the impression that at least as professional criminals went, he really was a nice guy and he didn’t deserve this kind of punishment. In truth Mariko had forgotten she’d put panties on the list. On any other night with any other man, she would have been mortified. But Endo was twice as embarrassed as she would have been, equal parts awkward teenager and sad puppy. Mariko found it hilarious.
“You know what?” she said. “On second thought, just get me a pair of sweatpants. I don’t want you thinking about me in my unmentionables.”
His spirits only slightly lifted, the big ex-ballplayer moseyed toward the FamilyMart. “That was indelicate,” Furukawa said.
“Boo-hoo.” Mariko hung up on him and, despising herself for doing it, trotted up the stairs.
Billiards Bagus was a dark place with low ceilings. Electronic dartboards lined two long walls, their round faces illuminated with a bluish glow. A rank of pool tables stretched toward the back wall, each one lit by a long, boxy light hovering over it like a UFO. There were no dart players or pool sharks; the tavern was empty but for the bartender and the old man with ageless eyes and pianist’s hands.
Furukawa hunched over the nearest table, cue stick in hand. He had a drink already waiting for her; whisky, she guessed, probably an expensive pour. She ignored it, not because he struck her as a James Bond bad guy who would poison her drink—which, in point of fact, was exactly how he struck her—but because she wouldn’t be beholden to him any more than she had to be. “So what’s thirteen oh four?” she said.
“We have people working on it. I can tell you more, but only if you join us.”
“Thanks but no thanks.”
Furukawa bent over with a grunt and began retrieving sunken balls, setting each one on the table with a heavy thwack. “What if Professor Yamada had asked you?”
“Asked me what? To be your assassin? He’d never do that.”
“I’m afraid you’re quite wrong about that. His last assignment for us was to recruit you. I’m sorry to say he died before he could complete it.”
Mariko scoffed. Furukawa narrowed his eyes at her and said, “Have I said something to amuse you?”
“For a secret clan that’s supposed to know everything, you guys can be pretty dense. You know how to make the whole damn country sit and beg and roll over at your command. How can you know so little about people?”
Mariko could see she’d startled the bartender with her sudden rudeness, but she didn’t pay him any mind. For his part, he desperately pretended not to have heard her. “Yamada-sensei was a good man,” she said. “He wasn’t about to try to sell a cop on becoming a killer for hire.”
Furukawa gave her a disapproving look over the edge of the pool table. “One would have thought a police detective would gather more information before leaping to conclusions. If you’ll forgive me for saying so, you haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”
“Then enlighten me.”
He retrieved the last of the balls and began to rack them. “Your sensei was the most highly trained swordsman in Japan—which, if I may be so bold, made him the deadliest in the world. I believe you saw that firsthand.”
Mariko wished he were wrong, but he wasn’t. She’d seen Yamada square off against four armed boryokudan enforcers. Outnumbered and outflanked, not many could have survived that altercation. Yamada was eighty-seven years old and blind, and still those yakuzas never stood a chance.
“He did not join the Wind as an assassin,” Furukawa went on. “He had no love for killing, and in any case we don’t dabble much in the assassination game anymore. It’s much too crude for our purposes. No, it was his obsession for the Inazuma blades that brought him to our attention. The Wind has been using these relics for centuries, never revealing their exceptional powers. Needless to say, we were astonished to learn a historian had somehow discovered their existence.”
Mariko smiled at that. She could read between the lines easily enough: the Wind had been actively trying to conceal the existence of these weapons, yet Yamada discovered them anyway.
“Imagine our surprise when we learned he was also a close friend of our very own Shoji Hayano. We suspected her of espionage, of course; it was a little too convenient that after all those years of secrecy the Inazuma blades should suddenly be rediscovered. When we found all parties were innocent, we invited Professor Yamada