Maohden Vol. 1 (5 page)

If a rival gang caught sight of this situation, the Sanbo Group would have been wiped off the face of the earth in two seconds flat.

The lobby lights glowed brightly inside the lobby, as if welcoming him. The whole thing was beyond belief. Only two reasons sprang to mind: the guards that night abandoned the building, or they’d given up trying to defend it. Either way, they’d bear the blame the rest of their lives.

Into the situation, at three o’clock in the morning, stepped Setsura Aki.

The first floor game center was empty. The garishly-painted American-style pinball machines and video arcade cabinets plastered with posters sat there like haunted tombstones in a grotesque graveyard.

Setsura crossed the room to the elevators at the back. The power was on. He pushed the up button. The doors opened, as if nothing was out of the ordinary. He got on. A few seconds later, he arrived at the seventh floor.

The hallway was filled with light.

Setsura walked with muffled footsteps. Quieter than any rubber soles. Silence uninterrupted by even a breath or a heartbeat. It was like a brilliant watchmaker had poured moonlight into the veins of a doll, wound the spring of a heart made from glass and paper, and this young man had stepped forth.

Turning the corners without hesitation, Setsura came to an ornate, ebony door. Though he’d only been there once before in his life, his memory proved precise. He grasped the brass doorknob.

He wasn’t greeted by an electric pulse strong enough to fell an elephant, or a spurt of mustard gas. The door silently opened to the left and right, revealing the large director’s office.

The lavish furnishings, the leather sofa and marble table, didn’t seem at all fitting to a yakuza’s headquarters.

Next to the window on the left was a large oak desk. Behind the desk was his host. The face beneath the shock of well-groomed blond hair sported an unusually hearty complexion. The build of his body suggested a sixtyish corporate president who was into sports and kendo.

However, his countenance and the vigor suffusing it—as if all the fat in his body had been boiled down and his face extruded from the lye—was hardly that of a company man.

Kanji Mitakara. The director of the Sanbo Group, that ruled over the northwest quadrant of Shinjuku. Their territory comprised the once quiet suburban neighborhoods and school zones from the Seibu Shinjuku line to Mejiro Boulevard, followed the cross streets to New Mejiro Boulevard, and traveled the length of Yamate Street, running through Kamiochiai, Nakaochiai and Shimo’ochiai.

This old man—it was said he could freeze a tiger in its tracks with a single look—stood at the head of an organization of five hundred “associates,” dealing in narcotics, prostitution and illegal weapons, and taking in seven billion yen a year.

He’d earned his livelihood in the black market for almost half a century without suffering so much as a scratch, his good luck and wariness making him a legend in Shinjuku. And now he threw the doors wide open and cast all precautions aside to greet this young man—just who was this Setsura Aki?

Setsura closed the door behind him and gave the old man a long look. “You look pretty drugged up to me.”

Kanji Mitakara nodded. His face was flushed, his intoxicated eyes moist. His pale lips moved, like a pair of willow leafs. “Yeah, I’m scared. Were you any other man in my line of business, hell, you could chew me up and spit me out and I’d die with a smile on my face.”

Fear and fierceness filled his voice, and it wasn’t just the drugs. Setsura answered quietly, “And knowing that, you threw the first punch.”

The voice emerged from the shadows drifting there in the darkness, devoid of human emotion, as if those crystal clear eyes existed only to take in all the melodrama of life and communicate only the cold hard facts to the cerebral cortex.

“What about Shiragi and Kurusu?” Mitakara asked.

“Skedaddled. But I know where.”

A faint smile finally graced Mitakara’s mouth. “Skedaddled, eh? Since the day I met you, I haven’t thought about anything else. But them, they’re still young, they’ve still attachments to this world. I have to hope you’ll see them off one of these days.”

“One of these days.”

Mitakara flashed a broad, relieved smile. “Good to know. I’d really hate to take the trip by myself and leave them behind, no matter how much I may deserve it.”

“So has Gento Roran returned?”

“That he has. Where has he been these fifteen years? No matter who you ask, nobody knows. But one thing’s for certain—he wants your head on a platter. I told him the odds were against us pulling it off. He was going to have to settle things with you himself. And we wouldn’t meet again.”

