Cloud of Sparrows (11 page)

“Shall we retire to the next room?” Genji asked. “These maids will attend Mr. Cromwell. They will call us if there is any change.”

Emily shook her head. “If he wakes, it may comfort him to see me.”

“Very well. Then let us be seated.” Genji sat on the edge of the chair. Just as when he was on the floor, he used his posture to hold his spine erect. Emily and Stark immediately leaned onto the back of the chair and let it do the work of holding them up. That seemed rather unhealthy, but Genji was open-minded. He tried it. Within a few seconds, he felt his abdominal organs shifting out of correct alignment. He looked at Cromwell. The man might live another hour, perhaps two. Genji wasn’t sure he could bear sitting atop this outsider device that long.

Stark, too, was looking at Cromwell, but he wasn’t concerned about the preacher’s demise. His thoughts were on the mission house the True Word had established in Yamakawa Domain northwest of Edo. Eleven missionaries had gone there from San Francisco a year ago. Among those eleven was someone Stark wanted to see very badly.

Stark, Emily, and Genji sat by Cromwell’s bedside and waited for him to die.

“There was no opportunity to shoot Genji at the harbor,” Kuma said. He wasn’t about to tell his client he had grabbed an empty musket. For a freelancer, reputation was the most valuable of all attributes. Why damage it for nothing?

“I find that difficult to believe,” Kawakami said.

“Nevertheless, such was the case.”

“Explain again why you shot that particular missionary.”

Another error, though a less important one. The one he had aimed at, the cold one walking on the near side of the palanquin, had tripped at precisely the moment Kuma fired. It almost seemed as though the man had looked in his direction, seen him, and dived out of the way. But that was most improbable. Even a trained ninja would not so easily have detected Kuma’s presence. He must have tripped. Kuma kept the confident look on his face. There was no way Kawakami could know his shot was entirely fortuitous.

He said, “He was the older of the two men. I assumed he was the leader. His loss will be more painful for Genji and other Christian sympathizers. I thought you would be pleased.”

Kawakami contemplated the situation. It would not do to have Kuma making critical decisions on his own. At the same time, he was most effective if he was free to act should promising circumstances develop. “Take no further action against Genji. If an opportunity to attack the missionaries arises, do so, but only while they are supposedly enjoying the full protection of the Okumichi clan.” Such a humiliating event was pleasant to imagine.

“Do you mean while they are inside Quiet Crane Palace?”

“Yes.”

“That will not be easy.”

Kawakami placed ten gold ryo on the table and pushed them toward Kuma. “Continue to watch Heiko. I am not so sure she remembers what she should remember.”

Kuma bowed, finished his tea, and slipped out the door. It had gone more easily than he had expected. Kawakami usually asked many more questions. Today he seemed distracted. No matter. Kuma was ten ryo richer. More important, he was still assigned to watch over Heiko. He would have done so anyway. To be paid for it was a blessing indeed. Namu Amida Butsu.

Kuma the Bear walked briskly, but not too briskly, toward the market section of Tsukiji. Anyone who bothered to notice him would see a fat, balding, middle-aged peasant with the vaguely cheerful expression typical of those who are not too bright. No one would see the deadliest ninja in the Home Provinces.

No one ever did. At least, not in time.

Kawakami had a hard time paying attention to Kuma. He couldn’t stop thinking about Heiko’s report. Such devastating carnage. Father and son killed in the same wretched hour. Root and the branch destroyed, and not by an enemy’s hatred but by one’s own madness. Could such a horror be true? Until there was confirmation from additional sources, Kawakami could only hope. If it was so, Kuma’s failure to maim Genji was most fortunate. Far better that the Okumichi clan collapse from within than be destroyed from without.

Kawakami closed his eyes and dropped into deep contemplation. In the fourteenth year of the Emperor Go-yozei, two and a half centuries ago, Reigi, Lord of Minato, had followed Nagamasa, Lord of Akaoka, into battle against the Tokugawa armies. Reigi had believed in Nagamasa’s gift of prophecy. The Tokugawa clan is doomed, Nagamasa said. I have seen it in a visioning. Nagamasa died, and good riddance to the false prophet. Reigi, at Nagamasa’s side, also died. As did his wife, his concubines, and all his children but one, a daughter who had married into a junior line of the Tokugawas. Kawakami’s revered ancestress. For generations, from grandmother to mother to daughter, the story had been passed, and grandmothers, mothers, and daughters had told the story in their nurseries to their grandsons and sons.

