A Bob Lee Swagger Boxed Set

by Stephen Hunter

  Yet he saw that was itself a form of Zen or bushido or whatever this little guy was selling. It wasn’t action, it was belief. You had to give yourself to it and trust it. You had to give up on the you part of you, because the more of you there was, the less belief there was and the more vulnerable you were.

  Day and night flowed together. Bob never saw the sun, not after the first morning’s work outdoors. He slept in snatches, was pulled from unconsciousness, dragged to the dojo floor, and put through paces. Some children watched and laughed. They thought he was really supremely funny, big, tall, clumsy, gangly. Sometimes even Doshu smiled.

  But it did seem a rhythm arrived somehow, sometime. The moves began to feel all right to him, possibly even good. The less he tried, the better he did. Maybe it was that he was so exhausted he didn’t care anymore. But he was learning smoothness.

  Doshu stood across from him; the bokken flashed toward his face, and Bob was fast enough to parry and ride the sword down. He saw three next steps: he could rise off the pinned sword and go for a horizontal cut—migi yokogiri—that would take Doshu across the chest; he could pivot inward, getting so close to Doshu that Doshu was helpless, and drive backward for a penetrating strike to the chest, tsuki; or he could float backward, find a new stance, and look for another, larger opening.

  While he was thinking, Doshu was cutting. Doshu had reversed, come out of the pressure of the upper blade, and stepping away, clipped him with two inches in the larynx. If the swords had been steel instead of wood, he’d be on the floor trying to hold the last of his seven pints of blood in his body, but he wouldn’t be fast enough.

  This went on; the combative katas increased, and Bob got them, he saw them, he understood the principle, saw the opening, but he just never quite got there in time.

  “Fuck!” he said.

  “Moon in the cold stream like a mirror,” the man said.

  Bob tried to crank up the concentration, but that didn’t work. He was being beaten severely at every exchange, and the blows of the wooden sword were raising knots on his bones and joints. His sweat poured off him. His fingers felt numb. How much longer would this go on?

  And suddenly it stopped.

  Doshu drew back from him and looked at him. Then he delivered a verdict.

  “First day, eight cuts. Not bad. Second day, cutting tameshigiri, not bad. Yesterday, fighting, good. Today, fighting, not so good. Nothing.”

  “I don’t have it today,” said Bob.

  “Is no ‘Don’t have today.’ No yakuza say, ‘You got today? Okay, now we fight.’ Is only now.”

  “I’m trying,” Bob heard himself say, and waited for Yoda to answer, “Is no try. Is only do.”

  But it was Doshu who answered: “You not know enough. Anyone beat you.”

  Bob wanted to say, But you said speed is sick. Wanting to win is sick. Then he stopped. Why fight him? he thought. He knows this shit, I don’t. It’s not up to me to point out his contradictions. Just go with it.

  He bowed, showing humility to his tormentor, and saw immediately that this pleased the man. Bob composed his face into an expression of nothingness. Is nothing. Nothing is. Only void. Enter void. Do not exist. Use thought to approach no-thought.

  “You sleep now.”

  “No, I’m fine. I can go on.”

  “No, sleep. Tired, sore, disappointed, confused. Not concentration. You sleep now. You come when you wake. But then, you fight.”

  “Fight?”

  “Sure. A match. But you must win.”

  “I will win.”

  “You must win. No win, I kick you out. I cannot help you nothing. You go away. Swagger die soon anyway, no worth helping.”

  “I will win,” pledged Bob, believing he would. He liked this little development; it was a return to cause-effect. It was an ending, a climax. He would fight, he would win, he would go on. The finality was pleasing.

  Doshu bowed; Bob returned the bow and went off. He went to the kitchen, where a surprisingly nourishing meal had been prepared; he ate it hungrily. Then the old lady—Doshu’s mother, his maid, his sister, no introductions had been made—took him to a room where he discovered a modern shower. She left, he stripped, and luxuriated in the warmth of the stinging water, feeling it soothe his bruised muscles and achy, swollen joints. Then, wrapping himself in a towel, he found his pallet behind the kitchen. Someone had covered it with a futon and a clean linen sheet and he settled into surprising comfort.

