Daughter of the Sword

by Steve Bein

  His father coughed, a hacking cough wet with phlegm and displeasure. “Plenty of money in it,” he said, raising a fist to his lips. There was another plastic tube running down his forearm, its end concealed by the white tape that held it to the back of his hand. “Plenty. Thought I taught you better than to get greedy like that.”

  “The market’s different now. The way you used to run things isn’t enough anymore.”

  Another cough from the old man. “Then you ought to rethink what you mean by ‘enough.’”

  Fuchida closed his eyes for a moment, the better to keep himself from rolling them.

  “You think I’m out of touch,” his father said. “Obsolete, neh? Well, I think you’re acting like some woman’s got you by the short-and-curlies. Making you spend money you don’t have. Making you take risks you know you shouldn’t take. The old way’s the old way for a reason, son. Your grandfather made his name with it and so did I.”

  Fuchida looked at the floor this time to keep his father from seeing his face. They’d made the Fuchida name known, all right. Every cop and every yakuza knew the Fuchidas served the Kamaguchi-gumi. Street muscle. Movers of anything stolen. Hirelings, not leaders. The Fuchidas had territory, even good territory, but they didn’t have an empire.

  “Dad, I’ve got everything under control. Honestly.”

  “I’ll bet. You want to make a big name for yourself in the ninkyō dantai, you do it my way. Otherwise you just get to be a big name with the police.”

  “Is this something you want to talk about so openly?”

  His father laughed, coughed, laughed again. “See? These risks you’re taking, whatever they are, they’ve got you looking over your shoulder. That ought to tell you something, son.” Another cough. “We’ve done things our way for a long, long time. Cops know it, business knows it, and we do our thing anyway. Because we have a code and we stick by it.”

  A cough from deep in the diaphragm left the old man breathless for a moment. A fleck of spittle on his lip drew attention to the fact that his skin had become as dry as paper. At last he said, “You young bucks today, you watch too many movies. You think the real money’s in drugs. But the code, it’s not just ours; the cops hold by it too. We don’t sell the hard shit, and they look the other way if we sell a little speed. And why shouldn’t they? Those damn dopeheads end up killing themselves. Look at the Americans, son: shooting each other day and night over that shit.”

  “Dad, speed’s half the business these days.”

  “Neh? And look where it got us. In my day shakedown money was enough. You wanted extra money, you’d steal something and sell it. Did I ever tell you about the time I sold that fire department their own trucks?”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  He laughed a rasping laugh. “They even thanked me for cutting them a good price. That was the power we had. But these days…” He snorted. “You kids. I never met a one who could sell speed without using it himself. You start using, now you’ve got the bosses looking in on you. Maybe they start wondering if you’re worth the risk. Then one day you wake up wondering why you can’t breathe with all this concrete filling your lungs. Listen to me, son. Break the code, people start paying attention. Stick to it, you make as much money as you want to make.”

  Not as much as I want to make, Fuchida thought. His father was right: he was breaking the rules; he was taking risks. But there was a new order now. The old guard lived in a world defined by Japan’s borders. Now the borders were found only at the edges of cell phone coverage. The corporate world had been the first to see that, and the result was record profits. There was no reason the ninkyō dantai couldn’t follow. There was a new virtue, one the old guard never thought to honor: ambition. They lived with limits on how much a person could make without taking from everyone else. Now the sky was the limit.

  “You’re thinking it’s a new age, neh? You’re thinking a man can aspire to higher things these days.”

  Fuchida looked up at his father. The old man’s ability to read people was uncanny—it bordered on telepathy, in fact, and Fuchida wondered how he did it. Was that the real cause behind his rise to power? His ability to read people and then to steer them, cajole them, get from them what he wanted—it was an awe-inspiring gift.

  And his father wasn’t through using it. “Let me tell you something about aspiration, Shūzō-kun. For those ordinary folks, it’ll get them anywhere. For a yakuza, it’ll only get you killed. See, the ones up top, they don’t see aspirations; they see insurrections. Don’t aim for the moon, son. Aim for a nice condo in Akihabara and regular pussy.”

