A Bob Lee Swagger Boxed Set Read online

  “Why?” Yano asked. “God, why?”

  “Certain necessities,” said the man.

  “Who are you?” Yano said.

  “I am Kondo Isami,” said his victor.

  “Kondo Isami has been dead a hundred years. He was a murderer too.”

  “Where is the blade?”

  “Don’t hurt my family. Please, I beg you—”

  “Life, death, it’s all the same. Where’s the blade?”

  “You piece of shit. Go to hell. You are no samurai, you are—” and then he coughed blood.

  “Die well, soldier, for you have nothing else left. I’ll find the blade. It belongs to me, because I was the strongest.”

  With that he turned, leaving Philip Yano in a pool of his own blood in the darkness.

  14

  RUINS

  By the time he arrived by taxi, it was all over. The last of the TV trucks was pulling out. There was a crowd but by now it had thinned. People stood about listlessly, aware that the show was almost over.

  The house smoldered. In a few spots, raw flames still licked timbers, but mostly it had fallen in on itself, a black nest of charred spars, half-burned boards, broken porcelain fittings, blackened flagstones. The odor of burning hung thick in the air.

  The garden was a riot of smashed plants, footprints, the treads of tires where the fire engines had pulled up. A few shingles lay around, a few pieces of broken, scorched furniture.

  He ran to the yellow public-safety tape. A few cops stood by, not particularly interested in the situation, in their navy-blue uniforms with the tiny pistols in the black holsters. Beyond, Bob could see some sort of conclave of investigators, men in suits or light jackets who had gathered at the sidewalk that once led into the Yanos’ vestibule. The whole scene felt moist, somehow, from all the water spent to fight the blaze; the ground was soft, in places muddy, the water pooled into puddles.

  Bob pushed through the crowd, no longer really interested in the rules of politeness that defined the culture of Japan. He didn’t care about the polite mob of witnesses.

  He ducked under the yellow tape that cut off civilian world from public-safety world and immediately attracted the attention of first one, then a second cop, and finally a third.

  “I have to see the investigators,” he said.

  “Hai! No, no, must wait, must—”

  “Come on, no, who’s in charge? I have to see the—”

  Somehow weight was applied to him. The Japanese uniformed officers were amazingly strong given their height, and with three of them gathered and more assembling, and the investigators looking his way, he felt the urgency of the collective will: go back, do not make a disturbance, you have no place here, you are not a citizen, do not interrupt, these are our ways.

  “I have to see the man in charge!” he yelled. “No, no, let me through,” and he squirmed away and quite logically, it seemed to him, made to approach the investigators or executives or whatever they were. “I have to explain. See, I knew these people, I had business with them, you will want my testimony.”

  It seemed so logical to him. All he had to do was make it clear.

  “Does anybody here speak English, please?”

  But for all his good intentions, he seemed to excite nothing but animosity on the part of the Japanese, who appeared not at all interested in his contributions.

  “You don’t understand, I have information,” he explained to two or three of the men who were forcing him back. “I need to tell people something, please, don’t push me, I have to talk to the man in charge. Don’t touch me, don’t shove me, please, no, I don’t want any trouble, but don’t touch me!”

  The Japanese barking at him seemed to be spewing gibberish, and their faces gathered into ugly, monkeylike caricatures, and he experienced the overwhelming melancholy that they really didn’t care and it infuriated him, and just at this moment, someone pushing on him slipped, a hand broke free and accidentally smashed hard into his chest, and the next thing he knew, he shoved back.

  He swam to consciousness. He was in some kind of ward, his head felt like a linebacker had crushed it against a curb, and he was sore everywhere.

  He tried to sit up, but handcuffs on one wrist had him pinioned to the bed frame.

  The room was pure white, brightly illuminated. How had he been unconscious in such a place?

