Daughter of the Sword

by Steve Bein

  When he reached the building, he found that an electronic security system controlled the front door. But luck was with him; from behind the glass door came the swelling hollow sound of heels clopping down the slatted stairs. Fuchida strode ten paces away from the building, turned, and walked back to the door. He reached it just as the woman descending the stairs did, and when she opened the door enough to pass the locking mechanism, he pulled it the rest of the way open with a chivalrous gesture. He smiled, she returned the smile, and he was inside.

  The building was clean but plain, the hallway carpet cheap, the walls painted rather than wallpapered. It was the sort of building he’d expect to find a policewoman living in, and hardly the kind of place a collector of antiquities would choose to keep an Inazuma. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department couldn’t possibly employ more than a handful of women, and so this one’s death would be noticed immediately, but despite all of that, Fuchida would cut this one’s heart out if she’d allowed the second Inazuma to rust in this shithole of a building.

  The flat he sought was on the second floor. Finding it, he clacked the brass door knocker. He heard unshod footsteps on carpet. Then the homey smell of steaming rice met him as the door drew back the length of his thumb. He saw a narrow band of a woman’s face in the crack of the door, bisected by a gleaming brass door chain. She was of an age with Fuchida, mid-forties, a head shorter than he was, with large glasses and a plump frame. He recognized the navy blue skirt and white blouse of her uniform through the door slit and reasoned she couldn’t have been home long. “Matsumori-san?” he said.

  “It’s Kurihara,” she said, “but yes, Matsumori was my maiden name. May I help you?”

  “Is your husband home?”

  “He’s still at work. What’s this about?”

  “If I’m right, you’re the granddaughter of General Matsumori Keiichi, of Army Intelligence in the Great World War? Is that so?”

  “Yes.” She eyed him warily. “Do I know you?”

  “I’m looking for your grandfather’s sword. I’ve been looking for it for a long time, in fact. It took me a while to track you down. Do you have the sword here?”

  He heard her tighten her grip on the doorknob. “We sold it a long time ago. You won’t find any swords here. Go away.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t. As I say, I’ve spent a long time looking for that sword. I’ll need you to tell me who bought it from you.”

  “I’m calling the police,” she said, and her bare feet took her one apprehensive step backward.

  Fuchida unshouldered his slender blue bag and withdrew from it his beautiful sword. In one movement he unsheathed the blade and swiped upward. Her song hung on the air. The golden door chain fell into two limp halves. Fuchida entered the apartment, kicked the door shut behind him without looking, and walked toward the fleeing Kurihara-san.

  His first slash severed her spinal cord not far above her pelvis.

  She collapsed, legs as lifeless as ropes. A dark bloodstain spread across her carpet. It was already as wide as a welcome mat. Fuchida bent down, took the phone from her hand, hit END, and slipped the phone into his pants pocket. “As you can see,” he said, “I’ve already got a sword, but consider me a collector. You’re going to have to tell me where I can find your grandfather’s weapon.”

  Kurihara let out a piercing wail. It carried horror and desperation—the twin realizations, perhaps, that she would never walk again and that the same sword that had crippled her would kill her where she lay. Strange to worry about both, Fuchida thought—surely someone about to die needn’t be concerned about disability—but her wide eyes darted back and forth from her dead legs to the bloody steel.

  Another scream wouldn’t do, so Fuchida kicked her in the sternum. “There are other ways to keep you from crying out,” he said, crouching on his haunches next to her. “I could run this through one of your lungs. But then you couldn’t tell me who bought the sword. I’d need you to write it down or something, and I’d hate to inconvenience you further after all you’ve been through this evening.”

  She whimpered through hitched breaths, clutching her midsection. Her face was ashen; her glasses lay at an odd angle because she’d broken one of her arms as she fell.

  He did not need to hurt her much to get the name he required. His first thought upon hearing the name was, That sly bastard. Keeping the sword from me this long—you sly, sly bastard.

