The Samurai Strategy Read online

CHAPTER TWO

  "Yo, counselor. Get thy butt over here and buy me a drink."

  I was standing in the smoky entry of Martell’s, on the way back downtown from Sotheby's, when I heard the voice, a Georgia drawl known from Wall Street to Washington. And sure enough, leaning against the long mahogany bar, the usual Glenfiddich on the rocks in hand, was none other than Bill Henderson.

  Long time, no see. I'd actually stopped by for a little ninety proof nerve medicine myself, not to pass the time with America's foremost cowboy market-player. But the idea of bringing in a Wall Street pro was most welcome. If anybody could dissect Noda's game, Bill was the man.

  What was I going to do? I'd stalled on giving Matsuo Noda a final answer, telling him I needed time to think. Then just to make sure the whole thing hadn't been some sort of macabre hoax, I'd checked at a Chase bank machine on Lex. He hadn't been kidding. A retainer had been deposited all right, presumably by certified check, since it had already cleared. I was on the payroll, ready or not.

  Noda was right about one thing. What he planned to do had grave international consequences. The problem was, his game had just one payoff. The way I figured it, he won if, and only if, the U.S. suddenly went broke. As international consequences go, that seemed reasonably grave.

  Henderson was the perfect guru to take apart the scenario. Assuming he was sober. Tell the truth, at first glance I wasn't entirely sure. The guy looked a mess. I assumed he was holding some sort of private celebration, or maybe it was a wake. What was the occasion?

  "William H., welcome back to town. Thought you'd decamped permanently down to D.C."

  "Packed it in. Back to start making a living again. Could be I've just set some kind of new world record for the briefest tenure ever seen on the Council." He eased over to make room, while the jukebox began some Bobby Short standard about incomparable NY. "So where's your TV star tonight? Sure love that gal." He toasted Donna's memory. "If tits were brains, she'd be a genius."

  Sexist? Tasteless? That was merely Henderson warming up.

  I hadn't actually set eyes on Bill since an ill-fated birthday dinner Donna had thrown for him in midsummer, a favor to a producer friend of hers at the station who'd wanted to try vamping a real live millionaire. That evening he'd arrived with a serious head start on the whiskey, his meditation on the concept of birthdays, and then proceeded to regale those assembled with his encyclopedic repertoire of farmer's-daughter and traveling-salesman vignettes. In the aftermath, Donna swore she'd kill him if he ever set foot in her place again. When I made the mistake of speaking in his defense, she critiqued a few of my character defects as well, then added me to the list.

  "Friend, no small thanks to you and that sordid evening, I haven't seen Donna since."

  "That was a dark moment in my history. After listening half the night to that air-head producer she put next to me, I was in mourning for the hearts and minds of America." He revolved back to the bar. "What're you drinking?"

  "Something serious." I pointed toward the single malt. Laphroaig neat.

  Just then Bill paused to watch as two women in bulky raincoats brushed past. They receded toward the other end of the bar, settled their coats across an empty stool, and ordered drinks. One was a youngish blonde, a bit nervous, having some tall, colored potion that looked as if it could use a cut of pineapple and a plastic monkey on the glass. But the other one, brunette, was a different story. Pained eyes, with a psychic armor that could only be called battle-weary New York. Joanna, all over again. Tanqueray martini. Straight up.

  "Hot damn, sure is good to be back in this town." He was trying, without conspicuous success, to catch the younger woman's eye.

  "Henderson, you're standing next to a man with some news that could well alarm you considerably."

  "Like maybe this dump might run low on booze?"

  "Not likely." I reached for my new drink. "I've got to make a decision, fast. So try to keep a clear head and see if you can help me out."

  In my estimation Henderson was a phenomenon—sober or loaded. He'd emerged from the red clay hills somewhere in north Georgia, former football All-State ("I only did it for the pussy"), and ended up at Yale Law—where we shared an apartment for three whole years. By the time we'd finished our degrees, I figured I was ready to tackle real life, but Bill had hung in and gone for a Ph.D. in economics. Although his athlete's physique hadn't survived Yale—an early casualty of the single malt and the Dunhills—Henderson still had the delusion he was twenty-five. Easter before last he'd arrived at my place down in the islands with some leggy print model half his age and a case of Jack Daniel's Black. Did the redneck routine bamboozle the cautious hearts of his admiring ladies? Probably. Right under the radar.

