“There will be more. I have the soba-yonin position in mind for you once my boy is made shogun.”

  The samurai bowed again and expressed his delight with a guttural, “Hai, to replace Yagyu as the chamberlain is my heart’s desire.”

  “Can you believe that other woman is striving so hard to have that unnatural child as the next shogun? Where would the Tokugawa be if that happened? Does not everyone see that?” she asked.

  The slightly gray Naomasu bowed his head as he spoke. “Anyone with any sense, my lady,” he said.

  “Exactly,” she agreed. “Now we have this new Yoshinobu bunch to contend with.” The lady stopped talking and froze. “Is that you Hakunnsai?”

  A voice from somewhere said, “It is I.” The gray-haired samurai jumped at the voice and grabbed for his short sword.

  “Calm yourself Naomasu. Even in this castle, your sword would do you little good if Hakunnsai wished you harm,” she said. “Now we can begin.”

  The gray-haired samurai kept looking around, trying to find where the voice was hiding.

  “These Yoshinobu trouble me,” she said.

  “Not as much as they trouble me,” the voice said. “I have lost many men to them.”

  “I guess maybe we sent the wrong ninja to Kyoto,” the samurai said.

  “I sent thirty good men to Kyoto to handle one boy as you indicated. Little did we know we were challenging the best swordsman in the country and a ninja master,” the voice stated angrily.

  “Gentlemen, we must not fight amongst ourselves,” she said. “They intrigue me. They are always doing the unexpected, like accusing us during the meeting of the Roju and Tairo last week. That Nagamasa derailed everything I had planned.”

  “I broke out in a cold sweat when he accused someone in that room of conspiring with the Fox Gang,” the samurai affirmed.

  “Yes, but who is the brain? Is it Nagamasa himself? Is it the old one they called Jii? It cannot be the youngster. He is too hotheaded. It is hard to devise a strategy when you know so little about the enemy,” she said.

  “We know Nagamasa likes women. He has taken up with the Hanzo whelp,” the voice said.

  “Really? … I wonder how much influence she has and by proxy how much Yagyu exerts?”

  “It doesn’t matter; kill them all and you get what you want,” the voice said.

  “Yes, but that has proven difficult to accomplish,” the old samurai said.

  “My boy will be shogun,” the woman vowed. “But what are the Yoshinobu doing? They have less than a month to accomplish the impossible.”

  “Nagamasa is holding an inspection on the Hatchibori right now,” the voice said.

  “For what purpose?” asked the old samurai.

  “From the tenor of the pre-inspection meeting, to dismantle it,” the voice said.

  “Tell me about this pre-inspection meeting,” the woman demanded.

  “The young swordsman visited the Hatchibori with Yagyu Jubei,” the voice stated.

  “Yagyu Jubei?” the woman questioned. “When did he return?”

  “We are not sure, but he has aligned his sword with the Yoshinobu,” the voice said. “The young swordsman presented a decree from Nagamasa that an inspection was to be conducted, and any crooked police could leave immediately without prosecution.”

  “I see,” the woman said. “Once again, the unexpected.”

  “We cannot have them dismantle the Hatchobori.” The samurai protested. “There are too many links to me.”

  The woman looked at the old samurai with a question in her stare. “You have not been there yourself, surely?”

  “No my lady, but several of my men have.”

  “Then you can easily claim you had no knowledge, and that will be the end of that,” she said. “Still, these Yoshinobu are troubling.” She paced back and forth for a few minutes, then stopped. “We must think of ways to unsettle their plans. Their task is to catch the Fox Gang. Hakunnsai, is he any closer to catching you?”

  “I do not see how he could be. As far as we can tell, the Yoshinobu have no intelligence-gathering capability, and only one ninja on their staff,” the voice said.

  “Then we can assume their efforts with the police have nothing to do with his task of catching and destroying the Fox Gang?” she asked as she paced up and down the center of the tatami floor.

  “My lady, if they have identified someone in the government as being tied to the Fox Gang, they could’ve tied the police to the use of cheap labor in the mines as a source of revenue for political ends. You said yourself they do the unexpected,” the old samurai said.

