Steve Bein: Year of the Demon

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Han prodded Glorious Victory’s pommel with a single cautious finger. “Whoa. Are you sure you should keep this thing hanging over your bed?”

“What’s the big deal? You’ve been here before. You saw my sword rack.”

“Yeah, but not with the sword in it. I mean, look at the size of that thing.”

Mariko rolled her eyes at him. “That’s not really what I invited you over to see.”

He craned his head under the rack like a plumber peeking under a kitchen sink. “You’re sure these screws can take the weight?”

“What are you, a carpenter now? Just read this, okay?”

She handed him one of Yamada-sensei’s notebooks, with her thumb marking a page referring to Joko Daishi’s iron mask. He reached for it blindly, his eyes still on Glorious Victory Unsought. “Aren’t you afraid it . . . I mean, earthquakes and all . . . seriously, Mariko, hang it somewhere else.”

“Where? Look around this great big penthouse of an apartment and show me another wall long enough to mount that sword.”

Han didn’t have to be a detective to see her point. “Well, I don’t know . . . prop it up in a closet or something.”

“Just look at the notes, will you?”

She explained who Yamada was—who he was to her, who he was to the study of history—and then explained about his notebooks. “See, none of this stuff ever makes it as far as the public eye,” she said, “but I’m telling you, that mask is important.”

“Even though I won’t see a word about it in any history book?”

“Especially because you won’t see it in any history book. I think Yamada-sensei’s Wind and Joko Daishi’s Divine Wind are the same thing, and if I’m right, then they’ve been around for a long, long time. We haven’t seen the last of them, and we haven’t seen the last of that mask.”

Han leafed through the notebook. “Are you for real? A five-hundred-year-old ninja clan in Tokyo?”

“Maybe, yeah.”

Han’s face lit up. “That is so cool.”

“Men,” she said, accidentally reverting to English. “It doesn’t matter how old you get; you’re all just eight-year-old boys.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.” Exasperation clung to her like a wet cloth. At least he was studying the notebook a little more closely now. Not much progress, but it was progress. “Help me look through all these boxes,” she said. There was no need to point at them; they were stacked four and five high along the back wall of her bedroom, taking up a lot of valuable floor space. “I need another pair of eyes on this stuff.”

“Why?”

“Don’t you get it? I should have seen the connection to Glorious Victory. I should have remembered it the second I saw the mask. If my memory was a little better, maybe they never would have stolen my sword in the first place.”

Han looked up from the notebook. “You can’t beat yourself up over this kind of thing. If your crackpot ninja theory is right, then there was nothing you could do to keep them from breaking in.”

He stopped himself for a second—maybe to think of something more comforting to say. Mariko could have used it. But no. “I mean, can you imagine what kind of totally badass tools they must have invented over the last five hundred years? Relocking a door chain from the outside would be, like, the tenth coolest thing they could do.”

Great. The eight-year-old boy was back.

“In case you haven’t noticed, Han, I’m feeling pretty fallible right now. I can’t afford to overlook details like this anymore. We’ve got a cult running around our city with high explosives. If these notes can help us find them, then I need someone else reading them, someone to help me connect the dots—”

“And now that I’m not working as a detective, my workweek is about to get a whole lot shorter, neh ?”

Mariko sighed with relief. She felt the tension seep out of her shoulders. They were thinking along the same lines again, and that was a blessed thing. “I figured maybe a couple of nights a week?”

Han flipped through Yamada’s notes again. “I don’t know,” he said. “Looks like pretty dry reading.”

“Maybe over a few beers?”

“Getting better.”

“I’ll give you the play-by-play of my goaltending duties.”

“Ow! Just kick me in the nuts and get it over with.” Han made a show of wincing. “First I get taken out of the game, and now you’re going to rub it in?”

Mariko laughed. “Come on. You have to admit you’re interested, neh ?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Me too.”

A-side:for SWAT operators, the front side of a building

ama:traditional Japanese free divers, best known for diving for pearls

ambo:ambulance

Aum Shinrikyo:Supreme Truth Cult, responsible for the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in 1995

B-side:for SWAT operators, the side of a building to their left as they approach the A-side

bizen:an unglazed style of Japanese pottery

bokken:solid wooden training sword, usually of oak

bushido:the way of the warrior

C-side:for SWAT operators, the side of a building to their right as they approach the A-side

CI:Covert Informant

D-side:for SWAT operators, the backside of a building (or, for irregularly shaped buildings, the side opposite the A-side)

daisho:katana and wakizashi together, the twin swords of the samurai; literally, “long-short”

dono:an honorific expressing great humility on the part of the speaker, more respectful than -san or even -sama

foxfire:magical lights said to be carried by foxes or fox-spirits

Fudo:a Buddhist deity, typically depicted as an angry, red-skinned demon with sharp horns and fangs, often wielding a sword and a lariat

gaijin:foreigner (literally “outsider”)

geisha:a skilled artist paid to wait on, entertain, and in some cases provide sexual services for clientele

gokudo:extreme, hard-core

gumi:clan (as in Kamaguchi-gumi)

haidate:broad armored plates to protect the thighs, usually of lamellar

hakama:wide, pleated pants bound tightly around the waist and hanging to the ankle

haori:a Japanese tabard (i.e., short, sleeveless jacket) characterized by wide, almost winglike shoulders, often worn over armor

hazmat:Hazardous Materials Team; alternatively, hazardous materials and items

Ikko Ikki:a peasant uprising, largely disorganized and only nominally Buddhist, whose political and economic influence endured for over a hundred years until the Three Unifiers quelled it in the late sixteenth century

kaigane:a sharp, stiff tool with a blade like a spatula used by ama to pry shellfish from rocks and coral

kaishaku:a samurai’s second, charged with virtually beheading him if he should cry out while committing seppuku

Kansai:the geographic region around Kyoto, Nara, and Osaka, and the locus of political power for nearly all of Japanese history

kappa:a water-dwelling mythological being, humanoid with reptilian features, with a topless head and a water-filled bowl in place of a brain

katana:a curved long sword worn with the cutting edge facing upward

kenjutsu:the lethal art of the sword (as opposed to kendo, the sporting art of the sword)