  All that notwithstanding, it was a commonly accepted fact that Bill was the sharpest private currency-trader on the East Coast. If tomorrow the dollar was about to dive, the guy who'd already sold it short tonight from Hong Kong to Zurich was invariably Henderson. That part of his life had been all over the papers the previous spring, after he got tapped for the President's Council of Economic Advisers. I guess some genius on the White House staff—urged on by that wily senator from New York, our mutual friend Jack O'Donnell—concluded the Council needed a pet "contrarian" on board for appearances, and Henderson looked to be a sufficiently pro-business pros­pect. Wrong. After a couple of interviews he was forbidden to make any more public statements. He'd failed to grasp that the national interest required fantasy forecasts just before elec­tions. Bill may have been a master of subtlety when he was trading, but otherwise he tended to call a spade a spade, or worse.

  "What's up?" He was about to punt with the blonde after one last try.

  "Maybe you'd better go first." I took a sip, savoring the peaty aroma. Let Henderson decompress in his own good time, then sound him out on Noda's chilling proposition. "What are you doing here?"

  "Call it modesty and discretion." He turned back.

  These were not, as you might infer, the first descriptors that leapt to mind whenever I thought of Bill.

  "Care to expand?"

  He slid his hand across the bar, extracted another Dunhill from its red pack, and launched a disjointed monologue starting with the goddam traffic in D.C., then proceeding to ditto coming in from LaGuardia.

  All this time his cigarette had been poised in readiness. Finally he flicked a sterling silver lighter, the old-fashioned kind, and watched the orange flame glisten off the mirror at our right. "So, old buddy, that's it. All the news that's fit to print. History will record this as the moment yours truly bailed out. I figure it like this. If I can't read the signals myself these days, what in hell am I doing giving advice? Time to hit the silk. Get back to making a living. Don't know how long this circus is going to last, but I figure we'd all better be saddled up and ready to ride, just in case."

  As it happens, self-proclaimed ignorance was a crucial ingredient in Henderson's deliberate "country boy" camou­flage, designed to disarm the city slickers. I estimated the professional dirt farmer next to me, Armani double-breasted and gold Piaget timepiece, was now worth about forty million, including a chunk of an offshore bank. Yet for it all, he still liked to come across as though he'd just moseyed in and wished somebody would help him through all this fine print.

  "Don't bullshit me, Bill." I toyed with my drink. "What you're really saying is you couldn't get anybody else to agree with you."

  "Have to admit there were a few trifling differences of opinion about the direction things are headed." He positioned his Dunhill in the ashtray and washed his throat with more Scotch. "You can't cover up the fundamentals with cosmetics. Things like a megabillion trade shortfall, a debt nobody can even count, and a dollar that don't know whether to fish or cut bait. Worst of all, we're still selling the suckers of the world more funny-colored paper than czarist Russia did. There ain't no quick fix for this one." He took another sip, then turned back. "But fuck it. Remember that old saying I used to have about being a lover, not a fighter
. I always know when it's time to call in the huntin' dogs and piss on the fire. I'm back in town to stay. I got hold of my boys and they're coming in tomorrow to start getting everything out of mothballs. We're going back on-line."

  As anybody who knew Bill was aware, he'd installed a massive computer bank in the converted "maid's quarters" of his Fifth Avenue apartment, hooked to the major futures exchanges and financial markets around the world. Running his operation on a moment-to-moment basis were a couple of young fireballs, his "Georgia Mafia," who did nothing but watch green numbers blink on a CRT screen and buy and sell all day. He and his boys talked a language that had very little to do with English—jargon about comparing the "implied volatil­ity" of options on this currency against the "theoretical volatility" for that one, etc. On any given day they were placing "straddles" on yen options, "butterfly spreads" on pound sterling futures, "reverse option hedges" on deutsche marks, and on and on. Half the time, Einstein couldn't have tracked what they were doing. Add to that, they leveraged the whole thing with breathtaking margins. To stay alive in Henderson's game, you had to be part oracle, part Jimmy the Greek. You also had to have ice water in your veins. It wasn't money to him, it was a video game where the points just happened to have dollar signs in front. The day I dropped in to watch, he was down two million by lunch, after which we casually strolled over to some shit-kicker place on Third Avenue for barbecued ribs and a beer, came back at three, and by happy-hour time he was ahead half a million. In the trade Henderson was part of the breed known as a shooter. Up a million here, down a million there—just your typical day in the salt mines. A week of that and I'd have had an ulcer the size of the San Andreas fault.