  “You may be right, Naomasu. I had not thought of that. We will open ourselves to danger if we underestimate their intelligence again,” she said.

  “Would shutting down the Hatchobori cripple your efforts?” the voice asked.

  “It would hurt us substantially,” she replied. “Our forces are large and spread out. We require vast sums of money to keep them employed and hidden.”

  “Then we should stop them,” the voice said.

  “Yes, but I want to stop them entirely. Our counter strategy must put us ahead of them, and eventually eliminate them for good.”

  “Yes, but how?” asked the samurai.

  The woman walked to the birdcage and stared at it for a moment. Then she imitated a series of chirps and whistles. When she had finished she turned to the samurai. “Naomasu, we need to embarrass the Yoshinobu in the eyes of the government as well as in their bid to destroy the Hatchobori. I want you to have our trusted contact in the police force arrange to capture the Fox Gang leader.”

  The old samurai looked surprised. Then he glanced at the ceiling. “Will not Hakunnsai object?”

  The woman laughed. “Oh Naomasu, it is such a good thing that you have me to think for you. We will not give them Hakunnsai. But at the same time, we must have the castle officials see that these country samurai are weak,” she said.

  “My lady that sounds good, but how are we to accomplish such a feat? Everyone thinks they are the embodiment of Bushido.”

  “What would happen if the Hatchobori were to capture the Fox Gang leader and then the citizens of Edo rise up in a riot in order to get their hands on this leader so they could execute him themselves?” she asked.

  The old samurai thought about it. “The officials would see that the magistrate was weak and could not control the city. They would be forced to commit troops from the castle to keep the peace.”

  “And how would that look for the magistrate?” she asked.

  “Very bad, my lady; not only would it look like he had lost control, but there would be many deaths and injuries among the citizens, and he would be blamed for that as well.”

  “Then don’t you think we ought to do all within our power to see that this is exactly what takes place?”

  The plan finally dawned on Naomasu. “Very well played my lady; I think I know exactly what to do,” he said.

  “I hope so,” she replied.

  “But my lady, even if we embarrass the Yoshinobu and Nagamasa has to admit failure, that is not a final solution to our problem.”

  “No it is not. But Hakunnsai will take care of that,” she said.

  The old samurai waited for the voice to say something. When the silence dragged on, the old samurai asked, “My lady, shouldn’t you give Hakunnsai his orders?”

  The woman moved back to the birdcage and whistled to the bird. This time it responded immediately. “I already have.”

  Chapter 18: Goro’s Knot

  Goro was not happy. He was supposed to be wakagashira of the Gumsumgumi. However, he did not feel like the first lieutenant. Life used to be good. The oyabun would give an order, and he would carry it out. Life was simple and had the same clean focus as the sumo ring. As a sumotori, he had found something at which he excelled. He had practiced hard and loved the competition. The rest of the world could be complicated, but sumo was simple. He knew the rules. He knew what everyone expected of him. He practiced until he became good. He had reached the level of yokozuna—grand champion. Even Nichi had not attained that pinnacle. However, when he injured his shoulder and could no longer fight at the high level expected of yokozuna, he was forced to retire. He understood. It was sumo. He knew the rules.

  Nevertheless, the adjustment from being yokozuna to being nobody had been difficult. He felt his life was over. He could have opened his own stable, but did not have the money or the head for business. He became so depressed that he thought of taking his life. Then he found Nichi. Or rather, Nichi found him. Goro had been working as a bouncer in a small brothel when Nichi, his old wrestling stablemate, found him and offered him a place in the Gumsumgumi.

  Nichi had been persuasive. The townspeople needed protecting, so Nichi had formed a group sworn to protect them. Each member swore a formal allegiance to each other and the organization, and everyone profited when the group profited. Goro saw that Nichi had borrowed the oath and rituals from sumo. Like sumo, you ate, drank, slept, and played with teammates. Like sumo, the entry into the Gumsumgumi began with taking sake and reciting ancient Shinto prayers. Like sumo, you swore allegiance to the group and its advancement. Like sumo, there was a rank structure.

