The Death Ceremony

by James Melville

  With the best will in the world, no room could possibly be found for them all to sit, but relief was at hand. Just as the other guests began to half-scramble up in deference to the Governor and his lady, a senior usher appeared at the door and with the most profuse apologies indicated that they should all now proceed to the tea ceremony room.

  Like the Governor's wife, Hanae patted her hair-do and adjusted her obi sash for reassurance and then demurely followed her husband along more corridors open to one side to give fleeting views of meticulously groomed inner gardens. It was quite a relief to be on the move again and away from the immediate proximity of the explosive voice of the British Ambassador, but she found herself wondering how on earth getting on for twenty people could possibly be fitted into a classic tea ceremony room with a floor space of four and a half tatami mats each roughly two square yards in extent.

  The room to which the guests were led was, however, not of this type, being altogether larger and loftier, at least twenty mats in size and much more like those found in Japanese restaurants of the most exclusive and expensive kind. It was a room of great beauty and Hanae realised at once that nothing but the finest traditional materials had been used in its construction. The woodwork was of hinoki, glowing like honey and subtly setting off the rich golden sheen of the tatami mats edged with plain black cloth. In the tokonoma alcove the only decoration was an ancient scroll mounted on silk.

  At first it seemed dark in the room, but the eye soon became adjusted to the subdued light filtering through the translucent paper of the shoji screens, and it was possible to see a wisp of steam emerging from the lid of the cauldron in the square kotatsu pit not far from the tokonoma, in front of the sliding fusuma doors through which the Grand Master would presumably make his appearance.

  Before that, however, came what an uninformed observer would have taken to be a highly unseemly disturbance, as the guests struggled with every appearance of sincerity to yield precedence to each other. Otani and Hanae took no part in the melee, since Otani marched decisively to a point near the back wall not too far from the door and therefore well down the pecking order, and made himself comfortable on one of the flat zabuton cushions already in place. Hanae sank gratefully down on his left,

  and watched with interest the tussle going on near the tokonoma. It was obvious to her that the Governor must sooner or later take the place of honour immediately in front of it, but he was urgently pressing the industrialist Takayama to do so. Takayama for his part was modestly declining the honour, while managing to draw attention to the presence of the British Ambassador, who looked to Hanae as though he quite expected to take precedence, even though he was protesting loudly that it would be entirely inappropriate for him to do so.

  All the other guests gradually sorted themselves out, including the dusky personages whom, Hanae agreed in an undertone with Otani, must be the other ambassador and his wife. It seemed for a while as though the argument among the three most distinguished guests would go on indefinitely, but all at once the Governor smiled winningly, made a graceful gesture of defeat, and plonked himself down in the place of honour. His wife, who Hanae thought had been looking rather tense and unhappy, at once took her place at his side. Takayama moved almost as fast, taking the next cushion in order of precedence and leaving the ambassador like a beached whale in the middle of the room with his wife smiling round rather wildly. The only places now left unoccupied were to the left of Hanae. Although some of the other higher-ranking guests made preliminary movements suggestive of yielding their places, they were perfunctory in the extreme, and eventually the ambassador, still talking to nobody in particular, made his way across the room and sank creakingly first to his knees and then into a cross-legged position. Hanae was profoundly grateful for the fact that his much smaller and less obtrusive wife took the place next to her.

  A hushed atmosphere now fell upon the gathering, rather as though all present were waiting for a church service to begin, and male attendants in formal Japanese dress glided in through the fusuma doors carrying lacquer trays of glutinous bean-jelly cakes. The Japanese guests produced wads of folded thick white paper and placed one sheet in front of them on the tatami to serve as a plate. In most cases the wife had the paper tucked into the kimono folds at her breast, and passed a sheet to her husband as well, but some of the men had a personal supply in an inner pocket.