  He liked to characterize his little trading operation as "a sideline to cover the rent." I happened to know what it really paid was the incidental costs of a lot of expensive ladies. Could be Bill's entertainment fund was in need of a transfusion.

  "Back to business?" I asked. "Like the good old days?"

  "Bright and early Monday morning. Got a strong hunch the Ruskies'll be in the market buying dollars to cover their September shorts on Australian wheat futures. Might as well bid up the greenback and make the comrades work for their daily bread. Then round about eleven, I figure to unwind that and go long sterling, just before London central figures out what's happening, shits a brick, and has to hit the market for a few hundred million pounds to steady the boat."

  Well, I thought, Henderson the Fearless hasn't lost his touch.

  "Bill, I want to run a small scenario by you." I sipped at my drink. "Say somebody'd just told you he was taking a massive position in interest-rate futures? What would that suggest?"

  "Tells me the man's getting nervous. If he was holding a lot of Treasury paper, for instance, he'd probably figured rates were about to head up and he didn't want to get creamed. See, if you're holding a bond that pays, say, eight percent, and all of a sudden interest rates scoot up to ten, the resale value of that instrument is gonna go down the sewer. But if you've already 'sold' it using a futures contract, whoever bought that contract is the one who's got to eat the loss. You're covered."

  "I'm not talking about standard hedging." I was wondering how to approach the specifics. "Say somebody started selling a load of bond futures naked. Nothing underlying."

  "Well, thing about that is, the man'd be taking one hell of a risk." He swirled the cubes in his glass. "Anybody does that's bettin' big on something we don't even want to think about. Some kind of panic that'd cause folks to start dumping American debt paper."

  I just stood there in silence, examining my glass. That was precisely my reading of Matsuo Noda's move. "But I can't think of any reason why anything like that's in the cards, can you?"

  "You tell me. It's hard to imagine. The economy's like a supertanker. Takes it a long time to turn around. But if you want a special Henderson shit-hits-the-fan scenario, then I can give it a shot. Say, for instance, some Monday morning a bunch of those hardworking folks around the world who've been emptying their piggy banks to finance our deficit suddenly up and decided they'd like their money shipped back home. That'd create what's known as a liquidity crisis, which is a fancy way of saying you don't have enough loose quarters in the cookie jar that morning to pay the milkman and the paperboy both. The Federal Reserve would have to jack up interest rates fast to attract some cash. Else roll the printing presses. Or of course"—he grinned—"we could just default, declare bankruptcy, and tell the world to go fuck itself."

  "Nobody would possibly let it go that far, right?" I toyed with my Scotch. "Particularly Japan. We owe them more money than anybody."

  "Wouldn't look for it to happen. Remember though, right now the U.S. Treasury's out there with a tin cup begging the money to cover its interest payments. If the national debt was on MasterCharge, they'd take back our card. So let some of those Japanese pension funds who're shoveling in money start getting edgy, or the dollar all of a sudden look weak, and you could have a run on the greenback that'd make the bank lines in '29 look like Christmas Club week."

  "That's thinking the unthinkable."

  "Damned well better be. But don't ever forget, paper money is an act of faith, and we're in uncharted territory here. Never before has the world's reserve currency, the one everybody uses to buy oil and grain and what have you, belonged to its biggest debtor nation. We're bankers for the world and we're ass over elbow in hock. Everybody starts gettin' nervous the same day, and the bankers on this planet could be back to swapping shells and colored beads."

  "Offhand I'd say that's pretty implausible."

  "And I agree. The system got a pretty good shakeout in the October Massacre of '87 and things held together, if just barely. Stocks crashed but the dollar and the debt markets weathered the storm. Nobody dumped. Japan doesn't want its prime customer to go belly up. Who else is gonna buy all that shiny crap?"

  I studied my glass again. If Henderson, who had pulse- feelers around the globe, wasn't worried, then maybe Matsuo Noda was just a nervous, spaced-out old guy. A loony-tune with an itch to gamble. Funny, though, he appeared the very essence of a coolheaded banker.

