Fishing for Stars

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘You give me too much credit. Kinzo-san used this fact in the hearing this morning.’

  Fuchida nodded. ‘Saito-san is not known to be yakuza and is only used by us very occasionally when we need a secret weapon . . . or a silent assassin. He is not only a kendo grand master but also Japan’s most famous exponent of the katana, the sacred sword. His name is known and respected by all. He is exactly right for this job. He brings both sides – the Shield Society and Konoe Akira – the correct prestige. At the same time they will know he leaves no footprints in the dust and cannot be crossed.’

  ‘More and more I find myself in your debt, Oyabun Fuchida. If Anna is brought back safely, I cannot imagine how I will ever be able to repay you.’

  ‘We will remain friends, and it is my experience that, over the years, there is always something that needs to be done. Friends are not made for personal gain, but neither are they free of obligation. Friendship involves loyalty and support for each other.’

  Finally I asked, knowing already that it was not a very bright question, ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’

  ‘Nothing. Everything is in place,’ the yakuza boss said. ‘Now we can only wait until Saito-san brings Anna-san to the office of Kinzo-san where you will be waiting, having arrived back from Osaka and the World Exposition. In the meantime you must stay here in the penthouse.’

  ‘I hesitate to ask, but I need another enormous favour, Fuchida-san,’ I said.

  ‘What is it, Duncan-san?’

  ‘Anna will be in withdrawal – three days at least without heroin. She will be in a bad state. Is it possible you could arrange . . . ? I will pay the street price, of course.’

  ‘How much will she need? Once, twice a day, more? Sufficient for a week?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, a week will be plenty. Will you let me know the cost, please?’ He could see my acute embarrassment at having to ask.

  Fuchida-san sighed. ‘The cost of being a heroin addict is already too much. In the end, this woman will let you down; they always do. I know from personal experience. When I was young and recruited by the great Yoshio Kodama, who, you will remember, united the yakuza after the war, he made me one of his wakagashira, his lieutenants. He was still a drug lord and many of us became addicted to heroin. It took me nearly ten years to get clean. None of the other wakagashira managed to give up and I watched them lose their integrity and honour.’ He smiled. ‘But, as you wish, it will be delivered this afternoon. There is no cost.’

  I kept forgetting that the yakuza boss had never met Anna and I was forced to conclude that he must have scant regard for her, questioning the wisdom of my involvement with a junkie. It was even more remarkable that he hadn’t thrown his hands up in despair and left us to stew in our own juice. This was particularly true when I tried and failed to think of anything we could do for him, or any use we might be to him or the yakuza in the future. All we had in common was butterflies! It was hard to imagine that insects alone might constitute an enduring bond between us. If he had any plans for me to pay him back in the future, they were beyond my imagining.

  The yakuza boss rose. ‘I must go out and will be back very late. The mama-san will show you your room and attend to your dinner. It has been a difficult time for you, Duncan-san. You must rest now. Is there anything else you might need?’

  ‘You have been a gracious host and wonderful friend, honourable Fuchida-san, and I, in turn, have caused nothing but trouble for you. I am eternally grateful and require nothing more except a toothbrush and a razor.’

  ‘Duncan-san, trouble is how we make our living. I must say, I can hardly wait to meet your Anna; you have endured a great deal on her behalf. This junkie of yours must be really something for you to have persisted with her!’ He chuckled. ‘You Westerners have strange attitudes to women.’

  Later, resting on a futon in the room set aside for me, I realised that, if I had done absolutely nothing, bugger all, to find Anna, she might have long since been back with me and, to boot, not much the worse for wear. Konoe Akira would have refused to pay the ransom and the Shield Society would have realised she was of no worth to them and, furthermore, that kidnapping a gaijin did nothing for their cause.

  Also, Anna wasn’t the sort to sit in a corner hugging her knees with her bottom lip trembling. She would have negotiated and paid for her own freedom. But, of course, she couldn’t do this without contacting me to arrange the ransom money and I had been in a police cell nursing my wounds along with my pride. She wasn’t to blame for any of my various predicaments. It had been my own lack of patience and inability to think things through, big-noting myself by involving the yakuza. Now she would carry a fresh set of scars for the remainder of her life. Even more bizarre and reprehensible, Konoe Akira would once again be responsible for them. Whatever possessed you to come to Japan, Nicholas Duncan, world-class bloody idiot?! I recall saying to myself before I fell into an exhausted sleep.

