own knots, Mr. Swagger. We need a westerner who can cut through knots. Fuck the kimono, fuck the obi, fuck the way saya fits in the obi, fuck all that shit. Cut through it. Find out who killed Philip Yano and why.”
“So you want to…help me?”
“By law, those of us in what passes for a military are forbidden from taking part in domestic affairs. The penalties are extreme; we are watched constantly. We represent a Japanese tradition that many Japanese have been taught to be ashamed of and cannot face. So they hammer us into insignificance. But you, Mr. Swagger, are uninformed, undisciplined, unaware. You can go anywhere and ask anything. You are true ronin. Masterless samurai, owing nothing to nobody. You really are Toshiro Mifune.”
“Don’t know about that, but I will try my damndest.”
“I believe you. All right then, you’ll have a number. We will staff that phone twenty-four hours a day. If you get in trouble, if you need help, if you need logistics support, intelligence, we will provide it for you. In the meantime, we’ll go our separate ways, seem to lose ourselves in the minutiae of meaningless existence as we have since Philip Yano and his clan were slain. I’ll even divorce my wife and move into a brothel. Well, no, I won’t.”
“Believe it or not, I catch the meaning. Otowa mentioned that story.”
“He would have, yes. Our retainer has been murdered, our clan destroyed. We will settle that account, Mr. Swagger.”
“But there’s a bargain that must be made. I will be part of that fight. That’s the bargain I’m making with honorable men, right?”
“All right, Mr. Swagger,” said Major Fujikawa, “you have your bargain.”
“Now,” said Bob, “let’s see if you’re as good as you say you are.”
“Go ahead,” said the major.
“At Narita, there’s a cop who’s the station’s sword expert. Someone they call to deal with sword matters, importation, exportation, ignorant gaijin who bring stuff in or out without doing the necessary paperwork, that sort of thing.”
“Yes. It is logical.”
“He’s the guy. He’s what this thing pivots on. He’s dirty. He has to be. He understood in a second the potential value of the sword I carried, he made the phone call, he’s the one who made the whole thing happen. I have to have his name and address. I start with him.”
21
Someone in the unit had a brother who was a cop at Narita, and in a few days, Major Fujikawa called with a name-Kenji Kishida-and an address. Bob intercepted him at Narita. He was the one on the brand-new Kawasaki 400, a gleamy red dream machine, bigger than all the other bikes. Obviously, he’d bought it with his yakuza windfall for finding the sword.
When he arrived at and departed from the station lot, parking and locking his bike in the gated compound, Bob watched from the coffee shop, where he could sit unobserved reading a newspaper. Kishida moved with an awkward limp. He didn’t have the agility, the rangy grace of a young man, nor was he muscle-bound like others who spent lots of time in the gym bulking up.
This fellow wore a suit, suggesting he was a detective or an administrator, and in his bright red-and-black helmet with its darkened fullface shield he looked almost ridiculous, like a hybrid beast, part salaryman, part knight in armor.
Bob monitored the man’s apartment house for a few days, until he was satisfied Kishida had no wife and kids at home.
The next week Bob noted that his candidate was working the midnight shift. One morning at 4 a.m., Bob pulled into Kishida’s apartment building’s parking lot, riding an identical Kawasaki 400, Metallic Majestic Red, that he’d bought in the name of Thomas Lee. He’d spent afternoons coming to terms with the left-hand driving. He was swaddled head to foot in racing leathers, and wore the exact red-and-black helmet with darkened visor that Officer Kishida wore. He pulled into the stall that Kishida always took and even aped the candidate’s slight limp, his old guy’s demeanor.
He entered the building, nodding at a sleepy night watchman at the desk who thought Bob was the officer, took the elevator up to the right floor, walked to the apartment, bent over, and attacked the lock with a credit card. There was no heavy security system, no deadbolts or electronic monitoring. The lock yielded in a split second. Then he was in.
The apartment, of course, was trim and neat. Three pairs of black shoes and two pairs of sneakers with shoe trees in them were lined up in the foyer. Bob went to the bookcase and saw many English books; Kishida spoke English. The books were all about swords. Most were in Japanese, several in German, and several in French. All were arranged by nationality, then alphabetically. He pulled one out at random and found it copiously underlined and with margin notes. On the inside cover were precise notes taken in a fine kanji hand, running up and down the page, indexed to page numbers. He pulled two other books out and found them equally dissected.
No dirty dishes were in the sink in the small kitchen, and the refrigerator yielded no germy sushi, no moldy noodles. There was a six-bottle carton of Sapporo, and three cans of that famous Japanese drink, Diet Coke. Next to the refrigerator was a half-open bottle of Ozeki sake.
Bob moved to the bedroom. It was nondescript, with Musashi’s famous shrike hanging on a scroll over the futon, which was flat and neatly made up. Against the opposite wall was a large TV and DVD player. In the closet were uniforms, shirts and ties, and two civilian black ties and black suits. Then polo shirts, a few pairs of jeans and chinos, all neatly pressed. Each hanger was exactly one-third of an inch from the next.
Closing the door, he went to the low stand next to the futon and opened it. There he found on one shelf, again alphabetically arranged, the creme de la creme of samurai DVDs, mostly Kurosawa but also several other top-line films he had seen, including Samurai Rebellion, Harakiri, Band of Assassins, and When the Last Sword Is Drawn. Beneath, neatly stacked and alphabetized, were porno DVDs, from a company called Shogunate AV. Shogunate AV seemed to specialize, as near as Bob could figure out, in something that might be called “teacher films,” for each of the covers showed an attractive young woman in her mid-twenties in a business suit and glasses lecturing a batch of boys. In subsequent shots she was stripping for them, they were touching her, she was servicing them, all in the classroom, where higher mathematics had been chalked on the blackboard.
Jesus, he thought, who came up with that?
He left the porn stash and went to the desk. Indeed, the still shiny owner’s manual to the top-of-the-line Kawasaki 22R400 bike lay on the desk, and it too had been scrupulously studied, underlined, and annotated, all in a precise kanji hand.
Where were the swords? This guy would surely have swords.
He never found them, but he found a vault in a living room closet. That’s where they’d be, this fellow’s small, proud collection.
Bob went back to the desk and found a photo album: our hero in kendo outfit through the stages of his life, young and proud, a winner of some local tourneys, a man in his twenties lean and dangerous. A woman appeared in some of them, but then she disappeared. Divorce, death? In the more recent photos, the swordsman had become a coach and posed with a group of younger kendo warriors.
Then, in a drawer, Bob found what appeared to be a pile of bills. They were all addressed to Kenji Kishida, of 1 -23-43 Shintoyo, Apartment 633, Chiba. Many were in kanji, a few, from Citibank, were in English and Japanese, and many said the same thing: they appreciated his recent settling of debts and they thanked him very much.
There it was. The guy was bankrupting himself buying swords he couldn’t afford. Then the dream sword is presented to him in the middle of a business day. He recognizes the Asano crest and the swordsmith’s signature, he reads the shape of the blade, puts two and two together, and recalls that somebody in the last few weeks wants an astonishing sword. He knows the number. He takes the sword apart. He makes his tang imprint, makes the call, faxes the imprint, and connects them to Bob. It takes a couple of hours to set up a tail. Bob’s sitting there like a fool; when he leaves, he has no idea he’s leading the killers to the Yanos.
