Kamakura Inn

by Marshall Browne

  Aoki climbed from the bath and reached for a towel. Out of the steam, the official’s voice came, thick and nasal. “Sincere condolences on your wife’s passing. A sad and regrettable situation. “

  Aoki gazed into the steamy bath at the indistinct figure. Last night, Ito had spoken similar words. What a strange place, a bizarre moment, to make such a remark.

  Aoki wrapped the towel around his waist, put on his yukata and slippers, bowed briefly at the recumbent form, and left the bathhouse.

  In the Camellia Room, he considered who’d be paying for Yamazaki’s mountain interlude. Yamazaki wouldn’t have put his hand in his pocket for innumerable costly banquets, golf dates, and trips like this one; Ito and his executives would’ve been the free-spenders. The monolithic government ministries were ripe with such practices—and the political scene. The power brokers who’d fucked him!

  His anger cooled. Yamazaki would be immune, like ex-governor Tamaki, to any qualms of conscience; it was the system, their home ground. However, the affair with the chairman’s wife was on another plane. A thought struck Aoki: Might it have been part of a bargain with Ito? Far from being a weak and feckless cuckold, had Ito coolly traded his beautiful wife to the sensual Yamazaki to protect himself as the bank weakened? Had that possibility occurred to the senior police investigators on the case?

  He’d surprised himself with the thought.

  Put on the padded, kimono. I’m worried about you. Your clothes are not adequate here. It was Tokie’s voice in his brain.

  Yes, I also recommend it, his father said.

  Stock-still, Aoki stared at the picture of the camellia as the voices faded in his head. A month after his wife’s death, he’d begun talking to them both. Walking around the silent apartment, sitting in the coffee shop or the bar, he’d say, “What do you think of this?” Or “Do you remember that day?” This was the first time they’d spoken.

  He removed his Western clothing and put on the kimono. Immediately he felt warmer, and hungry. From a drawer he took a chocolate bar and broke it in half.

  It was seven days after his article appeared that Eichi Kimura had been murdered. Assistant Inspector Nishi had told him that the reporter had been working on a follow-up story, calling on contacts, doing his own research this time. Kimura’s poor wife, finding that body.

  The old-fashioned phone jangled. Aoki’s head snapped up, out of the past, away from a vision of burst-out eyeballs, a half-severed tongue, and sliced-off ears.

  ~ * ~

  Chapter Ten

  SAITO’S ROUGH VOICE WAS IN Aoki’s ear. “I would like to continue our conversation and drink whiskey with you. I’ll be at the Go board from five thirty.”

  Aoki hesitated, then agreed to meet at six thirty and hung up. For a moment he’d thought the line to outside had been restored. Conversation! It had been mainly one-way traffic, though that was partly Aoki’s choice. What else did the guy have to say? Again, the feeling that something significant was about to happen came down on him.

  At 6:15 P.M. the electricity failed. Aoki, about to go to the anteroom, fumbled for the flashlight. Its beam stabbed out, transfixing a bonsai like a searchlight. He stood, listening. During the previous night the stream had gone silent; it was iced over, submerged by snow.

  He lit his way along the corridors. Under electric light the ryokan had seemed barely in the present; under oil lamps and candles, which had been rapidly put in place, it had regressed to the past. Aoki grunted, smelling the odor of molten candle wax. Flexing his shoulders in the warmth of the kimono, he paused in a small hall. On an impulse, he entered a corridor new to him.

  The voice, low but fierce in tone, was coming from behind a door on which a white azalea was painted. Aoki stopped beside it, trying to make out the words. Another voice, calmer, responded. Then the fierce one again. “Who called the dogs off the bastard? And why—”

  Ito’s!

  Beneath Aoki, a floorboard creaked. The angry voice cut off. Quickly the policeman moved on, eyes on the flashlight beam flickering ahead of his slippers. Behind him the azalea door slid open. He glanced back. In the lamplight from the room, Ito was peering along the corridor. To the banker, Aoki would just be a shadowy figure.

