“Loud and clear,” Sakakibara said. He sounded gruff and authoritative even through the tiny speaker.
“Have a good night, sir.” She dropped the phone back in her pocket. “So here’s the deaclass="underline" I’ll give your mask back anyway, since it’s yours, but you’re going to call off the hit on me one way or the other. You do understand how this works, neh? We don’t just come after you, we come after your dad. And yeah, I can’t touch him, and yeah, there’ll be blowback to cops in this city for a while to come, but at the end of the day cops and yakuzas are going to settle back into their old ways, and the only thing different is going to be you, implicating your old man on record. How well do you see that working out for you at the next family function?”
Kamaguchi rose from the couch, switching his grip on the beer bottle as if to use it as a weapon. He fixed her with a glare that said he might just chuck her phone off the balcony anyway, and her with it. Then his gaze flicked down to her left hand, which without her knowing it was resting on the heel of her SIG Sauer.
“You’re not afraid to use that, are you?” he said. His tone was almost congratulatory.
“Nope.”
“Heh. I heard about that. You and the guy in the subway. He’s the one who stole my mask?”
“One of them, yeah.”
“And the other one?” His grip on the bottle hadn’t changed yet. There was still a tension in his knees and shoulders, harnessed there but ready to explode, like a dog pulling at an invisible chain.
“In custody. He’ll see some serious time.”
Kamaguchi snorted a laugh and set down the bottle. “Then we’re square, sugar. Hell, I couldn’t’ve killed you anyway. You’re too much fun to fight. Come on, sit, have a beer.”
Mariko shook her head and took as step back toward the elevator. “About your mask—”
“Don’t worry about it. Get it to me when you get it to me. I know you’re good for it.” He snorted again and settled back into place on the huge black sofa.
“I am,” Mariko said, “but that’s not what I’m getting at. This guy, Joko Daishi, he thinks the mask gives him divine power. He’s a terrorist, plain and simple, and if he gets the mask back he’s going to cause all kinds of harm.”
“Blah, blah, blah.” Kamaguchi flapped the back of his hand at her, as if shooing a fly away from his food. “It’s my property, neh? I’ll do what I want with it.”
“That’s just it,” Mariko said. “He stole it from you once. He can do it again. I can’t force you to melt it down, but I’m telling you, unless you want people on the street to think you can’t protect your own property, you need to keep that thing under lock and key—”
“Already sold it.” Kamaguchi flipped the channel.
“You what?”
“I already sold it to him. It’s done.”
“You sold it to Joko Daishi?”
“Was that his name?” He settled on some sports channel covering a motorcycle race. “Yeah, I figured he wants it that bad, he’ll pay a good price for it.”
Mariko’s balled her hands into fists. She heard her breath coming loud and angry and she had half a mind to reach for her pistol again. “Do you have the slightest idea what this man intends to do with that mask?”
“Honey,” he said, twisting around to look at her, “I’m a gangster. This is what I do.” Then the TV reclaimed his attention.
“Mass murder,” Mariko said. “Mass destruction. Maybe killing your own people. Definitely hitting your own hometown. He thinks he needs the mask to make it happen. You want that?”
“Honey, I’m a gangster. I see a chance to make money, I take it. Shit happens to my people, I deal with it. Shit happens to other people, I let you deal with it.”
Mariko couldn’t believe her ears. All the work she’d put in, all the man-hours allocated by her department, all the fear, the tension, the worry, to say nothing of the quagmire Han had sunk himself into—all of it for nothing. For the second time in as many days, she’d surprised herself with her loyalty to a city that so often made her feel alien. Joko Daishi wasn’t just another criminal. His bombs weren’t just a menace to the general public. He’d threatened Tokyo, damn it, Mariko’s city, Kamaguchi’s city, and Kamaguchi couldn’t even be bothered to turn down the volume to hear her out.
All she could think of to say was “You selfish son of a bitch.” There was nothing left to do but walk away.
63
Joko Daishi’s indictment was the following Friday. His legal name was Koji Makoto. Age fifty-one, though he looked a lot younger. A history of petty crimes in his youth, all linked to mental illness, resulting in some court-ordered psychiatric care but not a day of incarceration. No known residence, no known relatives. If he had a source of income, the National Tax Agency didn’t know about it. As far as the bureaucracy was concerned, he’d stepped out of a psychiatric ward on the morning of his eighteenth birthday and simply ceased to exist.
The indictment was supposed to be at ten o’clock, on the first floor of a district courthouse around the corner from TMPD headquarters in the heart of Kasumigaseki, a neighborhood as schizophrenic as they come. The Metropolitan Police HQ was an enormous postmodern thing with a tower coming out the top that was striped like a candy cane. Across the street was the Ministry of Justice, Italianate, only three stories tall. Both of those fronted a moat of the Muromachi era, on the other side of which was the five-hundred-year-old sloping stone foundation of an Imperial Palace still decades shy of its one-hundredth birthday. Firebombing had eradicated the old palace, but the foundation had endured the bombers and worse—earthquakes, floods, erosion, an economy that valued downtown real estate over obsolete political heirlooms—emerging with a little more moss but otherwise hardly the worse for wear. Now that foundation was surrounded by brand-new skyscrapers, cell phone towers, hybrid electric vehicles, invisible waves of Wi-Fi. It stood stoically in their midst, unchanged.
Mariko wished she could say the same, caught in the midst of her swirling emotions. From the moment she woke up that morning, Mariko didn’t know where she needed to be. Her friend and partner had a hearing before Internal Affairs. It was scheduled for ten o’clock, the same time Joko Daishi’s indictment was supposed to take place. Part of her wanted the decision to be as easy as supporting a friend, doing the right thing, letting the job come second. It was the same part of her that wished she thought of Joko Daishi as Koji Makoto, not the religious title he’d given himself. It was the more charitable way to identify him—innocent until proven guilty and all that—but in her mind he remained the heartless cult leader, not the psychiatric case with a troubled childhood.
Her more cynical side doubted that Koji Makoto was even his real name at all. Most of her colleagues would have said she was grasping at straws, but they only thought in Japanese. Mariko read kanji characters as a native and as a gaijin, and the English-speaking part of her mind saw that, literally translated, Koji Makoto meant Short Path to the Truth. Too poetic to be coincidental, Mariko thought.
She wasn’t all that fond of her propensity to find reasonable suspicion even in the most innocent of details, like names in the blanks of standard governmental paperwork. The sad truth was that her capacity to see the worst in people made her a better cop. Today it made her unsure about her partner. Despite that idealistic voice in her head, this had never been as simple as standing by a friend. He worked with her and he’d jeopardized their investigation. He reported to her and he’d undermined her authority. And now, at ten minutes to ten, she knew exactly where she needed to be but she didn’t want to go.