Daughter of the Sword (46 page)

I have no inkling how to advise you. My duty as a son bids me to ask you to keep the sword for your own protection. My duty as a soldier would have me ask you to find some way to deliver the sword to the imperial palace. I feel as thin as a sheet of paper, and as frail; I feel I am being torn in two.

I can only suggest that you explain the decision to Hayano-chan and rely on her insight. My bitterest regret is that I did not put greater faith in her myself.

Please give my love to her. I think of her every day, and I miss her terribly. Of course I miss Mother too; whenever my thoughts go to her, I feel as though I am falling headlong down a well, and I need to pull my thoughts away before I fall too far. I miss you as well, Father, and I am so very sorry that I cannot be with you in your days of loss. I cannot imagine how I might make up for my mistakes, but I hope that I can survive this war and return home to do my best to try.

Yours,

Keiji

BOOK NINE

HEISEI ERA, THE YEAR 22

(2010 CE)

71

Saori’s phone was a bust. Yamada had been right about his protégé: the sword’s power was not yet so complete that he had lost all reason. Fuchida had wised up, and HRT found the phone dumped in the backseat of a taxi. “Keep it for prints,” Mariko told the HRT commander over the phone. She rode shotgun in a squad car on its way to the morgue, screaming down a canyon of asphalt and steel and light. Headlights and taillights traced ghost lines in her bleary vision, streetlights flitted by overhead, huge LED displays flashed on every side, and the lights of the squad splashed stroboscopic red over everything. “We know Fuchida’s our guy, but it won’t hurt the prosecutor to have another piece of evidence. And interview the taxi driver. See if he remembers anything.”

“Already on it, Sergeant. He says a long-haired guy stopped him and asked how much it would cost to get to Narita. We’re guessing your suspect dropped the phone on the sly while he had the door open.”

“Probably.”

“I’ve spoken with Narita security already, and I’m sending men—”

“Don’t bother. He’s not flying anywhere. He’s got his hostage; public places aren’t on his agenda. Besides, he’s in an awful hurry to get his ransom by tomorrow; no way he’s leaving the country today.”

“Good point.”

“Find out where Fuchida hailed the cab. The bastard’s got to be hiding somewhere nearby. It’ll be a place a woman could scream without being heard. A good-sized room, I think; I heard him take three or four steps to get to the hostage after he set down the phone.”

“Will do.”

“One more thing. If Fuchida’s in a hurry, maybe it’s because he’s keeping his supplier waiting. Or maybe his supplier’s on his way here as we speak, and Fuchida needs to meet him. I take it back: go ahead and contact Narita. The port authorities too, here and in Yokohama. Tell them to tighten up all cargo checks. They’re looking for cocaine. Focus on foreign carriers and ships out of foreign ports. But keep your team in the area; maybe we’ll get lucky and find where Fuchida’s holed up.”

“We’re on it, Sergeant.”

The HRT commander hung up just as Mariko’s squad pulled into the roundabout in front of the hospital. Mariko thanked the driver, then went inside and down to the morgue.

It was already late; it was likely the family would not come until morning. Mariko felt someone should be there for them, someone who could tell them what had happened to Dr. Yamada. And the morgue was as good a place to sit as any. She had no desire to go home; as badly as she wanted to sleep, dreams of Yamada’s blood and Saori’s squeals were not what she needed right now. Better to drift off in a strange place where she knew she could only sleep lightly. Dreamlessly.

Downstairs she found an old woman in white, wearing huge black Chanel sunglasses. She looked older than Mariko’s grandmother, and she stood facing a window Mariko had seen before. There would be a body on the other side of it, and Mariko wondered whose it was. Yamada’s would not be the only one here; in a city of thirteen million, any given hospital would have any number of corpses to deal with.

But the old woman turned to Mariko and said, “You’re here for him too.”

“What’s that?”

“You’ll have known him as Yamada Yasuo, I think,” said the old woman. “How did you meet him?”

