Kamakura Inn

by Marshall Browne

  He brooded on the coffee shop and its few occupants. The waitress looked at him, removed the cold cup, and replaced it with a fresh one. The cop was in the corner, behind the paper. Aoki shook his head slowly. Kimura, the poor bastard. That article, it had to be. Tokie. It was so cruel. But it was Tamaki that his thoughts settled on. The Fatman’s past was layered with corrupt deals; however, they’d found two cases where people within his ambit had been murdered, and several others where persons had just disappeared— in Osaka, Yokohama, and Kobe. It had been impossible to obtain evidence linking him to those cases. Where they had him was in those twenty-odd cases of corruption. As Assistant Inspector Nishi had commented, that was the deep shit they’d caught him standing in; witnesses to the bloodstained stuff were unavailable.

  The journalist, in taking up the case, had plunged into the pool of corruption; maybe the one of the blood was to have been next. Possibly Kimura knew what the Fatman was capable of. If so, the crusade he’d begun was even more courageous—and Aoki’s personal situation just a way station on a longer journey.

  Aoki sighed heavily. His wife had really upset an applecart. He got out his cell phone and called Nishi and asked for details of the murder. The assistant inspector said he would find out and call him back.

  Aoki sipped the coffee this time. He pictured Tokie and his father calling on the new widow. A tragic scene.

  Twenty minutes later his phone rang and Nishi’s voice was giving him the information. Kimura had been strangled at about 6:45 A.M. Worse than that—his wife had found him minutes later on their landing, his eyeballs dragged out on his cheeks, his tongue partly severed, and his ears sliced off and tossed on the floor. Already the police had found out he’d been working on a follow-up story to the first. A yakuza killing, they were saying at this point. That was all Nishi could get at the moment. Inspector Yoshikawa of the Second Division had the case.

  Aoki pondered what he’d heard. His throat muscles had tightened. The killing was especially nasty. How much detail had Tokie been told on the phone? His heart went cold for his wife. She was going to feel very responsible for the murder of her best friend’s husband, and there was not a thing he could do about that.

  The savage nature of the killing was a graphic message: a terrible lesson in not seeing, hearing, or telling. The yakuza’s sinister shadow lay over it like an oil slick in Tokyo Bay, and for Aoki, superimposed over that was the obese shadow of the Fatman.

  Automatically, Aoki pictured the routines Inspector Yoshikawa’s team would be engaged in. They’d be checking Kimura’s latest phone calls and appointments. But this crime was top-level yakuza. The investigation wouldn’t move fast and eventually would run into a dead end. Aoki could foresee that.

  What he couldn’t foresee was what other disasters were still coming down the freeway.

  ~ * ~

  Four days later, Tokie and her father-in-law attended Kimura’s funeral service while Aoki sat in the park watching the pigeons being fed by the young and by the old and infirm. At one point, he’d considered going to see Kimura’s widow to try to find out more, but his suspension, and the shadow on his tail, made it a hopeless move. The brass would read it as another breach of discipline, and probably the DG would decide that this inspector was just too much trouble to keep on the force.

  In the nights between the murder and the funeral, Aoki had started awake, listening for his wife’s breathing. On each occasion, he’d been unable to hear it above the humming of the air conditioner and had wondered if she was lying awake. Or a worse thing. Each time, she’d stirred slightly, as though aware of his vigil, as if giving him a signal that she was still with him. One night he got up and stared from the window at their small garden. For an hour he stood there, hearing the hum of the mosquitoes outside the wire screen, trying to make sense of what was happening in their lives.

  In those few days she prepared their meals, moving through the apartment, a pale ghost of her former self, and Aoki and his father began to attend to small chores around the house that were new to them. Each morning now, his father took a basket on his walk and visited the market for their food.

  After the funeral, Tokie packed a bag to go and stay with Madam Kimura and her elderly mother, leaving Aoki and his father to look after themselves. Five days later she came home, and Aoki was jolted by the change in her. In a distracted way, she spoke of her friend. She was more talkative than he’d ever known her to be, except half the time she didn’t finish a sentence before beginning another. A kind of semicrazy vivacity. “Dear daughter-in-law,” his father said. The old man talked to her gently; Aoki spoke his condolences stiffly, feeling ashamed of the way he’d questioned her the night of the day Kimura’s article had come out. The next day, the old man took her to a garden he knew. “It is famous for its tranquility,” he told Aoki. “There, your spirit becomes as still as a forest pool.”

  The murder and investigation were featured daily in Kimura’s paper, and on the weekend it printed an obituary. Aoki read about the significant things in Kimura’s thirty-eight years. The man he hadn’t known had won several important prizes for his journalism.

  It was plain that Tokie could not talk about the tragedy itself, and Aoki wondered how she had been able to help her friend. Everything was strange in the household. Aoki spent most of his time in the park, the coffee shop, or the local bars. He phoned Nishi once more, but there’d been no breakthrough that his colleague knew of.

  ~ * ~

  On the Friday night, his father, in the middle of a calm and scholarly talk on the Silver Pavilion in Kyoto, his concerned eyes on Tokie, slumped on the table, scattering the dishes, and was dead within seconds.

