Year of the Demon fb-2

by Steve Bein

  “I bet you never had any of them put a price on your head either.”

  “I don’t think he wants to shoot you. I really think he wants to talk.”

  Mariko looked down at her phone, which was vibrating in her hand like a fly trapped in a jar. She was tired of feeling unsafe. She wanted to answer the phone and challenge the Bulldog to a shoot-out at high noon. Clint Eastwood antics weren’t her cup of tea, and she still wasn’t all that confident in her marksmanship left-handed, but at least a good old-fashioned shoot-’em-up would see her problems resolved once and for all.

  And yet Han was right. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and every indication said Kamaguchi didn’t intend to kill her. First, he seemed to be honestly confused about the sword theft. Second, he wasn’t the type to call in advance to schedule a drive-by.

  Damn it all, she thought. Then she answered her phone.

  “Bitch, you hang up on me again, I’ll make you regret it.”

  Mariko rolled her eyes and almost hung up. Only a panicked gesture from Han made her think twice. She sighed and said, “What do you want?”

  “I told you. A bargain. Tell me where to pick you up.”

  “Metropolitan Police HQ,” she said. “Chiyoda-ku.”

  “Fine. Half an hour.” And the line went dead.

  The silence made Mariko’s heart race. She’d just made a date with the man who was hired to kill her. And he had just agreed to meet the target of his assassination order in front of a high-rise full of cops. More to herself than anyone, she said, “I can’t believe I’m going to go through with this.”

  “You’re not going alone,” Han said. He gave her shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “I’ll be right behind you in an unmarked car, with two others on a rolling tail.”

  “I’m not scared,” she said. It was only a little lie. “It’s just . . . the guy’s a gangster, Han. He makes a living destroying other people’s lives. Do I really want to get into bed with him?”

  “This is Narcotics, Mariko. We deal with bad people. It’s part of the job.”

  “Yeah, I get that. It’s just . . .”

  She didn’t know how to finish her own thought. Fortunately she and Han shared a telepathic wavelength. “It’s a gamble,” he said. “I know. You’re on first base and you’re thinking of stealing second. That’s just one of the risks you take sometimes if you want to win the ball game.”

  17

  The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department’s headquarters looked like a giant concrete book, standing on end and opened slightly, with a three-story drink twizzler for a bookmark. The building’s eighteen floors of unadorned, wedge-shaped, postmodern concrete loomed over the heart of Chiyoda City, Tokyo’s governmental district, right across the street from the Ministry of Justice and right across the moat from the Imperial Palace gardens. A phallic red-and-white tower stood atop the building, complete with three observation decks full of various antennae, dish-shaped and mini-phallus-shaped, whose arcane purposes Mariko couldn’t begin to guess at.

  The mere sight of the HQ building still sent a thrill rippling over Mariko’s skin. She’d worked so hard to get onto the TMPD, harder still to make detective and sergeant, and seeing the department’s headquarters through the windshield of a squad car confirmed for her what still seemed unreal: that at last she’d made her way to her dream assignment in Narcotics. Moreover, HQ’s overlook of the Imperial Palace stirred memories heavily laden with happiness and grief. She’d only been in the palace once, and it was the murder of her beloved sensei that had prompted her visit. Thinking of Dr. Yamada was enough to make her want to cry, but since that was something she could never let a coworker see, she had to suppress the urge every time she showed up to work.

  And that was on days when no gangsters came calling. Talking to Kamaguchi on the phone had shaken her to the core, and she hadn’t been herself even before she saw his name on the caller ID. If Kamaguchi wasn’t responsible for the break-in, who was? And if he didn’t have Glorious Victory, what could he possibly offer as a bargaining chip? And what did he want in return?

  Han was pretty shaken up too. He tried not to show it, but he was already on his third cigarette, and he paced back and forth in front of the HQ building like a panther in a cage. “Are you sure we shouldn’t call Sakakibara in on this? We could have snipers on all these rooftops in ten minutes flat.”

  “You were the one who said this was a good idea.”

  “Yeah, but that was before I knew I was going to be waiting on the sidewalk with you. If he shoots at you, he might hit me by mistake.”

