Daughter of the Sword: A Novel of the Fated Blades

by Steve Bein

  “This?” Mariko made no effort to keep the acid from her voice. “This is where you wanted me to drive?”

  “It doesn’t sound right. There’s a quieter entrance, where cars can—”

  “Cars can what? Just drive in? So we can ask if the emperor’s busy?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Well, shit.” Mariko should have known better. This woman had been talking like a crazy person from the start. And now, lo and behold, it turned out she was crazy. “You know,” Mariko said, “when you told me to drive to the Imperial Palace, I figured you were just getting us to the right neighborhood. You know, like, ‘Go to the palace, then turn right onto whatever-the-hell.’ I hate to admit it, but I really didn’t see this coming.”

  “You could stand to learn a thing or two about speaking to your elders,” Shoji said. “Most especially if we’re going inside.”

  “Inside where? The palace? We’re not going in. Not even in a squad car we’re not. You need ten kinds of clearance to get in there. Even if I could get the clearance, it would take a month to get an appointment.” Mariko hammered the steering wheel with her fists. “Why did I ever let myself think you were for real? Shit!”

  “There is a quieter entrance. On the northwest side, as I recall, but as you say, you may have to drive around a bit before you find the right one. And you’d do better to mind your language.”

  “We’re not getting in there.”

  “Do you have a better idea?”

  She had Mariko there. So, after negotiating traffic and a series of mazelike roads, Mariko wended her way to a high wooden gate set in higher wooden walls with manicured trees visible through every window. “I am Shoji Hayano,” the old woman said when the gate guards approached the vehicle. “Would you please let His Majesty know I’d like to speak with him?”

  The guard gave her exactly the look Mariko had predicted. But instead of turning her away straight out, he said, “May I ask what it’s concerning?”

  “The death of a friend to the family,” Shoji said. “And an old gift.”

  “Wait here.”

  Mariko wondered what kind of surprise they were waiting for. A bomb squad and half a dozen men with assault rifles seemed to be the minimum in store. Her patience grew thinner and thinner. Then, just like that, a man in a suit motioned her to pull forward.

  Mariko idled over the threshold of the imperial family grounds. Her squad’s wheels crunched tan gravel and threw reflections on a close-cropped lawn verdantly populated with trees. A black limousine pulled out in front of her, then drove slowly as Mariko tailed it. The road meandered under the green canopy until its terminus, an elegant brown building with wide roofs and rain chains descending from the gutters. No, not building. Palace. This was the emperor’s home.

  Mariko submitted to a weapons search and noted that Shoji-san was not required to do the same. Then, entering the warmly lit foyer, Mariko found herself sinking toe deep in the most luxuriant carpeting she’d ever felt.

  “I feel so underdressed,” she said.

  Mariko took Shoji’s elbow when a man in a black suit, a telltale bulge under his left arm, walked them down a white hallway. The accents were teak woodwork, the beige carpeting as soft as anything. They reached a sitting room of teak and white and that soft, lush carpet, all pale in comparison to the three walls of picture windows overlooking a serene and verdant water garden. Dwarf maples arched their boughs over a still pond, whose surface was disturbed only by the occasional red leaf floating on the surface. Something inside Mariko relaxed, while at the same time she dared not sit, lest she disturb the museum-like tranquillity.

  And then they were there. Emperor Akihito wore a blue-gray suit, and his silver hair was immaculate. Empress Michiko wore a buttercream dress and a welcoming smile. They were shorter than Mariko had expected—no taller than she was, in fact—yet they carried themselves with an air Mariko could only describe as regal. And why not, she mused; their usual visitors included sheiks and kings and presidents, and even they would all feel unusually lucky to be here.

  Both Mariko and Shoji bowed low, and of the thousands of bows Mariko had made in her life, she felt she really meant this one. Their Majesties received their guests with grace ushering them to sit on the white couches overlooking the water garden. Steaming cups of tea already awaited them, arranged in perfect symmetry on a low teak coffee table. “My condolences, Shoji-san,” the emperor said. “The news of Sergeant Kiyama’s death reached us this morning.”

