The Drowning God (19 page)

 

CHAPTER 37

S
uzuki, sword flailing, leapt for the Kappa's head. Takuda and Mori pulled up short, reflexively dodging the arc of Suzuki's spastic blade.

Suzuki caught up to the head just before it reached the drainpipe. He tried to spear it with his sword, almost stabbing himself in the shin on the second try. His bungled attempt at stabbing the head diverted it from the drain until he could stop it with his foot. He kicked it back up the slope, where it stopped at Takuda's feet. It hissed and spat, rolling its yellow eyes at Takuda and Mori.

Suzuki's sword hung from his fingers. He was breathing more heavily than Takuda was. “I'm sorry. I'm sorry.”

Takuda pointed at him. “Sheathe your blade. Now!”

When Suzuki's blade was secured, Mori released the hilt of his own. He stepped toward them. He let out his breath. “Okay,” he said, looking from Takuda to Suzuki. “Okay.”

They looked down at the head in the brilliance of Mori's lantern. Mori sighed. “It's still dangerous, isn't it?”

It stared back at them, one after another, pouring out pure hatred through its eyes. But it also poured out visions of its long, hideous life.

Takuda saw it as a young man, a monk traveling to the darkest reaches of China. He saw it dragged down into a pool under a secret temple, black water and black prayers entering its mouth and its heart and its eyes. He saw it change to something less than human as the black goddess of the temple made it one of her children. He saw it learn to snap with its new beak and pull the unwitting innocent down to the depths to feast on their soft, sweet entrails. Takuda saw himself, as if in a mirror, as if in a film, bending down and taking the Kappa's head to his chest, holding it safe, feeding it until it could feed itself again . . .

He blinked. He stepped back as if pulling himself free of the Kappa's eyes. Mori was staring at the Kappa's head, entranced. Suzuki was staring too, the corners of his mouth drawn into a frown of concentration

That's your best trick, filth. In a second, you'll see my best trick.
He bent for his sword.

“Mori, uncuff me. The key is in the back of—­”

Then Suzuki stepped back and drew his long, long blade.

“Mori! The priest!”

Mori stepped back into a deep stance as he drew his own blade, ready to dispatch the maddened priest.

Suzuki raised his sword above his head and brought the blade down between the Kappa's eyes. The thin blade sprang sideways off the Kappa's rubbery face. It dug a divot out of the Kappa's slick brow and split its beak, but the head remained intact. Lightning and scenes of green, cloudy water shot through Takuda's head.

Suzuki frowned at Takuda and sheathed his sword.

Takuda scanned the concrete for his own sword—­now was the time. He retrieved his blade and lopped off the Kappa's cuffed arm at the wrist, just below the handcuff, and the severed claw slid out as well. Takuda let the empty cuff dangle as he gripped the sword for close work and settled into an easy front stance. He let out slack on the hilt as he raised the sword above his head, and then he stepped forward into a “four-­point” stance, bringing the blade straight down into the Kappa's face with all his might.

For my son Kenji
.

The impact was tremendous, but even so, the Kappa's head spread and flattened for an instant before splitting in half. It lay open slowly as coiled cartilage and black, gelatinous blood spilled onto the concrete. The eye facing Takuda winked furiously, focused on him for a second, and then rolled back in its shallow socket.

Takuda saw a vision of a primitive farmhouse and a gray-­haired woman drawing water from a stream.

As it dies, it thinks of its mother? Ridiculous. It's much too late for that.

Takuda addressed the left side of the head. It was harder to split, but it split.
For my brother Shunsuke.

The Kappa's last coherent vision: returning to the village of its birth while it still resembled a man in some ways, walking down the dirt path to that primitive farmhouse to see its gray-­haired mother. Then looking into her eyes as it strangled her.

As the right half of the cranium split, the blade struck sparks off the concrete below.
For your poor mother.

For my wife Yumi.
A shard of the blade whizzed past Mori's head.

For my parents, for all the parents of the Naga River valley.
The blade shattered, leaving him with a cleaver as long as his forearm. It would do.

For Mori's sister Yoshiko.
With the final blow, the tang separated from the blade, leaving him with a bladeless hilt. He let it roll off his fingers onto the concrete.

The Kappa's head lay cut into seven pieces. They eyes were dead, spilled onto the concrete, and the rubbery skull was empty.

Suzuki poked a dead eye with the toe of his boot. “Just as it's written on the great mandala of the Nichiren sects, ‘
Those who trouble the practitioners of Buddhist Law will have their heads split into seven pieces
.' Who told you to do this?”

“Gotoh, the old village clerk.”

“Gotoh? Really? That old rascal.” Suzuki chuckled as he dropped to his knees. He unzipped his coveralls to reveal the priestly robe and sash.

Mori aimed the lantern at him. “What are you doing, Priest?”

