A Bob Lee Swagger Boxed Set

by Stephen Hunter

  “Who disposes?” said Boss Otani.

  “It’s certain to be unpleasant. Perhaps the testers should provide disposal,” said the factotum.

  “Nii?”

  “Yes. We’ll dispose.”

  “Good. Then it is settled.” He addressed Nii. “Tomorrow you call the Club Marvelous and the manager will supply you with the details.”

  “Kondo-san thanks his friend and mentor,” said Nii.

  “I would do any favor for Kondo Isami,” said Boss Otani.

  The Korean woman left much later than her sisters. They got off at five and walked, en masse, to the subway station at Shinjuku. It wasn’t the danger, for Kabukicho was patrolled by police and yaks, both intent on crushing disturbances, who kept the crime rate to almost nil. However, unpleasantness could occur if a single woman met a group of men. Westerners were the worst, especially the Canadians and the Texans, though Germans occasionally acted out as well, and some nasty Iranians might be encountered. If the men were drunk and horny and angry, and had received the age-old message “For Japanese men only” in many bars, it could be awkward for everybody and end with teeth knocked out, eyes blackened, feelings ruffled.

  But on this night the woman, a corpulent enough country girl from outside Pusan, had been stopped unaccountably by her boss. She had been quizzed about another girl, who was suspected of sleeping with westerners on her own (rare) spare time. All proceeds must be generously shared with management and a strict no-freelancing rule was enforced.

  But this woman did not room with the suspect, so what was the point? It made no sense to her and cut into the five hours she had off, and she had now missed the 5:40 a.m. train and another wouldn’t depart until 6:10 a.m.

  She hurried alone across the splotches of illumination, the dark shadows of Kabukicho, as dawn approached and another night of expensively purchased sin put itself to sleep. She headed east down Hanazono Dori, heading toward Shinjuku station. Her cheap wood-soled sandals clattered on the empty street as she rushed, the clubs now mostly deserted, the barkers gone, the sailors headed back to the harbor, the airmen to the air bases, the tourists to their giant hotels. It was the hour of the hare.

  The street, which drew its name from a shrine a few blocks behind her, was featureless in the low light. She didn’t like this part of the walk; she focused on the brighter lights of a major cross street ahead.

  And then she saw—hmmm, a blur, a move, some kind of disturbance—and, with it, heard a rustle, a shift, a clunk, some weird night noise that had but one characteristic, that it didn’t belong.

  She turned, looked back into the blur of countless vertical signs, brightly lit from within, blazing into infinity. The rain spattered on her glasses. She drew her cheap raincoat more tightly against her, annoyed that it was useless against the sudden chill. It was probably nothing, but she felt that someone was waiting for her just ahead. You could never be sure, and she had so much responsibility, she could not afford to be robbed or injured. She hurried back along Hanazono Dori, hoping to get to a large avenue that would still be populated, like Yasukuni Dori.

  And where were the cops? Normally, she hated the police cars, particularly the sullen young officers who looked at her as if she were a member of the herbivore kingdom, but now she wished she saw the red light of official presence. Nope, nothing. Not far off she saw the jagged skyline of East Shinjuku, lit with spangles of illumination, promising a new world order or something.

  Her life was crap and would never be anything but crap. She worked for next to no money under tight supervision, giving hand jobs and blow jobs and greek the night long. She had absorbed enough Japanese sperm to float a battleship. On a good month, she scraped together a few thousand yen to send back to Korea, where her mother, her father, and her nine brothers and sisters depended upon her. She suspected that it was her father who had secretly sold her to the Japanese man, but family loyalty was nevertheless something she felt powerfully, a Confucian conceit that gave everything she did the faintest buzz of virtue. It meant that in the next life she would be something higher, better, easier.

  She turned back, to check again. It was then that she saw the two men. They were in the shadows, moving stealthily, matching her movements, but when her eyes fastened on them, they froze, almost melting into nothingness like skilled Red guerrillas. She stared and in seconds lost their outline. Were they really there? Was she dreaming this?

