“Or when Venus is aligned with Jupiter or whatever.” Han thought about it for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah, could be. I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”
“How do you figure that?”
“We’re on our way to Intensive Care. One of our suspects lawyered up.”
19
Mariko didn’t care for hospitals. She supposed nobody actually liked hospitals, especially when, like Mariko, they’d recently been confined to one. She was laid up for a solid week after her sword fight with Fuchida, but that wasn’t why she had a hang-up about hospitals. It was her father’s death that made her so uneasy.
It wasn’t an easy thing to explain. There was no drama to it. She hadn’t carried him bleeding into the emergency room. She wasn’t in the room for his death rattle. She hadn’t been there at all. She’d known he was sick when she went off to school, but her parents hadn’t revealed how sick. He’d been weak for a long time by then, long enough that the daily fear of death had subsided. It was disturbing how quickly a family could return to business as usual even when one of their number was dying. Get the groceries, do your homework, clean the dishes, Dad’s got cancer. So Mariko went off to college with her father’s blessing, and then—in her memory it had only been a matter of days—her mom called to tell her he was dead.
For years after that, Mariko had wished she could have been in that hospital room. At a minimum, she wished she’d been the one to make the choice of whether or not to come. At eighteen she hadn’t had it in her to make that choice unemotionally; she would have dropped everything, no matter the effect on her GPA, and that was precisely why her parents hadn’t called. They knew their daughter well.
All the same, Mariko still thought she should have had the right to make the choice herself. Now and again, even all these years later, she tried to imagine the room where he died. There were no photographs. It wasn’t the sort of event you broke out the cameras for. Mariko had never asked her mom to describe it—nor her sister, now that she thought about it, though Saori was younger, so she’d been there until the end. For all Mariko knew, the room where her dad had died looked exactly like the room she was standing in now.
She’d never seen the man in this room before, but she’d seen plenty of battery victims in her time. He seemed to sink into his bed. Both eyes were blacked. A huge swollen dome dominated the right side of his face from eyebrow to hairline, obviously the result of some massive blunt force trauma; it looked like someone had managed to shove a hamburger bun up under one of his eyelids. A neck brace squished wrinkles into his unshaven cheeks. Both lips were punctuated with cuts. His forearms were nothing but knotted, swollen bruises—almost certainly defensive wounds—but neither was broken. In short, by the standards of the Kamaguchi-gumi, he’d gotten off light. He’d stay under observation for a few days, but he wouldn’t spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair.
The suspect’s mouth moved constantly. At first Mariko thought he was delirious, but after a while she saw he was chanting the same words over and over again. A mantra. His eyes blazed at her, the whites as brilliant as the full moon, unnaturally bright thanks to the red and purple contusions that surrounded them. Mariko could barely hear him, but given the way he stared at her, it seemed he meant to speak directly to her. And that wasn’t what she found weird; the weird part was her sneaking suspicion that this man looked at everyone with that same thousand-yard stare. It made her not want to get close enough to hear that mantra of his.
The only other person in the room was SWAT’s tactical medic, who was so obviously exhausted that Mariko wasn’t sure he’d be safe to drive himself home. “He’s been spouting that same line ever since we put him in the ambo,” the tac medic said. “Never stops, never sleeps.”
“That’s speed for you,” Han said.
Mariko had reached the same conclusion. Staying up for days on end was probably just another day at the office for a cult that cooked massive quantities of amphetamines. On the other hand, selling that much product probably left a good amount of cash on hand for legal fees.
The lawyer was already reaching into his pocket for his business card as he walked into the room. “Officers,” he said, giving Mariko and Han a short bow. His tone was a little too familiar, his dress a little shy of the immaculate benchmark set by the rest of his profession. His shirt was pressed to perfection, but he hadn’t quite tucked it all the way in. His suit was of second-best quality, which was to say far more expensive than anything Mariko or even Lieutenant Sakakibara could ever justify putting in their rotation, yet not quite up to snuff in the scrutinizing glare of the courtroom spotlight. If he were a gaijin businessman, no one would ever have noticed these details, but in a Japanese defense attorney they bespoke pride, swagger, even gall.
But it was understated swagger, swagger by implication, just like the quality of the business card he proffered with both hands, one to Han and then one to Mariko. The card was not paper but wood, a veneer thinner than cardstock and smoother than silk. HAMAYA JIRO, it read, ATTORNEY AT LAW.
It was an implicit request for Mariko and Han to offer their own cards, and to be professional they had no choice but to oblige. Hamaya had already set the terms of their relationship. “I’m sure you’ll agree,” he said, “that Akahata-san is not yet in any condition to endure a police interrogation.”
Mariko eyed the man in the bed, whose eyes still blazed like a madman’s. His lips still moved in their playback loop, chanting their mantra. “Akahata, is it? He looks ready to talk to me, Counselor.”
Hamaya gave her an insouciant bow. “He speaks, yes, but not to anyone in this room. He prays for Joko Daishi to liberate our souls.”
Han and Mariko shared a knowing glance. It was the second time they’d across the word daishi this morning. Without seeing the kanji, there was no way of knowing what daishi meant—with these two characters it meant “nun,” with those two, “cardboard”—and so when Nanami had said the Kamaguchi-gumi was slinging Daishi these days, there wasn’t much for a narc detective to do with the information. Daishi could have been a nickname, an ingredient, anything. But in context, Joko Daishi could only be Great Teacher Joko, the same daishi as Kobo Daishi, whose name was known to everyone. Kobo Daishi was the sobriquet given to Kukai, the eighth-century monk who had contributed as much to Buddhism as anyone in Japanese history. No doubt the name Joko Daishi was meant to evoke images of Kobo Daishi, earning credibility by association.
“Joko Daishi, huh?” Mariko eyed the tweaker in the hospital bed. “Let me guess: he’s the leader of your Divine Wind?”
“The very same,” said Hamaya, bowing, his eyes closing, his voice full of reverence. Akahata’s chanting went from a silent mouthing to a barely audible whisper. His lips redoubled their pace.
Not seeing the kanji for Joko, Mariko couldn’t do anything with the name. It would have been nice to have something to plug into a search engine. She’d have liked to wheedle the name the old-fashioned way too, but somehow she didn’t think it would fly if she suddenly expressed interest in joining the Divine Wind and asked Hamaya to write down his whack-job leader’s name and home address.
The latter might well have been a psychiatric ward. There was no doubt in her mind that this Joko Daishi was a loony and an extremist. It took an extremist to command such loyalty from Akahata, a brand of loyalty that was almost literally undying: that head trauma might easily have killed him, and if it had, he’d have gone to his grave with Joko Daishi’s name on his lips. Nor did Mariko harbor any doubt that the Daishi pills that Nanami was popping these days were directly connected to the man called Daishi that Akahata prayed to. One glance at Han told her he was thinking the same thing.