Daughter of the Sword (13 page)

HEISEI ERA, THE YEAR 22

(2010 CE)

21

As he crossed the waiting room, Fuchida Shūzō wondered what everyone else there was thinking about. All the faces were impassive, downcast. It was dinnertime for these people. Fuchida had only just woken a few hours earlier—like all of nature’s deadliest predators, he was a nocturnal creature—but most of the visitors in the waiting room were accustomed to being home at this hour or else still at work, enslaved by the impossible hours of the
sarariman
. It was not an especially active time for acute care, and only a dozen or so sat on the powder-blue pleather couches. All of these people waited on a loved one, or else waited to receive attention themselves. Which ones were thinking about death? Which ones chided themselves for their own stupidity? Dog bites, falls from ladders, unexpected allergic reactions—most of the injuries here were foreseeable, avoidable, and nonlethal. Stupidity. But then there were the ones that required paperwork to release remains to the morgue. Which ones were they?

Fuchida could not tell, nor was he certain why he could not tell. Was it the unflappable demeanor the Japanese were famous for the world over? Or had he so little compassion that he could not tell the mildly irritated from the panic-stricken?

Fuchida felt neither irritation nor panic. He’d felt both in the past, when the diagnosis had first come through, but now coming here was
scarcely different from going to the post office or collecting protection money. It was just something he did.

His only feeling was a vague sense of something missing. It bothered him like a song stuck in his head that he couldn’t place and couldn’t shake. He felt this way often when he was without his beautiful singer, but even a yakuza couldn’t get away with carrying a sword through the halls of a hospital. Now that he thought about it, he did feel a niggling irritation too, not at having to come to the hospital but at being deterred from hunting down the Inazuma blade he’d been seeking for all these years. Time was growing short. It had never been in the cards for him to hold on to the second Inazuma for long. He hadn’t understood that before, but it was clear to him now. For fifteen years he’d thought to make himself the first man in history to own two Inazumas, but now he understood that he could parlay the second sword into something greater, something too valuable for him to consider keeping the weapon for himself. Yes, he would be the first to hold two Inazumas, but only briefly—just long enough to seize the reins of his own destiny. But if he did not acquire the second blade soon, the only option left to him would be to sell his beautiful singer, and that he could not abide. Better to be a mere courier for the second Inazuma than to part with his beloved.

Fuchida walked across the faded blue carpet of the waiting room, his path already worn gray by thousands of prior patients, and jabbed the elevator button with his thumb. When the elevator came, he pressed the button for the tenth floor, then spent the ride examining his distorted reflection in the polished steel walls. He wore his black suit and white shirt again, a bolo tie today, his hair tied back in a tail. Would someone say he looked sad? Anxious? Bored? Fuchida couldn’t tell. He just looked like himself.

He got out on the hospice care floor and went to the room he always went to. His father was watching television. The volume was low—whatever else might be afflicting him, the old man’s hearing was still as sharp as a wolf’s—and Fuchida didn’t recognize the program.
Some show about movie stars. His father lay under a dark blue blanket and pale blue sheets. His hospital gown was also light blue, and he huddled in an extra blanket wrapped about his shoulders and chest. A thin clear plastic tube was taped under his nose to supply oxygen.

“Hello, Dad.”

“Shūzō-kun. Come on in. Sit.”

His father muted the television, and they talked about the usual. “You ought to come by for breakfast sometime,” the elder Fuchida said. “The morning shift’s got a nurse with an ass like a ripe peach.”

“She should let you chew on it. They’re not feeding you enough, Dad.”

“They feed me plenty. I just can’t keep anything down. How’s business?”

Fuchida bunched his lips, nodding. “Fine. Looking better all the time.”

“You move those DVD players we talked about?”

“There’s no money in electronics, Dad.”

His father coughed, a hacking cough wet with phlegm and displeasure. “Plenty of money in it,” he said, raising a fist to his lips. There was another plastic tube running down his forearm, its end concealed by the white tape that held it to the back of his hand. “Plenty. Thought I taught you better than to get greedy like that.”

