The 47th Samurai

28

They got there by midnight. The traffic in Nick’s neighborhood was normally nonexistent at this hour, but tonight it was terrible. Four blocks from Nick’s, the lanes froze into gridlock; nobody was going anywhere.

“There’s a cop up ahead, trying to get this sorted out,” Susan said.

“I’m going to slip out and see what I can see. If I don’t make it back in time, I’ll meet you at Nick’s.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. Everybody will notice a gaijin. I’ll go. You scoot over and stay with the car.”

She got out; he moved behind the wheel and waited.

Ten minutes later the car hadn’t moved an inch, but Susan was back. As she approached, he could see, from the slowness of her movements and her downcast expression, that the news was very bad. She ducked into the seat.

“They burned it. Like the Yanos’. Burned it to a crisp. Burned the houses on both sides too.”

“Maybe he got out.”

“No,” she said from far away, “he didn’t. The cop said a man was dead. A suicide. He set his house on fire, then he cut his own throat. They carted him away to the morgue an hour ago.”

Swagger tried not to concentrate on Nick, poor Nick. He tried not to feel rage or pain or despair. He remembered Doshu: “Only now.” Only now. Yeah, right, but get me off this goddamned frozen star, the alien place where everybody I talk to gets whacked hard and ugly by men of shadow I have never even seen and the game is nothing I understand.

Only now. Only now. Think it through.

She didn’t say anything but just sat there for the longest time. Her almond eyes seemed unfocused; maybe she was seeing afar with a close-up eye and seeing close-up with a distant eye.

“Poor Nick,” she said at last. “I think he was finally in the clear.”

“Smart guy. Brave guy. The best.”

“Poor guy-”

“Look, I’m not the boss or nothing, but we have to think this through. If Nick cut his own throat, it means Kondo Isami found him and he knew he’d be tortured. He knew these boys. So he went out samurai.”

“I hate to think of that.”

“Well, ma’am, somebody has to think of that, so I guess I’ll go ahead and be the one.”

“You know, it makes me sick how good at all this you are.”

“I understand that. I make a lot of people sick. I’m a sergeant, it’s my job. We are in a war, people are dying, people are in danger, so let’s just figure out a next move.”

She was silent. Then she said, “I can’t think in this car. We’ll go to a coffee shop. I have to get out of this stupid traffic.”

The place was half-empty. They got coffee at the counter, then found a table at the back. Starbucks. It was like being in Iowa.

“Okay,” Swagger said, “you tell me if I’m right. You’re smart. I only went to high school.”

“New rule: sarcasm not permitted. Sarcasm out of bounds. Get it?” she said angrily.

“I apologize. It was stupid. It won’t happen again. Okay, here’s where we are. Nick found something. We don’t know what. But somehow they heard about it and came after him. He gave you a clue. So somehow he had enough time to hide what he had and to call you. ‘Susan, I fed the dragon.’ Then he cut his own throat, knowing that if they got to him, they’d torture him and he’d give everything up. Little skinny Nick, more samurai than any of those boys. And here’s another thing I have figured out. See if you agree.”

“Okay.”

“They didn’t burn the place for no reason. They figured out he’d learned something, and they were worried he’d left it. They couldn’t find it. They burned the place so that whoever he was working with couldn’t find it either. There’s no point in burning the place otherwise. It just attracts attention and the last thing these people need is attention.”

“That makes as much sense as anything.”

“Okay, so let’s think about the clue Nick gave you. Maybe I’m full of shit, but it can’t be that hard. He cooked it up in two seconds. You said he sounded scared on the phone. He knew they were there. He hid whatever it was fast, he came up with a clue fast, and it was something only you knew.”

“But what does that tell us?”

“It means it plays off something you know. ‘I fed the dragon.’ No, no, ‘Susan, I fed the dragon.’ Not dragons in general, not dragons in history, not dragons in no poetry or movies or songs, but a dragon that Susan knows. So what we have to do is find a point where three things touch: Susan, Nick, and a dragon. What does Susan know about dragons?”

“Nothing.”

“Did you ever discuss dragons with him?”

“No.”

“Did he ever mention them to you?”

“No. Never. The first time I heard the word ‘dragon’ from his mouth was last night.”

“What was the first thing you thought when he said ‘I fed the dragon.’”

“Oh, this is helpful. I thought, What the fuck is he talking about?”

“Are there any dragons in your past?”

“I dated a couple, that’s all. I was married briefly to one.”

“Think of what a dragon could be or relate to. A team name? Your high school football team-I’m betting you were a cheerleader-was it the Dragons?”

“I was the head cheerleader. It was the Panthers.”

“Ever study, uh, what’s it, dinosaurs?”

“Paleontology, archaeology, geology. No, never. Russian and Japanese literature.”

“Oh, that’s helpful. You can make a lot of dough off that.”

“Swagger, I gave you sarcasm warning number one. One more violation and you’re on your way to Arkansas.”

“Idaho. Let me say some dragon things to you. You react. Maybe it’ll jog a memory.”

“Fire away.”

“Flying dragons.”

“Nothing.”

“Sleeping Beauty.”

“Nah.”

“Prince Charming?”

“No such thing.”

“Reptiles.”

“Are dragons reptiles?”

“Well, they’re green and scaly. They’re like dinosaurs or big alligators.”

“Do they have two-chambered hearts? Are they cold-blooded?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t know either.”

“Chinese dragons?”

“No.”

“Dragons in parades? You know, people under a long dragon thing?”

“Wouldn’t that be a Chinese dragon?”

“Dragon bones? Dragon wings? Dragon tracks? Dragon breath?”

