Murder on the Cliff

by Stefanie Matteson

  By now, Charlotte had a better idea of what was going on. If what Spalding said was true, Akanohana had the advantage. After charging his opponent with lightning speed, he had succeeded in getting hold of Takafuji’s chartreuse mawashi with both hands. For a few seconds, he skillfully pushed and pulled his opponent around as Takafuji tried in vain to free himself. Finally Akanohana succeeded in throwing Takafuji off balance and the match was decided. With Takafuji’s belt firmly in his grip, Akanohana hoisted the squirming and kicking wrestler into the air and deposited him outside the ring as summarily as a bouncer throwing a lightweight-but-troublesome patron out of a nightclub. He nearly landed in their laps.

  It was a spectacular display of strength and skill for Akanaohana and a humiliating defeat for Takafuji. The referee pointed his fan at Akanohana; it was a perfect record—he hadn’t lost a single match.

  “Unless anything unforeseen happens, Japan is about to see its first foreign yokozuna,” said Spalding as the crowd went wild.

  7

  Charlotte took the man’s business card and tucked it into her purse. The card identified him as Mr. Junichi Kanazashi, chairman of the Shimoda Board of Education. He looked disappointed that she hadn’t offered him one in return. She knew that the exchange of business cards was a major preoccupation of the Japanese, but a business card was something Charlotte had never needed. After fifty years in front of the cameras, her face was as familiar to most Americans as their best friend’s. Failing a business card, she introduced herself as Charlotte Graham and explained that she had played Okichi in Soiled Dove.

  With the reference to Soiled Dove, Kanazashi’s face lit up. He stepped back to size up her full height. “Miss Graham, of course,” he said, pumping her arm vigorously. “I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance. I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you. You are so tall—much too tall for a geisha.”

  Thanks to Soiled Dove, Charlotte was famous throughout the Orient as well. Playing Okichi was to the Japanese what playing Joan of Arc would have been to the French, or Queen Christina to the Swedes. Almost without knowing it, she had become a cultural icon.

  “I could never have played Okichi on stage,” she agreed. With her white skin and black hair, she had made a fairly believable geisha as long as the camera camouflaged her height.

  Kanazashi laughed. Reaching into his breast pocket, he withdrew a leather notebook. He ripped off a sheet of paper and extended it to her. “Please, may I have your autograph?” he asked.

  Charlotte signed the paper with her round, bold scrawl. She was not the kind of star who scorned her fans. For fifty years, her fans had been her bread and butter, and she had been happy to oblige.

  They were standing on the rear loggia of Edgecliff, the mansion that was the scene of the Mikado Ball. The light of the setting sun bathed the landscape in a tropical yellow light tinged with orange: an ochre light. She wondered if Ochre Point has taken its name from the light of the setting sun or from the ochre with which its fabulous mansions had been built.

  She handed her autograph back to Kanazashi, who gazed at it as fondly as if it were a fifty-dollar bill that he’d just picked up off the sidewalk. “I’m going to frame this and hang it in the museum in Shimoda.”

  “I hardly think it’s a museum piece,” said Charlotte.

  She was happy to have found this genial Japanese man. Since arriving at the ball, she’d been subjected to a series of lectures on what was wrong with America. One man she had talked with had even written a book called The War Between Japan and America Is Not Over. Apparently the Japanese trade group that owned Edgecliff was a hotbed of Japanese right-wing nationalism.

  “You know, Miss Graham, because of Soiled Dove, Shimoda has gone from a sleepy fishing village to a major tourist attraction. I, for one, have grown rich from the Okichi legend,” he added, explaining that the hotel he owned was the site of the annual Shimoda Conference, a gathering of Japanese and American intellectuals and businessmen.

  Their conversation was interrupted by a young woman in a flowered kimono who offered them a tray of hors d’oeuvres.

  “Have you been back to Shimoda since you filmed the movie?” asked Kanazashi as he helped himself to a cracker heaped with caviar.

