by Steve Bein
“One of them, yeah.”
“And the other one?” His grip on the bottle hadn’t changed yet. There was still a tension in his knees and shoulders, harnessed there but ready to explode, like a dog pulling at an invisible chain.
“In custody. He’ll see some serious time.”
Kamaguchi snorted a laugh and set down the bottle. “Then we’re square, sugar. Hell, I couldn’t’ve killed you anyway. You’re too much fun to fight. Come on, sit, have a beer.”
Mariko shook her head and took as step back toward the elevator. “About your mask—”
“Don’t worry about it. Get it to me when you get it to me. I know you’re good for it.” He snorted again and settled back into place on the huge black sofa.
“I am,” Mariko said, “but that’s not what I’m getting at. This guy, Joko Daishi, he thinks the mask gives him divine power. He’s a terrorist, plain and simple, and if he gets the mask back he’s going to cause all kinds of harm.”
“Blah, blah, blah.” Kamaguchi flapped the back of his hand at her, as if shooing a fly away from his food. “It’s my property, neh? I’ll do what I want with it.”
“That’s just it,” Mariko said. “He stole it from you once. He can do it again. I can’t force you to melt it down, but I’m telling you, unless you want people on the street to think you can’t protect your own property, you need to keep that thing under lock and key—”
“Already sold it.” Kamaguchi flipped the channel.
“You what?”
“I already sold it to him. It’s done.”
“You sold it to Joko Daishi?”
“Was that his name?” He settled on some sports channel covering a motorcycle race. “Yeah, I figured he wants it that bad, he’ll pay a good price for it.”
Mariko’s balled her hands into fists. She heard her breath coming loud and angry and she had half a mind to reach for her pistol again. “Do you have the slightest idea what this man intends to do with that mask?”
“Honey,” he said, twisting around to look at her, “I’m a gangster. This is what I do.” Then the TV reclaimed his attention.
“Mass murder,” Mariko said. “Mass destruction. Maybe killing your own people. Definitely hitting your own hometown. He thinks he needs the mask to make it happen. You want that?”
“Honey, I’m a gangster. I see a chance to make money, I take it. Shit happens to my people, I deal with it. Shit happens to other people, I let you deal with it.”
Mariko couldn’t believe her ears. All the work she’d put in, all the man-hours allocated by her department, all the fear, the tension, the worry, to say nothing of the quagmire Han had sunk himself into—all of it for nothing. For the second time in as many days, she’d surprised herself with her loyalty to a city that so often made her feel alien. Joko Daishi wasn’t just another criminal. His bombs weren’t just a menace to the general public. He’d threatened Tokyo, damn it, Mariko’s city, Kamaguchi’s city, and Kamaguchi couldn’t even be bothered to turn down the volume to hear her out.
All she could think of to say was “You selfish son of a bitch.” There was nothing left to do but walk away.
63
Joko Daishi’s indictment was the following Friday. His legal name was Koji Makoto. Age fifty-one, though he looked a lot younger. A history of petty crimes in his youth, all linked to mental illness, resulting in some court-ordered psychiatric care but not a day of incarceration. No known residence, no known relatives. If he had a source of income, the National Tax Agency didn’t know about it. As far as the bureaucracy was concerned, he’d stepped out of a psychiatric ward on the morning of his eighteenth birthday and simply ceased to exist.
The indictment was supposed to be at ten o’clock, on the first floor of a district courthouse around the corner from TMPD headquarters in the heart of Kasumigaseki, a neighborhood as schizophrenic as they come. The Metropolitan Police HQ was an enormous postmodern thing with a tower coming out the top that was striped like a candy cane. Across the street was the Ministry of Justice, Italianate, only three stories tall. Both of those fronted a moat of the Muromachi era, on the other side of which was the five-hundred-year-old sloping stone foundation of an Imperial Palace still decades shy of its one-hundredth birthday. Firebombing had eradicated the old palace, but the foundation had endured the bombers and worse—earthquakes, floods, erosion, an economy that valued downtown real estate over obsolete political heirlooms—emerging with a little more moss but otherwise hardly the worse for wear. Now that foundation was surrounded by brand-new skyscrapers, cell phone towers, hybrid electric vehicles, invisible waves of Wi-Fi. It stood stoically in their midst, unchanged.