  “You know, Han, you can be a real asshole.”

  “Just trying to lighten the mood a little.” He smiled from behind his cigarette, but Mariko wasn’t laughing. “Okay, okay, guilty as charged,” he said. “But seriously, shouldn’t we call the LT?”

  “Come on, you know what he’s going to say. ‘Frodo, you’re a sergeant; think for yourself and do your damn job.’” Mariko caught herself short. “Holy shit.”

  “What?” said Han, his shoulders suddenly stiff. His eyes darted this way and that, clearly on high alert. “You see Kamaguchi?”

  “No. Frodo.”

  “Huh?”

  “The nickname. Frodo. I think I just figured it out. The hobbit part’s easy, neh? I’m short. But who’s the only hobbit who winds up with nine fingers?”

  She waved her maimed right hand at him. Han puffed at his cigarette and shook his head. “You’re insane. How can you be thinking about that right now?”

  Mariko shrugged. “Honestly, I’m just kind of surprised Sakakibara’s nerd trivia runs that deep. Didn’t figure him for a Tolkien fan.”

  “Great. Mystery solved. Now all we need to know is—”

  Just then a big red Land Rover came to a sudden stop in front of them. Traffic swerved around it like a flock of doves fleeing a hawk. The rear door opened automatically, like a taxi’s, and a big man stepped out. It wasn’t the Bulldog; this guy was bigger. He obviously spent a lot of time at the gym, and maybe some time with a steroid needle too. Mariko wondered where they ever found enough pin-striped fabric to make a suit that would fit him. Tailoring a suit for a guy with no neck couldn’t have been easy in the first place.

  He nodded at her. “You Oshiro?”

  “Yeah,” said Mariko.

  “Get in.”

  Mariko nodded as nonchalantly as she knew how, then sauntered in her summoner’s direction. She would not be seen to be scared. On cue, Han jogged to the unmarked car idling at the curb. No point in having an invisible tail; they wanted the Kamaguchis to know Mariko was never out of sight.

  She waited until Han was in the car before she got within arm’s reach of the Land Rover. “Where’s Kamaguchi?” she said.

  “Waiting for you.” The bodybuilder climbed into the backseat, taking up most of it. Under his suit jacket Mariko saw the telltale lines of an antiknifing vest—all the rage in yakuza couture ever since a certain cop got herself all over the news with her samurai showdown. Tokyo had seen a rash of sword and knife attacks since then, mostly among yakuzas who thought it was gokudo, extreme, hard-core, to duke it out old-school. Evidently Kamaguchi’s errand boy didn’t care to become a statistic. “Come on,” he said, “get in.”

  The seat he offered her was on the left side of the vehicle. Mariko didn’t know whether this was a calculated tactical choice, but if it was, it was a good one. Most cops wore their holsters on the right hip, and if Mariko had worn hers there, her pistol would have been in easy reach for him. But Mariko shot left-handed now, so when she got into the car, her weapon was safely between her left hip and the door. “Let’s go,” she said.

  The drive seemed to take forever and no time at all. The muscle man had no qualms about discussing business in front of a cop, and so over the course of a couple of phone calls Mariko learned that he went by “Bullet,” that one of his errands today was to collect a lot of something, and that the code he and his fellow yakuzas had developed for
speaking about their criminal activities left Mariko utterly clueless about whether Bullet was supposed to collect weapons, protection money, or baseball cards. It could have been anything, and it left Mariko wondering whether she’d even pick up on it if he decided to turn the conversation to the subject of where to dump her body after he killed her.

  Bullet had a private parking spot in the parking garage under an Ebisu high-rise, and a pass code for the elevator’s keypad that admitted him to the penthouse floor. So much for backup. This wasn’t good.