“The market’s different now. The way you used to run things isn’t enough anymore.”

Another cough from the old man. “Then you ought to rethink what you mean by ‘enough.’”

Fuchida closed his eyes for a moment, the better to keep himself from rolling them.

“You think I’m out of touch,” his father said. “Obsolete,
neh
? Well, I think you’re acting like some woman’s got you by the short-and-curlies. Making you spend money you don’t have. Making you take risks you know you shouldn’t take. The old way’s the old way for a reason, son. Your grandfather made his name with it and so did I.”

Fuchida looked at the floor this time to keep his father from seeing his face. They’d made the Fuchida name known, all right. Every cop and every yakuza knew the Fuchidas served the Kamaguchi-gumi. Street muscle. Movers of anything stolen. Hirelings, not leaders. The Fuchidas had territory, even good territory, but they didn’t have an empire.

“Dad, I’ve got everything under control. Honestly.”

“I’ll bet. You want to make a big name for yourself in the
ninkyō dantai
, you do it my way. Otherwise you just get to be a big name with the police.”

“Is this something you want to talk about so openly?”

His father laughed, coughed, laughed again. “See? These risks you’re taking, whatever they are, they’ve got you looking over your shoulder. That ought to tell you something, son.” Another cough. “We’ve done things our way for a long, long time. Cops know it, business knows it, and we do our thing anyway. Because we have a code and we stick by it.”

A cough from deep in the diaphragm left the old man breathless for a moment. A fleck of spittle on his lip drew attention to the fact that his skin had become as dry as paper. At last he said, “You young bucks today, you watch too many movies. You think the real money’s in drugs. But the code, it’s not just ours; the cops hold by it too. We don’t sell the hard shit, and they look the other way if we sell a little speed. And why shouldn’t they? Those damn dopeheads end up killing themselves. Look at the Americans, son: shooting each other day and night over that shit.”

“Dad, speed’s half the business these days.”

“
Neh?
And look where it got us. In my day shakedown money was enough. You wanted extra money, you’d steal something and sell it. Did I ever tell you about the time I sold that fire department their own trucks?”

“Yes, Dad.”

He laughed a rasping laugh. “They even thanked me for cutting them
a good price. That was the power we had. But these days…” He snorted. “You kids. I never met a one who could sell speed without using it himself. You start using, now you’ve got the bosses looking in on you. Maybe they start wondering if you’re worth the risk. Then one day you wake up wondering why you can’t breathe with all this concrete filling your lungs. Listen to me, son. Break the code, people start paying attention. Stick to it, you make as much money as you want to make.”

Not as much as
I
want to make, Fuchida thought. His father was right: he was breaking the rules; he was taking risks. But there was a new order now. The old guard lived in a world defined by Japan’s borders. Now the borders were found only at the edges of cell phone coverage. The corporate world had been the first to see that, and the result was record profits. There was no reason the
ninkyō dantai
couldn’t follow. There was a new virtue, one the old guard never thought to honor: ambition. They lived with limits on how much a person could make without taking from everyone else. Now the sky was the limit.

“You’re thinking it’s a new age,
neh
? You’re thinking a man can aspire to higher things these days.”

Fuchida looked up at his father. The old man’s ability to read people was uncanny—it bordered on telepathy, in fact, and Fuchida wondered how he did it. Was that the real cause behind his rise to power? His ability to read people and then to steer them, cajole them, get from them what he wanted—it was an awe-inspiring gift.

And his father wasn’t through using it. “Let me tell you something about aspiration, Shūzō-kun. For those ordinary folks, it’ll get them anywhere. For a yakuza, it’ll only get you killed. See, the ones up top, they don’t see aspirations; they see insurrections. Don’t aim for the moon, son. Aim for a nice condo in Akihabara and regular pussy.”

It’s not up to me, Fuchida wanted to say. My sights are set higher than yours. I’m hardwired that way, you’re not, and that’s all there is to it. But instead he said, “You’re right.”

“Ahh, you don’t buy that. You’re saying that to shut me up.”

