He wriggled his toes and practiced his foot-stretching and ankle exercises. He had been a paratrooper for ten years before transferring on fast-track promotion to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, and jumping out of airplanes meant that sometimes you landed in the wrong way and in the wrong place. Which at times was not healthy. His tendons complained. His ligaments were appalled. Still, what the hell; it had been a lot of fun. And he still jumped occasionally. It was a thoroughly ridiculous activity for a sane adult in his middle years, and that appealed to him.
Adachi swung his legs off the sofa and poured himself a generous slug of sake, then another. The alcohol on top of the pleasant lethargy imparted by his recent violent exercise gave him a pleasant buzz. He swung his legs back on the sofa and idly picked up a report. It showed comparative crime statistics. The twenty-three wards of Tokyo, with a population of eight million, had seen ninety-seven murders last year. New York, with a slightly smaller population, came in at just under two thousand. Robbery came in at three hundred and forty-three for Tokyo and ninety-three thousand for New York. The rape figures were a hundred and sixty-one compared to over three thousand two hundred.
He smiled in satisfaction. It appeared as if the Tokyo cops were doing something right. On the other hand, paradoxically, he liked New York and wouldn't mind at all living there. Man does not live by crime-free streets alone. Still, for making his outstanding contribution to Toyko's law enforcement efforts, he felt entitled to a rest. And he did not grudge his forty-one thousand fellow metropolitan cops their share of the glory. He closed his eyes, thought of Chifune looming over him naked and beautiful and sexy, and slept.
Outside in the general office, the seven members of the special task force investigating the links between organized crime and politics nodded approvingly to one another. They had wagered useful money on Adachi winning the detectives' kendo championships, and they wanted their man to keep his strength up. Besides, things were quiet.
And then the phone rang.
* * * * *
Senior Public Prosecutor Toshio Sekine, a gray-haired man in his early sixties and actually rather slight, had the kind of physical presence and gravitas that would have dominated the big screen if his orientation had been that way. Instead, he had settled for the law and a life of public service and a career of distinction even by the high standards of the Tokyo Public Prosecutor's office.
Sekine-san specialized in putting bent politicians behind bars. In most countries that was a career with unlimited lifetime potential. In Japan, there was the additional complication of major links with the Boryokudan, the organized crime syndicate. Further, the whole corrupt mess was so institutionalized that it was becoming hard to know what was actually illegal anymore. If the norm in politics was corruption, was it corruption anymore or merely the way the system worked?
The prosecutor sipped his green tea. He came from a samurai background wit a tradition of service to the state. He regarded the Japanese political system with distaste. It seemed to him that most elected politicians were small-minded and venal. Fortunately, they were largely irrelevant to the orderly governance of Japan. The country had an excellent and largely incorrupt civil service and a law-abiding population driven by the Confucian work ethic. In Sekine's opinion, elected politicians were more akin to a branch of the entertainment business. They provided distraction but had little to do with the serious business of running a country.
Superintendent Adachi was shown in. He bowed respectfully. He had enormous respect and affection for the senior prosecutor. They were both of the same social class, their families knew each other, and both the prosecutor and the superintendent were graduates of Todai — TokyoUniversity. Even more to the point, they had both taken law degrees. That made them the cream of the crop. TokyoUniversity graduates constituted an elite, and the inner circle came from the law faculty. Todai alumni practically ran the country. Senior Prosecutor Sekine had not selected Superintendent Adachi by accident. The investigation of political corruption linked to organized crime was a tricky and dangerous business. It was essential to have people on your team you could trust and who were predictable. Sekine trusted Adachi to serve him well.
The prosecutor gave Adachi time to relax, collect his thoughts, and sip his tea. The policeman had just come from the crime scene and had supervised the removal of Hodama's body. He had had a long day, and his fatigue was showing.
"Hodama?" the prosecutor said, after Adachi had sipped at his tea.
Adachi grimaced. "An extremely unpleasant business, sensei," he said, "a massacre. Everyone in the house was killed. The bodyguard in the front was shot where he stood. Two others died inside the house. The manservant was shot in the bathroom. Hodama himself was boiled alive in his own bathtub."
The prosecutor made a sound of disapproval. "Guns," he said disdainfully. "Guns. This is very bad. This is not the Japanese way."
Adachi nodded in agreement but silently speculated whether or not the victim would have been any better off chopped to death with a sword in the more usual Japanese style. On the issue of being boiled alive, he thought a couple of 9-mm hollow-points were preferable any day of the week. Anyway, execution by boiling had not been much in vogue since the Middle Ages. The last person he had heard of being killed that way was IshikawaJoemon, a notorious robber. He had been a Robin Hood figure, supposedly robbing the rich and giving to the poor — less deductions for expenses. Hodama had not quite been in the same tradition.
"The method of Hodama's death," he said. "I wonder if that is indicative in its own right."
The prosecutor shrugged. "Let's not speculate just yet. First the facts."
"We think the killings took place around seven in the morning," said Adachi. "Hodama was a man of regular habits, and the physical evidence would tend to support this. The police doctor cannot be quite so precise. He puts the time at somewhere between six and eight.
"The bodies were not actually found until 3:18 P.M.. Hodama normally received from 2:45 P.M. onwards. Today, the outer gate was not open and there was no reply to either the bell at the gate or the phone, so eventually a local uniform was called. He nipped over the wall to check out if anything was wrong and left his lunch all over the first body he found. They are not used to blood and guts in that part of the world."
"So the Hodama residence was unguarded from about seven in the morning until after lunch," said the prosecutor. "Plenty of time to remove what needed to be removed."
Adachi nodded. He knew exactly what the sensei was getting at. Hodama was one of the most powerful men in Japan, and a constant stream of visitors brought money in exchange for favors. The operation was extensive. There should have been some written records and considerable sums of money on the premises. The first question the prosecutor had asked when they had spoken by phone earlier in the afternoon was whether any records had been found.
"We went over the place again," Adachi said. "We used the special search team, optical probes, and all the gizmos. We turned up nothing written at all — nothing — but we found thirty million yen in a concealed safe." He grinned. "It was in a series of Mitsukoshi shopping bags."