  Noticing a Japanese lady on the other side of the room courteously offering paper to the black couple in the tribal robes, Hanae realised that the British pair were similarly unprovided and hastily passed two sheets to them with a nod and a smile. The ambassador thanked her noisily, drawing attention to the silence of everyone else in the room, then at last fell silent himself and followed the example of the others by attacking his bean-jelly cake with the sliver of bamboo provided and transferring lumps of it to his mouth. The attendants withdrew, closing the sliding screen door behind them. Almost at once it opened again and a distinguished figure entered the room, a single attendant close behind.

  The Seventeenth Hereditary Grand Master of the Southern School of the tea ceremony proceeded gravely to his place beside the cauldron, placed the implements of bamboo and lacquer which he would employ carefully on the tatami, knelt and bowed low to his guests.

  Chapter 2

  Hanae knew that the Grand Master was an elderly man; something over sixty, certainly. Yet, as he raised himself from the profound bow and his eyes flickered round the room and held hers for a fraction of a second, she was aware of an animal power in him of a distinctly sexual nature which momentarily disturbed her breathing. Hanae soon enough pulled herself together, reflecting a little ruefully that probably every other woman in the room had reacted in the same way as herself.

  She always liked to see men in traditional Japanese dress anyway, and would have been happy indeed if Otani had consented to put on his own dark-blue kimono, the short outer jacket held together at the front by its splendid woven silk tasselled cord. The Grand Master's garments were of stiff silk and fell around his unexpectedly burly frame magnificently. The touch of pure white at his neck seemed to emphasise his fleshy lips, fine profile and thick grey hair.

  Not a word was spoken at this stage, and the Grand Master began at once to perform the tea ceremony he must have conducted tens of thousands of times since childhood, trained as he had been from infancy to inherit the headship of his family and with it responsibility for the school and its network of hundreds of licensed teachers throughout Japan.

  Hanae, although herself less than reverent about the ceremony, had to admit that the Iemoto performed it with wondrously fluid dexterity: the grace with which he handled the long bamboo ladle, warming the bowl he had brought with him with water from the cauldron simmering over the charcoal, the seemingly casual way he folded and re-folded the silk square with which he ceremoniously wiped the slender bamboo spoon before scooping out the requisite quantity of powdered tea from its lacquer container, and perhaps above all the muscular authority of his handling of the whisk. All his movements took Hanae's breath away again as she remembered the trembling of her own hand and the generally gauche incompetence of her efforts when in the presence of her own teacher in Tokyo thirty-five years earlier. That teacher, too, had been a disciple of the Southern School, and Hanae remembered the prescribed movements well enough although she had not performed, or indeed even attended, a tea ceremony for years.

  She found herself wondering what might be passing through the mind of the alarmingly attractive Grand Master as he performed the ritual so familiar to him, and through the minds of the other guests watching him so intently. Even the British Ambassador was still, his big ungainly shape towering a head higher than anyone else in the room; while his black counterpart gazed in fascination, his chubby face glistening.

  The tea was made at last, and with a distant smile the Grand Master passed the bowl to his assistant who placed it before the guest of honour. The Governor bowed low, his hands on the tatami mat before
him and his forehead almost touching them, and the Grand Master bowed in response. Then all the other guests bowed.

  Afterwards Hanae swore she heard nothing apart from a rustling of clothing; not even the cracking of a knee joint which would not have been unexpected in a company of whom the youngest was well into middle age. Otani thought he did hear something, but could not be sure.

  What he and all the other guests did see as they resumed an upright position, however, was the Grand Master slumped in a heap, his attendant bending over him incredulously. Otani flung himself across the room without rising properly from his knees, and was looking down at the fallen man almost before anyone else in the room fully realised that anything was amiss.

  The Grand Master had toppled to one side, and without touching him, Otani came to the conclusion that he was almost certainly dead, even though little blood had emerged from the ugly wound in his forehead. Nevertheless, as he reached for the limp wrist of the uppermost arm and failed to find a pulse, he ordered the attendant to phone for an ambulance at once, and to summon the nearest uniformed policeman from outside the buildings immediately.

