuchida switched the phone to his left hand, then started the car. He didn’t know how seriously the police were taking this stakeout, but it was possible they might monitor cellular traffic.

  “Hello?” said the American.

  “I am here, Mr. Travis.”

  “So when are you sending me my picture?”

  “Terribly sorry, Mr. Travis. I cannot access the sword just now.”

  “What’d you do, lose it? No, don’t even answer that. Just listen. You get your hands on my sword, and you do it pronto, or else your whole world is going to turn to shit. You do not want to stand between me and what I want.”

  Fuchida smiled. “Do you threaten me?”

  “You bet your ass I’m threatening you.”

  Fuchida wished he had better command of this language. “Bet your ass” was one of those phrases that would never come naturally to him, utterly inexpressible as it was in his own tongue. Someday, when he was rich enough to command his own destiny, he would arrange to live in the U.S. for a year and master as many of their offensive sayings as he could.

  For the present, his English would have to do as it was. “You are a stockbroker, Mr. Travis. You cannot hurt me.”

  “I’m a commodities trader, you ignorant fuck. And I don’t need to hurt you. All I need is Ryusuke Kamaguchi’s phone number. Surprise, motherfucker. Didn’t think I knew about him, did you?”

  There followed a torrent of words too fast for Fuchida to follow. Then, slower, “I know all about your rules against pushing coke. I make one call to your oyabun and you end up in bowls of shark fin soup all over your shit-ass little country.”

  “Shark fin soup is Chinese, not Japanese, Mr. Travis.”

  “Good for the Chinamen.”

  “Your ship, it will arrive here shortly, yes? Much too late to turn it around. I think you should not threaten me, Mr. Travis. I think now you have no choice but to deal with me.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe I sell all the shit to the Koreans and let them infiltrate it into your market. Then you don’t see a penny, do you? One way or another, I’m getting paid. I’d tell you I don’t give a fuck how, but the fact is I want that sword. When the ship gets there, you’re going to be standing on the dock to meet it, sword in hand. My boys don’t see it, they give me a phone call—and then Kamaguchi’s getting a phone call. Wakaru?”

  “I understand, Mr. Travis.”

  Fuchida folded the phone shut and dropped it in the seat beside him. He tucked the Nissan into the next parking spot he saw, then took his BlackBerry from his jacket pocket and waited as it pulled up his calendar. He could not help but feel that, if only his English were better, he could have properly asserted himself over the American. He could not understand how they had managed to permeate every corner of his country with their language and still leave the possibility that he could not speak it. The BlackBerry with its impossible distinction between r’s and l’s, the Versa with its unpronounceable v; he lived in a world that defied speech.

  The burakuberi showed him what he’d memorized already, what he double-checked now only out of frustration. The American’s ship would arrive on Wednesday. A week from yesterday. To walk into Yamada’s house, take the sword, and walk out again might take as long as two minutes. He had six days to accomplish it. He wondered how he could manage it given so little time.

  45

  Mariko hated to admit it, but Lieutenant Ko was actually good at police work. Yes, he was sexist; yes, he was a horrid, ugly, evil little troll; but damn him, he had been right on the money when he’d accused her of collecting nothing but circumstantial evidence. Fuchida had left no fingerprints at any of his murder scenes, and as he’d committed all but the Kurihar
a homicide in public places, there was no point in trying to collect fiber evidence. Even if some go-getter in Violent Crimes had wanted to look for any trace fibers Fuchida might have left behind, Mariko couldn’t have told him what her perp was wearing, how long his hair was, or any other detail. Neither she nor a single member of her team had even laid eyes on their suspect.

  Mariko had nine cops working under her in round-the-clock shifts, and so far all she had was hours and hours of unremarkable footage. Her stakeout team knew Yamada’s mailman on sight. That was all.