  Charlotte shook her head. She had always meant to return. The little fishing village at the edge of the mountain-rimmed harbor was one of the most beautiful places she had ever seen.

  “Oh, you should see it now! We have”—he counted on his fingers—“three museums with displays on Okichi. Make that four—the new Shimoda Port Memorial Hall also has an Okichi exhibit.” He held up the piece of paper. “That’s where your autograph is going to hang. Even the restaurant that Okichi opened a few years before she died has a display. We also have an Okichi Festival.”

  “An Okichi Festival too?”

  “Along with our own Black Ships Festival in mid-May. Not to criticize the way you do things here in the United States …”

  That was all right, everybody else was, Charlotte thought.

  “… but you could make a lot more of the Black Ships Festival than you do. We celebrate for three days: parades, parties, fireworks. The children are let out of school. It would be very good for the tourist business of Newport.” A look of sadness crossed his face. “Of course, it is terrible about Okichi-mago committing suicide on the one hundredth anniversary of Okichi’s death.”

  “Yes, it is,” Charlotte agreed.

  He continued: “But I don’t think her suicide will hurt the Black Ships Festival in Newport. In fact, it will enhance it, just as the tragic story of Okichi’s death has enhanced tourism for Shimoda. I think tourists will be very interested in seeing Townsend Harris’s replica of the Temple of Great Repose and the place where Okichi-mago jumped off the cliff.”

  Japanese tourists might be interested, but Charlotte doubted that American tourists would. To say nothing of the fact that neither Paul nor Marianne would ever have anything to do with such a scheme.

  “Maybe you could arrange a tour to Newport for the Japanese,” Charlotte said. She was speaking half-facetiously, but he took her seriously.

  “Yes, you’re right!” he said, his face lighting up again. “That’s a very good idea. I am going to look into it right away.” Pulling out his notebook again, he made a notation. “An Okichi tour to Shimoda’s sister city. I think it would be a very big success.”

  They were interrupted by the whirring of a helicopter rotor. A helicopter was approaching over the ocean from the direction of Providence, to the north. Directed by national guardsmen, the helicopter landed on the lawn, and the governor emerged with his wife—he in black tie, she in a full-length gown.

  “I guess the ball has officially begun,” said Kanzashi.

  Following the crowd, they drifted inside for the opening ceremonies, which were held in the Great Hall, a majestic gilt-encrusted arcaded hall rising three stories. From the outside, Edgecliff was undistinguished: a Gothic pile of red sandstone that Charlotte had mentally dubbed the Smithsonian-by-the-Sea. But the interior was palatial. As the usual dignitaries gave the usual speeches, she studied the surroundings. Overhead, an enormous mural depicted Zeus at the Banquet of the Gods. Above the windows, gilded figures in bas-relief represented the industrial and liberal arts. The curving staircase was lined with a balustrade of white marble dolphins and cupids. Like Marianne’s parlor, nothing made any sense, but it had a kind of mad magnificence.

  After the speeches, the guests headed toward the adjacent oak-paneled library, where dinner was to be served. Charlotte went in search of her table. A Black Ships committee member at the door had told her that she was assigned to table number twenty-three.

  She found her table on the other side of the library. Her tablemates included a young couple who identified themselves as Japanophiles, several Newport city councilmen and their wives, and the city solicitor and his wife. Charlotte sat between the last couple: a handsome, light-skinned black man named Lewis Farrell and his beautiful Hispanic w
ife, Toni. They were a charming couple, and she was pleased to find herself in such pleasant company.

  Charlotte had no intention of asking him how a black man had ended up in Newport, but he told her anyway. It appeared to be a favorite story. He explained that he was a descendant of slaves who were brought to Newport in 1690, a time when Newport rivaled Boston as the country’s busiest seaport, and was the center of the slave trade.