  “A terrible loss,” said the empress. “How are you holding up, Hayano-chan?”

  How did they know Yamada? They spoke with absolute sincerity—they missed him—but Mariko didn’t dare ask why. And the empress—she spoke to Shoji as only a friend would, using the first name, the intimate -chan. How did those two know each other?

  “I am…coping,” Shoji said, sighing. “May I introduce Detective Sergeant Oshiro Mariko? She was Keiji-san’s student. She is also investigating his murder.”

  “Ah,” the emperor said. “You have our thanks. I daresay we have heard of you.” He looked at his wife as if for guidance, just as might happen in any other house in Tokyo. Mariko found the intimacy endearing.

  “Yes,” said the empress. “There were stories about you in the newspaper, neh? A year or so ago. You are our first woman to be promoted to detective, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes,” Mariko stammered. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Wonderful,” the empress said. “Our condolences to you too on the loss of your teacher. Sergeant Kiyama has been a friend to this house for…oh, who knows how long? Since before my time, certainly.”

  Mariko’s mind staggered like a drunk. The emperor and empress had heard of her. They’d read about her in the paper. On top of that, they were old friends with Yamada-sensei. How?

  Mariko tried to connect the dots. She put the emperor and empress at about the same age as her grandparents, so younger than Yamada by a good bit. Kiyama Keiji: that was how Shoji and Their Majesties knew him. And a sergeant, the same as Mariko. Had Yamada been a cop? In his youth, before his professorial days? No. The war. Yamada-sensei had fought in the war.

  All of a sudden she remembered something Yamada once said: “There’s an old soldier’s saying: Commanders can always be relied upon to do the obvious, once all alternatives have been exhausted.” It made her laugh now, just as it had made her laugh then. She contained her laughter to a small smile. Then she realized the empress would take that to be the retreating smile of a shy little mouse of a woman. Not the sort of woman to make sergeant and detective.

  “May I ask,” Mariko said, mustering every ounce of politeness she’d ever learned, “how Your Majesties came to know Yamada-sensei?”

  The emperor regarded her with the smallest smile. The kind of grace that Mariko had to struggle to muster came to him like purple came to irises: naturally, beautifully, irremovably. “Your sensei once owned a sword,” he said. “In the days of the war he served his country at Guadalcanal—a greater sacrifice for him than for most, as his mother was dying of stomach cancer at the time. Before his deployment, he left his father his sword. At Sergeant Kiyama’s request, his father brought the sword to my father. Along with Shoji-san, by the way, who was only a little girl at the time.”

  He bent down, took up a teacup with two fingers, and raised it to his lips. Mariko wondered whether Yamada had ever had tea with him like this. She wished she’d known Yamada had lost a parent to cancer just like she had. She wished he could tell her stories about his parents, about the war, about what happened after and why he had to change his name.

  But she had no time to think about that now: the emperor had set down his teacup, and his every word commanded her attention. “Detective Sergeant Oshiro, there are those who say our house survived the war because of the sword. I do not mean our palace. That was destroyed. Burned to the ground. No, I mean the Imperial House itself. Did your sensei ever speak to you about this sword?”

  “He d
id, sir. The Tiger on the Mountain, isn’t it? He said.…The legend says that if that sword was in a castle, that castle could not fall.”

  “Just so,” said the emperor. Those pale eyes locked with Mariko’s, and she found herself instinctively lowering her gaze. “And what do you know about more recent history? Did you know my father offered terms of surrender before the tragedy of Hiroshima? The Americans wanted unconditional surrender, and my father’s generals offered surrender with one condition only: that the house of the emperor remain as the head of state. Then came Hiroshima, then Nagasaki. Afterward, the Americans accepted our country’s surrender, unconditional but for one proviso: that the house of the emperor remain as the head of state.”

  “Your Highness,” Mariko said, “are you suggesting that the Tiger on the Mountain preserved the Imperial House? That the Allies would have unseated your father had Yamada not given him the sword?”

