The Moving Blade

by Michael Pronko

  The sword pinched in place, Sato jabbed at the foreigner’s chest but his arms were too short and the foreigner was fast and limber. Blade and baton whisked the air. Sato backed against the closest wall to rebalance, breathing hard, trying to think.

  “The USB.” The sword upright and his feet planted, the foreigner stared at Sato.

  Sato’s stiletto had no reach and the baton was too thin, but he swung them side-to-side in a defensive X as he broke for the opening to the alley.

  The tanto sword caught him from right hip to left rib.

  Sato’s knees buckled and he folded over like a split sack of rice. In the instant before his mid-section gushed from top and bottom, one of the USB drives flew out of his cut-open pocket and dropped through the grate of the sewer beside him. The foreigner snatched at it, but the memory drive tumbled into the pipes far out of reach below.

  Slumped over a concrete step, Sato wheezed and clutched at the warm stream of blood before his fingers loosened and his body slackened. He eyed the foreigner kneeling over the sewer with a small flashlight peering below, felt the ruffle of the foreigner going through his pockets, and dimly gazed at the tangled wires crisscrossing the alley overhead.

  ***

  The jacket was as sticky-wet as body tissue, and so was the wad of ten-thousand yen bills, which he tossed aside. The netsuke carvings, he dropped on the ground. After wiping the tanto blade with a neat cut of rice paper and resheathing it inside his long leather coat, he picked up the DVD, glanced around and walked away.

  Chapter 2

  When Jamie Mattson saw her father for the first time since she was thirteen, he lay in the casket in the Shida Funeral Hall and Crematorium. The white silk kimono and fat brown beads in his neatly folded hands made him look like a Buddhist monk.

  She remembered him more like the large photo on the wall behind the casket, a smile on his lips telling her funny stories during long walks around Tokyo. She pressed a handkerchief to her nose to block out the smell of sickly-sweet flowers and smoldering incense that filled the funeral hall.

  Next to Jamie sat her mother, Sachi, who’d flown in from Hawaii. Jamie waited after her flight from New York to meet her at Narita Airport and come together to the funeral hall and crematorium on the outskirts of Tokyo. They switched into their black funeral dresses in a changing room in the private family area. In the mirror, Jamie was surprised at the leathery skin of her mother’s island tan and the bags in her eyes. In their boxy funeral dresses, they could have been twins, but undressed, Jamie was fuller and plumper than her mother, who seemed to have shrunk.

  Sachi’s black sunglasses embarrassed Jamie, but she said nothing as they sat in the front of the hall for the service. After chanted prayers from a bald, white-robed monk, the first speech started. Sachi leaned over and whispered, “This guy was the chairman of Nippon Steel, an old friend of your father’s. Runs an arts foundation now.” Unsure why she needed to know this, she patted her mother’s hand.

  Jamie tried to listen to the next speech from another chairman of something, but she had hardly spoken Japanese over the years in America. She could feel the language stirring inside but couldn’t grasp much. Her father would have understood every word. Jamie could read his name, Bernard Mattson, in katakana under his memorial photo, but almost all the kanji characters on the floral wreaths were beyond her. She regretted not studying, but had let it go, along with the relationship with her father. Though never officially estranged, they had lost touch after her mother swept her away from Tokyo to a Massachusetts boarding school.

  When he emailed her again after years of silence, she realized she had never been angry or alienated. They’d just drifted apart. She had no reason not to write back. She enjoyed their renewed contact more than she expected and they arranged a father-daughter trip to Kyoto, Mount Koya and Beppu Onsen. After that, they’d planned to revisit their favorite spots in Tokyo, where they used to walk together some twenty years before.

  She got the news of his death exactly one week before the reunion trip.

  When the last speaker finished, the priest asked the hundred-some people in the hall to stand. He started chanting, slow, indecipherable sutras. Jamie followed her mother to the front where she pinched incense from a bowl and sprinkled it on flat burners, sending up a thick stream of white smoke. They bowed and prayed and circled back to their seats. The crematorium staff handed her a white chrysanthemum.

