by Barry Lancet
The onslaught ceased.
Blood from my ear, nose, and a gash on my leg streaked the marble.
“Back to your position, Jim Brodie.”
I shuddered, without rousing myself. I needed time to recover. Muster my strength. My thoughts. My last reserve. I scrambled for a way to circumvent the Walker’s ploy, but it looked unbeatable. The minute I made a move, Rie would be hung. The Walker had only to wrench the stool out from under Rie and hold me at bay. I wondered if she’d learned this setup from the other Steam Walkers.
I couldn’t last much longer. I had managed to stay conscious but was fading. Once I sank into darkness, all was lost. I no longer had illusions about her intended outcome for Rie or me. The Walker would not let a policewoman live, even if she was blindfolded.
An image of Jenny flickered through my thoughts. Someone would come forward to take care of her. Maybe the Rennas. She played well with their children, and Renna owed me. Less than a year ago, I had been counting on Bill Abers to fill the role if an emergency arose. My onetime shop assistant had practically been an uncle to Jenny. But those days were gone.
“Back to your position, Jim Brodie.”
I lifted my head. I peered at my tormentor. I saw Rie’s head poking over the Walker’s shoulder. I opened my mouth to speak, then goose bumps flecked my arms and back. Not out of fear but because of what I’d just seen.
From this position, Rie and the Walker were aligned, with Rie two yards to the rear. The arrangement triggered a memory. About the unworkable. The impossible.
And yet the vision lingered.
“I expected more from you, Jim Brodie. If you can’t rise, then it is over.”
“I’m getting up,” I said.
I struggled to my knees. The Steam Walker stood with her feet spread and aligned. I needed her to pull one leg back. But with the newfound arrogance her stance suggested, a shift seemed unlikely.
I fell forward.
The Walker laughed but did not stir. A glow of triumph infused her features. “I overestimated your skills,” she said.
I started to rise again.
The Walker watched me with supreme satisfaction. I was on my knees, my hands on the floor to support my flagging bulk. I tried to straighten up, then fell forward a second time, my palms dropping back to the cool marble.
The Walker maintained her stance.
“We are almost finished here, Jim Brodie.”
I drew myself up. My torso began to straighten. As I did so, I pulled one leg back farther, tucking the knee under. Behind my back, my foot came up on its toes. It arched. I made as if to stand again.
Then I exploded out of the crouch. I sprang off my back foot like a sprinter off a starting block. Only I surged upward more than forward, pushing with both hands as well as my feet. I leapt high. The move required height. I’d learned it in Bangkok five years ago at a Muay Thai training camp run by a friend, but I never imagined finding a practical use for the impressive but nearly impossible maneuver.
I was mistaken.
When events have taken you beyond the realm of the possible, avenues to the impossible open.
Then it happened.
As it always does when the adrenaline in my blood surges beyond a certain level. As they say it happens to a clutch ball player when he waits at the plate, hoping to connect with an unhittable pitch. Or when a wide receiver stretches his fingers out to reel in the unreachable catch. My awareness expanded. My senses kicked into overdrive. My eyes parsed movements in microseconds. I saw the action in a frame-by-frame sequence. Clearly delineated as I sailed through them—allowing me to sharpen my response.
The Steam Walker inched away. The slack in the rope increased. She dropped one foot back. I focused on the front leg, the thigh now slanting away in partial retreat. Believing me no longer a threat, the Walker felt no need to relinquish much ground. The rope still gave her the ultimate power over me. She raised it now in warning.
Adrenaline raged through my system. My body kept rising, propelled by strong, muscular legs. One of the side benefits of martial arts training.
The Steam Walker was puzzled. She couldn’t see a strike forming. Neither my arms nor my legs were shifting into offense positions.
That was the beauty of the move. One of several.
My leap carried me higher. The moment came. My forward foot landed on her forward thigh. A second launch pad had been established. I pushed myself upward again. The knee of my opposite leg smashed into the middle of the Steam Walker’s face. I heard cartilage crunch. My momentum hurdled me over her falling body.