  He tried a moment longer, but there was no response to his probing fingers. Then Otani stood and surveyed his fellow guests, some of whom were beginning to scramble to their feet. "Ladies and gentlemen. Please keep your seats for a moment. I am a police officer. The Iemoto has been injured. Medical help will arrive very soon." Then he turned to the Governor of Kyoto Prefecture, dropped to his knees in front of him and spoke in an urgent undertone, but with no real attempt at confidentiality. "Governor. Forgive me for taking action. I am Otani, commander of the Hyogo Prefectural Police. With your permission I will liaise with officers of the Kyoto force for the moment. I should be obliged if you could ensure that the ambassadors at least do not leave the premises for the time being." The Governor nodded, a look of stupefaction still on his face and Otani made without more ado for the door and into the corridor.

  There was no time to retrieve his shoes from the custodian at the main entrance, so he fumbled briefly with the screw-lock of the glazed sliding wall which gave on to the side garden, wrenched it open and jumped down on to the gravel, wincing on impact. The moss was kinder to his feet, but he was soon heedless of discomfort as he rounded the side of the building in which the tea ceremony room was located and made a quick inspection of the outside of the shoji screen which had been behind him and Hanae.

  The small hole he had spotted in the paper from inside was not difficult to find, and from his recollection of the layout of the room and the position of the Grand Master, Otani made a crude estimate of the probable trajectory of the bullet. Then he plunged into the dense stand of bamboo, made for the boundary wall and managed to haul himself up to its tiled top by half-climbing one of the more sturdy plants which nevertheless swayed dangerously under his weight. As he did so he heard the wailing of an ambulance approaching.

  On the other side of the wall was an alley: too narrow for a vehicle larger than a motor-bike, but offering easy access to a proper road no more than fifty metres away. There was a similar wall on the other side of the alley, marking the boundary of a substantial property of an old-fashioned kind. As is usually the case in Kyoto, the house itself was practically invisible save for its roof, but the white wall of a separate fireproof storehouse with its tiny ventilation window abutted on to the wall.

  The alley was deserted, and there was obviously nothing Otani could do there. He therefore climbed down from his perch and after looking carefully around and sniffing the air, made his way back through the garden, sitting on the edge of the corridor to brush the gravel and dirt from his socks as best he could before going back to the tea ceremony room, expecting to be greeted by a scene of chaos.

  He had been gone less than fifteen minutes, but the room proved to be almost empty, except for the Governor, the two ambassadors, the police inspector who had greeted the Otanis on their approach to the school, and a middle-aged man in a black suit and silver tie. The inspector saluted, his face solemn. "Mihara, sir. I regret to inform you that the Iemoto was already dead when the ambulance arrived."

  Otani knew he was on delicate ground. He had received the Governor's bemused consent to liaise with the Kyoto police in the emergency, but had already exceeded his brief by chasing off in a vain attempt to find some trace of the gunman. "I am distressed to hear it," he replied briefly. "Needless to say, Inspector Mihara, if I can be of any service to you ... ah, may I ask where the other guests are?"

  "In another room, sir. There was to be another tea ceremony at three o'clock, and some of those guests were already beginning to arrive." He turned to the man in the black suit. "Mr Terada here is the Chief of the General Affairs Section of the School, and responsible for the administration of today's ceremonies. After consultation with him I have arranged for arriving guests to be informed that the later ceremony is cancelled." The man Terada nodded his assent. His face was a sickly grey colour.

  The British Ambassador looked almost as ill, and the shock had left him chastened. He was standing in a corner conversing quite quietly with his black colleague and the Governor, and Otani seized the opportunity to draw the inspector to the other side of the room. "Inspector. I must apologise for having left the room before you arrived. The fact is, I think there may be more than a possibility that the Iemoto was killed by a shot intended for the British Ambassador over there. You will see a small hole in the shoji of the back wall. It is precisely at the level the ambassador's head would have been had he not been bowing at the moment when the shot was fired. I made a rough guess as to where it might have come from and hurried to see if I could find any trace of the gunman."