  He woke sensing light.

  I am ready, he thought. I will win.

  He found a fresh jockstrap, pulled on gi trousers, covered them with hakama trousers, which he now knew how to tie, all the little bows and straps, all nice and neat. Attired, he stretched for twenty minutes, warming his muscles. Finally, all loosey-goosey, he put on his gi jacket, belting it tight, and walked to the dojo.

  Doshu awaited, as did his opponent.

  “You must win,” said Doshu. “No mercy, no hesitation, no doubt. Give all. Become void.”

  “I—,” said Bob, then stopped when he saw the enemy.

  It wasn’t merely that the enemy was about four feet tall and about ten. It was much worse. She was a girl.

  25

  THE FLOATING WORLD

  Nick worked the clubs. Uptown, downtown, all around the town. He did the fancy glass-and-chrome joints in the Ginza, the most sophisticated of Tokyo’s nighttime districts. It cost him a fortune, because the Ginza is possibly the most expensive strip of real estate in the world, but he’d just moved two pounds of pure Moroccan White Girl to a minor yak offshoot and so he had a big wad of cash in his drawers and he didn’t mind spreading it around in search of a scoop that would put his rag on the map big-time.

  And it would be a scoop too: Kondo Isami, the legendary yak killer, man of mystery and blood, working for a new big boss on a new big plan. That would make him in this burg. God, he loved this filthy town.

  But he had no luck on the Ginza strip. He worked the gay part of the city, Shinjuku-2-Chome, on the principle that a few of the yaks were fairy or went to both coasts; they might sneak off here to relax, to get off, to forget the slicing that was so much a part of their lives, and might relax enough so that with a gallon or two of sake, they might spill something to a rent boy, he might spill something in turn. He worked Ace and Kinswomyn and Kinsmen and Advocate.

  But no. The fags weren’t talking, or if they were, they weren’t talking to him, a straight guy with blondish hair and too much money to burn.

  He had no luck either in Akasaka, another bright grid of streets loaded with bars, clubs, joints, particularly soaplands, those slippery palaces of hygiene and blow jobs, but not quite as sophisticated as Ginza. A lot of loose lips, in more ways than one, in the soaplands. Again, nothing. Nobody was talking.

  He tried bouncers, barkeeps, hostesses, jazz musicians, rockers, cops, dealers, a few low-ranking yaks, people he knew or who knew of him. He spread a fortune around doing all the places: Cavern Club, Crocodile, Fukuriki Ichiza, Gaspanic Bar, Geronimo Shot Bar, Ichimon, Hobgoblin Tokyo, Shinjuku Pit Inn, Ruby Room, Nanbantei, Milk, Maniac Love, Warrior Celt, Xanadu, and Yellow. He got names and places from guys and moved on to other guys, other places, but generally he got the same warning, high town or low.

  “Baby, you don’t want to ask about that guy. That guy’s serious. If he finds out, he’ll come to call in the night and you’ll end up cut to noodles.”

  “I hear you. It’s just I heard a little something, I’d like to lay it out.”

  “It’ll lay you out, Yamamoto-san. You’ll die for the glory of the Tokyo Flash. Is that what you want?”

  “Thanks, bud.”

  “Good luck, man.”

  He tried Nishi Azabu, Roppongi, Harajuku, and Shibuya Center Gai, even Ebisu, popular with the expatriate set, though it was almost unthinkable that a gaijin would know something before a Nipponese would.

  No, no, no, nothing. Instead, he came upon a yak scoop, having nothing to do with anything at all. S
till, it was all the buzz, and he heard it in a dozen places. The yak talk was porn talk, almost the same thing. The boys at Imperial had made some big American connection and were cooking up a deal; it looked like they’d be getting western stars, blond girls, into their product line, and that looked promising if they could only get import licenses. Anyone who got American product into Japan stood to make a fortune, as the Japanese hunger for white women was well known. And if you could get white women to do the Japanese things—bukkake, subway groping, pig snout rings, bondage, urination fantasy, rape, teacher, airline hostess, office lady—the profits would be huge. But until now no one had been able to break the ban on foreign product; nobody had the juice to get it through customs. One man stood against it.

