The important thing was that the Soviets had cooperated. They must be scared, Durell thought. As scared as we are. Just like me.
“You mentioned a third item, Dr. Freeling.”
“Quite so. I’m setting up a mobile laboratory, which should be ready to go in approximately three hours, with every facility for procuring from Miss Kamuru blood samples with which to precipitate the needed serum. Please stay where you are, once you capture Miss Kamuru. I’ll come up there. It’s quite urgent.”
“Everything is,” said Durell.
“This is more so. You see, we’ve just had a report that the quarantine at Hatashima is ineffective. Something to do with some contaminated fish shipped from the local cannery. The plague is spreading up and down the coast now. Not far from where you are, by the way.”
18
LIZ PRUETT was waiting in the sushi restaurant when he arrived. Her black hair was glossy, and she had repaired her makeup, but there were small lines of strain around her eyes that did not quite disappear when he showed up.
“Have you eaten, Sam?”
“Yes. Did you learn anything?”
“I know where she is. I hope I know, that is. I have the address. What about Skoll?”
“He’s on ice. I called Tokyo. They say we must cooperate with the Russians, but I’m satisfied to work alone.” The address she had obtained was out in the suburbs in a rural district along a graveled road that bumped through the foothills of the mountains near Sendai. The rain fell with intermittent intensity. Liz seemed preoccupied and silent. Once her hand stole out and touched his, and rested there. Her fingers were cold. She had hired a car, and Durell did the driving, following her directions; she had obtained a tourist map of Sendai and the coast, and it seemed to be reasonably accurate.
Their objective was a small farm and woodworker’s shop listed in the city directory under the name of K. Kamuru, maker of kokeshi dolls.
“He’s her grandfather, all right,” Liz said. “She would have come running here, frightened as she is, not understanding why everyone is after her.”
Durell shook his head. “I’m not optimistic. She was too far ahead of us. And lots of other people can find this place and connect it with her, just as easily as you.”
“Well, we have to be hopeful,” Liz said.
Durell hadn’t found hope to be of much practical benefit in his business. He watched the rainy countryside, and the small farms that appeared after the Sendai suburbs were behind them. The road twisted steadily upward toward the mountains. A tourist bus passed them, and several other cars, heading for the hot springs nearby. In the windshield he saw Liz Pruett’s reflection, as she bent her head over the road map. She had put on her glasses again, but there was a hint of eye shadow and lipstick that she hadn’t used before. She shivered and buttoned the top button of her raincoat. Her fingers fumbled with the little task.
“Turn here,” she said.
The road ran through wet, autumnal woods, trim and clean, with all the fallen firewood and faggots picked up by the tidy local farmers. The place they wanted was a small, whitewashed farm that was obviously not used primarily for farming. A television antenna lifted incongruously from the thatched roof. There was a modem, barnlike structure reached by a walkway at the back of the house, and a small fence and flower garden adjoined it. Telephone lines looped away through the rain across the folded fields and rolling hills. The mountains seemed very close here.
“That’s Mr. Kamuru’s workshop,” Liz said, pointing. “It’s where he makes his kokeshi dolls. His family has been carving them for generations. Yoko was bom here.”
“Do you think she’s here?” Durell stopped the car at the painted gate. “It doesn’t look as if anybody is around.”
“We may be too late.” She shrugged helplessly. “Maybe the Chinese, or Skoll’s people, or Major Yama-toya’s police beat us to it. It’s up to you, Sam.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I—I guess I’m just nervous.”
“Because of Colonel Po?”
“I suppose so.”
Durell got out of the car and stood in the rain for a moment. There were dimpled puddles of water in the road. Geese cackled from a series of little, tentlike shelters. Not a soul was in sight. The mountains loomed in russet colors, washed by the rain, and behind them was a blur of smog from the city to the south. There was a rather large pond to the left of the workshop, reflecting the scarlet maple trees. Some of the geese were in the reeds near the pond. Durell walked up a swept path with Liz a step behind him, and went around the house and pushed open the door to the shop.
