By the Sword

  “Moki’s friend must have told you,” he said, smiling as he seated himself. “What else did she tell you?”

  His smooth English said he’d been raised in an English-speaking household.

  “Nothing. I have no idea who she is.”

  He frowned. “Then how—?”

  “Let me tell you a story, see if it rings a bell. Four days ago, right here at this table, I met with an Asian dude who also called himself Nakanaori Slater. He gave me a middle name too but—”

  “Okumo?” Slater’s face lightened a few shades. “He said he was Nakanaori Okumo Slater?”

  “Yeah. Quite a mouthful. So I was glad for the just-call-me-Naka part.”

  He looked baffled. “But I’m—”

  The waitress arrived then. Older than the one last time. Jack ordered a Hoegaarden, then waited to see what Slater would do.

  “A double Jack Daniel’s on the rocks.”

  Jack realized in the case of Naka One he should have heeded W. C. Fields’s warning about never trusting a man who doesn’t drink. Naka Two drank Jack Daniel’s before lunch. Did that earn extra trust points?

  He caught Jack studying him. “I need a double after what you just told me.”

  “Don’t have to explain to me.”

  “Describe this ‘Naka,’” he said.

  “Japanese—all Japanese from the look of him, though he said he had an American father.” He pointed to the dippity-do over Slater’s left forehead. “Same hairstyle too.”

  Slater lifted his hair, revealing the rest of his forehead. “Did he have this?”

  Jack stared at what looked like a red wine stain spreading from his hairline almost to his eyebrow. He tried to picture Naka Slater Number One’s face and couldn’t recall ever getting a peek under the dip.

  “Couldn’t say.”

  “My dad called it the Slater Stain. All the Slater men have something like it.” He released the handful of hair, letting it drop back into place. “He had it, and both my sons have it, though thankfully to a lesser degree than I.” He leaned forward, his onyx eyes intent. “What else did he tell you?”

  Jack gave him a condensed version: Heirloom katana blade stolen from his Maui plantation, traced to New York, woman living with artist friend gives him Jack’s name, so Naka Slater comes to New York to hire Jack to find the blade.

  Slater’s face was even paler than before. “That’s incredible! It’s all true except that I’m Naka Slater, but I didn’t get to New York until yesterday. He didn’t happen to mention any scrolls, did he?”

  “No, nothing about scrolls.”

  “A bunch of ancient scrolls my father and Matsuo confiscated from—”

  “‘Confiscated.’ I like that.”

  “Okay, stole. They were stolen from me along with the katana, and I’ve recovered neither. I don’t care about the scrolls—have no idea what’s on them and couldn’t care less—but that katana…”

  The drinks arrived. Even though he wasn’t all that hungry after the earlier omelet, Jack ordered the burger with cheddar cheese and bacon. Couldn’t pass up an Ear burger. Slater ordered the same.

  Naka Two was starting out a lot easier to like than One.

  As the waitress was leaving, he tapped her arm and rattled the ice in his near-empty glass. “Another of these?” He pointed to the barely sipped Hoegaarden but Jack shook his head.

  Not yet.

  Slater drained his sour mash and said, “Another Slater trait: a fondness for booze and a very efficient liver.” He put down the glass and stared at Jack. “Now the all-important question: Did you find the blade?”

  Jack gave a reluctant nod. Slater must have noticed the reluctance because he stiffened in his seat.

  “Oh, God. Don’t tell me—”

  Jack nodded again.

  He slammed his fist on the table. “Kokami!”

  “Pardon?”

  “A Hawaiian term of endearment. Any way of tracking it down?”

  Leaving out the deaths and the yakuza and what he’d had to go through to get the sword, Jack told him about the attempted exchange, Naka One’s attempt to kill him, the subsequent accident, and the disappearing sword.

  Slater squeezed his eyes shut. “So, it’s literally a dead end.”

  “Very literally. Very dead.”

  Slater’s second JD arrived. As he scooped it up and sipped, Jack remembered something.

  “Roll up your sleeves.”

  “Why?”

