by Steve Bein
“Boss, come on—”
“Do it,” said Furukawa, and Mariko passed on the message. It wasn’t quite fair to say Endo’s head sagged like Charlie Brown’s, but Mariko thought sad piano music would have been appropriate. He pulled the shopping list out of her hand and read it dejectedly. “You have to be kidding me. Underwear?”
“What? I didn’t bring any with me.”
He gave her an imploring look, striking the impression that at least as professional criminals went, he really was a nice guy and he didn’t deserve this kind of punishment. In truth Mariko had forgotten she’d put panties on the list. On any other night with any other man, she would have been mortified. But Endo was twice as embarrassed as she would have been, equal parts awkward teenager and sad puppy. Mariko found it hilarious.
“You know what?” she said. “On second thought, just get me a pair of sweatpants. I don’t want you thinking about me in my unmentionables.”
His spirits only slightly lifted, the big ex-ballplayer moseyed toward the FamilyMart. “That was indelicate,” Furukawa said.
“Boo-hoo.” Mariko hung up on him and, despising herself for doing it, trotted up the stairs.
Billiards Bagus was a dark place with low ceilings. Electronic dartboards lined two long walls, their round faces illuminated with a bluish glow. A rank of pool tables stretched toward the back wall, each one lit by a long, boxy light hovering over it like a UFO. There were no dart players or pool sharks; the tavern was empty but for the bartender and the old man with ageless eyes and pianist’s hands.
Furukawa hunched over the nearest table, cue stick in hand. He had a drink already waiting for her; whisky, she guessed, probably an expensive pour. She ignored it, not because he struck her as a James Bond bad guy who would poison her drink—which, in point of fact, was exactly how he struck her—but because she wouldn’t be beholden to him any more than she had to be. “So what’s thirteen oh four?” she said.
“We have people working on it. I can tell you more, but only if you join us.”
“Thanks but no thanks.”
Furukawa bent over with a grunt and began retrieving sunken balls, setting each one on the table with a heavy thwack. “What if Professor Yamada had asked you?”
“Asked me what? To be your assassin? He’d never do that.”
“I’m afraid you’re quite wrong about that. His last assignment for us was to recruit you. I’m sorry to say he died before he could complete it.”
Mariko scoffed. Furukawa narrowed his eyes at her and said, “Have I said something to amuse you?”
“For a secret clan that’s supposed to know everything, you guys can be pretty dense. You know how to make the whole damn country sit and beg and roll over at your command. How can you know so little about people?”
Mariko could see she’d startled the bartender with her sudden rudeness, but she didn’t pay him any mind. For his part, he desperately pretended not to have heard her. “Yamada-sensei was a good man,” she said. “He wasn’t about to try to sell a cop on becoming a killer for hire.”
Furukawa gave her a disapproving look over the edge of the pool table. “One would have thought a police detective would gather more information before leaping to conclusions. If you’ll forgive me for saying so, you haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”
“Then enlighten me.”
He retrieved the last of the balls and began to rack them. “Your sensei was the most highly trained swordsman in Japan—which, if I may be so bold, made him the deadliest in the world. I believe you saw that firsthand.”
Mariko wished he were wrong, but he wasn’t. She’d seen Yamada square off against four armed boryokudan enforcers. Outnumbered and outflanked, not many could have survived that altercation. Yamada was eighty-seven years old and blind, and still those yakuzas never stood a chance.
“He did not join the Wind as an assassin,” Furukawa went on. “He had no love for killing, and in any case we don’t dabble much in the assassination game anymore. It’s much too crude for our purposes. No, it was his obsession for the Inazuma blades that brought him to our attention. The Wind has been using these relics for centuries, never revealing their exceptional powers. Needless to say, we were astonished to learn a historian had somehow discovered their existence.”
Mariko smiled at that. She could read between the lines easily enough: the Wind had been actively trying to conceal the existence of these weapons, yet Yamada discovered them anyway.