  “I love to see the reactions of some of these snobby Colonial Dames types when I tell them that my ancestors have been in New England longer than theirs,” he said, his eyes crinkling in a good-natured smile. He had a long, narrow face and a stylishly droopy mustache, and wore round glasses with gold wire rims that gave him a professorial air.

  He also filled her in on his wife’s ancestry: she was descended from Portuguese fishermen who had emigrated to Newport from the Cape Verde Islands.

  It was this variety that Charlotte loved about Newport. Dozens of diverse groups—the blacks, the Portuguese, the socialites, the sailing crowd, the intellectuals, the artists, the Naval War College personnel, the college students, the fortune hunters, the day-trippers, the summer residents, and the merchants and shopkeepers—each existing in their own little world on this idyllic New England island.

  From Lew and Toni’s ancestry, the topic of conversation at the table shifted briefly to Soiled Dove and then to Shimoda, which the young couple who’d said they were Japanophiles had just visited.

  “The chairman of Shimoda’s board of education was just telling me that there are several museums there devoted to the memory of Okichi,” said Charlotte.

  “Not museums really,” said the young man. “There are exhibits in several of the temples, but they don’t really amount to much. There’s a memorial museum with a few mementos in Okichi’s family temple. Her grave is also there—just behind the temple. They still keep incense burning in her memory.”

  “What about the other temple?” prompted the wife.

  The husband looked embarrassed.

  “Tell them,” she urged.

  The husband took a breath. “There’s another temple in which they have a display of Okichi’s palanquin and some other mementos. Next to it there’s another building in which there’s a display of—I don’t know quite how to describe them—they call them ‘Buddhist images symbolizing ecstasy.’”

  “‘In commemoration of Okichi’s amorous exploits,’” the wife said, raising her fingers to indicate quotations marks around the words.

  “What do Buddhist images symbolizing ecstasy look like?” asked Toni.

  “Well.…”

  “Like the male organ,” interjected the wife, who clearly wasn’t as reticent about such matters as her husband. “They’re phallic symbols; some of them are really very beautiful, carved out of wood or ivory. Unfortunately, Bob wouldn’t let me take any home. They sell them all over town.”

  “The town’s really made a big deal of the Okichi legend,” her husband added. “In addition to these … phallic objects … you can buy all sorts of other Okichi souvenirs: postcards, towels, key chains.”

  “Every time the tourist business starts to slacken, they think of some new angle of the Okichi legend to promote,” the wife added.

  The husband looked up. “Here comes our dinner,” he said, obviously relieved to get off the subject of Okichi’s amorous exploits.

  A parade of waiters had appeared, and were serving the guests their dinners. The dinner was typical banquet food, but with an Oriental touch: lemon sesame chicken or a shrimp stir-fry, served with rice and shitake mushrooms and carrots and snow peas in a ginger sauce.

  “Did you know that Okichi’s descendant, the young geisha who was here for the Black Ships Festival, committed suicide this morning?” one of the city councilman’s wives asked the young man, Bob.

  The news was apparently out.

  “Yes, we heard about it,” Bob replied.

  “I heard she did it because of her obligation to her patron, but I can’t say I really understand it,” said the woman.

  “It’s a difficult concept for a Westerner to comprehend,” Bob said. “The Japanese call it giri, or obligation, but it’s easier to understand if you think of it in terms of guilt. Every time you receive a favor, you’re incurring a debt, which you’re then obligated to repay in kind, or better.”

  The same story that Spalding had given her, Charlotte reflected.

  “In Okichi-mago’s case, her obligations were so much greater than what she was owed that the only way for her to redress the balance was to kill herself,” Bob continued. “If you consider the suicide in her family history, you have a pretty potent motive.”

  “But to take your life!” the councilman’s wife said. “It seems very extreme.”

