The Moving Blade

Chapter 1

Chapter 1Hideyasu Sato rarely took jobs involving foreigners. They usually lived in tall apartment buildings, kept little cash and had bad taste in valuables. But this job was pitched as an easy in-and-out with good pay and a light load.

Getting into the house was, as always in Tokyo, a cinch. He slid a small tension wrench into the keyhole of the kitchen delivery door, levered it up, poked in a rake pick, and after a few tickles, the lock plug spun loose and he was in.

The homeowner had just died, so Sato timed the break-in during the funeral—the best time to rob anyone in Tokyo. After the long ceremony, cremation took an hour or so, depending. Since the owner was famous—Bernard Mattson was a name even Sato knew—the post-funeral chitchat by bigwigs would give him a further cushion.

Sato left his shoes by the door and stepped into the stately, old house in the Asakusa shitamachi “lower town” district of eastern Tokyo. The kitchen had surprisingly few modern appliances and looked a little like he remembered his grandmother’s in the countryside—spacious, simple, functional.

Walking into the living area, Sato admired the exquisite wood beams and intricate wood paneling. A tatami-floored room in Japanese style, empty save for a scroll, statue and vase, opened to the right. The main living room was Western style, with parquet floors that were wide and open, with a sofa, chairs, tree-trunk table and Japanese antiques.

Sato found the bookcase-lined study, and sat down at the computer to copy the two files he’d been hired to retrieve: “SOFA” and “Shunga.” It would be easy to download the files to two USB drives and erase the computer before carrying the drives across town, but the computer was old and slow, the fan whirling loudly as he downloaded the files. All around him, the wood frame house creaked like an old man’s bones.

When he’d downloaded one file on each of two separate USB drives, he pulled out a DVD to wipe the computer clean. He rebooted and waited while it worked its magic. He turned off the computer. Waited. Turned it back on. A small arrow pulsed at the bottom of the empty, grey screen. Pressing the keys and clicking the mouse had no effect. It was wiped clean.

As he rose, Sato could not help but look around, impressed at the offset shelves, paulownia tansu chests, and bamboo-sleeved pot hook dangling from the ceiling. His grandmother had cooked with one of those. Many things in the room could be resold, but from the long shelves along the wall, he pocketed four easy-to-carry netsuke carvings: a smiling frog, a tanuki raccoon-dog, and two of couples locked in s****l embrace. The netsuke were like ivory diamonds—compact and easy to sell.

On the way out, Sato surveyed the kitchen. It was hard to guess where a foreigner would tuck away cash, if at all, but he went with instincts honed by years of breaking in Japanese homes. Inside an old tea cabinet, he found a cherry-bark box with a false bottom concealing a thick wad of ten thousand yen notes.

Not so different, Sato chuckled to himself as he stuffed the money in his pocket next to the netsuke and USB drives. He slipped on his shoes, closed the door, exited through the garden and walked away as if he had lived in the neighborhood all his life.

It wasn’t until he was changing trains in Ueno that he noticed the foreigner. Over the years, Sato had been tackled, punched, stabbed and slapped so his ear drum burst, but by following his most basic rule of never stopping, he always got away. He couldn’t run like a young man anymore, so he’d doubled up on caution. Now, he had something new—a gaijin trailing him through Tokyo.

He’d noticed him on the train, but many foreigners returned from Asakusa on the same route. This foreigner, though, wasn’t checking his cellphone for directions or looking at his camera photos. He was staring out the window at the subway walls, too patiently, too attentive to nothing.

Sato got off in Ueno and glanced back to see the foreigner riding the escalator a dozen steps behind. He was so tall he had to duck under the metal ceiling panels. His hat hid his face and a black leather coat stretched to his calves. Sato hurried to the Yamanote Line platform without looking back.

When the train got to Tokyo station, Sato could see his head jutting over the crowd like a giraffe. All that milk and beef, Sato thought. It was trying to get milk and beef that pushed him into housebreaking fifty years ago. So, Sato decided to follow another of his rules—stay on the train. The rush hour crowds in the stations made it easy to lose anyone.

The best plan was to ride all the way to Shinbashi, hurry up and over and down to the next platform for a train back towards Tokyo Station, and push into the middle of the jam-packed car just before the doors close.

At Tokyo Station, he glanced back down the long, steep escalator of the Chuo Line.

The foreigner was gone.

As he rode up, Sato texted the address of the house in Asakusa to the crew waiting to get in, describing what was there and estimating how long they had to get in and out. He was glad to leave the heavy stuff to the Koreans and Chinese. They were younger, quicker and stronger. Braver, too, he had to admit. He was never sure where they hocked what they carted off, but that wasn’t any of his concern. He trusted them for his cut, which was always sent promptly through automatic bank transfer.

At Shinjuku Station, Sato followed another of his rules and steered himself to the densest middle of the crowd. Outside the station, he blended in with the pedestrians hunkered deep into their coats against the winter wind, moving at their pace.

