A Bob Lee Swagger Boxed Set

by Stephen Hunter

  “Okay, in a few minutes. Now, what about a nice cup of noodles?”

  “Mr. Swagger, have you had a breakdown? Really, I—”

  “No, ma’am, I am fit as a fiddle. I do think we should have some noodles.”

  “You are—”

  “We should watch for a while before I go into my Toshiro imitation. Come on.”

  So the samurai and his companion went into Solo’s noodle-rama and had a nice cup of noodles each, and a diet Coke. It was actually pretty good. They sat near the window.

  “What do you see?” she asked.

  “Well, I see a large Mercedes S-Class, black, very shiny, parked in the lot. Your standard yakmobile.”

  “You have no idea how many of them are in there. We should call the police.”

  “Yes, and what do they find? An old man polishing a sword in the presence of several thugs in suits. Where would the crime be? Would the old man say, ‘These guys have terrorized me into polishing this stolen sword’? He would not, because he fears retaliation, and rightfully so. The cops would say, ‘How is this sword stolen? Has it been reported stolen?’ And of course we’d have to answer, ‘We have no proof except for the crazy accusations of Slim Whitman here who claims it’s a sword he brought into the country a few months ago.’ Then the yaks would say, ‘And here’s the license for the sword,’ which they got from Yano-san. So the sword goes back to the yaks, we’re booted out of town, and Mr. Tatsuya—”

  “Mr. Omote, dammit. Can’t you get anything right?”

  “Mr. Omote gets back to polishing. Meanwhile, the cops discover my passport ain’t no good and I’m arrested. That don’t sound too good to me.”

  “Come on.”

  She led him back to the car.

  “Get in.”

  She opened her purse, a rather large green leather bag, and handed it to him. He looked inside and saw the grip of a small pistol.

  “It’s a sterile Chinese Makarov. I got it from a couple of the Agency clowns on the fourth floor. It’s loaded with some magic candy called three-eighty hollowpoints, whatever that means, it had the boys all giggly. Take it.”

  “No.”

  “Swagger, you can’t go in there with just—”

  “Yes, I can. This game is called swords. It’s their game. I beat them at it and that makes me the winner. And throw that thing into Tokyo Bay. It’ll get you sent to Japanese women’s prison for the next fourteen years and they don’t have no Kate Spade bags there.”

  “I hope you survive long enough to tell me how a bumpkin from Utah who sounds like Johnny Cash before the cure can identify a Kate Spade.”

  “I’m from Idaho out of Arkansas. My daughter made me buy her one. I also bought one for my wife. You must do okay. They ain’t cheap. Sure you won’t have a drink?”

  The question wasn’t even sane enough for an answer. She just looked at him. He took the small, flat brown bottle out of the paper bag, cranked off the cap, smiled, toasted her, and said, “Cheers.”

  Then he poured some of it into his hair, and ruffled his hair with his other hand.

  He splashed some on his neck.

  He handed her the bottle.

  He pulled down his tie and unbuttoned four buttons on his shirt and tugged his shirt up on the left side.

  “‘The foundation of the Way is always deception.’ Yagyu, sixteen thirty-five,” he said.

  “All right, Swagger. I give up. Go to your little war.”

  “See ya,” he said, stepping out.

  “I’ll be waiting for you to come out, that is, if you come out.”

  Nii was amazed. The old man, barefoot and in black like some kind of hipster, with glasses so big they blew his eyes up like a bug’s, sat on a low stool on a platform. He looked like some kind of musical performer. He was bent over the long curve of steel, his eyes fiercely concentrating, his left hand securing the blade against a block of wood, his right gripping a piece of flat stone. A water bucket sat at his right foot.

  He was in the part of the process called finishing. It had been a long, slow war, starting with foundation stones and the full power of his imagination and his stamina and his know-how, all applied against the blade in an act that was part love and part hate and all art. The blade, for its part, fought him stubbornly. Its scars were proudly earned in forgotten battles, its surface was stained by the blood of many, some justly taken, some not so justly taken. It did not want to return to the ceremonial pristine.