  Goro took to it immediately. He had purpose again. It did not take him long to move up from a shatei, or little brother, to a kyodai, or big brother. Then he was shateigashira, or second lieutenant. Within two years, he became wakagashira, or first lieutenant. He liked being number two to Nichi.

  The success of the Gumsumgumi had a lot to do with Nichi and his leadership, but it had more to do with the organizational structure he created. The oyabun boss gave the orders and the kobun family carried them out. However, Nichi’s genius was borrowing the sumo rank structure and family trappings. As a kobun member attained rank, he had the duty to start his own family of followers and to elevate it to success. The outcasts of society found a place where neither birth nor education nor family ties meant anything. Your ability to help your family and to grow your own family was what mattered. That and your allegiance to the entire Gumsumgumi group could take you a long way in this wide-open city.

  As first lieutenant, Goro could stay close to Nichi, and because of all the threats associated with their booming success, Goro had taken responsibility for Nichi’s safety. He had really become Nichi’s yojimbo. He understood the job, and he was good at being Nichii’s bodyguard. Whenever Nichi was threatened, Goro would place himself between Nichi and the threat, and then crush it.

  However, his good life changed with the arrival of the young samurai. First, Nichi promoted him to yojimbo. Then, Nichi wanted Goro to take him under his wing and teach him the Gumsumgumi way. It was as if Nichi wanted to make him a member. True, several ronin were now members, but they had given up the two swords and were now involved in business enterprises. No real samurai had ever become a member. Moreover, no samurai would ever be a member if Goro had anything to say about it. That went double for the smart-mouthed young bastard.

  First, the young samurai had humiliated Goro by knocking him unconscious in the jail. Then, he had saved Nichi’s life twice, making himself a hero in the process. Then, he had engineered their jailbreak, thus becoming a hero to the entire kobun. Now Nichi was spending all of his time with the man, which was not much really, as the samurai was seldom around. He would appear occasionally during evenings and take up a position on a bench in the gambling hall.

  Lately he brought a friend. The same tall, one-eyed ronin that he had saved during the jailbreak was now with him constantly. Whenever Goro planned his mental revenge on the samurai, that black-clad, one-eyed demon clouded the picture. Goro was a big man and afraid of almost no one. Nevertheless, the one-eyed ronin frightened him. His appearance and demeanor screamed ferocity. He would kill and think nothing of it.

  Even Nichi’s attitude toward Goro had changed. All Nichi talked to him about anymore was business. Nichi had him learning all aspects of Gumsumgumi’s trade. If that was not bad enough, he had him checking all the books on all the businesses. Nichi expected Goro to know which businesses were profitable and which were not, and why. Goro was never good with numbers, but he was getting much better now.

  What concerned Goro was the reason for all this change. Nichi had called him the week after the jailbreak and told him of the role change.

  “Goro, you’re going to have to become wakagashira in fact and not just in name. You have to learn the entire business. I have too many enemies after me. I may die tomorrow. You have to be ready to step up,” he said.

  Step up and run the Gumsumgumi? He could not do that. He would not know how. In keeping with all this weirdness, he now had another assignment that he hated just as much. While the Gumsumgumi were in jail, their fiercest rivals, the Yamakai-gumi, had decided to expand their territory. They attacked and captured two taverns and a gambling parlor owned by the Gumsumgumi. Three of his brothers died. It was a slight loss of income and a huge loss of face. Obviously, the Yamakai-gumi had not expected Nichi to survive his stint in jail. Now the Yamakai-gumi must pay. All Nichi had told him was to “fix it.” What did that mean? Maybe get the lost enterprises back. If so, how? He hated these general type orders. It was so much easier when he knew what Nichi wanted.

  He could ask the young samurai for advice. Knowing the young samurai’s willingness to help, he would probably help. He tended to be helpful to everybody. But he could not see himself asking the young samurai. Unlike everyone else, he did not like the samurai. Still, he worried and fretted about what to do.

  Myo saw him in the opposite corner of the gambling hall. She was sitting next to Hideki and Nichi. Jubei was beside Nichi.

