Maohden Vol. 2 (21 page)

“Some rent-a-cops have been keeping an eye on the hospital. Hyota dispatched two of them this morning. Acquaintances of yours?”

“Now that you mention it, a couple have been hanging around. I pretend to be out.”

A man with a bald head like an octopus was speaking to the receptionist. With a flick of her finger, her voice flowed through the speakers. “Yoshihiro Asai-san, a senior director for the Shinjuku Restoration Society.”

The sparkle in Mephisto’s eyes grew all the more intense. “The Shinjuku Restoration Society is the godfather of the criminal syndicates. How do you wish to proceed?”

Setsura started toward the door. “That baldy looks like he means business.”

Behind him, Mephisto got to his feet. “It’s been a while since your threads have revealed themselves in all their dexterous glory.”

The prospect of seeing this killing technique in action practically made him shake with joy. Compared to these two, the lackeys of these mob bosses were pretty damned ordinary.

Baldy bowed upon seeing the two of them. His hair had receded all the way from his forehead. The swirl of hair that was left painted a black pattern on his pate.

“My name is Asai. I am pleased to meet you.”

“Please sit down,” Mephisto said, not deigning to introduce himself. He offered him a chair.

“No, that’s fine. If it is all right with you, we would like to invite you along to accommodations of our own. No, not you, Doctor. The young man.”

The pleasant smile on his face couldn’t hide the emotions in his eyes. Eyes like a snake. Eyes of the archetypal villain. He must be good at getting what was asked of him. This type was a dime a dozen in big business, starting off all deferential, but sooner or later carrying the weight of the entire enterprise on their shoulders.

He’d climbed the corporate criminal ladder kissing up to his superiors and selling out his subordinates. Once he’d gotten his hands on that brass ring, this kind of bottom feeder fully intended to count his own and the company’s success as one and the same. The worst of the crime families were turning into a bunch of men in gray flannel suits.

“And what business would you have with him?” Mephisto asked.

Setsura interrupted and said in a lazy voice, “Let’s cut to the chase, Baldy. What if I say no?”

The balding head darkened in a flash. Laboring to keep the snarl from his lips, he said, “You gotta leave here sometime, kid. Keeping people waiting tends to tick them off. Besides, we didn’t come here to put the hurt on you. There might even be some room here for cooperation and compromise. Let’s talk it over.”

“A negotiation with the mob, eh,” Setsura said, stretching mightily. “Sure, why not? Let’s hear what you have to say.”

Asai reined in his temper. When it counted, he was a man who could summon up great reserves of patience, the kind of patience it took to kiss all the ass that got him where he was today.

“Are you telling me there’s no way to convince you to accompany us to our premises?”

“Not bloody likely.”

“Then we have no choice but to stay here until you do.”

“Do you intend to raise a ruckus in the hospital?” Mephisto asked softly.

Asai paled a bit, cleared his throat, and said, “Rest assured you have nothing to worry about. Come along quietly.”

“Nobody will be coming along quietly. Neither can you leave. No patients come to this hospital and, still breathing, choose to stay. Though some boasting of no physical defects at all have, from time to time, been known to go missing.”

Asai raised his hand. Four men at the receptionist’s desk started towards them.

“Stand down, Setsura,” Mephisto murmured, twisting the ring on his finger.

A woman in white passed in front of the three like a shadow. The suits looked down their noses at the nurse standing in front of them. They were men who made a specialty of eradicating life, honing their skills on the monsters and demons that nested here in Shinjuku.

They carried five-round, hand-held missile launchers in the holsters under their arms. Guided by a visual recognition guidance system and streaking along at Mach three, one missile could light up an area sixty feet in diameter with two hundred thousand degrees of heat.

But now they were going to get up close and personal with a fear greater than anything else in their knowledge.

The nurse’s slender hands swept sideways. Two of the men flew backwards with crushed throats. The remaining two were halted in midair as they tried to retreat, the nurse’s arms buried in their stomachs up to her wrists.

Puncturing the abdominals of these mountain-sized men like tissue paper, she wrenched her hands and tore out their insides. Having seen to their gruesome mutual demise, throwing the two blood-soaked bodies over her shoulders, she marched back to the elevator.

Asai’s gaze was glued to her back. His forehead was covered with a sheen of sweat. His shirt was plastered to his chest.

Smiling, almost elfin eyes looked into his terror-stricken ones. “It is human nature to never learn from one’s mistakes, but a yakuza’s threats have little entertainment value. Do you know what will happen to them? Downstairs is a most efficient and well-equipped vivisection room. Brain cells in particular are useless once dead, so it’s best to conduct the procedures while the donor is still alive. You, too.”

Asai’s face twisted in fear. Mephisto gently restrained his raised hands. That alone froze the yakuza’s errand boy in place.

“If—if—you kill me—”

Mephisto’s forefinger touched his trembling lips. He whispered as if to a beloved child, “Time to take a nap.”

He lowered his hand and pushed his finger through Asai’s Adam’s apple. Asai’s eyes rolled back in his head. When Mephisto drew back his hand, not a drop of blood was left behind. Not the hint of a wound marred Asai’s skin.

Mephisto practiced as well in the field of psychic surgery, its effectiveness well-established for many years now, able to remove tumors without leaving a scar.

He said to the nurses that materialized like specters behind him, “Take him away.”

Asai slumped down into the chair. Perched on his knee was a disgusting, blue-green lump. A toad. Peering out from the warty skin, the heavy glistening eyes took in Setsura and Mephisto.

“Hoh,” said the delighted Mephisto. “It looks like somebody else has been stealing a march on Gento.”

The rain didn’t let up towards evening. The streaks of silver only seemed to multiply.

