Stephen Hunter - The 47th samurai

“Dragon bones? Dragon wings? Dragon tracks? Dragon breath?”

“No, no, no, no.”

“Flying Dragons.”

“You said that.”

“A gang called the Dragons?”

“No.”

“A triad called the Dragons?”

“No.”

“A flying dragon kick from karate?”

“No.”

“The sleeping dragon? That’s a kendo move, low to high.”

“I know what it is. No, not that.”

“A Chinese restaurant called the Dragon.”

“No.”

“Saint George?”

“No.”

“Saint Andrew?”

“No.”

“Prince Charming.”

“You did that one already. This isn’t working.”

“Well, I’m pretty much out of dragon stuff. Could it be a picture, a movie, a book, a poem, an article, a paper, a-”

“Hmmm,” she said.

He saw something in her eyes. It was that faraway look: seeing the mountain as if it’s close at hand.

“Article?”

“Paper. If dragons are reptiles, does that make them lizards?”

“There are no dragons, so can’t they be anything?”

“Well, as you said, green and scaly. That makes them reptiles. So wouldn’t they be lizards?”

“I suppose. Why?”

“It’s just that-oh, it’s nothing.”

“Try it. What the hell?”

“Lizards. I have something in my life dealing with lizards. I may have mentioned it to Nick.”

“But you’re not sure.”

“Swagger, nobody can remember everything they’ve said to a casual acquaintance over a five-year period.”

“Of course. Sorry. But you said a paper. School paper. Lizards.”

“Yeah, it’s a story I’ve told a few times in embassies and at the department, at parties and dinners, that sort of thing. Did I tell it to Nick? It’s possible. I met him at a party at the Japanese ambassador’s residence on Nebraska in D.C. about five years ago. It was low-key professional: I was supposed to chat him up, he was supposed to chat me up. There was some drinking. I may have told him.”

“Tell me.”

“I had a petty good-girl’s ambition to graduate from high school with a four-point-oh average. I had to be perfect, and for three years, I was perfect. But my senior year, I dropped a couple of points in advanced-placement biology. I had to somehow make it up, or I’d get a B, and there would go the four-oh. So I went to the teacher and I said, you know, I can’t quite make it up on the remaining tests. If I ace them, I still just get an average of three-nine-nine in here. Is there any extra credit thing I could do? He was a good guy. He said, ‘Well, Susan, if you wrote me a paper and it was really good on an original subject, I don’t see how I could keep from giving you the A that you need so badly.’ The joke is, I have no feeling for biology. I just learned it by rote. I had no gift at all and there was nothing I was capable of writing an A paper on. I had no inspiration, no anything. So I went to the National Geographic bound volumes in the library and just paged through them. I was looking for something that might stimulate my imagination.”

“And you found something?”

“A lizard. A big, ugly lizard. God, it was ugly. It was about ten feet long, green, carnivorous, with a forked tongue. It was limited to seven islands in the West Pacific near Java. The biggest island was called Komodo, and so the lizard was called a Komodo lizard. So I became an overnight expert on the Komodo lizard-this is before the Internet, I should add-and I did a paper on its prospects in an environmentally diminishing world. I got the A, I was valedictorian, my parents weren’t disappointed, and I went on with my life as planned, except of course I didn’t marry Jack McBride, but that’s another story. The funny thing is, that lizard really helped me by being so interesting. So the joke is, now and then if I’m happy and I’ve had a few drinks and people are toasting, I toast. My toast is ‘Here’s to the lizard.’ And they all laugh, because it’s so unlike little Susan Okada, the Asian grind with the four-oh average who never makes a mistake. I may have told that to Nick, after toasting the lizard. I think a bunch of us, some Japanese journalists and some State people, I think we went to a sushi place in Georgetown. That may be where I did it.”

“And that’s it?”

“Yeah. But see, here’s the thing. That creature is also sometimes called a Komodo dragon. Maybe I toasted the dragon and that’s what Nick was thinking of.”

“Komodo? Is that a Japanese word? It sounds Japanese.”

“No, it’s Indonesian, I think.”

“It sounds Japanese. Os, lots of syllables. It could be Japanese.”

“It does sound Japanese. It actually sounds like a Japanese word, very common, kamado. Kamado simply means stove or oven. It’s an inverted ceramic bowl or something. In the old days, most Japanese homes had one. It’s a grill, I suppose. You grill fish in it. Usually small, it’s-”

They both let it lie there, on the table.

A few minutes passed. Then Bob said, “Nobody would see the correspondence between the word Komodo, the name of the lizard, and the word kamado, meaning grill, unless they spoke both English and Japanese well. That would be you. And nobody else would have a Komodo in his background except you. Now, the next question: would Nick have had a kamado?”

“He shouldn’t have. They all have microwaves now. But he did have one. Don’t you remember how his house smelled the night you were over? He had just eaten and he’d grilled some meat. He grilled his meat in a kamado.”

“Now, Nick’s sitting there, somehow he knows he’s about to get hit. It’s over. But he doesn’t panic, not Nick, he’s a cool hand, he’s samurai all the way. He knows he can’t get out, but he tries to preserve what he’s got, which is some documents, that’s how he beats his killers. Where’s he put them? He slides them into the kamado. Maybe there’s a liner and he puts them under that, in the bowl. Then he calls you and he’s afraid the phone is tapped and the only thing he can think of is that little anecdote from your first meeting and the correspondence between kamado and Komodo, that only you would see.”

“He was good at puns. He said he loved to write his headlines in his rag because he liked the puns, the more outrageous the better.”

“I think,” said Bob, “tonight I’m going to pay a visit to the ruins of Nick’s house. You tell me what I’m looking for and where it’ll be. I’ll find it if it’s there.”

It was one of his favorite spots: the secluded cemetery at Sengakuji, the Shrine of the 47 Ronin behind its gate and its imposing statue of Oishi. Here lay the remains of the 47 who’d forged through the walls at Kira’s, slaughtered his bodyguard in furious battle, then beheaded the old man. It was as sacred a spot to the Japanese imagination as was possible, and when the Shogun visited, he always called ahead, made certain that the place was “closed for maintenance” so that he would have it to himself and that the usual clouds of incense smoke from the hundreds of joss sticks lit by supplicants would have cleared away.

Here was naked bushido. It expressed itself on many levels. The bodies themselves, after the mass seppuku, were buried at the highest level, in Buddhist fashion, a thicket of vertical grave markers and ceremonial wooden stakes weathering in the rain and snow. One could-and many did-buy a bundle of joss sticks to lay in tribute to the 47 or their lord Asano, who was here also, which was why a low, smoky vapor lingered among the headstones. Below was a museum, for tourists; a courtyard, wide and gravelly, the shrine itself, the typical Buddhist structure of timbers and white plaster of a pattern spread widely across the whole of Asia, under a tile roof with tilted corners, an archetype that on a thousand Chinese restaurants had become a cliché. Here also-between the courtyard on one level and the cemetery on another-was the stream in which the men had washed the head that night so long ago. Here was the vengeance and the loyalty of the retainers. Here were men who’d die before they’d live with dishonor. Their headstones lay alongside the paths, under the shade of trees. Here is where they presented Kira’s head and got a receipt-preserved and displayed in the museum-from the priests: