Aoki drank the first cup of the scented liquor straight off, and some little devil made him tap the bowl twice on the table. At the sharp double sound against the wood, Saito’s eyes lifted to the detective’s. He said, “Despite what the papers reported, Ito wasn’t complaisant about Yamazaki’s seduction of his wife. He saw himself as forced to accept it—needed Yamazaki to shield him and his bank from the storm hovering on its horizon, which Yamazaki was able to deliver. “ He shrugged. “When the banking committee and the Bank of Japan moved on the bank, that shield was destroyed.”
Saito sipped at his glass, then also tapped it twice on the table, and his thick lips twisted in a smile. More of his mockery. Aoki watched, expressionless. Where was this black-humored mystery man heading now?
“Being a cuckold doesn’t sit well with any man’s ego. Especially a highflier like him. What were his thoughts when all of that came out? When the whole nation knew? And then last night’s obscenity.” He grimaced. “The police will be here shortly. Then, I think, Mr. Ito is going to be grilled. That ample pink flesh will become an even pinker hue. “ He laughed, a rough sound.
The only laughter Aoki had heard here was the Go-player’s. No. He’d heard Yamazaki’s at the end of the MOF man’s imitation of Madam Ito in the height of passion. He frowned at his sake cup. Saito was still pointing the finger at Ito. Concerning Ito and Yamazaki, did this man have a game in play parallel to the one on the board—just as dark and intense? Yeah, “killer instinct”—from his father or his own subconscious; a suspicious character, anyway. Ito wasn’t going to be the only one for grilling when the CIB arrived.
Aoki placed his hands on his knees and stared at the Go-player. “The Fatman’s Club. Six months ago, Governor Tamaki and his cronies were here. Did you know that, Saito-san? This obscure ryokan seems to have a lot of connections to people and matters that’ve been in the public eye.”
Saito had dropped his eyes to the defunct match. Osaka? Retired? What was the truth? Aoki was squinting to better pick up his reaction, but the other sat still and silent as a Zen monk at midnight meditation.
Aoki put down the cup. From the windows, the snow light flowed into the room, putting a nimbus around Saito’s head. He used the man’s name for the second time. “Saito-san, you’re from Osaka. D’you know the Osaka One restaurant?”
He wondered if Saito had heard.
Then the voice came. “No.”
Aoki drained the last of the sake and stood up. “Good night.” He bowed and left the room. Saito had hardly touched his whiskey. He hoped he’d have time to search the room.
Out of the whirlpool in his head, as he passed through the hall, Aoki thought, If the murderer put the scroll with its brutal Zen motto in the Azalea Room, Yamazaki’s killing was premeditated, not due to any hot rush of passion. It was a message from a tortuous and educated mind, a mind like the Go-player’s.
Everything was still up for grabs—except suddenly he felt that Chairman Ito had stepped into the clear concerning Yamazaki’s murder.
~ * ~
Chapter Seventeen
AT ANY MOMENT SAITO MIGHT down his whiskey and decide to retire. Aoki descended the staircase and traversed a corridor. Here: the northeast corner, the devil’s gate! His lips tightened. He couldn’t believe that stuff. Softly his slippers brushed over the boards; ahead, a glowing pale blob—a painted chrysanthemum. He paused beside it, listening.
Had Kazu Hatano told him about the Fatman’s Club to send him in yet another direction? Though maybe she felt pity for the grief he’d had from the Fatman’s hands.
He slid the door open. The oil lamp had gone out, the room maid’s failure. His flashlight stabbed into a space as organized as Saito’s stones on the board. Except for a suitcase on a stand, there was nothing to show that a guest was in residence. He opened the wardrobe door. The blue suit and a dark overcoat, hung side by side. A wide-brimmed black hat and a radio packed in its carrying case were on the shelf. The suitcase was unlocked, and he lifted the lid. Clothes, immaculately folded. Ready for departure?
Aoki, taking shallow breaths, listened again. Then his fingers probed down the sides of the layered garments and touched something different. Carefully, he extracted a folder. He flipped it open and held the light on the contents. He was looking at Madam Ito’s face on a front page—at clippings on the missing-woman case! Then clippings on Kimura’s story, Tokie’s suicide, the follow-up stories after Kimura’s murder!
Aoki felt as if he’d taken a stunning punch on the forehead. Here was the source of Saito’s amazing knowledge! The guy must have known Ito and Yamazaki were coming here! And Saito had known in advance that Inspector Hideo Aoki was, too—undeniably! He’d only known himself on the morning of his departure.
A new chill invaded Aoki’s heart. Superintendent Watanabe’s face, curly hair, and yellow tie and gloves were glowing hazily in his mind’s eye like a warning beacon in thick fog.
A faint sound in the corridor. Aoki twisted his neck toward the door, straining to hear, heard only the timbers of the ryokan excreting their usual creaks. His facial muscles felt tight against his bones. He replaced the folder, then checked between the layers of clothing. No weapon, no identification papers, no cardboard tube to carry a scroll in. He lowered the suitcase lid and clipped it shut. He must get out.
He swept the flashlight into the alcove and over a scroll. With the same difficulty he’d had with the one in Yamazaki’s room, he read the old Japanese:
Frost! You may fall!
After chrysanthemums there are
no flowers at all!
—OEMARU
It seemed right for the season, to belong in the room. He must go.
He stepped out into the corridor and closed the door, tension coiling and uncoiling in his stomach. Should he grab Saito and put him under restraint? Mightn’t be so easy. Anyway, did the possession of all that information from the past make him Yamazaki’s murderer?
Aoki moved, quiet and fast, back to the stairs. There were too many things in play: Ito’s nervy reticence, his bodyguard in situ outside his room—maybe there was a stew of passion, jealousy, and revenge in the banker’s gut, as Saito was contending, but the Go-player’s real role? Aoki needed a lot more resources than he had available to probe that fellow’s depths.
The sly zipp-zipp of the chef’s knife work came back—and the missing sister, if she was here at all. Had Kazu Hatano kept the assignation with Yamazaki? Shit! Aoki brushed fingers over his cracked lips.
The staircase was lit by an oil lamp, a dirty amber glow. His hand was on the bannister when footsteps sounded in the darkness above. Descending! Aoki turned and, passing the corridor to Saito’s room, slipped back into another. He pressed his shoulders into a doorway. Turning his head to the side, he had a good view of the half-lit stairs.
A man came slowly down the staircase into the meager light. He stopped—a tall figure, head in an attitude of listening. Saito! He gazed into Aoki’s corridor, then turned and entered his own.
On the wooden staircase, more footsteps! Aoki blinked several times, remoistening his eyes. A man in a padded kimono descended, carrying a tray, and the light gleamed on a silver plate cover. Chef Hatano! Aoki couldn’t make out his face, but he recognized the figure, its malevolent intensity. The chef also took the corridor to the Chrysanthemum Room.
For a moment Aoki gazed at the empty hall, then retraced his steps and ascended the staircase. What in hell was that about? Room service—a late-night snack? Saito probably was taking his meals in his room, but at this hour? Why had it been brought by the chef? That guy wouldn’t take kindly to a room maid’s duties, and earlier Aoki’d had the impression that he’d retired for the night.
~ * ~
It was 10:55 P.M. and Aoki stood by the brazier in the front hall. Someone had put more charcoal in before going to bed, and he warmed his hands. Then he gingerly inserted a cigarette between his lips and lit up. The office was dark, the door closed.
“Wake
up, Hideo!’’
He started and looked up quickly as if to see the old man’s face in the shadows. The voice had sounded tired and peeved. But a question lay in the air between them: How had Saito known that this suspended inspector of the TMP was coming to the ryokan?
Aoki dragged the fragrant smoke into his lungs. Like a jolt of electricity from bad wiring, the connection to the gold Fatman badge leaped out of his subsconscious.
One night, in the Ginza, a door had opened across the narrow street from where he’d paused in a doorway to light a cigarette. He’d been about to flick the lighter when a figure emerged just as an electric light snapped on in a room above, illuminating the face.