Somebody had cleaned up and gone away.
The place was broomed clean, the lathes and wood-carving tools covered with white canvas; the drill press was locked. Large pigeonholes held piles of brightly colored wool and bits of cloth for the kokeshi doll costumes. There were doll heads, arms, legs, and bodies all in neatly aligned bins. The wide plank floor had been swept clean of all shavings. There was a smell of old tobacco and sawdust in the place, but the big iron stove was cold, and there was a damp chill in the interior air.
“Her grandfather is gone,” Durell said grimly. “We’ll have to find out just where.”
“No sign of Yoko either,” Liz commented.
“Not yet. But old Kamuru didn’t leave in a hurry—like an hour ago. If Yoko showed up here this morning, she didn’t find him. Her grandfather hasn’t been here for a couple of days, I think. So she didn’t find him at home.”
He listened to the dim cackling of the geese at the pond. “But somebody has to be here, to tend the place.”
They both heard the sound at the same moment, a small metallic ping from outside the open wood-carver’s shop. Durell moved to the door in time to see a blue-smocked figure with a black umbrella trying to mount a bicycle that had been leaning against the back wall of the farmhouse. The rain had softened the ground there, and the bike wobbled erratically as the man headed for the road, holding the umbrella above him with his left hand. Durell cut around the house, running fast, and came out on the road as the man on the bicycle reached it. The Japanese showed no intention of stopping. He peddled faster and tried to swerve around Durell, who caught his upraised arm and pulled him off balance, and the bike and the rider crashed to the wet gravel of the driveway.
He was old, as twisted and gnarled as a Japanese dwarf tree, but there was defiance in him; no fear, only anger. He chattered at Durell in a local Tohoku dialect that came too fast for comprehension. Durell picked up the bicycle from the wet road. The old man’s umbrella was broken.
“Kamuru-san—”
Surprisingly, English came from the angry mouth. “I am not the boss. He is away. I have nothing to say to you. I have said everything to the police. The boss is on a holiday. He is a crazy old man, always looking for more old dolls, old designs from days that are dead, as we all shall be soon enough. So go away. I have nothing to tell you.”
“The wood-carver has gone on a holiday?”
“Hai,” said the Japanese.
“With Yoko?”
“No. I told you, he left some days ago.”
“When?”
“Last week. Four, five days. I work for him. He has no women in the house. I cook, I clean, I tend the geese, and I sweep the shop. All right?”
“Where did Kamuru-san go on his holiday?”
“I do not know. I told the police I do not know. I tell you I do not know. It is not my business.”
“When were the police here?”
“Artists are all crazy,” the old man blurted.
“Yes, they are different from you and me.”
The bright little eyes in the wrinkled face looked up shrewdly at Durell’s height. The rain fell quietly about them. Liz was not in sight. The fields and the mountains looked misty in the wet afternoon air, like an antique Japanese landscape painting.
“What did she do?” the old man asked in a whisper. He was obviously aligned against all art
ists, and from Durell’s remark, he thought he had found an ally. “Why do the police want the child?”
“Yoko did nothing. She is innocent. What did the police say?”
“No more than you. Just to question her. I would tell them nothing. I want no trouble. I have never spoken to a policeman in my life. Long ago—” The old man paused and sighed. “It was a long time ago. Before the grandchild was born. It was nothing to do with the Kamurus. But I hate the police, you understand. During the war it happened. To me, to my daughter, to my daughter’s daughter. The soldiers. Ah, my life has been hard.”
“When was Major Yamatoya here?” Durell asked.
“Ah. You know him? Old Kampei-tai man. Terrible.” The caretaker chuckled. “An hour ago he was here. I tell you, I said nothing to him.”
“But you know where Kamuru-san is?”
“Sure. On a holiday.”
“And Yoko? Where did she go when she found he wasn’t at home?”
