Year of the Demon

by Steve Bein

  Of course Hideyoshi had the power to give Shichio nearly anything he wanted, but he also owed a great many favors. He was renowned for his battlefield cunning, but known better for his skill at parley. He’d conquered whole territories with nothing more than promises, granting this or that to every daimyo that would oppose him. Rumor had it that he paid his newly conquered enemies better than he paid those who were already close to him—as well he should, if his purpose was to buy allegiance. Hideyoshi had secured everything west of the Nobi plain, but even he could not grant land endlessly.

  And there were those things even Hideyoshi could not grant. Glorious Victory Unsought. The esteem of others. A samurai’s birthright. An estate acquired through conquest, not granted as a gift. A surname and a house of his own. Shichio thought himself superior to the likes of Mio Yasumasa, the consummate samurai. It only spoke to his delusion—a peacock was a peacock—but at least he could play make-believe by taking on the name of Okuma and having warriors of his own to order about.

  “You may be right,” Daigoro said at last. “He probably thinks even Glorious Victory would be his, as the rightful property of the Okuma clan.”

  “He might,” said Katsushima. “But the more pressing question is what you will do to stop him. You’re no longer the head of the Okumas. You have no say in whether your mother marries.”

  “And she hardly has a say herself. . . .”

  Daigoro could already see it in his mind’s eye. Shichio the honey-tongued. Shichio the pretty, preening songbird. In all likelihood he was already composing a serenade to the fair Lady Yumiko. In her current state she had no defense against him. He would insinuate himself in her mind until she could not help but say yes to him.

  And worse yet, Hideyoshi no longer had a sober voice to counsel him. If anyone could have talked Hideyoshi into forbidding the marriage, it was General Mio. He had promised to keep an eye on Shichio—and, now that Daigoro thought of it, he’d also promised that Shichio would find a way to worm his way out of the truce. This was it. Marrying Daigoro’s mother was the most complete victory imaginable. Far worse than simply razing House Okuma to the ground, this would see House Okuma rise to prominence with its worst enemy seated at its head. The Okumas would become Shichio’s slaves. He could even order them to hunt down Daigoro and Katsushima. Daigoro’s family would become a monster, a hideous ghoul of its former self.

  “Maybe you were right,” Daigoro said. “Calling on the Wind seemed desperate to me before, but now—”

  Katsushima shook his head. “I’ve thought on that too. Shinobi were never the best option. For one thing, I’m no longer sure you can afford them. For another, we cannot be certain they would take your coin. The Wind are the best in the world, but they will not have forgotten what happens when they take aim at people in high office and miss.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oda Nobunaga. Toyotomi’s predecessor. His enemies tried sending shinobi against him. When they failed, Oda did not stop at killing the assassins, nor even the enemies who hired them; he destroyed the conspirators’ families, and the families of the assassins too. Whole clans vanished overnight.”

  “But Shichio is just a general—and a lowborn one at that. He’s no Oda Nobunaga.”

  Katsushima shrugged. “He doesn’t need to be. Hideyoshi has risen higher than Oda ever did, and Shichio stands in Hideyoshi’s shadow.”

  Daigoro hung his head, and with his gaze downcast he saw his hands armored in their white kote. Now that the plates on the backs of the hands had been lacquered white, he could hardly make out the bear paws worked into the steel. “The Wind! I can hardly believe I’ve uttered the thought aloud. Who am I, Goemon? What am I doing?”

  “You know perfectly well what you do. You strive to keep to your father’s road.”

  “Do I?” Suddenly Daigoro felt weighed down by his armor. Glorious Victory pulled at him more heavily still, threatening to pull him right out of the saddle. “I walked that road once. But do I still? Or have I wandered off onto some other path?”

  Katsushima was silent for a while. At length he said, “There was a time when I knew, Daigoro. No longer.”

  “I’ve surrendered my name. I’ve surrendered my family. I am an enemy of the throne. I’ve even surrendered the right to wear the topknot. How can I say my life has anything at all to do with bushido?”

  “Perhaps you shouldn’t.”