“Imagine our surprise when we learned he was also a close friend of our very own Shoji Hayano. We suspected her of espionage, of course; it was a little too convenient that after all those years of secrecy the Inazuma blades should suddenly be rediscovered. When we found all parties were innocent, we invited Professor Yamada to work for us.”
“Why would he do that?”
“For the library, of course. Our records of his beloved relics were far more complete than he could have imagined. And I confess that they were in a dreadful state. We cannot maintain a permanent archive, you understand. We must remain mobile. We had documents scattered hither and yon, and so he had a lifelong project: to bring order to the collection.”
He must have been like a kid in a candy store, Mariko thought. “I get it. He’s another pool ball to you. You put him in front of the pocket and you give him a little nudge, right?”
“Just so. But Yamada proved most recalcitrant. He refused.”
Mariko refrained from doing a fist-pump. Score one for the good guys, she thought.
“In a way, it was Joko Daishi that changed his mind,” Furukawa said. He’d racked the balls; now he took up a cue and lined up a break. “Or rather, Koji Makoto, formerly Shoji Makoto. His mother told you about his maladies, I think. Did she tell you he was raised under my care?”
“She said she got his meds through you.”
“Quite right.” The cue ball struck with a loud crack, sending the other balls hurtling in every direction. “He required constant monitoring. You understand, psychiatric pharmacology was still in its infancy. Many of his medications were still in testing. In effect, the Wind raised him as one of its own. This was a common practice for us in ages past, but it has been many generations since we trained our genin from childhood.”
“Sure. Those pesky child labor laws must be a real pain in the ass in the ninja racket.”
“Very droll, Detective. The point, if I may ask you not to interrupt me any further, is that young Makoto was our very best. Even as a boy he was possessed of a scintillating intellect. He showed a particular knack for chemistry—the evidence of which you have already seen, I think.”
Mariko nodded emphatically. His “knack” blew her right off her feet at Haneda, and would have torn her limb from limb if Akahata had managed to detonate his bomb in Korakuen Station.
“It may interest you to know his passion for chemistry started from entirely peaceful motives,” Furukawa went on, casually sinking one ball after the other. “His interest was in pharmaceuticals, not weaponry. He aspired to exorcise his own demons. But I ask you, Detective, how could he study psychotropic drugs and not learn the secrets of amphetamines or high explosives? It is all one science. Unlock it and you unlock all of it.”
And now he uses all his tricks, Mariko thought. His terrorist recipe book went beyond high explosives and ricin. He cooked MDA too, a psychedelic amphetamine he distributed widely to his Divine Wind cultists. It heightened his godlike status—or demonlike, if that was how they thought of him. Mariko didn’t understand all the ins and outs of the cult. She didn’t feel the need. He was recruiting cultists and bending them to criminal purposes; that was enough for her to do her job.
“We believe he inherited his mother’s gift of foresight,” Furukawa said. “Imagine what that power would do in a mind already given to hallucinations. Many schizophrenics suffer from delusions of grandeur, even delusions of their own immortality. The difference for Koji-san is that some of his hallucinations occasi
onally come true. Is it any wonder he thinks of himself as a god? Would you or I not come to the same conclusion?”
“So you used him,” Mariko said. “You had a very sick man and you propped him up as a phony cult leader. You guys keep getting better and better.”
“The cult of the Divine Wind was entirely his idea. And your moral pronouncements are wearing thin.”
“Hey, you’re the one who called me, asshole. If you want someone who doesn’t give a shit about right and wrong, maybe law enforcement isn’t the best place to go looking for new recruits.”
“Thin and getting thinner, Detective. And fraying at the edges too. Can you hear your own hypocrisy? I seem to remember an intelligence asset of yours. Shino, I believe, though you called him LeBron. Did your partner have him killed on purpose? No. He sent the boy into harm’s way, and all the while he lulled himself into thinking he was doing the right thing.”
Mariko didn’t need the reminder. She could still picture Shino’s body, sprawled facedown in the basement of Joko Daishi’s covert headquarters. His face was as red as the worst sunburn, the result of cyanide poisoning.
