The Toyotomi Blades (21 page)

See, there are only six possibilities here. If we reverse the order so the numbers on the tangs go from six to one, instead of one to six, that doubles the combinations. That’s still only twelve patterns, regardless of which blade is missing and what order the Tokyo blade and the New York blade fit into the pattern. We don’t have to know which is the right pattern. All we have to do is enter all twelve into a computer program that will try to match each pattern to the Nissan digitized map of Japan.

“I know a digitized map is kept as a series of numbers, very much like the numbers you showed me for the photo enhancement. For instance, a section of a digitized map might look like this.” I took a piece of paper and a pencil and wrote:

0444444444
4044466664
4044666666
4404666666
4404444444

Kiyohara stayed silent, but as soon as I put down my pencil he said, “What’s that?”

“It’s a simplified drawing of a digitized map. For instance, zero could be water, so the string of zeros on the left side of the diagram could be a river. The number 4 could be flat farmland, and 6 could be foothills. If we knew the patterns on the six blades we could create a similar map looking at temples, rivers, and mountains. The temples and villages shown on the blades may have moved or disappeared, but it’s not likely that something like a mountain will vanish, so we’re bound to have landmarks that will line up. By computer we can match the blades’ map to the Nissan Japan map.

“After four hundred years, we’re not going to get a perfect match, but we can calculate how close a match we get and review those portions of Japan which give us as close a fit as possible. We can actually eliminate a lot of geography. We’re probably looking at a very small portion of the main island of Honshu, probably centered around Osaka castle and the surrounding countryside. Osaka was the stronghold of the Toyotomi, wasn’t it?”

Kiyohara nodded.

“If we had the pattern on the blades,” I continued, “the actual matching of the blades to your map would be easy. Our problem is we don’t have all the blades and we also don’t know how they fit together. The solution to those problems is that we don’t have to come up with an answer.”

“What?”

“Because one-sixth of the map is missing, theoretically the best match we could come up with is five-sixths, or eighty-three percent. If we had the landmarks on all six blades I suppose we could match things one hundred percent, but I’m betting that starting with an eighty-three percent match will be good enough. We can’t match perfectly, but we can narrow down the search, and maybe there are other clues that can help us.”

“How will we know the scale to use with the map on the blades?”

“We’ve got several mountains shown on the blades. If we get a match on mountain locations, we just adjust the scale to match the distance between the mountains on the digitized map. Then we look to see if things like rivers, temples, and villages align.”

“I see,” Kiyohara said. “So there are only twelve possible patterns.”

“That’s right.”

“And instead of trying to figure out which is the right pattern, we’ll just try to match all patterns, using mountains as landmarks to set the proper scale.”

“That’s right. That’s the beauty of it. By using the computer, we can try all combinations. That would be difficult to do manually, but the computer will grind away trying every combination of blade pattern to every geographic location to see if it gets a match. We can even measure how close each pattern fits. We can come up with something like a percentage scale that will measure how close each of the patterns fits to the current geography of the area. It will chew up a lot of Nissan’s computer power, but by switching things around and trying different combinations we might come up with the answer.”

Kiyohara tapped the diagram with the various combinations. “This is pretty good. You just swapped things around, trying different combinations. How did you come up with it?”

I smiled. “I was trying to find some elegant solution and I was totally stumped. But after I saw it was simply a matter of shuffling the patterns around and trying every possible combination, I realized that this whole problem was actually child’s play.”

22
      

T
he headquarters of the Sekiguchi-gummi was near Tokyo’s Tsujiki Fish Market, in a relatively modest neighborhood of three- and four-story buildings. It was in a modern four-story office building that looked neat and clean. There were no signs on the front, but there was some kind of logo on the front door of the building done in gold. It was a circle with three bars and a dot.

It seemed peculiar to me that a crime family would have an office, but I guess in some American cities organized crime uses bars and restaurants for its headquarters, and everyone in the neighborhood knows it. Sugimoto had offered to come with me but I turned him down. His English skills would have been handy, but I didn’t trust him. I might be paranoid, but I didn’t know what his past relationship with the Sekiguchi-gummi was, so I didn’t want him coming along to muddy up the waters. Besides, I had arranged for my own companion.

We walked through the front door of the building. In the modest lobby there was a desk and a young man in his twenties was sitting there to act as a receptionist. He was studying some kind of newspaper. It looked like the horse-racing forms we have in the United States, except this paper had pictures of small outboard motor boats that seemed to be racing each other around some kind of circular pond with a grandstand. Many Asians like to gamble and it looked like this guy was selecting his picks for races to be held that day.

He didn’t bother looking up at us until we approached his desk. Then he looked up from his paper and continued to look up and up and further up. He more or less ignored me, but since I was standing next to Gary Apia, I could see where I might be lost in the shadow of Gary’s seven-foot, five-hundred-pound frame. The man sat there with an open mouth.

When I asked Gary to accompany me, he had given me a quick “Sure, bruddah.”

“Before you agree, let me explain what’s happening.” I told him about my involvement with the Sekiguchi-gummi in Los Angeles and what I wanted to accomplish with my visit. I also told him of my run-in with the Yakuza in Hibiya Park. “You might not want to get involved with these guys,” I said.

He laughed. “Those kinda guys are always sniffing around the rikishi, looking for a tip on who to bet on. They don’t scare me. Let’s go for broke.”

That Hawaiian what-the-hell attitude never sounded sweeter to my ears, and now that we were actually in the lobby of the Sekiguchi-gummi building, I was glad to be standing next to him. He was wearing a blue kimono, and his hair was in a simplified version of the elaborate, slicked down hairstyle he wore for sumo wrestling. He told me he was required to dress this way by the association that runs sumo in Japan, and he looked very much like a seventeenth century warrior, instead of a modern athlete. It was hardly the dress for inconspicuous sleuthing, but I wanted to call as much attention to us as possible. If something happened to us, I wanted plenty of people noticing that we went into this building.

