The Assassin's Touch

by Laura Joh Rowland

  “I want to see Tama,” Lieutenant Asukai said. “Send her out.”

  Soon a woman emerged. Tama was so small that she looked like a child, although Reiko knew she must be near the same age as Yugao, in her twenties. Tama wore a plain indigo kimono; a white cloth bound her hair. She had a face as plump-cheeked and smooth as a doll’s. As she beheld Lieutenant Asukai and the other guards, fear widened her innocent eyes. He led her to Reiko’s palanquin.

  Reiko said, “Hello, Tama-san. My name is Reiko. I’m the daughter of Magistrate Ueda, and I’d like to talk to you.” She opened the door. “Come inside so you don’t get wet.” She felt an instinctive urge to protect Tama, who seemed too sweet and defenseless to survive in the world.

  Tama meekly obeyed. Inside the palanquin, she looked around as if it were some alien place. Reiko thought she’d probably never been in one before: Servants didn’t ride; they walked. She knelt as far from Reiko as possible and tucked her hands in her sleeves.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Reiko said. “I won’t hurt you.”

  Bashful, Tama avoided Reiko’s gaze. Reiko said, “I need to ask you some questions about your friend Yugao.”

  Tama stiffened. She eyed the door, as if she wanted to jump out but didn’t dare. “I—I don’t know any Yugao,” she said in a whisper so soft that Reiko almost couldn’t hear it. Her face, honest and transparent, gave the lie to her words.

  “I know that you and Yugao were friends,” Reiko said gently. “Have you seen her?”

  Tama shook her head. Her eyes begged Reiko to leave her alone. She whispered, “No. Not since three years ago, when she...”

  “Moved to the hinin settlement?” When Tama nodded, Reiko wondered if Tama was lying again. The girl’s nervousness made it hard to tell whether that was the case, or if she was just shy with strangers or afraid that her connection with a murderess would get her in trouble. “Don’t worry, nothing bad will happen to you,” Reiko assured Tama. “I just need to find Yugao. She escaped from jail yesterday, and she’s dangerous. Do you have any idea where she might have gone?”

  “Jail?” Tama gasped the word. Shock and dismay filled her eyes. “Yugao was in jail?”

  “Yes,” Reiko said. “She murdered her parents and sister. Didn’t you know?”

  Tama sat staring in open-mouthed horror: It was obvious she hadn’t known. Reiko supposed that crimes in the hininsettlement weren’t publicized. Tama buried her face in her hands and began to sob. “Oh no, oh no, oh no!”

  Reiko took hold of Tama’s hands and gently pulled them down. Tama’s eyes were streaming and her face blotched with tears. She gazed helplessly at Reiko.

  “I don’t know where Yugao is,” she cried. “Please believe me!”

  “Have you any idea where Yugao could have gone? Are there any places that you and she went when you were children?”

  “No!” Tama snatched her hands out of Reiko’s grasp. She wiped her tears on her sleeve.

  “Try to think,” Reiko urged. “Yugao might hurt someone else unless she’s caught.” Tama only wept and shook her head. Reiko grabbed the girl by the shoulders. “If you know anything at all that might help me find Yugao, you must tell me.”

  “I don’t,” Tama whimpered. “Let me go. You’re hurting me.”

  Ashamed of bullying this innocent, helpless girl, Reiko let go of Tama. “All right. I’m sorry,” Reiko said. But even if she couldn’t find out where Yugao was, perhaps she could still make her hunt for Tama worthwhile.

  “Tama,” she said, “there’s something else I need to ask you. Why would Yugao kill her family?”

  The girl cringed in the corner of the palanquin, still and silent as a baby bird that hopes the cat will get bored and go away if it waits long enough.

  ’Tell me,” Reiko said, gentle yet firm.

  Tama’s will crumbled under Reiko’s. At last she whispered, “I think .. . I think he drove her to it.”

  “Who did? Do you mean her father?”

  Tama nodded. “He .. . when we were children .. . he used to come into her bed at night.”

  Reiko felt a flash of vindication at this evidence for her theory about Yugao’s motive for the murders. “Is that what Yugao told you?”