  He looked down at Kurihara. She seemed terribly old now, though scarcely a minute ago he’d guessed the two of them were the same age. She was pale, her face wrinkled by fear and pain, her body shrinking into itself.

  In the end he wasn’t sure whether he killed her out of pity or to keep her from crying out after he left. He supposed it didn’t matter. Dead was dead.

  4

  The precinct was a slender two-story core sample bored through the belly of a twelve-story government center. It was an early postwar building, sandy concrete instead of glass and steel, a squat little sand castle compared to the gleaming skyscrapers that surrounded it. Mariko’s precinct house occupied about one-fiftieth of the building’s square footage. The rest of the complex housed a post office, the ward’s finance department, and offices for similar sorts of lethally boring work: construction permits and inspections, parking violations, public works, parks and recreation. The precinct house tunneled exactly through the middle of the bottom two floors, from the hedgerows along the front of the government center right through to the narrow alley separating the complex from the back wall of the abutting office building looming forty stories overhead.

  They couldn’t do a lot at her precinct, given its limited space, but Mariko felt proud of it anyway. They had only one interrogation room, a holding cell that barely qualified as such—really it was no more than an ordinary cinder block office with a beefed-up door—and the only way they’d managed to acquire any office space at all was to rehab the whole second-floor filing area once the department went digital. The carpet the color of wet cigarette ashes left a lot to be desired, as did the harsh lighting, but with the upstairs renovation Mariko and the rest of the sergeants each got a cubicle of their own. Mariko’s had family photos pinned to the fabric wall: skinny Saori at her high school graduation, already showing hints of meth abuse; their mother grinning over a fiftieth birthday cake frosted to look like a Ping-Pong paddle; her dad with his little girls on his knee, all three giving the peace sign. The last one was the only photo in a frame, the only one at the office that had been taken during their time in the States, the only one Mariko had from before he got sick.

  The station had one small evidence locker left, on the ground floor next to the arsenal with its little rack of pistols and single box of 9-millimeter rounds. Mariko would have checked her stun gun back in to the arsenal if its allegedly shatterproof plastic hadn’t exploded against the concrete after bouncing off the back of Bumps Ryota’s head. She didn’t know what Tasers cost, but she was sure she’d find out when she saw the deductions on her next paycheck.

  Walking past the locked door of the arsenal, Mariko felt her cheeks redden. Even little errors loomed large in her eyes, and she didn’t know the range officer well enough to know how big a deal he’d make of the broken Taser. Though she was proud of all her little precinct house could do, and proud of her own accomplishments within it, her feet always seemed heavier here. The pressure for perfection weighed on her like a backpack full of bricks, and that pressure was more intense here than anywhere else. Some days she felt it might sink her into the wet ash carpet.

  There were days when she asked herself why she worked here. Not this precinct, not even the TMPD—she wondered why she stayed in Japan at all. Her English was good enough; she could have applied to a department back in the States, or in Canada—hell, anywhere but here. Anywhere she could just worry about being a good cop, and set all the misogynist bullshit aside. The days she entertained thoughts of leaving were the days she had to remind herself of the last promise she’d mad
e to her father. She told him she’d make him proud. Moving halfway around the world, abandoning her mother and sister after they’d already lost so much—it just wasn’t the way to earn his pride.

  And she had to admit there were days she was proud of herself. Even when the pressure made her want to throw her badge out the window, she could look at that badge and see TOKYO METROPOLITAN POLICE DEPARTMENT. It was the most elite police unit in the country, and in that unit she’d made detective sergeant. Of course that was the very source of all the pressure. All she had to do was settle for being a meter maid and she could have made all the stress disappear. There were days she asked herself that question too: Why not go easy on yourself? Why do you always have to pick the hardest road?

