They could see her. She diverted down their little lane, a stout woman still fifty yards off, slightly spooked, moving too quickly, aware that she was being followed, unaware that she was being driven. She wore a cheap cloth raincoat, a scarf, and glasses. Even from this distance, her wooden-soled sandals made a distinct click on the pavement.

“Now, Nii,” he said. “What did Noguma do wrong?”

“He was too big in his cut,” said young Nii, crouched beside him. Nii had the plastic garbage bags with him. His was the most unpleasant task of the night.

“Yes, he thought he was in a movie. When he stepped forth, he was consumed in drama. I believe also he stopped to think. At that point it is too late to think. You must be an emptiness.”

“Yes, Oyabun.”

“There is no thinking, no willing. Both take time. Time means death, not for your opponent, for you. Do you read western literature?”

“I listen to western music.”

“Not quite the same. I think of Conrad. He said something so brilliant it is almost Japanese. Musashi could have said it. Or Mishima. ‘Thinking,’ he said, ‘is the enemy of perfection.’”

“I understand,” said Nii, who really did not. It was still memorization for him. You did this, then you did that, then you did another thing, all in sequence, and if you did one out of sequence, you got yelled at. But of course all the time you were thinking, your opponent was cutting.

“Be empty, Nii. Can you be empty?”

“Yes, Oyabun.”

The woman felt confident now. Another ordeal had passed. She was down the dark promenade and had stopped twice. The two followers had missed her detour. She was alone. It was all right. She would survive another night in Kabukicho. She would get another glorious day in that adventure known as her life. She would send another 15,000 yen back to-

He moved so silently, so speedily, he could have been a ghost.

“Hai!” she said.

He materialized out of the trees to the right of the promenade like a giant bat, smooth and dark, in flowing garments, his face almost Kabuki white, like a demon’s, yet at the same time so graceful were his movements she could not tear her eyes from him. She knew she was dead. He was a dancer, a magician of the body, a hypnotizer in the fluid, swooping flow of his body as his arms came up. She stared at him, somehow calmed, and there was a frozen moment when she looked into his eyes and felt the compassionate touch of another human mind and then he-

Arctic Monkeys screamed. Nii simply watched in the dim light and could not look away.

He saw the oyabun appear in front of the woman so smoothly and so evenly there was no aggression in the move and in some way the woman was not frightened. There was no terror. So charismatic was he that he somehow blinded her and took her into death as if it were a deliverance. She seemed to welcome it as a purification.

His arms went up into kasumi gamae, the high-right stance, the elbows near, the arms almost parallel, the sword cocked and coiled behind his head, the hands apart on the grip, one up close to the collar, one down low on the very end. He paused, musically almost, as if to obey the ritualistic demands of the drama. Then the strike and its parts: elbows apart came together as he unleashed downward, the blade flashing high over his head, then plunging downward, as the palms rotated inward. The left hand provided the power, the right the guidance as force was applied along the full edge.

Nii watched: the blade drove on an angle through her with almost utter nonchalance, as if she were liquid, driving across the chest on an angle toward the hip, speeding up as the force continued, but it was so sudden and surgical that she couldn’t scream or jerk or even begin to comprehend what was happening to her.

Just as easily, just as quickly, he got through her, driving the sword edge through the inner landscape of her body, feeling the different textures and elasticities of the blood-bearing organs, the crispiness of the spine as it split, the tightening of the gristle of her intestines, the final spurt through the epidermis from the inside out. Astonishingly, almost illogically, her left quarter, the whole thing, arm, shoulder, neck, and head, slid wetly off the cut and fell to earth, little filaments and gossamer connections breaking as it went, her face with still a look of astonishment, leaving her other three-quarters erect for just a second. A jet of black spurted from the hideous opening of the cut that had become the leading edge of what remained, and when the knees went, clumsily, the whole awkward thing fell to earth, and instantly the blood began to pool blackly in the dim light.

“Yes,” said Kondo Isami. “It’s very sharp still.”

Nii said nothing.

“Now, little Nii. Get this mess cleaned up and disposed. And say a word over her when you bury her. She was good cutting.”

It was called kirisute gomen, meaning “to cut down and leave.” It was the right of every samurai, according to article seventy-one of the Code of 100 Articles of 1742.

17

“He says,” said Big Al, “that it’s not an official form, it’s a draft. It was just typed from notes.”

“So there’s no way of telling if it’s authentic. It could be a forgery.”

They sat in an office behind Sushi Good Friends, a profitable restaurant owned by Al Ino. Al also owned three other sushi restaurants, two strip malls, a couple of pizza joints, two Hair Cutteries, three gas stations, and two McDonald’s around Oakland, a few more in San Francisco, and one or two way out in Carmel County. He was a retired master sergeant, USMC, whom Bob had found through a contact in Marine HQ, under the category Japanese language specialists, as Ino had spent twenty-four years in Marine Intelligence, most of it in Japan.

“He doesn’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because he says that although it’s not an official form it is organized like an official form. He’s seen a lot of coroner’s reports. He was a homicide detective in Osaka for eleven years, Gunny.”

The “he” was the father-in-law of one of Al Ino’s sons, who had retired to America to be close to his daughter. Al said he was a top guy who knew Japanese crime up one side, down the other.

“That’s Osaka. Maybe they do it different in Tokyo.”

“Trust me on this one, Gunny. They don’t do it different in Tokyo.”

“Gotcha.”

They were discussing the document Bob had received a few days earlier, shipped by SAL, the big Japanese shipping company. It had turned out quickly enough that the return address was phony, as was the name of the shipper, one John Yamamoto.

“It seems like-”

“They’re Japanese, Gunny. They’re very careful. Every i is dotted, every t crossed at every step. They’re thorough, methodical, and they have infinite patience. They work like dogs. That’s how I ended up owning half of Oakland.”

Bob looked at the document. It was thirty pages long, column after column of kanji characters arranged vertically on the pages, with never a strikeover or erasure, now and then a crude stick-figure drawing with arrows or dotted lines signifying this or that mysterious pathology.

“No names?”

“No names. Just scientific fact on the burned remains of five humans found in the Prefecture of Tokyo at such and such a time at such and such a place. Five dead human beings, and some remarks, some oddities, some things he couldn’t figure out.”

“I’m not sure I can get through this. I once had my own father autopsied, if you can believe it, and I got through that. I’m not sure-”

He trailed off. He needed a drink. A splash of sake would taste so good. It would calm him just enough. Al Ino was a drinking man and Bob could see a whole rack of bottles on a cabinet on the other side of the office. In any one of them, paradise hid.