  In the war, the old man’s weapons were stones. There were dozens of them, each with a specific name, a specific grain, a specific face, to be used in one place, in one direction—arato, kongoto, binsui, kasisei, chunagura, koma-nagura, uchigumori hato, uchigumori-to—and the art of the campaign was in knowing the place for each in the time-consuming ritual. The old man’s face was as wrinkled as a prune’s, but his hair was long and fluffy. He looked more like a saxophonist than a warrior, but a warrior he was, and the glitter of a million particles of ground steel were the evidence of his attack, even if, every hour, he vacuumed them up, for an unvanquished particle could slide between stone and blade and cause havoc.

  Nii watched as something beautiful emerged with slow precision out of something mundane. What had seemed to be a common chunk of old steel, smeared, spotted with rust, nicked, and hazed, was now an elegant sweep of colors and textures. It didn’t shine, not really; it glowed, as if lit from within. Somehow as the old metal was removed, the blade regained its life and power. It was alive now. The smeary, milky line (or smudge, really) of the hamon ran along the whole edge. The tip, kissaki, was cruel and perfect, a couple of inches of eloquent steel that would penetrate anything. The thicker metal of the mune had a golden quality, substantial and embracing, solid yet giving rather than crudely strong and brittle. And the two grooves (bo-hi, they were called) gave the blade an aerodynamic purity and would make it sing as it cleaved the air. It looked hungry for blood. It was one of those objects that was sacred and profane at once. It wanted but one thing, to drink more blood, and yet it was also an expression of the distilled genius of the people of the little island who had created and spread its soul and spirit across half the known world. Nii knew none of this. He could express nothing of it. He felt all of it. It had gotten his mind, for once, off little girls.

  The old man worked steadily, without seeing anything but the sword, six inches from his face. He was, in his way, too cool to see the gaudy, fashion-obsessed yaks of the world. He communicated to them that, though loud and forceful, they were trivial, meaningless. He lived to work. He accepted that day some weeks ago when they had simply shown up with guns and a large pile of money.

  “You will do this work. This work and no other. You will keep it secret from everybody. You will be watched. You must finish by the first week in December.”

  “It cannot be done in that time.”

  “Yes, it can,” Kondo had said to him. “You must know who I am, and what I am capable of. I would hate to spill your blood—”

  “Life, death, it’s the same.”

  “To you, in your eighties, but perhaps not to children, grandchildren, wife, friends, and so forth. We will leave a big hole in this small town.”

  Glumly, the old man accepted the new now. He gave himself up to the blade. What choice did he have, really?

  And now he was done. A final burnishing, an inspection, the full power of—

  “Nii!” someone called.

  Nii looked up. He saw that the old man had stopped polishing, something he’d never done before. That disturbed Nii.

  Then Nii heard it: someone was banging on the door.

  “Who is that fool?” he demanded.

  “It’s a gaijin. It’s some stupid-looking gaijin.”

  “Fuck. Well, I’ll get rid of him,” Nii said. “You, back to work.”

  But for some reason the old man would not work. He stared at Nii with great intensity, as if seeing him for the first time or as if he knew something. Then he smiled.

 
He spoke for the first time in months.

  “This is going to be good,” he said.

  Bob knocked hard on the door. He heard stirring inside. He tried the lock, felt it rock in the jamb but not give much at all. He knocked again, harder.

  “Hey!” he said. “Hey, goddammit, open up. I got a sword needs polishing!”

  Something stirred inside, and through a small crack in the curtain behind the glass, he sensed a flash of movement. What he could see was otherwise unimpressive: shelves and on the shelves what looked to be shoeboxes, and in the shoeboxes what looked to be stones, some flat, some jagged, all different in shape, texture, and color.

  “Hey,” he shouted again, “goddammit, I have a sword! You want some money? I have money for you. Don’t you want to work? Come on, goddammit, open the hell up.”

  He did this for about three minutes, loudly, a drunken gaijin who would not go away, not soon, not ever.

  “I hear you! Goddammit, I hear you in there, open up, goddammit!”

