by Steve Bein
“Why, Detective Watanabe!” Mariko said, reverting to Japanese again. “I had no idea you spoke such fluent English.”
“And I had no idea anyone in this department remembered it doesn’t actually say ‘Han’ on my business card. No wonder you made sergeant. You’ve got a mind made for paperwork.”
“Now that’s low.”
“So you’re okay, then?”
Mariko felt her pulse quicken. Even while he was joking, his attention had never wavered from how she was coping with shooting Akahata. Now that things had calmed down a little, Mariko found herself feeling more conflicted than she’d realized at first. She knew she’d fired in self-defense, and in defense of the lives of everyone else on that platform. But there he was, staring blankly at the ceiling, a puppet snipped from its strings. And there was Mariko, with a second death on her hands. After Fuchida, that made two this year. More than the rest of Narcotics combined. And yet she didn’t know what else she could have done. She’d given Akahata the option of submitting peacefully and he hadn’t taken her up on the invitation. A bullet in the brainpan didn’t seem out of line.
At least not to Mariko. A few dozen onlookers still lingered on the opposite platform, and by now one of them had probably recognized her. Her fame after the Fuchida affair might have been short-lived, but her missing finger was memorable and it only took one eyewitness to spot it. Reflexively she stuck her right hand in her pocket, knowing it was far too late to start any attempt at damage control. Even as she tabled her own moral assessment for later, even as she told her partner she was okay, she wondered what the consequences would be for killing a man that every last bystander would describe as being unarmed.
Whatever the consequences might be, there wasn’t a thing she could do about them at this point. Even if there were, she could hear a platoon of cops coming down the stairs, and when they reached her they would need orders. She had a shell-shocked teenager to deal with, a body to zip up and roll away, a bomb to quarantine, a major subway station to restore to working order, and if she really got cracking she might get it done by midnight. “Seriously,” she told Han, “I think I’m all right. Ask me again in a couple of days, maybe. For now, let’s get this crime scene locked down.”
62
“Tell me again why you don’t want me to call the papers,” Mariko’s mother said.
She sat with her two daughters around her living room coffee table, all of them sitting on the floor and playing rummy. Mariko had been appraising both of them without saying a word. Her mom was wearing a polo shirt with a logo embroidered on it that Mariko didn’t recognize, probably from the manufacturer of something related to her beloved sport of Ping-Pong. She seemed radiant, not careworn, as she’d so often been of late. Of course she’d panicked after she found out her eldest daughter had been in the same room as thirty-odd kilos of high explosives, but that was after the fact, after she knew Mariko was safely at home. More important, Mariko guessed, was that her second daughter was also safely at home.
Saori was looking good. She’d regained some of the weight she’d lost. Her hair didn’t seem so brittle and her skin had regained its luster. The scabs she’d accumulated from when she was using, the bruises, the pallor, had vanished. Her teeth would never recover from the years of meth abuse, but otherwise she was back to being her contented, girlish self.
“Yeah,” Saori said, “you’re a hero, Miko. Didn’t you save, like, fifty people?”
“Fifty-two,” Mariko said. And killed one, she could have added. Akahata’s death had a completely different character than Fuchida’s. With Fuchida it was a simple quid pro quo: he gutted her, Mariko stabbed him back. But Akahata hadn’t actually done anything violent; he’d only threatened to. Mariko shot him preemptively. With a couple of days’ hindsight she’d expected to feel some guilt over it, but still none had come. She didn’t feel good about it, either. If anything, she was just apprehensive about what would come next.
A psychologist might have been able to explain the scientific reasons why she preferred to look ahead rather than back. Mariko knew she might seek out a psychologist someday. Every sensible cop in Narcotics had asked her how she was doing, and all the thoughtless ones had asked her what it felt like to shoot somebody. Sooner or later that would wear on her. And she hadn’t been in the field since the incident. Sakakibara benched Han and ordered Mariko to take two days of vacation time, which meant Mariko hadn’t so much as looked at her pistol since she’d checked out of post that night. Maybe she’d get the jitters when she came back to work, but for the moment she was thankful to be with her family, and that was all she needed.
Not for Saori, though. “Fifty-two,” she said, gripping Mariko’s wrist insistently. “Shouldn’t you get a headline for that? Shouldn’t I get a headline for that? My big sister in the news again—and not for what they’re saying now. Come on, Miko, you deserve better than this.”
“I can’t,” Mariko said. “For one thing, the department’s already given its statement. For another, you might have noticed they didn’t mention the bomb in that statement. You have to understand how important it is to keep that secret. I told you two because I think you have a right to know, but if the bomb scare gets out, it gives Joko Daishi exactly what he wants: mass panic.”
It didn’t feel good to say that out loud. It might be that fifty-two onlookers saw a cop shoot an unarmed janitor, but Mariko knew the truth. She knew how close they’d come. A dozen different theories were circulating on talk radio, doing the same kind of postgame could’ve-would’ve-should’ve analysis that followed every baseball game, and Mariko had the power to disperse all of their blissful ignorance with a simple phone call. So did her bosses. But TMPD couldn’t exonerate her without explaining about the bomb, and that they could not do. The mere mention of it would cause a rash of panic, plus God knew what else on talk radio.