  Let me declare at once that I did not witness what happened next. Anna described everything to me, except for the incident at the gate with the two guards, later recounted to me by Fuchida-san, who had seen some of it and heard the remainder from Saito-san.

  Arrangements were made for Kinzo-san to receive a call from the kidnappers to tell him the place at which Anna would be handed over. He would then contact Saito-san and give him the address, then wait the hour it took for Saito-san to reach Anna by motorcar. Upon arrival and after ensuring Anna was present and unharmed, Saito-san would call him and give him an address the Shield Society had given him that was close enough to Kinzo-san’s offices for him to deliver the ransom. After Saito-san received an all-clear phone call, he would then take custody of Anna and return her by motorcar to Tokyo. Simple enough.

  But, as it turned out, what in fact happened was that Kinzo-san, having received the call from Anna’s captors with the address at which she was being held, called Saito-san who was waiting with Oyabun Fuchida at the helicopter terminal in Central Tokyo. They immediately boarded a waiting three-passenger Bell Jet Ranger. Five minutes later it set down in a vacant lot in an industrial site close to the Bay area just three minutes’ walk from the address the Shield Society had given. They had arrived forty-five minutes before Saito-san was expected by motorcar.

  Saito, a man in his late forties, was dressed cheaply in the ragged clothes of a poor old man or a bum. Wearing a straggly grey false moustache and a dirty brown felt hat pulled down hard onto his eyebrows, he gave the appearance of a witless alcoholic. He affected a limp and carried a walking stick made from the ebony core of the persimmon tree, a dense, fine-grained timber that is incredibly strong. Fuchida had encouraged him to wear a bullet-proof jacket, as he himself did, but he’d refused. ‘It will slow me down,’ he’d argued.

  They stopped about a hundred metres from the address they’d been given – a small double-storey warehouse set in the centre of an industrial lot and surrounded by a high steel-mesh security fence about twenty metres from the building. Fuchida waited out of sight while Saito, pecking his way with the stick, limped drunkenly towards the padlocked wire gate, behind which he could see two guards with submachine-guns slung over their shoulders.

  Swaying and staggering, singing drunkenly, mumbling and shouting to himself, often gripping the cane with both hands to keep his balance, Saito approached, then outside the gate fell backwards onto his bum, toppling over, his legs flung in the air and the stick flying. Laughing helplessly, he lay for a moment, then rolled over so that he was on all fours from where he tried to get up, failing several times, his arms collapsing under him. Finally he managed to crawl towards the walking stick and use it to climb painfully to his feet. He swayed, waving his free arm and shouting incoherently, then staggered up to the gate where the two bored guards stood watching.

  Reaching the gate, Saito leant on his walking stick, grinning, and beckoned drunkenly to them, fumbling in his ragged jacket for a stack of what appeared to be postcards. He hooked the stick over his arm so both ha
nds were free and removed the top photograph from the stack and held it up. ‘Only one hundred yen,’ he slurred, attempting unsuccessfully to push the postcard through the gap between the gate and the steel gatepost. Both guards moved forward to take a closer look at what proved to be a high-definition, colour, full-frontal photograph of a young big-breasted blonde woman with her legs spread, about to insert a large dildo between them.

  ‘Phiff! You ask too much, old man,’ one of the guards laughed, pulling the postcard through the gap, examining it briefly then handing it to his companion with a grin, who in turn examined it closely.

  ‘We’ll give you two hundred yen for the lot,’ the second guard offered, pointing to the stack Saito held.

  Saito frowned drunkenly and, shaking his head in exaggerated denial, quickly returned the remaining postcards to the inside pocket of his ragged jacket, grabbing the walking stick just in time to avoid losing his balance. He brought his forefinger up and waved it reprovingly at them, then held it still. ‘No . . . no . . . one . . . (hic) only one, one hundred yen!’ he stammered. ‘Look, very good gaijin fucking! Very dirty picture!’ He propped the walking stick against his leg and once again withdrew the stack from his inside pocket and removed the top one, holding it up against the wire. It showed two young blondes, sexually entwined in the ‘69’ position. It would have been obvious to the two guards that at one hundred yen each the high-quality photographs were a veritable bargain.