Mariko wished she could say the same, caught in the midst of her swirling emotions. From the moment she woke up that morning, Mariko didn’t know where she needed to be. Her friend and partner had a hearing before Internal Affairs. It was scheduled for ten o’clock, the same time Joko Daishi’s indictment was supposed to take place. Part of her wanted the decision to be as easy as supporting a friend, doing the right thing, letting the job come second. It was the same part of her that wished she thought of Joko Daishi as Koji Makoto, not the religious title he’d given himself. It was the more charitable way to identify him—innocent until proven guilty and all that—but in her mind he remained the heartless cult leader, not the psychiatric case with a troubled childhood.
Her more cynical side doubted that Koji Makoto was even his real name at all. Most of her colleagues would have said she was grasping at straws, but they only thought in Japanese. Mariko read kanji characters as a native and as a gaijin, and the English-speaking part of her mind saw that, literally translated, Koji Makoto meant Short Path to the Truth. Too poetic to be coincidental, Mariko thought.
She wasn’t all that fond of her propensity to find reasonable suspicion even in the most innocent of details, like names in the blanks of standard governmental paperwork. The sad truth was that her capacity to see the worst in people made her a better cop. Today it made her unsure about her partner. Despite that idealistic voice in her head, this had never been as simple as standing by a friend. He worked with her and he’d jeopardized their investigation. He reported to her and he’d undermined her authority. And now, at ten minutes to ten, she knew exactly where she needed to be but she didn’t want to go.
It wasn’t her lingering mistrust that told her to find another place to be at ten o’clock. If anything, her cynicism and pessimism would lead her straight to Han’s hearing. But trumping those, overriding her feelings of betrayal, she was torn between wanting to be a source of support for her partner and dreading being there to see his verdict handed down. She wanted to spare him that shame. The tension between those two desires had been building all morning, and now she had to walk it off, pacing up and down from the courthouse to the police headquarters. She’d seen Han pace like this, cigarette smoke trailing him. She’d never had much interest in smoking, but maybe today was the day to start.
Sakakibara caught up with her halfway down the block. “There you are,” he said, walking fast on stilt-straight legs. Obviously he knew where he wanted to be. He hooked her by the crook of the elbow, spinning her on her heel and dragging her toward the courthouse. “Come on. Do you want to see this prick indicted or not?”
A simple indictment wasn’t usually the sort of thing that drew a lieutenant’s attention, or even a sergeant’s for that matter, but Joko Daishi had masterminded a plot to terrorize the city and run up a hell of a body count while he was at it—not fifty-two but hundreds. That train platform would have been packed if he’d had his way. If Mariko hadn’t shot him. If Han hadn’t put her where she needed to be. It had been a fifty-fifty shot as to which one of them would get to Akahata. Han had raced off the same as she did—had volunteered to be on a train platform with a madman and a bomb, the same as she did. It was blind luck that made her the hero instead of him. Again Mariko wondered what Han’s fate should be.
“Sir, it’s over.”
“What?”
“Joko Daishi’s lawyer, Hamaya. He had the case pushed up an hour. Nine o’clock.”
Sakakibara stopped cold. “And?”
“I saw it,” Mariko said. It was sheer luck that she’d been there. She showed up early for Han because she couldn’t sleep, and she happened to see Hamaya Jiro hurrying toward the courthouse. She nearly caught up with him, thought better of it, slipped in the courtroom behind him, and watched the whole proceedings.
Hamaya hadn’t noticed her until afterward. “Sergeant Oshiro,” he’d said. “A fine morning for a trial, wouldn’t you say?”
He’d dropped the word trial on purpose. Joko Daishi wasn’t on trial yet. But Han was. “Do thank your partner for me when you see him,” Hamaya had said. “If it weren’t for him, I can only imagine how difficult it would be for me to mount my client’s defense.”
