by Dane Hartman
“See, man?” said Harry, seething, one hand still in his hair, the other pointing the Magnum at his nose. “You don’t have to give up your life to the cause. All you have to do is take me to your leader for a little talk. Either that or I’ll introduce you to your ancestors in a very dishonorable way.”
“Ok,” the kid said hastily. “Sure. I’ll take you. But how are we gonna get out of here?”
Callahan directed the last crook to climb back up the support beam to the upper level. He checked his watch. It was only a couple of minutes since the robbery. If they were lucky, Harry could avoid the other patrol cars until the kid could direct them to a decent hiding place. Now was the time to see just how fast the Kawasaki could go. It ought to do well. It was made in Japan, for Christ’s sake.
Chicago, like every other city, had a lot of holes to crawl into. Once Harry and the Japanese made it off the drive on the motorcycle, they ditched the machine and stayed in the back room of a pizza parlor for most of the day. From their position among racks of cheese, oil, and pepperoni, Harry heard the radio reports about the holdup. According to them, the thieves got away with almost a half-million dollars, utilizing a cunning diversion in the front of the bank to mask another group of thieves getting the cash out the back. At least that was the present police theory.
After nightfall and a large Italian pie with sausage and mushrooms, the Japanese led Harry to a car, and they both went up Lake Shore Drive past the Navy Pier, the Palmolive Building, the Water Tower, and the Oak Street Beach. Stretching out from that point, northward up the coast, was what was known as the “Gold Coast,” a section of high-class, high-cost apartment buildings.
The Japanese’s car turned into one of these places, and they parked in a reserved spot in the underground garage. Without a word, the Japanese went over to the elevator and pressed the button “PH,” for Penthouse. The two men went up almost fifty flights before the doors opened. Standing on the other side of the opening, between four of his guards, was the leader of the Kozure Ronin and the mastermind behind the morning’s robbery.
Sergeant Terry Inagaki.
C H A P T E R
S i x
Harry Callahan was not surprised. Angry, yes; surprised, no. Terry Inagaki stood before him, secure in the very heart of the Kozure Ronin, smiling like an understanding yet vindictive diety just about to eradicate a naughty worshiper.
“Come right in, Inspector,” the traitorous Chicago cop stated. “I have been expecting you.”
Harry remained in the elevator, one finger on the “Door Open” button, and his other hand wrapped around the surviving crook’s neck. “What makes you so sure I won’t just kill you and leave?” he asked quietly.
The inspector’s question caught Inagaki halfway in a turn. Patiently, but with a touch of irritation, the Japanese stood in profile and looked at Harry.
“Because I know you too well, Inspector,” Inagaki explained. “First, you are a pragmatist. You do not fight unless you know you can win—and you’re sure you cannot win. So you know there is no way you could shoot me and get out of this building alive—even with Ryoma as a shield.” Inagaki motioned toward the surviving crook.
“Second, you are a realist. You know that if you kill me you will be back at base one concerning the kidnapping of Suni Michelle. And she is, after all, the only reason you are concerning yourself in all this. True?”
Harry did not answer. He merely released Ryoma and pushed him forward. Inagaki smiled as if he had won something precious, then turned away. The four guards fell into position all around Harry—one in front, in back, and on both sides. Inagaki led the way to a pair of plain metal doors opposite the elevator. He pushed them open to reveal a spacious room with redwood panels evenly distributed along the walls and interspersed with banners depicting ancient Japanese insignia and family crests.
The floor was highly polished varnished hardwood on which several bamboo mats were evenly spaced. Across the way was a platform, upon which a ceremonial sword holder made out of animal horns was set. A long sword was resting several inches above a short sword. Both were curved and had ornate metalwork on their long, cloth-covered hilts. Callahan recognized them as samurai swords.
Inagaki moved unerringly toward the platform and stepped up. He was wearing a double-breasted pinstripe suit with fairly baggy pants. Only when he was standing on the upraised section did Harry see he was wearing split-toe sandals rather than shoes. The Japanese pulled up his pants legs and sat on his knees. He motioned the guards surrounding Harry to walk to the left of the platform. The four men moved, and Harry had little choice but to go along.
