Daughter of the Sword: A Novel of the Fated Blades

by Steve Bein

  “I’m going there right now,” Fuchida said, pointing across the avenue. “My car is just across the street.”

  For three seconds she stood there thinking. Then she said, “All right. But don’t try anything. My sister’s a cop. She taught me how to do stuff you won’t like.”

  “I’ll keep my distance,” Fuchida said with a smile. “What’s your name?”

  “Saori.”

  53

  The cell rang in Mariko’s purse while she was at her mother’s. Her fingers fished past the Cheetah and the compact and her key chain before they found the chirping phone.

  “Oshiro?”

  “Yes,” said Mariko, and then with her thumb over the receiver, “Just a second, Mom.”

  “Sorry to bother you off duty,” said the voice on the other end. It was a deep male voice, vaguely familiar to Mariko, but she couldn’t place it. “We got a fifty-two keeps mentioning your name.”

  Fifty-two. 10-52 was TMPD code for an ambulance request.

  Saori.

  “How is she?” Mariko said. Her heart pounded so hard that the words shuddered in her throat. “Is she alive?”

  “It’s a male,” the cop’s voice said. It could only be a cop; no one else would use the term fifty-two. “Slender, average height. No ID, but he says his name’s Kawamura Ryotarō. You know him?”

  “No,” said Mariko. Then, after a second, “Well, maybe. Which hospital?”

  “Tokai. Better hurry, Oshiro. He’s bleeding bad.”

  As soon as Mariko hung up, her mother was clinging to her arm, fingernails digging like a cat’s claws. “Who was it?” she said. “Is it her? Is she all right?”

  “I don’t know, Mom. It wasn’t Saori. Maybe someone who knows something, though. Mom, I need to go.”

  It took fully five minutes for Mariko to disengage herself from her mother, fifteen minutes more before she reached the hospital. She approached the desk attendant in a rush, and then for a moment she couldn’t remember the name the cop on the phone had given her. At last she said, “Kawamura. Kawamura Ryotarō.”

  The desk attendant looked at Mariko’s badge, then directed her to the waiting area of the emergency room. Just then the big white ER doors bumped open, tapped at first by the foot of a gurney, then pulled to the walls by the invisible hands of automated hinges. On the gurney lay Kawamura “Bumps” Ryota.

  Bumps had one purple cheek, the eyebrow purple on that side too, and a fat pillow of ice packs was bound to his abdomen by what looked like half a kilometer of gauze. An IV drip hung from a tall chrome pole, its plastic vein snaking down until it entered Bumps’s left forearm. He lay on clean white sheets, but blood spattered the blue jumpsuit of the paramedic wheeling the gurney. A uniformed cop followed him, sunglasses propped in his hair and reflecting the ceiling’s rectangular lights.

  “Officer Toyoda,” Mariko said to the cop. She hadn’t seen him since Toyoda let Bumps slip past him in the shopping mall sting. He looked at her with sullen eyes, his mouth expressionless, leaving it to Mariko to sort out whether he was still pissed at her for dressing him down or whether he was embarrassed that she found him at his new detail questioning ER patients. Mariko didn’t have the energy for it. She told the paramedic, “I need to speak with your patient.”

  “He’s lost a lot of blood,” he said. “I’m taking him to surgery right now.”

  “Tried to help her,” Bumps said weakly. An incoherent murmur followed, trailing into nothing.

  Mariko walked alongside the gurney, which the paramedic was pushing toward polished steel elevator doors on the far side of the lobby. “You’ve seen better days, Bumps.”

  She saw Toyoda do a double take, then squint at Bumps, then groan. “That’s the same Bumps we collared?”

  “No, it’s one of the hundred other guys around here named Bumps. Nice detective work.”

  Toyoda groaned again and rolled his eyes. Mariko tried not to enjoy it too much. In truth she could forgive him for not recognizing Bumps in his current condition. But pulped face or no, Mariko would never have forgotten a guy who out-juked her in front of a bunch of other cops.

  She wished she had more time to relish the moment. “What happened, Bumps? Looks like someone kicked you in the face.”

  “I fell. After he stabbed me.” Bumps slid his pale right hand up onto his bandaged belly.