“She ran away. She saw the police coming. She has gone—” The old man clamped his mouth shut and looked at Liz Pruett as she came around the house from the woodworking shop. He bowed and smiled and tried to fold up his broken umbrella. Women made him nervous.
“May we go into the house to avoid the rain?” Durell asked politely.
“I wish no trouble,” the caretaker said.
“Just for a moment,” Durell urged.
The old man would not look at Liz again. He led the way through the gate and along the walk, through the formal garden behind the wall, and into the traditional wooden house. The floors were polished with a shine that enabled Durell to see his reflection in the old black planks. The kitchen was scrupulously tidy. The old man opened a modem refrigerator and took out several bottles of Akita beer, offered them, bowed when Durell and Liz declined, and opened one for himself. Off the kitchen was a small room that was obviously his own. Durell glimpsed a small chest of drawers, several photographs, a huge old-style Chinese platform bed. He started in there, and the old man forgot his English in his agitation, slammed down his beer, and tried to bar the way.
Liz said, “He’s telling you that it’s his private room. No admittance.”
“Did the police search the house?”
“Yes,” the old man said. “Everything. A man has no privacy today. They were not polite.”
“Neither am I,” said Durell.
He went into the old man’s bedroom against a spate of protests. It seemed significant that there were no kokeshi dolls in the room. On a shelf near the bed were the photos that had caught his eye. They were all old, taken at least fifteen or twenty years ago, and constituted the usual memorabilia people collect that are of interest only to themselves, and which get thrown out as trash upon their death. There was one of Yoko, which he recognized, even though it had been taken of her as a child. There was another girl with her, posed in front of a temple gate, smiling in their school uniforms.
Durell picked up the photograph. The old man was at his elbow, breathing hard and clutching his bottle of beer. “Who is the other child?” Durell asked.
The old man made a spitting sound. “My one and only granddaughter. She is dead.”
“She was a good friend of Yoko’s?”
“Hai. Until my own daughter, her mother, went wrong.” He giggled, then snorted angrily. “Go look in the House of Dolls. That is where you will find Nishi. My granddaughter. To me, she is dead. But Yoko maybe—maybe she went there.”
“The House of Dolls?”
“You find it,” the old man snapped. “I know nothing of such places.”
“In Sendai?”
“Hai.”
“This other picture.” Durell picked up a small, framed photograph showing a woodsy cottage with a backdrop of mountains behind it. A lake shimmered in one comer of the faded snapshot. “What place is this? Does it belong to you?”
“No. It is Kamuru-san’s.”
“A vacation cottage?”
“Ho. You are very clever. Much more intelligent than the police.” The old man . tipped up his bottle of Akita beer. “The police look and do not see. They bully and stamp about and shout at me. You look directly into the heart of everything.”
“Where is this place?” Durell insisted.
“In the mountains, near Ningyo. Kamuru-san goes there sometimes. He has a shop there, too. He stays and works when we quarrel, and we happened to quarrel over the geese last week, so he went away for a time.”
“Did you tell Yoko this?”
“I had no chance. But she will know. The police came in their big cars and motorcycles, and the major shouted at me, but Yoko hid in the woods past the pond.”
Ningyo,” Durell repeated. “Is it far from here?”
“Two hours by car.”
Durell did not know if the old man was lying or not. But he was sure that Yoko had not been taken by the Japanese police. If she had been the old man would surely have been arrested, too. He saw no real reason to doubt the man’s words. He picked up the photo of the two teen-age girls again.
“Your granddaughter’s name is Nishi?”
“So they call her.”
“At the House of Dolls?”
“Kamuru-san once made many kokeshi for them. It used to be an inn. Today it is an evil place, and I know nothing of it. My daughter is there, and she is dead.”
“Nishi and Yoko were good friends?”
“Once, some years ago.”
The old caretaker put down his bottle of beer and stamped away through the kitchen and out through the front door of the house. Durell did not try to stop him. Through the gateway he watched as the old Japanese righted his bicycle, opened his broken umbrella, and mounted skillfully, then pedalled away, holding the bent ribs and tom black fabric over his gray head.
