Stephen Hunter - The 47th samurai

His whole manner was refined, poised, amused, confident. Say, hadn’t he come up in the world? And he wore his kingliness well, as Nick observed how extravagantly he was treated by the waitstaff and how generously-but quietly-he responded. He was a happy man, Nick realized; good job, plenty of dough to spend, the future looking brighter and brighter.

Nick watched the play of the evening. Occasionally a band member would come over and pay homage to Nii, occasionally the staff. Others came and paid honor and were rewarded with a smile or a touch; girls too, he seemed to be catnip to girls, that gangster thing just drives them wild.

And after a time luxuriating in the pride of having Made Good, Nii spoke to a young woman-the most childish woman there, Nick noted-and she trotted off to get her coat and tell her friends she wouldn’t be going home with them. The two walked out, holding hands, and Nick let a long minute pass before leaving a generous mound of yen on the bar and following.

He shadowed for a while from across the street, and eventually Nii took the little date into a nice apartment building and upstairs. Quickly enough Nick dashed across the street and sited himself a little to the oblique so he could see two sides of the structure. He prayed that Sir Lancelot Nii’s place was on one of these two sides, and indeed, within a few minutes, a light on the fifteenth floor came on. Nick counted windows, establishing how far from the corner the apartment was, so that he could get into it tomorrow.

Nick got there early. He was wearing a wig, a dark mop, because it occurred to him that it wouldn’t do to let the world on to the fact that a blond-haired man much too old for blond hair was stalking a well-known yakuza killer.

It didn’t take long; a Mercedes pulled up, a black S-Class limo, and Nii, crisply dressed for work, and the girl, looking as if she’d had her brains fucked out and couldn’t even comb her hair, stepped into it and it sped away.

Nick had a little thrill. Was Kondo in that car? It was unlikely Kondo would pick up his own crew. More likely he hired a limo service to round the boys up and bring them where they would do that day’s business.

Nick crossed the road, went to the apartment’s foyer, flashed a credential at the doorman. It was quite an impressive piece of paper, signifying him to be a representative of the Domestic Appropriations committee of the Diet. It was entirely authentic, in its original owner’s name, and a Kabukicho forgery expert had expertly glued Nick’s picture on it.

“I’m taking depositions on the land scandal,” Nick said. “Mr. Ono,” that being the first name he’d cross-referenced with a phone number listed to that address.

“I shall buzz him, sir.”

“Not if you want to keep your job, you won’t.”

“Yes sir.”

“And you won’t tell the houseboy either. I know how these places work. You call the houseboy, tip him, and he gets to Ono before I do, Ono has time to destroy incriminating documents, Ono gives the houseboy a huge tip, and he splits it with you. I’m not stupid.”

“Sir, Joji’s on fourteen; he won’t be involved.”

“You make sure Joji stays on fourteen.”

“Yes sir.”

Nick knew Ono lived on seventeen and so he took the elevator up to that floor, got out, and took the stairway down to fifteen. He quickly established the door that had to lead to Nii’s and went down to fourteen. He found the houseman, a dull-looking Korean, smoking a cigarette in a closet on break.

“Oh, there you are, Joji,” he said. “Dammit, I do this twice a week! I locked myself out of my apartment. Can you let me in?”

Joji looked at him dully, trying to place him.

“It’s me, Nii, fifteen-oh-four, come on, Joji, I’m late.”

If Joji hesitated it was only to secure a bigger tip; Nick slipped him a 5,000-yen note, and they went upstairs. Joji used his house key and headed back to his cigarette.

Nick was alone in the apartment. Very nice. Had Nii gone so far as to hire a decorator? The place was very much your modern yakuza, without frill or kitsch. No books, but one whole wall given over to a sound system and just about every western rock or rap CD ever cut, a shelf or two of Shogun AV’s teacher-blows-Koichi-and oh, say, naughty, naughty, even a few black-market items involving young girls. Nii, you’ve got some sick bugs in you. There was also, of course, a TV screen big enough to land a jet on.

Skipping through the apartment, Nick counted clichés: the furniture was black leather and chrome with a few modernist gewgaws here and there, crystal sculptures signifying crystal sculpture, a horrible and therefore priceless piece of modern art on the big wall.

Another room was the workout palace, which explained Nii’s new body. The space was half dojo; a wall rack held a batch of swords, some wood, some steel, for cutting. In the corner lay a pile of tatami mats.

The bedroom had its own special sort of cliché: the mirror on the ceiling threw back the image of the devastated bed, sodden and twisted and wrecked. Stains and the smell of sweat were everywhere. Handcuffs, lined with soothing foam, still attached to the bedpost, suggested the way the night had gone. Also a coil of rope lay on the bottom half of the bed, so Nii had probably done some tying too. He must have had that Japanese thing for a well-tied knot. As an aphrodisiac, the form of the beautiful young girl, bound and helpless before him, had done wonders for Nii: three discarded, half-full rubbers lay like squashed snakes on the hardwood floor. Nick thought, Oh, to be twenty-five again!

Next, the closet: ten black silk suits, each with a swanky Italian tailor’s label, three pairs of black oxfords, twenty pairs of almost-new Nikes, and a pile of neatly ironed and folded white silk shirts.

Nick sat at the desk and began to work through it very carefully. One drawer had a collection of sports magazines, another bank statements, which showed the guy was indeed doing very well, and other bills: dry cleaning mainly, rent, and…well, well, well, here we have something very interesting.

It was a series of drawings: three diamonds, crude and amateurish, in the first. In the second, the diamonds had begun to be subsumed by superior imagery, as the new forms obscured the crudity of the original pattern. In the third, the imagery, drawn by a master, had triumphed, and no trace of the diamond remained. The third, a kind of design proposal, had been signed with a name from a tattoo parlor in Shinjuku, Big Ozu. Nick had once done a story for the rag on Big Ozu, favorite skin artist of the yakuza. He was your man for snake scales, imitation Kuniyoshi faces, lions, tigers, and bears, as well as fans, scrolls, bamboo, and kanji, all popular yakuza motifs. He still tattooed the traditional way: not by electric needle, but more slowly, more painfully by bamboo sliver. So now that he was in the bucks, Nii had hired Ozu to craft a design to absorb his no-class street-gang origins, as if obliterating his sordid past.

The big guy owed Nick a favor, for his piece had driven Ozu’s customer list through the roof, including some movie stars and rock singers. And he also knew that men tell their tattooists what they don’t tell their wives, bitches, shrinks, and buddies.

“I am not going to strike a child,” Bob said.

“Probably true. But she strike you, often,” said Doshu. He spoke quickly to the girl, who began to carefully assemble her kendo armor.

“This interesting,” Doshu said. “My pupil Sueko. She will be safe from your blow and armed with a bokken. As she short, bokken long. When she strikes, much pain. You wear no armor. On the other hand, with a shinai, even your strongest blows will not affect her, that is, if you are even able to strike her. Also, as you long, shinai short. Yet you must defeat her.”