A Bob Lee Swagger Boxed Set Page 8

  “Is that what happened here?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not impossible. Clearly this is an ancestral blade, shortened for wartime use. By shape and grace, as my daughter has noted, it appears to be koto—old. Koto blades were generally thinner and more graceful and sharper, meaning livelier in the hand than shinto blades. Koto means ‘old’ as in—well, it differs, but roughly ‘old’ as in before sixteen hundred. Of course there are complexities. Possibly a shinto smith—that is, someone after sixteen hundred—merely duplicated the shape of the koto blade. It happened frequently; the swordsmiths, after all, were merchants, they did custom orders, they responded to market forces, they tried different things.”

  “So you’re telling me this sword might be some kind of antique, a historical artifact. Would it be valuable?”

  “Very possibly, not that we could ever sell such a piece. It is ours, it is of our blood. It is my father’s. What I’m telling you is that it might be, ah, interesting. Meaning of interest to more than just our humble Yano clan. Interesting to scholars, interesting to historians, interesting to the nation and the culture. What is far more provocative is the sword’s heritage, what we can learn of it from what’s left of its tang. If that looks promising, we might have the sword polished. I’m not good enough to attempt it. It’s a time-consuming discipline only practiced by a few at the highest level, but if the sword has secrets, a polishing will liberate them. We’ll see its soul if we polish it.”

  9

  NII OF SHINSENGUMI

  Nii of Shinsengumi was an obedient samurai. He obeyed his great lord Kondo-san in all things. He would die for Kondo-san. Kondo-san, after all, had seen talent in the wild street-boy, aggression, perhaps even a future. Many hoped for such a thing, but it had actually happened to Nii. Nii was taken from nothingness into Shinsengumi. He finally belonged to somebody, to something; he was no longer an orphan, dirty, laughed at by other children. His fluffy body hardened under discipline. He learned things that astonished him, and his faith in himself grew appropriately to his love for his great lord.

  He was still young, but in Shinsengumi, all things were possible. The group was comprised of the best men, and though its discipline was severe, the pleasure and the privileges attendant upon joining such chosen ones were omnipotent.

  He learned the katana, the long cutting sword, its intricate economy of force and power, its strength and its grace. Applied correctly, with judgment and experience, katana could cut through anything including bodies, fully, one side to the other. He imagined unleashing it: the swing, the thunder of the cut, the spewing, jetting blood, the scream of the stricken, his stillness.

  He learned wakizashi, the shorter, personal defense sword. It was an indoor sword. It would not catch on ceilings or doorjambs, and yet it too had almost the same power as katana. No one could stop it if a determined Shinsengumi applied it; he saw short, harder cuts, the slack stunned look of the cut, dissolving into pain, a cough that issued blood, the collapse to the floor like a sack of grain.

  He learned tanto. Tanto was short, and without nearly the curve of katana and wakizashi, for it was not made for cutting but for thrusting. If he put his strength behind it, Nii could shove it deeper into a body than anyone in Shinsengumi. He could easily reach the blood-bearing organ and he knew exactly where to pierce: down, through the shoulder on a slight angle, into the pumping heart. Or up from the back, next to the spine, seven vertebrae from the neck up, again piercing the heart. Pierced, the heart would yield its treasure in seconds; the body it sustained would go instantly soft as if its knees had melted, its eyes would roll up into its skull and it would fall without discipline to the floor, frequently shattering teeth when it landed. The blood would pool like an ocean.

  But tanto held another possibility. Disgraced or surrounded, in tanto lay a hope for dignity. Nii of Shinsengumi knew what he must do to spare himself the shame and sustain Kondo-san’s affection forever. He knew he could do it too; he didn’t need a second.

  He’d ram the blade fiercely into the left side of the pit of his own stomach, a minimum of three inches, more likely four to five. Better yet, six, though not many could force themselves to push for that long. Then one would smartly draw it across his belly, just under the navel. Tanto was always kept sharp for that purpose. His guts would slip out wetly amid a flood of blood, shit, urine, and other substances. It was said that one had eight seconds of consciousness after the blade reached its point of arrival. They would be an interesting eight seconds. Would one scream? Would one beg for the pain to stop? Would one be unmanned?

