A Bob Lee Swagger Boxed Set

by Stephen Hunter

  “Can I visit her?”

  “Not a good idea.”

  “She needs someone.”

  “It’s not possible.”

  “Miss Okada, don’t you want these people? They killed a family and orphaned a four-year-old child. They have to be punished. Don’t you see that? Didn’t you send me an autopsy report? I have an idea in my head this professional objectivity is a game; you want these guys as bad as I do.”

  “I didn’t send you anything. That’s a delusion on your part. But it’s not the serious delusion. The serious delusion is that you want to believe that you and I are buddies, in this together, in a quest for justice. No way. I work for the United States government, which is where my loyalties begin and end. Don’t romanticize me, because I’ll disappoint you. Here’s the reality: you have one inch of leash. You pursue this investigation for a little while longer. If you develop some evidence, you make sure it comes to me first, last, and only. If it’s of value, I will see that it gets to the proper Japanese authorities, and at that point our interest ends. The Japanese system will deal with it, or maybe it won’t, because that’s the reality. If you break my rules, I’ll report you in a flash and you’re on your way to a Japanese prison.”

  “I would say you drive a hard bargain, except you don’t bargain at all.”

  “No, I don’t. You can’t go samurai on me, do you understand? If you samurai up, I will have to take you down hard. I do not bullshit, Swagger, and I tell you loud and clear: if I have to, pardner, I will bust you up so bad you’ll wish you’d never entered this rodeo.”

  23

  THE TOKYO FLASH

  Of course she drove a red Mazda RX-8. Long hair flying, wearing aviator’s teardrop sunglasses, she flew through the Tokyo traffic like a ninja, cursing at the slower, veering in and out, braking hard, gunning too fast, rushing through the gears, utterly confident in the left-handed driving. It was late afternoon of the following day, and when he called her, she told him she’d pick him up.

  But they didn’t go to any reporter. Instead, they pulled into a large building of gray brick, clearly Catholic, from the religious statue in the front yard. She drove around the side to the parking lot that faced a playground behind a cyclone fence.

  “You stay here,” she said. “I don’t want her seeing you. We don’t know what she remembers, what her associations are. Believe me, this child doesn’t need any more trauma. It’s hard enough.”

  He sat in the car as Okada disappeared into the building and, ten minutes later, emerged with the child.

  Bob watched. Immediately he saw the difference. Where Miko had been a force of nature, a naturally gregarious, adventurous child, now she held tightly to Susan’s hand and didn’t seem to want to go out on her own. Susan took her to a swing, sat her on it, and pushed, but in a few seconds the child began to holler.

  They were too far away for Bob to hear, but he saw Susan take the child off the swing and hold her. Then they walked to a slide and, tentatively, Miko climbed and desultorily descended the gleaming surface. But there was no liberation, no surrender to the giddy power of gravity; it was a glum trip.

  The visit lasted a few minutes. Miko seemed fearful, constricted, clinging neurotically to Susan, who was talking gently to her but without much effect.

  It was almost more than Bob could take. He found his muscles tensing, his jaw clenching, and his anger rising.

  I don’t care what I said to Susan, he thought. The man who did this to her will feel fear too. Then I will cut him.

  The woman and the child went inside and Bob tried to relax, but his mind was too buzzed. He wished he had a drink, but that would not solve anything. Instead, he climbed out, took a few drafts of fresh air, and tried to calm down. Pretty soon Susan arrived, and they drove off.

  “Let me ask you something,” he said as she gunned through the busy avenues. “When this is over and let’s assume I’m still standing, I ain’t in no jail, and I’m headed back to the States—”

  “No.”

  “You don’t know where I’m going.”

  “Sure I do. I know exactly where you’re going. You want to adopt her.”

  “I am already a father. Some say I’m a good one.”

  “I’m sure you’re a great one. Moreover, you could make her a wonderful home in the West, and sooner rather than later she’d heal, though never completely, and she’d come back to us and she’d become happy and productive and have a wonderful life. That doesn’t matter.”

  “What matters?”