A bit more caution couldn’t hurt, he decided, so he turned into the Isetan department store. The first floor was crowded for a perfume sale with neatly dressed Japanese women sampling scents. Sato slipped through the medley of aromas and down a stairway to the tight-set basement counters selling tea, jam, cheese, pickles, miso and dried fish—a maze no foreigner could manage. Sato zigzagged past middle-aged women sniffing out daily bargains as salespeople called out their wares in booming, froggy voices. At the back of the basement floor, the underground market ended at a door into a bland corridor with stairs up to Yasukuni Dori Street.

He finally stopped in the fresh air outside and lit a cigarette by a display window of fall fashions. He looked back and forth from the mannequins in their put-on poses to the glass doors he’d just exited.

He smoked all the way down to the filter. Maybe he was being too cautious but that was better.

People flowed around him on the sidewalk, so he huddled close to the big window to wiggle one of the USB drives into the cigarette pack for safekeeping.

He decided to smoke one more. When he finished, no one had emerged. Lost him, his instincts told him as he ground out the butt, smug he still had the knack.

Halfway downhill towards Golden Gai, he stopped to buy cigarettes at a small tobacco stand wedged into a four-floor building. He slid a thousand-yen bill under the glass counter and looked back the way he came. As the old woman gave him change, he caught her rheumy eyes set deep in her furrowed smoker’s face—and quickly looked away. She was old and her cheeks hung from her head like worn saddlebags.

Sato stood there and tamped the fresh pack, then pulled out a few of the cigarettes, slipped the other USB drive in and tossed out the couple cigarettes that wouldn’t fit into the gutter.

He walked on to a narrow intersection a few blocks down, and turned onto a small street cramped with beer crates, Styrofoam fish boxes, and plastic trashcans. Some of the spotlights from the tall nightclubs on the main street had clicked on, but it would stay dark and deserted in the arm’s-width alleys of Golden Gai until customers started arriving much later.

Sato turned into a narrow dead-end with a patchwork of bars not much wider than their doors and stopped in front of the Pan-Pan Club. It was far ahead of the rendezvous time and Sato recited another of his rules: Never rush things.

But this time, he broke it. It would be better to get rid of whatever was on the USB drives and go have a drink and a good meal with the cash he’d lifted. Sato knocked on the door—the only one not slathered in thick paint or handwritten signs. He got no answer.

Before he could knock again, he sensed someone behind him. He fumbled for the handle of the stiletto inside his jacket and plucked the metal baton from his waistband, turning around with both hands ready.

“Hand me the files,” the foreigner commanded in fluent Japanese. His tall, lean frame blocked the trickle of light from the alley beyond. A single overhead bulb cast their shadows in opposite directions.

Sato was surprised by how well he spoke Japanese, by how he knew about the files, by how he had, in fact, tracked him across the city, and managed to confront him right at that spot. How could this have happened? He’d never been cornered before.

“It’s just easier if you hand them over,” the foreigner said. He held out his left hand and reset his feet and shoulders. His leather coat gleamed in the dim light.

Sato reached into his jacket for the drive-wiping DVD and tossed it onto the pavement between them. When he bent over to get it, he’d kick the foreigner in the head, stab him, and take off. The sides of the small bars were only a step away, so he’d have to be careful getting past. Fifteen years ago, he could have done it. Thirty years ago, it would have been as easy as picking a lock.

The DVD shimmered on the dull gray of the concrete, but the foreigner did not even glance at it. From a sheath inside the front flap of his coat, the foreigner pulled a tanto sword as long as his forearm. Together, sword and arm could reach the walls of the cramped cul-de-sac encircling them.

Sato clicked the stiletto and telescoped the baton with a flip of his wrist. The sword whirred and Sato jerked sideways as the sword crashed into the door above his shoulder, splintering the cheap wood.

The sword pinched in place, Sato jabbed at the foreigner’s chest but his arms were too short and the foreigner was fast and limber. Blade and baton whisked the air. Sato backed against the closest wall to rebalance, breathing hard, trying to think.

“The USB.” The sword upright and his feet planted, the foreigner stared at Sato.

Sato’s stiletto had no reach and the baton was too thin, but he swung them side-to-side in a defensive X as he broke for the opening to the alley.

The tanto sword caught him from right hip to left rib.

Sato’s knees buckled and he folded over like a split sack of rice. In the instant before his mid-section gushed from top and bottom, one of the USB drives flew out of his cut-open pocket and dropped through the grate of the sewer beside him. The foreigner snatched at it, but the memory drive tumbled into the pipes far out of reach below.

Slumped over a concrete step, Sato wheezed and clutched at the warm stream of blood before his fingers loosened and his body slackened. He eyed the foreigner kneeling over the sewer with a small flashlight peering below, felt the ruffle of the foreigner going through his pockets, and dimly gazed at the tangled wires crisscrossing the alley overhead.

***

The jacket was as sticky-wet as body tissue, and so was the wad of ten-thousand yen bills, which he tossed aside. The netsuke carvings, he dropped on the ground. After wiping the tanto blade with a neat cut of rice paper and resheathing it inside his long leather coat, he picked up the DVD, glanced around and walked away.