  Not Nii of Shinsengumi. He could not disgrace himself before his lord. He would be silent, for in his pain would be the sheer rapture of a warrior’s pure death. That was the way of the warrior. Death was the way—

  The music on his iPod stopped.

  Damn, the battery was running down. Again! He had the worst iPod! It always let him down.

  He’d been listening to Arctic Monkeys live in concert at the Brixton United football stadium, the great song “Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not.” The beat had him really pumped up. He’d felt it to his bones.

  Aghhhh. It would be a long night without Arctic Monkeys. He reached for and lit a Marlboro. He sat in a sleek Nissan Maxima, jet black, five on the floor, half a block down from the Yanos’ house.

  His job was the American; he would stay with the American, and he would call in and report to Kondo-san any movement or change in plans. He’d stay the night if he had to.

  He had a Chinese-made wakizashi in saya wedged into his belt diagonally up his back; he had a Smith & Wesson Model 10 .38 Special. He wore a black Italian shirt, a black Italian suit, a black Italian hat, and a pair of extremely expensive Michael Jordan Nikes. He wore Louis Vuitton sunglasses, which had cost him more than 40,000 yen. They were really cool. He wore his hair in a glistening crew, held taut and bristly by Yamada Wax. It was perfectly trimmed. He was twenty-three, strong as a bull, and ready for anything. He had chosen death.

  Nii of Shinsengumi was a very good samurai.

  10

  BLACK RUST

  “The rust,” said Tomoe Yano in English. “Look at the rust, Father.”

  “Oh, what beautiful rust,” said Philip Yano.

  Bob thought, Are they nuts?

  “That’s koto rust. No rust is so black as koto rust.”

  “Beautiful, beautiful black rust,” said Philip. “Oh, so beautiful.”

  Wearing rubber surgeon’s gloves, the father disassembled the sword. He used a small hammer and a pin, perfectly sized, to drive the bamboo peg out of the grip. It popped out effortlessly. He tracked the little nub of bamboo down as it rolled on his bench, then stared at it.

  “Shinto, at least. Maybe original, maybe koto.”

  “Then why so easy? It just fell out.”

  Bob remembered: the peg had been stuck. But he didn’t say anything; what did he know?

  “I don’t know. Maybe it was disassembled recently. I can’t say. One of many questions. This is very interesting.”

  Philip Yano slid the grip off, then carefully disassembled the guard—tsuba, Bob knew—and several spacers, seppa, and finally the collar, habaki, and laid out the parts symmetrically on the bench, blade at the bottom of the formation, grip above, hilt laid flat, and four spacers.

  Then they saw a piece of paper folded tightly about the metal of the tang.

  “The paper,” the young woman said gravely.

  “Yes, I see it.”

  “Father, pick it up. See what it is.”

  “No, no, not yet. Pen ready?”

  “Yes.”

  He spoke in a swift blizzard of Japanese. Then he translated.

  “The tsuba—that is, guard—is government issue, the model of ’thirty-nine also. So when it found its new scabbard, it was rehilted, this is what I tell Tomoe. Spacers—seppa—also military issue, as is habaki, nothing special. Two holes, indicating it has been cut down, but we already knew that.”


  “The rust,” Tomoe said.

  “What is it with the rust?” asked Bob. The tang itself was swallowed in black erosion, so much so a fine black dust had fallen on the bench beneath it.

  “The blacker the rust,” said Philip Yano, “the older the blade. What it means, Swagger-san, is that this sword is at least four hundred years old. Somehow it ended up in the military furniture of nineteen thirty-four.”

  “Is that uncommon?”

  “It happened.”

  “So it’s not a blade manufactured by machine in some factory in the forties. It’s much older. It’s a real samurai thing. That is why it’s so sharp?”