“That’s because your client is guilty.”
“Only of what you can prove in court, Sergeant. I’m afraid the district attorney will have a tough time of it, once it becomes clear how much evidence is inadmissible. If I’m not mistaken, your entire investigation would have fallen flat if your partner hadn’t illegally tailed Akahata-san.”
He had her on that one. The district attorney chose not to press charges on anything connected to the Kamakura house. The heroin, the cyanide, even Shino’s murder. None of it would stick.
But Mariko wouldn’t let him see the cracks in her resolve. “Too bad you won’t be drawing a paycheck from him anymore. That breaks my heart.”
“I’m sure. No doubt you’re equally heartbroken that Akahata-san is not alive for cross-examination. If not for you and your partner, the case against Joko Daishi would be ironclad.”
Mariko felt herself fuming but refused to rise to Hamaya’s bait. “You’ll wriggle out of a charge here or there, but we’ve got your client dead to rights on the bomb-making factory. We got that from a search warrant on phone records, not from anything Han did. That means we’ve got your client on unlawful use of weapons, and believe me, the DA’s office can turn that into five or six different counts by itself. Then there’s conspiracy, furtherance, public endangerment—and after all that, your client gets to go to federal court, where we’re going to smack him with every last terrorism charge we’ve got a law for. I hope your little cult believes in reincarnation, because Joko Daishi’s looking at back-to-back life sentences from here to eternity. Best of luck with that.”
“The best of luck, indeed,” Hamaya had said, giving her a little bow by way of a farewell. “I have no doubt of it.”
That was nine thirty. Now, at nine fifty-one, Mariko’s frustration hadn’t cooled in the slightest. “He’s going to walk on almost all of it,” she told Sakakibara. “How many charges should we have nailed him on just for the dope? Precursor chemicals, manufacturing, intent to distribute, you name it. Plus the two homicides, plus all the prohibited substances charges . . . I don’t know what you charge someone with for having a gas chamber in his bedroom, but I sure as hell hope we’ve got a law against it.”
“We probably do.”
“And what does it matter?” Mariko clenched her fists, wishing she had a bokken in her hands and something to smash with it. “None of it’s going to stick. I was thinking we had a lock on terrorism and conspiracy, but that cocky bastard Hamaya seems to think otherwise. He’s a slippery little fucker. He’s looking for ways out already.”
“That’s his job,” said Sakakibara. “You know that.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, and she told him about what else was on her mind. Kamaguchi Hanzo. The mask. How Hamaya might already be on his way to file some paperwork Mariko had never heard of, something that would release the mask from police custody so he could hand-deliver it to Joko Daishi.
It ended up becoming more of a tirade than an explanation, and at the end of it she felt deflated. She slumped against the side of the HQ building and threw up her hands. “What the hell have we accomplished, sir? Joko Daishi will see some time—I hope. But after that, he’s still got his mask and his cult, and we didn’t even seize all of the explosives. He’s got more people out there. We have no guesses about who they are. He’ll have more targets. We have no idea where. And for all of this, I get my name dragged through the muck and maybe Han loses his badge. So what the hell was the point?”
Sakakibara grimaced at her, his thick Sonny Chiba eyebrows scrunching toward each other like hairy black caterpillars. “We’re cops, Frodo. Not lawyers; not judges; cops. That makes us goalkeepers, and the simple truth is that sometimes the bad guys get one through.”
He took her by the chin—an astonishingly gentle gesture coming from him, almost fatherly—and raised her eyes to meet his. “What did you think when you took this job? That we were going to stop every crime in the city? We stop the ones we can, but some of them are going to get by us. If you can’t live with that, just hand me your badge right now. I’ll fill out the paperwork for you.”
“Sir, you know I can’t—”
“Can’t what? Take a cushy desk job for the same pay? Get off the streets, rest your feet for a minute? Sure you can. You don’t need to be in the dirty little corners where the lines get blurry, where it’s hard to tell right from wrong. Go take a job in a police box in the suburbs, where the worst problem you’ll have for the rest of your career is not knowing the answer when someone stops in to ask for directions. How many COs have you served under who told you to do exactly that?”