Mitakara suddenly stopped speaking. His eyes brimmed. His lips trembled. He seemed caught up in a rapturous state.

“It is terrifying,” he said, the words leaking from the corners of his mouth all the weaker and euphoric. “Anybody who sees you fight regrets it, and now resents those who sleep soundly at night having not seen what they’ve seen. I at last wish to see for myself. What will become of this city?”

Setsura stood there in front of the door. He didn’t answer. Or perhaps it was the darkness itself that held its tongue.

“This city has belonged to the likes of
you
all along. Fifteen years and we’ve only just remembered. He’s a tough nut, tougher than
his
father, tougher than
yours
. Are you tougher than your father?”

“He had minions. Have they returned too?”

“Hyota? He didn’t show his face. But he has means and skills of his own. Ah, parting is such sweet sorrow.”

“How did they convince you?”

“Promise me—to send Shiragi and Kurusu on to their just rewards—I couldn’t do it alone, but with you—”

Mitakara’s head popped off his shoulders like a manhandled old doll coming apart. The blood fountained from his severed neck. The body ballooned to twice its normal size.

Setsura leapt backwards, to the door, opened it and slammed it shut while still in midair. The door mostly contained the explosion that followed. The four-inch thick oak bowed outwards and split apart under the pressure, the cracked wood stained red.

He landed in a corner of the hallway. Carried along by the shock wave, the flames and shards of wood rained down on him. If those shards possessed a sentience of their own, they would certainly have expressed their surprise at what their target did next.

Maintaining a perfect balance, Setsura jumped back again without bending his knees. The walls of the director’s office crumbled like an earthen levy assaulted by a flood, spitting out fire and a blast of superheated air. The flames washed down what was left of the hallway and raced after Setsura.

He didn’t land but glided three feet above the floor. The black slicker kicked up around his waist streamed out behind him as the jump turned to flight. The eyes watching the fire pursuing him were dark and clear.

The stairs came up before him. Fire consumed the floor in front of him. A hellish inferno blocked the way back.

Setsura’s right arm, hanging by his side, jerked up. Rebounding like a spring, he abruptly changed directions toward the line of windows on his right. Bulletproof glass and hardened steel shutters covered the windows.

His left hand moved within the rushing wind. The black night outside peeked in. Setsura Aki twisted his body and sailed head-first through a gap where the glass and shutters had been. The claw of fire reaching out to him missed by a hair’s breadth, raking only the empty sky.

Mitakara had literally bet his death to lay the trap, ingesting a radioactive catalyst that turned his body into a furnace. Setsura Aki slipped out of the snare and escaped into the night.

Who was this Gento Roran who rose to challenge him? Somewhere out in the night, as if answering that question, a dog howled.

Streets blessed with such a rich variety of pedestrian traffic could be found nowhere else.

Salarymen wearing three-piece suits and neckties; young men and women in the ever traditional T-shirts and jeans; girls thronging the information booths on the street corners, 3D video cameras hanging around their necks—probably sightseers from outside the ward.

Men dressed in long reddish-brown robes, razor marks still fresh on their bald heads, evangelists for one of Shinjuku’s hundreds of pagan sects. Maintaining a safe distance behind them, a heavy-set man in his fifties wearing a rumpled suit, not a speck of emotion in his eyes—undoubtedly a hit man hired by a rival sect.

A discerning eye could read the occupations of the other passersby: a yakuza capo wearing a brightly-colored suit and necktie and sunglasses, his underlings in gaudy aloha shirts; an illegal cyborg, its special alloy head and arms glinting in the sunlight; outlaw espers, hard to tell apart at a glance; the usual underworld muscle.

In the recessed plaza of a building, a perfumer randomly called out to the tourists, trying to lure them over to his “instant illusion” booth, promising to deliver the real experience of two hours of the hottest sex with an ideal lover in thirty seconds flat.

The rumors said that since going on sale, the number of dead and disabled customers had already reached double-digits.

A man wearing a fedora stood on the corner in front of the shuttered Mitsukoshi building. His coat was inappropriate to the season, unusually large and bulky due to the handguns and assault rifles and grenades and incendiaries hanging all over it—the kind of street vendor you could only find in Shinjuku.