No, better for Tokyo’s hero lady cop to take the momentary hit to her reputation. Everyone in Narcotics knew the score, the top brass did too, and if rumors of the truth managed to slip out here or there, at least there was no one to recognize them officially. Even Joko Daishi couldn’t do it. For one thing, he was more Tyler Durden than Osama bin Laden: not the type to claim credit for his political cause, most certainly not when his agent had failed. For another, inmates didn’t have the right to call press conferences. So the department quashed his cause and considered Mariko collateral damage.
“You two have to understand,” Mariko said. “Seriously, you can’t talk about this. To anyone. Okay?”
“But what if—?” Saori began.
“If anyone asks you about it, tell them your sister thought the assailant was a direct threat to his hostage’s life. You don’t have to have a knife or a baseball bat to kill somebody. Crushing the guy’s windpipe does the job just fine.”
She flapped her cards on the table. “Oh,” she added, “and I’m out.”
Again Mariko found herself receiving a punishment she didn’t deserve—a round of boos this time, though she supposed this was a whole lot better than the thrashing she was taking in the press. Those stories would lose their shine before the week was out, passing out of public memory just as quickly, though for the moment they really did sting. And unlike the press corps and the radio harpies, Mariko’s mom followed up with another round of dessert.
“Okay, girls,” she said after they finished their cherry cobbler, “one more game and then this old woman has to get to bed.”
“Sorry, I can’t,” Mariko said. “I’ve got someone I still have to meet tonight.”
“Oooh,” Saori said. “A date! Is he hot?”
“No. Most definitely not.”
“Who, then?” Saori said. At the same moment, their mom frowned and said, “It’s someone from work, isn’t it?”
“Sort of.” The whole truth was complicated. She was looking forward to ending her professional relationship with this man, but she didn’t particularly look forward to being in the same room with him.
• • •
She spent most of her train ride thinking about Han, about what to do with him, about where the moral lines lay. One way or another, her partner was going to stand before Internal Affairs. Her gut told her to stick up for him. Ten seconds of reflection on that told her she had a stronger obligation to stick up for the law. If a citizen broke the rules and got away with it, that was just a fact of life, but if a cop broke the rules and got away with it, that chipped away at the rules themselves. Law enforcement without accountability was a police state, not a police department.
What if Sakakibara decided to back Han’s play? What if he found a way to wriggle around the fact that one of his officers ignored a suspect’s civil liberties? Did it matter that the very next day the same suspect tried to murder Mariko and fifty-two other people? No. In civilian life it would matter, but legally, rights were rights.
The Americans had a good word for them: inalienable. A right that could be stripped depending on the situation wasn’t a right at all. Sakakibara respected that. He was good police, and he was a real hard-ass when it came to playing it by the book. But he always said it was to protect his unit’s conviction rate. What if, just this one time, he could boost Joko Daishi’s prison time by covering for a detective who strayed outside the lines and then came right back in? If he defended Han, Mariko would be left with the choice of crossing her CO and betraying her partner, or else looking the other way on a moral question that just wasn’t up for negotiation.
With all of that on her mind, she walked up to the building she didn’t want to walk up to and rang the doorbell she didn’t want to ring.
When the steel doors slid open, Bullet was waiting for her inside, taking up half the elevator. Ever his chatty self, he said nothing on their ride up to Kamaguchi Hanzo’s apartment.
“There she is,” the Bulldog said with a sharp-toothed grin, “my hot little gokudo cop.” He got up from his sofa, a huge Western-style block of black leather, tossed his TV remote aside and picked up a sweating bottle of beer. “Get your tight little ass in here and tell me what you got for me.”
“Everything you want,” Mariko said. She remained just outside the elevator, standing her ground just to show the Bulldog she wouldn’t follow his orders. “We claimed your mask as evidence.”
“So? Where is it?”
“A phone call away.” She pulled a smartphone from her pocket and held it out as if to offer it to him. “If I deliver your mask, you’ll call off the bounty on my head?”
“That’s the deal, honey.”
“And your dad? I’m square with him too?”
“He gave the contract to me. I’m the only guy you have to worry about.”
“Then I’ve got you on record admitting to conspiracy to commit homicide.” She came closer, showing him the phone’s little screen.
Bullet took a menacing step forward. “Taking this phone from me won’t do you any good,” she told him, never taking her eyes off the Bulldog. “I’m not the one recording this. My department is. You getting all this, sir?”
“Loud and clear,” Sakakibara said. He sounded gruff and authoritative even through the tiny speaker.
“Have a good night, sir.” She dropped the phone back in her pocket. “So here’s the deal: I’ll give your mask back anyway, since it’s yours, but you’re going to call off the hit on me one way or the other. You do understand how this works, neh? We don’t just come after you, we come after your dad. And yeah, I can’t touch him, and yeah, there’ll be blowback to cops in this city for a while to come, but at the end of the day cops and yakuzas are going to settle back into their old ways, and the only thing different is going to be you, implicating your old man on record. How well do you see that working out for you at the next family function?”
Kamaguchi rose from the couch, switching his grip on the beer bottle as if to use it as a weapon. He fixed her with a glare that said he might just chuck her phone off the balcony anyway, and her with it. Then his gaze flicked down to her left hand, which without her knowing it was resting on the heel of her SIG Sauer.
“You’re not afraid to use that, are you?” he said. His tone was almost congratulatory.
“Nope.”
“Heh. I heard about that. You and the guy in the subway. He’s the one who stole my mask?”
“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.
