30

It was the next evening, past midnight, at the same Roppongi Starbucks.

He put it before her. It was slightly scorched, but he gently opened the manila envelope and one by one spread the documents out onto the table of the coffeehouse. He could see Nick’s handwriting in kanji running up and down the pages of vertically lined genko yoshi.

“And no one saw you?” Susan asked.

“I done some crawling in my time. I got in close as I could, then crawled past the other houses till I reached the ruin. I didn’t even have to go inside; I found the kamado buried under some fallen timber close to the first-floor patio in the backyard. Half the bowl remained intact and the envelope was in the lining between the charcoal chamber and the outer wall. It slid right out. I got my ass gone fast. Total time on-site, less than five minutes. Just in case anyone was watching, I doubled back three or four times. Nobody could have stayed on me, way I ride. I’m in the clear.”

Susan applied the full force of her intelligence to the pieces of paper, now and then shuffling them, now and then righting them, trying to make them assemble into coherence. Bob sat quietly, aware that he no longer existed.

Finally, fifteen minutes and another cup of coffee later, she said, “Okay.”

“He had it?”

“Most of it.”

“Does it make any sense?”

“Yeah. In fact, it’s simple. It’s just business.”

“The guy we’re after, he’s a businessman?”

“Is he ever. His name is Yuichi Miwa, called ‘the Shogun.’ His fortune is based on pornography: he is the founder of Shogunate AV. Miwa got into DVD early and onto the Internet early; thus he made millions, which, reinvested in newspapers, television, software, games, and so forth, became billions. But now he may lose it.”

“Someone’s coming after him.”

“Someone is. It’s an up-and-coming AV company called Imperial. Imperial, evidently, has American money behind it; they want to take over the Japanese market, import American women, blondes mostly, to perform in Japanese-style porn. The government has forbidden that for many years, but if Imperial can get it done, their profits would go through the roof. Miwa happens to be president of something called AJVS, the All Japan Video Society, the industry rep group, I guess a kind of MPAA for dirty movies. AJVS works with the government and controls the regulations of the business; under the Shogun, the government has kept American product out of Japan. Miwa’s term is almost up and there’s an election. He’s won unopposed for sixteen consecutive years, but now he’s opposed. Imperial is spending a lot of money and is running a slate. There’s dozens of smaller porn studios, and they’re either going to follow the Shogun or the usurpers from Imperial. See, it’s like a lot of industries and regulatory agencies. If you control the industry association, you really control the regulators, in this case something called the Administrative Commission of Motion Picture Codes and Ethics. Really, as it functions, AJVS controls the commission. It is the commission.”

“So what does the sword have to do with any of this?”

“Miwa has to win that election. If he loses it, he loses everything. So he needs to do something bold to make himself a beloved institution. He has to transcend porn and become a hero to the people. At that point, the smaller studios and Imperial cannot vote him out. He’s too big. He in essence becomes president-for-life. He maintains control of AJVS and the commission and ipso facto the industry; he prevents the American product from coming into Japan. His business thrives; Imperial withers and dies.”

“Now I get it. Yuichi Miwa understands how sword-nuts the Japanese are,” Bob said. “It will be his publicity masterstroke: he will make a big-deal announcement that he found the most revered relic in Japanese history. It’s the actual blade used by the great Oishi in the attack of the Forty-seven Ronin against Lord Kira in seventeen-oh-three. It’s the thing that took Kira’s head. He’ll get all kinds of media. He becomes a hero. That’ll establish him as the Great Man of the People who cannot be replaced.”

“The little guys know if the election goes against him, it will be a complete loss of face for the industry. They cannot afford the shame.”

“I see.”

“Yes,” she said, “and now it swings into line. That’s why the Yanos had to be wiped out. It had to be entirely a Miwa production, his campaign, his search, his recovery, his restoration, his presentation, all under his auspices. The Yanos mess up that narrative and show the random nature of the process. He’s not a campaigner for the culture, he’s just a rich guy who bought something off someone. So they had to be eliminated entirely, and their deaths had nothing to do with anything else in their lives. They were just the people who were in possession of the sword. They were in the way. They had to be destroyed for the welfare of the Shogun, their property confiscated.”

“So the Yanos had to die,” Bob said, “so some creep could win an election for king of teacher-blows-Johnny.”

“Well, you could have put it more eloquently, but essentially that’s right.” Suddenly a deep melancholy seemed to overtake her. “The terrible thing is, I think he wins.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Now it’s too late. He has the sword. It’s protected, it’s guarded, it’s hidden. No one could ever get it back. There’s no connection to the Yanos. He’ll announce it in time for this ridiculous porn election, get all the media, get the TV and the print, and win his little contest. I don’t see a legal way of reaching him. I suppose you could give a statement to the police identifying the sword as the one you brought into the country, I suppose we could find police factions that would see it our way, I suppose-”

“Yagyu Munenori, sixteen thirty, The Life-giving Sword: ‘It is missing the point to think that the martial art is solely in cutting a man down. It is not in cutting people down. It is in killing evil.’”

“Forget it, Swagger.”

“I can’t. I didn’t come across no ocean to give a statement.”

“It’s moot. You forget, we don’t even know where it is. You can’t be Toshiro Mifune because there’s no place to be Toshiro Mifune.”

“I’ll find the goddamn thing in ten minutes.”

“Swagger, you’re proposing a felony. I have a duty to report you to the authorities. I always told you this.”

“Okada-san, you know the authorities have been bought off by Miwa. There ain’t no authorities in this case. It’s just you and me, redneck and cheerleader. We do something or that little girl is orphaned and there’s no justice in it at all. It’s just a thousand years of history all over again: big guys with swords cutting people down and laughing about it.”

“That sword is locked and guarded in one of Miwa’s seven estates around Tokyo.”

“I can find it in ten minutes.”

“Swagger, it is locked and guarded in-”

“It’s being polished.”

“What?”

“The blade needed restoration. He would hire the best polisher in Japan to bring out every last wiggle of the hamon on the blade. It has to be beautiful, don’t you see? He can’t take the blade into his mansions, because the sword polisher’s equipment is heavy stone and the art of polishing a sword is delicate, slow; it demands total concentration. Somewhere right now, within a few miles of us, there’s a sword polisher working the blade to perfection under heavy guard. The polisher probably doesn’t want to work on the sword, but Miwa and his pal Kondo Isami don’t care what the polisher wants. They don’t care what anybody wants.”

She looked at him.

“So what are you proposing?”

“I go to the shop. I get the sword.”

“That’s a plan?”