Steve Bein: Year of the Demon

“Or desperate.”

“Lucky to be alive either way. Assuming he survives, that is.”

“Right,” said Han. “Sakakibara said the dude’s in surgery, neh ?”

Mariko nodded. “So we’ve got a seller who’s willing to take enormous risks—”

“Enormous by dope slingers’ standards. Not exactly my grandma’s sewing circle.”

“Exactly,” she said. “And a buyer who’s willing to beat his supplier half to death. Is this case making any sense to you?”

“Nope.”

“Me neither.” Mariko chuckled and shook her head. “But you’re interested, neh ?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Me too.”

Mariko could smell herself in the elevator. She was sweaty, her matted hair felt as if it still had a helmet strapped onto it, and she smelled faintly of Fourth of July fireworks.

She was the only person in the whole apartment building who would have drawn that comparison. She was the only one who had ever celebrated the Fourth of July, because she was the only one who spent her childhood in the States. It was strange, thinking of fireworks she hadn’t smelled since junior high, and she wondered why on earth her hair would suddenly share that smell. Then she remembered the flash-bang going off right above her head.

The elevator announced her floor with a canned voice that sounded just like the woman who narrated those airline safety videos. Mariko hauled herself out of the elevator and tromped down the narrow corridor to her apartment. Her boots felt like they were made of lead and she wanted nothing more than to take a hot shower and collapse into bed. But that was a pipe dream. She’d won enough races and tussled with enough bad guys to know her body’s reaction to an adrenaline high. She wasn’t going to sleep anytime soon.

That was all right, because she had some research to do.

But the shower came first. Then she flicked on the electric teapot, and when it clicked itself off she poured boiling water into two extruded polystyrene containers of Cup Noodles. It was something of a post-workout ritual for her, planting herself on the bed, savoring the soy sauce smell of instant ramen, and cracking open one of her old sensei’s notebooks. Usually her evening workouts involved swords, not bulldozing bad guys through locked doors, but the cool-down ritual was equally effective in either case.

Professor Yamada Yasuo, her first kenjutsu teacher, had earned himself a seat in the pantheon of Japan’s greatest medieval historians. He harbored a fascination with the material culture of the samurai that began with his first week in army boot camp and stayed with him until his dying day, leading him to earn black belts in every sword art Japan had to offer. Fate had a cruel sense of irony: Yamada-sensei died of a vicious sword wound, and at the hand of his own student, no less. Fuchida Shuzo was a butcher and a sociopath, and after killing Yamada, he’d forced Mariko into the sword fight that cost Mariko her finger and Fuchida his life. Mariko wasn’t religious, but she knew fate’s cruel irony when she saw it: living by the sword and dying by the sword and all that.

She had the honor of being Yamada’s last kenjutsu student, and also of being the inheritor of all of his notebooks. He’d written everything by hand—had never even owned a computer—and most of his work was over Mariko’s head. In fact, much of it was over the heads of the many tenured and gray-haired history professors whose dissertation committees he’d chaired back when they were in school, but even so, Mariko enjoyed working her way through his notes. She thought of them as her way to have a little conversation with him.

Tonight, however, she was looking for something specific. That demon mask, the one on the office shelf in the packing plant, was familiar somehow. At first she thought it might have been a pop culture thing—growing up overseas, she’d missed out on a lot of her generation’s icons—but Han hadn’t recognized it either. That made her think the mask must have been somewhere in Yamada-sensei’s many scribblings.

She had hundreds of his notebooks, stacked in tightly packed banker’s boxes along the far wall of her tiny bedroom. She had no space for them, but neither could she bear to part with them. She liked coming home to him, even if all she had left of him was his old notes and his sword. Glorious Victory Unsought, the final masterpiece of Master Inazuma, rested in the sword rack she’d installed over her bed. It was enormous, a horseman’s weapon, and it threatened to pull out the mounting screws with its weight. That in and of itself might have been tempting fate’s sense of irony—in a land of earthquakes, a swordswoman was unwise to sleep directly under her weapon—but the sword was so long that this was the only wall it would fit on.

She was skimming tonight, not reading, and she worked her way through five volumes in the time it took her to finish her dinner. It was on the last page of the last notebook that she found what she was looking for.

The demon mask stared back at her. Its long, curving fangs were sharper than its stubby horns, its face wrought in a permanent grimace. It had a sharp row of incisors but no lower jaw, as it covered only the top half of the face, like something one might wear to a masquerade ball.

Yamada-sensei must have sketched it when he was younger, before he lost his vision. He’d surrounded it with notes, including guesses at its weight and size, and also the names of some historical figures attached to it. Mariko only recognized one of the names: Hideyoshi, one of the San Eiketsu , the Three Unifiers. Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Oda Nobunaga, and Tokugawa Ieyasu were the founding fathers of her country, three great warlords who united dozens of warring fiefdoms and turned them into one pacified empire. If not for them, there would be no Japan.

A thrill of adrenaline clenched Mariko’s stomach and froze her breath in her lungs. It was the same feeling she would expect after narrowly missing what should have been a fatal car crash. Not two hours ago, she’d raided that packing plant with a small army of cops. What if the Kamaguchis had initiated a firefight? Both sides had automatic weapons. This was the kind of artifact that Indiana Jones would risk his life to recover, and one stray bullet could have destroyed it forever.

It was uncanny that she should own the only notebook with a sketch of this mask and that she just so happened to be in the same room with the mask. Not so long ago, she would have called it a spooky coincidence, but this was Yamada’s notebook, and her time with him had been weird enough that she’d stopped using the word coincidence when it came to him.

Of course it was possible that Yamada’s mask had nothing to do with the mask she’d seen tonight. More than possible, in fact. Probable. Almost certain. There were thousands of masks in Japanese history, tens of thousands, and as a historian and a lover of medieval artifacts, Yamada would have had an interest in any number of them. But his particular speciality—his raison d’être, in fact—was studying the artifacts that no one else dared to study lest they be accused of believing in magic. Mariko wasn’t ready to believe in magic, but she did believe in fate. Her experience with Yamada left her no other choice. And that meant she had to admit the possibility that she and the mask were fated to cross paths.

A strange catharsis settled over her. She’d satisfied her curiosity about the mask. She’d reinforced her faith in her own powers of recollection, association, and deduction—never a bad thing for the only female detective in a department run by chauvinism and prejudice. And she’d forged a new connection with her departed sensei. She didn’t like believing in fate. It was too close to astrology for her, too trippy-hippy, so if she had to suffer her new belief, it was good to find more evidence in support of it.