Again with the mind reading. Fuchida could lie to anyone, even to a polygraph, but he’d never been able to lie to his father. “All right, Dad. I’ll try to see it your way. I will.”

“
Neh?
There’s a good boy.” A wrinkled hand with yellow nails found the TV remote and turned the sound back on. “This here’s a good show. You ought to see the girls they bring out on this one.”

Fuchida stayed until dinner came around, and after he’d seen his father eat enough, he excused himself.

Walking down the sterile corridor, antiseptic smells assaulting his nose, he wondered: A man can’t help his ambitions, can he? Controlling desire was one thing. Controlling fear was another. Fuchida had mastered both of those. But ambition was not the same as desire, was it? Ambition governed the upper limits of desire. It called for planning, not gluttony. And in Fuchida’s experience, ambition was inborn. Some people sought to lead. Most did not. Some people sought to star on television, or show in art museums, or become prime minister. Everyone
said
they wanted such things, but only a few were born with the ambition to accomplish them. And how could anyone change what was innate?

Besides, Fuchida wasn’t looking to upset the balance of power. Usurping leadership of the Kamaguchi-gumi was the farthest thing from his mind. He only wanted to follow his own path, not a path chosen by some
kaichō
from a more powerful clan. Taking the second Inazuma would be his first step on the road to creating a new power, an empire all his own.

All the pieces were already in place. He needed only to kill the old man and claim the sword. He could do it now, without his beautiful singer—just drive over there, break in, take the sword. But even blind, the old man was dangerous with a blade, and ever since Fuchida had started sleeping with his beautiful singer, he had no taste for carrying a pistol or a knife. That old house was full of swords, and the blind old man would have the advantage in the dark.

And there was the other thing too: there was a time when they’d been friends, he and the old man. Fuchida had been forced to kill a friend before. Endo, the kid’s name was. Fuchida had been little more than a kid himself. The order had come from Kamaguchi Ryusuke himself, no more than a piss-ant
wakashū
at the time, but he was a Kamaguchi all the same, and a Fuchida had to obey. Endo had stolen from the family, and Fuchida strangled him for it. He remembered how surprised he’d been to learn how long it took to kill someone that way. He didn’t get the same high from killing Endo as he did from a stranger, and ever since, Fuchida had been careful about getting too close to people.

No, it was too risky to go kill the old man himself. Fuchida looked at his watch. Too late to set up a hit tonight. All the guys he would have called would be halfway drunk by now, and he wanted them sharp. Fuchida felt a spike of irritation and willed it away. He wanted the sword, but he could be patient. A day wasn’t too much to wait. Out of respect for the friendship, he thought, and gave himself an approving nod. A day wasn’t too long to wait to murder a former friend.

22

Standing on the sidewalk in front of her mother’s apartment building, Mariko felt she was preparing to enter a boxing ring. No one else would have seen signs of an impending altercation. The building was as clean as if the developer had just cut the ribbon that morning. So was every other building on the block. Even the streets and sidewalks were immaculate. There was nothing ominous about the spotless glass or polished steel of the building’s revolving door. Everything Mariko could see was as clean and sterile as a scalpel.

She knew these buildings concealed darker truths. In her first year on the force she had worked the midnight-to-eight shift, the hours when a cop only deals with bad people doing bad things. She had knocked on hundreds of doors in buildings like this, called on scene not by the victim but by her neighbors when the violence got loud enough that they had no choice but to call. In Japan it took a lot to cross that line.

Back when her father got his promotion and moved the family to Illinois, they’d lived in a big house on a big lot, and the man next door used to beat the hell out of his wife every two weeks. Every payday he’d get shitfaced and come home surly, and all the neighbors would pretend not to hear the doors slamming and the coffee cups being hurled against the walls. They wouldn’t call the police until the sounds
were human. It got so bad that even the Oshiros would call, but that had taken some getting used to. Interfering in other people’s private lives wasn’t in keeping with the Japanese spirit. The flinch response to sue, to call a cop—that was an American thing, and that too had taken getting used to.