  “We shall never know. The drama of history cannot be replayed. We only know that my father did have the sword, and he did retain his throne. If the sword had anything to do with that, then Sergeant Kiyama gave to us as great a gift as any emperor has ever received. He has been a friend to our house ever since.”

  Mariko looked at the floor, gobsmacked. Was it possible? Could Yamada have saved Japan? Gaijin might never understand it, but Japan without an emperor was not Japan. Those sheiks and presidents were not emperors. Their power came from wealth—or worse still, from the popular vote. This man commanded reverence simply by sitting in front of her on the couch.

  And her sensei had known him—known him well enough, in fact, that an old friend who wanted an audience had only to knock on the door. Known him well enough, Mariko realized suddenly, that if Yamada placed a phone call, the Imperial House itself might be persuaded to make an annoying police lieutenant stop putting obstacles in the way of one of his detective sergeants. When Mariko had asked Yamada who he’d called in the TMPD, she was thinking too small. Even her follow-up question about the mayor’s office wasn’t nearly big enough. The idea that Yamada had invoked the emperor’s assistance on her behalf was enough to take her breath away.

  “It is the Tiger on the Mountain we’ve come to ask about,” Shoji-san said, and her words gave Mariko’s drunken, stumbling mind something to cling to. “Your Highness, Keiji-san was killed for his Inazuma blade. It was another Inazuma that took his life. The winds of destiny are blowing like a typhoon now; Your Majesty’s sword is a part of that storm, I think.”

  “You think!” said the empress, smiling. “Hayano-chan, you say, ‘I think,’ where anyone else could say, ‘I am certain.’”

  “Nothing is certain about the future,” Shoji said.

  “Ahh,” Mariko blurted, knowing it was rude to interrupt yet unable to contain herself. “Shoji-san, since the moment we met, you’ve spoken as if you can see the future. Now Her Majesty speaks to you as I do with my little sister, and she seems to believe you can see the future too. Please, tell me what’s going on.”

  Silence reigned for a long moment, and Mariko was afraid she’d given offense. Then, taking her eyes off of Shoji, she saw the emperor and empress were smiling, much as they might have with a toddler grandchild, as if they found her lack of refinement cute.

  “Detective Sergeant Oshiro,” the emperor said, “Shoji-san has been my family’s seer ever since the war.”

  “Seer?”

  “Goze was the old word. And as for my wife’s calling her Hayano-chan, well, the two of them were fast friends from the moment they met. That was at our wedding, I daresay.”

  His gray eyes turned to the empress, who nodded her head ever so slightly. Her every movement was graceful. By comparison, Mariko thought she must have looked like an orangutan in a ball gown. Somehow it had never occurred to her that the empress might have personal friends. Now that Mariko had caught herself thinking it, she wondered how the idea had ever made sense, but somehow she’d always thought of royalty living a solitary existence. You didn’t hear about them out playing golf, as the prime minister was wont to do.

  “If I might be so rude,” Shoji-san said, “I wonder if I can steer our conversation back to the sword. I think it plays a role in what is to come. If so, Oshiro-san must wield it.”

  Wield. Not carry. Not deliver as ransom. Wield. Just what did Shoji see in Mariko’s future?

  And how had Mariko come to believe that Shoji could foresee anything at all? Goze were the stuff of fairy tales.

  Then again, so were magic swords.

  So many strange things had happened, and in such quick succession, that Mariko found her thoughts came only in disjointed, stagger-stepped fashion. In hindsight she wasn’t quite sure how she’d come to leave the Imperial Palace, nor how the long, heavy silken bag came to be in her hands. She remembered profuse good-byes and thank-yous, and a slow drive through the verdant grounds under a light rain. And then she was back in the world, stopped at a red light with the emperor’s own sword lying on her lap.

  It weighed little more than half as much as Glorious Victory Unsought, and was shorter by the length of her forearm. She could tell that much without unsheathing it—indeed, without even removing it from its black silken bag. The imperial seal, a round, stylized chrysanthemum blossom, was embroidered in gold on the bag, and the bag was tied shut with beautifully woven golden kumihimo cord.