  ‘Let’s see them all, Grandpa,’ the first guard demanded, indicating that he should pass them through the small gap between the gate and the fencepost.

  Saito cackled merrily, shaking his head, indicating that even though he was inebriated he wasn’t a complete fool. Then, apparently forgetting he wasn’t holding the walking stick, he took a step backwards and lost his balance, flinging the cards in an arc as he attempted to snatch the walking stick. Further off balance, he tottered then fell, striking the back of his head against the roadway, the pornographic cards spread around his motionless body, the walking stick somehow ending up between his sprawled legs.

  ‘Shit! He’s knocked himself out!’ the first guard said.

  ‘Good! Open up!’ the second guard said gleefully. ‘The photos are ours!’

  The first guard reached into his trouser pocket for the padlock key and moments later the gate swung open. Reaching down they quickly gathered up the photographs. The second guard, seemingly the more dominant, took those his companion held out and placed them all in the back pocket of his trousers. ‘We’ll share them out later,’ he decided. ‘Show them to your girlfriend – they’ll make her horny. Women deny it, but they love hard porn.’

  The first guard grinned. ‘I don’t think so; not mine anyway.’ He pointed to Saito. ‘What about him? We’ve got someone coming in less than an hour to collect the foreign bitch.’ He paused, then grinning lewdly added, ‘Now that’s a piece of quality tail. I wouldn’t mind having a piece of her!’

  ‘Their slits are too big; you wouldn’t touch the sides!’ the second guard laughed, then pointed. ‘There’s a deep ditch across the road. Here, give me a hand. We’ll dump him.’ He unslung his submachine-gun. ‘You’re right, the six of us should have gang-raped her. These foreign bitches are hot. They can’t get enough cock.’ He placed his automatic weapon against the gatepost.

  The first guard did the same. ‘I thought you said gaijin pussies were too big for us.’

  ‘For your cock, not mine! We’d let you go first while it’s still tight,’ he teased.

  ‘Shouldn’t we kill him, smash his head in? It will look like he did it when he fell; an accident.’

  ‘Nah, poor bastard’s harmless. When he wakes up he won’t remember a thing.’

  ‘Fuck me dead! What’s this? Another drunk?’ the first guard exclaimed, peering down the road.

  In an instant, the kendo grand master leapt to his feet without using his hands in an astonishing feat of athleticism, and in the same smooth movement drove the end of the walking stick hard into the throat of the first guard, instantly collapsing his larynx. Before he’d hit the ground the stick swung in a two-handed backward arc to drive with enormous force up under the ribcage of the second guard, rupturing his aorta and killing him instantly. The first guard, his legs kicking wildly, lay clutching his throat with both hands, choking on his own blood. The kendo grand master quickly dispatched him with a single blow to the side of the head.

  Fuchida-san arrived, panting. He was carrying a katana still in its sheath in one hand and a short-barrel Remington shotgun in the other. ‘Good! Good work,’ he gasped. ‘I thought you were a goner. Seeing you lying on the ground with the two of them hovering above you I was sure it was all over, my honourable friend,’ he panted. ‘I was about to fire when you jumped to your feet. I’ve seen you before but never witnessed anything quite as good!’ He laughed. ‘You should audition for the opera. Your drunk act would have fooled me completely.’

  Saito smiled. ‘Your shotgun would have truly ruined our surprise and at that distance probably missed, Oyabun,’ he said softly.

  ‘Without you, Saito-san, there would be no surprise, we could not have done this without your skill,’ Fuchida-san countered, his voice edged with sentiment.

  Saito, ignoring the compliment, pointed. ‘There is a ditch over there. Help me dump this scum.’

  Together they carried the two dead men across the road to the ditch and dumped them into it, where they disappeared under the tangle of weeds.

