Daughter of the Sword (18 page)

They were dancing now, eight of them, the others being either on break, drinking with customers, or up in the champagne room. The eight on stage danced in cones of color, the light from the spots seemingly solid with all the cigarette smoke suspended in it. The club was warm with the heat of the Friday night crowd, but not so warm for the girls; Fuchida could see the erect nipples crowning the shadows of their breasts, swaying in the semisolid light.

The bartender nodded to Fuchida as he walked in, already reaching for a bottle of Maker’s Mark. Fuchida threaded through the crowd and up the stairs to the club’s upper deck, where customers rarely came except on their way to the champagne room. The second floor overlooked the first, but it was too far from the stage for most customers’ liking, and the first floor was more than roomy enough.

Naoko, one of the dancers, brought Fuchida his drink. She wore low heels, an electric-blue thong, and a baby-doll T-shirt that read “Nice Claup” in
romaji
. She sat on his lap as he sipped at the whiskey, but only briefly. “I can’t stay,” she said, her lips close to his ear so as not to shout. “My set’s up next.”

He sipped again from his Maker’s Mark and watched the men gawk at her as she made her way through them. They knew better than to touch her. That happened a lot at the Kabukichō clubs, but not here, not even the drunks.

The black faux leather creaked under him as he settled into the booth to watch the clientele. He recognized a group of them. Friday night regulars. They were stockbrokers, he thought, or something like that, anyway. He wasn’t a hundred percent sure what the difference was between a stockbroker and a trader and an investment banker, but whatever these guys were, they were the kind of useless that needed to pay to see a naked pair of tits. They’d be here until the trains started running again at five or six in the morning, laughing at their boss’s jokes, drinking themselves legless just because he said so.

If there was a worse fate for a man, Fuchida didn’t know what it was.

Downstairs, a boy came in from the street. He was skinny as a bamboo pole, maybe twenty or twenty-one. He wore his hair the way they did these days, an hour spent carefully arranging it to look the same as it would right after a good postshower toweling. The kid’s grandfather was tight with Fuchida’s dad, and so the family had made sure the kid had a job. For now he was Fuchida’s errand boy, but the kid was smart, and Fuchida predicted he’d make his way up the ladder.

The boy scanned the club, his eyes probably still adjusting to the dark, and when he spotted Fuchida he scurried up to the upstairs booth. “Boss,” the kid said, “the cops nailed Kaneda.”

Fuchida looked the boy in the eye. “They have him now?”

“Yeah. I hear it was a lady cop who brought him in.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope.”

Stupid fat fucker. “Begging for help, is he?”

“He wants a lawyer, yeah.”

“All right.” Fuchida returned his gaze to the dance floor. “Go
home; get a good night’s sleep. When you wake up, find yourself a good suit. Tone your hair down; make yourself look like a lawyer. Then go see Kaneda and tell him he gets a real attorney when he manages to actually win a fight against an eighty-seven-year-old cripple. Until then, tell him he can put his fat ass on the cot in his cell and sit there until he’s skinny enough to slide between the bars.”

“You got it.”

“Get out of here.”

One of the drunk stockbrokers was waggling his nose in Naoko’s muff. Fuchida had a mind to walk down there and smash a shot glass or two with the guy’s forehead. It wasn’t a matter of being territorial; he just wanted to break something. Four men. Four men against a blind man old enough to remember when Fuji was just a molehill. How could so much have gone so wrong?

Twice now he’d made an attempt on the sword. The first time he’d gone himself, and he would have broken in too if it hadn’t been for the song. It was his beautiful singer with her high, crooning cry, serenading him to fight, to kill, to prove himself to her. He knew better than to indulge her. Give in to her now and only madness could follow—madness, and then death. So he’d sent Kaneda and the others instead. And now this.

He was poised to carve out his place in history, and now the universe conspired to delay him. Becoming the first to own two Inazuma blades was just the first step in creating his legacy. Even that would pale when he parlayed the old man’s sword into the creation of his new empire. He would not compete with the bosses of the Kamaguchi-gumi, but neither would he settle for leading his father’s life. Fuchida had no interest in being the underworld equivalent of those useless drunk stockbrokers. He would not live in thrall. He would take the reins of his own destiny, and to do that all he needed was to get his hands on that sly old bastard’s sword.