Liz said, “We’ve just missed her—again.”
Durell nodded. “And she still doesn’t know why everyone is chasing her. It may be a form of amnesia, induced by the fever she suffered. Anyway, it’s plain that she’s afraid of just about everyone.”
“Do you think she went to this mountain cottage of her grandfather’s?”
“Possibly. Or to Nishi, her old girl friend.”
“What kind of place is this House of Dolls?”
Durell grinned. “Easy to guess. No place for a lady. That’s why the old man considers his granddaughter as dead. Kind of Victorian, but understandable.”
“I want to go there with you,” Liz said suddenly.
“No good. They’d never let you in, if I’m right. I’ll have to go alone.”
Liz looked strained. She took off her glasses and swung them on a crooked finger. “And what am I to do?”
“You go to Ningyo and find old Kamuru-san. Maybe Yoko went there, instead of to her girl friend. We’ll have to split up, Liz.”
“I don’t want to do that,” she said.
He stared at her. “Why not?”
“I’m afraid,” she said.
19
LIZ took the rented car for her drive to the mountains, and left Durell in Sendai, where he found a cab driver who grinned at once and nodded toothily at the address he gave.
“The House of Dolls?” said the cabby. “Always busy, sir, every hour, every day, that place.”
“Popular, is it?”
“All types, all sizes; very exotic for Americans.”
“Let’s go then,” Durell said.
It was still raining, a misty wetness of the sort that had inspired Japanese poets and artists for centuries. They rode beyond the city’s main shopping center of the Ichibancho arcade and entered an area of quiet, old-fashioned homes. Durell’s eyes began to feel gritty from lack of sleep, but he knew he would soon get his second wind. He looked at his watch, saw it was mid-afternoon, and dusk would come early because of the rain. Time was running out. He wondered if a radio broadcast to Yoko Kamuru, asking her to turn herself in, would have any effect on the frightened fugitive. Now that the plague had broken out of the quar
antine around Hatashima, it was even more imperative to find the girl and bring her to Dr. Freeling. Every hour heightened the danger to the entire Tohoku area, perhaps to all of Japan, perhaps—
He found no profit in brooding over the potential disaster. They came out on the banks of the wide Hirose River, in a wooded, tree-lined section. They passed an area of pools and playgrounds, deserted in the drizzle, and then the driver grunted and said, “Busy, busy,” and turned into a stone gateway and eased along a garden of rocks, and dwarf trees, and formal, humpbacked bridges. The red tiles of the house’s roofs gleamed wet with the rain; it was surrounded by privacy.
“Do you know a girl named Nishi who stays here?”
The toothy grin flashed. “Ah, yes. Very popular, Nishi. Beautiful and talented. Many men favor her. But a very expensive young lady. Not true geisha, of course. You Americans do not understand difference between geishas and whores.”
“Nishi is a whore?”
The cab stopped in front of the elaborate entrance. “Of course,” the driver said, mildly surprised. “What else?”
“Wait for me,” Durell said, as he got out.
“Wait? You can stay the night, sir, have dinner—”
“I won’t be long.”
“Ho ho. You Americans quick at everything, hey?”
A Japanese woman in a lilac kimono, her black hair piled high with ivory combs in traditional style, admitted him, bowing low, smiling, gesturing him inside with words of polite and formal welcome. Durell spoke to her in Japanese, and she smiled, covered her mouth to hide her teeth in a gesture of politeness.
“Welcome to the House of Dolls, sir,” she murmured. “Kokeshi girls of all varieties, but alive, not wooden, sir.” She giggled. “We will try to make your visit most pleasant. We have the best food, hot baths, recreational games, the very finest and most genteel of company.” Then her slanted, made-up eyes gleamed like hard marble. “We accept all kinds credit cards, honored guest.”
Assignment Tokyo Page 11