  “Connections, which you don’t have.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s very hard for foreigners to adopt a child in Japan. First, few of them are available. I’m not sure if she qualifies. Then there’s the shape of your eyes. They’re round. The Japanese are disinclined to let a westerner adopt a Japanese child, unless there’s some prior connection. It’s not like China or Korea where cute girl babies are a cash crop for American yuppies.”

  “There’s no hope?”

  “Not a whisper. Not an eyelash.”

  “Suppose your boss, Mr. Ambassador, used his influence.”

  “He wouldn’t do it for me, why would he do it for you? I don’t have the juice, you don’t have the juice.”

  “That sucks.”

  “It does indeed. But the world is full of terrible injustices. Ninety-eight percent of them can’t be helped or fixed. This is one of them. Concentrate on the two percent that can. Ah, here we are.”

  Nick Yamamoto lived in a quiet Tokyo residential neighborhood a few kilometers geographically and several universes culturally from Kabukicho. His was one of those nondescript wooden homes behind a fence that was attached to other homes on either side, all of them squashed together like french fries in a greasy bag. They had no trouble parking in the quiet neighborhood, slipped through the gate, and knocked.

  Like many Japanese males he was slender, small, wore glasses, moved fluidly. Unlike most Japanese men, he had blond hair. It was thatchy, moussed in odd directions, and suggested some kind of rock star. If you only counted the hair, he looked eighteen; the rest of him was a man of forty-odd years.

  “Do you like it?” he asked Susan.

  “No. It’s stupid.”

  He looked up at Bob.

  “Is she a bitch or what?”

  “She can be pretty tough,” Bob said. “You should get her started on me if you want to hear some ugliness. Anyhow, my name is Bob Lee Swagger. I like your hair.”

  “See, he likes my hair.”

  “What does he know? He’s a gaijin.”

  Bob and Nick shook hands, bonding immediately on their mutual fear of the great and wonderful wizard Susan Okada. Nick took them into the place, all wood floors and luxurious western furniture. A seventy-two-inch TV hung on one wall broadcasting baseball, but everywhere else books were jammed into shelves and framed front pages hung on walls. The smell of grilled meat hung in the air; Nick had just finished dinner.

  “A drink?” Nick asked.

  “Can’t touch the stuff,” said Swagger. “If I do, I’m gone for a month. Please go ahead.”

  “Okada-san?”

  “No, I’m working. This isn’t social.”

  “Tea, coffee, Coke, anything?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Well, I think I will, if you don’t mind.”

  Nick went and got himself a jug and a cup and proceeded to lubricate himself with small sips of sake. He ushered them to the leather sofa and he slipped into a nice Barcelona chair.

  “Nick used to be the Tokyo Times’ Washington bureau chief, which is where I met him. But then he was recalled and in a few months got himself fired. What was it, Nick? I don’t remember. Plagiarism or bribery?”

  “Actually, it was both.”

  “The cocaine made him do it. It wasn’t his fault.”

  “The cocaine made me do it. It was my fault.”

  “Anyhow, he says he’s clean now, and he’s still a one-man show. He
publishes, writes and reports, and lays out the Tokyo Flash, a weekly of a disreputable sort. Tokyo has hundreds of them. His is one of the best. If you want to know about Brad and Angelina, or what porn star has just left which studio to go hard-core for two billion yen, Nick would know.”

  “But I know some other stuff too.”

  “He’s published seven books on the yakuza. And he knows a lot more than he’s published.”

  “I’d be dead if I published what I know.”

  “You sound like just the man I need,” said Bob.

  “Well, I’ll try. I owe Susan for something in D.C. So try me.”

  “Kondo Isami.”

  “Ohhhh, I’m impressed. Which one? Kondo the original, or Kondo Two, the Sequel?”

  “I guess the first to start.”

  “You probably couldn’t understand the second without the first.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  Nick poured himself a little more sake. He turned off the TV, fished among his CDs and found one, and popped it into a player.

  “Soundtracks from several samurai movies.”

  “Swagger’s seen a lot of samurai movies. Too many. He has the Toshiro Mifune disease.”

  “Well, Swagger-san, I’m a writer, so I believe in mood. This is the right music for this story.”

  He took another swig on the sake.