  About then, the two women across the bar waved for their check and began rummaging their purses. Sadly enough, the brunette had done everything but send over an engraved invitation for us to join them. She and I had looked each other over, and we both knew what we saw. The walking wounded.

  It made me pensive. More and more lately I'd begun to wonder about the roads not taken, the options that never were. What if all our lives had started out differently? Where would you be? Where would I be—playing lawyer now, or maybe driving a cab? It was the kind of woolgathering that drove Donna Austen insane.

  It was on my mind that first afternoon I met her, when she brought her sound guy down to record some "voice-overs" to use with shots of the house. She made the mistake of asking for a little background, so I decided to go way back and give her the big picture. It turned out to be a little kinky for the six- o'clock news.

  I suited the tale by telling her about my father, once a rig foreman in the oil patch out around Midland, Texas. I was still a kid when he started tinkering around weekends with drill bits out in his shop, and I was no more than about ten when he came up with a new kind of tip. Turned out it could double the life expectancy of a bit, not to mention the life expectancy of a lot of roughnecks who had to change them every few hours. He patented the thing, and next thing you knew, he was "president" of Permian Basin Petroleum.

  "Your father was a successful inventor?" She'd set her Tab down on the living room table and perked up. Here was some "color" for her profile.

  "More than that. The man was a believing capitalist." Was she really going to understand the significance of what happened? "You see, since no banker would risk loaning out venture capital back in those days, he had to take PBP public. He needed money so badly he sold off sixty percent of the company."

  "Like those entrepreneurs who created home computers in their gar
age?" She brushed at her carefully groomed auburn hair. Maybe here was her hook, the grabber.

  "Close. He took the money, several million, and started production. And guess what? The bit he'd invented was too good. Next thing you know, another outfit that will remain nameless here came along and infringed on the patent, saying 'sue us'—which he began trying to do. But since they were already tooled up to manufacture, they undercut his prices and drove PBP's stock down to zip. Then came the kill. They staged a hostile takeover and—since PBP now owned the patents, not him—axed the lawsuit. Bye, bye, company."

  "How does this story relate to what you do today?" She was checking her watch, no longer overly engaged.

  "Well, by the time all this happened, I was off studying engineering at the University of Texas. But when I graduated, I decided to do something else. I headed for Yale Law."

  "If you can't lick 'em, join 'em? Something like that, Mr. Walton?"

  "Not exactly, Ms. Austen. I wanted to find out if the Bible's right: that guys who live by the sword better be ready to die by the sword. After the sheepskin, I shopped around and found the Manhattan law firm that handled the biggest oil-field-service outfit in the country, then applied to that firm's corporate department. A couple of years and a lot of memos later, our oil-field client somehow got the idea they ought to go vertical, acquire their own source of equipment. Next I ran some numbers and showed them how profitable it would be to acquire a certain tool company that now owned the patent on a terrific drill bit. Of course, it would require a hostile buyout, but with a little restructuring they could swing it financially."

  "And?"

  "I worked nights and weekends for six months and personally devised the takeover. By oddest coincidence, when we were through we decided to strip all that company's overpaid executives of their 'golden parachutes' and dump them on the street. My graduation present to the old man."

  She rolled her eyes and waved at her sound man to shut off the mike. "Mr. Walton, I think our viewers would be more interested in personal stories."

  What did she want, I wondered. This was the most "personal" story I had.

  "What do you mean? What I eat for breakfast?"

  "I do personalities." She looked around the living room. "Are you married?"

  "I was."

  On came the tape. But she didn't get what she wanted. Joanna wouldn't appreciate being critiqued on Channel Eight's evening news. And Amy would have killed me. So I just plunged ahead and finished off the other saga.

  "There's a bit more to this intimate bio. Guess I'd seen enough quick money in the oil business that I'd forgotten you were supposed to be impressed by it. Or maybe I'd just never mastered the art of kissing my elders' asses convincingly. You'll find, Ms. Austen, that those are two attitudes whose rewards are largely intangible; Wall Street compatibility definitely not being on the list. After five years the Management Committee offered a partnership, but by then I'd decided to go out and try making it on my own. Be my own man."

  She waved the sound man off again. "You mean you quit?"