  Then he saw movement in the dark, which soon resolved itself into two husky young men in suits. They had impassive faces and one wore sunglasses. They were about 240 each and lacked necks. They had short arms that hung at a slight bend because the muscle was so overdeveloped it kept the arms from straightening.

  They came to the door, and Bob heard clacking as the lock was released. The door slid open an inch but no farther and both young men crushed against the opening with their full linebackers’ weight and strength, giving no quarter.

  “Hey, I—”

  “You go away. Shop closed. No one here. He gone. Go away now, please.”

  “Come on, fellas,” he said with a drunk’s belligerent stupidity. “I bought this thing for a thousand bucks. It needs a shine. This is the place, ain’t it? Guy told me this place really shines ’em up good. Come on, lemme in, lemme talk to the fella.” He held up the white-sheathed, white-gripped wakizashi.

  “Go away now, please. No one here. Polisher gone. Go elsewhere. Not your business here.”

  “Guys, I just want—”

  “No business for you here.”

  The door rocked shut and Bob heard it click.

  The two men edged back, then disappeared into a rear room.

  He stood there a second, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a metal pick. The clickings of the door had informed him that it was a standard throw-bolt, a universal fixture, easily overcome. He slid the pick in the keyhole, felt the delicate mesh of tumblers and levers, wiggled this way and that, and felt each tumbler eventually give up its position. He put the pick away, took out a plastic credit card, drew that up the door slot to the bolt, and began a steady upward tapping, gentle and persistent, urging the bolt off the spring-driven lever that secured it. In two seconds, with a snap, it yielded to these probings and popped open.

  He stepped into darkness.

  “Hey,” he said, “anybody home? Goddamn, the door wasn’t locked, you must be open.”

  He heard shuffling from behind a curtain, some whispers.

  He bulled his way back with a lurch, stepped through the curtain, spilling awkwardly into the larger rear room, and there beheld a strange spectacle. A small old man with hippie hair and spaceman goggles sat on a platform with the blade, which Bob recognized instantly by shape and length, though now it gleamed like some rare piece of jewelry.

  Six extremely husky young men, all in black suits, three in sunglasses, all holding sheathed wakizashi, stood across from him. He almost laughed: they looked like the Notre Dame interior line doing an en masse imitation of the Blues Brothers.

  Suddenly the Japanese began to jabber, an excited, stunned blast of men talking over other men, until finally one yelled loudly and seemed to take command. He leaned forward and sniffed.

  “You drunk. You go home. Go now, go fast.”

  “Just want to get this here sword shined up so it’s like that thing there. Damn, that’s a pretty one. Sir, can you make this one like that one?” He held the sheathed wakizashi and waved it about theatrically.

  The leader spoke harshly and two of the linemen came at Bob, bulking up as they came, their muscles bunching as they tensed, their right hands forming fists.

  “Whoa, whoa,” he said, “no rough stuff, fellas, please, please!”

  The bruisers halted.

  Then he looked at the old man, who looked back. He winked. The old man winked.

  A frozen moment transpired as everybody took stock. Eyes flashed this way and that, hands tightened on hilts, breathing became harsh. Bob was suddenly quiet, wary, eating them up. It was a moment that seemed to last an eternity. One could compose a haiku during its exquisite extenuation.

  Bob looked at the fat leader.

  “The one he’s polishing? The one you killed the Yanos to get? I want it back. And I want you knocking at the door to hell.”

  Then it was over, as if no concept of quietude or peace existed anywhere on earth. It was time to cut.

