Kamikaze (27 page)

The photo on the other side of the lectern was a shot of the mushroom cloud boiling over Japan as the
Enola Gay
made its sharp bank out of harm’s way. But the black-and-white shot didn’t capture the colors of hell.

What Joe had told his father was the truth: he
was
willing to die for his beliefs. What he wasn’t willing to do, and had done unknowingly, was kill non-combatants for power politics.

Now, confronting that accursed blast, he recalled what Chuck had once said about the Vietnam War.

“Red?”

“Yeah, son?”

“I wonder why it took three decades for America to acknowledge the heroes of the My Lai Massacre? Back
in ’68, when I was fighting in ’Nam, we heard about Lieutenant Calley going berserk at that village, and about how GIs had indiscriminately shot Vietnamese civilians. That was a pivotal point in ending the war. Calley got life in prison—until Nixon made sure he went free.”

“War crimes happen.”

“Sure, but why did we hide the flipside of the coin? What stopped the massacre was a single chopper crew. They flew over the bloodletting as it was under way, landing between those rogue GIs and the terrified villagers. They had to point their chopper guns at their own comrades to stop them killing. Two of them covered the pilot while he confronted the leader of the marauding forces, and that led to the ceasefire order. The crew coaxed some villagers out of a bunker for evacuation, then flew a wounded child to a hospital.”

“They did the right thing, Chuck, and they got medals.”

“In 1998! And only after a letter-writing campaign. It makes you wonder.”

“What brought that on?”

“Retirement,” Chuck said. “That’s the kind of American hero I wish I’d been.”

Now Chuck was dead, and Joe faced the mushroom cloud that was really aimed at Russia.

All those civilians slaughtered or slowly tortured to death through radiation sickness.

How he wished he could take back the bomb.

Joe would give his life to put that genie back in the bottle.

“‘I’ll meet you at Yasukuni Shrine,’” Genjo Tokuda had said during that talk with his son. “That’s the farewell that the kamikaze—and the rest of us too—exchanged before going into battle. ‘A man must live in such a way that he is always prepared to die.’ Confucius teaches us that. ‘Only by reason of having died does one enter into life. The future life is the all-important thing.’ We learn that from Buddhism. Honor means fighting to the bitter end. Surrender equals dishonor. It is only at the moment that he determines to die that a man attains purity. The discipline required of all samurai comes down to a readiness for death. Followers of
bushido
must fight on until every sword is broken and the last arrow is spent. There, my son, is the difference between cowardly Western and honorable Japanese philosophies. The West tells its soldiers how to live. We tell ours how to die.”

For the first time in his wretched life, Kamikaze actually
felt
like a man. What had Dickens written at the end of
A Tale of Two Cities?
“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done. It is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”

His life was a tale of two cities, and he had lived it miserably in the wrong one.

Tokyo.

That’s where he belonged.

Now, as he ducked under the crime-scene tape, Kamikaze focused on his father, who was waiting for him at the Yasukuni Shrine. In his mind, he saw the great bronze
torii
gateway and the broad approach lined with cherry trees, rows of stone lanterns, and statues of national heroes. Almost all of
Japan’s fallen soldiers, sailors, and airmen were registered as
kami
—as gods—at the shrine, an apotheosis that Kamikaze yearned to experience. There, among the guardian spirits of their nation, Genjo Tokuda bowed toward his son.

“I’ll meet you at Yasukuni Shrine,” Kamikaze said to himself as he lit the wick of the Molotov cocktail and began his run at the atomic bomber.

They called them “Judy bombers,” back in the war.

Yokosuka D4Y3 Suisei planes.

Those diving devils that so plagued American warships.

Kamikaze attacks were unlike anything ever experienced in the wars of the Western world. Shintoism had no taboo against suicide. Instead, it was the ethical duty of the kamikaze to “bleed the enemy white” in any way possible.