I locked my eyes on Rie. I had planned to land on the edge of the stool but it was skirting away. The Steam Walker’s reflexes were superb. Even as she tumbled over backward, she wrenched the stool out from under Rie.
Rie’s body was dropping.
The rope above her head snapped taut against the hook overhead.
Rie began to choke. A horrible gaggling sound escaped her lips. Her arms and legs churned against their restraints. I heard the crack of the Steam Walker’s head on the unforgiving marble. In her vindictiveness, she had sacrificed the moment she needed to cushion her fall.
I plowed into Rie. Her body swung away from me. I found my footing and reached out. I wrapped my hands around her writhing form—and lifted. The rope slackened. Rie wheezed as she drew in fresh air. I shifted her sideways and disengaged the rope from the hook. Then I set my policewoman girlfriend down and ripped off the noose, the gag, the blindfold.
I glanced over at the Steam Walker.
She lay motionless on the white marble floor, a trickle of blood winding its way out from behind her head.
She was anything but pristine and immaculate.
EPILOGUE
THE SUN, THE MOON, THE TRUTH
THIS time the doctors persuaded me to stay. For fifteen days. I had two cracked ribs, a ringing in one ear, and countless bruises, to which they applied a glistening salve three times a day. Rie was a few rooms down, with a light rope burn and a sprained neck. But she was up and about and came to see me as often as she could.
Once I was released, we spent a weekend lingering in the restive waters of a secluded hot springs resort, then at long last I flew back to my daughter. Before I left, I broached the subject of latent psychological scars with Rie and she read me the Hoshino clan riot act about their being a law enforcement family, her being third-generation, and none of the men being as tough as she. I didn’t bring it up a second time.
My return to San Francisco was joyous. Jenny leapt into my arms, hugged me, and refused to let go. I finally pried her loose with a promise of her favorite gelato. She upped the ante by asking permission to sleep in my bed. I accepted.
Knowing she’d stumbled onto a good thing, my daughter repeated the hugging act for ten days. By way of apology, I let her. And bought her gelato on each of those days as well. On the eleventh day, we rested.
* * *
The Steam Walker survived.
She regained consciousness the next day, and was transferred to a jail hospital. Arrest papers had been issued.
Kiyomi Komeki was questioned. The reclusive clothier had known the Steam Walker since grammar school. They were each other’s oldest friend. The story spread by the Walker’s abusive father when the teenage girl ran off into the hills was that she was staying with distant relatives. Komeki never associated her classmate’s disappearance with the legend of the Steam Walkers. It was easy enough to believe that a strong-willed girl would want to escape the cloistered village of their youth. By the time her friend was making a career of assassination, the mythic figure of a reemergent Steam Walker had shape-shifted into a man.
The pair was reunited in their late twenties, when the Walker showed up on Komeki’s doorstep for a visit, as a small-time importer and exporter of furniture. Komeki was thrilled to offer her friend use of her transportation network, and to invite her childhood playmate into her home anytime she found herself in Tokyo.
&
nbsp; Stunned by the news of her school chum’s betrayal, Komeki supplied the Tokyo police with the Steam Walker’s real name. When a detective dug into the Walker’s past, they discovered she was an only child, her mother had died during an accidental spill on a staircase, and her father had disappeared one morning on the way to work and was never heard from again.
SAN FRANCISCO AND TOKYO
Ken Nobuki emerged from his coma six weeks after the shooting, healthy and cheerful, though with residual problems. His speech was ragged at first and he had trouble recalling certain words and parts of his life. Therapy brought mental and physical improvements, and doctors felt confident the setbacks would be overcome. Ken was itching to return to Japan and climb back behind his potter’s wheel, but a clean bill of health was not immediately forthcoming.
Naomi, Mrs. Nobuki, and Shu flew to San Francisco to be with him. His wife and grandchild stayed two weeks, then returned to Japan for Shu’s schooling. Before the eight-year-old left, he asked to visit his friends at the Napa County Sheriff Department. Mrs. Nobuki tried to talk her grandson out of the idea but soon found herself unable to refuse his animated and oft-repeated request.