  Daigoro had hoped Katsushima would say something like that, but now that he heard it, it made his heart feel colder and heavier than ever. He’d hoped to feel some solace in the thought of giving up. It should have comforted him. At any rate, that’s what the abbot of Katto-ji would have said: give up everything, and when you have nothing more to lose, you will lose all fear of loss. But if I surrender bushido, Daigoro thought, will I even know who I am?

  “The life of the ronin is not without riches of its own,” Katsushima said. “Sake, women, freedom; they’re much warmer companions than duty.”

  “Is that why you followed me all this way? Hoping to recruit me?”

  Katsushima chuckled. “If I wanted to recruit you as a ronin, I wouldn’t have let you get married.”

  Daigoro wished he could smile too, but he couldn’t muster the energy. “Tell me the truth, Goemon: why do you still follow me?”

  Katsushima swallowed. “We should discuss that another time.”

  “I cannot say how much more time we have.”

  “We’ll talk after we’ve rested.”

  Daigoro shook his head. “I cannot say how much rest we’re likely to get, either. We are quarry. The arrows bound for us are already in flight. And apart from all that, if we do not keep our tongues waggling, I’m apt to doze off and fall out of my saddle. Tell me, Goemon, why do you still ride with me?”

  Katsushima’s face grew stern. “You’re drowning, Daigoro. You need someone to help you keep your head above water.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re trying to carry your family and your father’s image and all the rest of it. It’s too much for a drowning man to bear, Daigoro. You need to let them go.”

  Exhausted as he was, Daigoro had trouble following the metaphor. He actually felt as if his armor were pulling him off his horse; it was not hard to imagine it dragging him underwater. “Speak plainly,” he said. “I do not understand.”

  Katsushima’s face grew sterner still. “I speak in circles because I don’t wish to give offense. We approach a crossroads, you and I. You have a problem in Shichio and a problem in your family. There is a single solution for both problems, one I’ve hinted at before. I can solve both problems for you with one stroke of my sword, but you bar me from doing so. You can solve it too, but you bar even yourself. A man can hold up his drowning friend, Daigoro, but only for so long. Sooner or later he must let him go or drown with him.”

  “I’m too tired for this, Goemon. Just tell me what you mean.”

  “No. You need to reach this conclusion yourself. Shichio means to marry your mother. In so doing he will destroy your clan forever. You cannot kill him; he is out of your reach. So what do you need to do?”

  “I don’t understand—”

  “Yes, you do. All it takes is one stroke of your sword to save your family name.”

  “Who—?”

  “You tell me, Daigoro. Who must die to save your family?”

  Daigoro’s pulse pounded in his ears. His breath came short and quick. He had to press against his saddle horn to keep himself upright. “My mother,” he said. “You’re telling me to kill my mother?”

  “Of course.”

  Daigoro stammered. A hundred objections bubbled up, but the only word he could make intelligible was “Why?”

  “Is it not clear? You should have put her out of her misery months ago.” Katsushima scowled, his voice harsh and low. He was losing his patience. Daigoro wished he could think faster, but he was just too tired, and Katsushima’s suggestion was too enormous for him to grasp.

/>   “No. I cannot—”

  “She is a constant distraction. Were it not for her, your negotiations with the Soras would have been a success, Inoue Shigekazu would be your ally instead of your father-in-law, Izu would be stable, and your house would be the stronger for it. Now she is the key that will unlock the Okuma clan. You cannot allow Shichio to take that key, Daigoro. If you don’t destroy it, he’ll use it to destroy you.”

  “No.” Daigoro’s heart pounded so hard he thought it might burst. He was scared and angry—angry not at Katsushima but at himself. Why could he not think faster? Everything Katsushima had said was true, but still, was there no counterargument?

  “There must be another way,” Daigoro said, but even to his own ears his voice sounded feeble.