  A slim Japanese woman in glasses and a business suit stared at him. She looked about thirty, which meant she was probably closer to forty, and sat across the room in a shabby, plain chair. She was reading Time magazine. She had beautiful legs.

  He put his free hand on his forehead, felt its heat, then ran it down to his chin, which was sheathed in whiskers, two or three days’ worth. Yet he was clean. The Japanese had beat him unconscious, then in their thorough way cleaned him, sedated him, stitched him, and committed him.

  “Oh, hell, where am I?” he said to no one, blinking at the brightness of the light, feeling deep pain behind his eyes.

  He tried not to think of the loss, but the more he denied it, the more it hurt. An image of the perfect family came before his eyes, the little Yano unit, each committed totally to the other, the love that was duty that held them together.

  It was all terrible, but the worst was Miko, the child.

  Who could kill a child? he thought, and he felt killing anger rise and knew it would kill him before it would kill anyone else. The grief was like a weight on his chest, trying to squash all the oxygen from his lungs. He thought he might have a heart attack.

  “Is there a nurse?” he said.

  The woman looked at him.

  “Sorry, do you speak English?”

  “I was born in Kansas City,” she said. “I’m as American as you. My dad is an oncologist and a Republican and a two-handicap.”

  “Oh, sorry, look, please get me a nurse or something. I need another shot. I can’t, it’s—it’s just, I don’t know.”

  “Just relax, Mr. Swagger. You’ve been heavily medicated for three days now, I don’t think you need more medication. Let me call a doctor.”

  She punched a button on a science-fiction control panel next to his bed, and indeed in a few seconds a staff doctor in a white coat with grave Asian seriousness came in. Pulse taken, eyes checked, head wound examined, Bob passed muster.

  “I think you’ll be okay,” the doctor said to him in English. “You’re a pretty tough old bird. You have enough scars.”

  “Really, doctor, I’m fine, it’s my—I need a sedative or something. I’m feeling very bad. I just can’t lie here. Can you get someone to release me?”

  “The cops don’t want you free,” said the young woman. “The Japanese have very strict rules about certain things and you broke all of them and even invented some new ones.”

  “I was a little out of my head. Come on, doctor, please?”

  “Sorry, Mr. Swagger. You’re going to have to come to terms with it sooner or later. What you need is relaxation, peace and quiet, a good therapist, and your own country, your family, people you love and who love you.”

  “I’d settle for an aspirin. Some kind of sleeping pill would be better.”

  The doctor spoke in Japanese, then said, “I’ll give you aspirin for the pain.”

  A nurse brought a tray with three white pills and a glass of water; Bob gulped them all.

  Suddenly he was alone with the woman.

  “You’re from Kansas City?”

  “Yeah. I’m with the American embassy here in Tokyo. My name is Susan Okada. I’m head of the Bob Lee Swagger department. We specialize in deranged war heroes.”

  “How’s business?”

  “It was crappy for the longest time. Now it’s finally heated up.”

  “Where am I?”

  “The Tokyo Prison Hospital.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Yeah, it sounds so nineteenth century. You’ve been here for three days. Your wife has been notified.”

  “She’s not coming, is she?”r />
  “No, we didn’t see the need.”

  “I just don’t—Ah, Christ, I don’t know what to say.”

  “Well, we need a statement from you. Then we’ll get you to Narita and off you go. The Japanese won’t press charges.”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “That’s not how they see it. They have you for assault, disrespect for a police officer, public drunkenness, disturbing the peace, and worst of all, for not being Japanese. They’ll put you away and forget about it. They’re not that interested in your version of things.”

  “Oh, Christ. My head hurts. God, I feel so awful.”

  “Have a drink of water. I could come back tomorrow, but I think you’d be better off to get this over with. The sooner you do, the sooner we get you out of here.”

  “All right.”

  She opened her briefcase, got out a digitized tape recorder, and moved close.

  “All right, the whole story. Your involvement with the Yanos, start to finish. How you ended up punching cops at the scene of a fire.”