So, on a crisp sunny Northern California afternoon in the opening days of February, I drove Ken’s wife, daughter, and grandson out to Napa. Sheriff Nash and police sketch artist Cheré Copeland greeted the arrivals at the station steps as if they were royalty. Inside, a surprise party awaited Napa’s star witness. Shu received a hero’s welcome from the whole department and was presented with an official Napa Sheriff Department hat, scaled to size. After cake and ice cream, Shu was given a ride in the sheriff’s personal patrol car, with escort vehicles front and rear.
The three-car procession drove at a regal pace into the city of Napa, where the mayor presented Shu with keys to city and county, followed by a case of “children’s wine”—a dozen bottles of high-end grape juice with personalized labels from a famous local winery that read FROM THE CELLAR OF SHU NOBUKI. A case of the adult version was lavished on Mrs. Nobuki. I translated every word for the young star. Rare was the moment when a grin was not splitting his face from ear to ear. The whole affair brought tears to his grandmother’s eyes on more than one occasion.
After Shu and Mrs. Nobuki flew home, Naomi found long-term accommodations near the hospital and visited every day. She talked to her father, read to him, brought him Japanese snacks, and sat quietly by his side. I stopped by often, at times bringing Jenny.
In the fifth week of Naomi’s tenure, the baton was passed to Japanese doctors of the family’s choosing, and Ken and his daughter boarded a plane for home.
* * *
I may have mopped up the mess, but I was far from satisfied.
We’d nailed Tad Sato. We’d nailed the Steam Walker. We’d nailed two Washington vermin.
Yet one of the guilty escaped without a scratch.
I had hoped to land a few blows on the overfed ogre that was the Japanese nuclear cartel. Instead, at the other end of the tunnel, I found a greedy husband who had succumbed to the oceans of money they circulated—as had the legions of politicians, bureaucrats, media bigwigs, and professors before him.
TEPCO and its cronies were guilty by association. Naomi, her family, and I handed down a private sentence against them, but the broader scope was an issue for the people of Japan to resolve, with Naomi and others like her leading the charge.
On my end, taking out a few lobbyists—locusts who gnaw away at the heart and soul of the American system—made for a respectable consolation prize, though it paled in comparison. About the time I’d resigned myself to a runner-up position, Naomi called. After an exchange of pleasantries, she said, “Brodie, do you know the expression ‘Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, the truth’?”
“Yes, I see it often, sometimes as an inscription on some Buddhist piece. What about it?”
“I’m back on the road with other activists. And it’s coming, Brodie. I can feel it. We’ll get there.” She meant to the truth. “Despite the evil, the cronyism, the corruption. It’s coming.”
“Very glad to hear it,” I said.
And in my mind’s eye, I set the runner-up trophy aside.
SAN FRANCISCO
Tension electrified the room.
In Sarah’s eyes was expectation of the highest order; in her husband’s, apprehension of equal measure.
The three of us sat in the private viewing room at the back of my antiques shop. In chairs set around a low William and Mary table, with a Charles Burchfield watercolor watching benevolently over us, I spread out a velvet cloth on the table to protect the table’s surface and brought out the Oribe tea bowls—not one, but two. After which, not one but two gasps escaped Sarah’s lips.
She drank in the pair of bowls—the black-over-white one I had hand-carried from Kyoto, and Takahashi’s “returnee,” which had arrived last night and lived up to its billing as a minor masterpiece. A smile she could not suppress spread across Sarah’s face.
“Oh, Brodie, this is the best. You’re the best.”
“So, the new one?” I asked.
It was in the classic green-and-white mode.
“Yes, if . . .”
She cast a deferential look toward Sean, who nodded without hesitation.
I said, “No pressure. I imagine I’ll be able to find another buyer if you don’t want it.”
Which, of course, was a major understatement. The piece wouldn’t last a week after I’d made a few calls, and Sarah knew it. The comment was mostly for her husband’s benefit.