Mariko couldn’t help smiling a little. “Actually, sir, the last one told me he’d have me working the precinct coffeemaker.”
Somehow he’d made the shift from concerned father to stern father and back to bitter, grumpy commanding officer. “Fine. Go take his advice. Or stop pitying yourself and recognize you did something magnificent. You saved fifty-two lives. You put a very bad man in the ground and you put another one in a cell. The day that’s not good enough for you, just hand me your badge and I’ll fill out the paperwork.”
Mariko looked back down for a minute, then found his gaze again. “Thank you, sir.”
“You know what happens now?”
“Sir?”
“The same thing that happens in any other sport with a goalkeeper. The other team gets the ball back and they try to score again. Now, are you ready to do your damn job?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Let’s go to your partner’s hearing.”
Mariko glanced at Sakakibara’s huge black diver’s watch. “We’re running late for that, sir. Do you think they’ll let us in after—”
“They haven’t started yet. I told them to hold off until I got there.”
Mariko was glad he’d already started walking so he couldn’t see her jaw drop. She knew her lieutenant had some swat, but she didn’t know his arm reached that far. It made her wonder if IAD would allow him to get involved in their decision too, made her wonder whether Sakakibara would push to get Han off or see him hang.
True to his word, it was Sakakibara who unofficially began the hearing when he walked through the door. Mariko found it embarrassing, seeing Han being deposed, and she could only imagine what he was feeling. She thought of Saori, who, somewhere along the way of her Twelve Step program, had to make a list of everyone she’d every wronged while she was using, and then had to go out and apologize for each offense. It was no easy thing, admitting you were wrong. It took a kind of strength not a lot of people had. Saori didn’t have it; she’d had to build it from scratch. It made Mariko proud to see Han push ahead, explaining everything he’d done and leaving nothing out. He held no one else to blame, nor did he shield anyone else from blame. If IAD found reason to investigate Mariko as well, it would start with Han telling them the truth as plainly as he could.
For an event that would see Han’s whole career hang in the balance, the hearing was surprisingly brief. The review board adjourned after only an hour, sequestering themselves to make their judgment. Mariko found herself sagging bac
k into her seat, and until then she hadn’t even noticed she’d been sitting forward, hands gripping her knees, waiting for the board’s ruling. Now she wanted to know how long review boards generally took to make their decisions—or, more precisely, how long she’d have to be waiting on the edge of her seat, tense as the skin of a drum.
And since she lacked anything even approximating the proper sense of decorum for a woman of her rank and station, she asked. The chair of the review board, a commander she hadn’t met before, gave her the same kind of frown he’d have given a Tokyo Disney mascot walking into the room, a blend of puzzlement and offense. “Fifteen minutes,” he said, making it clear that he was doing her a great honor even in recognizing her existence, and closed the door behind him.
Mariko found herself immediately at Han’s side, which surprised her. The part of her that was still pissed off at him still had a loud voice, but it had lost its majority. “Fifteen minutes?” she said. “You’d think they’d take longer than that for something this important.”
“Yeah,” said Han. “You’d think your partner wouldn’t say anything to ruffle their feathers before they made their ruling, too.”
She blushed for a second, but he winked at her and even gave her a little grin. “You look awfully relaxed,” she said.
“What’s there to be nervous about? The worst part’s over.”
Mariko hadn’t realized that was true, but now that she thought about it, it was almost self-evident. Working up the courage to make a full confession was agonizing work. After that, taking your licks was easy. Han had just looked his own guilt full in the face; he knew he deserved punishment and he’d already resigned himself to accept it, however harsh it might be.
A few minutes later the review board returned to render its verdict, and again, paradoxically, Mariko found herself more nervous about it than Han. The chairman sat down with what looked like a sheet of prepared notes that he didn’t bother looking at, making Mariko so curious she wanted to jump out of her seat to see what it said.