  “Your first lieutenant seems down,” Myo observed.

  Nichi smiled. “Yes, when he has to learn new things or figure something out, he tends to brood over it.”

  Jubei glanced at Goro. “He’s a little old for brooding, isn’t he?”

  “Goro is a good man Jubei. He was yokozuna once and has never recaptured the glory he once had. I am training him as my replacement and making him learn everything. If I’m not around, this organization will survive only with someone who has his sense of duty and tradition as headman—like Goro.”

  “Are you going somewhere Oyabun?” Hideki asked.

  “Not planning on it; just being prepared,” Nichi replied.

  “I think I’ll go over and cheer him up,” Myo said. So saying, she went through the routine of raising slightly to get her toes curled under her, then rocked back, allowing her kimono-clad knees to come off the floor and twisting slightly, uncoiling into a standing position. It was a graceful motion that Hideki liked watching. Everyone else took such simple things for granted, but he had not grown up around women, so such little things intrigued him. He watched her graceful, swishing motion as she made the toed-in walk of a kimono-clad woman to the other side of the hall.

  “That’s quite a woman,” Nichi said to no one in particular.

  Hideki blushed.

  “So why do you think she chose you?” asked Nichi.

  “I have no idea,” said Hideki, “but I’m glad she did.”

  The woman known as Myo to the Gumsumgumi stopped at Goro’s bench and bowed slightly. “What troubles the first lieutenant of Gumsumgumi?” she asked as she took a seat on the bench beside the large man.

  Goro flashed a wide smile. “And how are you, lady Myo?”

  “I am no lady, Goro. You know that,” she teased.

  “I’m just happy that I lured you away from the yojimbo. Everyone seems to fall under his spell,” he said.

  “We’ll talk about him later. Let us talk about you. What is troubling you?” she asked.

  “I am troubled by many things, lady Myo. The new yojimbo troubles me. That used to be my job, and I was good at it. Now I am figuring interest on loans instead. Nichi used to tell me what he wanted. Now he tells me to “fix it,” and I have no idea what he wants. I’ve got too much new stuff coming my way, and it’s hard to think.”

  “So which is it that troubles you the most?” she asked.

  “My immediate problem is fixing the Yamakai-gumi. They took over a couple of taverns and a gambling hall while we were in jail. Now I have to ‘fix it.’“ he said.

  “What will you do?” she asked.

  “That is the trouble. I do not know. My initial reaction was to go over and kill them. However, Nichi also said we must keep a lower profile with the new magistrate. So I’m not sure what to do.”

  “I am only a woman, but I’m a businesswoman, so maybe I could help,” she offered.

  Goro beamed. “Please, lady. I will listen to anything.”

  “You are a warrior, Goro,” she said.

  “I am?”

  “Certainly. You have fought more battles than most samurai if you count your time inside the dohyo,” she said.

  Goro saw the truth in this and grinned. “Yes, I suppose you are correct.”

  “So look at your task as if it were a sumo challenge,” she said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “If you are fighting a smaller opponent in the sumo ring, how would you approach him?” she asked.

  He pondered the question and responded carefully. “Well, after the initial tachiai or clash, I would try to immobilize him, probably with a slap to the side of the head to negate his speed. Then move to his side and pick him up or spin him down.”

  “Well there are your tactics for the Yamakai-gumi,” she exclaimed.

  “What tactics? What do you mean?” he asked.

  “The Gumsumgumi are larger than the Yamakai-gumi. They attacked you because they thought the Gumsumgumi weak with you and Nichi in jail. Now they are preparing for your retaliation. It is as if you are in the sumo ring with a smaller fighter. You have both completed the shiko and leg stomping exercise to drive out evil spirits, and you each are crouching at the shikiri-sen starting line. Any second, both of your fists will touch the ground and you will fly at each other for the tachiai. He is smaller and faster, and you are larger and stronger. If you meet him head-on after the tachiai, he will outflank you and attack you where you are weakest. So you must stun him at the tachiai to stop his momentum and attack his vulnerability.”