  Miwa, called “the Shogun” because he was the genius at Shogunate AV, was known for his ferocious interest in keeping Japanese porn Japanese; the Shogun worked hard to keep the laws really tight so that any American outfit trying to set up business in Japan would find itself ensnared in legal troubles and police harassment. It was almost certain he was a nationalist crackpot, as were many yaks with business connections and many businessmen with yak connections.

  The Shogun was head of AJVS, the All Japan Video Society, the professional group that represented Big Porn’s interests and worked with the Administrative Commission of Motion Picture Codes and Ethics, which theoretically regulated the porn industry, though it was more frequently thought to be a subsidiary of AJVS by virtue of collateral interest or out-and-out bribery. The key to the Shogun’s power was his presidency of AJVS, which in turn made him the most influential figure of the Administrative Commission; it made him the boss, really, of porn. If he lost that, he lost everything. And his term at AJVS was up. Word had it that for the first time in years, bribe money was being spread around to the other porn studio execs—there were hundreds of studios—to deny the Shogun reelection; if Imperial took over AJVS, they took over the Administrative Commission as well; they’d open up trade with the Americans. As rich and powerful as Miwa was, how could he stand against a huge tsunami of American capital, ravenous for the incredibly flexible gymnastics of the classic Japanese pussy? He hated the Americans. It was more than anything rational, it was cultural: their product was uninteresting, it had no ideas, it reflected a society of decadence and softness. “Keep Japanese pornography Japanese!” the Shogun said.

  That’s all the boys were talking about. It was like a war was going to break out, and maybe it was, as both Imperial and Shogunate AV had their powerful sponsors in the business. Maybe the streets would run red with blood as the two porn giants tried to dominate and set the future.

  “Nah. The porn people may have yak money in them, and yak influence, but they don’t like to go to the blades. They’d rather sue or try to ruin each other with unsubstantiated rumors. They’d never kill. They get too much pussy. If you get a lot of pussy, you don’t see the point in cutting someone’s head off, especially when it might get you your head cut off.”

  “Maybe Kondo is signing up with one of those outfits just as a threat, a hint of future difficulties,” Nick said to this source, a detective on the Organized Crime Squad, who knew.

  “He’s above that crap. His thing is the elegant, perfect hit. He’s not going into alleys with hoods and start madly hacking off heads. It’s too common. He picks his jobs, that’s all. He’d never get involved with porn. He’s old school. He’s like all the stiffs who hate Miwa for making millions off pussy.”

  “Sure,” said Nick. He slid over ten 10,000-yen notes.

  “Wow,” said the cop, “that’s a nice tip. You won’t tell anybody I talked to you?”

  “You bet I won’t,” said Nick, “and you won’t tell anybody I talked to you?”

  “You think I want to spend my last eight seconds bleeding out in an alley?”

  Finally, only Kabukicho was left. He was well known there, and it made him feel a little vulnerable. But he had no choice. He knew this was dangerous and Kabukicho was Otani’s and clearly Kondo had an Otani connection. The wires in Kabukicho would be direct; any questions he asked would get to the wrong people fast.

  He knew he ought to hire somebody to do the asking for him, somebody from out of town so it wouldn’t get back that it was Nick Yamamoto, the Tokyo Flash, the Clark Kent of the Tokyo tabloid scene, on the trail.

  But he couldn’t resist. He had that reporter gene. He wasn’t an elegant writer, he wasn’t ambitious for power, fame, or money, but he just had to know a little bit more, a little bit sooner. That’s what drove him. It was such a high—it got you much higher than the White Girl, which is why he was able to walk away from the White Girl for personal use, though he didn’t mind making a buck or two off her once in a while—to hear something first. There was that moment when you knew what nobody else knew. God, what a buzz, what a jolt.

  He began casually, with people he knew were so minor they were probably unconnected to anything big.

  “Anything going on? I’m thinking some kind of realignment. A certain guy who’s worked with Otani on some delicate matters now working with someone else, someone big, someone from a little outside? Hear anything?”