  It’s not up to me, Fuchida wanted to say. My sights are set higher than yours. I’m hardwired that way, you’re not, and that’s all there is to it. But instead he said, “You’re right.”

  “Ahh, you don’t buy that. You’re saying that to shut me up.”

  Again with the mind reading. Fuchida could lie to anyone, even to a polygraph, but he’d never been able to lie to his father. “All right, Dad. I’ll try to see it your way. I will.”

  “Neh? There’s a good boy.” A wrinkled hand with yellow nails found the TV remote and turned the sound back on. “This here’s a good show. You ought to see the girls they bring out on this one.”

  Fuchida stayed until dinner came around, and after he’d seen his father eat enough, he excused himself.

  Walking down the sterile corridor, antiseptic smells assaulting his nose, he wondered: A man can’t help his ambitions, can he? Controlling desire was one thing. Controlling fear was another. Fuchida had mastered both of those. But ambition was not the same as desire, was it? Ambition governed the upper limits of desire. It called for planning, not gluttony. And in Fuchida’s experience, ambition was inborn. Some people sought to lead. Most did not. Some people sought to star on television, or show in art museums, or become prime minister. Everyone said they wanted such things, but only a few were born with the ambition to accomplish them. And how could anyone change what was innate?

  Besides, Fuchida wasn’t looking to upset the balance of power. Usurping leadership of the Kamaguchi-gumi was the farthest thing from his mind. He only wanted to follow his own path, not a path chosen by some kaichō from a more powerful clan. Taking the second Inazuma would be his first step on the road to creating a new power, an empire all his own.

  All the pieces were already in place. He needed only to kill the old man and claim the sword. He could do it now, without his beautiful singer—just drive over there, break in, take the sword. But even blind, the old man was dangerous with a blade, and ever since Fuchida had started sleeping with his beautiful singer, he had no taste for carrying a pistol or a knife. That old house was full of swords, and the blind old man would have the advantage in the dark.

  And there was the other thing too: there was a time when they’d been friends, he and the old man. Fuchida had been forced to kill a friend before. Endo, the kid’s name was. Fuchida had been little more than a kid himself. The order had come from Kamaguchi Ryusuke himself, no more than a piss-ant wakashū at the time, but he was a Kamaguchi all the same, and a Fuchida had to obey. Endo had stolen from the family, and Fuchida strangled him for it. He remembered how surprised he’d been to learn how long it took to kill someone that way. He didn’t get the same high from killing Endo as he did from a stranger, and ever since, Fuchida had been careful about getting too close to people.

  No, it was too risky to go kill the old man himself. Fuchida looked at his watch. Too late to set up a hit tonight. All the guys he would have called would be halfway drunk by now, and he wanted them sharp. Fuchida felt a spike of irritation and willed it away. He wanted the sword, but he could be patient. A day wasn’t too much to wait. Out of respect for the friendship, he thought, and gave himself an approving nod. A day wasn’t too long to wait to murder a former friend.

  22

  Standing on the sidewalk in front of her mother’s apartment building, Mariko felt she was preparing to enter a boxing ring. No one else wo
uld have seen signs of an impending altercation. The building was as clean as if the developer had just cut the ribbon that morning. So was every other building on the block. Even the streets and sidewalks were immaculate. There was nothing ominous about the spotless glass or polished steel of the building’s revolving door. Everything Mariko could see was as clean and sterile as a scalpel.

  She knew these buildings concealed darker truths. In her first year on the force she had worked the midnight-to-eight shift, the hours when a cop only deals with bad people doing bad things. She had knocked on hundreds of doors in buildings like this, called on scene not by the victim but by her neighbors when the violence got loud enough that they had no choice but to call. In Japan it took a lot to cross that line.