  “Hey,” she called in her heavily accented, grammatically fractured Japanese. “Who you? What want? You go away, you no hurt me.”

  In the beautiful Korean of her consciousness, she was far more articulate: are you demons come to take me? Or drunken, fattened American fools who want a free greek fuck to brag about on the flight home? Or young, angry yaks, annoyed that the boss thinks so little of you and therefore look for someone upon which to express your rage?

  But they were so still they seemed not to be there. In a second she had convinced herself that it was her imagination. It was punishment for thinking unkind thoughts about her father.

  She turned and headed again down Hanaz—

  She heard a sound. There were two men behind her. But she was not stupid or panic-prone. She did not scream and run hopelessly into the middle of the street. Instead she accelerated her pace just enough, tried hard to give no sign that she knew she was being stalked. She tried to think. The streets were dark and it was still half a mile to the bright lights of Shinjuku Dori. They could overtake her at any point.

  She looked for a sudden detour. She could head for either the Lawson’s convenience store or the Aya Café, both of which were open twenty-four hours a day. She could maybe find an alleyway. The prospect of getting home had become meaningless. She cared only to survive the night and if she had to lie in garbage behind some horrid club, she would do that. A better plan was to find one of the all-night joints, where she could nurse a few cigarettes until seven. It would then be pointless to return home. She could spend a couple of hours in the club, then go back on. It would be hard, but she would get through it.

  She came upon an unlit little promenade ahead, not far from a section of fifties bars called the Golden-gai. There was no overhead and she thought if she darted down it, the two men following wouldn’t see. By the time they’d gone beyond it and returned, she’d be out at the other end, on Yasukuni Dori.

  It was called Shinjuku Yuhodo Koen, an anomaly in Kabukicho, a curved, flagstone walk set almost in a glade, two hundred yards behind Hanazono Shrine, lined with trees on either side, almost unknown to the general public and certain to be deserted at this hour. It was dark enough to hide or to not be seen. It was ideal. She darted into it, opened up her gait, and prayed that she had dumped her stalkers.

  Since the promenade was narrow and the trees close, he would use kesagiri, a cut that began at the left shoulder and drove downward on the diagonal, splitting collarbone, the tip of the left ventricle, left lung, spine, lungs, right lung, liver. Well delivered, it sometimes flew through the curls of the intestine to exit at the right hip just above the pelvis. It was a good test for the blade, which in casual experimentation had proven astonishingly sharp. Old Norinaga knew his business, back there in his darkened hovel in 1550 or whatever, working in the light of the bright fire, as in an anteroom of hell, folding and refolding as his crew of young hammerers laid their strength and will into the glowing chunk of steel and iron.

  It was an unusually heavy blade, signifying that it had not been polished often, which meant it had a certain structural integrity. Not much of it had been stoned off in the 450 years since its forging. No hairline vertical cracks, invisible to the eye, ran through the hamon. No niogiri and no breaks in the nioguchi. No ware, no bubbles, no acid damage. It was merely scratched dull by a half century in a scabbard and before that however many years of mundane military duty and before that, who knew? All that was known was what it had accomplished in 1702. He had remounted it, hating the esthetics of the junky army furniture of 1939. Now it wore a
simple, pure shirasawa, a wooden sheathing and a wooden handle that assembled neatly into one curved airtight wooden object, almost like a piece of avant-garde sculpture. The shirasawa was called a blade’s pajamas. It was a storage mechanism, not a fighting or a ceremonial one and it meant no tsuba had been affixed, for the tsuba, the handguard that kept the fingers off the sharpness of the blade and caught opposing blades as they slid down toward the hands, was a fighting accouterment or—many were extraordinary works of art in their own right—an esthetic device. But he expected no fight tonight.

  They could see her. She diverted down their little lane, a stout woman still fifty yards off, slightly spooked, moving too quickly, aware that she was being followed, unaware that she was being driven. She wore a cheap cloth raincoat, a scarf, and glasses. Even from this distance, her wooden-soled sandals made a distinct click on the pavement.