  She eyed the mountain of gauze that wrapped him like a cummerbund. She could see only one reason to have so much dressing on his back: his puncture wound must have gone clean through him. The biggest knife in Tokyo wasn’t big enough to leave a hole like that. Either Bumps was attacked from the front and behind, or else…“You get stabbed by a sword, Bumps?”

  Toyoda and the paramedic both stopped in their tracks. Mariko thought she could guess why. They both knew Bumps’s wound was a through-and-through, but neither of them could imagine how Mariko could have known that. Toyoda, unable to restrain himself, blurted, “No wonder you made detective.”

  For his part, Bumps only said, “Uh-huh. Tried to help her.”

  “You know his name, don’t you, Bumps? It’s Fuchida?”

  “Uh-huh. I tried—I tried—”

  “Son of a bitch,” Toyoda said. He gaped at her the way she remembered looking at twenty-year veterans when she was in her first month. There was awe there, and shame, and maybe a touch of dread that he’d never attain her status. But of course he didn’t know what case she was working. He wouldn’t know about the sword killings either. He certainly would have heard reports about the recent string of homicides, but Ko had slammed the lid on any talk of swords. As far as he was concerned, that aspect of the case was Mariko’s private little flight of fancy. And as far as Officer Toyoda was concerned, Mariko had walked up to the victim, eyeballed him, and identified both the assailant and his weapon on the spot.

  Mariko had no time to correct him. Her mind was racing. At last she had her connection between Fuchida and the rash of drug dealer murders. “Fuchida’s the one you told me about, isn’t he? The one who wants to blow the cocaine market wide open? What happened, Bumps? Did he come after you for talking to me?”

  “Not you. Kamaguchis.”

  “I should have seen it before,” Mariko said. “He needed to recruit people to sling for him, but someone started talking, neh? The Kamaguchi-gumi found out about his coke plans, and Fuchida had to silence everyone who could rat him out. Damn, I should have guessed it. Why else would he make dealers his targets…?” Her racing mind doubled its speed. “That many dealers could move a lot of blow, neh? He must be getting one hell of a shipment. And that explains why he wants the second sword.…”

  She snapped her phone from her purse and motioned the paramedic to take Bumps on his way. With the phone pressed to one ear and a finger pressed to the other, she walked quickly for the door. Her heels clacked against the marble and an ambulance wailed outside, but Mariko had no thought for anything but the ringing phone.

  “It’s Oshiro,” she said as soon as someone picked up. “Run all the sword names you’ve got against narcotics convictions. Check with NPA, Interpol, everyone.”

  “Are you sure, Sergeant? Fuchida’s bōryokudan. They’re more likely to kill a coke dealer than to deal it themselves, neh?”

  “Fuchida’s looking to change the playbook. He’s trading the sword for coke, I’m sure of it. I think he figured the bosses would’ve noticed if he paid in cash, so he tried an end run around them. It didn’t work; the Kamaguchi-gumi’s onto him now, and they’ll be gunning for him soon if they aren’t already. We need to catch him before they do, understand? They are not going to win this one.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  At last, Mariko thought. At last she had a clear vision of her enemy’s plan. She even understood why he’d been so damned hard to find. Hiding from the police was one thing; hiding from yakuzas was a whole new level of complicated. At last the pieces were falling into place.

  And as much as she hated to admit it, Yamada had been right fr
om the very beginning. The forces of destiny were flowing, roaring in her ears as loud as a waterfall. Her cocaine tip, Yamada’s case, the Kurihara murder—in the end they all proved to be facets of the same jewel. It was too much to call coincidence. Yamada-sensei would be delighted.

  She looked at the screen on her phone. Seven oh two. She was late for Dvořák, late for meeting Yamada. Oh well, she thought. She’d find him at intermission. And now she had something interesting to talk about.

  Three floors up, Bumps Ryota lay in an anesthetic fog. His last meth hit had long since worn off, a perfectly good high ruined by that maniac and his sword, but the oxycodone in his IV drip was kicking in nicely. A pillar of pain still stood firm in the left side of his belly—in his mind’s eye it was a length of cloth, twisted and twisted so many times that its fibers were tearing—but the rest of his body was a thick gray cloud, cool and without substance.