  “No,” Tama said. “She didn’t have to. I saw.”

  “How? What happened?”

  With much prodding from Reiko, Tama explained, “I spent a night at Yugao’s house. We were ten years old. After we went to bed, her father came over to us and crawled in next to her.”

  Reiko pictured the mother, father, sister, Yugao, and Tama lying on mattresses in the same room, as families did who lived in close quarters. She saw the man rise and tiptoe through the darkness to Yugao. She was shocked that he would commit incest with her in the presence of her friend and his whole family. The man deserved to be an outcast and hadn’t been wrongly accused by his business partner.

  “He thought I was asleep,” Tama continued. “I shut my eyes and lay still. But I could feel them moving in the bed near me and the floor shaking while he lay on top of her. And I could hear her crying when he ...”

  Tama couldn’t be mistaken. Children of her class must often see their parents coupling, and she would have recognized that Yugao’s father had been doing with his daughter what he should have done only with his wife.

  “Yugao must have hated her father for hurting her,” Reiko said to herself. “She must have hated him all these years.”

  “But she didn’t. The next morning, I told Yugao that I knew what her father had done. I said I was sorry for her. But she said she didn’t mind.” Tama’s eyes reflected the surprised disbelief that Reiko felt. “She said that if he wanted her, it was all right because she loved him and it was her duty to make him happy. And she did seem to love him. She followed him around. She would climb on his lap and hug him.”

  As if they were lovers instead of father and daughter,Reiko thought with a shudder of revulsion.

  “And he loved her,” Tama said. “He gave her lots of presents—dolls, sweets, pretty clothes.”

  With them he’d paid for Yugao’s cooperation, suffering, and silence.

  “If there was anyone Yugao hated, it was her mother,” Tama said.

  “Why?”

  “She complained about how her mother was always scolding her. She didn’t like any thing Yugao did. Once I saw her hit Yugao so hard that her nose started bleeding. I don’t know why she was so mean.”

  Reiko deduced that the mother had been jealous of her daughter for stealing her husband’s affections. And since she couldn’t punish the man she depended on for a living, she’d taken out her anger on Yugao. “How long did this go on?”

  “Until we were fifteen,” Tama said. “Then I think her father stopped.”

  That would have been three years before the family moved to the hinin settlement. Reiko wondered if Yugao had held a grudge for so long. “How do you know? Did she say?”

  Tama shook her head. “One day I went to visit Yugao. She was crying. I asked what was wrong. She wouldn’t tell me. But I noticed that her little sister Umeko had a new doll. And Umeko sat on her father’s lap and hugged him the way Yugao used to. He ignored Yugao.”

  Amazement stunned Reiko. The man had committed incest with both his daughters, not just one. It seemed he’d grown tired of Yugao, and Umeko had replaced her as his favored pet and victim of his lust.

  “Yugao changed,” Tama said. “She hardly ever talked. She was mad all the time. She wasn’t fun anymore.”

  Even though her father had stopped violating her, she must have been crushed and angered by his desertion. Reiko asked, “What happened after that?”

  “She was at my house all the time. When I worked in my father’s teahouse, she would help me.”

  Reiko imagined Yugao had wanted to avoid her own home, where she would see the father who’d rejected her, the mother who’d unjustly punished her, and the sister who must have caused her terrible jealousy. Tama had been her refuge. But when Yugao and he
r family had moved to the hinin settlement, they’d been cooped up together, and she’d lost her friend; she’d had nowhere to go. The tensions inside the family must have reached a crisis point and exploded into murder.

  ’The customers at the teahouse liked her.” Tama sighed. “She would go outside with them, and ...”

  Her pause conjured up visions of Yugao coupling with men in a dark alley. Reiko suspected that Yugao had been seeking love from them that she couldn’t get from her father.

  “Some of them fell in love with her,” Tama said. “They wanted to marry her. But she was mean to them. She called them idiots and told them to leave her alone. She would go outside with other men right in front of them.”

  Perhaps she’d also craved revenge on her father, which she’d satisfied by hurting her suitors, thought Reiko.