  “What do we do with this?” Jamie whispered to her mother.

  “Drop them on him.”

  Jamie frowned and twisted the flower in her hand, watching as each person took a flower as they returned to their seats.

  Sachi leaned over. “There’s that goody-two-shoes first wife of his.”

  What? That was the first Jamie had heard of—what?—another wife, before or after or when? Before she could get a look, two white-gloved employees gently turned the casket towards the door and everyone faced the center of the hall. As the funeral attendants rolled Mattson’s casket down the aisle, everyone placed a white chrysanthemum into the casket. On top of the flowers, around his body, people nestled in personal notes, handwritten prayers, old photos and a well-worn book or two. When they reached the door of the hall, two attendants fit the casket lid in place and everyone bowed deeply.

  Jamie and Sachi followed the attendants pushing the casket to the far end of a long hallway. Jamie peered inside the other halls at clumps of silent people dressed in black, waiting. The attendants pushed the casket into a hall with a high ceiling. Light filtered in from frosted windows high above. Along one wall was a vaulted steel door, burnished to a dull matte, from which protruded a waist-high frame of rollers. The attendants pushed Mattson’s casket to the end of the frame, lined it up, and then lifted it onto a large tray on top of the rollers.

  Jamie walked over to the big white casket and put her hand on the smooth wood. She wasn’t sure yet of the extent of her loss but thinking of the emails he’d written to her over the past year or two, so full of life and humor, so intimate and wise, she choked up. Tears rolled down. She was just one week away from seeing him again. At least she should have had that, his presence, their togetherness, once more. He had wanted that more than anything, he’d written, and so had she. Jamie wiped her eyes and walked back to stand by her mother, who stood silently watching behind her black sunglasses.

  An attendant pushed a large silver button and the door ascended. A wave of dry heat surged into the room from the roaring burners inside. Sachi nodded, the workers pressed a button, and the coffin glided into the oven.

  A burst of light circled the coffin as it entered the flames and the room resounded with a fiery crackle. The inner door slowly descended until all that could be heard was the muffled rumble of the burners deep inside.

  “What do we do now?” Jamie whispered.

  “Wait.” Sachi whispered. “I told them to use high heat so it would not leave so many bones.”

  “Bones?” Jamie wondered, making a face.

  A loud pop from inside the oven echoed through the hall.

  Sachi smiled. “Always had to have the last word.”

  A short, plump Japanese man who had followed them to the room, but stood waiting at the door, came over and bowed deeply to Sachi and Jamie.

  Sachi looked at him. “Shibata-san? Is that you?” She settled her sunglasses on top of her head.

  Shibata smiled and held out his arms. He was bristling with energy. A smile played across his impish, curled lips despite the solemn surroundings. His bump of a nose was flanked by fleshy cheeks. He looked familiar to Jamie, but she wasn’t sure why. Her mind felt clogged with insistent memories and murky feelings, with fatigue and nausea and grief.

  The younger man standing next to Shibata was the most handsome Japanese man Jamie had ever seen, magazine model looks with long hair tucked behind his ears and light-brown eyes. He thumbed a bracelet of sandalwood prayer beads and held a leather clutch bag along his forearm.

  Sachi turn
ed to Jamie. “This is Shibata-san, one of Bernie’s oldest friends. You probably don’t remember.”

  Shibata bowed deeply and mumbled a polite phrase in Japanese before switching to English. “Jamie, I know you when you little girl. Your father great friend.” He turned to the handsome man. “This Ken-san.”

  Ken bowed his head and offered formal condolences in a soft voice.

  Shibata smiled at Jamie before speaking again in Japanese to Sachi. They talked quickly back and forth, her voice rising and shrugging off his questions and her hands gesturing at Jamie. Jamie started to remember him, inside a restaurant or bar she and her father stopped by during a walk.

  Shibata turned to Jamie and said, “I have many thing give you, of your father, and many more tell you. Is important. You stop by my club, yes?”

  Jamie nodded yes. “Where is it?”

