The Moving Blade

by Michael Pronko

  “I’m glad he’s helping,” Hiroshi said. “He called and told me.”

  “You answer his calls, but not mine? Just how many apologies do I have to give you?” Jamie brushed her hair back. She looked at Hiroshi, and then at the brick wall.

  Hiroshi tuned in to a solo from Miles, each of his notes falling and spreading like raindrops in still water.

  Jamie looked back at Hiroshi and reached under the table. “I wanted you to have this.” She handed him a thick book wrapped in Japanese washi paper.

  Hiroshi pulled back the thick, pulpy paper. It was titled, simply, “Shunga.” The cover featured a woman in kimono, her smile half-covered with her sleeve while a young man with a topknot pushed his hand deep inside her kimono.

  “I wrote something in the front.”

  Hiroshi opened the front cover. In Japanese characters, it said, “Shogyo Mujo Shoho Muga. Love, Jamie.” It was the same saying Mattson had on his wall, above where Jamie put his ashes: All things must pass and nothing stays the same.

  “Is that your brush work? It’s impressive.”

  “My father taught me calligraphy at the kitchen table, on newspaper, but I haven’t held a brush since I was a girl.”

  “I have something too.” Hiroshi reached in his bag and took out the wood box.

  Jamie smiled as she lifted the bowl out of the box and unwrapped the silk lining. The yellow, pink and dark orange glazes were lined with bright gold where the pieces were sealed together along the cracks.

  “I thought this was lost.”

  “They redo the cracks with gold paste. The craftsman told me repair is just part of the life of the bowl. It marks the event of breaking and becoming whole again.”

  Jamie marveled at the tea bowl and looked up at Hiroshi. “Is this real gold?”

  “Repaired bowls sometimes have greater value.”

  Jamie smiled and turned the bowl in her hands. “This is the bowl I ate breakfast from when I was a little girl. I guess I can’t anymore.”

  “Quite an expensive bowl for a little girl.”

  “Even for a big girl.”

  Hiroshi listened to the jazz playing in the background, Miles Davis, one of the late fifties quintets, he wasn’t sure which one. He would get a stereo and buy CDs of the records he used to have. He left all his records behind when he went to America, not that he could afford many. Or maybe he’d go for vinyl instead, recover what he lost. He wrapped the book back in the soft paper and slipped it into his bag.

  Jamie took his hand. “I was thinking we could stop by and see Shibata. And maybe get some yakitori. I loved that place we went. My treat.”

  “I’ve got a funeral to go to.” Hiroshi squeezed her hand and looked along the row of record covers, reading the colorful, styled titles over the crisp, shadow-heavy photos of John Coltrane, Art Blakey, Sonny Rollins, Lee Morgan, music trapped in time, in faces.

  Jamie let his hand go and leaned back. “All my life one side of me fights with the other. Too open for Japan, too delicate for America. You’d think just once the two sides could—”

  “We’re the same that way,” Hiroshi said.

  “You mean, too much to—”

  Hiroshi touched her hand. “I’ve got to go.”

  “Let me get the coffee.” Jamie snatched the check off the table before he could get it.

  “You’re becoming more Japanese.”

  “I’m becoming more myself.”

  Hiroshi waited while she paid and they climbed the steep stairs to the busy sidewalk outside.

  Jamie turned to face Hiroshi. “I’m going on a pilgrimage. Two, in fact, to Shikoku and Chichibu. For my father.”

  “That sounds wonderful.”

  “When I get back, maybe we could—”

  “Get together. Yes.”

  They stood there, both looking past each other at the Shinjuku crowds passing by.

  “Do you have to move the bones at the funeral you’re going to?”

  “That part’s finished already. Today’s just the memorial service.”

  Chapter 49

  Hiroshi and Sakaguchi joined the long line of people waiting to pay their respects at Yushima Seido Temple. Higa’s mourners were an odd mix of stiff funeral suits and designer black-on-black, but they stretched along the outer temple wall of stacked flat stone and down the sidewalk to the corner.

  “Look at all these people,” Sakaguchi chuckled.

  “I thought he was a loner,” Hiroshi whispered.