  Mariko had never been able to answer that question. Even in junior high she’d picked cross-country, not the fifty-meter dash. In high school she made it worse and chose the triathlon. She still ran a tri every summer. There was no reason to it. Nobody needed to run a triathlon. Nobody needed to run anywhere anymore. The world no longer required it. She told herself that she did it to stay in shape, that so long as she knew she had another race on the horizon, she could not let her body fall into disrepair as so many cops proved all too willing to do. But then the tri only made sense because she was a cop. What if she had taken up chess instead of track and field? What if she’d joined the computer club instead? How much easier would her life have been? She would have been richer, more comfortable, less frequently injured, more normal—and bored out of her mind. That was the sole logic of the triathlon, and the sole logic of police work as well: no matter how wearisome it became, the difficult life was her sole inoculation against terminal boredom.

  Mariko turned left at the coffeemakers and electric teapots and gave a nod to Mishima, who sat at a desk with the night’s paperwork arrayed before him like cards in Solitaire. “Is he in there?” she asked.

  “Yep. He’s all set.”

  Mariko opened the white steel door and closed it behind her. Bumps Ryota was pacing, handcuffed, along the back wall, and he gave a startled quiver when she closed the door. He bowed to her, then hurried to the nearest of the two old wooden chairs and half sat, half fell into it. Mariko hadn’t noticed earlier, but the man smelled like the bottom of a laundry hamper.

  She took her customary seat on the opposite side of the room’s lone table, which, like the chairs, was of a vintage that made Mariko think of the wooden furniture in her grade school’s library. She was led to believe that furniture like this wouldn’t have lasted long in the interrogation rooms of New York’s or Chicago’s PDs, but this was Tokyo, and perps could be expected to show a certain degree of civility.

  All the same, Bumps was amped. His fingers drummed out a hummingbird rhythm against his belt buckle, and while Mariko could have done with a nap, Bumps looked like he was ready for another fifty-meter dash. She slipped her right hand into her purse to wrap around the haft of her Cheetah.

  “What have you got for me, Bumps?”

  “Huh?”

  “You said you’re valuable to me,” Mariko said. “Right now that’s true: you’re another arrest I can tell my LT about. Unless you’ve got something else for me, I’ll just book you and call it a night.”

  “No. I got information. Good information.”

  “Well?”

  Bumps shook his head, his stiff blond hair following a half second behind. “No way. I want a deal first. I don’t want to go to jail.”

  “Neither do I,” said Mariko. “That’s why I don’t walk around with twenty-two grams of crystal methamphetamine on me. That’s an intent to distribute charge, Bumps. You’ve also been selling that shit to my sister, and that makes me want to kick you in the nuts and throw you in the worst prison we’ve got. So spill this info you say you have before I come to my senses and start kicking.”

  “Uh,” said Bumps. “Okay. Well, word is there’s a new mover in town. Not dealing yet—just testing the market, if you know what I mean.”

  “Not good enough. I can find a dealer under any sewer grate in Tokyo.”

  “Not like this guy. Says he’s going to sell cocaine. Says it’s going to hit Japan like Godzilla, and he wants to know who’s in line to be his distributors.”

  Mariko didn’t let it show, but for a brief moment she felt gratitude toward Bumps Ryota. Until now he’d only inspired feelings of revulsion and vengeance in her, but this was big. “You got a name for me?”

  “No, but I do know he rolls with the Kamaguchi-gumi.”

  “You’re high, Bumps. Yakuzas don’t go in for coke.”

  “Like I said, he’s not selling yet. Laying the groundwork, though, I’m telling you.”

  He looked at her expectantly, the bags under his eyes a curious shade of purple in the light of the ceiling’s twin fluorescent tubes. Mariko thought about her service weapon, about how she’d only ever drawn it once in her four years on the force, about how much she’d enjoy drawing it now and giving Bumps a good long look right down the barrel. It was the wrong thing to feel. Not because he didn’t deserve it—he did, and so did everyone else in his profession—but she wanted to hurt him because of what he did to Saori, and at the end of the day she knew the one who did it to Saori was Saori. Even if Mariko shot him right here and now, Saori would find another dealer.