“Well, I'm praying for this creature. It was a man once, but it must be reborn in the depths of hell. Imagine how many lifetimes—­” Suzuki's voice died away as Mori stepped up and unzipped his coveralls as well. “Ah, Officer . . .”

“I'm not a policeman anymore, and this piece of filth murdered my sister.” Mori's urine chattered among the fragments of the Kappa's head, jostling its loosened eyeballs and sending a rivulet of steaming muck down the concrete. Suzuki closed his eyes and began chanting the sutras low in his throat.

When Mori finished pissing, he grinned at Takuda and tossed his chin at the trickle of filth heading for the drainpipe. “See that? That's all the Kappa that will ever get back to the river.”

Takuda laughed more out of surprise and embarrassment than actual amusement. Mori was a young man acting out a tough-­guy routine. He would probably cry when it was all over.

Mori leaned over to spit precisely in the center of the seven fragments.

Then again, maybe he won't cry after all.

The trickling sound hadn't stopped with Mori's stream. It seemed to be getting louder, and more streams of liquid were joining Mori's urine on the floor. They looked behind them. Slowly, the valve wheel was turning, and greenish, soapy water trickled out of the spout.

“Ogawa? Ogawa, are you up there?”

The pulley chain jerked, and the valve opened all the way. A torrent as thick as Takuda's thigh hit the concrete.

Suzuki jumped up just before the torrent hit his knees. It was up to Takuda's ankles in a second, and it burned.

“What is this stuff, Mori?”

“I don't know,” Mori said. He coughed and gagged, pointing up to the bar grate above. “Did you hear the door? I just heard the door.” He bent over, gagging and heaving.

“Chloramine,” Suzuki said. “It's chloramine. The fumes will fill the room and choke us out before we make it to the door.”

“Door . . . locked . . . Ogawa” Mori vomited explosively.

Suzuki pulled them by the sleeves. “Come with me. Quickly!” He led them to the drain where the greenish wastewater swirled downward. Fresher air shot up from the funnel. “Cover your eyes and your mouth and your nose and just slide down. When you hit the bottom, go—­which way is upstream, Detective?”

“Right.”

“Go right. Do not swallow it, and do not get it in your eyes. When you get down there, roll in the water and strip off your clothes.”

Mori retched uncontrollably.

“Okay, he goes first,” Takuda said.

They sat him in the swirling liquid and pushed him down the incline. He slid a meter down the concrete and stopped, the caustic flow buffeting his back. Suzuki sighed and pushed Takuda down after him. Their combined mass sent them rocketing down the drainpipe. They hit the spillway sputtering and coughing. Takuda was so weak and jittery, it took all his strength to drag Mori upstream and roll him in the water.

“Don't get the water in your wounds,” Mori gasped.

Takuda sat. They had lucked into a sandy spot. “Too late for that.” In the light of Mori's lantern, Takuda's feet were red and puffy. He wondered if his fishing boots might still be near the foot of the drainpipe, but a glance over his shoulder told him they had been swept away in the greenish froth from the holding tank.

Suzuki hit the spillway with his legs straight out, his arms folded on his chest. He seemed to skip across the water and out of the glow of Mori's torch. Then he floundered upstream toward them, his face streaked with blackish muck.

They sat panting, Mori's lantern a bright spot in the cavernous dark.

“It's dead,” Suzuki said, wonder in his voice. “It's dead, and we're alive.”

“I need help,” Mori said. His lips were purplish, and there were deep purple bags under his eyes. The rest of his face was a frightening pale green.

“Let's get you out of here. There's a—­breeze,” Suzuki said as he washed the mud off his face. “We're upwind—­from the spill. That's—­the best medicine. You're sick, but you—­won't die.”

“I lost my sword.”

Suzuki knee-­walked in the sand and presented Mori his sword. Sick as he was, Mori bowed from the waist. “Hey, Priest, you're not sick at all.”

“Oh, I suppose it's because I'm taller.” He helped Mori to his feet. “Also, I started shallow breathing as soon as I smelled it. Maybe shallow breathing is why Detective Takuda isn't sick either. Dr. Fujimoto's epinephrine kept him moving, but his lungs are still half-­paralyzed. No deep breaths from him. Always lucky.”

“Always lucky,” Takuda said. “How did you know it was chloramine?”

“The temple is so poor that I clean the bathrooms myself. I've learned that ammonia and chlorine don't mix. You never forget that smell.”

“We don't have time for chemistry class,” Mori said.

Behind them, flashlight beams danced in the cavernous spillway.

“Well, here they come,” Takuda said. As he stood, they heard the first voices echoing off the concrete. “It's probably the village police. Zenkoku won't do its own dirty work down here. Stash your swords up under that ledge. We'll probably be going from jail to hospital to jail before we can get back here.”