  “Perhaps there is,” said Katsushima, “but that is why we stand at a crossroads. To me the right path is obvious. If you want to look for a different path, then here is where we part company. I cannot watch you destroy yourself, Daigoro. Standing up to Shichio and Hideyoshi was noble. Throwing yourself on Shichio’s sword is stupidity. And that is what you do if you allow him to marry your mother. He’ll turn your own men against you. It is more than foolish; it’s appalling, and I will not stand by and watch you do it.”

  “I’m so tired,” Daigoro said. “I can’t think. . . .”

  “What need is there for thinking? You need only to act. Ride with me, north and east, as fast as we can. Put your mother out of her misery. Save the rest of your clan.”

  “No. I can’t kill her, Goemon. I just can’t. And neither can I allow you to do it.”

  Katsushima frowned. “I will not kill her without your permission,” he said, “but I will not watch her sink you either. She is ballast, Daigoro. She will pull you under unless you ship her overboard.”

  With that Katsushima put his heels to his horse. Daigoro’s chestnut mare ambled to a halt, bending her head to eat a tussock of grass growing along the edge of the Tokaido. Daigoro was too tired to make her change her mind.

  He watched as the white dust settled in Katsushima’s wake. Now more than ever, he felt utterly alone.

  BOOK SEVEN

  HEISEI ERA, THE YEAR 22

  (2010 CE)

  41

  “Do I have to call him?”

  “Yeah, pretty much.”

  Mariko looked down at the phone in her hand, then looked back at her partner. She and Han sat at their desks in Narcotics, canned coffee at their beck and call. Phones rang, keyboards clicked, desk fans hummed, all background music to the ever-present murmur of a dozen different conversations. In short, the unit was abuzz, as well it should have been given the case Mariko was running. Cultist fanatics were at large in her city, well supplied with drugs, cyanide, and the willingness to distribute them liberally.

  Mariko’s sole advantage was a hard-nosed lieutenant who was willing to go to the mat with any commanding officer, anytime, to get what he wanted. Sakakibara reassigned every cop in his unit and commandeered another six or seven detectives besides, handing out orders like a blackjack dealer dealing cards. Back when Sakakibara first gave her this case, Mariko thought she was investigating the Kamaguchi-gumi on a simple trafficking ring. Now she lived under the cold, dark, looming shadow of a potential mass murder. She had two officers in the field trying to track down Akahata. Two others were working on Urano Soseki, the Kamaguchi-gumi’s capo, pressuring him to testify that Akahata was the one who delivered the Daishi. She paired another detective with a lab tech to sort out how much speed they’d seized in the packing plant raid and how to find a line on who cooked it. All of them reported to Mariko.

  But there was one lead on the Kamaguchi-gumi that Mariko had to follow herself. She took a deep breath to steel herself, poised her finger over her phone’s keypad, then thought better of it. “Han, you know I hate this guy.”

  Han blew his hair away from his face and took a sip of coffee. “Think of it as cultivating a contact,” he said. “This is police work, not a social call.”

  And you’ve been coloring outside the lines, thought Mariko. As far as she was concerned, Han’s judgment about good police work was suspect. But in this case he was right. She sighed and dialed the number.

  “Well, well, well,” said Kamaguchi Hanzo. “My hot little gokudo cop. I been wondering when I was going to hear from you.”

  Mariko already wanted to hang up. “I need you to tell me about your chemical supply company,” she said.

  “Fuck that. When are you going to give me my mask?”

  Mariko squeezed the phone; the plastic crackled in her grip. “We’re working on it. Tell me what you sold the Divine Wind.”

  “Hexa-something. Why ask me? Don’t you detectives keep a notepad or something?”

  “Just the hexamine? Nothing else?”

  “Nothing else.”

  “Don’t hold out on me, Kamaguchi. This is important.”

  “Look at the balls on you! What, you want me to sell them something else? I got girls, I got guns, I got whatever. Tell me where these cocksuckers are holed up and I promise I’ll deliver something they won’t forget.”

  Mariko rolled her eyes. “Did you sell them sodium cyanide?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “You sound pretty sure for a guy who only runs a front company. You can’t tell me you memorized every item in your inventory.”

  “You’re irritating as hell, you know that?”