  Shove her pistol in his face. Cram the Cheetah right in his gray, wasted mouth and pull the trigger. Those were the urges she suppressed as she withdrew her hand from her purse, slipped it into her jacket pocket, and passed Bumps Ryota a thin stack of folded papers held together by the clippy-thing of a ballpoint pen. “These are CI papers. You know what a CI is?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “But what? You’d prefer to face charges of possession? Intent to distribute? Evading arrest? I don’t think so. I think you and I both win if you sign on as a confidential informant. You’re never selling meth again; those days are over. Your choices now are to start selling blowjobs while you’re in prison or to start selling information to me.”

  Bumps’s shoulders slumped. He unfolded the sheaf of papers and looked over the cover sheet.

  “Better,” said Mariko. “Here’s the rules. One, you ever sell meth again, we prosecute to the full extent of the law. Okay?”

  Bumps sighed. “Okay.”

  “Two, you provide a steady stream of information leading to arrests. You’re going to buy the dope, we’re going to set up stings on the guys you buy from. It’ll look like it’s unrelated to you, so no one’s going to put a target on your head. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Three, you ever so much as look at my sister again and you’re never going to have the luxury of seeing a prison cell. I will personally see to it that every arrest we make knows you’re the shithead who dimed him out. From there it’s just a matter of who gets lucky in the office pool: do we find your body floating in the harbor or splattered all over the subway? Are we clear?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Good.” Mariko stood in front of the interrogation room’s mirror and primped her jacket and hair. “On that coke thing,” she said, leaving the room, “have a name for me next time or it’s your ass.”

  “All righty.”

  Mariko left him looking like a kid who’d just found out he wouldn’t be getting a puppy after all. But for her part, she couldn’t restrain a smile. Cocaine. From the Kamaguchi-gumi. This was huge—terrible, yes, but huge. The first words her new lieutenant would hear from her would be about what promised to be the biggest drug bust of the year. Perhaps he’d take her more seriously. He might even give this the funding and manpower it deserved. She had two months to close this case—two months before her probation was up and they’d decide whether to accept her application to Narcotics. Two months wasn’t a lot of time, but with the right commanding officer and the right backing, Mariko knew she could make it happen.

  “Hey, Mishima,” she said. “Is Lieutenant Ko in tonight?”

  “Nah. I think he pulled a
double shift this morning. I wouldn’t call him if I were you; I never met an LT yet who wasn’t pissy after pulling a double.”

  “No problem. I’ll find him tomorrow.”

  Mariko left the precinct house with a bounce in her step. Tomorrow was going to be a good day.

  5

  “Come in, Oshiro. Come in.”

  Lieutenant Ko had an overlarge mouth flanked by deep creases like gills. What hair he had left was graying, and clutching only to the sides of his head. His black eyes were barely visible behind large square glasses, and the word around the precinct was that no one had ever seen him without a cigarette in his mouth. He sat behind his desk, his smoky office oppressively hot and lined with beige steel filing cabinets. Papers were stacked on top of them here and there, with more stacks decorating his desk as well, though there was a clear space in the middle for him to work and to park his ashtray.

  It had taken Mariko three days to get an appointment with him—an appointment in the ass end of the morning, no less; the sky was still dark when Mariko’s alarm went off. Ko was new to the station and surely had a great deal of catching up to do, but even so, Mariko felt three days was excessive. Her new lead was too important.

  “Be a dear,” Ko said through his cigarette, “and get me a cup of coffee before we get started, would you?”

  “No, sir,” said Mariko.

  His big fish mouth frowned, cigarette hanging down from his broad lips. “Excuse me?”

  “It’s not in the job description, sir. I’m a detective, not an OL.”

  The frown deepened, as did the deep wrinkles framing it. “Close the door, Oshiro.”

  She did so, then resumed her attention stance, hands clasped behind her back.

  “We’re new to each other,” Ko said, tapping ashes into the glass ashtray. “It’s to be expected that we’ll all have a breaking-in period around here. That’s all right. I just want to make sure everyone understands which way the wind’s going to blow.”