His phone rumbled in his pocket. He knew who it was without looking; only one person would call this number at two thirty in the
morning. He walked quickly for the door to the manager’s office and let himself in. The bass still thumped through the door behind him, but quiet was a relative thing in a strip club.

“Mr. Travis,” Fuchida said in English, the
v
giving him trouble. Differentiating
v
from
b
had always eluded him. “How are things in California?”

“I’m sorry?”

The reply came in Japanese, and from a woman. Fuchida looked at the phone. The caller ID said HOSPITAL WEST, followed by a number Fuchida didn’t recognize. “Who is this?” he said.

“My name is Ichikawa Junko,” the woman said. “I am the night nurse in palliative care at St. Luke’s International. Begging your pardon, but I was given this number as an emergency contact for a Fuchida Tatsuya-sama. Have I misdialed?”

Fuchida blinked hard. He wished he’d brought his drink with him. “No. You called the right number.”

“I’m so sorry, sir, but Fuchida-sama has taken a turn for the worse. The file we have for him instructs me to call should anything change in his condition. I’m terribly sorry to be calling so late.”

“Just get to the point, will you?” Fuchida opened one drawer after the next in the manager’s black sheet-steel desk, looking for a tumbler and something to fill it with. “What’s going on with my dad?”

“I’m so sorry, sir, but his breathing has become quite irregular. His oncologist fears he may not survive the night.”

A double beep overrode the nurse’s next obsequious apology. Fuchida looked at the phone’s little screen again. PRIVATE NAME, the caller ID said, and below it, PRIVATE NUMBER. He looked at the phone, almost said something into it, looked at it again. Then he hit the green CALL button and switched to the other line.

“Mr. Travis,” he said.

“Fuchida-san,” the American said, his voice booming and friendly. To Fuchida he sounded like an overeager car salesman. “What’s up? You got my sword?”

Imagined visions flashed in Fuchida’s mind. Kaneda, that useless whale, sitting on a cot in a holding cell. Mas, Tiger, Takeshi—probably all dead. He envisioned them as he would have killed them: Mas with a puncture wound through the center of his enormous forehead; Tiger’s belly fat oozing from a stab wound right through the navel; a slash across the side of Takeshi’s skinny neck, just above the collarbone. “Yeah,” he said in his best American English. “I have it. We can do business now, yes?”

“Hell, yeah. Pretty soon you won’t be the only badass samurai in the biz, huh?”

“You will be badass samurai too. When do you come?”

“The ship’s already en route. You’re sure we got no trouble with the cops?”

“No trouble,” said Fuchida, still searching the manager’s desk. Americans never seemed to be able to understand the role of yakuzas in Japan. All those mafia movies swimming around in their heads gave them weird ideas about police and their ability to interfere with organized crime. Somehow
gaijin
just couldn’t get their heads around the idea that for all intents and purposes yakuzas
were
cops. The
ninkyō dantai
were police departments for those who couldn’t go to the police. It was the same as in
The Godfather
and
Goodfellas
, Fuchida thought, so for the life of him he couldn’t get why Americans had such a hard time understanding that policemen were the farthest thing from the average yakuza’s mind. It would take a death wish
and
a wish for career suicide to make a cop interfere with the clans that kept his whole country from going to shit.

Still the American droned on in his ear. “You’re going need a big crew to handle five million dollars’ worth of merchandise. You know that, right?”

Finally, a fifth of Wild Turkey, the good imported stuff, in a drawer meant for those hanging green file folders. And a set of four glasses nestled in there with it, only a little dusty. He blew one out and filled it. “Do not worry, Mr. Travis.”

“I’m not the one who needs to be worried. All I have to do is plan what I’m going to do with my layover in Hawai‘i. It’s all on you after I jet over there to get my sword. I’ll call you later with the when and where.”

The American hung up, and Fuchida reflexively closed the phone and dropped it into his pocket. It buzzed immediately. Right. The hospital. He drained his glass, pulled the phone out again, and flipped it open. “Yes?”

“Sir, your father,” the night nurse said. “Did you hear what I said? He’s taken a turn—”

“Yes,” Fuchida said. “A turn for the worse. I heard.”