  “Now, Nii,” he said. “What did Noguma do wrong?”

  “He was too big in his cut,” said young Nii, crouched beside him. Nii had the plastic garbage bags with him. His was the most unpleasant task of the night.

  “Yes, he thought he was in a movie. When he stepped forth, he was consumed in drama. I believe also he stopped to think. At that point it is too late to think. You must be an emptiness.”

  “Yes, Oyabun.”

  “There is no thinking, no willing. Both take time. Time means death, not for your opponent, for you. Do you read western literature?”

  “I listen to western music.”

  “Not quite the same. I think of Conrad. He said something so brilliant it is almost Japanese. Musashi could have said it. Or Mishima. ‘Thinking,’ he said, ‘is the enemy of perfection.’”

  “I understand,” said Nii, who really did not. It was still memorization for him. You did this, then you did that, then you did another thing, all in sequence, and if you did one out of sequence, you got yelled at. But of course all the time you were thinking, your opponent was cutting.

  “Be empty, Nii. Can you be empty?”

  “Yes, Oyabun.”

  The woman felt confident now. Another ordeal had passed. She was down the dark promenade and had stopped twice. The two followers had missed her detour. She was alone. It was all right. She would survive another night in Kabukicho. She would get another glorious day in that adventure known as her life. She would send another 15,000 yen back to—

  He moved so silently, so speedily, he could have been a ghost.

  “Hai!” she said.

  He materialized out of the trees to the right of the promenade like a giant bat, smooth and dark, in flowing garments, his face almost Kabuki white, like a demon’s, yet at the same time so graceful were his movements she could not tear her eyes from him. She knew she was dead. He was a dancer, a magician of the body, a hypnotizer in the fluid, swooping flow of his body as his arms came up. She stared at him, somehow calmed, and there was a frozen moment when she looked into his eyes and felt the compassionate touch of another human mind and then he—

  Arctic Monkeys screamed. Nii simply watched in the dim light and could not look away.

  He saw the oyabun appear in front of the woman so smoothly and so evenly there was no aggression in the move and in some way the woman was not frightened. There was no terror. So charismatic was he that he somehow blinded her and took her into death as if it were a deliverance. She seemed to welcome it as a purification.

  His arms went up into kasumi gamae, the high-right stance, the elbows near, the arms almost parallel, the sword cocked and coiled behind his head, the hands apart on the grip, one up close to the collar, one down low on the very end. He paused, musically almost, as if to obey the ritualistic demands of the drama. Then the strike and its parts: elbows apart came together as he unleashed downward, the blade flashing high over his head, then plunging downward, as the palms rotated inward. The left hand provided the power, the right the guidance as force was applied along the full edge.

  Nii watched: the blade drove on an angle through her with almost utter nonchalance, as if she were liquid, driving across the chest on an angle toward the hip, speeding up as the force continued, but it was so sudden and surgical that she couldn’t scream or jerk or even begin to comprehend what was happening to her.

  Just as easily, just as quickly, he got through her, driving the sword edge through the inner landscape of her body, feeling the different textures and elasticities of the blood-bearing organs, the crispiness of the spine as it split, the tightening of the gristle of her intestines, the final spurt through the epidermis from the inside out. Astonishingly, almost illogically, her left quarter, the whole thing, arm, shoulder, neck, and head, slid wetly off the cut and fell to earth, little filaments and gossamer connections breaking as it went, her face with still a look of astonishment, leaving her other three-quarters erect for just a second. A jet of black spurted from the hideous opening of the cut that had become the leading edge of what remained, and when the knees went, clumsily, the whole awkward thing fell to earth, and instantly the blood began to pool blackly in the dim light.

  “Yes,” said Kondo Isami. “It’s very sharp still.”

  Nii said nothing.

  “Now, little Nii. Get this mess cleaned up and disposed. And say a word over her when you bury her. She was good cutting.”

  It was called kirisute gomen, meaning “to cut down and leave.” It was the right of every samurai, according to article seventy-one of the Code of 100 Articles of 1742.

