Stephen Hunter - The 47th samurai

“Other than that, stay away. If you fight others, you will die. You are not strong enough to cover all the sectors of defense. The longer you go, the slower you will get. A good swordsman will play you out, waiting for your sword to still or drop, for your concentration to falter, and then he will kill you. In fights, you must win quickly, one, two blows, or you will die. The longer you fight, the larger the chance that you will die. You survive not merely on your sword, but on your guile in fighting only those you can beat and never those you cannot beat. A great swordsman will kill you in a split second.”

“He knows,” Bob said. “He sees where this is going. He’s telling me I cannot fight Kondo.”

Doshu heard the name and turned to Bob.

“Swagger-san,” he said, with something almost but not quite like affection. “Kondo: death.”

They roared through the Japanese night in her Mazda, the rush of the wind so intense it precluded conversation. Maybe there wasn’t much to say, anyway. Kyoto was a blur of light behind them, Tokyo not yet a blur of light ahead of them. She kept the red sportster up well over eighty miles an hour, driving with calm deliberation, all intensity and concentration.

But after a couple of hours, it began to rain. She pulled over to the shoulder. A car, too close behind, screeched and honked.

“What’s his problem?” Bob said.

“He was too close. I should have signaled. Can you latch the top?”

“Sure.”

She pressed a button and the rubberized roof came out of its compartment, unfolding on an ingenious structure until it covered the cockpit. He got it latched without trouble, though the mechanism, clever and Japanese, was new to him.

“Do you want me to drive? You must be exhausted. Now it’s raining.”

“I’m fine. I’m a big girl. Anyway, you’re just as tired as I am.”

“No, I didn’t get much sleep there, that’s for sure. That old guy worked me to the bone. ‘Eight cuts! Eight cuts!’ I haven’t worked that hard in years.”

“You are a hardworking guy,” she said. “Believe me, I know plenty who aren’t. My supervisor likes to cultivate ‘the big picture,’ which means I do the work and he’s out on the links chatting up businessmen. But I guess it’s okay that he’s lazy, because he’s so stupid if he worked hard he could really screw up.”

“Amazing how full the world is of assholes,” he said. “Anyway, have you heard from Nick yet?”

“No, nothing. I checked my phone and e-mail before we left. I’ll check again.”

She flipped open the little jointed piece of plastic, worked it over, its bright glow illuminating her grave face, and then announced, “No, nothing yet.”

“Okay.”

“What are your plans? You have to tell me, Swagger. I’m so afraid, now that you think you’re Yojimbo, you’ll go out on your own.”

“No, I told you I’d clear everything through you and I will. I’d hoped to hear from Nick, that’s all.”

“Suppose you don’t.”

“Then I’ll try and find a private investigator, a guy with yakuza connections, maybe an ex-cop, and we’ll turn him loose on the case. Maybe I should have done that already. I didn’t think of it. I was just thinking of how to keep that old man from whacking me black and blue.”

“A private eye won’t work. If Kondo doesn’t want to be found, the PI will know it and he will just take your money and conveniently come up with nothing. Nick’s got the guts to ask around; I doubt anybody else does.”

“Then I’ll go to Kabukicho and start kicking in doors on yakuza joints and asking loud, impolite questions about Kondo. That should get me noticed.”

“That should get your head delivered to the embassy by Black Cat Courier by Monday.”

“Then I don’t know. Maybe I am overmatched on this one.”

“On the other hand, you’ve learned stuff-”

Her cell phone rang. She checked the number ID and said, “It’s Nick.”

She hit talk.

“Hello, Nick, what is-”

But then she was quiet.

“Oh, hell,” she said.

“What?”

“It was Nick. But he said ‘Susan, I fed the dragon.’”

“‘Fed the dragon’? What the hell could that mean?”

“I don’t know. But it was also his voice. It was full of fear. Real, ugly fear.”

“Oh, Christ,” Bob said.

She dialed Nick’s number. There was no answer.

Nick had it, or most of it. He sat in his kitchen under a bright lamp, looked at his notes, an outline, a time line, charts of consequences, phone numbers, the whole thing: amazing how it came together, how quickly.

The tattoo artist, Big Ozu, had told him of Nii’s bragging about easy street from now on, and how he could afford to have his back finished and the horrible, crude diamonds hidden in an abstract of classical Japanese shape and color and the kanji inscription, “Samurai forever.”

It took some doing and a mighty investment in the world’s best sake, but Nick finally got Ozu to reveal the darkest secret: the name of the man to whom Nii, through Kondo, was now pledged. It was as if Kondo’s clan had found a new daimyo, its connection to the ruling powers was now so much more powerful.

It was a name he already knew: Miwa.

Miwa, the shogun of Shogunate AV and head of AJVS, at that very moment stuck in a power struggle with Imperial to maintain command of Big Porn, trying to keep it Japanese against Imperial’s hunger to Americanize the industry and bring white women in.

Now, what could Kondo do for this man, and of what meaning would a sword, a special, important, historical sword be?

Nick could have left it there: the man just wanted the sword because he was a collector, this was the mother of all swords, to add it to his collection would be-

But then why didn’t he just buy it from Yano? And why were Yano and his family wiped out, why were certain suggestions given so that the unfortunate tragedy of the Yanos was not pursued with alacrity and instead allowed to drift? It hadn’t even been assigned to a senior investigator.

So Nick began to look at Miwa. It turned out there was quite a lot of data: Miwa’s career was storied, publicized, even self-publicized. It was the tale of a poor boy, going from nothing to something and conquering Japan in a way few men had since the shogun, an irony in itself. Miwa lived in luxury with houses everywhere in Japan, seven in Tokyo, two in Europe, one in Vail, one in Hollywood, one in New York. He traveled by private jet, he consorted with millionaires and movie stars, his amorous adventures were legendary.

How could such a man want one thing more?

And Nick realized that it wasn’t “one thing more”-it was simple survival. He saw now how a sword could help Miwa and establish his line forever.

Against that, the deaths of the Yanos was nothing. Really, what was it? A mother, a father, four children? You could cut them down and leave them. That, simply, was the eternal order of the universe. Who were they next to greatness? What were they? Compared to the fabulousness of Miwa and the scope of his ambitions, what did they weigh? Who cared for them? No samurai would rise to their defense. They must yield to the inevitability of it all, and cease to impede Miwa in his march to glory.

Nick needed a drink. He went to the refrigerator and got out a bottle of sake. He struggled with the plasticized cap and finally, in frustration, got out a small kitchen knife, sliced the plastic off, and poured himself a drink.

Ah. The taste of sake, so utterly Japanese. He set the knife down on the table and sat back. He allowed himself to take some pleasure.

Nick saw a golden life before him, where it would all go: his scoop would shock the world, an arrest would follow, Japan’s foundations would be shaken, the world’s journalists pouring in upon him as the scandal reached epidemic proportions, his own redemption.