  No record of Fuchida connected him to any of the slain drug offenders. Nor did he appear in connection to any known drug offender in Tokyo. A search in the opposite direction generated hordes of drug offenders with bōryokudan connections, but none of interest: all of them were pushing pedestrian stuff, few were ever prosecuted, and none of them had any known association with Fuchida. Here and there she found cases of rogue coke and heroin dealers, most of whom had been chopped up by yakuzas before they ever showed up on a police department’s radar. The bōryokudan were brutally efficient at maintaining their end of the tacit agreement; all the cops had to do was look the other way at the softer narc crimes they allowed yakuzas to commit with impunity.

  Everything Mariko discovered made it all the more reasonable to think Fuchida had nothing to do with the drug scene. So why was the morgue cooling off three dead pushers with sword wounds? Surely Tokyo couldn’t have more than one sword killer at large. Mariko was certain that Fuchida was responsible, but the evidence that was good enough to confirm a hunch wasn’t evidence enough to convict.

  And from there she could only conclude that she’d never find Fuchida unless he walked right into her sting. The thought hardly inspired hope. It seemed as likely as Saori popping back up, and it had been eight days since anyone had seen her. In fact, the last person to see her was Mariko, who had watched her storm away from the Lawson just down the street from her mother’s apartment. Saori had been sober for eight days then, and in all likelihood she’d been high for the eight days since.

  Their mother was worried sick, of course. Mariko found it odd that she wasn’t feeling the same worry herself. A family having its youngest daughter go missing for more than a week should have been worrisome, shouldn’t it? Yet unlike her mother, Mariko had been able to overcome her initial panic. Maybe her kenjutsu training had already instilled some self-control in her, or maybe it was just that after a few days her brain had gone into survival mode. Maybe she’d taken all the panic she could take, and now she just shoved the rest into some deep, dark corner of her mind. Every time she thought about Saori, she felt her stomach do backflips, but the cold, hard truth was that she didn’t have to think about Saori every minute. Most of the time she found a way to go about her day: work, sword training, going into the Docomo store to get her phone contract sorted out.

  It was while waiting for the Docomo guy to fix the computer glitch that Mariko figured it out. If she were the big sister in any normal family, the panic she’d felt at first would probably have grown worse with every passing day. But Mariko was the sister of an addict. Their mom was the mother of an addict. And that came with certain facts, one of which was that until Saori got sober, she was apt to disappear into some deep, dark hole now and again.

  Once she figured that out, Mariko got a better understanding of her mother too. Her mom thought of their family as normal. She’d always thought of them that way, despite having a husband die of cancer at forty-three and despite having two daughters react to his death in the most incongruous ways possible. And because their mom thought of the family as normal, Saori’s absence was the biggest thing in the world. It had replaced the sun: everything revolved around it, and everything took on a different color in its light.

  It was only when her mother stopped playing Ping-Pong that Mariko understood how bad things were for her. Mariko had been sleeping at her mom’s ever since, though the combination of sleeping on the sofa conspired with Yamada’s relentless kenjutsu drills to put a crick in Mariko’s neck that just wouldn’t quit. For the past few days she’d eaten breakfast and dinner with her mother every day, but even so, when Mariko finally got her phone back and working, she checked her messages hoping for something from Saori and found thirty-eight messages from their mother instead.

  So instead of looking for Fuchida, and instead of looking for Saori, Mariko went looking for a quiet place where she could sit and call her mom. Worry was one thing, but they’d have to have a chat about why thirty-eight messages was a little much for someone she was going to see for dinner every night.

  As it happened, Mariko was right across the street from the shopping mall where she’d arrested Bumps. She went in and sat on the same bench where she’d stationed Mishima on the night of the sting. The mall was dead, and a listless gray light shone down through the roof of translucent plastic half eggs.

  Mariko called home to talk her mother off the ledge. That phrase, talk her off the ledge, struck her even as the phone was ringing. Saori had first coined the phrase, back when Mariko was still in academy. Their mother had always been the hysterical sort, overprotective of her children yet more than willing to bully them with guilt. It was a New Year’s party, and over a secretly shared glass of shōchū Saori had asked whether Mariko got to learn any supersecret police negotiation skills, the better to talk their mother off the ledge when she inevitably flew off the handle about Saori’s drinking underage.