  Back when her father got his promotion and moved the family to Illinois, they’d lived in a big house on a big lot, and the man next door used to beat the hell out of his wife every two weeks. Every payday he’d get shitfaced and come home surly, and all the neighbors would pretend not to hear the doors slamming and the coffee cups being hurled against the walls. They wouldn’t call the police until the sounds were human. It got so bad that even the Oshiros would call, but that had taken some getting used to. Interfering in other people’s private lives wasn’t in keeping with the Japanese spirit. The flinch response to sue, to call a cop—that was an American thing, and that too had taken getting used to.

  The Americans had a saying: “Silence is golden.” Mariko used to wonder why there was no equivalent in Japanese. It was only when the family moved back to Tokyo that she understood. There was no need for such a saying in Japan. Japanese people didn’t bellow into their cell phones. They didn’t shout across a train car to each other, or laugh so loud that everyone else in the room could hear. Grocery store managers didn’t announce their business over loudspeakers; they found their employees themselves, and even that they did only rarely, because the employees were so well trained that they didn’t need to be told to open another register or to clean up aisle five. Americans would have thought it bizarre to devote that much time to training a grocery store clerk, and yet they were more than happy to complain loudly whenever lines got too long or a clerk gave incorrect change.

  Japanese shoppers weren’t like that. Japanese housewives weren’t like that. They tended to keep their suffering silent, and their neighbors tended to do a more thorough job of pretending they didn’t hear what was going on next door. So Mariko had been in a hundred buildings like this one when it should have been a thousand. Every time she had followed protocol, keeping her voice soft and diplomatic when she asked the abusive asshole if there was a problem. Illinois cops were different: they hammered on doors even in the dead of night, and they weren’t afraid to pick a fight with the husband if the wife wouldn’t press charges. At any given hour of any given day, Mariko preferred Japanese silence to American rowdiness, but whenever she worked a domestic she wanted to bash the door down like a good old American cowboy.

  It had been nearly a year since she’d been called to a domestic, because ten months ago she’d started her probationary assignment with Narcotics. Domestics were her least favorite calls, and so she sure as hell didn’t miss them, but now she felt guilty upon returning to the boxing ring. For a lot of her mother’s neighbors it was almost literally that: it was a place they’d go to get in a fight. It wasn’t that way for her mother, who lived alone now and whose husband had been a good, kind man when he was still alive, but Mariko couldn’t help thinking about what happened behind some of the other doors.

  That guilt would have to wait for another time, because today had worries of its own. She didn’t know what to anticipate with Saori. They hadn’t spoken to each other since Mariko dropped her off at detox eight days before, and though Mariko always hoped rehab would bring her sister some emotional stability, in her heart of hearts she didn’t know whether she’d be having dinner with the twenty-two-year-old her sister really was or the petulant teenager her sister preferred to act like all too often.

  In any case, Saori was due to be at her meeting at five o’clock, and so Mariko had deliberately timed her arrival at her mother’s place for five minutes after five, rather than coming straight over when her shift ended at four o’clock. She hadn’t spoken to their mother face-to-face since Saori’s most recent drug bust, and she hoped that with a little one-on-one time she might talk their mother into maintaining a unified front. Too often their mother made excuses for Saori’s addiction, but maybe this time Mariko could convince her to stand strong.

  Even that was likely to create a quarrel if it wasn’t handled right, and Mariko knew full well how bad she was at handling this sort of thing. She’d spent her formative years in the States, and that had deprived her of the peacemaker mentality that defined so many Japanese women. She was a foreigner in her own country. That was why men like Lieutenant Ko didn’t like her: Mariko had no sense of how to be conciliatory. That, plus the fact that she actually had ambitions toward a career, made her more than a foreigner; by her culture’s standards she was clinically insane. That was certainly how men like Ko saw her, and how her mother saw her too. How could she explain to her mother that for an addict like Saori, all the diplomacy and peacemaking and refusal to confront simply amounted to enabling?

  Mariko had no interest in quarreling with her mother, especially not on this of all days. But this was not the day to avoid seeing her mother either, so she pushed the revolving door and entered the lobby, leaving a handprint on the otherwise unblemished steel.