  "I'm very grateful to you, sir. And did you?"

  "No, but of course my inspection was hasty and very superficial. The important thing is, if I may say so, to provide special protection for both ambassadors, though I doubt if there need be any concern for—who is the other one?

  "He's the Ambassador of Ghana."

  "I see. At all events, if there's anything in my idea, the assassin will soon learn that he killed the wrong man and may remain in the vicinity to make another attempt."

  Otani looked hard at the younger man, then turned aside to let him think about what he said. Mihara needed only a few seconds to digest the information Otani had provided, before turning to the administrator Terada and asking him to provide a list of the names of all the guests at the ceremony and sending him out of the room. Otani guessed that this was simply a way of getting rid of him, and was not surprised when the inspector moved quickly across to the Governor and the two ambassadors and interrupted their conversation which appeared to be in English. After listening briefly to Inspector Mihara, the Governor looked over to Otani and gestured to him to join them.

  Otani went over, and took his first proper look at the Governor, who was short and portly like many another prominent politician, his enamelled badge of office gleaming in his lapel. At close quarters he seemed less impressive than his deft handling of the precedence fuss at the beginning of the ceremony had led Otani to think him, and the sweat on his forehead was very noticeable.

  "I am very grateful to you for your prompt actions, Superintendent," he said as though very far from meaning it. "This is a shocking business. The tragic death of the Grand Master is a terrible thing, and now the Inspector here tells me that you consider that the shot may have been aimed in fact at the British Ambassador. Sir Rodney Hurtling had just been hazarding the same suggestion." Otani puzzled over the sounds Saa Rodoni Haatoringu and then concluded that they must represent the ambassador's full name. Haatoringu bore some slight resemblance to the word the ambassador had uttered while peremptorily introducing himself to Hanae, and thanks to his trip to England Otani had at last learned the significance of the title "Sir".

  As he bowed his head in acknowledgement of the Governor's words, Otani thought that he looked completely out of his depth in an emergency situation, without advisers to guide him
and menials to do his bidding. "It is, of course, purely by chance that I happen to be here today, Governor. I did however venture to suggest to Inspector Mihara that it would be prudent to arrange special protection for both their Excellencies when they leave these premises. The assailant may still be in the vicinity."

  At this the British Ambassador looked round in some nervousness, and moved round so that his colourfully robed African colleague was between him and the shoji screens. "I don't know about you, Edwin," he then said to the other envoy, "but I feel I ought to return immediately to Tokyo." Then he made an impatient gesture, and turned to the Governor, changing to Japanese. "However, I can't. Perhaps Osaka would be better. I can't let my European colleagues down . . . wait a minute while I think. Of course the Rolls is safe enough. The trouble is, Governor, I have an important exhibition to open—well, jointly open, perhaps I should say—on Wednesday in Kobe, and my wife and I had planned to stay here in Kyoto tonight and tomorrow. It's all rather difficult."

  His words were quite comprehensible to Otani, but the ambassador's thought processes were beginning to make his head spin slightly. He therefore gently intervened.

  "May I suggest, Governor—subject of course to Inspector Mihara's advice—that His Excellency might proceed by car to his hotel under escort? I gather from the ambassador's remarks that the vehicle is bullet-proof ..."

  "Who told you that?" Sir Rodney Hurtling's eyes flashed at Otani, dark suspicion in his manner.

  "Why, you did, Ambassador. At least you implied as much." Otani's adrenalin levels were still high, and he had no intention of allowing this boorish man to browbeat him.

  "Did I? Oh. Anyway, you're a senior police officer, I'm told. Still, the information isn't for general consumption, you know. You advise that, do you?"

  The man was obviously still dithering, and Otani decided to be charitable. "You've had a serious shock, Ambassador," he suggested kindly. "You will no doubt need to confer by telephone with your staff at the Embassy ..."