  It seemed so to Charlotte too, despite what Spalding and this young man had said. Yes, Okichi-mago was obligated to Tanaka. And, yes, she had seemed mildly depressed. She remembered the tears rolling down her white cheeks. But there was something not quite right about the suicide theory—something besides the point that it seemed like a drastic solution to a minor problem, giri or no giri. The image came to her mind of Okichi-mago’s body lying on the shingle beach, her green, turquoise-flecked eyes staring up at the pale dawn sky. And then it struck her what it was that wasn’t quite right: the broken pieces of the sake cup lying on the rocks. Why would she have retrieved the sake cup from the house if she already had one in her hand? It didn’t make any sense. As Okichi’s descendant, Okichi-mago would have been more familiar with the legend than anyone. First Okichi built the fire at the edge of the cliff and burned her possessions and her papers. Then she carefully set out the comb, the mirror, and the sake cup Harris-san had given her—the sake cup she had been drinking from for more than thirty years—and then she jumped. She didn’t set out one sake cup and then jump with another.

  There was something else that wasn’t quite right about the suicide theory too: the scraped surface of the baroque pearl on Okichi-mago’s obi clasp. If she were going to throw herself off the gallery, she wouldn’t have leaned over the railing and kicked up her legs as if she were diving off a diving board. One, it would have been awkward; two, it would have been unpleasant: she would have been looking straight down at the rocks below; and three, it would have been difficult if not impossible to kick her legs up high enough to propel her over the railing. The natural approach would simply have been to climb to the top of the railing and jump. That’s why people who plunged from heights were called jumpers. But picking up her legs would have been a natural way to push her over the railing. Charlotte imagined Okichi-mago standing at the railing, just as she had been earlier in the evening, her sake cup cradled in her hands. Then she imagined someone sneaking up on her from behind and pushing her over. Finally she imagined that person trying to make the murder look like a suicide. Not realizing that she was already holding a sake cup—she would have been holding it in front of her—the killer sets out the cup, the comb, and the mirror next to the fire, just as Okichi had a hundred years before.

  Unlike the suicide hypothesis, this was a theory without any holes; all the pieces fit together. There was another element of the original hypothesis that didn’t fit either, Charlotte thought. She had found Okichi-mago’s body lying several feet to the side of the place where her obi clasp had scraped the railing. If she had dived off the gallery, she would have landed directly below. But if she had been pushed, any twisting movement would have resulted in her landing off-center.

  The conversation at the table had drifted off to the price of food in Japan—something about cherries costing sixteen dollars apiece and cantaloupes a hundred and twenty-five. As her tablemates talked, Charlotte turned the pieces around in her head, trying to fit them together in some other way. But they added up to only one conclusion: Okichi-mago had been murdered. But who would have wanted to murder her? she wondered.

  Excusing herself, she went off in search of the geishas. She wanted to speak with Keiko, who
, as Okichi-mago’s younger sister, might be able to give her some clues. Thank goodness it was Keiko and not one of the other geishas who was Okichi-mago’s younger sister. After the labored conversations she’d had with some of the other Japanese at the ball, she welcomed talking with a Japanese who spoke good English. Keiko had grown up on Okinawa, and had learned English at a United States military base. From the library, Charlotte wandered out to the Great Hall, where an orchestra was playing Cole Porter. For a moment, she stood and watched the couples dancing, and the people who were watching them. Not seeing the geishas, she headed over to the bar and asked the bartender if he had seen them. He directed her to a morning room adjoining the library. The room was empty except for Keiko, who sat despondently in a gilded armchair, drinking Scotch.

  “Keiko?” she said. She hadn’t really expected to find her at the party, but then parties were a geisha’s natural habitat; she probably felt more at home with her grief here than she would have upstairs in her room.

  The girl nodded. She was wearing the same gorgeous kimono as the night before, on which geishas embroidered in gold and silver thread strolled among the willow trees and teahouses of the floating world.

  Charlotte took a seat next to her. “I’m very sorry about Okichi-mago’s death. I know you’ll miss her very much.”

  Tears leaked from the corners of the narrow eyes of her round, white kitten’s face, and she bit her carmine lip in an effort to keep from crying.