  He went on. Was Yamazaki the other party in the room? Hitherto, things had seemed equable between the two. Perhaps it was the bodyguard, Shoba. At the foot of the stairs, Aoki pulled up. The Fatman! Ito must’ve been referring to the investigation. The situation that had plunged Aoki into the abyss. Who called the dogs off the bastard? . . . Aoki drew in air. Freezer-cold air. He ascended the stairs to the hall.

  Kazu Hatano was there, dressed tonight in a white kimono, speckled with an indeterminable color, and an obi, with a design of flying dragons. She finished giving instructions to a maid, who hurried away with a secretive, sliding sound, and turned to him with her official smile. “I’m so sorry, sir, the electricity line’s gone down, somewhere on the mountain.” She spoke calmly, her face flecked with tiny shadows from an oil lamp that was not yet giving an even light.

  Telephone, now electricity. Aoki stared at the daughter of the missing woman. Her face seemed one with the kimono, a fascinating effect. “I hadn’t counted on weather like this.”

  She gave a delicate shrug. “The cold is coming up out of the ground.”

  Aoki wondered where her twin was, then wondered if Mori had reported to the proprietor that he’d asked for a woman—though unless she was already under the ryokan’s roof, no woman would be coming to the Camellia Room tonight. He bowed and left the hall.

  ~ * ~

  Half of Saito’s face was lit by lamplight, the other half in shadow. He was quite still, looking like an art photograph. A faint smell of sake emanated from his kimono. He raised his head unhurriedly. “There you are. Piece by piece the technology goes down, and still the snow falls.”

  Aoki’s eye was caught by movement, and he looked through the dining room door. A maid was setting the far corner table.

  “Ah, yes,” Saito said. “Despite events, they’re going to dine again on regional delicacies, and doubtless they’ll continue their conversation. A more urgent one. “ He rang the small bell; when a maid came, he ordered whiskey. “Will you?”

  Aoki shook his head and seated himself. His stomach felt too nervous to drink whiskey. He studied the board and couldn’t tell what new moves had been made, except that Black seemed to have massed at the top center.

  Unobtrusively, the bodyguard entered the room and went to a chair in a far corner. Aoki glanced at him. It was cold over there, but that guy wouldn’t feel anything.

  Saito ignored the new arrival. “The Master was ill. They kept having recesses, and it seemed the match might be abandoned.”

  Aoki nodded. This man knew he was in the police, knew his personal history. Why hadn’t he mentioned it?

  “I find this fact interesting: The informant identified as X in the newspapers said both men had betrayed Madam Ito with other women. Do you remember that? X reported that Ito had shown his wife contempt in the carelessness of his complaisance, and that Yamazaki, after two years of enjoying her, was moving to cut the connection. Each, by his own route, was abandoning her.”

  Aoki did indeed remember.

  “X described how in a garden teahouse Madam Ito wept while remonstrating with Yamazaki, how even as she wept she was charming, not once raising her voice.” Saito paused, as if contemplating the image.

  Aoki frowned. The scene was also in his head. He turned quickly. Ito and Yamazaki had appeared in the corridor door. Ito’s face was taut; the soft flesh of it now appeared compacted into pronounced ridges and hollows like refrozen snow. With a tense flick of his head, the banker glanced at the two men at the Go board. In contrast, Yamazaki’s easy arrogance seemed unaffected; his look deliberately traveled over the board. Aoki wondered if the man ever recalled the teahouse scene.

  Across the room Shoba shot to his feet, bowing. Aoki licked his lip. His sixth sense, his street vibes, told h
im that something deep was in play, deep and complicated. He looked down at his hands, frowning. Here he was, talking about the old, unsolved case with this Go-player, as two of the main protagonists moved past like ghosts, while their future was being implacably carved out, or carved up, in faraway Tokyo.

