Disciple of the Wind (28 page)

Behind her, Mariko heard a hollow sliding noise at the door, then the high-pitched grinding of an electric motor retracting the deadbolt. Either Endo or his lady friend had a key card—probably Endo, judging by the sheer mass that crashed into the door soon after. Mariko watched the door leap forward, only to slam to a halt when it reached the end of its chain. Endo dropped his shoulder into it again, and again the door only moved a few centimeters before it stopped dead.

“Oh, do keep it down,” the ageless gentleman snapped. He could
just as well have been fussing at a couple of pesky pigeons. “Need I remind you that ours is a
secret
society? You two are loud enough to wake the dead. Detective Oshiro, be a dear and unlock the door, won’t you?”

“No, sir.”

He reacted as if she’d poked him with a pin. “Excuse me?”

“I said no, sir.” Mariko was surprised to hear herself speak so formally. Something about this man engendered respect. “I’d rather keep your hired muscle on the other side of the door, if it’s all the same to you.”

He pushed his glasses back up the ridge of his nose with one thin finger. “Oh, come now. They won’t hurt you.” Raising his voice, he said, “Do you hear that? You’re not to hurt her.”

“With all due respect,” Mariko said, “the last time that woman tried to not hurt me, she damn near killed me. She
is
the one I chased through Tokyo Station,
neh
?”

He gave her a jolly but guilty shrug, as if she’d caught him stealing from the cookie jar. “Yes.”

“And she was under orders to make sure I ended up with the mask?”

“Oh, very good, Detective.”

Mariko pointed at the bruised half of her face. “This is what she calls restraint.”

“And you? What do you call restraint? You may have noticed you’ve got a rather large club in hand.”

Mariko aped his guilty shrug-and-grin. “Are you kidding? I’m the model of self-control.”

It was true. Mariko could have shattered the woman’s kneecap but chose to take her in the shin instead. She could have crushed every bone in her hand, but hit the pistol instead. She held back when she could have beaten the woman’s brains out. And she could have taken the bat to Endo while he was down. But Mariko didn’t feel like explaining any of that. Instead she just hollered, “Tell him, honey. Tell him how easy I went on you.”

“You broke my fucking finger, bitch.” The woman’s voice was strained, squeaking like a rope under too much tension.

“See?” Mariko gave the ageless gentleman a broad smile. “A model citizen, that’s me. Now if you want those two to come in and join us, you’ll have to ask them to pass the pistol in here first.”

He sighed. “I do think we got off on quite the wrong foot, Detective Oshiro.”

“The pistol. Then my stun gun. Then their key cards. Oh, and tell them to go fetch my purse while you’re at it.”

“You are quite the intractable one, aren’t you? Your file certainly wasn’t wrong about that.” He gave her an imploring look, and when that failed, another sigh. “Do as she says, Norika-san.”

Mariko heard a catty harrumph in the corridor. Then came a heavy thump on the carpet, and the pointed toe of a patent leather pump pushed a Glock Model 27 through the narrow gap allowed by the door chain.

The Pikachu and two key cards followed. Squishing the purse through the gap was harder, but Endo made it happen. “There,” the big ex-ballplayer said. “Happy now?”

“Almost,” said Mariko. She bumped the door shut with her hip and relocked the deadbolt. Keeping her eye on the ageless man, she picked up the Glock. Her
kote
strike had knocked the weapon out-of-battery, which was to say the slide wasn’t sitting right and the first round wasn’t seated right in the chamber. It was a common malfunction that took all of five seconds to fix. She kept the Glock, returned the Pikachu to her pocket, and tossed the baseball bat in the corner.

“That’s better. Now then, what did you say your name was?”

“Furukawa,” he said. “Furukawa Ujio, at your service. I’ll thank you not to point that pistol at me.”

“No problem. I’ll just need you to assume the position and let me pat you down.”

“Oh, come now. Is that really necessary?”

“Afraid so.”

He looked at her as if she’d just asked him to squat down and take
a dump on the carpet. With great reluctance, he turned around and put his palms on the wall. “I must tell you, Detective, I’ve conducted a great many employment interviews in my day, but I daresay this is the worst yet.”

