Daughter of the Sword: A Novel of the Fated Blades

by Steve Bein

  Frustration seethed through the phone. “Find a way,” Fuchida said. “Or I kill your sister.”

  “I’m telling you, it can’t be done. Not by tomorrow, anyway. I’m a sergeant, Fuchida-san. A small fish. You want to make things happen quickly, go kidnap the prime minister’s sister. Let mine go.”

  “No.” Fuchida spoke now through gritted teeth. “I’ll kill her. I’ll leave her around the city in little pieces.”

  “All right, all right.” Mariko’s heart was pounding. She’d been toying with his emotions, hoping that in his agitation he might reveal some clue to his whereabouts. But she’d never trained to negotiate with a kidnapper, and now her temper had gotten the better of her. She’d rattled a man whose mind was already brittle and ready to crack. She wished she had Yamada to guide her. She wished she hadn’t fucked up so bad that her sensei was dead.

  But he was, and she was on her own, and now Saori was counting on her. “Please,” she said, “settle down, Fuchida-san. It’s just that I don’t have a lot of room to maneuver. Look at it from my position. My lieutenant is going to want to know for a fact that we can get Saori back alive. And the fact is, you’ve killed before. We need to respect that. We need to be afraid you may do it again.”

  “You’re damn right.”

  Good, Mariko thought. Keep placating him. “Give me more time to talk to my LT. Please? Let me convince him you’re not to be trifled with. And please, Fuchida-san, don’t make any more threats about hurting Saori, or else I won’t be able to convince him that this will end well.”

  Fuchida grunted. She could hear the breath coming fast and loud through his nose. “Fine,” he said at last.

  “Fine. Wonderful. Thank you, Fuchida-san.” Her voice was all sweetness. “My LT’s going to want me to be able to speak with you. I can call you later at this number, neh?”

  “Fine.” And the line went dead.

  Mariko let out a sigh and slumped against the cold white wall of the concert hall. She wanted to cry. She wanted to throw her phone across the courtyard. Tension buzzed in her neck and shoulders; a piercing headache throbbed from the base of her skull. She closed her eyes and rolled her head back and forth against the cold, hard edges of the bricks.

  “Oshiro,” one of the other cops whispered. She didn’t open her eyes to see which one. “You all right?”

  It was the most idiotic question she’d ever heard. Her sister was kidnapped and her sensei was murdered. On top of that she was surrounded by cops too stupid to take any initiative of their own except to ask idiotic questions. Why the hell would she be all right?

  But she couldn’t say any of that, and even if she could have, she didn’t mean it. They weren’t stupid; they were looking to their sergeant for orders. She was the stupid one. She was the one who should have been on the scene. She was the one who could have kept Yamada-sensei alive. All she wanted to do was find a dark place and cry for him. All she wanted was solitude and silence enough to center herself. Right now her grief was enough to knock her over if she tried to stand.

  “Get that phone triangulated,” she said, eyes still closed, her pulse pounding in her ears like a taiko drum. “Call HRT. I want a team en route the second we have a fix on that phone. Then call our surveillance unit; tell them I want a tac team inside Yamada’s house, armored up and armed in case Fuchida loses patience and decides to get ballsy. Have you contacted Dr. Yamada’s next of kin?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Do it. Let them know where they can find him. And one of you, find me a bottle of Tylenol. And a bottle of Jack Daniel’s while you’re at it.”

  Ino, Mishima, and Takeda laughed, and Mariko forced herself to laugh along with them. In truth she wanted nothing more than to sleep for a week. To lose Yamada and then to botch negotiations with her own sister’s kidnapper—it was too much for one night. Too much for one year, for that matter, and now she still had to stay sharp. They would find Fuchida soon. HRT would take point on it, but Mariko needed to be on the scene. This was Saori, after all.

  Her three men on site each had phone calls to make. Mariko estimated she might have as long as two minutes of respite. Two minutes before one of them came back to ask a question. Two minutes before she would have to be made of stone again, so none of her men would see a moment of weakness and interpret it as feminine frailty.