  “The other Naka was younger, but otherwise copied you down to the hair comb. I wonder if his tattoo was part of that.”

  Slater showed Jack a pair of bare forearms. “I don’t have any tattoos. As someone said, why decorate your body with drawings you wouldn’t hang on your wall?”

  “Okay. This other guy had some sort of hexagon or something tattooed above his left wrist.”

  Slater frowned as he pulled down his sleeves. “Hexagon? That’s it? No dragons or hibiscus or carp or any of the usual Japanese design salad?”

  “No.” Jack tried to picture the dead man’s arm. “Just a hollow hexagon with a bunch of crisscrossing lines. Like hatch marks.” He glanced at Slater and found him staring at him. “What?”

  “You’re pulling my leg, right?”

  “No.”

  He signaled to the waitress. “Can I borrow your pen?”

  She handed it to him and he began scribbling on the butcher-paper tablecloth. When he’d finished, he pointed to it.

  “Did it look anything like that?”

  Jack looked. “Exactly.”

  “It can’t be.” He slammed the pen down. “Impossible.”

  “If you say so. But for curiosity’s sake—let’s just assume I’m not lying—what’s it supposed to mean?”

  Slater was silent a long time. Finally…

  “Sorry. I’m not calling you a liar. It’s just…that was one of the symbols used by an ancient Japanese cult of self-mutilating monks. They—”

  “Whoa.” A cult? Winslow had mentioned a cult. “And did you say self-mutilating?”

  Slater nodded. “Well, not self-mutilating in the strictest sense. They mutilated each other.”

  “Swell.”

  “Once they’d gone through acolyte stages and reached the inner circles, they’d cut little flaps in their facial skin to hold a cloth mask in place, leaving only the eyes visible. Then they started giving up their senses, one at a time: sight, smell, taste, hearing, touch.”

  “Touch? How do you give up touch? Unless you cut off your skin.”

  “They had a slower method. One limb at a time. The final cut was high on the spinal cord, severing all sensation from the body but not so high as to affect the diaphragm. They were left floating in a black, silent void, seeing the thing they’d suffered for: the Kakureta Kao.”

  “Which means…?”

  Slater pointed to his drawing and ran his finger along the outline of the hexagon. “See this? That represents a head.” Then he tapped the hatch-marked center. “What sort of face do you see here?”

  “None. Just a bunch of lines.”

  “Exactly. Originally, when the tattoo was in progress, the artist would draw a rudimentary face inside and then obscure it with all those crisscrossing lines. Hiding it. That’s what Kakureta Kao means: They were called the Order of the Hidden Face.”

  “And what happens when they see this Hidden Face?”

  “Then they knew the meaning of everything. They died happy and ful-filled, and joined it in its eternal void.”

  Jack had noticed something. “You keep using the past tense.”

  “That’s because the last surviving members of the sole remaining enclave were incinerated by Little Boy on August sixth, 1945.”

  6

  “I hurt, sensei.”

  Wearing a surgeon’s mask and a stolen lab coat, Toru Akechi stared down at the man in the hospital bed and grieved. Poor Tadasu. Had he succeeded in his mission he would have been admitted to the Inner Circles.

/>   But he had failed.

  Tadasu lay in the bed like a broken marionette—legs suspended on wires, both arms in casts, his neck sheathed in a hard plastic brace.

  Toru nodded toward the clear plastic bag suspended over the side of the bed. When he spoke, the surgical mask he wore muffled his voice more than the traditional mask worn in the temple.

  “They give you painkillers.”

  “The pain is in my heart, sensei. The pain of failure.”

  Toru controlled a sudden burst of fury. He wanted to say, You should feel pain, Tadasu Fumihiro. In your heart and everywhere else. You deserve intractable pain for such miserable failure.

  For although Tadasu had to answer to him, Toru had to answer to others.

  But he modulated his response. “You made many mistakes, Tadasu. The first was in choosing the thief.”

  The younger man looked as if he was about to speak, but instead pressed his lips tightly together and nodded as best he could within his neck brace. He knew better than to mention that his sensei had approved the choice of Hugh Gerrish for the job.