  In the following days, it was very clear to Aoki that ex-governor Tamaki had reached into his and his family’s existence with a malignancy that transcended the poisonous layers of corruption the detective had unearthed. Aoki was certain that worry—about his son’s situation, about the terrible blow that had fallen on his daughter-in-law with Kimura’s death—had brought on his father’s death. Up against such tragedy, Aoki felt totally helpless, and now concern for his wife gnawed in his belly. He tried to imagine the depth of the despair that must be in her heart, though she spoke not a single word of it.

  On a humid morning, several old professors and other colleagues, a scattering of former students, and a few friends made up the twenty or so persons who attended the ceremony for his father’s spirit, at a shrine in the temple at the end of the street. At the start, Tokie slumped against him, and Aoki put his arm around her to hold her up.

  Aoki, his head full of incense, oblivious to the chanting of the Buddhist priest, was hearing the last words his father had said to him of a personal nature. “The only disgrace lies with your superiors.”

  Grimly, turning his head to look around, he imagined that the Fatman was there, somewhere in the temple precincts, watching the ceremony from concealment. Of course, it was a ridiculous notion: Fie would know nothing of the old professor of literature; probably wouldn’t have known much about Aoki, and certainly would’ve forgotten him by now. To the Fatman, the investigation would be history, as he pointed himself toward the political horizon where his sun was rising.

  Later, Aoki told himself that his father’s years of twice-daily walks over this hilly suburb could well be responsible for his death. After all, he was seventy-eight. But he didn’t believe that; out of professional habit he was just assembling all the evidence. Sergeant Saburi, Kimura, and now his father. The Fatman’s crimes were relentlessly accumulating. It was a coldhearted thought in the midst of this sadness.

  Tokie was sobbing quietly against his shoulder. Now there was just the two of them.

  ~ * ~

  The next morning, Aoki sat forward when Tamaki’s face flashed onto the television news. He was making a speech at a businessmen’s conference in Kobe. A powerful sincerity oozed from him.

  A hard knot of pain came into Aoki’s stomach. The government was caught up in one of it
s innumerable crises, not that it was in any danger of defeat. The Liberal Democrat Party’s hold on power was unshakable, and the opposition parties were hardly more effective than the shadow play of puppets. The strife that most often occurred was between the ruling party’s own factions. Tamaki was playing peacemaker.

  Aoki turned off the television. The apartment seemed as quiet as a tomb.

  At breakfast, Aoki did not know what to say to Tokie, He didn’t know how she would fill the gap in her life. Not looking at her, he said, “I will come to the rest of the plays with you, if you wish.”

  She gave him her sad shy smile. It was the first time he’d seen her smile since Kimura had been killed.

  The day was humid and rainy. In midafternoon, gusts of wind came from the sea, blowing away the rain clouds. Tokie had gone into the alcove where she did her calligraphy and was staring down at blank white paper. When she began to work, Aoki went out and took his father’s short walk to the temple.

  He checked his back. No one. It seemed the surveillance had been withdrawn.

  After the rain, it was hot and even more humid, arid Aoki bought an icy aluminum can of soda from a vending machine. He rolled it back and forth across his forehead, sighing with relief. It was September, but the summer heat was fighting a rear-guard action.

  After his walk, Aoki went to the coffee shop, drank coffee, and read the paper. Especially he looked at the latest batch of crime reports, reading between the lines with his experienced eye. Today, Kimura’s case wasn’t mentioned.

  Aoki frowned, concentrating. Had Tamaki initiated Kimura’s murder, or had his yakuza associates just stepped in to take care of it, protecting themselves from more of Kimura’s fact-finding, crusading articles on the Fatman and his shadowy associates? Inspector Yoshikawa of the Second Criminal Investigation Division would be thinking identical thoughts, which wouldn’t take him anywhere, either.

  Aoki reconsidered whether he might attempt to interview Madam Kimura, in particular to find out what her husband had been doing in his last days; try to do some work behind the official investigation. Grimly, he realized that it would be useless. The cop might or might not be on his tail today, but Watanabe would be keeping in touch with what was going on. Aoki would have zero room to move, and it’d just bring them down on him like a sledgehammer.

  At 5:30 P.M. Aoki transferred to the bar down the street. He lit a cigarette and drank a beer. He was just filling in time, waiting to go home to dinner.

  ~ * ~

  Something dark and heavy came down on Aoki as he fumbled for his key, brushing against the bonsai in their pots on the small porch—something like a weighty traditional cloak thrown over his shoulders. One winter, his father had spread such a cloak over the teenaged Hideo’s back.

  The apartment was in total darkness, and a new tightness gripped his throat. He switched on the light in the hall. The kitchen door was closed, which was unusual. He opened it, and the electric light flooded into the small room.

  His wife’s lifeless kimonoed body was suspended from the light fixture by a cord.

