The Toyotomi Blades (20 page)

The woman and the child finished their snack and moved on. I sat on the bench thinking about my solution to the problem, thinking through the computer techniques necessary to implement it. I took a scrap of paper and a pen from my pocket and tried sketching out my solution to see if I was right. I was so immersed that I didn’t notice the two men walking up the path towards me.

As they came close, I glanced up and dropped the pen and paper. It was my two Yakuza pursuers, back again and mad. The tall one let fly with a fist to my head. I’d like to say my catlike reflexes allowed me to avoid the blow, but the only cat my reflexes match is the chubby cartoon character Garfield. I did manage to move my head enough so the blow was just glancing, but it still hurt. A lot.

I tried twisting away but the tall guy grabbed the sleeve of my jacket so I couldn’t run. Sitting on a bench is not the best fighting posture, but it does have the advantage of leaving your legs free to kick. Leaning over, I brought my right leg up between the legs of the shorter man. I connected hard, actually lifting him off the ground slightly. The enthusiasm for the fight drained from his face, along with most of his blood. He grabbed his crotch and doubled over.

The taller man was still active and threw another punch at me. I raised my arm to block it and was too slow. It hit me in the chest so hard that tears formed in my eyes. My assailant was too close to kick, so I tried to return the compliment with some punches of my own. He was able to easily block my off-balanced flailing and the SOB actually smiled at my attempts to defend myself. A gold front tooth glinted back at me through my tear-stained vision.

He yanked at my jacket to get me in position for another shot at my head and managed to pull me off the bench. I fell to the earth with a hard thump to my shoulder. I knew what was probably coming next, and I was already rolling away when he drew back his leg to kick me.

I managed to roll under the bench. I’d like to say my tormentor hurt his leg by kicking the bench, but he saw what I was doing and quickly crossed over to the other side of the bench to kick me from that side. Naturally, I reversed my direction and rolled under the bench the other way.

He barked an order to the shorter man and once again came around the bench to kick me. I changed direction again, rolling to put the bench between us for protection.

I don’t know how long I could have kept up my impression of a rolling log, but I did know that as soon as the other thug recovered from my kick to the gonads, my little game would be over. The tall guy would get on one side of the bench and the short one would get on the other. I’d be the piece of meat caught in the middle, and a stomping by two pissed-off gangsters is not how I pictured my trip to Japan ending.

The old man at the concession stand shouted something at the two thugs. The taller man once again came around the bench, forcing me to reverse direction. If I continued rolling, I’d never be able to get to my feet, but if I stopped rolling, I was sure I’d get a well-placed kick to my head or ribs.

The old man at the snack stand gave a second shout. From under the bench I could see the old man running from the stand towards the fight. He ran with a rolling, bowlegged gait, like a sailor on a tossing ship. Under other circumstances, it would have been comical. The old man was waving a knife. It was a short kitchen knife, probably used for slicing steamed buns. Despite the knife, the two Yakuza didn’t take flight. Instead, the tall man quickly turned around and faced the approaching snack stand owner, growling something in Japanese. The old man slowed and then came to a stop, unsure about what he should do next.

The Yakuza then stared down at me. I looked up at him through the slats of the bench seat. He pointed a finger at me and said in heavily accented English, “Leave swords alone!” I blinked at him in surprise. I heard a noise behind me and glanced over my shoulder to see the shorter man starting to shuffle towards me, still clutching his crotch.

“Leave swords alone!” the tall man roared. I turned my attention to him and nodded vigorously. At my affirmative nod, the man grunted and repeated, “Leave swords alone.” I nodded even more vigorously and said, “Hai.”

The man nodded, looked at the smaller man and said something. The smaller man argued with the tall man, but the tall man seemed in charge. I don’t know what they said, but I got a hint as the smaller man aimed a kick at me that landed on my hip instead of a more delicate part of my anatomy. The small guy wanted revenge.

Instead, he obeyed orders and the men started moving away from the bench, one man backing up and the other sort of shuffling as he continued to hold on to his crotch.

At the retreat of the thugs, the old man came up to the bench and peered down at me. He looked concerned and said something in Japanese.

Now that the shock of the attack was over, the pain was more noticeable and it was with great effort that I was able to roll out from underneath the bench and get to my feet. Despite the pain, I was more embarrassed than hurt.

“Arigato,” I said, thanking the old man. I tried to think of a more polite way of saying thank you, but the phrases wouldn’t come to mind. “Arigato,” I repeated. The old man was saying something in Japanese, but I didn’t understand.

“I’m staying at the hotel. Hotel,” I said, pointing towards the Imperial. I couldn’t remember the Japanese name for it. The old man nodded his understanding, and started to help me hobble towards the hotel. After a few steps, I stopped and shook off the old man’s hand.

“No, thank you. I don’t think I need you to help me get back to the hotel.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out my wallet. I took out a fistful of Japanese bills and thrust them towards the old man. The old man shook his head no. He shoved the money back at me.

“Okay, I understand,” I said. “Thank you for your help. Arigato.” I hobbled towards the hotel with the old man staring after me.

During Vietnam, the federal government and U.S. Army spent a lot of money on me in an effort to turn me into a fighting machine. Because of a back injury, I spent less than three weeks in Vietnam, so the government didn’t get its money’s worth. Now, over twenty years later, I wish I had paid more attention to the hand-to-hand combat part of the training.