  "Couldn't have said it better. I hung up a shingle . . . and started playing the other side of the scrimmage line."

  "I understand you've been in quite a few takeover fights."

  "Let's say I've fought a lot of takeovers, Ms. Austen. There's a subtle but important distinction."

  Donna Austen turned out to be more interested in my marital status than in anecdotes about corporate mayhem. Thing was, beneath all that glitz I found her a challenging woman. Amy, on the other hand, despised her. But then she never likes anybody I bring home. The real problem, however, was that I kept thinking more about Joanna than I did about Donna. As witness this evening, when that sadder-but-wiser brunette headed out the door reminded me of her more than a little. . . .

  "Hate to see that young specimen depart without a good-faith offer of condolence." Henderson was wistfully eyeing the young blonde. Definitely his type. "Trouble is, I couldn't locate the equipment tonight with a compass and a search warrant." He hoisted his glass, then turned back and reached for another Dunhill. "So tell me what brings you uptown. Never knew you to venture this far into civilization just to stand a drink for your oldest and wisest confidant."

  Back to reality. "William H., you will undoubtedly find this difficult to accept, but I just got asked to front some Treasury action for a new client. Selling futures."

  "Where do you find your suckers?" He grinned. “That's never been your game."

  "Hey, at least I know the rules. Corporations have been known to hedge their debt offerings, my friend. But what I've done up to now's been strictly bush league compared to this."

  "So what's the play?"

  "A foreign outfit that wants low profile. And P.S., they're talking substantial numbers."

  "What do you mean, 'substantial'?" Suddenly Henderson's input file was on red alert.

  "Probably wouldn't impress a high roller like you, Bill." I paused. "Half a trillion dollars."

  "Jeezus." He went pale. "Who's putting up the earnest money for this shot? Let interest rates head the wrong way, you couldn't cover the margin calls on a position that size with the GNP of South America."

  "What if it happened to be some of our friends from across the Pacific? An outfit that calls itself Nippon, Inc." I looked at him. "Ever hear of it?"

  "Nope." He just stood there, examining his drink as though it suddenly had acquired an enormous insect. "But you've got a surefire knack for really messin' up an evening."

  "I guess this is what's meant when people talk about the big time."

  "Christ Almighty. Tell you one thing, that's a hell of a number to put on the table. I'd sure like to see those boys' hand."

  "Maybe somebody's paying to see ours." I finished off my drink and signaled for another. The more I thought about Matsuo Noda, the more I realized I needed it. "You know, this half scares the crap out of me."

  "Matt, old buddy, do yourself a favor. Stand clear. Just back away." He was getting more sober by the second. "You'd be lifting up some kind of big rock when you don't know what's under it. I never do that. Ironclad rule. Same as I always cut losses at ten percent and never let a long position ride over a weekend. And I'll tell you something else. Nobody lays down a bet like that unless he knows the casino's fixed." He paused. "I wonder if maybe we oughtn't to give Jack a call?"

  "O'Donnell?"

  "Low-key. Just touch base. Inside word is his Finance Committee's going to be holding hearings on foreign invest­ment, maybe in a couple of months. Besides, I know for a fact he owes you a few."

  That was true. Senator Jack O'Donnell was headed for reelection headaches. He was America's corporate nightmare— a former professor of labor law at Columbia who'd gone out and bought some tailored suits, shed thirty pounds, dyed his hair, and actually gotten elected to the U.S. Senate. He was despised on Wall Street for good reason. O'Donnell was the Grand Inquisitor of the corporate scene, hauling CEOs in front of his committee every time he sniffed some new scam to shortchange stockholders. Since we saw eye to eye a lot, I'd made it a point to lean on a few of my clients and come up with some campaign bucks for him, telling them it was good "insurance money." Still, if I leaked this to Jack, I'd probably be reading it tomorrow in The Washington Post.

  "Henderson, I can't bring him in. Nobody's talking any­thing illegal. Still, I'm beginning to think I ought to keep an eye on this from the inside."

  "Matt, you haven't been listening. Let me pass along a major working principle on how to keep your ass intact in this world. Write it down and tape it to your phone: Staying on the sidelines is a position too. That applies to Wall Street, and it damned sure applies to life." He stretched for a Dunhill, then leaned back. "Ever tell you about that feisty 'coon hound I used to have, redtick I called by the name of Red?"