  “Westerners can’t really appreciate the dynamic between shogun and emperor that played, off and on in Japan for three hundred years. I won’t bore you with it in detail, but we had this weird system of a showy but powerless emperor-god on a throne in Kyoto and a guy in armor who’d fought in a hundred battles and outthought everybody else running the show in Edo. They never got along.

  “It came to a head in the middle of the nineteenth century, when aggressive outsiders began pressuring Japan to open up and trade with the West. The shogun opposed the move, the emperor embraced it, more or less, and that set the clans a-warring. The emperor, as I say, lived in Kyoto, the shogun in Tokyo. I’ll call it Tokyo instead of Edo just to keep it simple.”

  “I’m very simple,” said Bob, “but so far I’m with you.”

  “A lot of pro-emperor ronin—masterless samurai, who despised the shogun—came to Kyoto and essentially turned it into Dodge City. It was violent, terrible, a city of anarchy. The year is roughly eighteen hundred sixty-two. In Tokyo, the shogun was embarrassed that he couldn’t keep control of the city where the emperor resided; it made him look foolish.

  “So a lord sympathetic to him, and certainly with his permission, hired a militia. Or maybe you’d call them vigilantes, or regulators, something cowboy. A gang, a posse, an outfit, whatever. They called themselves the Specially Chosen Ones, which in Japanese is Shinsengumi. They were led—well, there was a lot of turmoil in their own leadership, as there always is in Japan, but eventually, with the help of a really good, bloody assassination—by a guy named Kondo Isami. Big guy, tough guy, ran a dojo out west, very ambitious. So Kondo and his Shinsengumi set out to tame Dodge. They did it by killing. It’s been in a thousand movies, but you probably remember either Band of Assassins or When the Last Sword Is Drawn.”

  “Saw ’em both. Poor Toshiro gets beheaded in Band. I guess he was Kondo.”

  “That’s right. Kondo Isami is definitely the Mifune part. That’s what happened to Kondo when the emperor’s clans won and the shogun was replaced. But for a long time, in Kyoto, Kondo was the law, and he and his boys were the bloodiest mob old Japan ever saw. They killed and killed and killed. Kondo himself probably killed a hundred men in sword fights. He was your true-grit samurai, love him or hate him. So any man today calling himself Kondo means to scare you and frighten you and communicate to you that he is willing to kill. That he even likes to kill.”

  “And Kondo Isami Two?” Bob asked.

  “I’ve never seen his name in print. Supposedly it appeared only once and a few weeks later, the reporter’s head was found mounted on a tripod of golf clubs outside his paper, a tabloid called Weekly Jitsuwa. It caused quite a stir. The three clubs were the eight and nine irons and the number three wood. Ya-ku-za, of course, is slang derived from a card game’s losing hand, which is eight-nine-three.

  “Nobody knows who he is, only what he does. He’s an elite yakuza assassin, with a very small team of highly trained men who favor the old traditions. They still kill the old way, with the sword.”

  “You’ll have to explain that to me,” Bob said.

  “For a westerner it seems bizarre, I suppose. But in certain applications, the sword is actually far more efficient than the gun, if you don’t mind a lot of sloppy blood around. These guys spend their lives working on it and get very, very good. They can take you down as fast as a gun. It’s an extremely lethal weapon and they have a butcher’s knowledge of anatomy. They know exactly where to cut you or, if they have to, pierce you, to empty you of blood in a split second. They cut your lungs and take out your air supply, they cut your pelvis and shatter your support system, they cleave your brain and it all goes dark. You don’t even feel the pain, you just go down in a heap. And best of all: no noise. You can have a nice little battle, a good triple assassination, a one-on-one to the death, assured that no cops are going to show up. Nobody knows until the next morning when they notice all those pools of sticky red stuff in the gutter. Here, look at these.”

  He went to a cabinet, pulled out a file, and handed it to Bob.