  The elevator doors opened onto a wide vista of Ebisu and Roppongi, two of Tokyo’s wealthier districts. Mariko presumed this was Kamaguchi Hanzo’s apartment, since if it were not, she could hardly make sense of the ostentation. Most penthouse apartments would have a foyer with a locked door separating the home from the elevator—the better to keep out riffraff such as, say, police officers, or the pizza boy, or neighbors’ kids goofing off in the fire exit stairwell—but if Kamaguchi wanted to overwhelm his guests straightaway, the best way to do it was to flaunt the view. His furniture was too obviously expensive to be elegant. The same went for the carpeting, the paneling, the fireplace ignited by remote control. There was more artwork on the walls than Mariko would have expected from a gangster, but the collection was eclectic, probably selected by price tag more than by taste. It was an observation deck, not a living room, and the intended subject of observation was Kamaguchi’s personal wealth. Mariko noted that Glorious Victory Unsought was not in his collection.

  Neighboring Roppongi had a nefarious reputation as a haven of the most powerful yakuzas, and Mariko wondered how it felt for a gangster of Kamaguchi’s stature to live so close to real power and still be removed from it. Ebisu was gauche by comparison, a Harley parked next to a sleek Ducati, expensive but without the class.

  “There she is,” said Kamaguchi Hanzo, and as soon as she laid eyes on him she understood why his street name was the Bulldog. His underbite was more pronounced than his father’s, even more pronounced than the mug shots let on. His belly was as round as a barrel and his broad shoulders were sloped, as if his skull were so heavy it weighed them down. He had a thick head of jet-black hair, but otherwise he looked older than he really was. His rap sheet—which Mariko read as soon as she’d learned the hit from the Kamaguchi-gumi had fallen to him, and had read umpteen times since then—said he was only thirty-eight, but his wrinkles marked him at least ten years older than that. Just part of the territory, Mariko guessed, for one born into the high-stress life of criminal middle management. She wondered whether his moonlighting as a street enforcer caused him more stress or served as stress relief. As soon as the question struck her, intuition told her it was the latter. Not a comforting thought.

  “The hero cop,” he said. “The dragon slayer. The girl who doesn’t know when she’s overstepped her limits.” He spoke with a slight rasp, as if he were just getting over laryngitis, or as if he’d been shouting all night the night before.

  Mariko felt oddly cold. She’d expected her heart to race at the sight of this man, but instead she only flexed her fingers, calculating the exact distance between them and the grip of her SIG Sauer. She was still scared, but it was a sullen, brooding fear, not nervous jitters. “What do you want?” she said.

  “To show you something.” He beckoned her over with a meaty hand. “Come on. I’m making kebabs.”

  Given the sheer pretentiousness of the apartment, Mariko was surprised to learn Kamaguchi cooked for himself, but she had no interest in seeing him in the act—or rather, more pragmatically, no interest in following him into a roomful of knives. But she reminded herself that if he wanted to kill her, his own home would be the last place he’d do it, so she forced a cocky, relaxed deportment and followed him.

  The Bulldog’s kitchen smelled of onion and peppers. He had a little pile of each heaped on his marble countertop, alongside a few other vegetables and a big steel bowl with chunks of beef marinating in it. He also had a laptop sitting on the counter, on the opposite end from where he was preparing his food, and given the sheer size of the kitchen, the opposite end was pretty far away. His fingers swept up a big chef’s knife in a reverse grip, spun it around in a motion that looked like he’d spent a lot of time with a blade in his hands, and gestured at the laptop with it. Mariko hated playing games like this—he was trying to boss her around—so she sat on a stool and waited.

  At last Bullet woke the laptop, turned it toward her, and fired up its media player. What followed was a silent video feed from what looked like a closed-circuit security camera. It took Mariko a moment to recognize the room, since she hadn’t seen it from the camera’s perspective before, but soon enough she identified it as the salesman’s office from the packing and shipping company that she and Han had raided the night before.

  A cop walked into the frame wearing full SWAT armor, including helmet, goggles, and Nomex mask. No part of his face was visible. He walked with a bit of a limp—not from a recent injury, Mariko guessed. He wasn’t hobbling; he just had a rolling gait. He took something off the shelf that Mariko remembered well, the one with the eclectic collection of antiques and trinkets. The feed was just clear enough that Mariko could make out a mask-shaped blob in the SWAT cop’s hands.

