Stephen Hunter - The 47th samurai

“No. It’s not going to happen. It has been decided. We cannot have a dangerous, violent American citizen in this country illegally mixing it up with Japanese criminal elements, in ways that can’t be controlled and could explode into scandal, damage, death, anarchy, humiliation at any moment. We need the Japanese, we need their cooperation in a lot of bigger battles. There’s a war going on, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“Philip Yano noticed. He lost an eye and a career in that war.”

“What happened to Phil Yano and his family was a tragedy and an atrocity. But the wicked, wicked world is full of tragedies and atrocities, and they can’t all be avenged. Other things may matter more, like national security, like smooth relations between allies, like truth in dealing with allies, like any number of things that will be decided by people who see the big picture and live with responsibilities you and I can’t imagine.”

“What is Okada-san’s attitude in all this? I hear the State Department, I don’t hear Okada-san.”

“Okada-san is samurai. She works for a daimyo. She lives to serve him. It defines her. She obeys her daimyo. She made peace with that decision years ago. Her feelings are her business and nobody else’s. Duty is the only thing that counts. Now, Swagger, please, finish your motherfucking chicken skewers and leave quietly with me. It’s the best way. It’s the only way.”

“You are a tough one, Okada-san. I give you that. Nothing gets in the way. Professional to the core. You sure you weren’t a marine?”

“If it matters, I hate to see this end. What you’ve done-well, I’ve never seen anything like it. But that’s neither here nor there. I am samurai. I obey my daimyo. Now it’s time to-”

A strange noise came between them.

“Shit,” she said.

She bent, picked her green Kate Spade bag off the floor, and fished out her cellular. It buzzed irritatingly.

“Your daimyo wants an update.”

“It’s not my daimyo’s number.”

She popped the thing open.

“Yes. I see. No, no, that was the right thing to do. And when? All right, thanks. I don’t know. I-I just don’t know. No, don’t call them. I don’t know, I have to think. If you call them, it makes even more problems.”

She closed the phone and put it back in her purse.

“So,” he said. “Let’s go to the van. Let’s get this over with.”

“No,” she said. “It’s all changed.”

He saw now something in her eyes that could have been the beginning of tears. Even her tough warrior’s face and its self-willed impassivity, a signal mark of her beauty, seemed slightly affected. Gravity somehow had altered it into something darker, sadder, and more tragic.

“That was Sister Caroline at the hospital. Armed men just broke in and kidnapped Miko Yano.”

It still made no sense to the little girl. She had been at her friend Beanie’s house and they had a party and played with Pretty Ponies and watched a movie about a funny strange green man in a forest and giggled the night away and the next day two strange men and a strange lady took her away to this place full of nuns and nurses and hurrying and scurrying. She didn’t belong here, but there was no other place for her.

She understood, of course, that something had happened. A sister led her in prayer and finally told her about a fire and that Mama and Dada and Raymond and John and Tomoe were now with God. That was fine, but she had to know. “When can I see them?”

“My dear, I’m afraid you don’t understand. Let us pray again.”

The days passed, then the weeks. Every time someone came in the room, she looked up, felt a surge of joy and hope, and thought, Mama? Dada?

But it was only a nurse.

They dressed her in strange clothes. The toys were dour and limp, many broken. The other children stayed away from her as if she were infected. She was so alone.

“Mama?”

“My dear, no. You have to understand. Mama and Dada have gone to be with God. He called them. He wants them.”

In her mind, she could see only one face that comforted her. It was from the TV, a fabulous story she loved so much about a little girl and her three friends who went off to fight a witch. One of the friends was a tall, almost silver man with a great cutting tool. He was the Tin Man. She loved the Tin Man. He was in her life somehow. She associated him with her father, for she’d first seen him with her father. The man was kind, she could tell. She remembered him in her own house, and she saw that in some way her father loved this man and the man loved her father, something she saw in their bodies, in the way they related and joked and listened to each other. If Daddy and Mommy and her sister and brothers were gone, she wondered about the Tin Man. She dreamed about him. Maybe he would save her from all this.

But the bed-wetting started and it annoyed the sisters and the nurses. They tried to hide their anger, but a child is sensitive to nuances of face and tone and body, and she realized that she was letting them down horribly. It made her sad. She could not help it. It humiliated her, because hygiene (she didn’t know that word but thought only of her mother’s term for it, “being fresh”) meant so much and she had been coached in it so powerfully by Mama and now she couldn’t control her dirtiness. Voices weren’t raised, punishments weren’t threatened, blows weren’t unleashed; still, she felt the nuns’ disappointment like a powerful weight.

She didn’t know when the screaming started. But after a while, it seemed that there had always been screaming. She had no idea where it came from, but some nights, when she was alone in the dark and sometimes asleep, and sometimes not, she began to hear the screaming.

Mama? Dada? Raymond? John? Tomoe?

It wasn’t them, but it was. She missed them so. Why had they left? Why did God want them so badly? It seemed unfair.

“You must be strong,” the nuns told her.

But what was this strong? Her brothers, especially Raymond, the ballplayer, were strong. They lifted weights and their muscles bulged and shone in the light. They laughed and teased and needled each other about school and girls and homework and other things, and it had been so wonderful, though of course at the time she didn’t know how wonderful, and that it would soon end forever.

But that seemed not to be the strong the nurses wanted. It wasn’t muscles, but some other thing that she could not understand and could never do. It had nothing to do with each morning’s wet bed and every other night’s screams.

“It’s you that’s screaming,” one of the nurses said. “Not anyone else. Please, darling, you have nothing to fear. You are among friends who will take care of you. You must be”-that word again-“strong.”

And then one afternoon the screaming was so loud it woke her. But then she noticed she hadn’t been sleeping. It was daylight. There were no shadows. It occurred to her that it was not, this time, her own screams or the screams of Mama and Dada and John and Raymond and Tomoe but of Sister Maria.

At that point the door to her room exploded open, and a giant monster crashed in. He was a very bad giant monster, she could tell. One side of his head was swollen and yellowish, he had a bandage over the lower half of his face, and blood spots stood out against the white. He looked her over and she was so scared she peed.

He grabbed her.

“Little girl,” he said, “you will do exactly what I say or I will hit you hard. Do you understand?”

She felt the full force of adult will against her and if she wanted to scream, she couldn’t, for she was too scared.

Holding her roughly, he proceeded to the hall. She saw Sister Maria on the ground, her face bloody, and Nurse Aoki kneeling over her trying to help, afraid to look up, shaking with fright. She thought of the Tin Man. The Tin Man could save her. But the Tin Man was not there.