“I think you should come now, sir.” Her tone was equal parts compassion and reprobation.

“I think you should mind your own business,” said Fuchida. “Don’t tell me what I should and shouldn’t do.”

“Begging your pardon, sir. It’s just—”

“I know. A turn for the worse. I’ll be there.”

26

For two days straight Mariko had been in a panic.

Panic didn’t come naturally to Mariko. Her little apartment was orderly, as was her cubicle at the precinct, as was her mind. Usually. Panic made a mess of everything, and Mariko’s coping strategy had always been to arrange everything in order so that panic could never get a toehold.

Because of that, once panic got a grip on her, Mariko didn’t know how to shake it. She felt it like a tight bear hug around the chest. It made her ribs hurt. It made her breath come in short little gasps. And it had been locking down like a boa constrictor for two days running.

She’d filed the missing-persons report. She’d followed up on every unidentified case in every last hospital in greater Tokyo, then in greater Yokohama, asking specifically about unidentified patients with drug-related symptoms. She’d abandoned the hunt for Fuchida Shūzō entirely, choosing instead to read reports on every drug-related arrest or evidence seizure in the prefecture. Doing so violated no small number of departmental regulations. Those reports were none of her business, and she knew that son of a bitch Ko would have her ass in a sling if he ever caught word of it. But she did it anyway. She had to know what happened to Saori.

The triathlete in her wanted to jump in the ocean and swim until she could feel nothing but exhaustion. The cop in her told her that
would kill her; she’d never certified as an EMT, but she’d picked up enough to know that her battered ribs would see her drown if she tried to swim across anything wider than a bathtub. That left the sister in her screaming like a madwoman. She had half a mind to run out to Yamada’s place, grab that sword of his, and start hacking. She wanted to swing the goddamn thing until there was nothing left to chop and no strength left in her arms to chop with.

It drove her crazy, not knowing where Saori was. No one had seen her since she stormed off that night, and now she wasn’t returning calls—not from Mariko, not from their mother, nothing. Mariko felt the way she felt when she couldn’t find her keys, the kind of obsession that wouldn’t let her pay attention to anything else. But this was amplified a hundredfold, leaving her perpetually on the verge of nausea.

And then Bumps called, and Mariko kicked herself for not thinking of him beforehand. Again she risked drawing Ko’s attention when she did a quick search for the Narc guys who were using Bumps to bait other dealers. Then she hitched a ride with the nearest squad and went screaming downtown to the stakeout.

She called the lead on the case along the way, using the cell number she’d lifted from the computer. He arranged to meet her in a sushi bar across the street from the panel truck he was using to stage his surveillance. They didn’t bother exchanging descriptions; every cop in the precinct recognized Tokyo’s only female detective.

As such, Mariko was surprised to see a familiar face in the sushi bar. “Well, if it isn’t the giant-slayer,” said the tall cop she’d crossed paths with on the night of the attack at Yamada’s house. “Name’s Ino. Nice work the other night hauling in that beached whale.”

“Thanks.”

“No, seriously. I’ve never seen a perp so big that you couldn’t cuff him. Me and the guys were wondering how you even got him into a squad car.”

“Thanks. Where’s Bumps?”

Ino nodded toward the window, which overlooked a sort of urban
caldera. A small plaza stood surrounded by steep walls of steel and glass, concrete and neon, as if the city had erupted all around it and left this one little lowland behind. A one-way street cut through the plaza, though even with no traffic this could never have been a quiet place; the first few floors of every building were jammed full of Starbucks and McDonald’s, Mos Burger and CoCo Ichibanya, karaoke bars and Hello Kitty stores. But even with its thousand shoppers milling around like ants, this place was as serene as Tokyo got. In the center of the plaza there were even trees, short, fat palms sprouting out of a short, fat planter, surrounded by benches and looking like the spiky green hair of a creature from Dr. Seuss.

Mariko saw Bumps Ryota marching back and forth past the palms like a caged animal. He paced in that strange jittery meth-head way, looking as if he might blow away at any minute. “He’s alone,” said Ino. “The buyer isn’t supposed to be here for another hour, but still, I’d appreciate it if you’d make it fast.”