Inagaki motioned Ryoma to his feet. The crook hurried forward, fell to his knees before the platform, and kissed the floor in supplication.
“Please excuse me, Inspector,” Inagaki said humbly but with iron in his voice. “Before we can speak further, there is a pressing matter which must be seen to.” He clapped his hands. Behind the platform and to the right, one of the redwood panels slid open. Out came Denise Inagaki, carrying a short samurai sword upon a pillow. She ceremoniously walked to Ryoma’s side and stopped.
“Ryoma Seami,” Inagaki intoned. “You have failed in your mission, so causing shame to fall upon the house of the Kozure Ronin. You were to divert official attention from the establishment and leave no clues as to your real purpose. Instead, you have fled the scene, hoping to gain favor by bringing a man you feel may be a threat to the house.”
Throughout the entire diatribe, Ryoma did not move from his bowed position.
“In reality, this man is no threat. By attempting to gain favor, you have forgotten your original purpose and invited disaster. There is only one honorable solution to your dilemma.”
Ryoma sat up. His face was intent, but composed. Denise Inagaki lowered herself to her knees and placed the sword by the young man’s side. She bowed to him, stood, and left the room. Ryoma waited until she had disappeared and then took the short, curved sword in his hand. Between the sword and the pillow was a thick cloth. Ryoma wrapped the cloth near the top of the sleek, shiny blade. He held the sword so that the tip was pointed at his stomach.
Harry didn’t need to have the situation explained. He knew the rite of hari-kiri when he saw it. He felt the weight of his Magnum still in his shoulder holster, but he knew there was little he could do with it. Inagaki was right. The little bastard had too many answers to be killed yet. In the interim, however, he had to be witness to the young man’s execution.
“I have pledged my life to you,” Ryoma told Inagaki. “I am ready to end it on your word.”
Inagaki stood, pleased. He lifted his own long sword from its holder and pulled the wicked blade from its black scabbard. “Yours will be an honorable death,” he said. “A warrior’s death. You will go to a land much better than this.”
Harry could see, when push came to shove, the kid took a little more convincing. He started to sweat when Inagaki stepped down from the platform, and his mouth began to work once the Chicago cop took up position right behind him. Soon he could not keep his body from shaking. Harry checked out the faces of his guards. The ones beside him were licking or chewing on their lips. One was blinking fairly rapidly. The other was breathing hard. Harry turned his head to look full in the face of the guard there. The guard’s eyes jumped from the quivering Ryoma to Harry’s cool gaze.
Harry gave him a big, knowing smile, as if to say “There, but for the grace of Inagaki, go you.”
He turned forward in time to hear Ryoma scream and see him plunge the short blade into his abdomen. Inagaki was tensed, his long blade up over the kid’s head. Blood waterfalls began to stream down Ryoma’s pelvis. The young man, grunted, gasped, cried, and yelled once more as he tried to push the imbedded blade across to his side.
Suddenly, Inagaki swung down with his long sword and neatly, cleanly cut off Ryoma’s head. Even Harry was shaken as the head rolled and bounced off the bottom of the platform, but he kept his shock from showing. N
o matter what anyone thought, the live, unrehearsed decapitation of a person was not a sight that could be accepted calmly. The inspector’s guards were visibly upset as the headless neck stump shot out a stream of blood seven feet into the air.
Inagaki turned toward Harry as the corpse fell forward with a thunk, his eyes gleaming in the big room.
“This is what the Kozure Ronin are all about, Inspector,” he breathed. “This is how dedicated we are to our cause. You have seen what we are willing to do.”
Harry stared implacably into the fanatical eyes of the Japanese man, then slowly raised his hands to applaud. Three times. Sharply. The sound reverberated slightly against the wood paneling.
“Now that the floor show is over,” he said, “can we get down to brass tacks?”