  “But later there was one man. A samurai...” Tama sucked her breath through her teeth.

  “What’s the matter?” Reiko said.

  “He was scary.”

  “In what way?”

  Puckering her forehead, Tama searched her memory. “It was his eyes. They were so black and—and unfriendly. When he looked at me, I felt like he was thinking about killing me. And his voice. He didn’t talk much, but when he did, he sounded like a cat hissing.”

  Tama shivered. Then bewilderment crossed her face. “I don’t know why Yugao wanted anything to do with him. We knew he was dangerous. Once, another customer bumped into him. He threw the man on the floor and held his sword to his neck. I never saw anyone move so fast.” Awe and fright dazed her eyes. “The man begged for mercy, and he let him go. But he could have killed him just like that.”

  “Maybe Yugao wanted another man who would hurt her,” Reiko mused.

  “He acted almost as if she wasn’t there,” Tama said. “He would sit and drink, and she would sit beside him and talk, and he never answered—he just stared into space. But she fell in love with him. She stood in front of the teahouse every day, watching for him to come. When he left, she would run after him. Sometimes I wouldn’t see her for days, because she was off with him.”

  Reiko understood that Yugao had transferred her unrequited love for her father to the mysterious samurai. She speculated that Yugao had stayed in contact with him after she’d moved to the hinin settlement. If so, she might have gone to him after she’d escaped from jail.

  A thrill of hope tingled inside Reiko as she said, “Who is this man?”

  “He called himself Jin,” Tama said. “That’s all I knew.”

  Without a clan name, it would be difficult to trace him. “Who is his master?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Reiko fought disappointment. The mysterious samurai was her only clue to Yugao’s whereabouts. “What did he look like?

  “ Tama frowned in an effort to recall. “He was handsome, I guess.” After many attempts to coax a better description from Tama, Reiko gave up. “Do you know where he and Yugao went when they left the teahouse?”

  The girl shook her head, then stopped as a thought occurred to her. “I used to work at an inn, before I came here. Sometimes, when there was an empty room, I would let them inside so they could be together.”

  If Yugao and her lover had met up, maybe they’d gone back to the place that was familiar to them. “What’s the name of this inn? Where is it?”

  Tama gave directions. “It’s called the Jade Pavilion.” She edged toward the door. “Can I go now?” she said timidly. “If I stay away too long, my mistress will be angry.”

  Reiko hesitated, then nodded, said, “Thank you for your help,” and let Tama go. As she watched Tama scurry through the gate of her employer’s house, she wondered if she’d heard everything Tama knew about Yugao. She had a feeling that the meek, gentle Tama had managed to hide something from her.

  Lieutenant Asukai put his head through the window of the palanquin. “I heard what the girl told you,” he said. “Shall we go to the Jade Pavilion and look for Yugao?”

  That had been Reiko’s first thought, but if Yugao was with her mysterious samurai, and he was as dangerous as Tama said, then Reiko should be prepared for trouble. Her guards were good enough fighters to protect her from bandits and the stray rebel soldier, but she didn’t want to pit them against a murderess and an unknown quantity.

  “First we’ll fetch reinforcements,” she said.

  Chapter 24

  On a dingy street in the Honjo lumber district, Sano and Detectives Marume and Fukida mounted their horses outside a teahouse. Red lanterns hung on its eaves glowed in the misty twilight; their reflections in the puddles left by the rain looked like spilled blood. Sano watched his guards march the elderly proprietor, two maids, and three drunken customers out of the teahouse. They all looked frightened and confused because he’d interrogated and arrested them, which he’d already done with everyone he’d found at five other places on the list that General Isogai had given him.

  “I can’t believe any of those people is the Ghost,” said Detective Marume.

  “Neither can I,” said Fukida. “They’re not the sort that would know the secrets of dim-make, or that you’d expect to find on Yanagisawa’s elite squadron.”

  Sano had to agree. Frustration gnawed at him because he’d spent an entire day on this hunt, and the people he’d netted during the other raids appeared just as unlikely to be the assassin. But he said, “We figure that the Ghost travels in disguise. I’m not taking any chances that I’ll catch him and he’ll trick me into letting him go.” He told the guards, “Put them in Edo Jail with the people we arrested earlier.”