“I’m grateful you showed it to me first,” she said. “This will be our collection’s crowning piece. Are you sure it’s okay, Sean? Moneywise?”
Our. I glanced over at her husband. He blushed.
“Yes, of course,” he told his wife.
Sarah had tears in her eyes. She leaned over and hugged her husband, then excused herself to freshen up.
Sean watched his wife walk away, then glanced my way. The strife of our first meeting had melted away. Fortunately. I’d had my fill of contentious husbands.
“I haven’t seen Sarah this happy in a long time,” he said.
“You might have something there.”
“Damn decent of you to give us first crack.”
“My pleasure,” I said. “The bowl’s found a good home. Maybe a great one.”
“I appreciate the heads-up, too.”
I’d called Sean to explain that I had good news and a dilemma. I told him about the Takahashi bowl. When he asked if the other bowl was inferior, I said far from it. Both would make good acquisitions. Because of their different color schemes, some people would want the pair. Think classic Caddy versus classic Rolls. It depended on your preference. I could show Sarah the Caddy and closet the other piece. The Caddy fit her needs perfectly. It met his budget. Sarah would want it. She’d be happy. It would make a good addition to their collection. I could sell the Rolls in a flash to another client, so there was no pressure on them. But he should be forewarned. The local tea world was small. The likelihood that Sarah would run across the piece in a year or two or five was great. Then she would want to add a piece of the same level to her assemblage. I didn’t know what to do. I liked Sarah. She was a favorite customer. But I would abide by Sean’s decision, and keep it between us. “You,” I’d said, “have to decide for the three of us.” He opted to show Sarah both bowls.
Now Sean said, “I suppose I should be a wee bit jealous.”
“Of what?”
“That you could make my wife so happy.”
“It wasn’t me. It was the bowl. Maybe you could be happy with her.”
As the words left my lips, a soft finger plucked at my heart. My thoughts strayed to Mieko, my deceased wife, Jenny’s mother. Not that I needed to summon her consciously. The physical connection we’d shared in this life had been severed, but her presence was strong and vivid whenever I reached for it.
Sean saw something in my expression he
couldn’t interpret, and he was shrewd enough to leave it be. “You’re a good man, Brodie. No hard feelings?”
“None whatsoever.”
He smiled and held out his hand. I shook it, then he walked away with a lighter step to meet his returning wife near the middle of the shop, where he slipped an arm around her waist, whispered in her ear, and kissed her cheek. She smiled and kissed him back.
Brodie: art dealer, widower, adviser. Father, boyfriend, second-generation PI, and now—apparently—marriage counselor.
Funny how that works.
ABOUT AUTHENTICITY
Here’s what’s true.
In Kyoto, the Kiyomizu-dera is a long-established Buddhist temple with roots dating back more than twelve hundred years. Those planning a visit will be well rewarded by approaching the temple complex from the Ninen-zaka and Sannen-zaka walkways, a pair of picturesque historical lanes.
The Arashiyama district on the outskirts of Kyoto does indeed have grand bamboo forests that are illuminated part of the year. Nearby are a number of restaurants, temples, and shops. However, some of the best treasures the area has to offer can be found on the other side of the river, and are easily explored by bicycle, which can be rented locally.
The information about cosplay, manga, and vocaloids is accurate. The Kyoto International Manga Museum is, in comparison to the city’s twelve-hundred-year-old history, a recent addition, having been established in 2006 in a former elementary school in the center of town. The museum has become a must-see for both Japanese and international manga fans. While the collection contains a few English-language manga, the vast majority of the volumes are Japanese. That said, since manga comics are a highly visual form of expression, enthusiasts should be able to find some displays and books that appeal to their sensibilities. Items in the gift shop will most likely also keep them entertained.
Mount Asama, the resort town of Karuizawa, and the village of Kanbara are actual places. Mount Asama is a twenty-minute drive from the town of Karuizawa, or a good two and a half hours by car from Tokyo. The village of Kanbara was indeed buried after one of the volcano’s most notorious eruptions. It has been rebuilt and there is a modest local museum with exhibits and artifacts.