“Watanabe-san,” Aoki called out, then regretted it. Maybe the boss had a girlfriend and was keeping it quiet. The superintendent’s head swiveled in the direction of the voice, and Aoki stepped out into the street.
“Ah, Aoki-san, working late?” Watanabe was squinting at him.
“Off duty, on my way home.” Aoki smelled alcohol on his boss’s breath.
“Ah! Good night, then.” Watanabe had hurried off. It had been a week prior to the morning Aoki had been summoned to the director general’s room and ordered to kill the investigation.
The flash of gold in Watanabe’s lapel had been the Fatman’s Club badge! They were classmates!
Aoki gazed across the icy, shadowy hall. The connection between Watanabe and Tamaki had tumbled in his head like an acrobat, somersaulted and landed upright, perfectly balanced. The superintendent was in the Fatman’s pocket! Probably the yakuza’s!
Wake up, his father had said!
Almost in a dream, he dropped the cigarette into a sand tray. A scenario was unrolling in his head: The Tokyo Citizens Bank’s affairs with the yakuza had gone sour. In the eyes of the gangster bosses, Chairman Ito and Yamazaki of the MOF were to blame. Ex-governor Tamaki was the connection between the bank and the yakuza’s business. The gangsters were watching Ito and Yamazaki; they had seen the duo’s visit to this isolated region as a terrific opportunity to exact yakuza retribution. Sitting ducks. The Fatman, as head of the banking committee, had grabbed his opportunity to control the bank. It was the first and last time Ito and Yamazaki would sabotage the business of his gangster friends.
And Inspector Aoki. The unpredictable loaded gun; a future threat to the Fatman and his yakuza affiliations. Three birds with one stone! Watanabe, relentlessly patient, must’ve had the pair under long-term personal surveillance in relation to the Madam Ito case, his professional nemesis. But that was no longer his boss’s main game. Aoki saw again Watanabe’s every look, gesture, intonation at their last meeting . . . What a fool he’d been!
Aoki shook his head. The time frame to set up the mountain idyll had been really tight. Never mind, it’s been done. The world at large might not know where Ito and Yamazaki had gone, but Watanabe knew.
Now, with absolute certainty, Aoki knew where he, and the bank chairman, stood—one step from the quicksand Yamazaki had stepped into.
Aoki walked out of the hall. Who was the yakuza operative? It had to be Saito—but a guy in his fifties? Though maybe he wasn’t the knife man. The half-mad chef’s face flashed back. Apart from going bankrupt, what else had he been up to in Osaka?
~ * ~
Aoki stood in the doorway, surveying the dark anteroom. The ragged icicles stabbing down from the eaves had melted to a third of their original size. The Madam Ito mystery had withdrawn from the limelight into the darkness, as had the missing sister and whatever the fascinating but impenetrable Kazu Hatano was up to. Cunningly, Saito had put the spotlight onto Ito’s motive for revenge, and Aoki had been lining up the ex-husband and his daughters with their own such motives. The Go-player had been deliberately feeding the old mystery into his mind, entangling it with the current events to confuse him, until he could be eliminated. All the while Saito had been indulging his black-humored mentality beneath the facade.
Aoki hurried back to the hall and lit his way into the office. Kazu Hatano’s fire had died to embers. With the flashlight he studied the old dark-wood desk. He’d seen her taking papers from it. It seemed to be the heart of the ryokan’s administration, and maybe where she kept the guest register. He slid open one of the drawers: pens and pencils and all the accoutrements of record keeping and correspondence. He shut it, opened the next. No register. A stack of folders. He opened the top one, riffled through invoices for fish, meat, fruit and vegetables, propane, oil, telephone, electricity—
It was headed SENDAI SANATORIUM and addressed to Miss K. Hatano. He drew it out. His eyes raced over the detail. It was a statement of fees for a quarter’s accommodation for a Madam Nagayama. Aoki’s heart had begun to pound, his mouth had dried out, and he let out a long sigh. Was this the answer to the missing woman, or had he merely opened one small lacquered box in a cunningly fitted puzzle? But now he knew something that Kazu Hatano didn’t know he knew. He gazed down at the invoice, memorizing the few details, then slipped it back in order and slid the drawer shut.