  “At the scene of a murder. Okay…”

  He told it, not enthusiastically or well, but doggedly, the whole thing, the visit, the sword, his drunkenness at the airport, his discovery the next morning, his arrival at the site, his recollections of the troubles there.

  “I don’t recall hitting anybody. If I did, he hit me first.”

  She put the tape recorder away.

  “That doesn’t matter,” she said. “Anyway, I’ll have this typed up. Tomorrow, you sign it. I’ll have you on the one p.m. JAL to LAX and booked through to Boise. All right?”

  “No, not all right.”

  “Work with me on this, okay, Mr. Swagger?”

  “You have to tell me. What is going on? What is happening?”

  “The Tokyo police and the arson squad are investigating. We don’t know much, we don’t have good sources with the cops. And it’s not what is diplomatically classified Official American Interest, so they’re under no obligation to answer our queries.”

  “Ms. Okada, six people, a family of decent, normal, distinguished, happy people, were wiped out. Were murdered. There’s such a thing as justice.”

  “The Japanese haven’t confirmed anything about murders. The official line has to do with an unfortunate fire, a tragedy, a terrible, terrible—”

  “Philip Yano was an extremely capable professional soldier. He was a paratrooper, for god’s sake, the elite. He’d been under fire. He’d commanded men under fire. He was one of the best in his country. He was trained to handle emergency situations. If his house caught fire, he would have gotten his family out. If he didn’t, something is very, very wrong. That, coupled with my presentation of a sword that he believed might have been of some value, adds up to a very complex situation, requiring the best of law enforcement efforts and—”

  “Mr. Swagger, I am aware you are a man of some experience in the world and that you have been around the block more than once. But I have to say that in Japan we are not going to instruct Japanese official entities how to do their job and what conclusions to reach. They will do what they will do and that is it.”

  “I cannot leave six people dead in—”

  “Well, there is one thing you don’t know. There is some very good news. The child, Miko Yano. She is still alive, Mr. Swagger. She was at a neighbor child’s that night. Praise be to Buddha or Jesus H. Christ for small miracles, but Miko made it through the night.”

  Narita Terminal 2 again.

  The embassy van, driven by a uniformed marine lance corporal, scooted through the traffic, carefully found the lane to international departures, turned into a gate where a magnetized card reader permitted swift VIP access.

  A police car, with two grumpy Japanese detectives, followed but did not interfere.

  “They really want you gone,” said Susan Okada, sitting in the back with Bob, who was now rested, shaved and showered, and dressed in clean clothes.

  “That’s fine,” said Bob. “I’m going.”

  The van pulled up, and Bob and his new pal Susan got out, took an escalator up, and went through the vast gray room where the ticketing desks were. All the paperwork had been taken care of; he was waved through security, so there was no comic scene about the steel hip. And soon enough he was in the departure lounge at the gate. Through the window, he could see the vast, blunt nose of the 747. The plane would board in a few minutes.

  “You don’t have to sit here with me,” he said. “You must have better things to do.”

  “I have lots better things to do. But for now, this is my job.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m on the drunken idiot patrol. I have to make sure a certain guy doesn’t tie one on and end up in the hoosegow again. You get that.”

  “I get that. No drinks ever. I get that. I only fell off the wagon once in years and years. I am a good boy. I thought I had the drinking beat.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “All right.”

  “All kinds of people wanted to be here. The commanding general USMC Western Pacific wanted to be here. Evidently you know him.”

  She gave a name.

  “He was a battalion executive officer my first tour in Vietnam. ’Sixty-six. Good officer. I’m happy he did so well.”

  “Well, he wanted to make sure you were well treated by everyone, that this went smoothly. I saw your records. I see why they think so highly of you.”

  “All that was a long time ago.”

  “We have a minute. Let me speak with you frankly.”

  “Please do, Ms. Okada.”