“And what did your lieutenant do, noble man that he is? He kept your partner in the field as long as possible. Then he promoted him to detective again at the first opportunity. And your captain? He was complicit in that promotion. He demoted you without cause. And lest we forget, he has been deliberately deceiving this city for a week straight. Jemaah Islamiyah!” He scoffed. “There isn’t a journalist in the country who could make that story stand—not without evidence, and of course there isn’t any. Only a policeman could get away with such a lie.”
“Look, I told him not to say that stuff—”
“Oh, yes? You and how many others? Where are the legions of officers coming forward to speak the truth? Hundreds could do it, and how many have we seen? Not one. To a man, they stand behind your captain’s lie. And you preach to me about the ethics of your profession.”
Mariko’s cheeks burned. He was right. She could have gone straight to the press with what she knew, but she’d chosen silence instead. This was not the first time Furukawa had showed her an ugly truth about her profession that Mariko hadn’t seen herself. Maybe she’d suspected its existence, but she’d always chosen to look away rather than stare it in the face. She asked herself—not for the first time—how this man could know her own job better than she knew it herself.
“I’ll thank you to listen,” Furukawa said, “and to think carefully before you speak. We did not have a deranged cult leader to abuse as we saw fit. We had a brilliant young man who appeared to have his schizophrenia fully under control. He cultivated that appearance very carefully over the years. You must understand, Detective, Koji-san is a master manipulator. In his presence, you believe what he wants you to believe.”
“Bullshit. I’ve seen him. I’ve talked to him. He’s out of his mind.”
“You saw what he wanted you to see. You underestimated him, you let him loose, and he made you pay the price for that. I do not say this as an insult, Detective Oshiro. He duped me just as he duped you.”
“Then you’re not half as smart as you think you are. I only talked to him once. You worked with him for decades. How did he fool everyone in your organization?”
“By getting results.” As if to accentuate the point, Furukawa sank the eight ball with a hard, stabbing shot. “You must understand, Detective, the border between genius and lunacy is a hazy line at best. True, Koji-san’s methods were unorthodox, but so long as he delivered everything we asked of him, what need was there to question his motives?”
“Come on. The guy founded a cult. That didn’t make you a little curious?”
“Oh, quite the contrary: we marveled at it. It was a ploy so ingenious that it never occurred to any of the shonin. Koji-san’s principal task in recent years was to upset the balance of power in the drug trade—a regular occurrence, you understand. Routine maintenance.”
“Sure. Like an oil change.”
Furukawa ignored her cynicism. “The black market is like any other market: supply and demand reign supreme. Tinker with one or the other and everything changes. Koji-san adopted a radical new approach: the Divine Wind. So long as the cult’s allegiance was to him and not to profit, it could act in unprecedented ways. You saw one instance of that: by flooding the streets with the drug known as Daishi, he flipped the entire amphetamine trade on its head. Ordinarily such gross actions draw scrutiny, and that is something the Wind prefers to avoid. But this new cult leader was not a hidden power to be rooted out; he was an easy mark. If an underboss like Kamaguchi Hanzo took advantage of him, no one would question it.”
“But he didn’t just play Kamaguchi. He played you.”
“It shames me to admit he did. Such is the force of his personality. When he looks you in the eye, you have the distinct sense that he can see into your soul.”
Mariko rolled her eyes. She didn’t believe in souls. She knew all about that zealous look, though. She remembered standing nose to nose with Joko Daishi, gripping two fistfuls of his wiry black beard, looking him in the eye behind that eerie mask of his. Furukawa was right: Joko Daishi’s eyes were different. Darker. Deeper. Like bottomless wells. But Mariko didn’t see genius in there. She just saw a whole lot of crazy.
“Imagine it, Detective. Imagine how he must seem to those already of a malleable mind—the sort of people who seek the comfort and camaraderie of a cult. Unmedicated, this is a man who believes he is a god. With his hallucinations under control he is a virtuoso of deception, master of the Wind’s innermost secrets. We believed that Koji Makoto was the actor, and Joko Daishi the mask. He convinced us that his growing power was no threat to us.”
