Laura Joh Rowland - Sano Ichiro 07 - Pillow Book of Lady Wisteria

by Pillow Book of Lady Wisteria(lit)

  She ran down a dim, cold hall and swerved to avoid a man rolling a wine barrel out of a storeroom. Hirata passed maids working in a kitchen as he called, "Chidori-chan! Stop!"

  The hall ended at a closed door. Chidori tried to pull it open, but it stuck firm. She stood with her back pressed against the door and helplessly faced Hirata, her eyes and mouth round with terror.

  "Don't be afraid." Hirata halted several paces from her and lifted his hands in a calming gesture. Loud music and laughter rang out from the party. "I won't hurt you."

  Chidori must have gleaned reassurance from his manner, because her frozen stance relaxed.

  "Why did you run?" Hirata said.

  "I-I heard you asking questions," she whispered.

  An internal stimulus alerted Hirata that here was a witness with information he needed. "Do you know something about Lord Mitsuyoshi's murder that you haven't told us?"

  The kamuro looked away, biting her lips. "I didn't mean for anyone to get hurt!"

  "I know you didn't," Hirata said, but he regarded her with consternation. Had she stabbed Lord Mitsuyoshi? Was this what she'd concealed, and the reason she'd run away just now? Her little teeth were stained with lip rouge, and tears slid down the white makeup on her thin cheeks. She was just a child.

  "He told me that unless I did what he said, he would hurt me," Chidori wailed.

  "Who are you talking about?" Hirata said, puzzled.

  A word escaped Chidori in a rush of breath: "Lightning."

  "Who is Lightning?" As he asked, Hirata's pulse raced. This was a name that hadn't yet arisen in connection with the murder. Chidori had implicated a potential new suspect who had so far evaded detection. Hirata crouched before the kamuro, placing his hands on her shoulders. The bones felt fragile as a bird's. "Tell me," he urged.

  Chidori shook her head so hard that her limp hair flopped. "I can't. He made me promise not to tell. I'm afraid of him."

  "Don't worry. I'll protect you," Hirata said.

  She looked around to make sure nobody else was near, then mumbled, "He's Lady Wisteria's lover."

  "You mean one of her clients?"

  "No. He never had appointments. He never paid for her. The master didn't know about him and Wisteria. Nobody did, except me." Now Chidori spoke eagerly, as if relieved to confess. "They made me help them meet in secret."

  Hirata rose upright as surprise struck him. "Is this man from Hokkaido?"

  "I don't know where he's from."

  Still, Hirata thought he'd at last picked up the trail of the secret lover described in the first pillow book, which must be the genuine one. Whether the man came from Hokkaido didn't matter-Wisteria could have altered details about him to disguise his identity.

  "Tell me how you helped Lightning and Wisteria meet," Hirata said.

  "I was supposed to watch for him," Chidori said. "He would come and stand in the street in front of the house, and whenever I saw him, I would tell Lady Wisteria. That night she would put sleeping potion in her client's drink. I would go outside every so often to check her window for the signal. After her client fell asleep, she wrapped a red cloth around the lantern in her room so the light would look red. When Lightning saw it, he would go to the back door of the ageya. I would make sure no one was around, then let him in."

  And he'd made love to Wisteria while her clients slumbered, just as she'd written in the book, Hirata thought.

  "I didn't want to do it," Chidori blurted. "Courtesans aren't supposed to entertain men for free. I shouldn't have helped Lady Wisteria break the rules. My master would beat me if he ever caught me disobeying. Once I told Lady Wisteria that I wasn't going to help her anymore because I didn't want to get hurt. The next time Lightning came-"

  She shuddered, and her hands clutched the front of her kimono. "I pretended I didn't see him. I didn't open the door. In the morning, when I went to the market, he chased me into an alley. He said he was going to teach me a lesson." Chidori turned her face away from Hirata, opened her kimono, and whispered, "He did this."