“He was my sensei.…” Mariko said in a fog. “Wait—who are you? How did you get here? He’s only been dead an hour. They can’t have called the next of kin already.”

Mariko was speaking as much to herself as to anyone, and much too quietly for most women this one’s age to hear. But the old woman said, “I saw it. His death, I mean. It makes me so sad. And for his own student to kill him. Tragic.”

Mariko wondered whether she’d fallen asleep. “This is surreal,” she said. “You can’t know any of this. No one here knows any of it yet, and I just got here.”

The old woman looked at her. “My dear, you sound exhausted. You could use a good night’s sleep, I think.”

She was right. But even in its exhausted state Mariko’s mind was still a detective’s mind. Details still beckoned her attention, like the fact that this woman looked straight at her and yet said Mariko
sounded
tired. And the big black sunglasses, still on in a basement room at night.

This woman was blind. Mariko almost said so, but then remembered Yamada-sensei chiding her on his porch when she’d said the same to him. Instead she said, “Who are you?”

“My name is Shoji Hayano. Keiji-san and I have been friends for a long, long time. Since before your parents were born, I think.”

“Why do you call him Keiji-san?”

“Why, that’s his name. Kiyama Keiji. He only changed it to Yamada after the war. You couldn’t get into graduate school with a dishonorable discharge. Not in those days. He had no choice but to change it. And oh, did he feel guilty for it! But I think leaving his name behind let him leave some of his other guilt behind.”

Mariko still felt swamped by surreality. This woman spoke as anime characters spoke. She could have been a witch, or a dragon sitting on a giant mushroom, for that matter. She spoke as if Mariko had
been in the anime all along, privy to the plot and therefore able to follow the bizarre conversation through all its twists and turns.

Mariko dropped herself in a nearby chair; her brain was working too hard for her to exert the effort to stand up as well. Still she collected the details. The chair’s padding was clad in cracking green vinyl, and a metal leg missing its rubber foot scritched against the linoleum floor when her weight hit the seat. Shoji Hayano stood with two fingers resting lightly on the narrow metal ledge that framed the large plate glass window of the morgue’s viewing room. Mariko herself had not yet walked as far as she’d need to in order to see her sensei’s body through that window. She thought about that fact for a second, analyzing her motives—but only for a second.

“Guilt. You said Yamada-sensei felt a lot of guilt. For what?”

“Why, for not destroying the sword when he had the chance, of course. There were other things too. He was not there when his mother died, but I always told him not to feel guilty about that. We must not feel guilty for what we cannot control, dear. You need to learn that lesson too.”

“Lady, you don’t know anything about me.”

Shoji smiled a cute little-old-lady smile. “Child, I see more than you think.”

“Yeah, I’m getting that feeling,” Mariko said. Mariko was good with details, but this woman was something else. She spoke with unnerving familiarity—the same kind that Yamada had so often spoken with, the kind magicians spoke with when they knew which card you’d picked while you were just certain there was no way anyone could know.

“If you don’t mind,” Mariko said, “I’m going to step way out of line and offer to buy you a cup of coffee. I know you and I just met, but I have this feeling there’s a lot for us to talk about. There’ll be a cafeteria someplace upstairs. Would you join me?”

“I’d love to, dear.”

72

The café was nothing special. Old coffee and older muffins, and that antiseptic hospital smell. After a single cup of the stale, bitter coffee, Mariko switched over to green tea, which happened to be what Shoji was drinking.

“Keiji-san’s student will call on you,” Shoji said, her glasses fogging with steam from the tea. “You must offer him twice as much as he asks for.”

“How do you—?” Mariko didn’t even know how to finish the question. How do you know Fuchida will call? How do you know Fuchida will ask for a ransom? How do you suppose I’m going to give him double what he’s asking for when he’s not asking for money? His ransom demand is only a sword; how do you think I’m going to double that?