  The two closest yaks went for their swords to cut down the American, but they were not fast enough. Iai-Jutsu. The art of drawing and cutting. It was called nukitsuke. With his off-the-charts hand speed Swagger got the blade out—it clacked dryly as the transaction between blade and saya occurred—and into a horizontal cut called “crosswind” by Yagyu, one-handed, the cut landing with his front foot, the body weight behind it for power, so full of adrenaline he drove through both of them. Hidari yokogiri, his old friend, cutting horizontally from left to right. He thought he’d missed, for he only felt the slightest resistance, and for a nanosecond had an image of disaster. But the disaster was theirs. The blade slashed deeply in a straight line, gut to gut, through suit, shirt, undershirt, skin, fat, entrails, viscera, spleen, liver, whatever, and just kept on going in a mad driving arc, leaving in its wake nothing, and then everything. The blood pushed out with a good deal of power. It didn’t explode, as in too many movies, and spritz as though a sprinkler had projected it, it just sloshed out heavily, along with two breakfasts. And it kept on coming, seemingly gallons of it, in a red dump that literally sounded tidelike as it splashed against the floor. One stricken man went down like a sack of potatoes fallen off a truck; the other just stood there, stupefied, stepped back, trying to hold his guts in, and then sat down to die.

  Without thinking, Bob’s blade rode the energy high and came up into issuing from above, better known in the country of its origin as kami-hasso, and he watched as another man, sword high in jodan, came galloping at him. Under such circumstances, most men would panic: a huge, angry, bulged-eye man of immense strength charging full bore, the sword raised in his hands as he gathered strength to unleash a sundering blow, he was every mad psycho in every bad horror movie ever made. He screamed dramatically. But with eyes that saw far as though it were close and close as though it were a distant mountain, Bob waited until the clumsy drive of the blade announced itself and then with a quick small movement slipped to the left and shimmied into safety exactly as, trailing blade, he cut the big one’s belly open deeply, and the sword never fell. This one instead kept going by him, turned, eyes now spent of rage and filling instead with horror at the immense damage that had been done to him, went to one knee, dropped the sword, then toppled clumsily forward.

  Bob saw none of this. He turned and watched as the three remaining split up, two going one way, the third the other as they came around the old man on the platform, who watched the craziness largely indifferent. Bob’s lizard brain understood without actual thought that fighting one was better than fighting two, so he rotated to the left, coming around to meet the lone man on the left side of the inert polisher on his platform. His enemy was a slight but older fellow, not given to panic or stupidity. His long face intent, the sword before him, he approached steadily, just watching, waiting for Bob to give him an opening, which Bob of course didn’t, so he attempted to make one. His sword flashed laterally, the classic kesagiri, shoulder to navel, left to right, on the diagonal, but from somewhere at a sp
eed that has no place in time, Bob read the cues—“The eyes are the key to reading the actions of the mind: the light or gleam in an opponent’s eyes is as revealing as the movements of the rest of his body”—and rose to take the cut on his own blade, rode the blade down, and then reversed. It was uke-nagashi, the flowing block, and he absorbed the energy from his opponent, seized it, then unleashed it, snapping through with his wrist and extending one-handed in as small a space as possible. Throat. At the end of the arc, the point was traveling at stunning speed, generating amazing foot-pounds of energy, taking all of Swagger’s strength and distilling it to one small cutting edge.

  Results looked unpleasant, even shocking, but worse than that was the sudden noise the man made, a hideous wailing, as air and blood were forced from his split larynx and the realization of his own inevitable doom overcame him, causing his lungs to expel their atmospheres forcefully. But he did not fall. By one of the eccentricities of a dying body’s last spurts of energy, his knees locked and he stood still, arms fallen, sword lost, spewing blood from the cut throat—though in a kind of gurgly fountain style, not the patented Toho spray—as his eyes looked at nothing. Then, finally, like a tree, he fell, hitting the puddled blood so hard he kicked up splatters, some of which suddenly danced across Bob’s face, the old man’s face, and the ceiling.

  The other two came around the old man’s platform and confronted Bob, separating slightly; they dropped into classic tachi, relaxed standing, the sword before them, as they slid through the blood steadily on small, floating steps, eyes steady, faces intent, not angry or frightened. Bob found himself—who the hell told him this was best?—in kamehasso, sword higher, almost a batting stance but relaxed, trying and finding it within himself to stay calm as they rotated around the front of the platform and came at him smoothly. He looked for his opening, they looked for theirs and had the advantage because they could spread out on the sound idea that he could not—being no Musashi—fight in two hemispheres at once, and whichever he chose to defend, the fellow assaulting from the other would deliver the death cut.