  BOOK EIGHT

  SHŌWA ERA, THE YEAR 17

  (1942 CE)

  55

  Kiyama Keiji was running late.

  With four arms he might have managed to don his boots, open the door, and hang his tachi from the belt of his smart tan uniform all at once. As it was, he could not even keep a firm grip on boots and sword, and when he dropped the weapon its handle punched a hole through the paper of the shoji door.

  “Kei-kun,” his father called from the back room. “Are you all right?”

  Keiji could scarcely hear him over the clatter of boots falling to the ground. He tried in vain to scoop up the sword. It bounced noisily and ripped another panel in the shoji before it clattered to the floor.

  “I’m fine,” he called, falling to a seat and thrusting his left foot into his boot. This was no time for an extended discussion, and his father was famous for those.

  His mother, of course, slept through the commotion just as if she were a corpse.

  He put his second boot on, tied both of them, and hung his dusty scabbard from his belt at his left hip. “I’ll fix the door when I get home,” he yelled, then slid it shut behind him before any retort could follow.

  It seemed he was not the only one in a hurry that morning. It was a gray morning, the fifth of April, and the narrow road overflowed with people and handcarts trying to reach their destinations between rain showers. Keiji wove his way between them, brushing the dirt from his scabbard as he ran.

  It was two kilometers from the street the Kiyama house overlooked to the main thoroughfare defining the Tora-no-mon district, and another kilometer or so to the new duty station. As he rounded the corner into Tora-no-mon, Keiji was sweating hard. He was thankful the rain had started again; perhaps it might mask the sweat stains he knew were coming. Wondering how much time he’d made up in his great rush, he reached into his pocket only to discover he’d forgotten his watch at home.

  The momentary distraction caused him to bump into another pedestrian, one whose head was down under her broad sugegasa and never saw him coming. Both of them landed hard, Keiji jarring his shoulder as he fell.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” he said, struggling to one knee in the press of the crowd.

  “Watch where you’re going,” the woman said. Then, taking in his uniform, she said, “Don’t we have enough enemies overseas? What’s the idea, knocking down an old woman like me? You ought to be taking out your aggression on the Americans or the Chinese.”

  “Terribly, terribly sorry.” He offered her his hand.

  She was a rude old goat—and not much older than his mother, now that he got a better look at her. Keiji himself was only twenty-one; this woman couldn’t be much past fifty. He helped her to her feet anyway, endured her abuses, and hurried on to his post.

  He dodged a greengrocer’s cart a block later—Keiji seemed to be the only one who was looking where he was going in this rain—and as he passed a watchmaker’s shop, he saw it was ten minutes to eight. Barring further collisions he would just make it.

  Within sight of the tall beige Intelligence building he slowed to a fast walk, hoping to cool off somewhat before entering. He nearly tripped over a street urchin, a little girl with dirty bandages over her eyes. She raised her head as if to look straight at him and she said, “I see the tiger! I see the tiger on the mountain!”

  Keiji almost fell over, he stopped so fast.

  “What did you say?”

  “I can see the tiger on the mountain,” the blind girl said. “There’s a woman by the mountain, and the tiger is hunting her.”

  “How?” Keiji asked, so stunned he was hardly able to pronounc
e the word. He crouched before the girl, who turned a little bamboo shakuhachi over and over in her fingers. It was hard to guess her age, for half of her face was hidden behind the bandages that circumnavigated her head. A mop of unkempt hair hung down to her skinny shoulders, flopping over the bandages too. She was the size of an eight-or nine-year-old, but Keiji guessed she might well be older, for street children got little in the way of nutrition. How she knew the exact name of his tachi was beyond his ability to imagine.

  “The tiger stays with you,” she said. “That’s so nice.”

  “Who takes care of you?”

  “Mom.”

  “Where’s your mom?”

  “I don’t know.” A hopeful smile broadened under her brown-smeared bandage. “Do you know where she is?”

  “No.”

  Her smile faded and her shoulders sank. Try again, he chided himself. “I mean, I’ll help you find her.”