None of those questions were worth asking, for none of them could be answered. The old woman couldn’t
know
any of the things she’d need to know to answer them. So instead Mariko asked, “Am I right in thinking you’re blind?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Is that how you met Yamada-sensei? You had the same doctor or something?”

Shoji laughed, a thousand crinkles deepening in her cheeks. “Oh, no. I lost my sight when I was a little girl. Keiji-san didn’t lose his until both of us were old and gray.”

Something in the way she said it made Mariko think they’d been more than friends. And not lovers, that was certain; Shoji seemed to think of him like a brother, but one who was both many years older and many years younger. At times she spoke of him with reverence, the kind little children have for their adult siblings. Yet at other times her tone was protective, bordering on paternalistic, as if her vision extended far beyond his. She and Yamada had been close, but not so close that Shoji knew Fuchida’s name; she referred to him only as “Keiji-san’s student.” Yet Yamada and Fuchida had been close too—Mariko was sure of that much; he’d always spoken of Fuchida with deep concern—and so once again Yamada-sensei proved to be an enigma. Who was Shoji to him? Was she as important to him as he so obviously was to her? And if so, why had Mariko never heard of her?

Yet another list of riddles Mariko had no time to solve. She could only address the most pressing question: “What makes you say Yamada’s student will call me?”

“He must,” Shoji said with a shrug. “You can give him what he needs. And he
will
take it from you before the end.”

“This is crazy. You’re talking about him as if all of this has already—”

A vibration from Mariko’s purse cut her off. She unfolded the phone with her short, blunt thumbnail. “Detective Oshiro,” the deep voice said. “You know who this is.”

“Yes, I do.”

“That wasn’t nice of you, conning me into keeping your sister’s phone. I barely got rid of it before all your officers arrived.”

“Sorry about that.”

“You’re lucky your sister is still in one piece. I ought to kill her for what you did.”

He was angry, dangerously so; his quivering voice suggested his body was shaking too. Shoji reached a wrinkled hand across the table and touched Mariko’s fingers. “Offer him the sword,” she whispered.

“You can have the sword,” Mariko said, meaning it. “Just don’t hurt her.”

“Oh, quite the opposite,” said Fuchida. “She’s feeling as fine as can be right now.”

At first Mariko thought Fuchida was insinuating rape. The fantasy of the victim thanking her perp for her earthshaking orgasms fueled the plots of a million
manga
; Mariko saw the books on the trains every day, clutched in the sweating hands of vicarious rapists. But Mariko realized there was nothing lascivious in his tone. Sinister, yes, but not sexual. All at once she made the connection. “You got her high?”

“Hole in one,” Fuchida said. “In her less lucid moments she rambles on and on about how disappointed you’d be. I gather you’ve gone to great lengths to keep her sober.”

Shut up, Mariko wanted to say, but she couldn’t muster the will. She felt as if her heart were plunging down a cold, dark well.

“And your poor mother. What will she think?”

That cold, sinking feeling redoubled. In her ramblings Saori must have spoken of home. Now their mother was a target too. Fuchida had already proved his willingness to send killers into the home of an isolated victim. Mariko’s mother might have been younger than Yamada, but she was far less able to defend herself. Did Fuchida have people outside her house already? The very thought of it left Mariko paralyzed.

Shoji touched her fingers again. “The sword,” she whispered. “Soothe his need for it.”

“I’ll give you the sword,” Mariko said, struggling to speak. “I swear.”

“You’ll do more than that,” Fuchida said. “For starters, you’ll call off your dogs. If I catch even a glimpse of a police officer, I cut your sister’s throat.”

“Okay.”

“Next, you’ll implicate someone else in Yamada’s murder. I don’t care who, just not me.”

“I can’t. I have three officers that place you at the scene at the time of the murder.”

“You’ll do it or your mother’s dead. Your sister says you’re good at your job, Miko-chan. I’m sure you’ll find a way.”

“Okay.”

“Last, you deliver the Inazuma to me by midnight, or you get your sister back in tiny little pieces.”