  “Exactly. Think of some genius in a small shop in near-feudal times—before the year sixteen hundred—working at a forge, turning the orange metal in upon itself time after time, taking two or three different orange pieces and hammering them together after each had been folded over twenty times, beating them into a shape, then quenching them in cooling clay. Then he began filing, shaping, sharpening. It’s three kinds of steel, soft for the spine, which gives it weight and flexibility, a liquid feel; softer still in the core, more pure iron, more flexibility; and a sandwich of harder, tempered steel—yakiba—for the edge, sharp, to cut through armor, flesh, and bone and get deep into the body. Oh, it’s a war sword all right, and if my father carried it on Iwo Jima, he wasn’t the first soldier to sling this beauty about, not at all. It’s old, it’s venerable, it’s been to the dance many a time. Born in fire, cooled in earth, destined for blood. Maybe the inscriptions will tell the story.”

  He indicated the line of Japanese characters deeply chiseled in the tang, as the maker of the blade those centuries ago accounted for himself and his creation, and explained for whom he had toiled.

  “Can you read the inscriptions?” asked Bob.

  “That’ll be the fun part. There were thousands of koto smiths, and we will have to track through the records and find who made this sword. We will be able to learn the smith, maybe even the lord. Then we’ll look at history and begin to assemble a biography of this blade. Where it went, what it did before it somehow came to my father, and then yours, and then their sons.”

  “It all has meaning,” said the girl. “Father, read the nakago for Swagger-san.”

  “Nakago is the rusted tang under the hilt. Even it is full of tantalizing communications from the past. It’s suriage nakago, or possibly an o-suriage nakago. That is, it’s right on the edge between ‘shortened’ and ‘greatly shortened,’ the determining factor being how much of the signature is left. Usually, the butt end, even when shortened, retains the shape of the original. It was as if the desecrator were paying homage to his superior. This style is called Iriyama-gata, which places it sometime in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. The cutting-edge side of the tang is at an acute angle to the bottom end of the shinogi line; the other side runs either straight or at a slight upward angle to mune.”

  Lost me, Bob thought.

  But he guessed Philip Yano was telling him the very shape of the end of the tang held clues to its origin.

  “You sure know this stuff.”

  “I know nothing,” said Yano. “There are many to whom this language is as supple and expressive as poetry. I struggle, doubt my knowledge, wish I knew more, curse myself for not knowing yet.”

  “But do I get the bottom line? That this is a very old blade, and it could have some meaning beyond your family? Experts should examine it.”

  “That’s right. It may be nothing. Not every old blade was used by Musashi Miyamoto, just as not every old Colt was carried by Wyatt Earp. So the odds are very small. But still…they exist. Remember, someone always wins a lottery. I will learn what I can before I make any consultations. It’ll take me longer than it should, and it is foolish, as many could know in a flash. That’s all right, though. It’s time spent with my father.”

  “The paper,” said the girl.

  “Yes, finally.”

  “It looks like some kind of note,” Bob said.

  “This is why I fear it. It is possibly a death poem. We do that, we Japanese. It is because death is so welcome to us, that we reach to embrace it and celebrate it with poetry.”

  “Yet you hesitate, Father,” his daughter said.

  “Suppose it says ‘Dear god, save me, I cannot stand this anymore.’”

  “Then it proves your father was human,” said Bob. “I’ve been shot at a lot, and my thoughts have been ‘Dear god, save me, I cannot stand this anymore.’”

  “Swagger-san speaks a truth, Father. You must face it. You must reach out to your father.”

  “Do you want to be alone?”

  “No, no,” said Yano. “Much better to be with one I love and one I respect.”

  He took the paper off the nakago, shaking it so that an ancient fine powder of black oxidized steel fell away.

  He read it, and began to weep.

  His daughter read it, and began to weep.

  Bob thought it best to say nothing, but the girl looked over at him, the tears running down her face.

  “I think it’s for all the boys of Iwo Jima,” said Philip Yano, “no matter the color of their skin.”

  He read:

  Above the volcano

  a moon over hell

  lights the faces

  of the doomed and dying.

  Soldiers buried in black sand

  on the black island

  await their destiny.

  We are the broken jade

  of Sulfur Island.