  17

  INO

  “He says,” said Big Al, “that it’s not an official form, it’s a draft. It was just typed from notes.”

  “So there’s no way of telling if it’s authentic. It could be a forgery.”

  They sat in an office behind Sushi Good Friends, a profitable restaurant owned by Al Ino. Al also owned three other sushi restaurants, two strip malls, a couple of pizza joints, two Hair Cutteries, three gas stations, and two McDonald’s around Oakland, a few more in San Francisco, and one or two way out in Carmel County. He was a retired master sergeant, USMC, whom Bob had found through a contact in Marine HQ, under the category Japanese language specialists, as Ino had spent twenty-four years in Marine Intelligence, most of it in Japan.

  “He doesn’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he says that although it’s not an official form it is organized like an official form. He’s seen a lot of coroner’s reports. He was a homicide detective in Osaka for eleven years, Gunny.”

  The “he” was the father-in-law of one of Al Ino’s sons, who had retired to America to be close to his daughter. Al said he was a top guy who knew Japanese crime up one side, down the other.

  “That’s Osaka. Maybe they do it different in Tokyo.”

  “Trust me on this one, Gunny. They don’t do it different in Tokyo.”

  “Gotcha.”

  They were discussing the document Bob had received a few days earlier, shipped by SAL, the big Japanese shipping company. It had turned out quickly enough that the return address was phony, as was the name of the shipper, one John Yamamoto.

  “It seems like—”

  “They’re Japanese, Gunny. They’re very careful. Every i is dotted, every t crossed at every step. They’re thorough, methodical, and they have infinite patience. They work like dogs. That’s how I ended up owning half of Oakland.”

  Bob looked at the document. It was thirty pages long, column after column of kanji characters arranged vertically on the pages, with never a strikeover or erasure, now and then a crude stick-figure drawing with arrows or dotted lines signifying this or that mysterious pathology.

  “No names?”

  “No names. Just scientific fact on the burned remains of five humans found in the Prefecture of Tokyo at such and such a time at such and such a place. Five dead human beings, and some remarks, some oddities, some things he couldn’t figure out.”

  “I’m not sure I can get through this. I once had my own father autopsied, if you can believe i
t, and I got through that. I’m not sure—”

  He trailed off. He needed a drink. A splash of sake would taste so good. It would calm him just enough. Al Ino was a drinking man and Bob could see a whole rack of bottles on a cabinet on the other side of the office. In any one of them, paradise hid.

  “Well, it’s pretty hard stuff,” said Al. “Maybe I could submit a report to you, Gunny. You could look at it at a better time.”

  “No, I’ve got to do this. Just tell me. Is it bad?”

  “Well, here’s one thing I’ll bet you didn’t know. Whoever the oldest male victim is, he got one of them.”

  “Huh?”

  “Yeah, there was a lot of blood soaked into his trousers, and they didn’t burn because they were so wet. The blood typology and DNA matched nobody in the family. Does that make you feel any better?”

  Bob was surprised: it did.

  Here’s to you, Philip Yano. You were tough at the end. You defended your family. You went down hard. You cut.

  “Is it a surprise?”

  “Nah. He was pure samurai. That’s how he’d go.”

  “Good news, bad news,” Al went on. “Good news. I suppose, some mercy on a cruel night. The family members were shot. Nine-millimeters, head shots, once, twice. Someone went upstairs silently, from room to room with a pistol, and put them down. So there was no pain, there was no torture, there was no rape.”

  “Only murder,” said Bob glumly.

  “The ‘young female’ was shot twice, once in the jaw, once in the head. She must have risen, he got her as she was getting up, then he stood over her as she was still breathing and fired again. The others, the boys and the mother, it was clean.”

  Bob put his head in his hands. God, he needed a drink so bad! He thought of grave Tomoe and what she would have brought into the world as a doctor, with her care, her precision, her commitment to obligation, her love of her father and mother. Shot in the face, then in the head. Lying there as he came over, she probably understood what was happening, what had happened to her family.