Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Martin Cruz-Smith's novels include Stalin's Ghost, Gorky Park, Rose, December 6, Polar Star and Stallion Gate. A two-time winner of the Hammett Prize from the International Association of Crime Writers and a recipient of Britain's Golden Dagger Award, he lives in California.

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December 6

Simon & Schuster

Chapter One: 1922

Five samurai crept forward with a scuffle of sandals, eyes lit like opals by a late setting sun. A bloody haze flooded the alley, tinting street banners red, soaking drab wooden shops and houses in a crimson wash.

The story was tragic, true, profoundly satisfying. Lord Asano had been taunted by the unscrupulous Lord Kira into drawing a sword in the shogun's presence, an act punishable by death. He was beheaded, his estate confiscated and his retainers dispersed as ronin, wandering samurai with neither home nor allegiance. Although the evil Kira went unpunished, he watched the samurai, especially their captain, Oishi, for the slightest sign that they plotted revenge. And when, after two years, Kira's vigilance finally relaxed, on a snowy December night, Oishi gathered the forty-six other ronin he trusted most, scaled the walls of Kira's palace, hacked the guards to pieces, hauled Kira himself from his hiding place and cut off his head, which they carried to the grave of their dead Lord Asano.

Gen, the strongest and fastest boy, played Oishi, his leadership marked by the aviator's goggles he set high on his head. Hajime, second in command, had a face round as a pie pan and wore a baseball catcher's quilted vest as his suit of armor. Tetsu wrapped muslin around his waist, the style of a criminal in training. The Kaga twins, Taro and Jiro, were rotund boys in raveled sweaters. Both were ready to eat nails for Gen if he asked. Each of the five boys swung a bamboo rod for a sword, and each was deadly serious.

Gen motioned Hajime to look around the ragpicker's cart, Tetsu to search among the sacks stacked outside the rice shop, the twins to block any escape from a side alley of brothels and inns. Prostitutes watched from their latticed windows. It was summer, the peak of a warm afternoon, with neither clouds nor customers in sight, shabbiness plain, the city's poor clapboard houses huddled like a hundred thousand boats battered and driven by storm from the bay to founder along rivers, canals and filthy sluices, here and there a glint of gilded shrines, at all levels laundry rigged on poles, and everywhere the scurrying of children like rats on a deck.

"Kira!" Gen called out. "Lord Kira, we know you're here!"

A whore with a face painted white as plaster hissed at Tetsu and nodded through her bars to a pile of empty sake tubs at the alley's end. Gen approached with wide-apart legs, his bamboo sword held high over his head with both hands. As he brought it down, the tubs thumped like drums. His second stroke was a thrust. The tubs rolled away and Harry squirmed out, his ear pouring blood.

Tetsu jabbed at Harry. The twins joined in until Harry swung his own rod and drove them back. Harry wore two layers of woolen sweaters, shorts and sneakers. He could take a blow or two.

"Submit, submit," Tetsu screamed, whipping up his courage and raining down blows that Harry had no problem deflecting. Gen swung his pole like a baseball bat across Harry's leg, dropping him to one knee. The twins synchronized their blows on Harry's sword until he threw a tub at their heads and bolted by Tetsu.

"The gaijin," Hajime shouted. "The gaijin is getting away."

This always happened. No one wanted to be the vile Lord Kira. Harry was Kira because he was a gaijin, a foreigner, not Japanese at all. As soon as the hunt began in earnest, the fact that he was a gaijin was reason enough for the chase. Harry's hair was as closely cropped as the other boys'. He went to school with them, dressed and moved exactly like them. Didn't matter.

Down the street, a storyteller in a dirty jacket had gathered smaller kids around his paper slide show of the Golden Bat, champion of justice, a grotesque hero who wore a skull mask, white tights and a scarlet cloak. Harry slipped between them and the cart of an orange-ice vendor.

"It's going for the wagon," Hajime said. A gaijin was always "it."

Harry ducked around the ragpicker's teetering wagon and between the legs of the wagon's swaybacked horse, tipping a sack at the rice shop and pausing only long enough to whack Tetsu's shin. The twins weren't fast, but they understood commands, and Gen ordered them to block the doorway to a peep show called the Museum of Curiosities. Hajime threw his rod like a spear to catch Harry in the back. Harry stumbled and felt a hot, damp stab of blood.

"Submit, submit!" Tetsu hopped on one leg because the muslin had started unwrapping from his stomach from the effort of the chase.

"Got it!" Hajime tripped Harry, sending him rolling over the ground and through an open door into the dark yeasty interior of a bar. A workman drinking beer at the counter stood, measured his boot and kicked Harry back out.

The action had drawn the twins from the peep-show door, and Harry raced for it. The peep show itself was a gallery of muted lights, "mermaids" that were papier-mâché monsters stitched to fish and "exotic nudes" that were plaster statues. Harry backed up the stairs past the peep-show entrance, where constricted space meant he faced only one attacker at a time. The twins squeezed forward, falling over each other to reach Harry. Gen took their place, goggles over his eyes to show he meant business. Harry took a stiff jab in the stomach, another on his knee, gave a short chop on Gen's shoulder in return but knew that, step by step, he was losing ground, and the stairway ended on the second floor at a door with a sign that said NO ENTRANCE. THIS DOOR IS LOCKED AT ALL TIMES.

Blood ran down Harry's neck and inside his sweater. At school their one-armed military instructor, Sergeant Sato, gave all the boys bayonet practice with bamboo poles. He would march them onto the baseball diamond dressed in padded vests and wicker helmets to train them in thrust and parry. Gen excelled in attack. Since Harry, the only gaijin in school, was always chosen as a target, he had become adept at self-defense.

Hajime launched his spear again. Its tip raked the crown of Harry's head and bounced off the door. Gen broke Harry's pole with one stroke and, with another, hit Harry's shoulder so hard his arm went numb. Pressed against the door, Harry tried to defend himself with the halves of the pole, but the blows came faster, while Gen demanded over and over, "Submit! Submit!"

Magically, the door opened. Harry rolled backward over a pile of shoes and sandals and found himself on a reed mat looking up at a gaunt man in a black suit and French beret and a circle of women in short satin skirts and cardboard crowns. Cigarettes dangled from expressions of surprise. The air was thick with smoke, talcum, the fumes of mosquito coils and the heavily perfumed sweat of chorus girls.

The man carried an ivory cigarette holder in fingers painted red, blue and black. He tipped his chair to count Gen, Hajime, Tetsu and the Kaga twins gathered at the top of the stairs. "Hey, what are you trying to do, kill him? And five against one? What kind of fair fight is that?"

"We were just playing," Gen said.

"The poor boy is covered with blood." One of the women knelt to lift Harry's head and wiped his face with a wet cloth. He noticed that she had painted her eyebrows as perfect half-moons.

"He's not even Japanese," Hajime said over Gen's shoulder.

The woman reacted with such shock that Harry was afraid she would drop him like a spider. "Look at that, he's right."

"It's the missionary boy," another woman said. "He's always running through the street with this...