  She found her mother exactly where she expected to find her, in the gym on the fifteenth floor. The building wasn’t posh, but it did have its comforts, and the gym with its Ping-Pong tables had been the reason her mother had moved there. Whenever Mariko came to visit, she inevitably found her either kicking a neighbor’s ass in Ping-Pong or else smoking a cigarette on the terrace outside the gym with the person whose ass she’d just kicked.

  Today it was at the tables. Her mother was dressed as if the game were being televised: navy-blue tennis shorts, white socks pulled high, and a matching polo shirt with the Killerspin logo embroidered on the left breast pocket. Mariko opened the door just as her mother returned a serve almost too fast for Mariko to see. The ball dipped left, cut right as soon as it hit the table, and her mother’s opponent dropped her paddle on the table with a defeated thwack that indicated match point.

  Her mother pirouetted on her heel, smiling a victor’s smile. “Miko-chan,” she said, double-taking halfway through her spin. “You’re here.”

  “Wouldn’t miss it.”

  Her mother excused herself from her vanquished foe and retrieved her gear bag. “Mom,” Mariko said, “why do you need a whole bag for this game? An extra ball or two I can see, but why the extra paddles?”

  “They’re rackets, Miko, and anyone who calls them paddles has a lot to learn about table tennis. I’m sure I never questioned you on why you would pay so much for those bike shorts of yours. Or why you own so many pairs. Or why you don’t just bike in your swimsuit.”

  “Because—” Mariko cut herself short. There were perfectly good explanations. Triathlon shorts shed water better than cycling shorts, and if there was a swimsuit out there with enough padding for thirty or forty kilometers on the bike, Mariko hadn’t found it yet. But she swallowed all of that and laughed. “All right, good point. Do you want to catch a smoke first or should we go downstairs?”

  “No, we can go right down.” Lowering her voice, her mother said, “To tell you the truth, Maeda-san isn’t much competition. I hardly worked up a sweat.”

  Mariko waited until they were alone in the elevator before she brought up the obvious. “How’s Saori?”

  “Oh, she’s staying with me,” their mother said. “Staying out of trouble. I’m afraid she’s still a little mad at you for arresting her last week.”

  “Is that what she’s saying now? I didn’t arrest her, Mom. I got her out of being arrested. And anyway, it’s hardly my fault
—”

  “I know.” She patted Mariko’s forearm. “She twists things. I know. It’s not her, honey—it’s the addiction talking.”

  Mariko did her best to keep the exasperation from her voice. “You’re making excuses for her. Again.”

  “I’m taking care of my daughter in the best way I know how. Is it so bad to try to keep you two from fighting?”

  Not exactly a boxing ring, Mariko thought, but not friendly territory either. She had never been able to understand why their mother took Saori’s side. “I’m not fighting her, Mom. I’m doing my job.”

  “And who says you need to have that job? What was so wrong with wanting to be a reporter? Nobody stabs reporters.”

  She was talking about the Kurihara murder. A meter maid in Yokohama, killed by a large knife according to the ME’s report. It was already a cold case. More than a week old, no motive, no suspects. Mariko and her mother had both taken an interest, each for her own reasons. Mariko’s mother watched too many Law & Order reruns, and her imagination tortured her with wild speculations about what might happen to her daughter; an actual attack against a policewoman was impossible for her to ignore. Mariko would have been interested in the case out of sheer solidarity—you just didn’t fuck with cops—but she also couldn’t let go of the fact that the victim had been crippled before she was killed, and that there was no sign of rape, robbery, or any other motive for the homicide. She didn’t like cases she couldn’t understand, and something told her this woman wasn’t tortured and murdered for giving someone a parking ticket.

  But tonight Mariko was distracted from trying to figure out the killer’s motive. The reporter comment had arrested her normal stream of thought. She’d almost forgotten she had wanted to do that. She’d entered college only a few months after her father’s death, and declared a journalism major because she wanted to get to the bottom of what had happened to him. Liver cancer at forty-three was weird, weird enough that it drew attention when he was not just the sixth engineer at his plant to die of it but the one who lived the longest.