“No, no,” Mori said. His skin wasn't pink yet, but he was already a little less green. “Priest, keep your sword. There's an entrance to the spillways right there. We can double back through the spillways to go out the way the detective came in. Come on.”

Takuda and Suzuki helped him along. They stepped into the spillway pipe just as the lights came around the bend.

 

CHAPTER 38

O
ver the next three days, Takuda relaxed for the first time he could remember. He spoiled Yumi. He read frivolous magazines and watched nonsensical game shows.

He also realized that no matter how strange and fantastical the last two weeks had been, no one around him seemed to notice. Takuda's world had been turned upside down, but everyone else just went about their business.

The first time he went to a public bath after the Kappa's death, he soaped and scrubbed self-­consciously. He was sure the men and boys around him were staring at his bruises, his scrapes, the stitched lacerations on his forearms, and the five-­pointed wound on his chest. He resigned himself to being mute and mysterious and suspicious. He eased into the water, resting his arms on the tiled edge to keep the last of stitches dry.

After nods of greeting, no one seemed interested in him at all. The old men took turns complaining that foreigners had dominated the March sumo tournament in Osaka. Out of politeness, they called on younger men to agree with them. They included Takuda in turn, but otherwise, they didn't seem to notice him at all. He enjoyed it so that he stayed in the water too long. It helped sweat the poison out.

Later in the day, he went to prefectural police headquarters to quit. His resignation waited for him in a plastic folder at the front desk. Sitting in reception, he filled out the forms, dated them, stamped them, and then he handed them over along with his handcuffs, his badge, his black leather notebook and his ID. He hadn't checked out a firearm since his most recent training, so he just had to sign a statement that he possessed no ammunition and that he agreed to a search of his apartment, a search that would probably never occur. He asked to see his supervisor, but his supervisor was not available. He left a note of thanks, and he walked out a free man.

That afternoon, he lay on the floor with Yumi. She made noises of disgust as he took out his stitches, but she watched carefully, and she dabbed with alcohol just in case.

“You can be a security guard,” she said. “If you really don't have a black mark from the prefecture, you might open your own practice hall someday.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” he said. “As long as I don't make trouble on the way out, they don't seem to care what I do.”

She traced his strange new scars with a cotton swab. The alcohol dried in seconds, leaving behind the unreadable characters written in human flesh. “I doubt you'll go long without making trouble,” she said.

Later, he found her sobbing quietly at the kitchen sink. “I don't know what I expected,” she said. “I think I expected that everything would be different if we found out what really happened. I hoped I wouldn't feel the grief anymore.”

He slid to the kitchen floor with his back to the cabinet doors, holding her calf.

“I think I expected that Kenji would come back,” she said. “I almost thought that once you killed it, our boy would pop out of its stomach. Like a fairy tale.”

He rubbed her leg as she cried. He didn't tell her that everything was going to be all right. He was tired of lying to her and to himself.

They brooded the rest of the day. After dinner, he pretended to read the newspaper and enjoy his beer, but he wasn't fooling either of them. When the news came on, she slapped him excitedly as she turned up the volume. “Look, there's your priest!”

Village patrolmen Kikuchi and Inoue led Suzuki from his temple. The newsreader said Suzuki was being evicted for simple nonpayment of taxes and utilities, but that he was under arrest for fiscal malfeasance and “squatting,” a term Takuda hadn't heard in official use in years. Suzuki was leaving with only what he could carry: scrolls in cardboard cylinders, a vase, and an old cardboard accordion folder bursting at the seams. He carried one cardboard cylinder for an extra-­wide scroll, a cylinder just about the right length to conceal a laundry-­pole sword.

Clever priest.

“How did you know that was him?” Takuda asked.

“He's so tall! Look at that! That patrolman barely comes to his shoulder.”

The newsreader said there was an ongoing investigation into Suzuki's responsibility for the destruction of a shrine and of historically significant human remains. He was also under investigation for the recent chemical discharge into the spillway running under the Zenkoku Fiber plant, but police had been unable to prove that he had ever entered the plant itself.

“Your friend is in trouble there. Will they hold him?”

Takuda laughed. “They just want him out of the Naga River valley. That's the only reason it's on TV. They want us to see him. We'll go get him tomorrow.”

“Where will he go? Will his congregants take him in?”

“I don't think there are any.”

“Well, for now, I'll stitch up some extra-­long bedding for the second bedroom. He can sleep in there if he can stretch out diagonally.”

“Are you sure? He's clumsy and impractical. He eats like a horse.”

“He saved your life and avenged Kenji. He can eat what he likes.”

The next day, Mori and Takuda went to Naga River valley to pick up Suzuki. The skin around Mori's nose and mouth was still peeling from the gas and the subsequent treatment. He wore jeans, flip-­flops, a United Future Organization tee shirt, and the beginnings of a goatee.

