Disciple of the Wind (40 page)

“You don’t understand,” Shoji said. “A hundred and thirty-nine dead, and still my vision has not yet come to pass. I see a number, Mariko-san. 1304. I don’t know what it means, but I know it’s awful. A hundred and thirty-nine dead already, and I can only think, it’s not so bad yet. It’s going to get so much worse.”

31

T
here was no consoling Shoji after that. Mariko coaxed an invitation out of her to spend the night, just so Shoji wouldn’t be alone. Mariko needed the company too; she was wrestling with her own fair share of guilt. She once had the chance to shoot Joko Daishi in self-defense but she’d chickened out. Furukawa offered her a second shot at him and she turned him down. There would not be a third, because Joko Daishi wasn’t just a lunatic, cultist, or terrorist anymore; he was a good friend’s son. Regardless of whether he deserved to die, killing him was out of the question.

She knew she couldn’t blame herself for another person’s behavior. Saori had taught her that. The only sane way to deal with addiction was to hold the addict accountable. Even so, there was no escaping that niggling thought that maybe, just maybe, if Mariko had somehow figured out the right thing to say, she could have kept her sister from using. It was pure self-abuse. Mariko knew that. She could beat herself up all night and it wouldn’t change the fact that Saori had damn near killed herself using meth. By the same token, Joko Daishi wasn’t finished with his killing spree. It wasn’t Mariko’s fault, but she couldn’t help blaming herself.

She hadn’t brought anything out to Machida except her purse, so to stay the night she had to run out and pick up a couple of necessities. On her way to the stores, she took care of some phone calls. First was Saori, to invite her to come out to Machida the next day. Shoji enjoyed
her company too, and it had been a while since the fabulous Oshiro sisters had gotten together. Then a call to her mom, to break the news about her suspension. Her mom was a lousy liar; she feigned sympathy but Mariko could hear the relief in her voice. A suspended cop was unlikely to get shot or stabbed or any of the other things that happened on the syndicated American police dramas her mother followed so masochistically.

The next call was to Han, who didn’t pick up, so Mariko left a message asking for a Terminal 2 update. She knew she’d have to tell him about her suspension too—preferably over a couple of beers, so she invited him to go out the following night. Then, finally, came the call she didn’t want to make.

“I wondered when I might hear from you,” said Furukawa Ujio. “Did you have a pleasant visit with your friend Shoji-san?”

“How did you—?”

“Please. I know where your phone is. Even if I didn’t, our earlier conversation raised questions in your mind about Professor Yamada. There was only one place you could go.”

Mariko didn’t know which pissed her off more, the fact that he was right or the fact that he was so damn smug about it. Yamada-sensei had a similar ability to read her mind, and Mariko had always found it maddening in him too. She hated that Furukawa reminded her so much of Yamada.

“Thirteen oh four,” she said—too loudly. There were other pedestrians in earshot. She’d reached the narrow street where she planned to do her shopping, an urban box canyon and an all-out assault on the senses. All of the stores were brightly lit, and most had English names: FamilyMart, ABC-Mart, Mode Off. A pachinko parlor chimed and dinged and chattered, loud as a Vegas casino. Its signs were in English too, and though they were supposed to advertise slot machines, the placards read
PACHINKO AND SLUTS
. Cigarette smoke gave way to the syrupy, succulent smells of a
yakitori
restaurant. Between the sensory overload and the cramped quarters, it was enough to drive anyone into a full-blown panic attack.

Lowering her voice and covering her mouth, Mariko said, “Does that number mean anything to you?”

“No. Why?”

“Look into it. It has something to do with Joko Daishi’s next attack.”

“I see. His mother told you this?”

“Yes—and by the way, threatening to withhold a sick kid’s medication is pretty low even for you.”

“Withhold?” Furukawa seemed surprised. “Far from it. We went to great lengths to treat young Makoto.”

“Of course you did. Out of the goodness of your heart.”

“That’s quite enough,” said Furukawa. “I have no further appetite for your moralizing, Detective Oshiro. Either hang up the phone or come upstairs so we can speak like well-mannered adults.”

At that very moment someone tapped her on the shoulder. She whirled around, her elbow flying high, only to see Endo Naomoto backpedaling with a startled look on his face. “Whoa,” he said. “Totally sorry about that.”