  An ugly red scar ran down the center of the girl's bony chest to her navel. Hirata winced in sympathy. "So you knew his threat was serious. Did you let Lightning in the ageya the night of the murder?"

  Eyes downcast in misery, the kamuro closed her robe and nodded. The illusion of venturing back in time recaptured Hirata. He pictured Chidori opening the door, and the blurred figure of a man slipping into the house.

  "What happened when you let him in?" Hirata said.

  "He said that if I told anyone he'd been there, he would kill me. Then he went upstairs. I went back to work."

  Hirata listened to the hokan performing a lewd song, and the party guests roaring with laughter. In his mind he saw Wisteria embrace her lover while Mitsuyoshi lay unconscious. He felt the residue of passion and violence left by the murder.

  "That's all I know," said Chidori, and Hirata knew she was telling the truth. A sob burst from her. "Are you going to arrest me?"

  "No," Hirata assured her. "Lightning forced you to obey him. You're not responsible for the murder."

  "But if I hadn't let him in, maybe Lord Mitsuyoshi would still be alive."

  That was possible, but Hirata said, "His death wasn't your fault. Whoever killed him is to blame." The murderer could be Wisteria, Treasury Minister Nitta, Fujio, or some yet unidentified person, but Hirata would bet on Lightning. A man who would cut a little girl was brutal enough to have stabbed Lord Mitsuyoshi.

  "Tell me everything you know about Lightning," said Hirata. "Does he have another name?"

  Chidori puckered her brow in an effort to recall. "Not that I ever heard."

  "What does he look like?"

  "He's not very tall. But strong." The girl spread her arms to indicate muscular bulk. Under Hirata's questioning, she revealed that Lightning carried two swords, traveled on horseback, and wore his hair in a topknot, his crown unshaved. "And his eyes are funny-they move all the time."

  This description wasn't much, but Hirata deduced that Wisteria's lover was a ronin. "Can you think of anything else?" he asked Chidori.

  "Lightning always comes to Yoshiwara with a bunch of friends. They look as mean as him."

  A minor detail from his first day on the case took on new significance for Hirata. He realized how Lightning fit into what he already knew about the crime.

  Chidori regarded Hirata anxiously. "What if Lightning comes back? What if he finds out I told on him?"

  "Don't worry. He won't be back," Hirata said, determined to apprehend the man before he could do more harm.

  After thanking Chidori for her help, he gathered his companions. They left the ageya and hurried down Nakanocho. The night sparkled with light, sizzled with the smells of cooking, resounded with gay music from teahouses. Ever more attuned to the past, Hirata followed the route that Lord Mitsuyoshi's killer must have taken out of Yoshiwara. He could almost see ghostly footsteps on the road. When he and his party reached the gate, Hirata found the same guards he'd questioned during his first inspection of the crime scene.

  "I want to talk about the night Lord Mitsuyoshi died," Hirata said. "Tell me again who left Yoshiwara after curfew."

  "Treasury Minister Nitta," said the lean guard.

  Hirata was more interested in the others he'd disregarded while Nitta had been the focus of his inquiries. "Who else?"

  "The oil merchant Kinue," said the swarthy guard.

  "And the Mori gangsters," added his companion.

  A flare of elation lit within Hirata. "Was one of the Mori gang a man named Lightning?"

  "I don't know," the lean guard said.

  "They're thieves, brawlers, and killers," the swarthy guard said. "It's best not to know them."

  "The one I mean is short and muscular, with eyes that are always moving," Hirata said.

  The lean guard said, "That sounds like the leader." His companion nodded.

  Hirata's elation flared higher because the guards had confirmed his theory that the gangst
ers were the friends Chidori had said always accompanied Lightning. Now that he'd linked them to Lady Wisteria and the murder, they represented a new chance to solve the case and exonerate Sano.

  "Did they say anything to indicate where they were going?" Hirata asked. The Mori had lairs scattered all over Edo. When the guards shook their heads, he said, "Tell me exactly what you saw them do."

  "They came up to the gate," said the swarthy guard.