I stopped. Then I returned to the bench as fast as my sore body would let me so I could recover my note on how to solve the problem with the blades. Of course, I had no intention of keeping my promise to those SOBs to stay away from the swords.

21
      

I
spent most of the morning sitting with Mariko at a Tokyo police station. This time, I got a couple of English-speaking officers who were sympathetic and patient. They said they’d bring the two thugs in for questioning, but I decided not too much would be done if they didn’t pick up the two Yakuza before I left Japan. I called
News Pop
to tell them where I was, and Buzz Sugimoto came down to the station to help with translations and for moral support. Mariko was stressed out by the encounter, much more stressed than I. I had some bumps and bruises, but I was more angry than fearful. Mariko, on the other hand, clung to me so tightly that I had to ask her to back off a little, because she was exacerbating my aches and pains. Lovers don’t take too kindly to their paramours being used as soccer balls.

When all the paperwork was completed, Mariko, Buzz, and I left the police station. “You know what I don’t understand?” I said to him.

“What?”

“I thought the two Yakuza were going to tell me not to testify in Los Angeles, but instead the only thing they said was stay away from the swords. I don’t even know how they know I’m involved with the swords.”

“Even Yakuza watch television,” Mariko reminded me. “You were on
News Pop
talking about the swords.”

“But why they would care? They wanted me to promise I’d stop trying to solve the mystery of the swords.”

“What did you say to them?” Sugimoto asked.

“What could I say? I said yes. It was either that or get kicked to death. But I gave them a Japanese yes.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t Japanese sometimes say yes to indicate that they understand, not that they agree?”

“That’s true,” Sugimoto said.

“I said yes because I understood, not because I agreed.” I looked over at Mariko and she had a tight line for a mouth. If Sugimoto wasn’t there I’m sure I would have gotten a real “stomach-to-stomach” talk about my intention to pursue this.

“So what are you going to do now?” Sugimoto asked.

“First, I want to take Mariko back to the hotel. There’s no reason her sightseeing should be disturbed by this. Then, I want to get back to Nissan to talk to Mr. Kiyohara. I have an idea I want to run past him.” The look on Mariko’s face told me that sightseeing wasn’t on her mind. I felt some guilt about going to Nissan, but I had to see if my idea for solving the puzzle of the swords would work. “Then afterwards, I’m going to see if I can figure out this Yakuza thing. If I could only talk to the head of the Sekiguchi-gummi, I might be able to understand what they want from me.”

“I can arrange that,” Sugimoto said.

“What?”

“If you want to talk to the head of the Sekiguchi-gummi, I can arrange it. We did a show about them a year ago because they sponsored a contest to encourage
sumi-e,
Japanese traditional ink painting.”

“Organized crime sponsored a painting contest?”

“Junichi Sekiguchi considers himself a patron of the arts. In Japan, organized crime functions much more openly than in the United States. They still get involved in bad things, but they also have legitimate businesses they can use for things like sponsoring a contest. I’m pretty sure I can get you in to see him if you really want to talk to him. Do you want to do it today?”

“No, tomorrow. I want to make some arrangements first. Right now, I’d like to talk to Kiyohara-san.”

Within an hour I was facing Mr. Kiyohara across a metal table in a cramped conference room in the Nissan building. Excited, I launched into my solution to the problem of the blades.

“We use brute force.”

Kiyohara-san was puzzled by my statement, so I continued. “When you come right down to it, the solution is pretty simple. We’ve got six sword blades we’re dealing with and I think they fit together to form a map. The question is how do they fit together? This question is made harder by the fact that one of the blades is missing. I’ve been trying to come up with some elegant way of deducing how the blades fit together and what the map looks like, but actually this isn’t necessary.

“Although the problem looks impossibly hard, when you start moving the swords around to find all the patterns, you discover there are just twelve possibilities. That’s all. Are you familiar with the Japanese children’s game with the different shaped pieces of plastic? The one where kids move the pieces around until they make recognizable shapes?”

Puzzled, Kiyohara said, “Yes.”

“By computer we’re going to do something similar with the patterns on the blades. I’ll explain the details, but the important thing to keep in mind is that there are twelve, and only twelve, ways the blades can fit together, even when you account for the blade we don’t know about.”

“Now I’m confused,” Kiyohara said. “How can there only be twelve possibilities?”

I picked up a pencil and a sheet of paper. “Watch. From the numbers on the tangs we know where three blades fit. These are blades one, three and six. That’s Sonoda-san’s blade, the blade from Rotterdam, and my blade. We know the patterns on two of the other blades, and of course one blade is missing. Let’s call the missing blade X, and the two patterns we do have A and B. The problem is how to fit them together so we can match this pattern to a map of Japan.”

“Let’s assume that the missing blade is the second blade. Let’s label the New York blade A and assume it’s the fourth blade. The Tokyo blade, which we’ll label B, then becomes the fifth one. This is the pattern we would have.”

On the sheet of paper I wrote, “1 X 3 A B 6.”

“Now that may or may not be the real pattern formed on the blades. For instance, perhaps we have the New York blade and the Tokyo blade switched around. That would give us this pattern.”

I labeled a column two and I wrote, “1 X 3 B A 6.”

“Those are the only two variations if the missing blade is the second blade. But what if the missing blade isn’t the second blade? What if it’s the fourth blade? Well, we end up with two more patterns.”

I quickly drew the patterns on the paper. “And if the missing blade is the fifth blade we end up with this pattern.” I drew the remaining two patterns. I pointed down to the sheet of paper with the six patterns.