  “The feeling’s mutual.”

  Kamaguchi snorted. “I remember the cyanide because they asked me about it, okay? And I’ll tell you what I told them: I don’t deal in that shit.”

  “Why not?”

  “Prohibited substances list. There’s no money in it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Prohibited substances list. You buy that stuff, they watch you. You sell it, they watch you. You use it for anything dodgy, they watch you. Who’s got the time for it? I just sell other shit.”

  She cupped the phone against her shoulder. Whispering, she said, “Han, can I please hang up on this asshole now?”

  Han gave her a wink and a thumbs-up.

  “Good-bye, Kamaguchi-san.”

  She resisted the urge to hurl the phone at the wall. Instead she crushed it like a stress ball, squeezing more little crackling noises out of the plastic. “Tell me you got something good on the house,” she said.

  Han grinned. “Grand slam. Turns out it belonged to a cult member. She willed it to the Church of the Divine Wind right before she died.”

  “Not to Joko Daishi?”

  “If only. At least that way we’d have the dude’s real name in the will. But get this: the family got pissed that they didn’t get the house—”

  “Figures,” Mariko said. “It’s a nice house.”

  “It’s a damn expensive house. So one of the sons gets uppity and demands an autopsy. The rest of the family doesn’t go for it, but they okay some blood work. Guess what? The old bird tested positive for amphetamine.”

  A little thrill rippled down Mariko’s spine. “MDA?”

  “Can’t say. Can’t say on cyanide either—they didn’t test for it—but she was a geezer; it wouldn’t be that hard to induce a heart attack with a little speed.”

  That thrill chased itself up and down Mariko’s spine again. She felt a little guilty too; it was macabre to take pleasure in a hunch when that hunch was confirmed by a homicide. Nevertheless, she couldn’t help feeling encouraged; this murder reinforced her suspicion that the Divine Wind was willing to use cyanide-laced amphetamines to kill. “What else have you got?”

  “On the house? Let’s see.” Han reopened a window on his computer and drained the last of his coffee. “Five hookahs, thirty-eight jabs of heroin, big thing of cyanide. Everything says these guys split in a hurry, neh? I mean, there’s a ton of admissible evidence they could have stashed or destroyed or whatever.”

  Mariko nodded. Perps didn’t leave evidence behind if they could help it, and they almost never left expensive evi
dence behind. Whoever had been in that house, they’d left immediately after killing Shino. The only part Han had wrong was that it was admissible evidence; she and Han had gotten onto the house in violation of Akahata’s civil rights. She was glad they had evidence to draw inferences from, but nothing on Han’s list was worth a damn thing in court.

  “How about you?” he said. “You get anything?”

  “Pulled a couple of good prints from this,” she said, and she produced a carefully folded Ziploc bag from her back pocket. In it was the little fold-up Giants schedule she’d found next to the heroin on Joko Daishi’s altar.

  “Nice grab,” he said, clearly surprised to see the thing. “Where’d you get the Ziploc, by the way? Please don’t tell me you walk around with one in your pocket all day. If you’re going to go all TV cop on me, at least make it an evidence bag and carry a pair of tweezers.”

  “You’re a smart-ass.”

  “Guilty as charged.”

  “I swiped it from her kitchen,” she said. “And by the way, if anyone asks, you’re the one who swiped it from her kitchen. As long as you’re breaking regs, you can take the hit for stealing private property from dead little old ladies.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Pull that schedule out and tell me what you make of it.”

  He did as he was told, and crinkled his eyebrows just as Mariko did when she tried to make sense of the scribbles written on it. “What is this, some kind of prayer?”

  “That was my guess too.”

  “Look, today’s game is circled. I’ll bet somebody’s got tickets—and hey, if that prayer is for the Giants to win, maybe I’ll start praying to Joko Daishi too. They could use any help they can get.”

  “Go back a second,” Mariko said. “Tickets? For today’s game?”

  “Yeah, but if you’re thinking we might pull a lead out of that, you’ll have to tell me how we’re going to identify one nut job in a crowd of forty-two thousand.”