  "Only about a hundred times." Red was his favorite sermon text.

  "Well, ol’ Red somehow conceived the idea he was just about the meanest fucker in the county, a
nd he was always out to prove it. Then one night he made the mistake of treeing a big old mama 'coon, up in this little sycamore we had down by the creek. I heard him barking and raising hell and I knew I wouldn't get a wink if I didn't go down and see about it."

  "Henderson, Christ, I've already heard this."

  "Well, I'm gonna finish it anyhow, by God. Sounds like you could use a refresher course." He took a drink. "Now then, after I made it through the copperheads and briers and got down there, naturally the first thing I did was shine that tree with my light and count the eyes. Turns out that mama raccoon had a bunch of her little ones up there too. So she was in a real disagreeable frame of mind. Her eyes were bright red and I could tell she was thinking she just might eat herself a smartass hound for supper. I tried to explain this to Red, call him off, and get him to come on back up the house, but no, sirree, nothing would do but he had to take her on. So I figured it was time he had a little reality contact. I chunked a couple of rocks, got lucky, and down she tumbled. Next thing ol’ Red knew, he thought he had his ass caught in a brand-new John Deere hay baler. I finally had to kick her off him and get her back up the tree before she really got mad."

  "Henderson, I hear you."

  "Listen up, friend. There's a moral. You see, ol’ Red didn't have enough expertise that night to know when to stand off. But I'll tell you one thing: he learned real fast. Next time he chased that particular mama up that sycamore, he took one sniff and just trotted right on back to the house." He sipped again. "Every time I come across a tree full of something I don't know about, I remember old Red and just turn around and walk away."

  "I'm taking your warning under advisement." I threw down a fifty, glanced at the soundless Mets game on the TV over the bar, and reached for my coat.

  "You'd damned well better."

  "Henderson, get some sleep. As a friend and colleague, I must in all honesty advise you, you look like absolute hell."

  "I've always valued your candor." He waved for another drink. "But I've got some heavy thinking to do."

  "Okay, get home safe. Let's keep in touch."

  He saluted with his glass. "Tell you what, Matt, maybe I'll just do a little sniffing around myself, see if I can't get a fix on what's up the tree."

  "Okay." I was putting on my coat, checking through the window to see if the rain had stopped. Looked like it had. "Let's both sleep on it."

  "You do that." He wasn't smiling as I headed out the door.

  Henderson, who could slumber like a baby when he was down a million for the day, didn't look like he had much rest ahead that night. For all my brave talk, I didn't either. Now that the rain was over, I wandered over to Fifth to look at the trees sparkling in the streetlights. And to think. If you're from West Texas, you love to see green things wet.

  Then I hailed a cab downtown, still with lots of unan­swered questions on the subject of Matsuo Noda. What had happened to my country that could make it so vulnerable to the financial shenanigans of a single white-haired foreign banker? Was this what people meant when they talked about the tides of history? Was the free ride over?

  Back when I was a kid, I'd accepted as an article of faith that America was the greatest, that we were destined to lead the world forever. Was that hubris? Now I had this sinking feeling we were about to begin learning a little modesty. Maybe Amy didn't know it yet, but her America was going to end up being a lot different from mine. All of a sudden folks all over the world were about to be richer than we were. It was going to take some painful adjustment.

  That's when I finally decided. Yes, by God, I would track this one. And when I figured out what Noda had up his sleeve. I'd blow the whistle. Somebody needed to stand guard over this country, and if not me, who?

  Matt Walton vs. Matsuo Noda.

  As it turned out, the evening still wasn't over. Things continued to go off track, beginning with when I walked in my front door. I guess by now everybody's pretty blase about urban crime, but it's still always a shock when it happens to you. I also think it's getting worse. I can remember five years ago when Joanna and I never bothered even to latch the street windows. These days they have bars—a small precaution following an evening on the town during which everything we owned with an electric cord attached walked out into the bracing Manhattan night. That was my first experience with the hollow feeling in your gut when you realize your sanctum has been plundered. It's not the lost toys, it's the violation that gnaws at your karma.

  This time, though, it appeared to be minor. No forcible entry. Somebody had actually picked the front-door lock, a fact I only established to my satisfaction after every other possibili­ty had been considered and dismissed. Truthfully, I probably wouldn't have noticed anything at all that night if not for a wayward train of thought on the way home.