  Shibata handed her his meishi shop card with a sketch map on the back and his phone number. Without another word, Shibata and Ken hurried off, their black silk jackets shining.

  Jamie asked, “What were you talking about? I couldn’t catch anything.”

  “He kept asking about the autopsy.”

  “Actually, I faxed a form to the embassy saying to go ahead without one. That’s what the woman recommended.”

  Sachi pulled off her sunglasses and glared at Jamie. “What woman?”

  “An embassy rep called me in the middle of the night.” Jamie looked at the oven doors. “They needed my OK, about the house, about the funeral. I was listed as next of kin. I was upset.”

  A Japanese woman many years older than Sachi, as tall and poised as a ballerina in a mid-length skirt and business top, entered the hall. She walked slowly, deliberately and stopped with her feet together for a quick bow to Sachi before taking Jamie’s hands. “I’m Setsuko. I’m so sorry about your father,” she said in English.

  Sachi pulled her sunglasses over her eyes.

  “Setsuko? Dad mentioned you in his emails, but…” Jamie frowned and blinked. Confused, she turned to her mother as Setsuko squeezed her hands.

  “You have to talk to the police,” she said, squeezing tighter.

  Jamie’s frown deepened.

  “His stomach was cut open, like for ritual seppuku, hara-kiri.”

  “He killed himself?” Jamie felt like fainting. Her feet shuffled, her knees not holding, and both of the older women moved to steady her. “It was made to look like that,” Setsuko explained.

  “Were they after his Japanese art?” Sachi asked, still gripping Jamie’s elbow.

  “They were after his work,” Setsuko said, not looking at her.

  Jamie couldn’t piece together who this was or what she was telling her. “Are you…were you…?”

  Sachi said, “Your father was married when I met him. To her.”

  Jamie looked back and forth at the two women, processing this about her father’s life, then filing it to ponder later. “What work are you talking about?” Jamie asked.

  Setsuko shook her head. “He said it would all come out in his talk.”

  Jamie looked at the oven doors, the fire still humming inside. “He wanted me to be there for his talk, at the conference. It was only a week away, our trip.”

  “What trip?” Sachi asked.

  Jamie turned to her mother. “Our trip together. I was going to tell you, but he died too soon. It doesn’t matter now.”

  “Will you give the speech in his place?” Setsuko asked.

  “What?”

  “The speech he was giving at the conference.”

  Jamie coughed. “I don’t do speeches. I…”

  “Well, someone has to. But first, we have to find the speech.”

  Jamie looked at her own reflection in the brushed steel of the oven door. It was contorted, the black of her dress clouded gray.

  Setsuko dug in her purse. “Here’s a key to his house. I run a small English conversation school. Near Takadanobaba. Will you stop by? Or should I stop by Bernie’s?”

  “Either way, but…” Jamie absently took the key and meishi name card from Setsuko.

  Setsuko cleared her throat. “I don’t want to stay for the bones.” She walked out of the room without looking back.

  Jamie turned to Sachi and held up the key. “I can’t even remember where the house is. I haven’t been there since—”

  “Once you get to Asakusa Station, you’ll remember the way.”

  Jamie took her mother’s hand. “Mom, won’t you stay? My Japanese is so rusty and I—”

  “I had enough of all this, of him, of Japan. I only came for this to be with you. He had no other family.”

  Jamie stared at her blurry reflection in the rough-polished doors.

  “Did you bring any money?” Sachi dug in her purse.

  “I brought a credit card. Two.”

  Sachi put up her sunglasses. “Tokyo’s expensive. I don’t want to have to rescue you again.”

  “That was a one-time thing.”

  An attendant ushered them to a marble bench against the front wall of the hall, and Jamie felt relieved to be a small bit further from the rumble of the oven. Compared to the stifling warmth of the air, the marble was so cool it made Jamie shiver in her funeral dress. Side by side, they waited silently for Bernard Mattson’s body to turn to ash.

  Chapter 3

  Hiroshi Shimizu leaned back in his office chair and smiled at his computer screen. “Got him!” he said to Akiko, his assistant.

