Like many Japanese males he was slender, small, wore glasses, moved fluidly. Unlike most Japanese men, he had blond hair. It was thatchy, moussed in odd directions, and suggested some kind of rock star. If you only counted the hair, he looked eighteen; the rest of him was a man of forty-odd years.
“Do you like it?” he asked Susan.
“No. It’s stupid.”
He looked up at Bob.
“Is she a bitch or what?”
“She can be pretty tough,” Bob said. “You should get her started on me if you want to hear some ugliness. Anyhow, my name is Bob Lee Swagger. I like your hair.”
“See, he likes my hair.”
“What does he know? He’s a gaijin.”
Bob and Nick shook hands, bonding immediately on their mutual fear of the great and wonderful wizard Susan Okada. Nick took them into the place, all wood floors and luxurious western furniture. A seventy-two-inch TV hung on one wall broadcasting baseball, but everywhere else books were jammed into shelves and framed front pages hung on walls. The smell of grilled meat hung in the air; Nick had just finished dinner.
“A drink?” Nick asked.
“Can’t touch the stuff,” said Swagger. “If I do, I’m gone for a month. Please go ahead.”
“Okada-san?”
“No, I’m working. This isn’t social.”
“Tea, coffee, Coke, anything?”
“No thanks.”
“Well, I think I will, if you don’t mind.”
Nick went and got himself a jug and a cup and proceeded to lubricate himself with small sips of sake. He ushered them to the leather sofa and he slipped into a nice Barcelona chair.
“Nick used to be the Tokyo Times’ Washington bureau chief, which is where I met him. But then he was recalled and in a few months got himself fired. What was it, Nick? I don’t remember. Plagiarism or bribery?”
“Actually, it was both.”
“The cocaine made him do it. It wasn’t his fault.”
“The cocaine made me do it. It was my fault.”
“Anyhow, he says he’s clean now, and he’s still a one-man show. He publishes, writes and reports, and lays out the Tokyo Flash, a weekly of a disreputable sort. Tokyo has hundreds of them. His is one of the best. If you want to know about Brad and Angelina, or what porn star has just left which studio to go hard-core for two billion yen, Nick would know.”
“But I know some other stuff too.”
“He’s published seven books on the yakuza. And he knows a lot more than he’s published.”
“I’d be dead if I published what I know.”
“You sound like just the man I need,” said Bob.
“Well, I’ll try. I owe Susan for something in D.C. So try me.”
“Kondo Isami.”
“Ohhhh, I’m impressed. Which one? Kondo the original, or Kondo Two, the Sequel?”
“I guess the first to start.”
“You probably couldn’t understand the second without the first.”
“I’m all ears.”
Nick poured himself a little more sake. He turned off the TV, fished among his CDs and found one, and popped it into a player.
“Soundtracks from several samurai movies.”
“Swagger’s seen a lot of samurai movies. Too many. He has the Toshiro Mifune disease.”
“Well, Swagger-san, I’m a writer, so I believe in mood. This is the right music for this story.”
He took another swig on the sake.
“Westerners can’t really appreciate the dynamic between shogun and emperor that played, off and on in Japan for three hundred years. I won’t bore you with it in detail, but we had this weird system of a showy but powerless emperor-god on a throne in Kyoto and a guy in armor who’d fought in a hundred battles and outthought everybody else running the show in Edo. They never got along.
“It came to a head in the middle of the nineteenth century, when aggressive outsiders began pressuring Japan to open up and trade with the West. The shogun opposed the move, the emperor embraced it, more or less, and that set the clans a-warring. The emperor, as I say, lived in Kyoto, the shogun in Tokyo. I’ll call it Tokyo instead of Edo just to keep it simple.”
“I’m very simple,” said Bob, “but so far I’m with you.”