  The girl had stationed herself beneath the eaves of a butcher shop, and Keiji summoned the butcher with a wave of his hand. “Sir,” Keiji said, “do you know where this girl’s mother is?”

  “No,” the old man said. The way he frowned and shook his head told Keiji a lot more. The girl had been here often, and always alone.

  “Watch her for the day, will you? I’m stationed right over there”—he pointed to the Intelligence building—“and I’ll be back here between five and six o’clock to collect her. Make sure she gets something to eat, will you?”

  “What am I supposed to feed her, raw meat? This isn’t a restaurant.”

  Keiji reached into his pocket for his billfold. “Go buy her some—”

  He cut himself short. His billfold was missing, and all his money with it. His identification too. Had he forgotten it along with the pocket watch? No. He’d felt the leather corner against his fingertips when he discovered the watch was missing.

  The old woman.

  “Son of a bitch,” Keiji muttered. What a day to be pickpocketed. “Listen, sir, I’m Lieutenant Kiyama, with Military Intelligence. I work in that building right over there. I promise you, I’ll come back this evening and reimburse you for whatever you buy her to eat. Please?”

  Even at a dead run, Keiji was three minutes late for work.

  56

  Japanese military intelligence had its heyday after the defeat of the Russians, seventeen years before Keiji was born. Never before had such a tiny nation defeated one so vast. Never in the modern era had an Asian power bested a European one. And never before had a victor been treated with such international disdain. It had been military intelligence that defeated the Russians—or so Keiji had been taught in command school—and because of that victory, the intelligence division had enjoyed almost limitless favor with those who controlled the purse strings.

  The Military Intelligence building in Shōwa-ku was one of the products of that favor. Western in every aspect of style, it was one of the first buildings in Tokyo whose original specifications included wiring for telephones. It stood out like an island, a Bauhaus atoll rising out of a sea of ceramic-tiled roofs.

  On the fourth floor in a room of tall windows, General Matsumori paced back and forth. Hollow echoes resounded from his heels clopping against the concrete floor. “So this is the young lieutenant Kiyama,” Matsumori said. “Late, damp, stinking of sweat. Is that mud on your boots, boy?”

  Keiji’s gaze did not waver from the far wall. He did not dare to move from his attention stance, not even his eyeballs.

  He was surprised that Matsumori should be so concerned about the state of his uniform. The general wore neither his sidearm nor his sword. His jacket, blossoming with insignia of rank and battle honors, was draped over the back of his chair, and his cap lay flat on the desktop. He paced back and forth in his shirtsleeves, traces of white in his mustache, crow’s-feet betraying a career spent poring over maps and peering through spyglasses. He had a big, round belly and forearms like hawsers.

  “General Itō is an old friend of mine,” said Matsumori. Keiji noticed the two of them were equal in height, though the general was stockier, rounder, more muscular. “A mentor, in fact. He recommends you highly, Kiyama. I cannot see why.”

  “Begging your pardon, General Matsumori. I will not be late again.”

  “Not to my station you won’t. I’ll have you toting a rifle in the East Indies and fighting off dysentery if you’re ever less than ten minutes early. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Keiji spent the first day of his career in Military Intelligence cleaning toilets.

  57

  She’s fine,” the old butcher said, smiling. “She has a lot of questions about how to cut up a pig. We ate nigiri together for lunch, and I was just going to take her for some skewered chicken when you happened by.”

  “Thank you,” said Keiji. “Many thanks. I—I’m afraid I haven’t any money with me. My billfold, it was stolen this—well, it went missing earlier. I wonder if I could repay you tomorrow for your kindness?”

  The old man set his teeth for a fleeting moment. “If it weren’t for that uniform, son, I’d say you were having me on.”

  “Understandable, sir. I’m terribly sorry.”

  “Go on home. Take her with you too, neh? I don’t mind babysitting, but I’ve enough grandkids around the house already.”

  “Thank you, sir. Thank you very much.”

  Keiji crouched down and touched the little girl on the back of her hand. “How would you like to come home with me?”

  “I was listening, you know. I’m not deaf.”

  “Oh. I know that. I just— Say, what’s your name?”