  “I think I know who you’re talking about, but I don’t ever discuss him. It’s not healthy. He’d cut off my arm and make me eat my tattoos.”

  He went everywhere, Queen Bee, the S-M Club, Mysteria Purity, Le Grand Bleu, MoMo Iro, everywhere, talking to anyone, whores, image club performers, trannies, enforcers, bouncers, cutters, the odd Chinaman, the odd Korean, the odd African, impersonators, pickpockets, and everywhere it was the same.

  Nothing. Nothing.

  It was the nothing that had him tantalized. There was usually something, but the talk about the upcoming election for presidency of AJVS and its implications on the issue Imperial versus Shogunate AV had become so loud that nothing else was being talked about. It was as if an anvil had been laid across Kabukicho gossip lines. But then finally…oh, it was so small. It was so nothing. It was a wisp, a leaf in the wind.

  He was in a small club closed to strangers, so late it was early. Scotch was the drink of choice, blues the music and the lighting scheme, smoke the preferred atmosphere. You could hardly see across the room. Nick threw down another Scotch and water, turned to the barkeep, and said, “Another for me, another for Dad here.”

  Dad was a bouncer at Prin Prin, an image club that catered to the fantasy life of the Japanese male, including student-teacher, airline hostess, office lady, kimono. It even had a whole set built to resemble a subway car for those who just had to grope. But even in such a kingdom of the dream cum true, trouble sometimes broke out and thus a fast big man with good hands was needed. His specialty was the “soft punch” by which he deflated the overly amorous with a thunder blow to the midriff, yet left no scars, no bruises, nothing but a powerful sense of ill-being.

  “You didn’t hear this from me,” the thunder-puncher said.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

  “Swear to god, not from me.”

  “Swear to god twice.”

  “I have a bitch. She’s half Korean, supervises a shift at one of the hand-job joints. Tough little gal. Pretty, but tough.”

  “Yeah.”

  “She says all the Korean sex workers are nervous because one of their own got disappeared a few months ago.”

  “I didn’t hear a thing.”

  “That’s just it: you weren’t supposed to. Just here one day, gone the next. But here’s what my girlfriend knows that nobody else knows and she didn’t even figure it out till she thought about it. The next morning on the way to work, she saw a guy named Nii, some minor hood who somehow got into a good crew and is now off the street—”

  “Nii.”

  “Nii. She saw him stagger out of a bar where he’d clearly been for hours, go into an alley, and puke his guts out. Just puke. She swears that when he bent over, his jacket fell open and the bottom half of his white shirt was drenched in red.”

  “Lord.�
��

  “Like he’d been at some brutal hacking. So who had Nii hacked? The woman? Why would he hack some nothing Korean whore and then make it go away?”

  “Maybe he’s screwy that way. Jack the Ripper, that sort of thing. Or maybe it’s just Kabukicho. The odd whore gets disappeared once in a while. Life goes on. Boo fucking hoo.”

  “Sure. But there’s something weird here. What was weird, this Korean whore thing, it was somehow set up, all the Korean girls were talking about it for weeks. Her boss kept the gal late so she didn’t go to Shinjuku station with the others. She went later, by herself, and somewhere along the walk to the station, real early in the morning, she met up with somebody and just vanished. The Nii thing suggests she was cut.”

  “Hmmm. Doesn’t have to be Eight-Nine-Three Brotherhood.”

  “Yeah, it does. Because the thing was planned. Somebody with juice got it set up so that this gal could be, you know, cut from the herd, held for a certain time, then released to go off and be chopped, diced, spindled, mutilated in private. No cops, no witnesses; it was all planned out. And poor Nii had the cleanup job. He wouldn’t have the juice to set it up. He’s nothing, a servant, a cleanup kid. But he’s working for somebody with juice and somebody who likes to cut.”

  Nick saw it then: sure, it fit.

  Nii would have to work for Kondo. Kondo wanted to cut something. It was all arranged via Boss Otani. But why?

  “Do you remember the date?”

  “Only that it was just after that soldier-hero and his family got burned up. Remember that? God, that was sad.”