  Those were the days before Mariko knew that Saori had a problem, days when a little sister drinking with her friends in the park was no cause for alarm. Mariko had done her share of partying too—or if not her share, a little bit, anyway. Everyone had. After her twentieth birthday, Mariko bought for her sister just as a friend’s elder brother had bought for Mariko. How could she call herself a good elder sister and do otherwise?

  “Hello?” her mother’s voice said through the cell. “Mariko? What are you giggling about?”

  “Nothing, Mom. Sorry. Just wanted to tell you my phone’s working again.”

  “Oh.”

  “You okay?”

  “I just thought…” Her tone was as lifeless as the dull gray Plexiglas mannequin breasts overhead. “Since you were laughing, I was hoping maybe you’d heard from your sister.”

  “Nope. Sorry, Mom. I was only thinking of something funny she said.”

  “Oh. What was it?”

  “Something naughty.” Mariko sighed. “Why is it that when she’s gone, it’s easier to remember her being bad than being good?”

  It was strange to be having this conversation here, where memories of handling Saori with handcuffs flared so vividly. Mariko thought about fate, about that night, about how, of all the junkies in the city, it had been Saori to walk into her bust. If only she could get so lucky with Fuchida.

  “Miko,” her mother said, “do you remember the time your sister walked right through the rock garden at Ginkakuji?”

  “Sort of,” Mariko said, which was a lie. The sight of Saori’s pretty pink hat catching the wind just so, and of Saori’s little footprints leaving all those craters across the concentric rings so carefully raked into the pebbles—they were among the clearest memories of Mariko’s childhood. The story was old and worn, but she knew how much her mom enjoyed telling it. Mariko laughed at all the right parts, and in the meantime she wondered whether Saori had any choice but to be an abuser. What had pushed her over the edge? Was it Mariko, implicitly condoning her habits by buying her booze while Saori was still wearing her uniform skirt as short as their high school teachers would allow? Was Mariko’s culpability deeper because she’d been a police academy recruit at the time? Or was the cause something so deep-seated that even Saori couldn’t say what it was? Some genetic factor? Or could the whole problem be chalked up as Saori’s response to their father’s death?

  Mariko blinked hard. These were the questions that would run like a bullet train, taking untold kilometers to stop if she let them build any momentu
m. She tuned in to her mother again, laughing sincerely at the part in the story where the big gaijin tourist got so mad that a little girl had ruined his photo opportunity of the rock garden. “I was so embarrassed, Miko-chan. There aren’t even words to describe it.” But her mother was laughing all the same.

  “She’s always been a troublemaker,” Mariko said. “Mom, listen, I should get back to work, okay?”

  “I thought today was your day off.”

  “It is, but I’m running this stakeout, remember? I’m not really going to have a day off until it’s done.”

  “All right. You’ll be home for dinner?”

  “You bet.”

  Mariko folded her phone shut and used it as a paperweight, preventing the crosswind blowing through the mall from claiming the folder she set down on the bench beside her. She slid the top page of the report from the folder and skimmed it. It was the latest status report from her stakeout. It had half a ruddy brown thumbprint on one corner—barbecue sauce, Mariko guessed—and nothing else unusual. The comings and goings of the neighbors. An argument between a boyfriend and girlfriend, loud enough to get the surveillance officers’ attention, neither protracted enough nor violent enough to believe it was meant as a distraction. Fuchida remained a ghost.

  Mariko jumped in her skin when a pigeon burst forth from under her seat, startled by something only another pigeon could guess. Her pulse pounded hard and fast in her temples, but Mariko realized it wasn’t because of the pigeon. She would find no peace and quiet here, nor would she find it at work, nor at her mother’s apartment. There was only one place she could go to find a little serenity.

  “Why, Inspector,” Yamada said when he opened his door. “Have you come to update me on my many observers?”

  “I was hoping we might do some sword training, actually.”

  Her sensei smiled. “That’s the spirit. I’d just as soon not hear about your stakeout anyhow. It’s strange knowing they’re out there watching. I never know how much they can see.”

  “Pretty much everything,” Mariko said, and she told him how the thermal imaging worked.