Still concentrating on the formations before him, Saito said, “Are you bitter? “
Aoki exhaled his breath softly.
“Is my question impertinent?”
“No.” Retired was the entry against the man from Osaka’s name in the register. Did retired businessmen become hobbyists on the nation’s crime spectaculars, Go-players, and commentators on the financial world? Was that it?
Aoki touched his mole. Lateral thinking, or was it surreal? In these frozen mountains his ideas, his theories, were changing direction like wind shifts. He cleared his throat. “I wouldn’t say bitter. Hatred for the system.”
Saito’s eyes swept the board. “Ah, the system. Weren’t you a little naive? I mean, a TMP investigator of your experience taking on ex-governor, ex-minister Tamaki, the ruling party, and ultimately your own superiors in the police? From a base of no power whatsoever!” His eyes had become slits. “It’s the move a samurai with no wish to live longer might have made in his world.”
Aoki reddened. What choice had he had? He’d been under orders, and then Tokie had played her hand, and down he’d spiraled. His own case was beginning to feel like one he’d studied at the academy, not his life. He had several questions in his mind to put to Saito, but they should wait till the prefecture cops arrived. The same with Ito—and with Hatano.
“No comment?” Saito threw him a calculating glance.
Samurai! He’d just been doing the job he’d been assigned to. This man had misread the situation—just as Tokie had apparently seen him as engaged in a noble cause against corruption in high places. Sure, he’d wanted to see justice done, to do a pro job, but it’d been his personal angst, after putting in a horrendous amount of work and driving himself and his team into the ground, that had hit him like a pile driver.
Click-click. Saito’s hand was in the bowl of black stones. “Your superiors went down like rice stalks before the wind. It was unfortunate your wife took it to the journalist. No—tragic. Hatred of the system? Ito and Yamazaki are icons of it, of the same tarnished caliber as Tamaki. ‘The gray men who destroyed your life.’ I quote the Tokyo Shimbun.” Aoki grimaced; quite a bit of such stuff had been printed. Saito smiled cryptically. “Not bitter?” His voice resonated disbelief.
Aoki was becoming angrier. Damn his teasing questions. Was this Osaka fellow saying his mind might be off the rails, that he might be targeting this class of guy? That was crazy, because it was only about Tamaki. If he could ever drag the ex-governor under the spotlight of justice, he’d do it; if not, there was another option, and that was where the Go-player’s thinking had gone. Even ahead of his own!
Aoki held up his hands and studied them in the firelight. They were bloodred. He realized that, in his subconscious, he had made an appointment with Tamaki of that kind—if he could find no way to bring the Fatman before the law. He gazed at the Go board. The Go-player had cut very close to the bone.
Saito looked up. “The wonder of our country is that the old ways survive. From the furthest mountain village to the quiet suburban garden, the old Japan remains, despite the chaos of the markets. It goes on singing its song like the evening wind in pine trees, even in the records of the Go association! Change, with all its clatter and racket, might seem the main game, but in the end it’s an echo of history. “
Aoki stared at the big, hunched, black-kimonoed figure. In a burst of energy, the fire crackled and sparks flew.
Saito said, “The match finished on December 4. The last session was intense, close combat. All their combined art was in the moves. Each reached for stones with great rapidity. ‘The sky clouded over from shortly after noon, and crows cawed incessantly’—Kawabata’s words about this phase. “
Aoki frowned. The cawing of crows was a death knell. His father had said that once.
“The last play was Black 237. At forty-two minutes past two it was over, and the Master had lost. “
Saito smiled up from the board as though the old dead master had just died again, under his hands.
Ito entered the room and went in to dinner. Aoki followed. The bank chairman sat at the table he’d shared with Yamazaki, having a solitary banquet, a farewell to the ryokan and this bizarre and tragic interlude, Aoki thought. And to fame, reputation, and fortune. Tomorrow, or the next day, the road would be open, and the outside world would pour down on them like an avalanche.
~ * ~
Inspector Aoki walked through the semidarkness checking out the status of things. He stood in the shadows near the mouth of the corridor that led to Ito’s room. Ito had retired, and the squat and muscular Shoba was seated on a chair outside the door, settled for the night. Aoki retraced his steps. Ito was taking precautions. Was that a mark of his innocence?
He lingered on the small landing on Ito’s floor. Mounted on the wall near his head was a sword, a samurai weapon. Even in the dusk the elaborate enamel-and-gilt scabbard glowed. He gazed at it.
The Go-player has the killer instinct. You used that phrase, Hideo, one of the few times you talked to me about your work. That is a murderous match he is playing—one of the turning points in the history of Go, when a way of art, of symmetry, surprise, and nobility, was smashed like a beautiful ceramic bowl.
His father!
It became merely a test of strength, a testimony to victory and defeat.
In the freezing, empty stairwell, Aoki said, “But this man just replays a match that originated with others. “
Replays this match year after year. There are a myriad classic matches to choose from. The voice sounded weary.
“So—what are you saying?” Aoki said urgently. “That he’s a killer in real life?”
