The 47th Samurai

17

“He says,” said Big Al, “that it’s not an official form, it’s a draft. It was just typed from notes.”

“So there’s no way of telling if it’s authentic. It could be a forgery.”

They sat in an office behind Sushi Good Friends, a profitable restaurant owned by Al Ino. Al also owned three other sushi restaurants, two strip malls, a couple of pizza joints, two Hair Cutteries, three gas stations, and two McDonald’s around Oakland, a few more in San Francisco, and one or two way out in Carmel County. He was a retired master sergeant, USMC, whom Bob had found through a contact in Marine HQ, under the category Japanese language specialists, as Ino had spent twenty-four years in Marine Intelligence, most of it in Japan.

“He doesn’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because he says that although it’s not an official form it is organized like an official form. He’s seen a lot of coroner’s reports. He was a homicide detective in Osaka for eleven years, Gunny.”

The “he” was the father-in-law of one of Al Ino’s sons, who had retired to America to be close to his daughter. Al said he was a top guy who knew Japanese crime up one side, down the other.

“That’s Osaka. Maybe they do it different in Tokyo.”

“Trust me on this one, Gunny. They don’t do it different in Tokyo.”

“Gotcha.”

They were discussing the document Bob had received a few days earlier, shipped by SAL, the big Japanese shipping company. It had turned out quickly enough that the return address was phony, as was the name of the shipper, one John Yamamoto.

“It seems like-”

“They’re Japanese, Gunny. They’re very careful. Every i is dotted, every t crossed at every step. They’re thorough, methodical, and they have infinite patience. They work like dogs. That’s how I ended up owning half of Oakland.”

Bob looked at the document. It was thirty pages long, column after column of kanji characters arranged vertically on the pages, with never a strikeover or erasure, now and then a crude stick-figure drawing with arrows or dotted lines signifying this or that mysterious pathology.

“No names?”

“No names. Just scientific fact on the burned remains of five humans found in the Prefecture of Tokyo at such and such a time at such and such a place. Five dead human beings, and some remarks, some oddities, some things he couldn’t figure out.”

“I’m not sure I can get through this. I once had my own father autopsied, if you can believe it, and I got through that. I’m not sure-”

He trailed off. He needed a drink. A splash of sake would taste so good. It would calm him just enough. Al Ino was a drinking man and Bob could see a whole rack of bottles on a cabinet on the other side of the office. In any one of them, paradise hid.

“Well, it’s pretty hard stuff,” said Al. “Maybe I could submit a report to you, Gunny. You could look at it at a better time.”

“No, I’ve got to do this. Just tell me. Is it bad?”

“Well, here’s one thing I’ll bet you didn’t know. Whoever the oldest male victim is, he got one of them.”

“Huh?”

“Yeah, there was a lot of blood soaked into his trousers, and they didn’t burn because they were so wet. The blood typology and DNA matched nobody in the family. Does that make you feel any better?”

Bob was surprised: it did.

Here’s to you, Philip Yano. You were tough at the end. You defended your family. You went down hard. You cut.

“Is it a surprise?”

“Nah. He was pure samurai. That’s how he’d go.”

“Good news, bad news,” Al went on. “Good news. I suppose, some mercy on a cruel night. The family members were shot. Nine-millimeters, head shots, once, twice. Someone went upstairs silently, from room to room with a pistol, and put them down. So there was no pain, there was no torture, there was no rape.”

“Only murder,” said Bob glumly.

“The ‘young female’ was shot twice, once in the jaw, once in the head. She must have risen, he got her as she was getting up, then he stood over her as she was still breathing and fired again. The others, the boys and the mother, it was clean.”

Bob put his head in his hands. God, he needed a drink so bad! He thought of grave Tomoe and what she would have brought into the world as a doctor, with her care, her precision, her commitment to obligation, her love of her father and mother. Shot in the face, then in the head. Lying there as he came over, she probably understood what was happening, what had happened to her family.

“Is there more?”

“Unfortunately. Gunny, are you all right?”

“Let’s just get this over with.”

“The bad stuff.”

“If being shot in your bed is good, then…go on.”

“They were cut.”

Bob blinked.

“I’m sorry.”

“Not ‘hurt yourself shaving’ cut. Not ‘hell, I cut my finger’ cut. No. They were cut. Cut.”

“Christ.”

“I translate, roughly.”

Al picked up a sheet of paper out of the document that he had highlighted with a yellow Magic Marker.

“‘All limbs and necks were severed. Torsos were sundered diagonally and horizontally. In two cases, pelvic bones had been cut through, seemingly with one clean stroke. In another case, rib bones were sheared in two at roughly a forty-five-degree angle to the spine. All spines were severed. The instrumentation in dismemberment appeared to be a number of heavy, extremely sharp sword blades. The cleanness with which the bones were separated at the site of each incision suggests a weapon traveling at considerable velocity, as if at the end of a stroke of an extremely powerful right-handed man. Several less forceful cuts were also noted; in some cases, bones were merely broken and not fully separated, suggesting men of less intense musculature.’”

“His students.”

“Yeah. Hmmm, let me see.” Al rose, walked to a bookshelf, and pulled out a volume. It was called The Japanese Sword: The Soul of the Samurai, by Gregory Irvine.

He flipped through it.

“Yeah, there’s nothing arbitrary about the cutting that went on that night. It followed prescribed methodology of seventeen ninety-two. Here, look at it. That’s any one of the Yanos.”

Bob looked at the page, trying to keep his rage buried. Rage was not helpful. Rage got you nothing but dead in a hurry.

“It’s a cutting scheme according to the Yamada family,” said Al. “It illustrated the various prescribed cuts that could be carried out when testing a sword on a corpse.”

The line figure depicted a body wrapped in a jocklike towel, with the various dotted lines signifying cuts through center mass. It was headless, and helpful lines pointed out the proper angle through the shoulder on each side of the shorn neck, through the elbow and the wrist and latitudinally across the body from under the arms all the way down to beneath the navel.

“Okay,” said Bob, “that’s enough.”

He needed a drink.