Inagaki stared back at the inspector for a few moments to gauge the depth of his sincerity and then abruptly swung the sword toward the floor. The movement cleaned the blade of blood. The tiny red drops slapped into the wood at Harry’s feet. The guard to his right started as it did so. Callahan couldn’t help but wonder how many other hari-kiri victims had to be chased around the room by Inagaki and his sword before going on to “the better land.”
“You are a hard man,” Inagaki told him, turning toward the platform.
“Not as hard as you,” Harry responded. “To go through all you have in the last twenty-four hours.”
Inagaki returned to his sitting position on the platform, his face as angelic as a choirboy’s, even though the headless corpse still bowed before him, and Ryoma’s unseeing eyes stared up at the ceiling below him. “What have I gone through?” Inagaki asked.
“The routine at the airport first,” Harry explained. “No police force offers money to get someone out of town. Any other officer would have told me to beat it and let me pay the freight. You had the capital to offer an expense-paid holiday.”
Inagaki pursed his lips, closed his eyes, and nodded. It was a signal to continue.
“And the routine at the house. Shotguns, bombs, all very flashy and all making about as much sense as the Rockettes in El Salvador. The final straw was the crucified cat. That was a warning. But why give a man a warning and then try to kill him? The warning was from the Seppuku Swords, but the bomb show was set up to divert suspicion. No one would believe you were a gang leader after they tried to kill you.”
Inagaki smiled and nodded. “All very true. The bomb could only be set off by a radio signal I controlled. I saw that you had thrown it from out in the hall, pressed the button, and ran in just in time for the big boom. But is that all that made you suspect me?”
“Suspect, yes,” Harry answered. “I didn’t know until the robbery. The damn thing looked like a scene from Car 54, Where Are You? There was no way someone could have gotten out the back with all the shooting going on in front. All the reports said that half a million was taken, but all the Ronin’s bags were stuffed with paper. The only person who could have gotten out of that area from all the cops was another cop. So I knew one of the gang leaders was you. I just had to find your headquarters.”
“And here you are,” Inagaki concluded. “It is my turn to applaud you, Inspector.” He did so. Three times. Sharply. Then his face became hard and deadly. “What do you expect to gain out of this?”
“Don’t play inscrutable,” Harry countered coldly. “If you wanted me dead, the shotgun, bomb, or robbers could have done it. You only had me at the robbery as a test. If I didn’t survive, I wasn’t worthy. If I did, we could move on to the next step.”
“Which is?”
“Answers, you miserable little fucker,” Harry replied calmly. “You wanted me here; all right, I’m here. So where’s Suni?”
A pause hung in the room like a strangled man. Inagaki’s eyes became dull black orbs. Finally, the little Oriental rose to his feet. “Inspector, give your gun to one of the guards. It will be returned to you after this meeting. You will need it.”
Harry pulled the weapon out and handed it to the man behind him.”
“Leave us,” Inagaki instructed the guards. They did so. Callahan was alone in the cavernous room with the Kozure Ronin head. He stood exactly where the guards had left him, waiting for the Japanese to speak.
“The Seppuku Swords have Suni,” he finally revealed. Michelle is not her last name nor is Terry my first. I am Tetsuya Inagaki. She is Suni Inagaki. My sister.”
The revelation had all the effect of a cool wind on Callahan. When the inspector did not speak, Tetsuya continued.
“Her captivity is the only reason we had to rob the bank. If they did not have her, we could have raided one of their dens. As it is, they threaten to kill her if I do not relinquish my post and allow the Seppuku Swords to control the Nihonmachi underworld. Do you have any idea how much power and money I would be giving up?”
Harry had some idea. Enough money to set his army up with the most modern of sub-machine guns. Enough to send the teenage hatchet men all over the country to fight with the Chinese. Enough money to buy the loyalty of soldiers so they’d be willing to go on suicide missions and commit hari-kiri on demand. The Seppuku Swords were not asking Inagaki to leave his post; they were banishing him from his lifestyle, his corrupt being, his entire way of life.