But the old man was saying nothing more.
What had been smoldering in his subconcious burst into flame in Aoki’s mind like the anteroom fire, knocking his father’s voice clear out of his head. There was no missing sister—not here at Kamakura Inn. Another lie! Kazu Hatano had been the geisha who’d come to his room!
~ * ~
Chapter Sixteen
KAZU HATANO THE GEISHA! IN the dark of the Camellia Room, with the somehow softer voice telling him that she was the sister, in the height of passion, could he’ve been fooled? Aoki had returned to the corridor outside his room, a cigarette dangling from his lip.
Easily. In the semidarkness and slipperiness of this world, it was hard to take a firm grip on anything, yet a doubt about it nagged at him. Impulsively, he turned to go back to the office.
Ten minutes later he was shown into a small bedroom on a lower level. The sister’s room. The maid whom Kazu Hatano had instructed to bring him here lit the oil lamp and went out to the corridor to wait. He glanced around. The only personal item in the room was a framed photograph on a table. He gazed at it. The twin sisters. For sure, they looked identical; who was who, he couldn’t tell. He grunted and opened the wardrobe. It held female clothing, including several elaborate kimonos. He moved the hangers and sighed. Here it was, the azure kimono dappled with the deep red leaves. He’d begun to think that he might have dreamed that night. But who had been wearing it?
Dinner was well over, and presumably Chef Hatano would’ve finished for the night. Aoki had consulted the floor plan Kazu Hatano had given him and knew where the father’s room was. He’d decided to step over the line of his suspension and go for the guy. The bastard had clammed up earlier. “Let’s see what we can do about that,” Aoki muttered as he descended the stairs.
Minutes later, a door slid open and the wiry man’s eyes flicked over the detective. Aoki thought tensely, With the speed of his filleting knife. A modest room, from what he could see past the blocking figure. He said, “I want to ask you some more questions.”
Hatano said nothing. His face was shadowed, yet the two dark patches on his forehead stood out. Aoki coughed, clearing away the last cigarette. “Okay, what did bring you here two years ago?” Forcefully he said, “And I want to know what happened in Osaka, or here, for you to make the move.”
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br /> Aoki scrutinized the face before him. Every gram of this man exuded anger and menace. Did he have a tongue? The detective snarled, “I haven’t got all night; I’ve got murder on my plate—not fancy-cut sashimi.”
The chef came to life, exhaling a violent hiss through his teeth. “Murder. So what! There’re other things as deadly.”
Aoki blinked at the force of the man’s breath. He’d hit a nerve. “So?”
“Sssss—I owned a restaurant. My food was the best in Osaka, but you’d need a palate to know that. Yet I went bankrupt. So what? It happens, but it always happens if the loan sharks’ve got you by the balls.” He thrust his torso forward. “You cops should look into them. Banks don’t want to know the small businessman, so desperate fools take a month’s loan to get over a cash-flow glitch at forty-nine fucking percent a month! Fifteen times the legal limit! The glitch is longer, you’re trapped in a fucking repayment-borrowing cycle, business and house go down the tube, and maybe your fucking sanity.” He spat out, “These sharks are business-killers, life-destroyers!”
The savage bitterness came directly into Aoki’s face. Of course, he knew about the small-business warfare in the nation. It bred crime. But it didn’t shift murder from dead center in his mind. What Hatano said sounded like the truth, but the whole truth? This chef seemed like a candidate for deeper and dirtier problems, including his ex-wife’s disappearance and maybe Yamazaki’s brutal demise.
Aoki rocked slightly on his heels. Their faces were eighteen inches apart. He was at home dealing with this kind of shit, unlike the Itos of the world. “So you dragged your ass back here.”
Hatano’s eyes burned in the gloom. “Bankrupted, personally fucked, where else d’you go but back to your family?” He had locked his right fist in his left hand. He sneered, “There’s a lot of people I could take a knife to, but they’re in Osaka.”
The snarled phrases seemed to be curving through the air at Aoki like knives. He’d picked up the slur about his plebeian food choices. He frowned. He’d thought of something. “What was the name of this amazing restaurant?”
“Osaka One.” Hatano almost choked on the words, as if reluctant to speak of the dead.
Aoki gave a brusque nod. “So you’re an expert on that kind of mayhem, but what’s your take on this murder? Right in the bosom of your family, a family with a lot of interesting history. “
Hatano’s small mouth had snapped shut.
“What’s your take on your long-missing wife, your missing daughter? “
But the chef had clammed up again. A rush of blood to the head had brought the Osaka debacle spilling out, but family matters were something else. Now his eyes said, Fuck off. Aoki grunted, turned his back on Kazu Hatano’s father, and headed uphill through corridors, stairways, and semidarkness. It was 8:25 P.M.
~ * ~
Her office was quiet with the stirring of the charcoal fire when Aoki knocked and entered. His heart was going faster. She was there, seated at the desk; seemed always there. Presumably she slept, ate, washed and groomed herself, had conversations, but in any of those manifestations she was a mystery to Aoki.