The other shoppers flinched away like a skittish school of fish. Sudden violence out of small women was not a part of their daily routine. Endo was just as rattled. “What the hell?” Mariko said. “What are you doing here?”

“Playing billiards,” Furukawa said through the phone. At the same time, Endo nodded up at a fourth-floor window behind him. “The boss shoots pool here,” he said.

Mariko huffed and got her heart rate under control. She looked up at the long row of windows on the fourth floor, with a sign running under them reading
BILLIARDS BAGUS
. “You have to be kidding me,” she said, looking Endo in the eye while speaking into the phone.

“Come upstairs,” Furukawa said. “Let’s talk.”

“We already talked.”

“You have more questions now. You
have
been speaking with Shoji-san,
neh
? About her son?”

Mariko hated that this man knew so much about her—not just her
private conversations but even which store she was heading to. He got in her head in a way only Han and Yamada-sensei were allowed to. “Good night, Furukawa-san.”

“Whatever Shoji shared with you, it’s not the whole truth.”

“She has no reason to lie to me.”

“Oh no? Did she explain Professor Yamada’s role in her son’s life? Did she explain the assignment Yamada was supposed to give to you? Or why he gave you his sword?”

Mariko laughed—not too dismissively, she hoped. She didn’t want to oversell it. The truth was that she knew precious little about her sensei and she was always eager to learn more. One of the great mysteries in her life was why he’d taken her under his wing and entrusted her with Glorious Victory Unsought. Yet one more secret that Furukawa knew about her. How did he pull this stuff out of her head?

He had the good graces not to make her ask. “Please, do an old man a favor. Spare my knees and come upstairs so I don’t have to come down to you. We can speak in private here. Endo-san will show you the way.”

“Nope. Endo-san will do my shopping for me.”

Endo seemed earnestly offended. “What? No way.”

Mariko took out the little notebook she carried everywhere—standard detective equipment, as she thought of it—and tore out a page. “Here. The stores are closing in twenty minutes. If I have to talk to your boss, you have to run my errands.”

“Boss, come on—”

“Do it,” said Furukawa, and Mariko passed on the message. It wasn’t quite fair to say Endo’s head sagged like Charlie Brown’s, but Mariko thought sad piano music would have been appropriate. He pulled the shopping list out of her hand and read it dejectedly. “You have to be kidding me. Underwear?”

“What? I didn’t bring any with me.”

He gave her an imploring look, striking the impression that at least as professional criminals went, he really was a nice guy and he didn’t deserve this kind of punishment. In truth Mariko had forgotten she’d
put panties on the list. On any other night with any other man, she would have been mortified. But Endo was twice as embarrassed as she would have been, equal parts awkward teenager and sad puppy. Mariko found it hilarious.

“You know what?” she said. “On second thought, just get me a pair of sweatpants. I don’t want you thinking about me in my unmentionables.”

His spirits only slightly lifted, the big ex-ballplayer moseyed toward the FamilyMart. “That was indelicate,” Furukawa said.

“Boo-hoo.” Mariko hung up on him and, despising herself for doing it, trotted up the stairs.

Billiards Bagus was a dark place with low ceilings. Electronic dartboards lined two long walls, their round faces illuminated with a bluish glow. A rank of pool tables stretched toward the back wall, each one lit by a long, boxy light hovering over it like a UFO. There were no dart players or pool sharks; the tavern was empty but for the bartender and the old man with ageless eyes and pianist’s hands.

Furukawa hunched over the nearest table, cue stick in hand. He had a drink already waiting for her; whisky, she guessed, probably an expensive pour. She ignored it, not because he struck her as a James Bond bad guy who would poison her drink—which, in point of fact, was exactly how he struck her—but because she wouldn’t be beholden to him any more than she had to be. “So what’s thirteen oh four?” she said.

“We have people working on it. I can tell you more, but only if you join us.”

“Thanks but no thanks.”

Furukawa bent over with a grunt and began retrieving sunken balls, setting each one on the table with a heavy
thwack
. “What if Professor Yamada had asked you?”

“Asked me what? To be your assassin? He’d never do that.”

