by Steve Bein
“Maybe we can skip the toast and get down to business,” she said. “On the phone you said you were a friend of Dr. Yamada’s.”
“Friend? No. Ours was …” His free hand gestured in its idle way, tracing circles in the air. “Well, a complex relationship, shall we say. But we had each other’s respect. And he certainly had a great deal of respect for you.”
“You talked to him? About me?” Mariko had to take a step back to steady herself. She knew so little of Yamada-sensei’s private life. They’d only known each other a few weeks before he was murdered. If he had spoken to Furukawa about his newest student …
“You must have studied kenjutsu with him, neh?”
“Oh, heavens no. My interest in swords was … well, their interest. I appreciate their appreciation.” He snickered; clearly he found this to be the height of wit.
“I don’t follow you.”
“I’m a collector, Detective Oshiro. Antiquities. Fine art. And good whisky, of course.” He raised his glass to her.
“Then what did the two of you say about me? I don’t know anything about art.”
“Nor about whisky, I daresay. No, my dear, we spoke about your role in the Wind.”
There it was. The one word Mariko had been waiting to hear. She’d noticed earlier when she dropped the word “ninja” that Furukawa didn’t balk. All his shonin-chunin-genin stuff was related to the ninja too, but that didn’t mean it was related to the Wind; it could have been just a history lesson. But now Mariko had it right from Furukawa’s mouth. The Wind was more than Yamada’s notes or Han’s half-baked theories. It was real.
Not so fast, her detective’s instincts warned. Sometimes hearsay was good enough, but sometimes people just told you want you wanted to hear. Furukawa wasn’t above braggadocio. The suite alone was testament to that. “The Wind,” she said, deliberately sounding more skeptical than she felt. “The same Wind that was around five or six hundred years ago?”
“Even older than that. Yes.”
“And you’re telling me Yamada-sensei knew of it? I don’t mean historically, I mean now. He knew you still exist?”
“Oh, quite. He was one of us.”
The words struck her like a bucket of ice water in the face. She shook her head. “No. No way. No way in hell.”
“You knew him as a historian,” Furukawa said. “We knew him as our archivist.”
It wasn’t true. It couldn’t be. Her sensei was a good man. She remembered talking with him about his protégé, Fuchida, the one who would ultimately come back to murder him. Fuchida was born a yakuza, but Yamada had earnestly believed he could turn the young man away from that path. Mariko had never seen Yamada-sensei so ashamed as when he confessed that his erstwhile student had returned to his criminal roots. Yamada sincerely believed martial training was moral training, that self-discipline and self-control made one not just a better fighter but a better human being.
Mariko remembered that conversation well. She remembered another one, too, when Yamada discovered that Mariko had contacts within the boryokudan. In his mind, police officers did not fraternize with the enemy. Cops and yakuzas were only supposed to interact when the former slapped handcuffs on the latter. Yet to take Furukawa at his word, Yamada had been affiliated with the Wind, a criminal syndicate. “No,” she said again. “No way in hell.”
“The lady doth protest too much, methinks. So young, so naive.”
“So full of shit.”
He winced a little, as if her discourtesy physically pained him. “As it happens, it’s of little consequence whether you believe me or not. It only matters that you believe we exist, and that you listen to my offer.”
“Oh, right. The job offer. Getting me suspended from the force so I can become your ninja.”
“In so many words, yes.”
“Gee, thanks. Why am I the lucky girl?”
He pushed himself up from his chair and gestured vaguely toward her with his tumbler. “You are … well, uniquely positioned, shall we say. And uniquely talented. You may not realize it, Detective Oshiro, but you are already an accomplished ninja.”
Mariko could only wrinkle her face in puzzlement. “It’s true,” Furukawa said. “Consider your recent stealth operation in the Sour Plum. You entered in disguise, you gathered intelligence, and based on that intelligence you carried out a raid.”
“Hmph.” Mariko hated to admit it, but the old man had a point. She wouldn’t have described a buy-bust as an intelligence-gathering operation, but when it came right down to it, evidence was just another form of information.