Currently for sale was the latest caseless type 3 mm Colt M77, three fifty-round magazines included, for nine-hundred thousand yen. An old-school Colt Government .45 and a 9 mm Smith & Wesson M 659 went for fifty grand apiece.

The recent bestseller was the Steyr AUG assault rifle, thanks to the Austrian Army converting to Heckler & Koch caseless ammunition and dumping their used inventory on the market.

Tobacconists selling a compound of drugs illegal outside the ward called “Shinjuku weed”; “instant steroids” guaranteed to have no side-effects, for protection against the violence that could crop up in an instant; S&M parlors that invited passersby to beat on the patrons (anywhere but the head) with a hammer; the usual high street shops.

It hardly stopped there. Opium smugglers schlepping their wares around in metal lockers; a human reconstruction physician, a doctor’s bag in one hand, hurrying to a house call; diviners of ill fortune who only dealt in bad outcomes; students of the local school of fraud and grifting, all smiles no matter how unfriendly the crowd; the homeless and vagrants, their bodies festering under the effects of unknown narcotics.

The sightseers aside, people strolled by without the slightest alarm. The uniformed commando police now and then appearing among the crowds showed no inclination to arrest any of them. Their job was to keep Shinjuku’s streets safe for the tourists.

Every last one of them emanated an evil and foul odor that even in the middle of the day mingled with the rich and bewitching miasmas, filling the streets with an indescribable aura.

In the midst of all this—any “normal” person suddenly introduced into this environment could expect to get seized by the chills and feel nauseous enough to vomit on the spot—ordinary tourists happily plodded along. The reason must be that they’d been contaminated the minute they stepped foot in Shinjuku’s precincts.

Chaste and well-bred daughters were known to open their legs to any man at the drop of a hat after spending three days there. Out of every hundred perpetrators of domestic homicide nationwide, at least one had instigated the violence immediately after returning from the city.

Shinjuku Avenue, with the Isetan and Mitsukoshi department stores hugging the sidewalks on both sides, was the city’s safest boulevard. Fifty thousand people tread its pavement every day, and on average, only one murder was recorded there every three hours.

People flowed along the roads from there toward Kabuki-cho, Ichigaya, Shinjuku Gardens, roads leading them all down to hell. Of course they did. Because this was Demon City.

Among those fifty thousand, Banri Sasaki was a man with a mission, if one eccentric even for this population. In order to accomplish it, he had a HD camera and high-gain mike sewn into the collar of his shabby coat and belt buckle.

Compared to that, the Smith & Wesson .38 Military & Police six-round revolver in the holster on his right hip was nothing more than a sidearm.

Sasaki was about to cross the street from Mitsubishi Bank headed in the direction of Yotsuya, the Isetan department store on his left, cracks crisscrossing its once-majestic walls.

Just as the light turned green, he turned around, as if a contrary thought had suddenly occurred to him, and hailed a taxi waiting there at the crosswalk. It was an old-fashioned gasoline vehicle. Gas turbines were all the rage now. Here in Shinjuku, though, old technology still had its uses. To start with, late-model gas turbines were few in number and a prime target for thieves.

“Where to?” asked the driver.

He looked less like a cabbie and more like a carjacker, though that was more the product of his environment. The question was relayed via a speaker embedded in the bulletproof glass panel separating the front and back seats.

“Shinjuku police station.”

“You a cop?” the cabbie said with a grimace.

It was a rule of thumb that nobody drove a taxi in Shinjuku that didn’t have something to hide, and didn’t have a good reason to watch his back. Not only the bulletproof glass, but beneath the rear seats was a tank of gas. Tear gas, usually, but just as easily exchanged for sleeping gas or worse. And yet not one case of murder had ever been recorded. It was against the cabbie code.

“Something like that.”

Sasaki leaned back against the seat. Page one of every Shinjuku guide book warned tourists in bold print not to reveal they were from outside the ward. In order to deal with the number and variety of crimes in the city, the police deployed human doubles with implanted memories that veteran criminals had a hard time telling from real residents of Shinjuku.