won wars, the thousands of reluctant John Culpeppers, not the two or three Earl Swaggers.
But there was no sword.
Where could it be?
Maybe it got thrown out and off it went to the Kenilworth dump, to rust away to oblivion or be crushed to junk by a bulldozer.
Bob tried to think hard on the issue.
What is the quality of a sword?
Well, its sharpness, but that’s the sword as weapon. Think of the sword as object: the answer is, its awkwardness.
It’s long and thin and curved. You might display it, but it wouldn’t fit neatly into one of those standard cardboard boxes; no, you’d have to wedge it in.
Who’s packing these boxes? Probably some workingmen hired by the surviving son who has suddenly acquired a house he doesn’t particularly want and never remembers fondly, but he’s got to get it into shape, sell it before his wife files for divorce. So someone packs all this stuff, thinking not a bit about it, not engaged in the family’s life, having no special sense of the meaning of a sword taken in battle and-
Bob went to the first closet. No. But in the second one, he found three golf bags, and there, in the third one, amid the sixes and sevens and the drivers and the wedges and the putter was Captain Hideki Yano’s shin- gunto.
“Tom?”
“Oh, yeah, you found it,” said Tom Culpepper, rising from a desk in what had been his father’s study. He had his ever-present glass of Maker’s with him, apparently just recently freshened.
“I did, yes. It was in a golf bag. I thought you might want to have a look.”
“Yeah, I suppose I do. Yeah, that’s it,” he said, taking it, holding it to the light. “Here, let me point out something. See this peg or whatever it is?”
He pointed to a stub a few inches above the circular hilt of the old thing. It seemed clotted with some kind of black tar or something, smeary and gummy. But it also, in the right angle of light, threw up tiny puncture wounds.
“I remember the day I got cut. I’d snuck it out of Dad’s study and we were waving it around, playing pirate or something. ’Fifty-seven, ’fifty-eight, sometime around there. Then we got the bright idea to take it apart. Don’t ask me why. We examined it and it seemed to be held together by this little wooden pin through this hole. See, it runs from one side to the other. That secures the handle to the blade, I’m guessing.”
“I see,” said Bob, who already knew the correct terms from the Internet: the bamboo peg was mekugi, the hole into which it fit mekugiana.
“But it was stuck. We tried to drive it out with a hammer and nail and all we did was dent it. God, when I think of it now, I’m a little ashamed. We had no idea. It was just a big sword thing for killing pirates.”
“You were just kids. How could you know?”
“We never got it out. I hate to remember this thing on the floor and I’m whacking on it, the blade is getting all crudded up on the floor. It’s got some kind of gunk on it. Real thick black stuff. I don’t know if the Japanese officer put it there, or your father, or mine, or someone at the factory, or what. But it’s not coming out easily.”
“No, it’s not. Someone wanted to hold it together. Go on, pull it.”
John Culpepper’s son Tom drew the sword out. It buzzed against the tightness of the metal scabbard, then described an arc across the room as he brandished it.
“Wow,” he said. “This baby still wants to cut something. Here, it scares me a little.”
He handed it over to Bob, who in taking it felt some kind of charge-what? a thrill, a buzz, a vibration-as indeed the baby still wanted to cut something.
You could tell in a flash it was superbly designed for its purpose, a thin ridge running each side of the gently curving blade, reaching the tip-kissaki, he knew it to be called. He felt the blasphemous power of the thing. It had exquisite balance, but the blade seemed something even more, somehow weirdly alive. He waved it just a little and could have sworn that it contained some soft core that pitched forward in the momentum, speeding toward its destination.
He held it up to the light. Indeed, the blade had seen hard use. The steel was dull upon close inspection, a haze of crosshatched nicks and cuts. Small black flecks attacked it randomly. On the edge-yakiba, he knew-almost microscopic chips were missing, whether from small boys whacking it against a tree or a Japanese officer drawing it against a marine’s neck. The handguard-tsuba-was a heavy circle of iron, like an ornate coaster almost. The grip was tacky: the sword was covered in gritty fish skin, then wrapped elaborately in a kind of flat cotton cording that was darkened with sweat or grime, worn in places and frayed.
If you waved it, the sword rattled ever so gently, because, he now saw, the guard wasn’t secured tightly by spacers.
“I remember as a kid you could slice paper with it, that’s how sharp it was,” said Tom Culpepper. “Here, let’s try it.”
He grabbed a heavy piece of stationery and Bob touched edge to paper and felt the sword pause, then slide through neatly. Tom dropped two pieces of paper to the ground.
“I can’t believe it’s that sharp,” he said. “Nothing should be that sharp!”
7
You can’t get mad.
You can’t get mad.
Yet it was all he could do to sit there.
It’s a test, he told himself. They’re testing the gaijin. They want to see if I have the maturity, the patience, the commitment to politeness and ceremony to be worth talking to in Japan.
Or maybe, he thought, they’re like cops everywhere: they just don’t give a fuck.
Whichever, the result was the same. He sat in the Narita International Airport police station, forty miles outside Tokyo. It was a stark, functional space with nothing like the swanky, shopping-mall flash of the public hallways on higher levels.
The process had all been set up. Having discovered the sword, he had called the retired Colonel Bridges of the Marine Historical Section, explained all, and Bridges had volunteered to run the paperwork, which was considerable. He had the D.C. contacts and knew someone who knew someone at the Japan External Trade Organization, or JETRO, on the West Coast, which had some mysterious, influential connection with the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, known as METI, one of those large governmental entities with fingers in many pies. Arrangements were made with customs to let the sword into the country. It would be removed from quarantine immediately to the Narita Airport police department, where a license would be duly issued. Thus with the customs certificate and the license, it was all supposed to be legal.
But something was wrong. Now he waited in the central room, near the desk, with beaten Korean workers, with angry salarymen who’d gotten drunk and acted out and had to be put down with a thump on the head, with grifters and cheats, maybe with the odd minor gangster or two, as gangsters were said to be spread widely throughout Japanese society. They were called yakuza, he knew, “yaks” for short.
But, Wait, wait, wait.
Finally, Ah, yes, you have sword.
His interrogator wore a pale blue uniform with a small handgun-a Smith & Wesson possibly?-in a flapped black holster. He was an unprepossessing man, not one of your beefier cop types.
Yes, sir. The documents are there. I just need the license, and that was supposed to be arranged.
Arranged?
Yes, sir, here’s the letter.