Gary, in broken Japanese, announced who we were and why we were there. No response. Gary repeated his request for us to see the head of the Sekiguchi-gummi, then he looked at me and said, “Dis guy must be dumb. My Japanese is bad, but he should know your name and why we’re here.”

I personally thought that sitting in slack-jawed amazement was probably a pretty good response when confronted with Gary’s imposing presence for the first time. The guy acting as a receptionist must have decided it wasn’t a wise policy to irritate the giant, because he finally picked up a phone and started talking in rapid Japanese.

In a few moments a pinched-faced, middle-aged woman came into the lobby. When she saw Gary her eyebrows raised slightly, but otherwise she gave no indication that it was at all unusual to have a kimono-clad mountain standing there. She looked at me and said, “Mr. Tanaka, I’m Mr. Sekiguchi’s private secretary. He asked me to bring you to his office. I’m so very sorry, but I think we might have a problem getting your friend up to his office.”

“What do you mean?” Gary said, his eyebrows narrowing suspiciously.

“Please come with me,” she said. She took us out of the lobby and down a short hall. At the end of the hall was a tiny elevator, which would normally only hold two or three people. It was hard to imagine how Gary would fit into the elevator.

“I don’t like dis,” Gary said.

I thought about ancient Japanese castles with winding entrances and narrow passages which were designed to break up formations of enemy troops. I wondered if the elevator had the same function.

“Why don’t you wait for me, Gary?” I said. “With you here I don’t think anything will happen.”

“Are you sure, bruddah?”

“Pretty sure. Just don’t wander too far away.”

“No sweat, bruddah.” He looked at the secretary and said, “Will you do da translating for him?” I smiled at this. Even I could tell that Gary’s linguistic skills in Japanese were rudimentary, at best. But still, he spoke a lot more conversational Japanese than I could muster.

“Mr. Sekiguchi speaks English, so I’m certain there’ll be no problems with Mr. Tanaka and Mr. Sekiguchi speaking to each other.”

The woman and I crowded into the small elevator. She pressed the button for the fourth floor and we started ascending. I was once in an elevator in New York City, in an old building on Bleecker Street, that was smaller than two phone booths. You could hardly inhale, but the sign on the wall said the maximum capacity was thirteen. I don’t know if Japanese elevator companies have an equally perverse sense of humor, but the elevator we were in was so small that crowding more than three into it would probably constitute some kind of sexual encounter.

When we got to the fourth floor, the door opened and I was stunned.

The elevator opened into a small lobby. While the public lobby downstairs was austere and rather cheap looking, the lobby up here was positively opulent. The rug was a thick blue wool and the walls were beautifully paneled with dark and light woods inlaid in a geometric pattern of rectangles.

In the center of the lobby was a large desk made of wood so dark it almost looked black. The secretarial chair and word processor made me conclude this was the command station for my guide. Hanging on the wall behind the desk was a scroll painting. I don’t know that much about Japanese painting, but this one looked very old and very elegant. It was a painting of a monkey sitting in the bottom corner of the scroll, looking up. In the upper corner of the painting, about six feet from the monkey’s face, there was a tiny butterfly. The huge expanse of white space between the monkey and the butterfly was pristine and effective. In Japanese painting they say that the white space is often as important as the brush strokes, and in this particular composition that was certainly true. The white space made you realize how far above the monkey the beauty of the butterfly was.

On the secretary’s desk was an ikebana flower arrangement. It was a single iris, a long green leaf, and two small white chrysanthemums. Each piece of the arrangement was in perfect harmony and balance with the other. Very elegant and very much in keeping with the lobby.

The secretary walked over to one of the wooden panels and gently pushed, revealing that the panel was a hidden door. Once again I thought about old Japanese castles, which often had secret panels or passageways so that the lord of the castle could escape in case of unexpected attack. The secretary stood to one side and bowed in order to usher me in to Sekiguchi’s office.

In Japan, adoption of adults is not uncommon. Sometimes when a young man marries into a family with no male heir, he will agree to take his wife’s name for his own in order to continue the wife’s family name. Kabuki actors and woodblock artists also commonly adopt their favorite pupils to pass on their name. Because of this custom, I wasn’t sure of the relationship that Mr. Sekiguchi had with the Sekiguchi-gummi crime family. I didn’t know if he was the founder of this family, some relative of the founder, or someone who had been adopted into the family and taken the Sekiguchi name. My purpose was not the genealogy of Japanese crime families, but still I was curious about how one got to be the head of a Japanese Mafia family. I suspect it involves acts and decisions that are pretty grim.

I thought the lobby was pretty posh, but it was nothing compared to the actual office. Sekiguchi’s office was designed to impress, and with me it did its job. It was a long rectangular room with a high ceiling. You entered at the far end of the rectangle and sitting at the other end, in splendid isolation, was a massive rosewood desk with a couple of black leather chairs set in front of it. The walls on either side of the office were pierced with small alcoves. In the alcoves were pieces of pottery or small Japanese paintings, each illuminated by its own light. These alcove walls were also paneled in rosewood and this, combined with the dark carpet, gave the office the feeling of a somber cathedral.

Sitting behind the desk was a tiny wizened man in a gray suit. On his desk were no papers, so he looked like a small statue set in a sea of wine-colored wood. As I waded through the thick carpet towards the desk, I was reminded of the scene in the
Wizard of Oz
where Dorothy and her companions are walking in the great hall of the Emerald City to approach the wizard. They’re so in awe that they’re shaking as they walk.