He decided, Quiet with her thoughts—and what thoughts! She wore the dark blue kimono. Was it she or her sister who’d worn the azure one with the deep red leaves—in the Camellia Room?
Face-to-face again! The thrill that had surged through his system at 3:45 P.M.—he knew the time precisely—hadn’t subsided, but now it was mixed up with everything else in his mind. Had he had this woman in the most intimate way, or had he not? It was amazing to him that he didn’t know. He cleared his throat. “Your sister?”
“We’ve concluded our search. She hasn’t been found.”
“And the maid was the last to see her—at eight thirty last night?”
“Yes.”
Unconsciously, he was shaking his head. “No doubt the local police’ll bring in sniffer dogs.”
She watched him impassively, so calm in the face of yet another family disappearance—such an incriminating disappearance—and of his discovery that her father was here. That flash of the inner woman last night, the decent and troubled persona, seemed a total illusion. Now she was impenetrable.
She studied the desktop, then looked up. “Governor Tamaki was here in the spring with a party from Tokyo.” Aoki blinked hard. Tamaki here! “The Fatman’s Club came for three days. Only one fat man, really.”
Aoki stared at her, rubbing fingers along his cheekbone. He knew of the club from the investigation, a gang of the Fatman’s classmates and sycophants, a kind of dining club and secret society. So they’d been here. His voice tight with curiosity and excitement, he said, “Were Ito and Yamazaki in the party?”
“No.” She showed her surprise. “Those two would have their own secret clubs, and they’d relate to the defilement of women.” She spoke with deep contempt. “I believe it was an inner circle of the club, all his old classmates.”
A muscle in Aoki’s cheek jumped. Classmates. The bond of a lifetime. “Did you know or recognize anyone, apart from the governor?”
She hesitated. “No.”
“What did they do here?”
“Drank and ate and talked. Once they went for a walk to look at the new leaves.”
Aoki nodded. It was hard to imagine Tamaki coming to such a remote place. He remembered the Fatman had once described himself in a magazine interview as “an urban animal.”
“Strange men,” she said. “They’d drink their sake straight down and then tap the cup twice on the table. They broke some. And they all wore a gold badge. “
“What kind of badge?”
“A small one—the silhouette of a fat man. It was meant to be Governor Tamaki, I think. Not a flattering likeness. The belly was huge.”
Aoki gazed at her, amazed that she’d volunteered this information—and at the flow of words. Then he realized she’d created a diversion—away from the sister and her father.
The badge had stirred something in him that had the illusive flavor of both premonition and memory. He creased his brow, but nothing came. He moved his head from side to side, loosening muscles.
She gave him a measuring look. A brass kettle was singing softly on a brazier. “Could I offer you tea?”
Surprised, he nodded assent. She produced two old, unmatched bowls. The whisk she used in them made only a whisper, and in the bowls the tea became green froth. Tokie and his father had frequently engaged in this ritual. “A serene moment,” his father had said, staring into Aoki’s eyes. Usually, he’d gone to the kitchen and opened a beer—another facet of their lives he hadn’t chosen to enter.
This tea warmed his insides. The bowl he held, hot in his hands, had an inner glow in the dusky room, and the firelight gleamed on its glazed surface. He found himself sinking into a quieter space; all his senses seemed more intense in these mountains. He shook himself out of this. He hadn’t mentioned her father again.
Out of the quietude of the ceremony, she said, “In the northeast, a devil’s gate has opened, and evil is flowing in.” Aoki’s face was blank. Was this some kind of mountain superstition? She was deadly serious. “In the old days, they’d cut off the northeast corners of buildings like this to counter such an entry. I regret my ancestors neglected to do it.”
She looked beyond Aoki to the fire. Her voice had sounded depressed. Being in mountains when you were a stranger to them was a tricky business, but he couldn’t pay attention to this. He’d been admiring the precise movement of her lips: sculpting words with a new vivacity. This woman was strung tight with sensitivity; she could well know of his newly aroused feelings for her.
He thought of something. “What’s the ryokan’s connection with Kamakura?”
“One of my ancestors was a cultured man. He admired the shogunate of Yoritomo, at Kamakura.”
Aoki absorbed this. Finishing the tea, he stood up, gave thanks, bowed, and left the office. In the hall, he consulted his watch. It was getting late. What was Saito up to?
The Go board was now a tract of black stones. Aoki blinked at it. Winner take all. Throughout the re-created match, Saito had been sitting in the challenger’s place—the executioner’s, for in this 1938 match, the Master of Go had been “executed.” No candles tonight; a single oil lamp glowed on a table, backed up by the light from the log fire. His father was right about Saito’s killer instinct, and Aoki wondered if the old man was back in the shadows, watching them.
Saito, an apparently untouched whiskey before him, motioned Aoki to sit. “A drink?” Aoki chose warm sake; it would build on the toehold of warmth the tea had taken in him. The bell tinkled. The sake was brought while they remained silent. Decisively, Aoki thought, I’ll search his room after this, if I can do it.
Kamakura Inn Page 15