  "They were moving fast, shoving their way through the crowds," said the other.

  "The leader had his arm around one of the others-a boy who looked drunk."

  "He was pale and stumbling over his feet, and his eyes were closed. The leader held him up and whispered to him as they came near us. But I couldn't hear what he said."

  "Then he ordered us to let the gang out. When we told him it was too late, he threw some coins at us and said, `Now open the gate.'

  "So we did. And the gangsters hurried out."

  "They got on their horses. The leader helped the drunk boy into the saddle and climbed up behind him. They all rode away."

  Hirata felt a victorious swell of enlightenment as he fitted a crucial missing link into the sequence of events associated with Lord Mitsuyoshi's death. He grew certain that both his luck and the investigation had taken a positive turn.

  "I just remembered something," the lean guard said. "When the Mori came into Yoshiwara early in the evening, I counted nine of them. But when they left, there were ten."

  "The tenth person was Lady Wisteria," Hirata said, summarizing his discoveries for Sano and Reiko. "She was Lightning's drunken boy."

  Sano nodded, accepting a cup of tea that Reiko handed him. Temple bells tolled midnight as they sat together in his office; coals hissed in the brazier. "It all fits," he said. "The red cloth and the hairs by the dressing table in Wisteria's room at the ageya, the fact that we couldn't find any witnesses who saw her leave the quarter. She signaled Lightning to come. She cut her hair and put on male clothing to disguise herself as a boy. She walked right out of Yoshiwara with the Mori gang, and no one recognized her."

  Satisfaction and fresh hope banished the despair Sano had felt last night, even though the cloud of suspicion still hovered over him. Today's discoveries were a ray of light that penetrated the nightmare he'd been living since the shogun accused him of murder and treason.

  "What I learned this morning confirms that Wisteria escaped with the gangster," Reiko said, her face aglow with excitement. She described her visit to Yuya the bathhouse prostitute. "Yuya wouldn't tell me the name of the man who owns the bathhouse and brought Wisteria there, but she said, `Lightning strikes during storms,' and mentioned gangsters. I didn't know what she meant then, but now I understand that Yuya was giving me a hint. The man must be the same lover who sneaked into Wisteria's room the night of the murder and took her away."

  "Now we know Lightning was involved in Lord Mitsuyoshi's death, and one place where he and Wisteria hid." As Sano beheld Reiko and Hirata, gratitude for their perseverance and loyalty overwhelmed him. "Thank you," he said in a voice gruff with emotion.

  He bowed to them, and they bowed back. After an awkward silence, Sano said, "Here's additional evidence that Lightning is the killer," and told Reiko and Hirata about his conversation with Mitsuyoshi's retainer. "According to Wada, Lightning threatened to kill Mitsuyoshi if he didn't pay his gambling debts, and they were enemies. Lightning had a motive for murder, as well as the opportunity."

  "He could have killed Wisteria, too," Reiko said. "According to Yuya, they got into a terrible fight at the bathhouse. Maybe she took him to Fujio's cottage to hide, they argued again, and he beat her to death."

  "The Mori are vicious beasts," Hirata said. "When I was a police officer, I saw teahouse girls they attacked, and shopkeepers murdered for resisting extortion. A woman falls in love with one of them at her own peril."

  The mounting evidence that Wisteria was dead eroded Sano's hope of finding her alive. He said, "We must find Lightning. Wada has already taken me to his gambling den. He wasn't there. The place was shut down, and I spent the day trying to pick up his trail, without luck. But I can send men to watch the bathhouse in case he shows up there again. Right now he represents our best chance of solving the case."

  And Sano's life might depend on capturing Lightning. "That he's been identified as a member of the Mori gang is fortunate for us," Sano said, "because we know where to start looking for him tomorrow."