“No, no, no, no.”

“Flying Dragons.”

“You said that.”

“A gang called the Dragons?”

“No.”

“A triad called the Dragons?”

“No.”

“A flying dragon kick from karate?”

“No.”

“The sleeping dragon? That’s a kendo move, low to high.”

“I know what it is. No, not that.”

“A Chinese restaurant called the Dragon.”

“No.”

“Saint George?”

“No.”

“Saint Andrew?”

“No.”

“Prince Charming.”

“You did that one already. This isn’t working.”

“Well, I’m pretty much out of dragon stuff. Could it be a picture, a movie, a book, a poem, an article, a paper, a-”

“Hmmm,” she said.

He saw something in her eyes. It was that faraway look: seeing the mountain as if it’s close at hand.

“Article?”

“Paper. If dragons are reptiles, does that make them lizards?”

“There are no dragons, so can’t they be anything?”

“Well, as you said, green and scaly. That makes them reptiles. So wouldn’t they be lizards?”

“I suppose. Why?”

“It’s just that-oh, it’s nothing.”

“Try it. What the hell?”

“Lizards. I have something in my life dealing with lizards. I may have mentioned it to Nick.”

“But you’re not sure.”

“Swagger, nobody can remember everything they’ve said to a casual acquaintance over a five-year period.”

“Of course. Sorry. But you said a paper. School paper. Lizards.”

“Yeah, it’s a story I’ve told a few times in embassies and at the department, at parties and dinners, that sort of thing. Did I tell it to Nick? It’s possible. I met him at a party at the Japanese ambassador’s residence on Nebraska in D.C. about five years ago. It was low-key professional: I was supposed to chat him up, he was supposed to chat me up. There was some drinking. I may have told him.”

“Tell me.”

“I had a petty good-girl’s ambition to graduate from high school with a four-point-oh average. I had to be perfect, and for three years, I was perfect. But my senior year, I dropped a couple of points in advanced-placement biology. I had to somehow make it up, or I’d get a B, and there would go the four-oh. So I went to the teacher and I said, you know, I can’t quite make it up on the remaining tests. If I ace them, I still just get an average of three-nine-nine in here. Is there any extra credit thing I could do? He was a good guy. He said, ‘Well, Susan, if you wrote me a paper and it was really good on an original subject, I don’t see how I could keep from giving you the A that you need so badly.’ The joke is, I have no feeling for biology. I just learned it by rote. I had no gift at all and there was nothing I was capable of writing an A paper on. I had no inspiration, no anything. So I went to the National Geographic bound volumes in the library and just paged through them. I was looking for something that might stimulate my imagination.”

“And you found something?”

“A lizard. A big, ugly lizard. God, it was ugly. It was about ten feet long, green, carnivorous, with a forked tongue. It was limited to seven islands in the West Pacific near Java. The biggest island was called Komodo, and so the lizard was called a Komodo lizard. So I became an overnight expert on the Komodo lizard-this is before the Internet, I should add-and I did a paper on its prospects in an environmentally diminishing world. I got the A, I was valedictorian, my parents weren’t disappointed, and I went on with my life as planned, except of course I didn’t marry Jack McBride, but that’s another story. The funny thing is, that lizard really helped me by being so interesting. So the joke is, now and then if I’m happy and I’ve had a few drinks and people are toasting, I toast. My toast is ‘Here’s to the lizard.’ And they all laugh, because it’s so unlike little Susan Okada, the Asian grind with the four-oh average who never makes a mistake. I may have told that to Nick, after toasting the lizard. I think a bunch of us, some Japanese journalists and some State people, I think we went to a sushi place in Georgetown. That may be where I did it.”

“And that’s it?”

“Yeah. But see, here’s the thing. That creature is also sometimes called a Komodo dragon. Maybe I toasted the dragon and that’s what Nick was thinking of.”

“Komodo? Is that a Japanese word? It sounds Japanese.”

“No, it’s Indonesian, I think.”

“It sounds Japanese. Os, lots of syllables. It could be Japanese.”

“It does sound Japanese. It actually sounds like a Japanese word, very common, kamado. Kamado simply means stove or oven. It’s an inverted ceramic bowl or something. In the old days, most Japanese homes had one. It’s a grill, I suppose. You grill fish in it. Usually small, it’s-”

They both let it lie there, on the table.

A few minutes passed. Then Bob said, “Nobody would see the correspondence between the word Komodo, the name of the lizard, and the word kamado, meaning grill, unless they spoke both English and Japanese well. That would be you. And nobody else would have a Komodo in his background except you. Now, the next question: would Nick have had a kamado?”

“He shouldn’t have. They all have microwaves now. But he did have one. Don’t you remember how his house smelled the night you were over? He had just eaten and he’d grilled some meat. He grilled his meat in a kamado.”

“Now, Nick’s sitting there, somehow he knows he’s about to get hit. It’s over. But he doesn’t panic, not Nick, he’s a cool hand, he’s samurai all the way. He knows he can’t get out, but he tries to preserve what he’s got, which is some documents, that’s how he beats his killers. Where’s he put them? He slides them into the kamado. Maybe there’s a liner and he puts them under that, in the bowl. Then he calls you and he’s afraid the phone is tapped and the only thing he can think of is that little anecdote from your first meeting and the correspondence between kamado and Komodo, that only you would see.”

“He was good at puns. He said he loved to write his headlines in his rag because he liked the puns, the more outrageous the better.”

“I think,” said Bob, “tonight I’m going to pay a visit to the ruins of Nick’s house. You tell me what I’m looking for and where it’ll be. I’ll find it if it’s there.”