  11

  STEEL

  On Tuesday night, the boy Raymond had a baseball game and got a single and a double. He played left field, appeared to have a sound arm and an instinct for the ball. On Wednesday, the daughter Tomoe had a recital; she played the cello, and to Bob at least, she was superb.

  It wasn’t that the kids were so well behaved and such high performers that so thoroughly attracted him, or even that the darling little Miko reminded him of his own daughter, Nikki—Y2K4 she had christened herself when young. It was that in some way the family unit was like an idealized Marine Corps. Everyone knew his duties and did them; there were no rogue neuroses, no raw egos, no angry resentments; if there were, they were held so far inside that they were never seen and never blew. But the Yanos laughed a lot and seemed genuinely to enjoy each other’s presence, to the exclusion of the world. He really felt happy among them.

  “No, I’ve enjoyed it so much, and you’ve been so hospitable. But I have to go; I have a life back in the States.”

  “I had hoped to have news for you on the sword before you left,” said Mr. Yano. “I have exhausted all my books and have begun to make inquiries. There are many antique volumes from the nineteenth century, with much information. The Book of the Sword was published in many editions in the last one hundred years. The best collection is in Osaka at the university there. I had planned a trip; you would enjoy that part of Japan.”

  “I’m sure I would; I have a wife and daughter, however, several businesses to look after, and remember that field I was cutting? I still want to finish that damned thing. Remember, I’m the Tin Man. Chop chop chop.”

  “I understand.”

  On the last night, he and Philip Yano sat up after the family had gone to bed. Yano drank sake from a ceramic bottle, in a little flat cup. Bob had tea. It was time to talk of that which united them and made them trust: war and wounds.

  “How is the hip? Is it painful?”

  “You get used to it. It’s always ten degrees colder than everything else, and as I said, getting through airport security is a mess. It’s not so funny now.”

  “You have other wounds?”

  “I seem not to be able to get out of the way of little pieces of flying steel. I have been shot and wounded a variety of times. That one was the worst. It took a friend from me, I am sorry to say, and he was a boy who would have given the world many gifts, so I mourn for him still. The other wounds sting sometimes, but it ain’t
nothing I can’t live with.”

  “My daughter says you sleep poorly.”

  “Sorry, hope I didn’t scare nobody. My dreams aren’t the softest. I took many lives. I thought I was a big samurai. And for what? Nothing I can lay a hand on. Well, something called ‘duty.’ I ain’t smart enough to define it, but I felt it then, and goddammit, no matter what, I still feel it. They ain’t takin’ it away.”

  “That is the burden of the samurai, that commitment to duty. That is why we are only happy among other samurai, who have taken lives, seen blood and ruin, tasted defeat and bitterness. No one else can truly know. They can guess; they cannot truly know.”

  “I’d drink to that if I was still a drinking man. I have to ask you, Philip. Your eye. You don’t talk of it. But I recognize scar tissue when I see it.”

  “Oh, that. Really nothing. Iraq.”

  Bob thought he misheard. Had he been drinking? Did the guy say Iraq, where the marines were still fighting?

  “I thought that was our little pile of bad news.”

  “Japan, in a spirit of support, sent small numbers of noncombat support troops, nominally guarded by Dutch combat troops, assigned engineering duties in a town in the south called Samawah. But you know the thorough, boring Japanese. We didn’t quite trust the Dutch, and so secretly a small unit of paratroopers was sent as actual security. It was my honor to be selected as commanding officer. They even postponed my retirement. Normally, you must leave at fifty-five, but because they trusted me, they asked me to stay in uniform through the assignment.”

  “You must have been a superb officer. That’s not a job they give to second-raters. But I already knew that.”

  “I worked hard but of course have no genius for it as do you. You were a hero, I was an officer who tried his best. On the third of February, two thousand four, an IED went off next to a Japanese troop carrier, which was pitched over and started to burn. Some men had difficulty getting out. As commanding officer, it fell to me to make the effort. We did in fact get them all out, but not before one of those RPGs detonated nearby and my face was sliced open, my eye destroyed. That was it. Thirty-three years of service, ten seconds’ worth of action, and a career-ending wound. So it goes. I did what I could, I got my people out, and I trust that the men remember me with respect.”