  He couldn’t imagine what could possibly have possessed him to go after Fuchida and the girl. Trying to help was one thing, but Fuchida had a damn sword. It felt like the thing was still in him, stabbing through the fog.

  After being stabbed he’d fallen on his face, and in falling he’d bitten his tongue. Hard. Between the oxycodone, his swollen cheek, and his handicapped tongue, he was afraid nobody could understand him. It was an elusive fear, one he had a hard time keeping track of in the fog, but it had real urgency whenever he found it, and so when he found it he spoke as best he could. “Forgot to tell her the most important part,” he’d repeat. “Tried to help her. Her sister. He has her sister.”

  54

  As she descended the shrub-lined stairs leading down to the Suntory Hall plaza, Mariko could tell it was intermission. It seemed much too early for an intermission—not even eight o’clock yet—but there were the lobby doors, black steel and glass, propped open despite the evening chill. All around them clustered a crowd of well-dressed people. But something was strange about this crowd. It took her a moment to sort it out, but at last she did: none of them were smoking. No gray puffs hovered above the crowd, nor did any smoke drift downwind of it.

  Her stomach became a cold stone. She sprinted toward the crowd; the cold air ripped at her lungs, making her breath taste of blood. Something was terribly wrong.

  She reached the crowd without slowing, punching through the first ranks of symphony patrons like a warhorse through helpless infantry. She muscled through the rest with sharp elbows and sharper words, men’s words, words her grandmothers would blush to hear her say.

  She fought her way into the lobby. At last, finding a ring of cold air in the center of the crowd, she saw the bleeding form of Yamada Yasuo. He lay on a gurney, a mask of clear blue plastic over his mouth and nose, layers of blood-sodden gauze heaped high on his belly. The paramedics weren’t even keeping it compressed anymore. Yamada-sensei was—

  No. She wouldn’t accept that. She fell to her knees before his body, her fingers squelching in his blood as she pressed the gauze to his chest. There was no pulsing wound to compress, no bleeding to stop. She glanced at his face, hoping for some sign of response. The unseeing eyes made her wince and flinch away.

  In some remote corner of her mind she asked herself why the paramedics hadn’t stopped her from interfering. They should have pulled her from their patient by now. She looked up to see the two of them, their blue uniforms splashed with red, held back by three plainclothes cops from her unit. A fourth policeman, who like the others must have been working crowd control until Mariko had barged in, laid his long-fingered hand on her shoulder. “Sergeant,” he said. That was all.

  Later, when at last the ambulance men had their way, when Mariko abandoned their patient so they could do their job, when the crowd had dispersed, when the men in her unit commandeered a tower of napkins from the snack bar and a half-empty bottle of Sani-Kleen from the ambulance so she could wash the blood from her hands and clothes and face, Mariko regained the power of speech. Sitting cross-legged on the cold flagstones of the plaza, looking at the blood on her shoes, she said, “What happened?”

  Ino—the one who had laid his hand on her shoulder, the tall one who had debriefed Yamada some days before—cleared his throat. “We never saw him coming. I was watching the lobby from the stairs. Mishima and Takeda had eyes on the front doors. We thought you were going to be side by side with Yamada. I spotted Yamada, and then I was looking over the crowd for you. Next thing I know, people are screaming.”

  Mishima, the chubby cop she’d worked with before in the mall sting, gave her a different story. “I’m watching Yamada from the moment he gets out of the taxicab,” he said, his breath smelling like day-old coffee. “He’s alone, which surprised me. But he’s an easy guy to track in a crowd; just follow the silver hair. So I’m watching him, and all of a sudden that little head of silver hair drops out of sight. By the time I get to him, there’s enough blood on the floor to fill a bathtub. No assailant in sight.”

  “I saw him,” said Takeda, a short cop and the only other detective on Mariko’s team. “He walked right past me. Strange-looking guy: pale face but dark eyes, dark mouth. Long ponytail and long black jacket. He was walking fast, neh, and the crowd parted for him, but I figured they did that because he looks like a dead guy. I didn’t know anything had happened yet, neh? Nobody’s screaming yet, because so far nobody’s seen any blood. Our perp, he must have killed him real fast, real quiet, neh, because he was a good ten paces from the body when he passed me, and still nobody was crying out.”