  31

  Edo's central fish market awoke to life before dawn. When Sano arrived early the next morning, fishermen had already moored their boats at the bank of the canal that ran beneath the Nihonbashi Bridge and begun unloading their catch. Dealers, servants from daimyo estates, and restaurant owners yelled bids. Inside the cavernous building that sheltered the market, porters hauled barrels of live, squirming fish to the stalls. Vendors arranged their wares and greeted hordes of customers. Sano trod paths already slick with slime and scales. Although women busily mopped and scrubbed, a powerful miasma of rotting fish tainted the air.

  Sano approached a vendor who worked for him as a spy. "Good morning, Kaoru-san."

  "Good morning, Sosakan-sama." The short, jovial man was cutting up a huge tuna, his knife moving so fast that the pink flesh appeared to slice itself. "What can I do for you today?"

  "I'm looking for a man named Lightning," Sano said. "He's one of the Mori gang."

  When the vendor heard the name, his knife slipped. A line of blood welled on his finger and stained the fish, but he kept slicing. "I'm sorry, I don't know any Lightning."

  "Have you seen him here recently?" Sano persisted.

  "No, master." Fear of the Mori apparently outweighed the vendor's need for the salary Sano paid him. "I'm sorry."

  Down the aisle, Hirata was arguing with a tea-seller. "I know that everyone here pays extortion money to the Mori," Hirata said. "Don't tell me you've never heard of them!"

  Sano watched in frustration as his detectives questioned other people who shook their heads and looked terrified. The market was a center of the Mori's criminal activity, and the gangsters usually infested the place like vermin, but today they'd made themselves scarce.

  When Sano joined his men outside the building, Hirata said, "It's as if the Mori smelled us coming and disappeared. And they've silenced everyone with threats."

  "I know another place to try," Sano said, hiding the desperation that burgeoned within him.

  Only a day had passed since the shogun accused him of murder and treason, but time was speeding away. The longer Sano took to solve the case, the more chance he gave Police Commissioner Hoshina to ruin his reputation and fabricate evidence against him. And Sano had serious misgivings about focusing his investigation on Lightning. If, in spite of all the clues that indicated Lightning's guilt, someone else had killed Lord Mitsuyoshi, then Sano was wasting precious time now.

  Yet he still considered Lightning his best suspect. He led his men into a labyrinth of alleys surrounding the market. Here, dilapidated buildings contained businesses that served the fish trade. Laborers crowded noodle and sushi restaurants. Shops selling nets, pails, and fishing tackle overflowed into the streets. Sano stopped outside a teahouse. He signaled Hirata and two detectives to go around to the back. Then Sano and the other three detectives drew their swords and ducked under the blue entrance curtain.

  A trio of men inside the teahouse sprang to their feet. All were shabbily dressed ruffians. The lone samurai among them bolted out a back door, while his comrades drew daggers and advanced on Sano and his men. A maid shrieked, dropped a tray of sake cups, and cowered in the corner.

  "Drop your weapons, and no one will get hurt," Sano shouted.

  The ruffians scowled, ready to fight, when suddenly Sano's detectives burst in through the back door. They grabbed the ruffians from behind and wrested away their daggers. Hirata followed, holding captive the samurai who'd run away. The samurai, already relieved of his weapons, struggled in Hirata's ar
mlock.

  "Well, see who we've got," Sano said. Though none of the men fit Lightning's description, the raid had paid off. "It's Captain Noguchi, former weapons master at Edo Castle. I've been looking for you."

  Captain Noguchi was a rawboned man whose feral, unblinking eyes regarded Sano with hostility. "Tell your lackey to let go of me," he said.

  "What's the matter, are you afraid to face your punishment for stealing weapons from the Tokugawa armory and giving them to the Black Lotus sect?" Sano said. "Did you think you could hide forever?"

  Although most of the surviving Black Lotus members had been captured, some remained at large. Sano headed an ongoing effort to clean up this human scum.

  "I was only following the true path of destiny." Fanaticism shone on Noguchi's face. "I'm an innocent victim of persecution by you, the evil destroyer who would wipe out all my people and condemn the world to eternal suffering!"