Of the many Pacific War exhibits in the convention hall, none had the psychological lure of this kamikaze plane. Steps led up to the cockpit of a recreated Judy bomber, where vets could strap themselves in—as Joe was doing now—to relive what it would have been like to embark on a crash dive. The windshield in front was actually a video screen, and the headphones he clamped over both ears provided the sound effects. Joe punched a button and found himself gripped by the white-knuckle dread of a suicide run.

So engrossed was he in this digital fantasy that he missed the real-life attack closing in on him.

“Something’s not right,” DeClercq had said at Special X last night. He was debriefing Jackie on the deaths of Genjo Tokuda and his henchman, the Sushi Chef.

“What, Chief?” she’d asked.

“Every yakuza who flew in from Tokyo is dead, and each played a part in Tokuda’s revenge against your family. The thugs he brought with him were hand-picked to carry out a personal vendetta. Tokuda was retired. Gang power had already passed to the next generation. So what’s to be gained by killing him?”

“You think it was an outsider?”

“Could be the local yakuza. The goons who supplied the guns and the mountain house. Are they sending a message to Tokyo that they want independence?”

“If so, what’s our move?”

“First, I want to be sure we’re not missing something. Could it be that your grandfather is still in danger?”

“The killer didn’t kill me.”

“You’re not the target, Jackie.”

“What would be the motive for killing both the yakuza godfather
and
his wartime enemy?”

“I don’t know. But I want to be sure that the colonel is off the hit list. There’s only one way to determine that. After your granddad gets out of the hospital tomorrow, we offer the killer a chance to strike somewhere that fits Tokuda’s vendetta.”

“Where?”

“A shooting gallery we control.”

So that’s why Red had walked to the far end of the convention hall pier, and why the forensic techs combing
the kamikaze crash scene were really ERT cops, and why Jackie—the moment the hooded intruder exposed his criminal intent by lighting the wick on the gasoline bomb—had reached inside the pocket of her white coveralls and yelled, “Stop! Police!”

Kamikaze heard the shout and knew that this was it. Chances were those forensic techs weren’t armed, but police who were would respond within minutes. By then, he’d have hurled his gasoline bombs at the American colonel. Frying him alive in the cockpit of the mock kamikaze plane was a fitting revenge for the war crime he’d committed against Hiroshima. Then Genjo Tokuda’s son would be worthy to meet his father and the samurai deities at Yasukuni Shrine.

“Banzai!” the attacker bellowed, breaking into a run, his crooked arm ready to throw the flaming bomb.

He never reached his target. There was only one defense to a kamikaze dive, and that was to fill the air with as much flak and shrapnel as you could, in the hope that something would hit the plane before it hit you. Because DeClercq was a tactician, that was his strategy, and every marksman lining the wall to Kamikaze’s side had earned the sharpshooter badge worn above the cuff of the red serge uniform.

Several shots hit the bottles tucked inside the open coat, spewing a mist of gasoline about the charging figure, and the flaming wick on the Molotov cocktail in his hand ignited that halo in a whoosh of hellfire. Unlike his Pacific War counterparts, Kamikaze was dead before he hit the deck.

Who?

The morgue stank of burnt flesh, but unlike those wimpy TV cops who wore face masks, dabbed the skin under their noses with Vicks VapoRub, or dashed out to the john to hurl their Cheerios, the two Mounties toughed it out. If Gill Macbeth, the forensic pathologist, could stomach the smell, then Jackie and Dane wouldn’t shrink from their job either.

“I’ve always wondered,” Gill said, probing the body she’d opened up with a Y incision, “if I’d get one of these.”

“A cross-dresser?” Jackie asked, holding up an evidence bag containing a pair of women’s red panties that had been removed from the man stretched out on the autopsy table.

“I heard a story once,” said Dane, “about a cross-dressing hit man in Japan. A gang war was raging between two yakuza factions. A pair of hoods schemed to go after the rival leader, a gangster named Akasaka or something like that. They hatched a plan to dress one of the hit men up as a woman and have him case the bar the gangster was known to frequent. Before long, the transvestite was popular in the bar, and he began entertaining Akasaka with
his impersonation. One day, the boss walked in with just two bodyguards, so that’s when the assassins struck. The second hit man entered and shot the yakuza boss five times, then took out one of the bodyguards with his last bullet. The cross-dresser knifed the other bodyguard. When I heard the tale, neither had been caught.”

