Glumly, the old man accepted the new now. He gave himself up to the blade. What choice did he have, really?

And now he was done. A final burnishing, an inspection, the full power of-

“Nii!” someone called.

Nii looked up. He saw that the old man had stopped polishing, something he’d never done before. That disturbed Nii.

Then Nii heard it: someone was banging on the door.

“Who is that fool?” he demanded.

“It’s a gaijin. It’s some stupid-looking gaijin.”

“Fuck. Well, I’ll get rid of him,” Nii said. “You, back to work.”

But for some reason the old man would not work. He stared at Nii with great intensity, as if seeing him for the first time or as if he knew something. Then he smiled.

He spoke for the first time in months.

“This is going to be good,” he said.

Bob knocked hard on the door. He heard stirring inside. He tried the lock, felt it rock in the jamb but not give much at all. He knocked again, harder.

“Hey!” he said. “Hey, goddammit, open up. I got a sword needs polishing!”

Something stirred inside, and through a small crack in the curtain behind the glass, he sensed a flash of movement. What he could see was otherwise unimpressive: shelves and on the shelves what looked to be shoeboxes, and in the shoeboxes what looked to be stones, some flat, some jagged, all different in shape, texture, and color.

“Hey,” he shouted again, “goddammit, I have a sword! You want some money? I have money for you. Don’t you want to work? Come on, goddammit, open the hell up.”

He did this for about three minutes, loudly, a drunken gaijin who would not go away, not soon, not ever.

“I hear you! Goddammit, I hear you in there, open up, goddammit!”

Then he saw movement in the dark, which soon resolved itself into two husky young men in suits. They had impassive faces and one wore sunglasses. They were about 240 each and lacked necks. They had short arms that hung at a slight bend because the muscle was so overdeveloped it kept the arms from straightening.

They came to the door, and Bob heard clacking as the lock was released. The door slid open an inch but no farther and both young men crushed against the opening with their full linebackers’ weight and strength, giving no quarter.

“Hey, I-”

“You go away. Shop closed. No one here. He gone. Go away now, please.”

“Come on, fellas,” he said with a drunk’s belligerent stupidity. “I bought this thing for a thousand bucks. It needs a shine. This is the place, ain’t it? Guy told me this place really shines ’em up good. Come on, lemme in, lemme talk to the fella.” He held up the white-sheathed, white-gripped wakizashi.

“Go away now, please. No one here. Polisher gone. Go elsewhere. Not your business here.”

“Guys, I just want-”

“No business for you here.”

The door rocked shut and Bob heard it click.

The two men edged back, then disappeared into a rear room.

He stood there a second, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a metal pick. The clickings of the door had informed him that it was a standard throw-bolt, a universal fixture, easily overcome. He slid the pick in the keyhole, felt the delicate mesh of tumblers and levers, wiggled this way and that, and felt each tumbler eventually give up its position. He put the pick away, took out a plastic credit card, drew that up the door slot to the bolt, and began a steady upward tapping, gentle and persistent, urging the bolt off the spring-driven lever that secured it. In two seconds, with a snap, it yielded to these probings and popped open.

He stepped into darkness.

“Hey,” he said, “anybody home? Goddamn, the door wasn’t locked, you must be open.”

He heard shuffling from behind a curtain, some whispers.

He bulled his way back with a lurch, stepped through the curtain, spilling awkwardly into the larger rear room, and there beheld a strange spectacle. A small old man with hippie hair and spaceman goggles sat on a platform with the blade, which Bob recognized instantly by shape and length, though now it gleamed like some rare piece of jewelry.

Six extremely husky young men, all in black suits, three in sunglasses, all holding sheathed wakizashi, stood across from him. He almost laughed: they looked like the Notre Dame interior line doing an en masse imitation of the Blues Brothers.

Suddenly the Japanese began to jabber, an excited, stunned blast of men talking over other men, until finally one yelled loudly and seemed to take command. He leaned forward and sniffed.

“You drunk. You go home. Go now, go fast.”

“Just want to get this here sword shined up so it’s like that thing there. Damn, that’s a pretty one. Sir, can you make this one like that one?” He held the sheathed wakizashi and waved it about theatrically.

The leader spoke harshly and two of the linemen came at Bob, bulking up as they came, their muscles bunching as they tensed, their right hands forming fists.

“Whoa, whoa,” he said, “no rough stuff, fellas, please, please!”

The bruisers halted.

Then he looked at the old man, who looked back. He winked. The old man winked.

A frozen moment transpired as everybody took stock. Eyes flashed this way and that, hands tightened on hilts, breathing became harsh. Bob was suddenly quiet, wary, eating them up. It was a moment that seemed to last an eternity. One could compose a haiku during its exquisite extenuation.

Bob looked at the fat leader.

“The one he’s polishing? The one you killed the Yanos to get? I want it back. And I want you knocking at the door to hell.”

Then it was over, as if no concept of quietude or peace existed anywhere on earth. It was time to cut.

The two closest yaks went for their swords to cut down the American, but they were not fast enough. Iai-Jutsu. The art of drawing and cutting. It was called nukitsuke. With his off-the-charts hand speed Swagger got the blade out-it clacked dryly as the transaction between blade and saya occurred-and into a horizontal cut called “crosswind” by Yagyu, one-handed, the cut landing with his front foot, the body weight behind it for power, so full of adrenaline he drove through both of them. Hidari yokogiri, his old friend, cutting horizontally from left to right. He thought he’d missed, for he only felt the slightest resistance, and for a nanosecond had an image of disaster. But the disaster was theirs. The blade slashed deeply in a straight line, gut to gut, through suit, shirt, undershirt, skin, fat, entrails, viscera, spleen, liver, whatever, and just kept on going in a mad driving arc, leaving in its wake nothing, and then everything. The blood pushed out with a good deal of power. It didn’t explode, as in too many movies, and spritz as though a sprinkler had projected it, it just sloshed out heavily, along with two breakfasts. And it kept on coming, seemingly gallons of it, in a red dump that literally sounded tidelike as it splashed against the floor. One stricken man went down like a sack of potatoes fallen off a truck; the other just stood there, stupefied, stepped back, trying to hold his guts in, and then sat down to die.

Without thinking, Bob’s blade rode the energy high and came up into issuing from above, better known in the country of its origin as kami-hasso, and he watched as another man, sword high in jodan, came galloping at him. Under such circumstances, most men would panic: a huge, angry, bulged-eye man of immense strength charging full bore, the sword raised in his hands as he gathered strength to unleash a sundering blow, he was every mad psycho in every bad horror movie ever made. He screamed dramatically. But with eyes that saw far as though it were close and close as though it were a distant mountain, Bob waited until the clumsy drive of the blade announced itself and then with a quick small movement slipped to the left and shimmied into safety exactly as, trailing blade, he cut the big one’s belly open deeply, and the sword never fell. This one instead kept going by him, turned, eyes now spent of rage and filling instead with horror at the immense damage that had been done to him, went to one knee, dropped the sword, then toppled clumsily forward.