“Well, a complex relationship, shall we say. But we had each other’s respect. And he certainly had a great deal of respect for you.”
“You talked to him? About me?” Mariko had to take a step back to steady herself. She knew so little of Yamada-sensei’s private life. They’d only known each other a few weeks before he was murdered. If he had spoken to Furukawa about his newest student . . .
“You must have studied kenjutsu with him, neh?”
“Oh, heavens no. My interest in swords was . . . well, their interest. I appreciate their appreciation.” He snickered; clearly he found this to be the height of wit.
“I don’t follow you.”
“I’m a collector, Detective Oshiro. Antiquities. Fine art. And good whisky, of course.” He raised his glass to her.
“Then what did the two of you say about me? I don’t know anything about art.”
“Nor about whisky, I daresay. No, my dear, we spoke about your role in the Wind.”
There it was. The one word Mariko had been waiting to hear. She’d noticed earlier when she dropped the word “ninja” that Furukawa didn’t balk. All his shonin-chunin-genin stuff was related to the ninja too, but that didn’t mean it was related to the Wind; it could have been just a history lesson. But now Mariko had it right from Furukawa’s mouth. The Wind was more than Yamada’s notes or Han’s half-baked theories. It was real.
Not so fast, her detective’s instincts warned. Sometimes hearsay was good enough, but sometimes people just told you want you wanted to hear. Furukawa wasn’t above braggadocio. The suite alone was testament to that. “The Wind,” she said, deliberately sounding more skeptical than she felt. “The same Wind that was around five or six hundred years ago?”
“Even older than that. Yes.”
“And you’re telling me Yamada-sensei knew of it? I don’t mean historically, I mean now. He knew you still exist?”
“Oh, quite. He was one of us.”
The words struck her like a bucket of ice water in the face. She shook her head. “No. No way. No way in hell.”
“You knew him as a historian,” Furukawa said. “We knew him as our archivist.”
It wasn’t true. It couldn’t be. Her sensei was a good man. She remembered talking with him about his protégé, Fuchida, the one who would ultimately come back to murder him. Fuchida was born a yakuza, but Yamada had earnestly believed he could turn the young man away from that path. Mariko had never seen Yamada-sensei so ashamed as when he confessed that his erstwhile student had returned to his criminal roots. Yamada sincerely believed martial training was moral training, that self-discipline and self-control made one not just a better fighter but a better human being.
Mariko remembered that conversation well. She remembered another one, too, when Yamada discovered that Mariko had contacts within the boryokudan. In his mind, police officers did not fraternize with the enemy. Cops and yakuzas were only supposed to interact when the former slapped handcuffs on the latter. Yet to take Furukawa at his word, Yamada had been affiliated with the Wind, a criminal syndicate. “No,” she said again. “No way in hell.”
“The lady doth protest too much, methinks. So young, so naive.”
“So full of shit.”
He winced a little, as if her discourtesy physically pained him. “As it happens, it’s of little consequence whether you believe me or not. It only matters that you believe we exist, and that you listen to my offer.”
“Oh, right. The job offer. Getting me suspended from the force so I can become your ninja.”
“In so many words, yes.”
“Gee, thanks. Why am I the lucky girl?”
He pushed himself up from his chair and gestured vaguely toward her with his tumbler. “You are . . . well, uniquely positioned, shall we say. And uniquely talented. You may not realize it, Detective Oshiro, but you are already an accomplished ninja.”
Mariko could only wrinkle her face in puzzlement. “It’s true,” Furukawa said. “Consider your recent stealth operation in the Sour Plum. You entered in disguise, you gathered intelligence, and based on that intelligence you carried out a raid.”
“Hmph.” Mariko hated to admit it, but the old man had a point. She wouldn’t have described a buy-bust as an intelligence-gathering operation, but when it came right down to it, evidence was just another form of information.
Even so, it wasn’t as if she snuck in there in a black mask to assassinate Lee Jin Bao. When she told that to Furukawa, he said, “Quite right. But neither did the ninja of old.