Even so, it wasn’t as if she snuck in there in a black mask to assassinate Lee Jin Bao. When she told that to Furukawa, he said, “Quite right. But neither did the ninja of old. Better to think of them as spies than assassins. The same is true of the undercover Narcotics officer, is it not? Perhaps there was the possibility that you would kill your target, but that was never your goal.”
Mariko had to grant him that point too. She didn’t know what to do with this eccentric, genteel, criminal, ageless man. His words varied from fanciful to insightful, from outright lies to undeniable truths. Stranger still, he reminded her of someone. But who? What gave him insights into police work that she’d never considered herself? Could he have been a cop? No. He was too effete; he’d never survive academy. But then how did he know Mariko’s job better than she knew it herself?
An easy explanation lay in plain sight. The Wind was real. Furukawa was a member. He knew the ins and outs of the TMPD because he knew the ins and outs of everything. That was his job as middle management in an invisible criminal syndicate. There was only one problem with that explanation: a centuries-old, all-powerful, supposedly nonexistent ninja clan was pretty hard to swallow.
“Prove it,” she said.
Furukawa’s carefully groomed eyebrows shot up. “I beg your pardon?”
“The Wind. Prove it exists.”
A hint of a smile touched his dry lips. He regarded her with a sparkle in his eyes, as if she were a little child who had inadvertently asked a deep philosophical question. “And how would you have me do that?”
“Well, what the hell is it that you people do?”
He thought about that for a moment. “I suppose you could say we’re in the king-making business.”
“Then make one.”
“Hm.” He thought it over as he returned to the liquor cabinet, to refresh his tumbler of whisky. After some consideration he said, “We do not make a habit of tugging the puppet strings just to illustrate a point. But in this case … well, your reputation precedes you. You’re not likely to change your mind without evidence.”
“Nope.”
“Very well. Now let me see. If I recall your address correctly, your district’s member of the House of Councillors is … oh, who is it? Takanuki Hayato?”
“That’s right. A little creepy that you know where I live, though. I mean, at least pretend you need to look it up. Otherwise … eww.”
Furukawa smiled ungraciously. “Don’t flatter yourself, Detective. I know your address because I ordered a watch placed on it.”
“Huh?”
“You have a very expensive mask in your apartment and a sword that is beyond price. Koji-san—pardon me, you think of him as Joko Daishi—well, he wants both of them, neh? He’s already stolen the sword from you once before. Do you think he hasn’t tried again?”
Mariko didn’t like the sound of that at all. “Do you mean won’t or hasn’t?”
“He has tried on four separate occasions since you reclaimed the sword. Always through his acolytes, you understand. He seems to have suspended his efforts; we’re not sure why.”
Four? Jesus, Mariko thought. She didn’t like being talked to this way, as if she should already know everything he was telling her. It was familiar somehow, but Mariko couldn’t think of who Furukawa reminded her of.
“I don’t suppose you want to tell me what happened to the acolytes,” she said.
; “You’d rather not know.” Furukawa raised his whisky in a little toast—to eliminated enemies, he seemed to say—and savored a mouthful of whisky. “But let’s get back to Councillor Takanuki. What do you think of him?”
“I think it’s a damn shame we’re stuck with him for another six years. He’s a cheap prick who keeps trying to cut federal support for local law enforcement budgets. That’s pretty much the only issue I vote on.”
“Then let’s not make a king of him. Shall I unmake him?”
“I don’t see how you could. He was just reelected.”
Furukawa picked up the phone that hung on the wall next to the liquor cabinet. He pressed one button, said, “Takanuki Hayato,” and hung up. “Let’s continue our conversation in the other room, shall we?”
He walked with short steps that made him seem considerably older than he appeared. Mariko followed him into the enormous room with the pool table. A massive flat-screen TV hung on one wall like a painting. Below it lay a dormant fireplace, home to a realistic ceramic reproduction of stacked, burnt logs. The pool table dominated the opposite half of the room, its ten balls packed tightly in their triangular rack. A universal remote sat nearby. Furukawa thumbed a button and the TV sprang silently to life.