  I'd been meditating on a particular sword in my collection, a katana, which was totally without distinction except for a little oral history. Reportedly the blade once tasted blood in a rather arcane episode. Noda probably would have approved. The story was, the samurai who'd commissioned it decided he liked it so much he didn't want the swordsmith telling anybody how he'd forged it. So after he'd thanked the guy graciously, deep bows and all the rest, he picked up the sword, bowed one more time, and then hauled back and sliced him in half, clean as a whistle. The kesa stroke, left collarbone straight through the right hip. It's said a samurai could do things such as that in the old days.

  My meeting with Noda had made me want to look it over, to refresh my memory concerning that Japanese capacity for the unexpected. So after I let myself in through the front foyer, I tossed my raincoat over a banister, headed down to the kitchen to pour myself a nightcap, and proceeded upstairs to the "office."

  I clicked on the light and then . . .

  Jesus! The place had been trashed. Drawers open, files tipped over, piles of paper askew. After the first numbing shock, that perception-delay your senses impose before you can actually accept what you're seeing, I quickly started taking inventory. Okay, what did they get this time?

  Well, the computer and printer were both intact, cordless phone was there still, the little nine-inch Sony in the corner was untouched. . . . Hey, could it be they hadn't actually lifted anything?

  Then I remembered why I'd come upstairs. Off to the side, under the back stair, was a big walk-in closet I called my sword room, always kept under lock and key. I glanced over at the door.

  Hold on. It was hanging open slightly. I strolled over and checked it more closely. The mechanism had been jimmied, professionally, but with enough force that the metal frame around the door was askew. Not a blatant entry, but a determined one.

  My heart skipped a beat. That's why they didn't bother with TVs. These guys knew where the real action was, the lightweight, very expensive loot. I opened the door, took a deep breath, and felt for the light.

  You could have heard my sigh of relief all the way out in the street. From the looks of it, nothing was missing here either.

  Be sure now. I quickly glanced down the racks, mentally cataloging the pieces. Everything had a place, and all the places were still full. Strange. This stuff was worth thousands. Burglars break in to steal. So what happened? Maybe some­thing scared them off. My sheepdog Benjamin, the fearless terror of the streets? He was now snoring at the foot of the stairs, but who knows . . .

  Walton, you lucky stiff, this could have been a major hit. I cursed at the thought of having to have the door and lock repaired, made a mental note to remember to call the locksmith over by Sheridan Square in the morning, and pushed the damaged door closed.

  What a hell of a night. I pulled the Sotheby's catalogue out of my pocket, recalling the auction that had inaugurated this fateful evening, and turned to chuck it in the file cabinet where I kept all the records for my hobby: prices, news clippings, correspondence, the rest.

  The cabinet, one of those cheap tin jobs you buy at discount office-supply places, was slightly askew. What's this? I yanked open the top drawer and sa
w chaos.

  Uh, oh. I went down the row, checking. Tell you one thing, my intruders had been thorough. Every drawer was a mess, just like the office. Then I got to the bottom, the one with backup data on the collection. Appraisals, provenance of the pieces, that kind of thing.

  It was empty.

  But of course! Any pro would know that half the value of a collection such as this would be in all the documentation. Which meant my methodical thieves were no dummies; they'd started with the paperwork, the valuations and authenticity info . . . which meant they weren't through. I must have interrupted their . . .

  My God! They could still be here.

  I edged for the phone and punched 911, the police emergency number. Next I went back and pulled down a sword, just for protection, and swept the empty house. It was all nice and tidy.

  Finally New York's men in blue showed, an overweight Irishman and his Puerto Rican partner, both with mustaches. I actually knew them, having once received a ticket for walking Ben off the leash. We went through the formalities, lots of questions with no answers worth writing down, and then they offered to send around a fingerprint squad in the morning. Sure, why not. And you'd better get new locks for this place, Mr. . . . Walton. Right. We all thanked each other and I saw them out.

  Then I headed back down to the kitchen. What was this all about? Stealing files? Papers? Those documents, lovingly and painstakingly assembled, were what made the swords some­how uniquely a part of my life. Something that actually wasn't going to decide to take a hike the next week. The stuff had no value to anybody except Matt Walton.

  Or so I thought.