“But?”
“The truth was quite the opposite. It was not Joko Daishi who taught Koji-san how to imitate a god, but Koji who taught Joko Daishi how to imitate a man. He learned just what to say and how to say it. Koji Makoto became the mask.”
A wry laugh escaped Furukawa’s thin lips. He shook his head, scornful of himself. “It’s so obvious now. That was the language he used: actors and masks. I should have seen it coming. Even as a boy, he was obsessed with ancient relics—no thanks to your sensei Yamada, I might add. It was Dr. Yamada’s love for the past that made him the ideal archivist, but it led to the rediscovery of artifacts that even the Wind had long since forgotten. Better for us all if that demon mask had remained hidden. But no. Yamada found it, Koji-san fell in love with it, and now look at what it’s done.”
“It? Hell no. You. You did this.”
Furukawa picked up the cue ball. His eyes grew so cold that she thought he might throw it at her. “I argued for its destruction. I saw to it that it would stay far away from Koji-san forever. And then …” He dropped the ball back on the empty table with a loud, sullen crack. “Then I allowed other things to become more important. I forgot the mask. We all did—everyone but Koji-san.”
“But it came back. You must have known. When we arrested Joko Daishi, we impounded the mask. That went in the computer, and I know you guys can hack our records.”
“We can,” he said dejectedly. “We did.”
“Then why didn’t you steal it from us? Or let it get lost in the system, or—I don’t know, whatever the hell you people do. Make the damn thing disappear.”
“We tried. But the Divine Wind was far more resourceful than we anticipated. They have people within your system.”
“So do you, neh?”
“Of course. But Koji-san knows ours and we don’t know his. I told you: we thought he was ours. We gave him access to everything he needed to betray us.”
“Which you didn’t figure out until he tried to blow up that subway station,” Mariko said.
Furukawa nodded. His head and neck seemed to sag under the weight of his remorse. “All of the balls were in place. We never saw it. We just handed him the cue and he ran the table. There is one thing left for you to understand, something you’ve misunderstood
from the beginning: not even the shonin could have prevented the Haneda bombing. That responsibility falls to Professor Yamada.”
“Don’t you dare!” Mariko wanted to snatch his pool cue and break it over his head. “Don’t you dare blame that on him.”
“How can I not? I told you earlier that Yamada denied us when we courted him. It was his friend Shoji-san that convinced him to join our ranks. She foresaw that only the person who wields Glorious Victory Unsought could kill her son. Yamada agreed to become our archivist, and named Glorious Victory Unsought as his price.”
“So what? That doesn’t set off any bombs in an airport.”
“When I learned of Shoji’s prophecy, I assumed Dr. Yamada was being noble. He would see to it that his friend’s son died painlessly. If he were a samurai, bushido would demand nothing less. It was my mistake: I saw his fascination with the sword and his strong moral stance, and I assumed the two went hand in hand.”
“They did,” said Mariko. “I don’t have to listen to this.”
“You do if you want to understand the truth. Right after the Haneda bombing, we sent six assassins after Joko Daishi. He killed five of them. The sixth escaped with her life, and with his mask. She says he took three bullets that night, including one to the head that the demon mask deflected. Any one of those three rounds should have killed him. Why does he still live?”
Because ballistics is a weird science, Mariko thought. Because the human body can be pretty damn stubborn when it wants to be. But she knew where Furukawa was headed. “You think it’s fate. You think only my sword can kill him.”
“I think that is one part of the truth. There are deeper secrets about Koji-san’s remarkable resilience, secrets I can share with you only if you join us. But what matters for the present is what Yamada believed. He trusted Shoji. That’s why he claimed the sword for his own: so none of our people would kill his friend’s only son.”
“Come on. Aren’t you supposed to be a ninja master? Why didn’t you do some ninja stuff? You could have stolen the sword, killed Joko Daishi, and returned the sword before anyone knew it was gone. Hell, you wouldn’t even have to be a ninja for that. You just have to be in a good heist movie.”