“The disembowled feline was a warning, yes,” Inagaki continued. “It is what they intend to do to Suni. I have until our summit meeting on Friday to decide. Then the two factions will meet to decide whether it will be war or peace.” The Japanese looked directly into Harry’s eyes. “You have less than forty-eight hours to find and free my sister.” Inagaki looked down and shrugged. “It is a reward for surviving the robbery.”
Harry smiled. “You cannot do the work of one Anglo round-eye?” he asked, letting derision creep into his voice.
Inagaki became philosophical. “The sight of a Japanese face would scare leads away. An American face will only create curiosity and perhaps derision. And if the Ronin make any move against the Swords, it will mean immediate torture and death for my sister. The others will not be expecting one lone white man.”
The Japanese rose, signaling that the meeting was at an end. He stepped down off the platform and went to the wooden panel his wife had disappeared behind. When he pulled it open this time, at least twenty gang members were standing in her place. They looked at Harry like a pack of lions at a Christian.
“Find my sister,” said Inagaki softly, “and I’ll let you leave Chicago alive.”
The gang boss closed the panel behind him. Harry was left alone with the still dribbling corpse of Ryoma.
Callahan got his gun from a guard on the way out. The four men accompanied him down in the elevator and out into the street. Even then, Inagaki had not finished with him. The gang members had some final words.
“Don’t bother calling the cops on this place,” one said.
“By the time they arrive there will be no evidence of our existence,” said another.
All four left to go back into the building. Harry had to hand it to them. For pure, vicious, amoral style, Tetsuya Inagaki and his boys took the teriyaki. But they had given him what he wanted. Information, a deadline, and room to breathe. Suni had to be alive or her brother wouldn’t be walking on eggshells. Now all Harry had to do was find her among 224 square metropolitan miles of Chicago.
His search was enormously aided by the package waiting for him back at the Sheraton. It was a small, soft package wrapped in bag paper. It was about the size of a football and Harry could feel right through it. Unless they were making bombs out of cotton now, it had to be something other than a booby trap. Harry brought it up to his room, lay it on the bed, picked up the phone, and asked room service for a steak and a baked potato with a side of beer.
He opened the package. Inside were the dark red leg warmers Suni had been wearing the night of the kidnapping. Inside one of them was a note.
“The girl is in terrible danger. You can help her if you come to the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute tomorr
ow at three P.M. Meet me in the Near Eastern Antiquities Collection. I will know you.”
Harry held on to the note and the warmers for many minutes. He stared at the note and thought. He looked out his hotel window over the Chicago River. When room service finally showed up forty-five minutes later, he told them to leave the food outside the door. He sat and thought for at least fifteen minutes more. He painfully pieced together the whole insidious plot. The first time he thought he had some sort of solution to the intrigue, his theory fell apart like a house of cards. The second chain of events he hypothesized also didn’t hold water. It slipped through his fingers.
Finally he pieced together a series of incidents that made some sort of outlandish sense. It wasn’t much of an explanation for the twists and turns in this case, but it was the only one Harry had. He filed his explanation for all the events in the back of his mind as he retrieved his dinner from the hall and dug in. Afterward he took a shower and went to bed. As he drifted off to a solid, solemn, dreamless sleep, he remembered the words his old partner Chico Gonzales—the one who went on to be a teacher—once quoted him.
Chico had been badly wounded by the “Scorpio” sniper, and after his recuperation, quit the force. Chico had told him, years ago, why he thought Harry was alive and successful when so many of his partners and friends were dead. He had used the words of, of all things, a Japanese scholar of the martial arts.
Victory is for the one,
Even before the combat,
Who has no thought of himself . . .
Harry Callahan went to sleep thinking of Suni.
The next morning, Thursday, Harry spent three hours getting to the University of Chicago campus. Not because it was so difficult to find or because the roads were so crowded. Harry left the Sheraton at ten in a taxi, so he missed the morning rush to work, but he took special care in changing taxis every couple of miles to avoid being followed. Otherwise the trip was rather straightforward.