  “Shall we try the next place on the list?” Fukida said.

  Sano glanced at the overcast sky, which was rapidly darkening. At this rate, he would never catch the assassin by tomorrow night. He might die before he could stop the Ghost’s reign of terror and fulfill his duty. His nerves jittered with a constant, obsessive impulse to check his body for the fingerprint-shaped bruise, the harbinger of death. He couldn’t afford to waste a moment. Yet if he had little more than a day to live, he didn’t want to spend it chasing a phantom through wet, desolate streets when he couldn’t even be certain that the Ghost was one of Yanagisawa’s seven fugitive elite troops. Sano experienced an overwhelming need to see Reiko and Masahiro. The time until tomorrow might be the last he had with them.

  “We’ll stop at home first,” he said.

  When they arrived at Edo Castle, night had immersed the city. Torches outside the gate flared and smoked in the mist. Smoke from a fire somewhere drifted over the deserted promenade. Sano and his men rode through passages deserted except for the checkpoint sentries. The castle was a fortification under siege by an invisible enemy, where most everyone in it cowered behind locked doors and legions of bodyguards. At his compound, Sano left his detectives at their barracks and went straight to his private chambers.

  Masahiro came running toward him down the corridor, arms outstretched, calling, “Papa! Papa!”

  Sano picked up his son and held him close. He rested his face against Masahiro’s soft hair and breathed his fresh, sweet scent. Would this be the last time? Sano’s heart ached as he said, “Where’s Mama?”

  “Mama go out,” Masahiro said.

  “She did?” Sano was disturbed that Reiko was out after dark in these troubled times, and surprised that after the attack on him last night, she would go about her business as though nothing had happened. Shouldn’t she be here waiting for him?

  He heard quick, light footsteps coming along the passage, and Reiko appeared. She wore a drab cloak over plain garments. Her face looked tired and unhappy, but it brightened when she saw him and Masahiro.

  “I’m so glad you’re home,” she said. Masahiro reached for her, and she took him from Sano. “I was afraid you wouldn’t come back.”

  “Where have you been?” Sano demanded. Reiko’s smile faded at his sharp tone. “I went to tell my father that I’d finished my investigation.”

  Sano was amazed, and h
urt, that she’d thought this errand was so important she’d left the house; he might have missed seeing her before he had to resume his hunt for the assassin. She could have sent a messenger. “You waited until this late at night?”

  “Well, no.” Reiko hesitated, then said carefully, “I went this morning. But then my father told me that there had been a fire at the jail, and Yugao had escaped. I thought I’d better try to find her. That’s what I’ve been doing all day.”

  “Wait. Do you mean that you got further involved in this business of the outcast criminal? After you told me you were finished with her?”

  “I know that’s what I told you. But I had to look for her,” Reiko said, defensive. “It’s my fault that she ran away. I couldn’t just sit and do nothing.”

  Even though her explanation was reasonable, Sano’s hurt flared into anger because she’d disregarded his wishes. “You know what a difficult position I’m in,” he shouted. “I can’t believe you’re so selfish and obstinate!”

  Anger sparked in Reiko’s eyes. “Don’t shout at me. You’re the one who’s selfish and obstinate. You’d rather have me let a murderess go free than try my best to catch her, just because you’re afraid of Police Commissioner Hoshina. Where’s your samurai courage? I’m beginning to think you lost it when you became chamberlain!”

  Her words had enough merit to stab Sano to the heart. “How dare you insult me?” he said, his voice rising louder with his fury. “For four years, you’ve given me problems and more problems. I wish I’d never married you!”

  Reiko stared at him, speechless and blank-faced with shock, as if he’d hit her. Then her face crumpled. Tears spilled down her cheeks. She hugged Masahiro, who wailed, upset by the quarrel. Sano’s rage dissolved into horror that he’d spoken so cruelly to Reiko.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice low with shame. He realized that the constant activity, little sleep, fear, and desperation had made him explode at Reiko. “I didn’t mean it.”