  They were autopsy and crime scene photos of men dead by sword. On the slab, the nude bodies had oval openings the size of footballs, sometimes hard to see because the skin sundered wasn’t white but usually mottled red, black, and green, not from disease, as Bob initially thought, but from the dense, almost obsessive tattooing that marked the bodies. But the cuts were visible once you focused on them amid the dragon’s heads and wolves’ yaps and kanji characters: they exposed a butcher’s festival of sliced meat inside, visible now only because the blood had drained. The cuts were gigantic, and deep, and permanent; they’d empty the sack of fluid that is a human body in a second. In the on-site photos of the rubbed-out of the underworld, the distinguishing feature was not the black suits and shoes, not the sunglasses, not the twisted postures of the fallen or the occasional lopped limb or split head, but the blood, the lakes and lakes of it. Each body sat like an island in the middle of a red sea; it lapped everywhere, spreading in satiny luster, as if by some mad king’s imperial mandate.

  “This Kondo Isami came on the scene about five years ago. An underboss named Otani was having trouble with a Chinese-sponsored hotshot in Kabukicho and was bedeviled by one individual in particular. ‘Bedeviled’ as in ‘cut really bad.’ Kondo Isami introduced himself to Otani by sending a business card and a head. It was very effective. As Otani rose, so did Kondo, specializing in the impossible, the discreet, the hard to do. Evidently, unlike most of the yaks, he is not tattooed. He has to be brilliant, socially adept, and completely presentable. But even so, there are weirdnesses. Many who’ve met him have not seen his face; he goes to great lengths, including masks or theatrical lighting arrangements, to prevent certain people from getting a look at it. But he’ll meet others very casually, it is said. He goes dancing or clubbing. Suddenly, for no reason, he doesn’t care if anybody sees him. Now what the hell could that be about?”

  “Sometimes he’s shy, sometimes he’s not. Maybe that’s all there is to it.”

  “No, there’s more. Nothing’s simple about this guy. He has brilliant sword skills. He’s at the level of almost transcendent technique that some of the legendary sams achieved, like Musashi or Yagyu. His boys may not be quite so advanced, but their internal discipline is tremendous. Only once has a Shinsengumi guy been taken by the cops, and he committed hara-kiri in the station with a fork before he talked. He turned out to be a street gang kid who’d evidently been talent-spotted by Kondo, brought into the unit, trained, and disciplined. They found him soaked in his own blood with a smile on his face.

  “Otherwise, they specia
lize in the hard to do. Enormously violent. There was a rumor some Chinese gangsters were going to mount a move against Boss Otani, and the Shinsengumi took them out in about thirty seconds in a Kyoto inn, where the group had gathered for recreational indulgence. They caught them in the lounge. The swords came out much faster than the Berettas, and they danced from man to man in seconds, cutting. Kondo himself split a Chinaman from crown to dick. Cut him in two, top to bottom. Amazing strength, but more. You have to know the art of cutting. He does. Then they left no witnesses.”

  “Look, Nick,” said Bob, “I think Kondo has a new client. I think he took out Philip Yano’s family, stole a sword of some rare value that had come Yano’s way, and now he’s got some plan for the sword that I can’t figure out. So can you ask around, see if you can find out who Kondo’s working for and what he’d need a special sword for? And why would he have to wipe out the Yanos? Why couldn’t he just send a burglary team in, crack the vault, and walk out clean? Or even buy the damned thing, not that, come to think of it, Yano would have sold.”

  “Sure, I can ask. But I’m getting something out of this. I’m getting a scoop that’ll make me the man in the tabloid game, and even get me back in the respectable rags.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Nick, be careful,” Okada said.

  “I’ll be careful. Meanwhile, Swagger-san, learn to fight.”

  24

  THE EIGHT CUTS

  The compass no longer held four directions. There was no longer a left or a right. That up/down stuff? Gone totally. As for colors, numbers, signposts, any markers of a universe to be navigated rationally: vanished.

  Instead, all reality consisted of the eight cuts.

  There were only eight cuts.

  Never more, never fewer.

  Tsuki.

  Migi yokogiri.

  Hidari yokogiri.

  Migi kesagiri.

  Hidari kesagiri.

  Migi kiriage.

  Hidari kiriage.

  Shinchokugiri.

  Or thrust, side cut left to right, side cut right to left, diagonal cut right to left, diagonal cut left to right, rising diagonal cut from right to left, rising diagonal cut from left to right, and vertical downward, the head-splitter.