“This is much more than that,” said Gill, pointing one of the tools of her trade at the open abdomen.

The cops peered at the organs she indicated with the blade.

“They don’t match,” said Dane.

The face and hands of the remains were charred black from the flames. The eyebrows were gone, but hair in the hood had been singed or saved in patches. Some of the fabric was burned right into the skin. The unexposed flesh beneath the killer’s clothes had been mostly spared, and Gill had recovered fingerprints from the hand that had gripped the Molotov cocktail.

“I knew something was wrong when I palpated the scrotum,” said Gill. “One of the testicles was missing. When I opened him up, I thought I’d find an undescended testicle in the abdomen. Instead, I found a mass on that side of the body.”

“What sort of mass?” asked Dane.

“The mass you see. That’s an ovary, a fallopian tube, and part of a uterus.”

“The guy’s a hermaphrodite?”

“A chimera, to be exact. In the past, as you know, I’ve had a case of chimeric blood. That’s not uncommon. Twin
embryos will often share a blood supply in the placenta, resulting in stem cells passing from one twin and settling in the bone marrow of the other. About 8 percent of non-identical twins have chimeric blood.”

“But this guy’s the real thing?” Jackie said.

“Yes. But genetically he’s not a guy at all. He-and-she amount to a guy and a gal in one body. What you see before you is literally Dr. Jekyll and
Sister
Hyde.”

Normally, Gill said, a single egg from Mom will join with a single sperm from Dad to produce an embryo that gets half its DNA from each parent. If that embryo splits in the womb, the result will be identical twins with the same DNA. An incomplete split produces Siamese twins. Both identical twins and Siamese twins are always of the same sex.

Non-identical twins result when two different eggs from Mom and two different sperms from Dad join up in the womb. Again, each embryo gets half its DNA from each parent, but the twins look different because each has a unique set of genes. Mom, of course, must be the mother of both twins. But if she had sexual relations with
two
men, each twin could come from an egg fertilized by a different father. In fact, there have been cases where the father of each twin was of a different race.

What we have here, Gill concluded, is the equivalent of Siamese twins from non-identical embryos. Instead of one embryo imperfectly splitting in two, two distinct
embryos fused together as one. A single child was born, but it was made up of two
complete
genetic cell lines—not a half-and-half DNA composition, like the rest of us have. In Greek mythology, a chimera was a monster created from hybrid parts: the head of a lion, the body of a goat, the tail of a serpent. This hermaphrodite is genetically
two
people—a he-and-she composed from the fusion of a boy and a girl.

It looks like a man on the outside.

But a woman hides within.

“Thus the red panties,” deduced Dane.

“Imagine having dual identities,” Jackie said. “One male and one female. What would that do to your mind?”

“Norman Bates in
Psycho,
”
said Dane. “But with a physiological abnormality.”

“I’m no psychiatrist,” Gill added. “But I grasp most of the terms. Intersex condition. Transsexualism. Androgyny. Klinefelter’s syndrome. Gender dysphoria. Sexual-identity crisis. Gender blurs. Gender bends. Gender switches. There’s nothing more complex or unfathomable than sex.”

“If only we knew their background,” said Dane. “I wonder where they were born and raised, and if there were any childhood traumas? Do you think the mother passed them off as a boy or a girl? Could it be that one saw the other as its imaginary twin? Or suffered from a dissociative identity disorder, like Jekyll and Hyde?”

“Why no corrective surgery?” Jackie asked.

“Perhaps it wasn’t available,” said Gill. “And by the time it was, there was no way he-and-she could choose which should live and should die.”

“So both chose life and took turns living it?”

The forensic pathologist shrugged and picked up Roger Yamada’s brain. Gill held out the Japanese diplomat’s mind as if she were Hamlet addressing Yorick’s skull.

“Biology affects psychology in weird ways. We’ll never solve the mystery of who did what in there.”

Dane nodded. “It’s a genetic whodunit.”