  ~ * ~

  Chapter Five

  ONE MONTH AND THREE DAYS after his wife’s suicide, Inspector Aoki reentered the world: He was seeing and hearing what was going on about him; was aware of his body, his thoughts, where he was. It was as though he’d been shot up into air and light from the depths of a dark pool.

  The reentry point, he believed at that moment, was the bar facing the municipal park. However, the past month remained substantially a mystery. Fragments were progressively to come back—coming into view like debris flowing down a storm-water channel—such as the uncle who’d appeared from nowhere and taken care of all the arrangements; of him.

  His sole memory of Tokie’s funeral ceremony was of incense. That odor was all that he retained. The rest of it was lost in a dense fog.

  He’d been in this clinic. There’d been injections. Bits and pieces of that were reassembling: a man who talked on and on, with many questions. A single utterance from the fellow jumped in Aoki’s mind, like a fish feeding in a stream: “Sometimes it’s the individual who is most familiar with trauma and disaster who crashes hardest. “

  Another fragment that emerged was the face of Superintendent Watanabe, leaning over him, saying something, but about any of that time, nothing was one hundred percent certain.

  He’d realized he was not in the bar at all but in a white, stainless-steel-fitted room, with a picture on the wall of a mountain covered with autumn-tinted woods. In reality, that was the reentry point. The next day, the police psychiatrist discharged him. He was to return each week for further treatment. Without fail, he was to take the prescribed medication.

  The hot, sultry summer had vanished. Now the days were cooler, and he began to take walks. Probably, some of them overlapped with his father’s, but he only knew for sure about the short one to the temple. He felt stronger each day, part of which he spent in the coffee shop and the bar, again reading the papers. He had lost weight in the clinic.

  He brought himself up to date on the Kimura case; it had faded to brief reports in the middle pages. According to the paper, the police had no leads, just as he’d expected. Soon it would fade away altogether, almost as though it had never happened. He didn’t contact anyone on the force, and no one contacted him; he’d fallen out of the loop.

  One night he took the train into Shinjuku and visited a jazz cellar. He listened to a scratch group and drank beer and smoked, speaking to no one. They’d played old stuff like “My Melancholy Baby. “ It had made him so sad that he’d left after three-quarters of an hour. He’d been there a score of times in the past, but Tokie had never known.

  At his weekly appointments with the psychiatrist, he was withdrawn and uncommunicative.

  Daily now, he was looking for news of ex-governor Tamaki in the papers. The Fatman had stepped back into focus, out of that month of fog; the fellow had been lying low while he’d been battling with other demons. Inspector Aoki especially didn’t mention this to the shrink. There had to be a way to deal with Tamaki, a way to expose the bastard and bring him to justice, a way to penetrate the system. He had some hard thinking to do—when he was fit to do it.

  He had blocked out that night. The leap forward to support her weight, the savage slashes at the cord with the kitchen knife, his desperate cries, the laying on the kitchen table of her drooping figure in the blue kimono, her sensitive fingers now limp, stained with ink from the calligraphy.

  She’d been gone for hours while he’d been sitting in the park, the coffee shop, or the bar. That was something he’d never get over. The police shrink had wanted to talk about it, but he hadn’t, and couldn’t.

  ~ * ~

  The first day after his discharge from the clinic, he spotted the police watcher, across the coffee shop, tucked behind a paper. They were at it again. Aoki stared, then almost got up to go and speak to the detective, but he restrained himself. Play it cool, an inner voice said.

  The earlier surveillance, after his suspension, had only lasted a few days. He saw Watanabe’s hand behind that, and behind this. Starting with his flare-up of anger at the internal affairs cops when they’d been sealing up the case records, and the walkout with his team, doubts about him—his reliability—had obviously accumulated in certain minds. Now, after Tokie’s suicide and his breakdown, they’d been renewed. He might be a dangerous man!

  That afternoon he took the train into Central and then to Roppongi. At Central he took evasive action, automatically using the tricks of criminals to lose his police shadow. “Unless the cop’s well above the average, it’ll do the trick,” he told himself.

  Early in the evening, he stood across the Roppongi street gazing up at the Fatman’s apartment. No lights. Then he remembered it was Friday.

  Aoki caught a train back to Central, bought another ticket, and went downstairs to the platform that was used by the trains going to Flakone. He had five minutes to wait, and he fed coins into a gleaming
machine, extracted a chocolate bar, and ate half of it.

  Forty-five minutes later, he alighted in a leafy district. Outside the station he paused for a moment, checking his memory. The lighted police kiosk was a hundred yards away to his left, and he turned and started off in the opposite direction. This was a circuitous way to the house, but it took him only ten minutes to get there.

  The street was overhung by large trees, which obliterated the meager illumination from the streetlights. The house, narrow-fronted, was partly screened behind a small thicket of slender bamboo. Two stone lanterns were unlit. Dimly, Aoki made out the stepping-stones, set in moss that went to the front door. It had warmed up again, and everything was drenched in humidity and stillness.

  Another dark residence. Where was the bastard tonight? Aoki stared at the silent house. He’d come here to this obscure place without any intention or plan, knowing only that it was one of the Fatman’s destinations, and in his mind, the politician had become a destination himself.