From the office door he stared out to the hall, again blinking quickly to moisten his eyes. He listened: just the sounds that were almost in his bloodstream. Yet tonight, a new edge.
The main thing he’d come to look for was the guest register. He’d had a hunch, and he needed to check who’d been in the Fatman’s party last spring, but the book was nowhere in sight. He’d get hold of it later. The Madam Ito case might’ve stepped back behind the main action, but it still itched in his brain.
In the Camellia Room, he rubbed his hands vigorously to warm them. Why hadn’t Saito sat quiet in the anteroom, playing his damned Go, until he was ready to make his move? Why risk playing a cop from Tokyo like a fish on a line? Aoki couldn’t fathom this, or the undercurrent of derisive humor in the man.
He paced the room. The rocklike Shoba was on guard outside Ito’s room. Fervently, he wished he had his pistol, but he had his hands, just like Shoba. Hands against a knife? He must stay awake tonight, and super-alert. He prowled across the room, swinging his arms, then pulled up, frowning. Should he go and join forces with Shoba?
~ * ~
Chapter Eighteen
THAT MADE SENSE. YAMAZAKI HAD gone down, Ito and Aoki were the remaining targets, and together the banker’s bodyguard and himself might stand a chance against the ferocious yakuza killer.
It struck him like a hammer: Something bad was happening! Something he should be preventing. In an instant dread was in his gut, his throat. Ito’s room.
Aoki flung open the door to the corridor and hurried along it to the stairs, then turned into another corridor. The great freeze of the snowbound region roared in his head, and he shivered in the padded kimono as if it were a cotton vest. The light beam danced ahead of his feet. Amid the background “talk” from the ryokan, there was something different. He slowed, switched off the flashlight, and felt his way forward, his left hand brushing wooden walls, tracing over the papered doors.
A corner: the one from which he’d seen Shoba on guard outside the banker’s door, ten paces away, an oil lamp close by. No light now. Another sound—human, moving away, fast.
Aoki jabbed at the button on the flashlight. Hahhh! Shoba was still seated on the chair. Blood was spouting from his neck, cascading over his shoulders and chest, pattering down onto the head. Aoki moved in. Shoba’s eyes were half closed, the lips slightly apart. Spotlit by Aoki’s flashlight, the brick-breaking hands were spread over the conical skull, as if to hold it secure on the blood-drenched lap.
Aoki swung the beam down the corridor until it hit a wall of darkness. Ito! Aoki’s throat muscles felt like steel bands. The bodyguard’s blood was still jetting up like a fountain. The inspector moved past the dead man, slid open the door, and shot the light into the room.
The banker was on his side, leaning on an elbow, blinking at the light. “Who? What is it?” he cried.
“Aoki. Shoba is dead. Murdered.” The fleshy face caught in the light was like parchm
ent. Aoki swung back to the door.
“Aaaa ... I heard something. Shoba moving.”
Aoki hissed softly through his teeth. The only part of Shoba that had moved was his head. There was no hair to lift that by: the killer must’ve laid down the weapon and used both hands to dump it onto the lap and splay the guy’s hands over it. Why do that? Blood must’ve sprayed the bastard’s hands and clothing. A madman . . . the samurai sword.
A few seconds later and he’d have found Ito’s corpse, too. Take a bet on that. Why hadn’t the killer come back out of the darkness to kill them both? Aoki blinked hard with nerves. This was a pro, adept but cautious.
“Come with me,” he snapped. He picked up a padded kimono and thrust it into Ito’s hands. He didn’t want the banker out of his sight. Ito froze in the doorway, staring at the corpse. In the flashlight’s beams the birthmark was framed by the bloody spread fingers. The banker’s mouth hung open; his chest was heaving, his breath wheezing. Aoki pulled at his arm and led him back to the stairs and up them. On the small landing, the samurai sword was still in its scabbard on the wall. Aoki looked at it grimly. Knives and cleavers aplenty in the kitchen. Sharp as razors. He’d decided where to go.
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