Chapter Two

Chapter Two

Mayor Kajiwara had sat hunched forward in his leather chair since the night before. Finally he leaned back and said to the man standing next to him, “Hey, what’s the time?”

Thirty minutes before, Deputy Chief Tanomo had raced over from police headquarters. He and the mayor were the only two men in the room. “It’s just past eleven forty-five.”

The mayor glanced at his own left wrist. “Oh. Yeah. Sorry.”

Life flooded back into his pale face and eyes. He truly believed that as long as he kept himself in one piece, Shinjuku would never fall apart. But as the last remark clearly demonstrated, the accumulated fatigue of the last several days was slowly eating away at him.

“Fifteen more minutes. The gates are still locked down?”

“Yes. Several of our officers were wounded in the latest skirmish.”

“And none of them?”

“The SDF has got the armor, that’s for sure. Seems there are monsters infiltrating the ranks. Word is a commander on the other side got an eye and the back of his head chewed off.”

“How unfortunate,” the mayor said, with a serves-’em-right smile.

The deputy chief of police couldn’t help but take that as a good omen. They were about to be boiled alive, and the mayor would be meeting it with his fists raised. There wasn’t another ally in this world worth having at the moment.

But the reality of their situation couldn’t escape him for long. Tanomo said, “Is there anything the citizenry can do right now about the sealed gates?”

“We’ve made thirty or forty calls this morning alone, lodging protests with every outside agency we can think of. I’ve got people still on it. But I don’t think it’ll do much good at this juncture. This is Demon City. When you think about it, what can be worse than simply living here?”

“Well—” Not certain of how to answer that, Tanomo’s voice trailed off. Then he said, “Well, what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.”

Though even he’d admit it sounded pretty dumb when he said it. In less than fifteen minutes, a nuclear blast was going to unleash a tidal wave of energy on their heads. Useless chest-thumping wouldn’t do much good.

“There are rumors of a nuclear missile strike, probably because of all the clairvoyants in this town. Most people don’t seem inclined to believe it. Or if they do, figure whatever will be will be. Compared to the reality they face every day, it simply isn’t a very realistic threat. I suppose that could be called one of the redeeming graces of this place.”

“I agree completely.” The mayor stretched. The springs in the seat of the executive chair creaked.

“And the missile?” Tanomo asked, returning to the more pressing matter at hand.

“We’ve run the gauntlet with the outside world and have nothing to show for it.”

“In any case, I suppose not dying in a screaming panic provides some consolation.”

“Sure.” Kajiwara massaged the knot out of his right shoulder. He got a La Aurora Double Corona out of the cigar case on his desk and bit off the end. With a cool and collected gesture, he lit up his last smoke and puffed away like a smokestack, as the deputy chief of police looked on admiringly.

The mayor drew a deep drag and exhaled a small cloud of purple smoke that drifted through his office. The cloud floated intact toward Deputy Chief Tanomo. Before he could react, a blue-white flash bolt of lightning struck him on the shoulder. With a stifled cry, he leapt backwards. A pencil laser sprang into his hand from the cuff of his right sleeve.

Kajiwara held up his hand. “Relax, relax.”

“What the hell was that?”

“A practical joke. Thought I’d break the tension, that’s all. A new item in the souvenir shops. It’s called a Thunder Cloud. A pleasant sensation?”

“More like getting scalded,” said the deputy chief of police, pressing a hand against his smoldering shoulder and doing his best to contain his anger.

“Hmm. Sorry about that. A stern warning should be delivered that the voltage regulator is out of adjustment. No wait, make that a fine. It’ll help balance the budget. Seems every knickknack shop in Shinjuku has contracted to stock the things.”

The cigar Kajiwara was holding, and other items of the sort, could just as well be manufactured outside Shinjuku. But when it came to toys on the somewhat dangerous side, “Demon City” had established itself as an important brand name. Shinjuku’s Office of Trademark Licensing received requests not only from within the ward but from around the world.

The foresight of the first mayor of Demon City, who’d registered the name, was praised to this day.

“With all due respect, Mr. Mayor,” the deputy chief of police interrupted him, as he applied a handkerchief to the injured place.

“What?”

“I may not look it, but I have been going out with the patrol officers twice a week. Not to pat myself on the back, but I’ve walked the beat around the DMZ a good thirty times.”

“Thirty-four.”

Kajiwara’s reply caught the veteran police officer momentarily off guard. Tanomo cleared his throat and broke the spell. “Go there ten times and you will lose your fear of death. Instantaneous death by nuclear missile might even be said to be easy by comparison. If you don’t mind me saying so, Mr. Mayor—”

“I’d rather not have to think about that place right now,” Kajiwara said, as if chewing on a bitter pill.

Allow himself to vent his personal feelings in ward council meetings, and since the beginning of his administration he would have been clamoring to pour every exorcist and battalion of shock troops in the world into Chuo Park. Except that, as the chief executive of Shinjuku, he’d signed off on ten times the regular budgetary expenditures in order to preserve this most dangerous place on earth.

Thanks to its name and existence alone, tours around the high perimeter fence brought in twenty times as much traffic every year as visitors to the Imperial Palace, not to mention the fees collected in the process.

“What were you saying?”

“In other words, I guess what I’m asking is, in the face of such premonitions of death, why are all the people so resigned to what is going on? From what I can see, it’s something more than mere bravado or a drug-induced euphoria.”

“So we’ve played all our trump cards and still lost the pot.” Kajiwara swiveled his chair around to face the window, gazing at the sky or the city. As a spectator, he would first look at the sky.

“And what about those cards up the sleeve?”

Kajiwara couldn’t help feeling more than a tad self-satisfied at the echoes of inquisitiveness and relief in the man’s studied tone of voice. A moment later, that sense of satisfaction rapidly faded, and the ineffable emptiness pressed against the mayor’s abdomen.

His gaze shifted to the distant rooftops of the city. Somewhere out there was his beautiful last ace. “There’s one left.” He might as well do the one thing he hadn’t done since the day he’d come to this city. “Namu Hachiman Daibosatsu. Glory to the God of War, incarnation of the Great Buddha. Let the dream of Setsura Aki come true.”

The intercom buzzed, bringing his prayers to an end. “What?”

In an atmosphere thick with foreboding, “Setsura Aki would like to see you.”

Kajiwara’s eyes flew open wide. “Is he alone?”

“Yes.”

Kajiwara felt like collapsing on the spot, but somehow kept it together. “Show him in.”

“Yes, sir.”

In the time between the intercom cutting off and the door opening, Kajiwara was sure his secretary was playing a bad joke on him. Setsura could not be alone.For the sake of his own good name, he could not have returned alone. And yet he entered the room alone.