The 47th Samurai

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 crème de la crème 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.

A week later Detective Kenji Kishida receives an envelope full of cash. He can settle his bills; maybe he buys a sword he’s longed for and it reposes right now in the vault. He’s got a little extra. He always wanted a bike. Why not? Who will notice? He probably never connected it with the Yanos. It was just a little favor of the sort a mildly dishonest cop might do for someone in power.

The officer did not go to work Saturday. He arose late and finally went to his bike about eleven in the morning. He had full racing leathers on and looked like a ’cycle knight. He examined his bike with a great deal of pleasure, checking connections, lubricants, this or that tube or pipe or cable. Then he put on his helmet, climbed aboard, keyed the engine, kicked up the stand, backed out. With a lurch-he had clearly not yet mastered the subtleties of the handle-grip clutch and the foot shifter-he shunted into motion.

Bob caught the tail end of this drama, as he’d been circling the blocks in a figure-eight pattern to keep the parking lot observed, figuring it would only be out of sight for seventy seconds out of every two minutes, and when he came by, the man had mounted up. Bob slowed, tracked him as he moved through the lot, let him join traffic, and followed a good three hundred yards behind.

Kishida threaded his way through the traffic, still clumsy and jumpy on the gears, edged his way through the suburbs of the small city of Narita to the Kanto Expressway, where, ever so tentatively, he finally got up into the higher gears and was soon humming along at 100 kmh. It never occurred to him that he was being followed, and even if it did, he probably wouldn’t have had the confidence to take his eyes off the road before him. So Bob slipstreamed along without much difficulty.

Then Kenji Kishida either tired of the strain of moving at high speed or decided he wanted to see something prettier than Nissans and Mazdas playing tag at 120 kmh and the revetments of the superhighway, so he took an exit ramp. Bob easily followed him. Soon enough the houses fell away. Ahead, some mountains dominated the landscape, and rows of carefully cultivated fields lay on either side. The traffic thinned, and finally Kishida turned up a smaller road and seemed to be heading into the mountains. He still had not noticed Bob, now two hundred yards behind.

The road was empty, climbing slightly through rich pine forests. Bob had never seen a more beautiful and serene range of hills. He knew he’d never have a better chance. The guy might join a heavier-traveled road in seconds.

He gunned up into fifth gear, goosed the bike, and flew beyond a hundred miles an hour. The wind beat against him and he closed the distance like a shot, zooming by Kishida, feeling the man’s sudden start of panic. Then, cruelly, he cut Kishida off, eating up his space, driving him onto the shoulder. The dust spun up in clouds as Kishida struggled with the treacherous loss of traction, got tangled up in gears and throttle and brake sequence, almost lost control, almost in fact died, but somehow managed to brake hard and bring the bike down in the dust.

Bob fishtailed to a halt, punched down his kickstand, and ran to the man lying next to the fallen, still chugging bike. He shut down the engine and saw through Kishida’s shaded visor the man’s fear, panic, confusion, and hesitation. Kishida tried to rise. Bob put a left-footed dragon’s kick into the side of the helmet-hadn’t done that in years!-and clocked him hard. Kishida fell down, slipped trying to get up, ripped at his helmet, then grabbed at his zippered jacket, perhaps to reach a gun or a tanto, but Bob kicked him in the helmet with another wheelhouse dragon’s sweep. That put him down solidly, and he lay, shaking stars and spiderwebs out of his head, trying to figure what the hell was-

Bob jumped him, pressing his knee against the squirming man’s chest. He pulled the zipper down, saw the shaft of a Glock, pulled it, dropped the mag, racked the slide to toss the chambered round but there wasn’t one, then tossed it twenty feet away. Kishida recoiled in horror. Bob yanked the man’s helmet off.

“You stay put if you know what’s good for you. I’ll smack you around even more if I have to!”

“I am a police officer. You are in big-”

“Shut up. I ask the questions, you answer ’em. That’s how this game is going to be played. The sword.”

“I don’t-”

“The sword, goddammit.”

“What sword?”

“The sword that bought you this bike. The sword that paid all your debts. The sword that bought you some new toy in your vault. The sword that’s going to buy you teacher porno for the next ten years.”

Kishida said nothing. His eyes suddenly went distant and he looked off, thinking. Then, finally, he looked back.

“I know who you are. I knew you’d come.”

“It don’t matter a lick who or what I am or who or what you know. What matters is the sword. You were the one who spotted it. Who’d you tell? How did it happen, how was it set up, what was the deal, the connection? Don’t give me any bullshit. I know more than you could guess.”

“Please, I had no idea those people would be killed. You have to believe that. I never realized…I just had no idea.”

“So you knew it was going to the Yanos.”

“No, but the collectors were talking afterward how some American at the site of the fire was screaming about a stolen sword. That’s when I saw how it could have been. I am ashamed. I should have committed seppuku, but I lack the courage.”

“You and me both, pal. Just tell me: who reached you? How did it happen? Who was on the receiving end of the information? How was it set up?”