  Akiko let out a squeal of delight as she stepped over to read the English email on the other side of the small office. Hiroshi pointed to the email in the center of his desktop. Around the email a profusion of Excel sheets, bank statements, flow charts and contracts overlapped in offset layers.

  Hiroshi read the rest of the email, scrolling down past two photos of the scam artist. In one he was bald and dumpy in a wrinkled suit, and in the other, he sported a thick gold chain over a buffed, tanned chest, gripping a drink at a beach bar.

  “Is that even the same guy?” Akiko laughed.

  “Yes. Wait. Oh, no. They’re going to prosecute him there.”

  “At least they got him,” Akiko said. “Let’s go celebrate. Lunch outside someplace?”

  “It’s taken us six months to put all this together. The Hawaiian FBI gets all the glory. We do all the work.”

  Akiko hummed in quiet consolation.

  “Let’s at least celebrate with a couple of espressos!” Akiko said. An espresso machine gleamed from its perch on top of an old metal file cabinet.

  The smell of fresh coffee would help cover up the disappointment, and the disinfectant. Hiroshi appreciated the rare privilege of having his own office, but it was converted from a janitor’s supply closet, and still smelled of it. Far from the noisy main building, it was quiet enough to call overseas on international cases. He was the only one in the homicide department where he’d been assigned who could speak English well enough to work with overseas cases and the only one who could make sense of financial forms in either language. He should have had a separate department, but he was assigned to homicide. Money and murder go together, the chief said the one and only time he stopped by.

  “I can’t believe they won’t send him back,” Hiroshi said, shaking his head at the screen. “What he stole was from Japanese pensioners here.” Hiroshi pushed back his hair, grown long since his hibernating instincts took over after the case last summer. It hung on both sides of his face like blinders keeping his eyes on the files, flow charts, account graphs, bank transfers, and victims’ statements that filled his days, and since he wasn’t sleeping much, filled his nights.

  Hiroshi mumbled, “Those American lawyers are good, but…”

  “It’s not fair, but that’s the way it is,” Akiko said, pressing the button for a double espresso.

  Unlike Hiroshi, Akiko was the most regular of workers, coming in promptly at the same time every day, usually leaving about the same time, and in between ensuring the office remained in order. Her
tight skirts, chic haircut and big eyes drew appreciative stares on Tokyo trains, but went largely unnoticed in the homicide offices. The detectives were too busy and overworked for flirtation or fantasy. Besides, she was strong and forthright, not cute and demure. She looked at faces, not at the floor.

  Hiroshi scrolled back to the top of the email and started reading it again, shaking his head, barely noticing the cup Akiko set in front of him as he started writing an email back. “Our prisons have room. Just for once, I want to see them convicted. Face to face.”

  Akiko went back to make a second espresso for herself. “Well, at least you can finally get to Boston. I’ll rebook that flight for you.”

  “Cancel Boston.”

  She inhaled, watching the thick coffee dribble into her cup. Hiroshi knew what she was going to say. She’d canceled and rebooked the flight a dozen times as Hiroshi decided to go, then not go, to meet his girlfriend, friend, lover, whatever she was.

  Akiko took a deep, yoga-style breath. “What happened?”

  “Everything happened.” Hiroshi sipped his espresso. With a loud series of clicks, he checked the last email from Sanae. He’d met her on the case the summer before, the one where he almost got killed. Since then, he’d been trying to go see her after she moved to Boston to put her daughter in high school. In between white-collar crime cases, he would book the visit. Then, Sanae would ask to reschedule. Then he’d rebook, or Akiko would. He was never sure if she still wanted to meet, was nervous about it, felt bad to ask him to fly there, or didn’t want anything more to do with him. The back-and-forth had exhausted him.

  Akiko said, “Why don’t you just get on a plane and talk it out there?”

  “Skype’s talking.”

  “Not really.”

  Akiko took her espresso back to her desk and sat down, sipping it slowly and looking at her screen, purposefully avoiding looking at Hiroshi writing to the Hawaiian detectives.

  Hiroshi leaned back from the screen. “I can’t believe they’re not sending him back for trial here.”