  Inside the courtyard, the mourners clustered around a large circular urn with a thick forest of incense smoldering to ash in the fine sand. A gentle wind dispersed the smoke in light grey wisps that rose up past the temple’s black pillars. Along the green copper roof, statues of squat dragon-fish and burly lion-cats glared and snarled at the milling crowd of humans below.

  On the altar of a glass-fronted building to the right, nestled between pyramids of mikan oranges, mochi rice cakes, and large sake bottles, sat an old photo of a handsome, energetic young man who looked nothing like the sallow, angry man Sakaguchi had met in the Endo Brothers Bookstore. But it was him.

  Hiroshi and Sakaguchi waited patiently in line for the two cushions on which everyone kneeled to pray for the departed spirit of the writer, activist and—according to some website posts—martyr, Higa. When they got to the front of the line, Hiroshi and Sakaguchi knelt side-by-side on the cushions, put their hands together and offered a prayer. They both groaned in pain getting up.

  In the open area by the urn, Hiroshi saw the Endo twins, Seiichi and Shinichi, and Sakaguchi pulled out Higa’s book, Complacent Japan, as they walked over to them. “It makes a lot of sense what he says in here,” Sakaguchi said to the twins, who bowed in unison. Each wore a black tie, button shirt and suit coat, making them look more alike than before.

  “Are these his readers?” Hiroshi asked, gesturing at the mourners.

  “He sat on a lot of committees, advised NPOs, NGOs,” Seiichi said. “They like to network. Even at funerals.”

  “Especially at funerals,” Shinichi said.

  Sakaguchi nodded at a long horizontal banner hanging between the pillars of the main temple building. In elegantly written characters, it read: Reveal and liberate. Conceal and enslave. “That phrase was in his book!”

  “We thought that would be a nice twist on the usual Buddhist pieties,” Shinichi said. “The priests found it amusing.”

  “It applies to detectives too,” Sakaguchi said.

  The twins talked over each other. “With all this attention, we’re doing full print runs of his older works.”

  “He wouldn’t have known what to do with the money.”

  “We don’t know either.”

  “Saori Ikeda bought us out and made us chief editors.”

  “She told us to publish whatever we like, as long as we make it sting.”

  “Good editorial policy,” Hiroshi said, trying to slow them down. “But, you gave up your bookstore?”

  Shinichi shook his head no. “We expanded. The insurance was enough to remodel. We moved the rare books to safe storage and switched all book sales online. A friend of Iino’s built us a website. Gives us more time for publishing.”

  “We have a website for that now too.” The twins chuckled.

  From around the smoking incense burner in the middle of the temple, Iino walked over with a lively group of nerdy-looking twenty-somethings. Two of them started talking to the Endo brothers about a publishing possibility and Iino handed a copy of The Silkworm Weekly magazine to Hiroshi and Sakaguchi.

  “Here’s the first exposé. Our blogs are getting more hits than ever. The photos of the base entrances went viral. The Okinawans had cameras in place, too, so we combined them all. The government shut down our cameras, but the footage had already circulated, so it’ll be out there forever.”

  “People won’t want to buy the book if the info’s all online, will they?” Sakaguchi asked.

  “Just the opposite. They don’t
want to buy the book unless it’s online.” Iino shook his head with amusement. “Next up is an exposé on consumer finance companies. Guess what family owns one of the biggest loan companies in Japan? And guess which Diet member refused to support a cap on the 25% interest rate for personal loans?”

  Hiroshi laughed. “I thought she looked like a loan shark.”

  “Rumor has it, Shinobu Katsumura’s resigning.” Iino tip-tapped his laptop bag and rejoined his colleagues.

  The detectives looked around the bustling temple courtyard. Higa’s spirit hovered over the proceedings, and Mattson’s too.

  “Where’s lunch?” Hiroshi asked Sakaguchi.

  “A ramen place in Jinbocho. Takamatsu will meet us there. Akiko, too. Feel like a walk?”

  “Might do our aching bodies some good.”

  Another wave of mourners made it impossible to exit at the main gate, so they headed through the still-billowing incense smoke towards the side gate. Hiroshi stopped in front of a moss-covered statue of the wrathful deity, Fudo Myo-o. The solid stone hands held a sword upright for cutting through ignorance and a curling rope for binding up evil. Elaborate flames, the stone worn by weather, crackled behind his fierce countenance. Suzuki had told him that a sword always had a history, but held no secrets. Hiroshi bowed to the deity before hurrying through the gate to catch up with Sakaguchi.