  All three of her men had more to say, but Mariko could only listen distractedly. They could not even agree on how tall Fuchida was, though now that Takeda mentioned the ponytail, all three of them recalled seeing him. She wanted to scream at them for their idiocy, their incompetence. Next time you stake out a lobby, a voice inside her yelled, you don’t put the tall guy up on the stairs and the short guy on the ground outside. And maybe you should think to keep an eye on the man who looks like a corpse, the one wearing an overcoat long enough to conceal a sword. She wanted to bring back the crowd just so she could scream at them, a herd of sheep so wrapped up in their bleating conversations that they might just as well have walked past an atom bomb on the way to their seats.

  But all of that was misdirected anger. Three cops and three hundred people did not notice a man walk up to Yamada and run him through with an enormous razor blade, but Mariko should have noticed because Mariko should have been standing right there. She should have seen Fuchida over her shoulder. She should have zapped him with the Cheetah and clapped her cuffs on him. Or trained her pistol on him before he ever got that close. At the very least she should have put herself between Yamada and the blade. She was young; she might have survived the stabbing. It should have been her in the ambulance now, bleeding but not dead, apologizing to Yamada for spoiling the concert. She’d had the opportunity to be the heroine and she hadn’t shown up.

  She went through the motions, trying to reconstruct the murder. Yamada had entered through the right-hand doors; Fuchida had exited through the left. According to the paramedics, the stab wound ran through the small intestine, the spleen, and the left lung. Yamada had turned to face him, then. Perhaps he’d heard the sword being drawn. He turned, and was face-to-face with Fuchida when the blade went in. At that distance Yamada might even have been able to make out his killer’s face.

  The footprints, bloody red on red carpet, suggested that Fuchida had walked Yamada to the wall of the ticket booth, then withdrawn the sword. “He was a tough old bastard,” Ino said. “Managed a few steps before he fell.”

  What did it matter? Mariko wanted to say. He never had a chance. Eighty-seven years old, with a perforated spleen to spread its toxins through the wound, complicating any attempt at surgery. Yamada had trained his protégé too well.

  Her phone rang. Mariko grabbed it reflexively, then thought better of it and almost let it fall back into her purse. There wasn’t a single soul she wanted to talk to tonight. But that wasn’t quite true. Ther
e was one, and her name was on the caller ID.

  “Oh my God, Saori, please tell me you’re okay.” The words came tumbling out of her mouth. “Just…just say you’re okay and tell me where I can find you. That’s all I can handle right now.”

  “I have your sister,” said a deep, masculine voice, “and I will give her back to you in exchange for the sword.”

  “The hell you will,” Mariko said, and the haze of grief and shock burned away into nothing. Part of her wished she could say it was her training that did it, but it was hate and anger that cleared her mind. She snapped her fingers at Takeda and motioned for a pen. Her other hand was already in her purse, groping blindly for her notepad. “You’re killing weekly these days. How do I know you haven’t killed her already?”

  A rattling sound followed: perhaps the phone being laid down on a hard surface. Footsteps. A thump, a squeal, and the man’s voice again: “Say her name.”

  “Mariko!”

  Another squeal, this one muffled, and a horrible chill in Mariko’s gut doused her white-hot rage. As scared as she was for Saori, a tiny voice inside her was thankful to hear that squeal. Anger couldn’t help Saori right now.

  As footsteps drew closer to the phone, Mariko scribbled, FUCHIDA. “The Inazuma,” he said. “You will deliver it tomorrow.”

  CALL HQ, she wrote. LOCATE THE PHONE HE’S CALLING FROM. “I can’t,” Mariko said, jotting down Saori’s phone number. “Thanks to you, nobody’s getting anywhere near that weapon.”

  “There is no longer any need to stake out Yamada’s house. Remove your officers from the area and get the sword.”

  “You just screwed any chance of that. That was your plan? To kill Yamada so we’d lift the surveillance?”

  “There is no one there to protect. The house is meaningless except for the sword.”

  “Don’t you see what you just did? Up until now we were looking for a high-end antiques thief. Now this is a homicide case. There’s no way my CO lets me lift that surveillance. Not anymore.”