  “I am so frightened you will try to make something of this tragedy. Yeats said, ‘Men of action, when they lose all belief, believe only in action.’ Do you see what he was getting at?”

  “I sound like a country-western hick, ma’am, and now and then I break a sentence like an egg, but it may surprise you that I am familiar with that quote, and I’ve read them other guys too, Sassoon, Owens, Graves, Manning, a whole mess of writers who thought they had something to say about war and warriors. I know who I am and where I fit in: I am the sort of man people like to have around when there’s shooting, but otherwise I make them very nervous. I am like a gun in the house.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that. But you know where I’m going. You can’t let this become some kind of crusade. You can’t come back. You don’t know the rules here. The rules are very, very strange, and you could get yourself into a lot of trouble and make a lot of trouble for a lot of other people. You must make peace with what happened: it’s a domestic matter, the Japanese will handle it. There have been allegations of criminal behavior but no findings yet. You have to play by their rules. Do you see what I am saying? The Japanese have kicked you out and never want to see you again. If you come back, there won’t be a second chance. You could do hard time.”

  “I hear you.”

  “It may seem unjust to you, or unbearably slow, or corrupt, even. But that is the way they do things, and when you try to change their system, they get very, very angry. They are their system, do you see? And you can live here for years and not understand it. I don’t fully understand it.”

  “Will you keep me informed?”

  “No,” she said, looking him in the eye. “It’s not a good idea. Put it behind you, live your life, enjoy your retirement. You don’t need to know a thing about it.”

  “Well, you tell the truth.”

  “I’m not a bullshitter. I will not ‘keep an eye’ out on things. I want you to let it go. Let it go.”

  “What about the girl?”

  “She will be taken care of.”

  “I have to—”

  “She will be taken care of. That’s all you need to know.”

  The flight was called.

  “Okay,” he said. “It’s against my nature, but I will try. But since you don’t bullshit, I won’t bullshit. I feel obligated here.”

  “What do you mean? You couldn’t have kno
wn—”

  “It’s a war thing. I’m a war guy, he’s a war guy. His dad, my dad, war guys. Us war guys, we’re all connected. So I picked up an obligation. It’s something ancient and forgotten and not in existence no more. Lost and gone, a joke, something from those silly sword-fight movies. Something samurai.”

  She looked at him hard.

  “Swagger, what men in armor believed five hundred years ago is of no help or meaning anywhere in an American life. Forget samurai. They’re movie heroes, like James Bond, a fantasy of what never was. Don’t go samurai. The way of the warrior is death.”

  15

  TOSHIRO

  What was samurai?

  It wasn’t bushido, the way of the sword; he read books on that and found nothing that really helped. It wasn’t any of the other things—calligraphy, computers, automobiles, screen paintings, woodcuts, karate, Kabuki, sushi, tempura, and so forth, at which the Japanese had such eerie talents. And it didn’t just mean “warrior.” Or “soldier.” Or “fighter.” There was some additional layer of meaning in it, something to do with faith and will and destiny. No western word equivalent seemed to quite get it or express it.

  Part of it was that kind of man, fascinating in himself, samurai. He wore a kimono. He wore wooden clogs. He had a ponytail. He carried a batch of blades. He would fight or die on a bet or a dime or a joke.

  He was lithe and quick and dangerous. He was pure battle. He was USMC NCO material to the max, hard, practical, dedicated, if not exactly fearless then at least in control of his fear and able to make it work for him. If samurai was to be understood, it would be understood through him.

  Bob watched movies over and over. He had a hundred of them, not just the ones the smart boys said were great like The Seven Samurai and Yojimbo and Throne of Blood and Ran, but movies nobody ever heard of in the West, like Sword Devil and The Sword That Saved Edo and Hanzo the Razor and The 47 Ronin and Samurai Assassin and Harakiri and Goyokin and Tale of a Female Yakuza and Lady Snowblood and Ganjiro Island.