“Employ . . . ? Huh? What do you mean, interview?”

“Well, of course. Why else did you think you were here? Detective Oshiro, I’ve arranged to see you today because I’d like to offer you a job.”

23

F
urukawa’s suite was twenty times the size of Mariko’s apartment. The dining table sat eight—or would have, if it weren’t covered in computer equipment. Mariko didn’t have a single room that would seat eight. The ceilings here were nearly three meters high. There was a parlor. A walk-in pantry in the kitchen. Two spare bathrooms. Mariko couldn’t imagine why anyone would even
want
three bathrooms. It was just more to clean. Then again, if you had daily maid service, maybe that didn’t matter.

Mariko couldn’t tell what the computers in the dining room were up to; the monitors showed only a little text box for entering a username and password. An old-school landline phone sat on the table, hooked up to a boxy gray gadget she’d never seen before. Cables ran down from the gadget onto the floor, then to a hasty stapling job along the baseboard, then to all the other phones in the suite. There were no folders, no papers, no pens—nothing analog.

There was, however, a pool table. It dominated an open space just beyond the dining room, and its mere existence was a staggering display of affluence. If you put them side by side on a floor plan, Mariko’s entire bathroom would have a smaller footprint than the pool table. The same was true of her kitchen. Then there was all the space
around
the table; it had a boundary as deep as the length of a pool cue. In Shinjuku, that much floor space could easily cost half a million dollars.

Mariko got to see every last feature of the suite, not because her host gave her the grand tour but because she insisted the two of them wouldn’t sit down and talk until after she’d cleared every room. No matter the thread count of the sheets, this was enemy territory.

“There,” Furukawa said, “are you quite satisfied? No, wait, don’t answer that. Allow me to pour you a drink first. We ought to share a toast.”

“A toast? What for?”

“A momentous meeting. It was decided some time ago that our paths would cross. Now, at long last, here we are.” He wrapped one of his slender hands around the neck of a broad-shouldered crystal decanter. Mariko assumed the smoky amber liquid within was the eighteen-year-old whisky she’d spilled earlier. “Shall I pour two?”

“A little early for the hard stuff, isn’t it?”

“Oh, how very gauche of me. I do apologize. In my line of work a man keeps odd hours.”

“And what line of work would that be?”

He pondered the question for a moment. His free hand circled subconsciously as he thought. “Let us say ‘middle management.’ That strikes close enough to the mark.”

“I didn’t know ninja clans had middle managers.”

That got a good, deep laugh out of Furukawa. “My dear, we all but coined the term. If you and I were to be having this conversation five hundred years ago, I would be the
chunin
, quite literally the ‘middleman.’ I would be answerable to some high-ranking
shonin
, just as my
genin
would answer to me.”

Just like
kenjutsu
, Mariko thought. She practiced many techniques from a
chudan
stance, a middle position below
jodan
and above
gedan
. “That Norika,” she said. “She’s one of your
genin
?”

“She is.”

“And that’s what you want me to do? Be your
genin
? Run around train stations in my nightie?”

“Oh, no. You would serve in quite a different capacity.”

Furukawa filled a tumbler with three fingers of whisky and settled the crystal stopper back into the decanter. “You’re sure you won’t have
one? Or perhaps something more fitting for the brunch hour—say, a mimosa? We’ve got some very fine fresh-squeezed orange juice on hand, though I must tell you, the champagne in this hotel is best described as potable.”

Mariko didn’t know what to make of this man. He was alone and unarmed, and when faced with the fact that Mariko had trounced both of his bodyguards single-handedly, his only concern was waking the neighbors. Had she been on duty, he would have had no cause for worry; between the law, general orders, and standard operating procedure, there was very little Mariko could do to threaten him. But she was under suspension. General orders and SOP had no bearing on her, and Furukawa knew that. As far as the law was concerned, all she had to do was say she was trapped in his room against her will and she could shoot him on the spot. Yet his biggest worry was that the champagne wasn’t up to snuff.

“Maybe we can skip the toast and get down to business,” she said. “On the phone you said you were a friend of Dr. Yamada’s.”

