Stephen Hunter - The 47th samurai

“Saw ’ em both. Poor Toshiro gets beheaded in Band. I guess he was Kondo.”

“That’s right. Kondo Isami is definitely the Mifune part. That’s what happened to Kondo when the emperor’s clans won and the shogun was replaced. But for a long time, in Kyoto, Kondo was the law, and he and his boys were the bloodiest mob old Japan ever saw. They killed and killed and killed. Kondo himself probably killed a hundred men in sword fights. He was your true-grit samurai, love him or hate him. So any man today calling himself Kondo means to scare you and frighten you and communicate to you that he is willing to kill. That he even likes to kill.”

“And Kondo Isami Two?” Bob asked.

“I’ve never seen his name in print. Supposedly it appeared only once and a few weeks later, the reporter’s head was found mounted on a tripod of golf clubs outside his paper, a tabloid called Weekly Jitsuwa. It caused quite a stir. The three clubs were the eight and nine irons and the number three wood. Ya-ku-za, of course, is slang derived from a card game’s losing hand, which is eight-nine-three.

“Nobody knows who he is, only what he does. He’s an elite yakuza assassin, with a very small team of highly trained men who favor the old traditions. They still kill the old way, with the sword.”

“You’ll have to explain that to me,” Bob said.

“For a westerner it seems bizarre, I suppose. But in certain applications, the sword is actually far more efficient than the gun, if you don’t mind a lot of sloppy blood around. These guys spend their lives working on it and get very, very good. They can take you down as fast as a gun. It’s an extremely lethal weapon and they have a butcher’s knowledge of anatomy. They know exactly where to cut you or, if they have to, pierce you, to empty you of blood in a split second. They cut your lungs and take out your air supply, they cut your pelvis and shatter your support system, they cleave your brain and it all goes dark. You don’t even feel the pain, you just go down in a heap. And best of all: no noise. You can have a nice little battle, a good triple assassination, a one-on-one to the death, assured that no cops are going to show up. Nobody knows until the next morning when they notice all those pools of sticky red stuff in the gutter. Here, look at these.”

He went to a cabinet, pulled out a file, and handed it to Bob.

They were autopsy and crime scene photos of men dead by sword. On the slab, the nude bodies had oval openings the size of footballs, sometimes hard to see because the skin sundered wasn’t white but usually mottled red, black, and green, not from disease, as Bob initially thought, but from the dense, almost obsessive tattooing that marked the bodies. But the cuts were visible once you focused on them amid the dragon’s heads and wolves’ yaps and kanji characters: they exposed a butcher’s festival of sliced meat inside, visible now only because the blood had drained. The cuts were gigantic, and deep, and permanent; they’d empty the sack of fluid that is a human body in a second. In the on-site photos of the rubbed-out of the underworld, the distinguishing feature was not the black suits and shoes, not the sunglasses, not the twisted postures of the fallen or the occasional lopped limb or split head, but the blood, the lakes and lakes of it. Each body sat like an island in the middle of a red sea; it lapped everywhere, spreading in satiny luster, as if by some mad king’s imperial mandate.

“This Kondo Isami came on the scene about five years ago. An underboss named Otani was having trouble with a Chinese-sponsored hotshot in Kabukicho and was bedeviled by one individual in particular. ‘Bedeviled’ as in ‘cut really bad.’ Kondo Isami introduced himself to Otani by sending a business card and a head. It was very effective. As Otani rose, so did Kondo, specializing in the impossible, the discreet, the hard to do. Evidently, unlike most of the yaks, he is not tattooed. He has to be brilliant, socially adept, and completely presentable. But even so, there are weirdnesses. Many who’ve met him have not seen his face; he goes to great lengths, including masks or theatrical lighting arrangements, to prevent certain people from getting a look at it. But he’ll meet others very casually, it is said. He goes dancing or clubbing. Suddenly, for no reason, he doesn’t care if anybody sees him. Now what the hell could that be about?”

“Sometimes he’s shy, sometimes he’s not. Maybe that’s all there is to it.”

“No, there’s more. Nothing’s simple about this guy. He has brilliant sword skills. He’s at the level of almost transcendent technique that some of the legendary sams achieved, like Musashi or Yagyu. His boys may not be quite so advanced, but their internal discipline is tremendous. Only once has a Shinsengumi guy been taken by the cops, and he committed hara-kiri in the station with a fork before he talked. He turned out to be a street gang kid who’d evidently been talent-spotted by Kondo, brought into the unit, trained, and disciplined. They found him soaked in his own blood with a smile on his face.

“Otherwise, they specialize in the hard to do. Enormously violent. There was a rumor some Chinese gangsters were going to mount a move against Boss Otani, and the Shinsengumi took them out in about thirty seconds in a Kyoto inn, where the group had gathered for recreational indulgence. They caught them in the lounge. The swords came out much faster than the Berettas, and they danced from man to man in seconds, cutting. Kondo himself split a Chinaman from crown to dick. Cut him in two, top to bottom. Amazing strength, but more. You have to know the art of cutting. He does. Then they left no witnesses.”

“Look, Nick,” said Bob, “I think Kondo has a new client. I think he took out Philip Yano’s family, stole a sword of some rare value that had come Yano’s way, and now he’s got some plan for the sword that I can’t figure out. So can you ask around, see if you can find out who Kondo’s working for and what he’d need a special sword for? And why would he have to wipe out the Yanos? Why couldn’t he just send a burglary team in, crack the vault, and walk out clean? Or even buy the damned thing, not that, come to think of it, Yano would have sold.”

“Sure, I can ask. But I’m getting something out of this. I’m getting a scoop that’ll make me the man in the tabloid game, and even get me back in the respectable rags.”

“Absolutely.”

“Nick, be careful,” Okada said.

“I’ll be careful. Meanwhile, Swagger-san, learn to fight.”

The compass no longer held four directions. There was no longer a left or a right. That up/down stuff? Gone totally. As for colors, numbers, signposts, any markers of a universe to be navigated rationally: vanished.

Instead, all reality consisted of the eight cuts.

There were only eight cuts.

Never more, never fewer.

Tsuki.

Migi yokogiri.

Hidari yokogiri.

Migi kesagiri.

Hidari kesagiri.

Migi kiriage.

Hidari kiriage.

Shinchokugiri.

Or thrust, side cut left to right, side cut right to left, diagonal cut right to left, diagonal cut left to right, rising diagonal cut from right to left, rising diagonal cut from left to right, and vertical downward, the head-splitter.

He stood, sweating, the very sharp blade in his hand so that his concentration wouldn’t wander. A mistake with a thing so sharp could cut him badly and he already bled in small quantities from a dozen brushes with the yakiba, the tempered edge, of the wicked thing. Doshu paid the blood no mind: the message was, if you work with live blades, you get cut. That’s all. No big thing. Get used to blood. It goes away or it needs stitches and there’s nothing in between.