  The two detectives continued down a street of musical instrument stores, which turned into an area of splashy-colored snowboarding shops pumping loud music into the street. At the bottom of the hill, a quiet row of bookshops with people standing and reading led left toward the Endo brothers’ store. The detectives turned the other way towards the Yasukuni Jinja Shrine, Kitanomaru Park and the Budokan martial arts stadium. An earthen rise lined by craggy-barked cherry trees, their willowy branches heavy with new green, swayed over the moat below.

  Sakaguchi said, “In his book, Higa wrote that people are still dying from World War II.”

  “Maybe Higa and Mattson were the last,” Hiroshi said, hoping that was true, knowing it wasn’t. They turned onto a small street. Takamatsu was standing on the corner of an intersection smoking a cigarette at a designated smoking area. Takamatsu waved them over to join the line for a ramen noodle shop where Akiko was holding their place.

  “Look at this line.” Sakaguchi shook his head with impatience.

  “Means it’s good,” Akiko said.

  As the line plodded closer, Takamatsu blathered on about how much money he was making from photographing people having affairs. He said love hotel receipts were the easiest thing to get and phone records not much harder.

  Inside, they bought tickets at the vending machine and sat down with Sakaguchi on the outside. Takamatsu hung his coat on a wall hook and slipped a paper bib on to protect his shirt and tie from splashes of oil or broth.

  Hiroshi faced the kitchen, and watched the main chef shake the noodles free of water with fierce strokes of his arm before easing the noodles into the broth in two neat folds. The prep chef layered beansprouts and bamboo shoots on thin slices of roast pork and fanned three sheets of black seaweed along the rim of each bowl. The waitress, a pretty young woman with an earful of piercings and a head scarf carried the bowls over one by one.

  They cracked their chopsticks apart and rubbed the splinters off, took up their Chinese-style spoons and entered a meditative, culinary silence. The next fifteen minutes passed without conversation—just four people, four bowls, a pitcher of iced water, lip-smacking slurps and the drone of the television on a high corner shelf. The other customers kept their own silences.

  When he got to the bottom of his bowl, Takamatsu removed his paper bib. “I’m off suspension in April. It’ll be a pay cut.”

  “Don’t come back. Open your own investigative service,” Hiroshi suggested, sarcasm thick in his voice.

  “Don’t encourage him,” Sakaguchi said.

  Hiroshi pulled out the copy of The Silkworm Weekly.

  Akiko put down her chopsticks and took it from him. She held up the grainy photos of trucks coming out of Yokosuka, traveling down the highway, delivering their poisonous loads to the Okinawan bases. “Wow! Right into the base!”

  “Unlike us. We were stopped at the gate.”

  “Unfortunately, transporting radioactive debris is not a crime,” Takamatsu said.

  “In Japan, it doesn’t have to be a crime. It only has to be disgusting,” Akiko said, flipping the pages.

  The waitress came over and Sakaguchi nodded for a refill of broth and poured his rice in, mushing and mixing the grain with his spoon.

  Hiroshi drank a glass of ice water. “I still can’t believe Gladius got away.”

  Takamatsu laughed. “Don’t get obsessive. Worst thing you can do in this line of work.”

  “If I wasn’t obsessive, I would never have taken this job in the first place. All accountants are obsessive.”

  “Did those guys who attacked Jamie roll over on Trey?” Takamatsu asked Sakaguchi.

  Sakaguchi poured and drained another glass of ice water and held up the pitcher for a refill. The waitress came over with a new, full pitcher. “The ones on the train haven’t said a thing. And I made sure they had every incentive to talk.”

  “The gang’s forcing them to take the rap?” Hiroshi asked.

  Sakaguchi and Takamatsu looked at him as if he was naive.

  Sakaguchi wiped the sweat off his face. “The two Koreans confessed to killing the thief, Sato, in Golden Gai. Who knows if they really did it or not, but the prosecutor wouldn’t let them take the rap for Mattson or Higa. Not yet, anyway. The prosecutor convinced the chief to wait for the real murderer.”