“I’m afraid you’re quite wrong about that. His last assignment for us was to recruit you. I’m sorry to say he died before he could complete it.”

Mariko scoffed. Furukawa narrowed his eyes at her and said, “Have I said something to amuse you?”

“For a secret clan that’s supposed to know everything, you guys can be pretty dense. You know how to make the whole damn country sit and beg and roll over at your command. How can you know so little about
people
?”

Mariko could see she’d startled the bartender with her sudden rudeness, but she didn’t pay him any mind. For his part, he desperately pretended not to have heard her. “Yamada-sensei was a good man,” she said. “He wasn’t about to try to sell a cop on becoming a killer for hire.”

Furukawa gave her a disapproving look over the edge of the pool table. “One would have thought a police detective would gather more information before leaping to conclusions. If you’ll forgive me for saying so, you haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

“Then enlighten me.”

He retrieved the last of the balls and began to rack them. “Your sensei was the most highly trained swordsman in Japan—which, if I may be so bold, made him the deadliest in the world. I believe you saw that firsthand.”

Mariko wished he were wrong, but he wasn’t. She’d seen Yamada square off against four armed
boryokudan
enforcers. Outnumbered and outflanked, not many could have survived that altercation. Yamada was eighty-seven years old and blind, and still those yakuzas never stood a chance.

“He did not join the Wind as an assassin,” Furukawa went on. “He had no love for killing, and in any case we don’t dabble much in the assassination game anymore. It’s much too crude for our purposes. No, it was his obsession for the Inazuma blades that brought him to our attention. The Wind has been using these relics for centuries, never revealing their exceptional powers. Needless to say, we were astonished to learn a historian had somehow discovered their existence.”

Mariko smiled at that. She could read between the lines easily enough: the Wind had been actively trying to conceal the existence of these weapons, yet Yamada discovered them anyway.

“Imagine our surprise when we learned he was also a close friend
of our very own Shoji Hayano. We suspected her of espionage, of course; it was a little too convenient that after all those years of secrecy the Inazuma blades should suddenly be rediscovered. When we found all parties were innocent, we invited Professor Yamada to work for us.”

“Why would he do that?”

“For the library, of course. Our records of his beloved relics were far more complete than he could have imagined. And I confess that they were in a dreadful state. We cannot maintain a permanent archive, you understand. We must remain mobile. We had documents scattered hither and yon, and so he had a lifelong project: to bring order to the collection.”

He must have been like a kid in a candy store, Mariko thought. “I get it. He’s another pool ball to you. You put him in front of the pocket and you give him a little nudge, right?”

“Just so. But Yamada proved most recalcitrant. He refused.”

Mariko refrained from doing a fist-pump. Score one for the good guys, she thought.

“In a way, it was Joko Daishi that changed his mind,” Furukawa said. He’d racked the balls; now he took up a cue and lined up a break. “Or rather, Koji Makoto, formerly Shoji Makoto. His mother told you about his maladies, I think. Did she tell you he was raised under my care?”

“She said she got his meds through you.”

“Quite right.” The cue ball struck with a loud crack, sending the other balls hurtling in every direction. “He required constant monitoring. You understand, psychiatric pharmacology was still in its infancy. Many of his medications were still in testing. In effect, the Wind raised him as one of its own. This was a common practice for us in ages past, but it has been many generations since we trained our
genin
from childhood.”

“Sure. Those pesky child labor laws must be a real pain in the ass in the ninja racket.”

“Very droll, Detective. The point, if I may ask you not to interrupt me any further, is that young Makoto was our very best. Even as a boy
he was possessed of a scintillating intellect. He showed a particular knack for chemistry—the evidence of which you have already seen, I think.”

Mariko nodded emphatically. His “knack” blew her right off her feet at Haneda, and would have torn her limb from limb if Akahata had managed to detonate his bomb in Korakuen Station.

“It may interest you to know his passion for chemistry started from entirely peaceful motives,” Furukawa went on, casually sinking one ball after the other. “His interest was in pharmaceuticals, not weaponry. He aspired to exorcise his own demons. But I ask you, Detective, how could he study psychotropic drugs and not learn the secrets of amphetamines or high explosives? It is all one science. Unlock it and you unlock all of it.”