“Yes. It is logical.”

“He’s the guy. He’s what this thing pivots on. He’s dirty. He has to be. He understood in a second the potential value of the sword I carried, he made the phone call, he’s the one who made the whole thing happen. I have to have his name and address. I start with him.”

Someone in the unit had a brother who was a cop at Narita, and in a few days, Major Fujikawa called with a name-Kenji Kishida-and an address. Bob intercepted him at Narita. He was the one on the brand-new Kawasaki 400, a gleamy red dream machine, bigger than all the other bikes. Obviously, he’d bought it with his yakuza windfall for finding the sword.

When he arrived at and departed from the station lot, parking and locking his bike in the gated compound, Bob watched from the coffee shop, where he could sit unobserved reading a newspaper. Kishida moved with an awkward limp. He didn’t have the agility, the rangy grace of a young man, nor was he muscle-bound like others who spent lots of time in the gym bulking up.

This fellow wore a suit, suggesting he was a detective or an administrator, and in his bright red-and-black helmet with its darkened fullface shield he looked almost ridiculous, like a hybrid beast, part salaryman, part knight in armor.

Bob monitored the man’s apartment house for a few days, until he was satisfied Kishida had no wife and kids at home.

The next week Bob noted that his candidate was working the midnight shift. One morning at 4 a.m., Bob pulled into Kishida’s apartment building’s parking lot, riding an identical Kawasaki 400, Metallic Majestic Red, that he’d bought in the name of Thomas Lee. He’d spent afternoons coming to terms with the left-hand driving. He was swaddled head to foot in racing leathers, and wore the exact red-and-black helmet with darkened visor that Officer Kishida wore. He pulled into the stall that Kishida always took and even aped the candidate’s slight limp, his old guy’s demeanor.

He entered the building, nodding at a sleepy night watchman at the desk who thought Bob was the officer, took the elevator up to the right floor, walked to the apartment, bent over, and attacked the lock with a credit card. There was no heavy security system, no deadbolts or electronic monitoring. The lock yielded in a split second. Then he was in.

The apartment, of course, was trim and neat. Three pairs of black shoes and two pairs of sneakers with shoe trees in them were lined up in the foyer. Bob went to the bookcase and saw many English books; Kishida spoke English. The books were all about swords. Most were in Japanese, several in German, and several in French. All were arranged by nationality, then alphabetically. He pulled one out at random and found it copiously underlined and with margin notes. On the inside cover were precise notes taken in a fine kanji hand, running up and down the page, indexed to page numbers. He pulled two other books out and found them equally dissected.

No dirty dishes were in the sink in the small kitchen, and the refrigerator yielded no germy sushi, no moldy noodles. There was a six-bottle carton of Sapporo, and three cans of that famous Japanese drink, Diet Coke. Next to the refrigerator was a half-open bottle of Ozeki sake.

Bob moved to the bedroom. It was nondescript, with Musashi’s famous shrike hanging on a scroll over the futon, which was flat and neatly made up. Against the opposite wall was a large TV and DVD player. In the closet were uniforms, shirts and ties, and two civilian black ties and black suits. Then polo shirts, a few pairs of jeans and chinos, all neatly pressed. Each hanger was exactly one-third of an inch from the next.

Closing the door, he went to the low stand next to the futon and opened it. There he found on one shelf, again alphabetically arranged, the crème de la crème of samurai DVDs, mostly Kurosawa but also several other top-line films he had seen, including Samurai Rebellion, Harakiri, Band of Assassins, and When the Last Sword Is Drawn. Beneath, neatly stacked and alphabetized, were porno DVDs, from a company called Shogunate AV. Shogunate AV seemed to specialize, as near as Bob could figure out, in something that might be called “teacher films,” for each of the covers showed an attractive young woman in her mid-twenties in a business suit and glasses lecturing a batch of boys. In subsequent shots she was stripping for them, they were touching her, she was servicing them, all in the classroom, where higher mathematics had been chalked on the blackboard.

Jesus, he thought, who came up with that?

He left the porn stash and went to the desk. Indeed, the still shiny owner’s manual to the top-of-the-line Kawasaki 22R400 bike lay on the desk, and it too had been scrupulously studied, underlined, and annotated, all in a precise kanji hand.

Where were the swords? This guy would surely have swords.

He never found them, but he found a vault in a living room closet. That’s where they’d be, this fellow’s small, proud collection.

Bob went back to the desk and found a photo album: our hero in kendo outfit through the stages of his life, young and proud, a winner of some local tourneys, a man in his twenties lean and dangerous. A woman appeared in some of them, but then she disappeared. Divorce, death? In the more recent photos, the swordsman had become a coach and posed with a group of younger kendo warriors.

Then, in a drawer, Bob found what appeared to be a pile of bills. They were all addressed to Kenji Kishida, of 1-23-43 Shintoyo, Apartment 633, Chiba. Many were in kanji, a few, from Citibank, were in English and Japanese, and many said the same thing: they appreciated his recent settling of debts and they thanked him very much.

There it was. The guy was bankrupting himself buying swords he couldn’t afford. Then the dream sword is presented to him in the middle of a business day. He recognizes the Asano crest and the swordsmith’s signature, he reads the shape of the blade, puts two and two together, and recalls that somebody in the last few weeks wants an astonishing sword. He knows the number. He takes the sword apart. He makes his tang imprint, makes the call, faxes the imprint, and connects them to Bob. It takes a couple of hours to set up a tail. Bob’s sitting there like a fool; when he leaves, he has no idea he’s leading the killers to the Yanos.

A week later Detective Kenji Kishida receives an envelope full of cash. He can settle his bills; maybe he buys a sword he’s longed for and it reposes right now in the vault. He’s got a little extra. He always wanted a bike. Why not? Who will notice? He probably never connected it with the Yanos. It was just a little favor of the sort a mildly dishonest cop might do for someone in power.

The officer did not go to work Saturday. He arose late and finally went to his bike about eleven in the morning. He had full racing leathers on and looked like a ’cycle knight. He examined his bike with a great deal of pleasure, checking connections, lubricants, this or that tube or pipe or cable. Then he put on his helmet, climbed aboard, keyed the engine, kicked up the stand, backed out. With a lurch-he had clearly not yet mastered the subtleties of the handle-grip clutch and the foot shifter-he shunted into motion.

Bob caught the tail end of this drama, as he’d been circling the blocks in a figure-eight pattern to keep the parking lot observed, figuring it would only be out of sight for seventy seconds out of every two minutes, and when he came by, the man had mounted up. Bob slowed, tracked him as he moved through the lot, let him join traffic, and followed a good three hundred yards behind.

Kishida threaded his way through the traffic, still clumsy and jumpy on the gears, edged his way through the suburbs of the small city of Narita to the Kanto Expressway, where, ever so tentatively, he finally got up into the higher gears and was soon humming along at 100 kmh. It never occurred to him that he was being followed, and even if it did, he probably wouldn’t have had the confidence to take his eyes off the road before him. So Bob slipstreamed along without much difficulty.