If not for Nagamasa, Kawakami and his ancestors would have been Lords of Minato, a truly great domain, instead of Hino, great in name more than reality.

Now the continuation of Nagamasa’s bloodline depended on one man.

Genji.

Dwelling in silence, Kawakami considered how he could further nurture the most painful, most humiliating ways in which that line might be cut.

Stark was a guest in the palace of a Japanese warlord on New Year’s Day, 1861, because of ten dead men.

The second dead man was Jimmy So Fast. His real name was James Sophia. He was called So Fast because he didn’t like to be called Sophia, and because he was so fast with cards no one could catch him cheating. The third reason he was called So Fast was because he was faster with a pistol than seven men. Those were the seven men he’d shot dead, none of whom was among the ten who eventually brought Stark to Japan.

Stark didn’t know any of this until Jimmy So Fast was dead. One of the reasons Jimmy So Fast was dead was because Stark, unlike any of the other men Jimmy So Fast cheated at cards, saw him cheating.

“Hold on,” Stark said. “You just palmed the bottom card, you son of a bitch.” He was seventeen then, a runaway from an Ohio orphanage on his first cattle drive in west Texas. His head hurt, his balls hurt, his back hurt, his hands hurt, his knees hurt, his ass hurt, his feet hurt. He had a bad sunburn and a worse hangover. But his eyes were as sharp as ever and he saw the son of a bitch palm the card. The ace of spades.

Jimmy So Fast gave him a cold look. “You know who you talkin’ to, boy-o?”

“Yeah, I do,” Stark said. “I’m talkin’ to a card-palming, cheating son of a bitch. Put down that ace of spades, you fuckless shitheel, or I’ll beat your goddamned head in for you.” The night he left the orphanage, Stark had done exactly that for Elias Egan, the night supervisor. For years, Egan had abused and brutalized many of the boys, including Stark. After he had his head beaten in, he didn’t do it anymore. Elias Egan was the first dead man.

Jimmy So Fast lived up to his name. His pistol was in his hand and pointed at Stark’s chest before Stark’s pistol was out of its holster. He would have made Stark his eighth dead man instead of becoming Stark’s second if not for his fascination with newfangled inventions.

Instead of a black-powder muzzle-loading revolver like everyone else had at the time, Jimmy So Fast carried a Volcanic Pistol, which fed revolutionary rimfire cartridges into the firing chamber, six of them one after another, with a hand crank. That was the other reason he was dead. The Volcanic Pistol jammed. When the cartridge in the chamber didn’t fire, Jimmy So Fast tried to crank in the next one, but the crank wouldn’t budge. While he was pulling and pushing at it, Stark drew his old muzzle-loader, pressed it against Jimmy So Fast’s cheek, and pulled the trigger. Jimmy So Fast was much faster on the draw than Stark, but Stark’s old muzzle-loader fired, and Jimmy So Fast’s Volcanic Pistol didn’t.

The third, fourth, and fifth dead men were gunslingers who thought it would increase their price in the killer’s marketplace by gunning down the man who had gunned down the famous Jimmy So Fast. The first of them would have killed the old Stark easily. The new Stark was something else. When he found out who he’d shot, he realized he’d done something more than blow the brains out of his second dead man. He’d also made himself a target for everyone looking to make a name as a fast gun.

The best thing would have been to undo Jimmy So Fast’s death. Stark couldn’t do that, so he did the next best thing. He practiced drawing his pistol, aiming, and firing. He practiced being alert to shifty eyes, tense shoulders, unnatural breathing, too much noise, and too little. He practiced not staying in one place too long. He practiced carrying a second gun in case his first one jammed.