“I can’t tell you. Go ahead, kill me. If I tell you, I’m dead. It’s the same thing.”

“You don’t want to die. Not with that pretty bike lying there and brand-new swords in your vault. It ain’t worth dying for, believe me. And I don’t want to kill you. Too much paperwork. Tell me. Talk to me, Kenji, goddammit.”

The man took a deep breath.

“I was approached by a low-ranking yakuza some six months ago. He gave me a hundred thousand yen. ‘For what?’ I said. He said, ‘Just for keeping your eye out.’ He knew that I was a collector, an ex-kendo champion, something of a scholar of the sword, and at Narita I was always the one called to inspect and judge blades that unsuspecting tourists brought in or took out without proper documentation, and that I was also asked to consult on sword thefts, insurance values, that sort of thing. So he knew that I was at a kind of crossroads of sword information.”

“He had a specific sword in mind?”

“No. He couldn’t have known what would or wouldn’t come in, if anything. But they were looking for something big, something that would make a splash. They turn up now and then as more and more swords are returned, as people look at the things they have in their trunks, as collectors and foreign buyers become more aggressive and pay more and more. Samurai is bigger than Japan. Samurai is international now.”

“So you saw the sword?”

“It was lying on a desk, just in from Customs. A fellow was typing up the license. I knew in a second it had historicity to it. I made a fuss and demanded to take charge. I told them it resembled a certain stolen sword and I had to make some phone calls. Once I had it in my office, I had some trouble getting the hilt off. Someone seemed to have poured some black tar or something into the mekugiana and I couldn’t budge it. Fortunately, I had my kit. I was able to knock the pin out with the brass hammer. There was even a poem written by someone, I don’t know who. ‘Moon of hell,’ that I remember. But I was too excited about the sword. I didn’t recognize the smith’s name, Norinaga. But I picked up the crest, looked at it through my loupe, and realized at once it was the Asano mon. I recognized the koto shape, which put it in the proper time period. It was a thrill. It was all I could do to keep from jumping up and down. It was only later when I researched the smith’s name that I realized what it had to be. If I had known that-well, I don’t know.”

“So you called?”

“Well, first I had to make the imprint of the tang. I did that quickly. Then I made the call. It was a young man’s voice, husky, strong, not the yakuza I’d first talked to. He heard me describe it and left the line for a second or so. He called someone. Another voice came on the line. He asked me to describe it. He was very knowledgeable. He even knew that the Asano family crest had changed over the years and had me recheck it to make certain that the one I had was right for the time. I told him the smith’s name. He got very quiet. I said, ‘What do you want me to do? Confiscate it?’ ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘fax me the oshigata and stall. Take an hour or two. Let the gaijin wait. Walk by him several times and note his height, his weight, his demeanor. Do you understand? We need to know what he looks like.’ So that’s what I did. I actually walked by you two or three times, and once sat near you. You didn’t notice me. I could tell you were angry. Then I went and called them and gave a detailed description. He had me wait another few minutes and then finally okayed the next move. I reassembled the sword and went to my supervisor and told him I had been mistaken and that the license was fine and to tell you how moved we were that you were returning it.”

“And that’s the time they set up to tail me to the Yanos.”

“I don’t know. I never heard from them again. Two weeks later a package arrived. I opened it and found three million yen. Not a fortune but enough to pay my debts, buy a shin-shinto that had caught my eye. I still had half of it left, so I bought the bike.”

“I don’t suppose you kept the package?”

“No, of course not, I destroyed it. I had to spend all the cash. I couldn’t put it in a bank because then I’d have to pay taxes on it and explain where I got it.”

“Do you still have the fax number or the original number?”

“No. I destroyed them too, after the murders.”

“Any names, any vocal characteristics, any-”

“I do recall one thing. When the young man went to call his master, he left the phone. But I heard the name. He called ‘Isami-sama.’”

“Isami-sama?”

“Isami, the name would be; sama is honorific.”

“Did you recognize it?”

“Any swordsman would recognize it. Kondo Isami, a great killer from the bloody past. Many duels and murders, many bodies. A pseudonym of a fellow with a high opinion of himself. Also bespeaking a high opinion: sama. It’s an inflated honorific, higher than san. It connotes high rank or special talent, as viewed from below. The man doing the talking considers this Kondo Isami highly accomplished and is trying to ingratiate himself.”

Bob walked over and fetched the Glock. He picked it up, punched the cartridges out of the magazine, then slammed the magazine home and handed the gun back to Kishida.

“If I need more information, I may visit you again.”

Kishida said, “If Kondo Isami catches you, he will make you tell where you got your information. You may be brave and resolute, but you will tell him. Then I am a dead man.”

“No, what’s going to kill you is that damn bike you don’t run worth a damn. You better get some practice on a closed course.”

“I get mixed up in the gears.”

“Good way to die young and beautiful.”

“It doesn’t matter. I am already dead.”

“Nah.”

“You can guarantee that?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Because I’m going to find him first. I’m going to cut him down and leave him for the birds.”