  A new question darted at him: Was Saito personally known to them? He’d observed a hint of wariness in their attitude to the Go-player, though most prominent men were suspicious of outsiders.

  Aoki ate at the same table as before. The dark old timbers strutted and braced high in the ceiling were different from the head-scraping rafters in the other parts of the ryokan. This room was a later addition. He leaned back and stared up into dense shadows. He was certain he could make out murky, painted faces, gazing back at him. The ryokan was getting into his mind, the cold was getting into his bones, but he had more appetite. When did Saito eat? Probably he dined early, in his room.

  The two at the far table had settled into another banquet, and the maids brought dish after dish. The detective watched them drink a toast in sake. To whom, or what? For me, it’s all shadow play, he thought.

  In a swirl of kimono, Kazu Hatano came to them, bowing, inquiring with a cold smile about the meal in an impassive play of formalities. She bowed to Aoki. A maid went out to the anteroom carrying a bowl of sour plums. Aoki brooded over his own warm sake. He’d ordered a plebeian meal, tempura and yakitori, fare not on the menu. The maid had taken this order without query. Two or three nights a week he’d eaten at cheap restaurants, while his wife and father dined at home on Tokie’s delicacies. Those days and hours, grief, guilt, a numbing sense of loss, were never far from the surface of his mind. Images of his wife kept emerging. In one, she stepped out from an alcove in this ryokan and watched him come and go. In another, her head was bent, her body erect, as she sat on a cushion making delicate yet sure brushstrokes on white paper, a breeze from the sea teasing at a wisp of hair.

  Aoki’s sake cup was frozen at his lips. That, and similar moments, he should’ve seized upon—prolonging and savoring them. Locked into his police life, he hadn’t. He drained the cup at a gulp. The cold from the mountains was flowing into his soul, more and more freely. At least his mind was now occupied with new questions.

  He got up and left the dining room. In the doorway he stopped and dabbed at his lips with a handkerchief. Blood. They were cracking in the astringent air. From the heart of the flickering firelight and darting shadows, Saito said, “On November 28 the match was drawing to a close. As is traditional, the players were ‘sealed in cans,’ shut off from the outside world, as we are. The aging Master was sealed into his own mind. It was his last match.”

  He’d spoken in a hard, judgmental voice. In the tricky light, Aoki couldn’t make out the look on his face. The detective stopped near the board. When Saito looked up, his eyes shone like the black Go stones.

  “My theory?” He’d reverted to Aoki’s earlier question as if there’d been no time gap. “I see a woman with a brown paper bundle moving through the crowds of Tokyo Central station, going to a locker, setting a puzzle, giving those two trouble, symbolically abandoning a humiliating existence.”

  Aoki stared. “If you’re right, where did she go?”

  “Where do you think? “ He spread his hands at their surroundings.

  Aoki didn’t respond, and the Go-player became reabsorbed in the battle. Aoki thought, Can I penetrate to the heart of this case, get a breakthrough for Watanabe, for myself, unearth this woman, or find out what her fate was? With her husband and her lover returning to the ryokan, her daughter here, and the old questions surrounding her disappearance blowing through the corridors like new breezes, maybe he had half a chance.

  ~ * ~

  The woman was to come at ten, if she came. Aoki didn’t care much one way or the other; his request had been impulsive. So far as sex was concerned, he supposed he might gradually find his way back to it.

  In the Camellia Room the oil lamp cast feeble light; another chamber of shadows. He found the remaining half of the chocolate bar and bit into it. Dessert. . .

  On his second trip to see Aoki in Kamakura, Superintendent Watanabe had turned into a proponent of mountain rest cures, but it had just been one of his smoke screens. Somehow his boss had learned of the Ito-Yamazaki junket, and he’d had to move fast. He must have asked himself why those men were going back to the missing woman’s old home. Aoki frowned intensely. The cop who’d run the missing-woman case, who’d lost his promotion over it, had kept an iron in the fire, and Hideo Aoki was now the one holding it!