“I didn't have you pegged as a jazz fan, Mori.”

“It makes the girls think I'm smart.”

Mori's ancient, rust-­red Suzuki Fronte screeched up the inclines toward the Naga River valley while the tinny alarm announced that they were straining the three-­cylinder, two-­stroke engine. Mori and Takuda kept the windows open and shouted over the racket.

“We're going to have to find work,” Mori said. “I can do whatever I need to. The priest can probably teach at a cram school.”

“Probably not,” Takuda said. “The other night, he said he would try to make a living as a priest. At least there's no one left in his own order to excommunicate him.”

Takuda was glad he had relaxed for a few days. All he had to do was get into the car with Mori, and a whole new set of questions came up. He was still wrestling with the answers to the old questions.

“You know we were set up,” Takuda said. “That's how you two got into the holding tank so easily.”

“There was no one there. No one,” Mori said. “We walked right through at the front desk, and there was no one at reception. We walked down to Ogawa's floor. The wastewater management office was empty. The hatch to the holding tank gantry was propped open with a cinder block.”

“A cinder block? That's a restricted area. Didn't it strike you as odd?”

“My sense of what is odd has shifted a great deal lately. Really, it makes sense if Zenkoku used us.” Mori tugged at the goatee. It didn't suit him, Takuda thought. It just gave focus to his nervous energy.

“It makes sense because Zenkoku used us to clean up the valley.” Takuda closed his eyes in the spring sunshine. “I can't wait to see this valley we've cleaned up.”

In Oku Village, the storefronts were still empty, but the shopping street seemed brighter, more welcoming. Old women in spring kimonos stumped along in pairs. Children in school uniforms wandered idly as if surprised to find themselves on the street at all. The florist swept the sidewalk in front of his store. The greengrocer sat on a crate, sunning himself.

“It's better,” Takuda said. “Can you tell?”

Mori nodded, looking back and forth as they approached the village police station.

Chief Nakamura and Sergeant Kuma stood at the station door. They stepped forward as Mori's tiny car pulled up, and then they stepped back as they recognized Mori and Takuda. The chief turned and went back into the station, and the sergeant pointed down the shopping street toward the Gotohs' dead end. His face was expressionless. Takuda was about to speak to him when Mori nudged him. Even a hundred meters away, they could make out Reverend Suzuki's white robes against the blackened ruin of the Gotoh house.

The police station door had slammed shut by the time Takuda looked back. The sergeant had probably locked it for good measure.

Suzuki was kneeling before the ashes of the Gotoh house when Mori and Takuda pulled up. His belongings were piled beside him.

“They just let me out about ten minutes ago,” he said. “Good timing.”

“Good timing is one word for it,” Takuda said. “Somebody was watching. They were just waiting for us to come down the straightaway in Mori's car before they let you out. They want us all gone.”

Mori kicked a chunk of heat-­shattered pavement past the police barrier and into the charred shell of the house. “Was this arson or suicide?”

“I don't know. I watched from the holding cell window. There was an explosion, and flames were shooting through the eaves before the first siren. The fire must have started upstairs.”

Takuda imagined old Gotoh pulling his withered body toward the kerosene heater. “We'll probably never know,” he said.

Suzuki's silk sash was gray with silt from the spillway, but he draped it over himself anyway. “The sash is the only thing that doesn't stink,” he said. “It's a kind of miracle. Everything else went into the trash.”

“You two will have to get new scabbards and fittings for your swords,” Takuda said. “Everything will stink, everything but the steel itself.”

“Maybe even the steel,” Mori said.

“Stay here,” Takuda said. “I'll pray for the Gotohs at their tomb after I pray for my family.”

“The Gotohs have a tomb here? Miyoko Gotoh never mentioned it. I assumed they would have a shrine burial somewhere. I'll join you and pray at their tomb, as well.”

“You two know what they did,” Mori said. “They're responsible for hundreds of murders. Hundreds. Including your father, Priest.”

Suzuki wrapped his beads around his fingers. “I know that. I'll chant now. Are you going to piss again? I'm downhill from you. Warn me if you're going to piss again.”

Takuda left them to it. The gravel path leading past Gotoh's house was sodden from the fire hoses and blackened with soot. At the end of the path, the cemetery lay still beneath the towering cedars. The few remaining tombs stood like sentinels. To his right, stacks of toppled stones squatted like toads.

Takuda walked past the Gotoh tomb. The tombstone lay toppled in a trench dug by its own weight. The base held a stump of shattered granite. The stump was rotten with moss and slick with veins of black fungus as if moisture and decay had seeped into the stone for generations.

A solitary figure stepped out onto the cleared path. Takuda walked under the silent trees to meet whoever awaited him at his family tomb.