“Do you play billiards, Detective?”
“Not really.”
“Pity.”
Furukawa fiddled with the remote, powering up the room’s top-of-the-line surround-sound system. Opulence upon opulence, Mariko thought.
“Oh, look at this,” Furukawa said. “The Hyatt does like its toys.” He pressed another button and with a whoosh the fireplace sprang to life too.
“Actually, that’s pretty cool.”
“Isn’t it? Ah, here we go.”
He got the sound system synched with the television, which was tuned to JNN, one of the all-news channels that Mariko never bothered to watch. She wasn’t alone; many detectives found the daily news too depressing. At work they stood eye-to-eye with the worst aspects of human nature; for them the purpose of watching TV was to wind down, not to take a closer look at just how awful people could be.
Sure enough, the anchorman was just wrapping up a story on yet another sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. He turned to face a different camera and the image behind him changed. An annotated bar graph vanished in a flash of computer-generated lens flare, replaced by a close-up of a well-dressed man wearing a scowl. Mariko recognized him.
“How much is enough?” the anchorman asked. “That is the question for Councillor Takanuki Hayato. JNN has breaking news on a campaign finance scandal that may have netted Takanuki as much as ten million yen in the last year alone.”
Mariko’s heart stopped. She couldn’t have been more surprised if the anchorman had stepped out of the TV screen and walked into the room. Furukawa, on the other hand, only had eyes for Mariko. For her part, Mariko belatedly noticed that she was gaping at the television with a wide-eyed, open-mouthed stare. It shamed her to be caught like that, with no more than a gaijin’s control over her facial expressions.
“How did you—?”
“You asked for proof of the Wind’s existence. Now you have it.”
Mariko shook her head. “That’s the why. I’m interested in how.”
“Quite simple. We were the ones to teach him how to siphon the money without being caught.”
He said it as if anyone could do it. Mariko gaped at him—again, to her embarrassment—but Furukawa just ambled toward the pool table. With one hand he held his whisky. With the other he lifted the triangular rack from the pool balls and set it aside. An idle swipe with his long pianist’s fingers sent one of the balls rolling lazily across the table.
“No.” Mariko could not make herself believe it. “Even if that were true, you … no, it’s impossible. You make a phone call and thirty seconds later it’s on the news? How?”
“I suspect you can answer that yourself.”
Mariko looked at the phone, then the anchorman, then the phone again. “You have someone in JNN. Like, right there in the studio, right this minute.”
Furukawa nodded. “Go on.”
“It’s got to be, what, an executive producer? Someone like that, anyway. Someone who has the power to …” The thought went careening through her brain, setting off sparks of other ideas. “It’s not one producer, is it? You have someone in there twenty-four hours a day. And it’s not just JNN. You could have done this through the papers, the nightly news… .”
“I could have, if I thought you could wait a few hours to see your evidence. Patience isn’t your strong suit, though, is it?”
Mariko scarcely heard him. “Wait. What if I’d said someone other than Takanuki? You can’t have dirt on everyone.”
Furukawa sipped his whisky. “Not everyone. Just everyone that matters.”
“Come on. You can’t tell me every single person takes the bait when you offer them a payoff.”
“Oh, no. But they don’t need to. In the court of public opinion, guilt by association carries a death sentence.” He ran his fingertips over the pool balls, scattering them. “We never act to achieve only one goal, Detective. It’s much like billiards. It’s not enough to sink your shot; you must always set up the next shot. You required me to expend Takanuki to prove a point. He was a ball that can only be sunk once, so now we will choose who will fall with him.”
“How?”
Furukawa gave her a devilish grin. “Once you prove a man is corrupt, all of his closest allies are subject to scrutiny. Their alliance need not even be real; in a matter of minutes we can fabricate a relationship of many, many years. Oh, is it a wonderful thing to be in the espionage business these days. Your targets always set themselves up for a fall.”