  Returning to the gate Fuchida pointed to the two submachine-guns leaning against the gatepost. ‘Do you want to go in with one of those, Saito-san?’

  Saito drew back, pointing to the katana Fuchida had brought and placed against the fence. ‘It is an old and trusted friend and much my preferred companion in a fight,’ the master swordsman replied. ‘You take one to cover me; that shotgun looks too dangerous.’

  ‘Those things are for wakagashira; boys’ toys. They see them all the time in American movies – dat-dat-dat-dat – they all think they’re Al Capone!’

  They dumped the two submachine-guns into the ditch. No more than fifteen minutes had passed since they’d landed in the helicopter.

  ‘Let me go in alone,’ Saito pleaded. ‘It will be quieter.’

  ‘No way!’ Fuchida cried. ‘I’m coming with you, old friend. You’ve already made my heart stop once today. Besides, we don’t know how many of the bastards are in there.’

  ‘There are only four, it will not be too difficult.’

  ‘Four? How do you know?’

  Saito pointed at the ditch. ‘They said so.’

  ‘Good. It’s been a while since I did something like this; I feel young again.’

  Saito slung the katana over his back. ‘I go in first, Oyabun. Follow, but not too closely. I don’t want to swing the sword and end up decapitating you with the follow-through, or removing your balls if it’s a low strike.’

  They proceeded towards the warehouse and entered through an open loading dock, then shortly after located a cement stairway that proved to be perfect for a near silent approach. At the top they stopped to listen, hearing nothing at first. Saito signalled to Fuchida, three steps below him, not to move. Then through a half-open door they heard voices, someone grumbling that they couldn’t wait to get out. Another voice replied, ‘Soon. The guy coming to get her should be here in half an hour.’

  ‘Not a moment too soon,’ the first bloke replied. ‘It’s been too fucking long. I have to get back to my job. They said it was only going to be a few hours. For all I know I’ve been fired.’

  One of the guards coughed, and began describing what he was going to have for dinner once they’d left. They were obviously perfectly relaxed in the knowledge that there were two of their comrades on guard at the gate.

  Saito signalled for Fuchida to follow and, drawing his sword, erupted into the room. The two men seated at the end of a table in the centre of the room with their backs to the door were seemingly killed in a mome
nt. In a single continuous slash the blade decapitated the first and cut into the back of the neck of the second guard so deeply that his head dropped forward, held only by the tendons in his neck as his spinal cord was severed. Neither body moved at first, then both slowly slumped forward onto the table.

  Saito, like a huge bird of prey, seemed to expand to fill the room. He killed the third guard seated further down with a horizontal strike from the left. The fourth guard, on the far left of the table and nearest to Anna, was beyond the immediate reach of the katana. He had just enough time to grab his weapon and step towards Anna, intending to use her as a shield. The explosion of Fuchida’s shotgun filled the room, blowing away half the guard’s chest and spattering Anna with blood and bone. The entire action had taken less than fifteen seconds.

  ‘Thanks for leaving one of them for me,’ Fuchida laughed. Then he seemed to notice Anna for the first time. She was backed into a corner, her hands covering her mouth and her entire body shaking uncontrollably on the dirty mattress. She hadn’t uttered a sound.

  Fuchida strode forward, stepping over the corpse of the fourth guard, being careful not to slip on the blood-covered linoleum. ‘Can you stand, Anna-san?’ he barked, realising there was no time for sympathy. ‘Now, get up! Go on, up on your feet!’ he commanded.

  Anna somehow managed to get to her feet, her knees shaking uncontrollably. Saito came over and between the two men they half carried her from the room and down the stairs. Once outside the yakuza explained, ‘We are here to free you, Anna-san. The honourable Duncan-san is waiting to welcome you! But you must walk at once! It is only a few minutes to the helicopter. This is no time to play the tearful little lady!’

  Something must have penetrated Anna’s numbed, drug-starved mind, because Fuchida-san forever after held her in high regard for what she did next. ‘Where I come from we say “please”!’ she snapped. ‘Of course I can walk! I don’t need anyone to carry me! And, by the way, I’m not a tearful little lady! Now, will you kindly return and fetch my handbag and shoes!’ she commanded.