  “Shoji Hayano.”

  “Well, Hayano, how would it be if you had dinner at my house tonight?”

  She crossed her arms and looked at the ground—or would have looked at it, if only her eyes were healthy. It was the gesture a sighted child might have made; Keiji guessed she must have lost her vision later in life.

  At length she asked, “Can we come back here tomorrow?”

  “If you want to.”

  “All right, then. I don’t want to miss my mom when she comes back.”

  They walked together hand in hand, the street mostly empty, the air wet with the scent of evaporating rain. “Hayano, can you tell me what you said this morning about the tiger?”

  “Uh-huh. The tiger is hunting a woman. He needs to kill her. But his house will wash away if he leaves to find her.”

  “That’s not what you said this morning.”

  Hayano pursed her lips. “Yes it is.”

  “No. You said…Never mind. Hayano-chan, where is the tiger?”

  “With you, silly.”

  “No. This morning you said something about a mountain.”

  “Yes. The tiger lives on the mountain. But he has to leave it to get the woman, and if he does that, the mountain will go away.”

  Keiji stopped and knelt next to the girl. “What does that mean, Hayano?”

  She giggled at him. “Silly! It means what it means.”

  He could hear her stomach growling. “Hayano, where is the tiger? Is it with me or is it in the mountains?”

  “No!” She laughed again. “It lives on the mountain, but it stays with you.”

  He took her by the hand and set her tiny, dirty fingertips on the pommel of his tachi. “This is my most prized possession, Hayano. Its name is Tiger on the Mountain. Do you know what it is?”

  “It’s a sword, silly. Anyone can see that.”

  “How did you know the name of the sword this morning?”

  She pursed her lips. “This game is boring. Can we go to your house now?”

  “Please, Hayano. Please?”

  “Bo-ring.”

  And that was the end of that.

  “Kei-kun,” his father said as Keiji slid open the shoji. “I’m glad you’re home. I just finished making dinner this minute.”

  “I told you I’d be working until six,” he called back to the dining room. “I
also told you I’d fix this door when I got home. You didn’t have to do it.”

  Keiji heard the clink of ceramic being set on the table, along with his father’s long explanation of patching the shoji panels and how Keiji’s mother certainly couldn’t do it and of course Keiji was going to be at work all day. Keiji listened for as long as it took to wriggle out of his boots and socks, then interrupted him. “Dad, I wanted to talk to you about inviting a guest for dinner.”

  “Oh! How wonderful. A girl, I hope.”

  “Well, yes. Sort of.”

  He heard stockings rustling against the floor as his father bustled toward the entryway. “Excellent! It doesn’t do for a man your age to go unmarried, especially not now that you’ve been promoted and— Oh.”

  “Dad, this is Shoji Hayano. She’s lost her mother. She’s obviously been injured too. I thought she might eat with us. And spend the night, maybe.”

  “Ah. Well, yes, of course. Hello, Hayano-chan. I’m Kiyama Ryoichi. Do come in.”

  Dinner was albacore over rice, accompanied by pumpkin and eggplant tempura. Hayano declared it delicious. “Where is your mom, Keiji-san? Doesn’t she like eggplant?”

  Ryoichi laughed. “Keiji’s momma is very sick, sweetheart. She doesn’t eat at the table; I’ll bring her food after we’ve finished.”

  “Oh.” She took another bite and chewed it slowly. “Why is she sick?”

  “She has what’s called an infection,” said Ryoichi. “She had surgery, and the cut the doctor made got infected, and now she has to stay away from everything that could make it dirty. She’s not even supposed to breathe anything that could be dirty. That’s why she has to stay in her room; the smoke from the stove could make her sicker.”

  “Oh. I had surgery once. On my eyes.” She took another bite of fish.

  “Did you?” Keiji’s father nodded thoughtfully. “And did you get an infection?”

  “Nope.”

  “That’s very good.” He ate his last thin slice of pumpkin, then began assembling a plate for his wife. “Kei-kun, when she’s finished, draw her a bath, neh? The poor dear’s cheeks are dirty.”