“You’re talking about electronic records.”
“Quite right. Financial transactions in this case. Can you imagine what the ninja of old must think of our targets today? The poor fools save every aspect of their lives in digital form. Voluntarily.” Furukawa let out a laugh and slapped his belly, a masculine gesture for such a feminine hand. “It’s like leading lambs to the slaughter, but these lambs operate their own slaughterhouse.”
Mariko wasn’t laughing. “That’s what we are to you? Livestock?”
“Oh, do have a sense of humor, Detective.”
She gave him a paper-thin smile. Furukawa put her ill at ease, but she hadn’t quite figured out why. She also hadn’t put her finger on why he seemed familiar to her. He was almost like a bunraku puppet: human enough, but existing in the uncanny valley where the more lifelike the puppet was, the more unsettling it became. But if he reminded her of someone, who was it?
Since she couldn’t put her finger on it, she had no choice but to set it aside and let it percolate through her mind. Mariko crossed the room, swiped up the TV remote, and zapped the anchorman into oblivion. The Takanuki story had rubbed her raw. “Okay,” Mariko said, “let’s say I believe you. You belong to the Wind, and the Wind has puppet strings everywhere. Neh?”
Furukawa nodded. “There is no place the Wind cannot reach.”
“Then what do you need me for?”
“That is the question of the hour, isn’t it?” He took his hand away from the table, focusing entirely on Mariko. “We believe you are the one who can put an end to this reign of terror. Koji-san’s ambitions have grown far too grand for our liking. As a cult leader he was no trouble, but now? Now things are different.”
“So let me at him. Tell me where he is. If I get the credit for arresting him, maybe I can get myself off Kusama’s shit list.”
“Would that I could,” Furukawa said. “There was a time when we might do just that, but no longer. Koji-san is too good at staying hidden.”
“Hidden? From the guy who can pick up the phone and end the career of any politician he wants? I don’t think so.”
Furukawa could not respond. He looked like a man at a funeral, not sad but drained. Empty. He picked up the black eight ball, tested its weight in his
willowy fingers, and sent it on a collision course with its kin. Balls clicked and clacked, rolling in every direction. Not one of them found a pocket. Mariko got the distinct sense that Furukawa felt like one of those billiard balls: powerless, ruled only by the heartless forces of inevitability.
She had seen that same fatalistic detachment before. Not often, but she’d seen it. The first time was with Yamada-sensei, who had first opened Mariko’s mind to the possibility that fate was something other than defeatist thinking. The second was Shoji Hayano, a blind woman and Yamada’s friend of over sixty years. She was a goze, a seer, exactly the sort of thing Mariko never would have believed in until she saw it herself. But she had seen it. Shoji foretold Mariko’s encounter with Fuchida. She even foretold Mariko’s death, and did nothing to stop it. She’d given up trying to defy fate.
The third person was Joko Daishi. He had spoken of his heavenly calling with the same overtones of inevitability. He believed in the supernatural too. And, come to think of it, he was the first person who had ever spoken to Mariko of the Wind. Born of the Wind, yet not of the Wind. That was how he described his Divine Wind cult. At the time she had no idea what to make of that. Now Furukawa had given her a little more to work with.
“Joko Daishi was one of yours, wasn’t he? A genin of the Wind?”
“At first, yes. He rose to become chunin, like me. Middle management.”
“The Wind trained him?”
“I am ashamed to admit we did.”
Mariko jerked the Glock from her waistband. “Then as far as I’m concerned, the Wind sent four drivers straight into oncoming traffic. You killed four and injured twenty.”
She racked the slide and put her front sight right on Furukawa’s breastbone. The suddenness of her anger surprised her; she found herself blinking back tears. “You killed twenty-three more with ricin at St. Luke’s International,” she said. “You killed a hundred and twelve at Haneda, and you damn near killed me too.”