  It had seemed a good choice at the time: Better to deal with a known quantity here in New York, where they had the temple, and fly him out to Maui rather than try to find someone in Hawaii.

  But Gerrish had betrayed them.

  “At least we have the scrolls,” Tadasu said.

  Yes…the Kuroikaze scrolls once again belonged to the Kakureta Kao. And that was good. Gerrish had delivered them as promised, but had reneged on the katana. Instead of turning it over, he had fled home with it. The Order’s reach was limited here in this barbaric land, and it had been unable to locate him. So they had turned to the man they had overheard recommended to that mongrel, Nakanaori Slater.

  At least that had been a good decision: The man had tracked down the katana.

  “How could you have failed in the last act of the task? You were to sever all links between the katana and yourself, and thus the Order. You are skilled in the use of the katana. You know all the kata. How could you not only fail to kill him but lose the katana as well?”

  Tadasu closed his eyes. “I had my moves carefully planned. But when I saw the blade…when I touched it…I could not help myself. I dropped my plan and flew into action without thinking.”

  “That is very unlike you, Tadasu. How could you be so reckless?”

  “I don’t know, sensei. I had this sudden, overwhelming urge. I didn’t give in to it. It…took over.”

  “And now, because of your foolish surrender to impulse, because of your weakness, the sword remains lost to us. It could be anywhere. Anyone could have picked it up.”

  “I saw him, sensei.”

  “You did?” Toru felt a jolt of hope suffuse his heart. Here was a chance to set this right. “Why didn’t you tell me? What does he look like?”

  “I saw only part of him—just his hand.”

  “His hand?” The excitement withered. “Of what value—?”

  “He had a tattoo, sensei.”

  That might be useful.

  “What did it look like?”

  “It was the strange man-figure that I have been seeing painted on walls throughout the city.”

  A man-figure graffito? The necessity of hiding his face—certain to raise alarms in post-9/11 New York—kept Toru from leaving the temple often, but on a recent trip, sealed behind tinted windows, he thought he had seen the figure Tadasu was talking about.

  He’d noticed a pen jutting from the breast pocket of the lab coat he’d borrowed. He went to hand it to Tadasu, then stopped as he realized both arms were in casts.

  He looked around and found no paper, so he pulled back Tadasu’s top sheet and began to draw. When finished he held it up where Tadasu could see it.

  “Is this it?”

  Tadasu gave another restricted nod. “Yes, sensei. That was on his hand.”

  Toru had no idea what it meant, but he would find out. He would learn everything there was to know about this figure.

  But now it was time to deal with temple guard Tadasu Fumihiro. He would be undergoing multiple surgeries. Who knew what he might say under the effects of anesthesia? The Kakureta Kao could not risk exposure.

  From a pocket of the silk tunic he wore beneath the lab coat, Toru withdrew the small ebony case of doku-ippen. He opened it and chose one of the deadly black-ringed slivers. When he looked up he found Tadasu staring at the box with bulging eyes.

  “Sensei, this is not necessary.”

  “Do you question me, Tadasu?”

  “No, sensei. But—”

  “Accept your fate. It is a kind death I offer. One prick of the skin and all your pain—in your heart and body—as well as the shame of your failure will be gone. It is for the Order, Tadasu.”

  The acolyte closed his eyes. Tears found their way between the lids.

  “I shall never see the Hidden Face.”

  “No, but in making this sacrifice for the Order, you will make that possible for others.”

  Eyes still closed, Tadasu nodded. “For the Order.”

  Holding the sliver between thumb and forefinger, Toru found a small area of exposed flesh near Tadasu’s shoulder and pressed the sharp tip into the skin.

  Then he turned and started toward the door, knowing that Tadasu would be dead before he reached the hallway.

  7

  …incinerated by Little Boy…August sixth, 1945…

  Then Jack realized: “The Hiroshima bomb—same as the sword. Did the katana belong to these kooks?”