Even in this corner of Takada no Baba Ichome near Waseda University, where the damage from the Devil Quake was comparably light, were remarkable patches of destruction. Here and there among the heaps of rubble were rows of prefab houses and shotgun shacks.

From a distance and at a glance, it appeared as a street of stores and houses immediately following reconstruction.

But those who took one step down that street without a clear purpose or resolve were likely to furrow the brows and pinch the nose. And realizing the true nature of their surroundings, frown and return the way they came, muffling their steps so as to not arouse the attention of those who lived there.

The tails of his black Inverness topcoat flapping like a pair of folded wings, Gento Roran visited the street that evening, shortly before those five yakuza showed up at Mephisto Hospital.

The gnarled gas street lamps cast curious shadows where his black leather boots tread the worn cobblestones.

The shades were closed in the windows of the houses lining the street. The light leaking out from the cracks in the curtains at times turned blue or multicolored, like the sidelong glance of a seductress, revealing a glimpse of the mysterious experiments being conducted inside.

In front of Gento, a team of six horses drawing a carriage appeared out of the darkness. Their hooves tread silently on the cobblestones. The wheels raised nary a creak of sound. And yet it drew closer and passed by with a rush of wind, the falling rain splashing off the horses and carriage.

The coachman waved his whip. Through the windows of the carriage could be seen what appeared to be four children, all wrapped in a phosphorescent glow.

A rich scent wafted on the disturbed air.

“Ah,” Gento murmured with a keen sense of satisfaction.
Aurum Potabile
, philosopher’s tincture, quintessence of bat liver, pickled lung of tarantula—the glories of Prague surely thrived here.

All would be found in any witch’s medicine cabinet, the stock and trade of alchemy.

Speaking of which, etched into the doors of these prefab dwellings were fire-breathing basilisks and unicorns. The weather vanes spinning on the roofs sported creepy-looking lizards instead of roosters. From parts unknown came the muttering of spells spoken in Latin.

This was Magic Town.

Not only criminals and outlaws came to Shinjuku after the Devil Quake. Headlong iconoclasts, parlor revolutionaries and practitioners of the dark arts mingled together there, along with a considerable number of witches and warlocks from every corner of the globe.

They needed a place where true magical research could be conducted, where the equipment and the tools and the funding could be brought together, a place drenched in the psychic elements. There wasn’t a better place than Demon City Shinjuku.

And so men and women wrapped in black cloaks filled the main street, the corners and the back alleys. Day and night came the heavy smell of sulfur and the whispering of strange spells, turning this little corner of the city dark as a caldron.

Gento came to a halt in front of a ramshackle building. Water as thick as paint poured into the ditch from a drainage pipe. There was a clay tablet next to the wooden door in the shape of a circular astrological chart. He pressed on the center. A metallic gong rang out on the other side of the door.

Next to the jamb, a vertical line of light emerged and grew wider. Bathed in a brilliant flood of light, as if the whole house itself was incandescent, was a girl of seven or eight with golden hair and blue eyes. Her face showed her Slavic features. Her skin was an almost transparent white.

Perhaps in keeping with the neighborhood, she was wearing a black satin dress. In fluent Japanese she said, “How may I help you?”

“My name is Gento Roran. Would your grandmother happen to be in?”

“She is in, but she is not. You have twenty-six ribs.”

“I do.”

The door opened wider and he was shown in.

The living room was graced by old-style furniture. The fixtures in the cupboard, the coat hooks on the wall were all made of brass. The air was pleasantly cool, though there was nothing like an air conditioner in the house. Despite the light pouring forth, no oily flame burned in the glowing brass lamp in the ceiling.

“This way.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, the girl showed Gento to the door in the back. Gento stepped into the square dark space. As soon as the girl closed the door behind her, a blue flame flickered to life in front of them.

The burning blue candle sat on the round black table. The girl stood on the other side. The pale ring of light revealed a room filled with a potpourri of bizarre objects.

“Please sit down,” said the girl.

Gento took note of the chair behind him and sat down. A wooden chair with a firm cushion.

“I apologize for the age of the furnishings,” she said. “The seat must be hard.”

“Oh, it’s fine. Where has your grandmother gone off to?” Gento asked, becoming aware of a strange essence suffusing the air.

“There was something she needed to get done. But I will listen to whatever our curious visitor has to say, this man without an astrological sign.”

She spoke in the manner of a presumptuous child, sounding oddly beyond her apparent years.

Gento neither took affront nor regarded her with any doubt or suspicion. “I would like you to investigate a young woman. An entirely ordinary person, she would seem. Doctor Mephisto has detected nothing unusual about her. However—”

“You had Doctor Mephisto examine her—” Something akin to a grimace rose to the girl’s glassy doll-like face. “In that case, I’m afraid I have nothing more to add.”

“That is what everybody says. The witches and warlocks elsewhere as well. The only person who might examine a patient of Doctor Mephisto’s and come to a different conclusion is your mistress, Galeen Nuvenberg.”

“So what troubles this young woman?”

“I do not know.” Asked the same question Mayumi had asked Setsura at the hospital, Gento gave her the same answer. “But if the powers of your mistress are anything close to what the rumors say, I’m sure an explanation will be forthcoming.”

“We accept.” The girl nodded her head. Her hair spilled around her face like a wave of golden threads.

“Are you sure? You don’t want to discuss the matter with her first?”

“When Grandmother is not in, she leaves everything in my care. Her wishes are mine and mine are hers.”

“Understood.”

“But first—”

The girl got up and walked to the wall behind her, where the stuffed heads of a deer, bear, owl, anaconda, goat and bat were mounted. Also on the wall was a curved scimitar, six feet long and sans the scabbard.