  A high-pitched digital chime gave her a start. Her cell phone. It was here somewhere. Even as she patted herself down in search of it, she realized her focus was slipping. Half a night’s sleep, Yamada’s murder, Saori’s capture—they were adding up.

  At last she found the phone and flicked it open. “Yeah?”

  “You know who this is.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You have the swords.”

  “Yeah.”

  The car behind Mariko honked, startling her. She grunted and gave the guy the finger and a few choice words, which prompted a “Well!” from Shoji.

  “Who’s with you?”

  “Nobody.” Mariko had a lot of tasks before her, shifting into first while holding the phone to her ear while keeping the sword from slipping off her lap, but she managed them all. “I needed help getting your second sword. The one who helped me is in the car with me. She’s old. No threat to you.”

  “Hmph!” said Shoji.

  Fuchida grumbled. At length he said, “St. Luke’s Hospital. Drive there now. Put your phone on speaker and leave it in your lap. If I hear you talk to anyone at all, your sister dies.”

  Mariko heard a yelp from Saori and she did as she was told. “I’ll get there faster if I can run the lights and siren.”

  “Don’t even think about it. Tell me the number of your squad car.”

  “Five-five-three.”

  “If you’re lying, your sister dies. If I see any cop car other than number five-five-three, she dies.”

  “You’re at a hospital, Fuchida-san. Cops are known to come there from time to time.”

  “Shut up. Do as you’re told.”

  She could hear the tension building in him. There was a hard-bitten edge to his voice, and the grumbling continued just beyond her range of hearing. “I’m on my way,” she said.

  75

  The twin towers of St. Luke’s International Hospital were the tallest buildings within sight. Blue glass and sharp angles dominated, and the towers were connected three-quarters of the way up the shorter tower (halfway up the taller tower) by a walkway that gleamed with sunlight peeking through the thinning clouds. To Mariko the hospital looked like something built out of LEGO.

  “I’m here,” she said to her phone.

  “There is a building across the street. The only one under construction. Park the car in front of the door.”

  Mariko did as she was told, finding the dust-brown building and bringing the squad to a halt in front of a makeshift front wall: two-meter-high plywood lashed to a scaffold skeleton with big fat zip ties looped through drill holes. The door was just a rectangle cut right into
the plywood, affixed with hinges and locked by a chain and padlock. It bore signs reading HARD HAT AREA and DO NOT ENTER. Killing the ignition, she said, “You want me to turn the speaker off? So people don’t hear you?”

  “Yes. Do it. Get out alone.”

  Mariko clicked the speaker button with her thumbnail, then cupped the phone to her thigh. “Wait five minutes, then call the police.” She spoke rapidly and softly, pulling her Sig Sauer P230 from the glove box as she did so. “The radio’s in front of your right hand. You just push the button and talk, okay? Tell them where I am and that I’m with Fuchida and the hostage. Got it?”

  Shoji nodded, and made a strange face when Mariko racked the slide to check her chambered round—an awkward motion with her right hand pressing a phone to her leg.

  “Is that a pistol?” said Shoji.

  “Of course,” said Mariko. “You don’t expect me to go up there and get in a sword fight with him, do you?”

  In the next breath she was back on with Fuchida. “Sorry. Dropped the phone. Very sorry. Please don’t be angry.”

  Had she put enough vulnerability in her voice to sell it? It seemed so. Fuchida said, “Stupid shit like that is going to get your sister killed. Don’t do it again.”

  Angry, Mariko thought, but not unhinged.

  She exited the car, sizing up the building as she did so. Big windows: lots of opportunity for snipers, if only she’d been able to call for one. Fuchida had listened in on her every move, and Shoji, one of the last dinosaurs in Tokyo, didn’t have a cell phone, or else Mariko might have used it to text for backup. It hardly mattered. The windows were highly reflective, and the noon sun rendered everything behind them invisible.

  She made sure Fuchida could see her hands if he was watching from inside, then ducked back in the car to retrieve Tiger on the Mountain. The Sig prodded uncomfortably against her floating ribs as she bent, but its weight was a comfort. She readjusted her jacket to cover it and made sure to keep her elbow close to her side to keep the pistol concealed.