  Slater shook his head. “It belonged to a Japanese Intelligence officer named Matsuo Okumo who was at ground zero with the sword when Little Boy went off. He died along with that psycho cult.”

  “Looks like they’ve risen from the grave.”

  “Maybe someone started them up again. They’ve had since forty-five to rebuild.”

  “If they’re back, why doesn’t anybody know about them? They’re terrific tabloid fodder.”

  “If they’re back, they’re laying low. After the war it was discovered they were kidnapping children and mutilating them.”

  Jack stomach tightened. “Jeez. How do you know so much about them?”

  “My father left a posthumous memoir—a balls-to-the-wall tell-all that takes no prisoners. In his will he asked me to get it published, but no one would touch it as a memoir. I did manage to sell it as a novel. I called it Black Wind. Didn’t sell too well. If you want a copy—”

  Thinking of the Compendium, Jack waved off the offer. “Thanks, no. Got too much to read as it is.”

  “As you wish. My father was pretty merciless with himself as well. At times it was tough, as his son, to read about his failures of nerve, but in the end I respected him more than ever.”

  Jack thought of his own dad, and how close they’d become on their last outing…before…

  He shook it off and said, “Okay, you’ve been told this Hidden Face thing is extinct, which may or may not be true, but the guy pretending to be you wore the tattoo and knew everything that you knew.”

  “Someone must have tapped my phone. That’s the only way.”

  “He wanted the sword. Why?”

  “It killed a lot of Kakureta Kao members.”

  “The memoir says so?”

  Slater nodded. “Yeah. If they’re back, they may want it as some kind of totem. Or to destroy it.”

  “Good luck. If Little Boy couldn’t turn it into a Dalí clock, I don’t see how they…” A thought occurred to him. “Wait. If they’re looking for it, that means they didn’t steal it. Which leaves us with the question of who hired Gerrish.”

  “Gerrish?”

  “The name of the thief. A pro—a very dead pro.”

  “Dead?” Slater’s eyes narrowed. “You?”

  “No. But he’s not the only one. Two others have gone to their greater reward because of that thing.” Jack decided not to mention how O’Day had passed. “Almost like it’s cursed.”

  “Maybe it i
s.” He sighed. “My father told me he’d handled the sword a number of times before the bomb and said it felt different afterward…changed.”

  “Well, it took one helluva beating.”

  “He didn’t mean physically. He meant spiritually. Like it had lost its soul.”

  “Yeah, right.” Jack tried to imagine that happening with one of his guns.

  Slater shrugged. “You either get it or you don’t. How’d you feel when you held it?”

  Jack remembered the dark elation while swinging it around in his apartment. And the urge to keep it instead of give it up.

  “Let’s get back to this Kaka-Kookoo group. If they didn’t hire Gerrish, who did?”

  Slater shook his head. “Oh, they hired him. The scrolls that disappeared with the katana once belonged to Kakureta Kao. Matsuo Okumo gave them to my father for safekeeping.”

  “Then why—?”

  “Would they hire you to find it? Maybe something went wrong with the plan. Maybe they tried to kill the thief like they did you, and he escaped and ran back here. Or maybe he thought he could get a better price for it elsewhere.”

  Or maybe decided to keep it, Jack thought, remembering his own vacillations.

  “Well, it is, after all, the Gaijin Masamune.”

  Slater looked baffled. “What’s that? I was told it was a Masamune blade, but ‘Gaijin’…?”

  “Apparently it’s a fabled and much sought after collector’s item.”

  “Sought after enough to kill for?”

  Jack nodded. “You betcha. Three corpses will attest to that. And I could have been the fourth.” As Slater shook his head in dismay, Jack added, “Something else you should know.”

  “I’m almost afraid to hear.”

  “There’s another player on the field.” He raised a hand as Slater opened his mouth. “Don’t ask who because I don’t know. I do know they’re Japanese—underworld types, from the look of them—and ready to kill to get the katana.”

  Slater leaned back, puffing out his cheeks as he exhaled. “Man. Who’d have dreamed? I’m almost willing to forget the whole thing, except…”