  “The tanto sword we took from Gladius was clean as a whistle,” Hiroshi said.

  Takamatsu shook his head. “He certainly waltzed out of the airport.”

  “He won’t waltz back in,” Sakaguchi said. “Or not again. Or not so easily again.”

  Takamatsu frowned, wondering what more he didn’t know.

  “The Red Notice from Interpol will catch him somewhere,” Hiroshi said.

  “That’s why they have fifteen days in every sumo tournament. You don’t have to win every day, just more days than everyone else.”

  Hiroshi filled his glass from the pitcher and slurped it down, then got up pulled on his coat. “I have to run.”

  Takamatsu had a smirk on his face. “Going to see Mattson’s daughter?”

  Hiroshi shook his head. “You always think you know where I’m going.”

  Takamatsu looked at him. “You don’t ever seem to know.”

  “Ah, but this time, I do.”

  Chapter 50

  Hiroshi crossed over the thick, Edo-era bridge gate into the huge gardens of Kitanomaru Park, once part of the Imperial Palace. A few people strolled in the first non-wintery day of the year, slowing their pace amid the greenery, talking to each other in the afternoon sun. Past the Budokan, he found a bench near the central fountain and speed-dialed Jim Washington, who had left several messages during lunch.

  “Hiroshi? Where have you been? I wanted to let you know we got a hit on Gladius. He was detained in Spain.”

  “They won’t send him here, will they?”

  “Doubtful, but even if he gets out of this, he’ll be on the persona non grata list for all EU countries. He won’t be able to set foot anywhere else without the possibility of being detained.”

  “I guess that’s a first step.”

  “Need a first before you can have a second. You know, one of our undercover guys was killed in Macau last year. The killer was high up in some agency or other.”

  “You got him and he did time?”

  “No, but we made his life a living hell,” Washington said, chuckling. “He was yanked off planes, held in custody, detained in airports, put on watch lists. We froze his bank accounts.”

  “Any way to get a hold of Gladius’ accounts?”

  “I can look into that. Or you can, once you’re here at Interpol.�
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  “I’d still rather see him in jail.”

  “We can work on getting his security clearance revoked. We do whatever we can, however we can.”

  “Justice delayed is—”

  “Justice still. That’s what I like about you, Hiroshi, not easily satisfied. You’ll be a great asset to our team here. You ready for the interview?”

  “Actually, I’m sorry, but I won’t be coming to the interview.”

  “But we’re all set. The Asian bureau chief is here. What happened?”

  Hiroshi frowned. “Just, well, things have changed.”

  “We’re locked in pretty tight time-wise, but we can reschedule.”

  “It’s not that. It’s that I’ve decided to stay where I am for now.”

  “Listen, I’ll make some excuse for you. We can do the interview next time he’s in town. I’m not going to let your cold feet now ruin your chances later.”

  “With so much to take care of—”

  “You’re just tired from that case. It sounded rough. Take some time. We’ll talk again.”

  “Thanks, Jim, but—”

  “We need you and you’ll have far greater impact here, more reach, more resources. Take a little more time. We can wait.” Washington clicked off before Hiroshi could answer.

  Hiroshi put his cellphone away. Washington was a good man, and he would talk to him again soon. He felt bad to say no. It wasn’t something he’d done very often.

  Hiroshi got up from the bench and followed the dirt path leading to the hill above the moat. The wide sidewalk circled through the park before veering through lush tracts of thick bamboo grass. He walked off the path to a higher ridge where he could see the moat walls, an intricate pattern of tightly set stones that extended around the entire palace grounds.

  These days, the moat was a place for couples to rent boats and row across the tranquil surface of murky, green water. He watched them for a while, amused that so few even knew how to handle a boat, their oars flailing and splashing as they mostly just floated along too happy to even think to take a photo.

  Hiroshi carefully searched each bench before finding her. She sat looking across the moat calmly eating her lunch. Hiroshi sat down on the next bench. He wondered how long it would take her to notice him. She was lost in an afternoon daydream, enjoying the freedom of lunch break. Hiroshi stared at her to draw her attention. Surely, she would look up eventually.