  It was the most brazen theft she’d ever heard of. Stealing from the Kamaguchi-gumi was suicidal, and doing it in the middle of an active crime scene was a whole new level of crazy. Or maybe not, she thought. It was only crazy if you thought anyone was going to see you. If you were a modern-day ninja—the sort of person who could steal a huge sword from a seventeenth-floor apartment, for instance, even with all the doors and windows locked from the inside—then you could probably pull it off. She hit the PLAY button again, and watched a grainy image of the thief who, if her hunch was right, had also stolen Glorious Victory Unsought.

  “You let those idiots take my stuff,” said Kamaguchi. “Now you’re going to get it back.”

  Mariko ignored him and closed the media player, the better to look at a PDF that Kamaguchi had open in another window. It was an insurance appraisal—a big one, over two hundred pages long, but the page that was displayed showed a familiar antique half mask. Its rust-brown skin was pitted with age, and the blacksmith who forged it clearly had a gift, for the mask was astonishingly expressive, its anger as genuine as any living creature’s. Seen up close, its stubby horns looked cruel. Unlike the sketch in Yamada’s notebook, Kamaguchi’s mask had one broken fang, its tip sheared off in a perfectly straight line. Otherwise Yamada’s sketch was a pretty good likeness—though unlike the sketch, the PDF also included the mask’s appraised value. It was more than Mariko would make in the next ten years.

  She tried to remember what Yamada’s notes said about her sword and the mask. They were related somehow. The mask had a connection to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, one of Japan’s founding fathers, but Glorious Victory did not. That cold, sullen fear wouldn’t let her remember any more than that. It wanted her undistracted.

  “Hey!” Kamaguchi said. “Are you listening to me?”

  “Sort of.” She was provoking him and she knew it. “Who are ‘those idiots’?”

  “Huh?”

  “You said we let ‘those idiots’ steal your mask. That means you’re assuming the guy in the video isn’t a cop, neh? Why? He doesn’t look coplike enough to you?”

  Kamaguchi chuckled. “Heh. You guys aren’t dumb enough to take my shit. No, this was those religious pansies.”

  “Who?”

  “Cult types. Nut jobs. They’re the only ones who could have stolen it.”

  “So why coming whining to me?” Mariko said, feeling her false bravado fade away, gradually being replaced by the real thing. It felt good to stand up to this guy. “Go kick their asses. Get your toy back.”

  “You don’t want me to do that. I lost my patience with these sissies a long time ago. I go after them now, there’s going to be blood.”

  He was bullshitting her and she knew it. Kamaguchi Hanzo
wasn’t the type to shrink away from a little bloodshed. He was hiding something, but she wasn’t sure what yet.

  So she took a gamble and headed for the door. “I’ve got things to do. You want to start talking straight, be my guest. Otherwise I’m—”

  “Don’t be so touchy,” the Bulldog said. “No wonder Fuchida-san felt like killing you. Fucking women, neh?”

  “Yeah. Women. Have a nice day.”

  “Look, those cult types, they’re the ones who wanted to buy the mask. That’s what the dope was for. Get it? Last night was all because of the mask.”

  Mariko came back and sat on her stool. “Keep going.”

  Kamaguchi’s knife dealt the finishing blow to a long, slender zucchini and tore into the next one. “They wanted the mask. Wanted it right fucking now. Offered me way more than it was worth. So I okayed it. But then they told me you assholes were coming to crash the party, so they wanted to hurry things up. I told them to fuck off. But no, they show up anyway, and then everything goes to shit. Heh. I don’t need to tell you that, neh? You’re the ones who made it go to shit. And right after you’re done, right in the middle of your cleanup operation, their boy walks right in, takes my property, and walks out. Right under your goddamn noses.”

  “So?”

  “So get it back. It’s your fault.”

  Mariko smirked. “Let me get this straight. TMPD’s to blame because you went through with a dope deal, didn’t pay up, and then your supplier came by to get what you said you’d pay him?”

  Kamaguchi chopped into a pineapple, angry enough that his blade banging on the countertop made Mariko’s ears hurt. “I don’t owe them shit. I told them not to deliver. They delivered anyway, and then you showed up to seize it all. No. I don’t owe them a damn thing.”