“Friend? No. Ours was . . .” His free hand gestured in its idle way, tracing circles in the air. “Well, a
complex
relationship, shall we say. But we had each other’s respect. And he certainly had a great deal of respect for you.”

“You talked to him? About me?” Mariko had to take a step back to steady herself. She knew so little of Yamada-sensei’s private life. They’d only known each other a few weeks before he was murdered. If he had spoken to Furukawa about his newest student . . .

“You must have studied
kenjutsu
with him,
neh
?”

“Oh, heavens no. My interest in swords was . . . well, their interest. I appreciate their appreciation.” He snickered; clearly he found this to be the height of wit.

“I don’t follow you.”

“I’m a collector, Detective Oshiro. Antiquities. Fine art. And good whisky, of course.” He raised his glass to her.

“Then what did the two of you say about me? I don’t know anything about art.”

“Nor about whisky, I daresay. No, my dear, we spoke about your role in the Wind.”

There it was. The one word Mariko had been waiting to hear. She’d noticed earlier when she dropped the word “ninja” that Furukawa didn’t balk. All his
shonin-chunin-genin
stuff was related to the ninja too, but that didn’t mean it was related to the Wind; it could have been just a history lesson. But now Mariko had it right from Furukawa’s mouth. The Wind was more than Yamada’s notes or Han’s half-baked theories. It was real.

Not so fast, her detective’s instincts warned. Sometimes hearsay was good enough, but sometimes people just told you want you wanted to hear. Furukawa wasn’t above braggadocio. The suite alone was testament to that. “The Wind,” she said, deliberately sounding more skeptical than she felt. “The same Wind that was around five or six hundred years ago?”

“Even older than that. Yes.”

“And you’re telling me Yamada-sensei knew of it? I don’t mean historically, I mean now. He knew you still exist?”

“Oh, quite. He was one of us.”

The words struck her like a bucket of ice water in the face. She shook her head. “No. No way. No way in hell.”

“You knew him as a historian,” Furukawa said. “We knew him as our archivist.”

It wasn’t true. It couldn’t be. Her sensei was a good man. She remembered talking with him about his protégé, Fuchida, the one who would ultimately come back to murder him. Fuchida was born a yakuza, but Yamada had earnestly believed he could turn the young man away from that path. Mariko had never seen Yamada-sensei so ashamed as when he confessed that his erstwhile student had returned to his criminal roots. Yamada sincerely believed martial training was
moral
training, that self-discipline and self-control made one not just a better fighter but a better human being.

Mariko remembered that conversation well. She remembered another one, too, when Yamada discovered that Mariko had contacts
within the
boryokudan
. In his mind, police officers did not fraternize with the enemy. Cops and yakuzas were only supposed to interact when the former slapped handcuffs on the latter. Yet to take Furukawa at his word, Yamada had been affiliated with the Wind, a criminal syndicate. “No,” she said again. “No way in hell.”

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks. So young, so naive.”

“So full of shit.”

He winced a little, as if her discourtesy physically pained him. “As it happens, it’s of little consequence whether you believe me or not. It only matters that you believe we exist, and that you listen to my offer.”

“Oh, right. The job offer. Getting me suspended from the force so I can become your ninja.”

“In so many words, yes.”

“Gee, thanks. Why am I the lucky girl?”

He pushed himself up from his chair and gestured vaguely toward her with his tumbler. “You are . . . well, uniquely positioned, shall we say. And uniquely talented. You may not realize it, Detective Oshiro, but you are already an accomplished ninja.”

Mariko could only wrinkle her face in puzzlement. “It’s true,” Furukawa said. “Consider your recent stealth operation in the Sour Plum. You entered in disguise, you gathered intelligence, and based on that intelligence you carried out a raid.”

“Hmph.” Mariko hated to admit it, but the old man had a point. She wouldn’t have described a buy-bust as an intelligence-gathering operation, but when it came right down to it, evidence was just another form of information.

Even so, it wasn’t as if she snuck in there in a black mask to assassinate Lee Jin Bao. When she told that to Furukawa, he said, “Quite right. But neither did the ninja of old. Better to think of them as spies than assassins. The same is true of the undercover Narcotics officer, is it not? Perhaps there was the possibility that you would kill your target, but that was never your goal.”