  Aoki savored the chocolate. Yet was that really what it was about? No briefing? Not a word? It stank of double-dealing and trouble. Forget the superintendent. He dropped into a deeper meditation and in a moment believed that he was hearing the pulsating heart of the ryokan as it pumped blood through its aged arteries. In reality, the next thing he was conscious of was the sliding sound of stockinged feet moving over the corridor boards, and the door slid open.

  Aoki gasped. A geisha in full regalia!

  Kazu Hatano was kneeling in the doorway.

  Aoki felt the hair on the back of his neck prickle. She bowed low, displaying the smooth sheen of her hair and its single gold ornament. Then, still on her knees, she moved into the room and bowed again, arms crossed, palms against her breasts. Her face was a powdered mask, aglow in the dusk.

  “Kazu Hatano!” he breathed.

  She was six feet from him, and a flowery fragrance enfolded him. “No, sir, I’m her sister.” Her voice was a whisper. The kimono appeared to be of an azure color with deep red leaves dappling it. Aoki gazed at this woman sprung from the heart of old traditions, from the heart of autumn. The twin sister! He didn’t know what to say.

  But from now on words were redundant. A geisha of a certain type, she perfectly understood his mood and requirements, no conversation, no games, no food, no liquor. She turned the oil lamp down until the room was nearly dark. After a time she lay on him, his erection within her, her hair, cold and tensile, brushing his face. He was afloat in her perfume. Slowly she straightened up, arched her back, and began to move in a slight rocking motion within which her vaginal muscles gripped his penis in a delicate, yet ardent, separate movement. It seemed to Aoki that they were soaring above the ryokan and the snowy mountains, that stars were dropping past them on all sides, and then he was a falling star himself.

  He awoke to the flickering sensation of her tongue and the pressure of her lips. In that warm, painted mouth his cock began to respond, and the moment of ejaculation brought a harsh gasp from deep in his throat. He slept again.

  A draught of cold air striking his head woke him. The door had just slid shut, or was it part of the dream? She had gone, yet he could still feel her deft fingers tracing the long welt of scar tissue on his side, the legacy of a Tokyo gangster’s knife.

  He lay back amazed afresh at the geisha’s identity, at her behind-the-scenes presence. Where in this rambling structure did the twin sister of Kazu Hatano reside?

  Could the missing woman have been concealed here in the family’s ancient home all this time? That must be Saito’s conjecture! Seven years ago, surely the police would’ve had the same idea, and searched? Aoki hadn’t been familiar with that part of the investigation.

  Warm, heavy-limbed, half-dreaming, cocooned by the ryokan’s creaking timbers and rustling fabrics, Inspector Aoki sent his mind drifting off along remote corridors, in pursuit of a rustling kimono.

  ~ * ~

  Chapter Eleven

  INSPECTOR AOKI HAD READ ABOUT such storms, and now he dreamed of them blowing down from Siberia, howling over the Japan Sea, drawing up moisture and dumping it as snow on the western “reverse” side of Japan. All life was flying to shelter, including Aoki. In midflight, up to his chest in snow, his eyes flicked open. He sat upright and was swept by dizziness. He put his head into his hands. Then he threw back the quilt and stood up, his right arm thrust out as though to ward off danger. />
  The kotatsu was cold ashes, smelling acrid and sour. He fumbled for matches and lit the wick of the oil lamp. Shivering, he put on the padded kimono and reached for the phone. Still dead. He checked his watch: 8:05 A.M.

  On the futon, the cat stirred and stretched. Aoki gazed at it. “When did you arrive?” It rubbed against his leg, purring an answer, its eyes upturned to his face.

  He turned and switched on the radio. Static crackled, then a voice surfaced.

  Senior government officials are locked in discussions with directors of the Tokyo Citizens Bank. A team from the Bank of Japan is investigating the extent of the problems. Financial commentators report that the bank’s fate is in the hands of the government. The bank’s chairman and a senior Ministry of Finance official, last seen together, remain missing.