“A lot of pro-emperor ronin-masterless samurai, who despised the shogun-came to Kyoto and essentially turned it into Dodge City. It was violent, terrible, a city of anarchy. The year is roughly eighteen hundred sixty-two. In Tokyo, the shogun was embarrassed that he couldn’t keep control of the city where the emperor resided; it made him look foolish.
“So a lord sympathetic to him, and certainly with his permission, hired a militia. Or maybe you’d call them vigilantes, or regulators, something cowboy. A gang, a posse, an outfit, whatever. They called themselves the Specially Chosen Ones, which in Japanese is Shinsengumi. They were led-well, there was a lot of turmoil in their own leadership, as there always is in Japan, but eventually, with the help of a really good, bloody assassination-by a guy named Kondo Isami. Big guy, tough guy, ran a dojo out west, very ambitious. So Kondo and his Shinsengumi set out to tame Dodge. They did it by killing. It’s been in a thousand movies, but you probably remember either Band of Assassins or When the Last Sword Is Drawn.”
“Saw ’ em both. Poor Toshiro gets beheaded in Band. I guess he was Kondo.”
“That’s right. Kondo Isami is definitely the Mifune part. That’s what happened to Kondo when the emperor’s clans won and the shogun was replaced. But for a long time, in Kyoto, Kondo was the law, and he and his boys were the bloodiest mob old Japan ever saw. They killed and killed and killed. Kondo himself probably killed a hundred men in sword fights. He was your true-grit samurai, love him or hate him. So any man today calling himself Kondo means to scare you and frighten you and communicate to you that he is willing to kill. That he even likes to kill.”
“And Kondo Isami Two?” Bob asked.
“I’ve never seen his name in print. Supposedly it appeared only once and a few weeks later, the reporter’s head was found mounted on a tripod of golf clubs outside his paper, a tabloid called Weekly Jitsuwa. It caused quite a stir. The three clubs were the eight and nine irons and the number three wood. Ya-ku-za, of course, is slang derived from a card game’s losing hand, which is eight-nine-three.
“Nobody knows who he is, only what he does. He’s an elite yakuza assassin, with a very small team of highly trained men who favor the old traditions. They still kill the old way, with the sword.”
“You’ll have to explain that to me,” Bob said.
“For a westerner it seems bizarre, I suppose. But in certain applications, the sword is actually far more efficient than the gun, if you don’t mind a lot of sloppy blood around. These guys spend their lives working on it and get very, very good. They can take you down as fast as a gun. It’s an extremely lethal weapon and they have a butcher’s knowledge of anatomy. They know exactly where to cut you or, if they have to, pierce you, to empty you of blood in a split second. They cut your lungs and take out your air supply, they cut your pelvis and shatter your support system, they cleave your brain and it all goes dark. You don’t even feel the pain, you just go down in a heap. And best of all: no noise. You can have a nice little battle, a good triple assassination, a one-on-one to the death, assured that no cops are going to show up. Nobody knows until the next morning when they notice all those pools of sticky red stuff in the gutter. Here, look at these.”
He went to a cabinet, pulled out a file, and handed it to Bob.
They were autopsy and crime scene photos of men dead by sword. On the slab, the nude bodies had oval openings the size of footballs, sometimes hard to see because the skin sundered wasn’t white but usually mottled red, black, and green, not from disease, as Bob initially thought, but from the dense, almost obsessive tattooing that marked the bodies. But the cuts were visible once you focused on them amid the dragon’s heads and wolves’ yaps and kanji characters: they exposed a butcher’s festival of sliced meat inside, visible now only because the blood had drained. The cuts were gigantic, and deep, and permanent; they’d empty the sack of fluid that is a human body in a second. In the on-site photos of the rubbed-out of the underworld, the distinguishing feature was not the black suits and shoes, not the sunglasses, not the twisted postures of the fallen or the occasional lopped limb or split head, but the blood, the lakes and lakes of it. Each body sat like an island in the middle of a red sea; it lapped everywhere, spreading in satiny luster, as if by some mad king’s imperial mandate.