When the third dead man found him in Pecos, Stark was faster than Jimmy So Fast had ever been. Five cowboys and two whores watched the third dead man die with his gun barely in his hand. Five cowboys and two whores can spread a story far and wide in not much time. They can also exaggerate like nobody’s business. By the time Stark rode into Deadwood, his reputation was so frightening that dead men four and five teamed up to face him together. Two things went wrong for them. First, they started firing at twenty feet, and they couldn’t hit a herd of cattle at that distance. Second, it so happened Stark did his target practice at twenty feet, and he shot targets every day since he had killed Jimmy So Fast.

No one else looked to face Stark after Deadwood. Who had a chance against a man whose gun hand moved faster than the eye could see? Who pulled the trigger so quick the second man was dead before the first man even started to bleed? Who could hit an eyeball at a hundred paces? Deadwood had its share of tale-spinning cowboys and whores, too.

For a long time after that, Stark didn’t shoot anything except targets. His reputation got so big, he hid inside of it. Stark the fast gun was six foot eight, scarred across his right eye with a knife cut, mean as a rabid sow, drank whiskey and never ate, liked beating women more than fucking them, and fucked them only after he had beaten them to within an inch of their lives. Stark started saying his name was Matthews and no one recognized him. They were looking for somebody a lot bigger and a lot meaner.

Two years passed before Stark met the sixth dead man. He was a whoremaster in El Paso who didn’t know how to let go. After that, Stark didn’t think about dead men for almost a year. He even stopped shooting targets. He was happy and he thought he would always be happy from then on. He was wrong. He said good-bye to Mary Anne and the two girls and went looking for dead men seven, eight, nine, and ten.

He found the seventh dead man four days’ ride north of the Mexican border in a dust hole with the highfalutin name of la Ciudad de los Angeles. It wasn’t close to being a city, and if any angels called it home, those divine beings were extremely well disguised. Before he died, the seventh dead man told Stark that the others had fled north with plans to take ship across the Pacific. He told Stark not because he hated his former companions, or because he was dying from the pulsating hole in his stomach, or because he wanted to atone for any pain he might have caused innocent parties. He told Stark because Stark had shot him in both knees after shooting him in the stomach, and was promising to shoot him in the groin next.

The eighth dead man tried to run out of a bar in Sacramento, and Stark put a .44 caliber bullet into the back of his neck and took his head clean off.

The ninth dead man caught Stark off guard. He was waiting behind the door in a San Francisco hotel room. How a five-hundred-pound man could hide behind a door was a mystery Stark didn’t have time to ponder. He came out stabbing with a huge bowie knife and almost buried the ten-inch blade in Stark’s back. Stark’s .44 got knocked out of his hand, so he pulled his concealed .22 revolver and pumped five bullets into the ninth dead man. He kept on coming, that bowie knife flashing in front of him. Stark swung the .22 like a hammer, got lucky, and bashed the ninth dead man’s temple in.

The tenth dead man was one of two people. He was the man who took ship to Japan as a True Word missionary one year earlier. If it wasn’t him, then the tenth dead man was Stark himself.

One of them had to die.

The monk they called Jimbo returned to Mushindo Monastery late in the afternoon. Sohaku could hear children’s happy voices well before anyone came into view. Wherever Jimbo went, he was followed by a flock from the nearby village.

“Don’t go back yet, Jimbo!”

“Yeah, don’t go!”

“It’s still early!”

“What are those weeds for? You’re not going to eat them, are you?”

“My grandmother said you can have dinner with us, Jimbo. Don’t you want to do that? Aren’t you sick of monk’s gruel?”

“Tell us one more story! Just one!”

“Jimbo, tell us again about how Buddha’s angels came from the Pure Land and showed you the Way!”

“Jimbo! Jimbo! Jimbo! Jimbo!”

Sohaku smiled. The last voice belonged to Goro, the slow son of the village’s idiot woman. He was big, even bigger than Jimbo, who was a head taller and fifty pounds heavier than any other man in Yamakawa Domain. Before Jimbo arrived, Goro moaned, groaned, cried, and screamed, but he didn’t speak. Now he had a one-word vocabulary and he used it constantly.

“Jimbo! Jimbo!”

“Stop.” Jimbo arrived at the gate. He saw the monks, armed with bamboo staffs, deployed around the armory. Abbot Sohaku sat in meditation beside the barricaded doorway. “Go home,” he said to the children.