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 him 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 wit
h 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.
Not missing. Here! Just up to their necks in snow. Aoki switched off the radio and rubbed warmth into his hands. Today was the seventh anniversary. He wondered if it was significant only to him. For sure, Ito and Yamazaki would be rushing back to Tokyo the moment the road was open.
A woman’s voice called him from outside the door, then it slid open: Mori, in her hands a small lacquer tray with his tea and a tube of ointment on it. She bowed. “For your lips, sir.” She clucked her tongue and pointed at the floor, and Aoki saw that two dead mice were lined up there. “She’s brought them to you, sir,” the maid said.
A red woolen scarf wrapped around his neck, the ointment smeared on his lips, Aoki left his room. Last night flashed back, like the aftertaste of a delicious dessert, soon eaten and soon forgotten. Yet the appearance of Kazu Hatano’s twin sister, in such a role, had amazed him.
Aoki walked the corridors. Saito’s theory that the missing woman had deposited her bloody clothes in the station locker and fled to the family’s ryokan might merely be the Go-player’s fantasy, and how far could he be trusted, anyway? All his statements were sardonic, apparently infused with black humor. She’d been dead and gone these seven years, not hiding out. Her photo had been in every paper, on every TV screen. This Osaka guy could be just laying down a bullshit trail, following some personal, sardonic agenda.
Aoki shook his head. Now he was fantasizing! His own photo had appeared beside Tamaki’s in the papers. Newspaperman Eichi Kimura’s had also been bracketed with the Fatman on the front pages, but only once; then the party had killed the story. The journalist had come uninvited into his life, and he’d hardly known him, yet he’d died because of their wives’ friendship.
Ascending the stairs to the hall, Aoki remembered the man Kimura had met the night before his murder. In a bar in Shinjuku, Madam Kimura had told the police, the mystery man had suggested to her husband that he back off writing about the Fatman. Big money was offered, and she said Kimura had turned it down. A mistake; he should’ve at least played along. According to his wife, he’d tried to question the man, whom he guessed was a government bureaucrat. Kimura hadn’t described him further. By seven the next morning, her husband was dead.
Ito and Yamazaki—would they be able to claw back lost ground when they escaped from here, to surround and eliminate the forces against them, as that damned Saito was doing on the Go board? Maybe Saito was no more than an ardent observer of lurid crimes, who’d struck it lucky at this ryokan where he’d come to view autumn leaves and replay the classic Go match. Aoki shrugged and shook his head.
He was already at the Go board. This morning he wore a dark green kimono, which appeared almost black in the gloom. Click-click-click: stones in an unusual spurt. The big man leaned back from the table and motioned Aoki to take a seat. There was a glint in his eye. Instead of sitting, Aoki moved to stand near the fire.
“So, Madam Ito hurried back to the mountains and went into hiding within these walls. Have you thought any more about that?”
Aoki frowned. Again Saito had resumed a previous conversation as though there’d been no interval, one of his tricks. He said, “Where’s the evidence for that?”
“The whole case was short on evidence.” Saito placed his big hands on his lap. “Your personal case was almost as dramatic as Madam Ito’s, wasn’t it? Especially your wife. Please accept my condolences on that tragedy.”
Yet again! The intimacy of these strangers’ condolences was unreal to Aoki.
Saito shrugged, at the fate that life dealt out, and turned back to the Go board. Aoki, his face dour, went to breakfast.
At the moment Aoki returned from the dining room, Yamazaki entered the anteroom and paused to gaze at the board. The MOF official had on a padded gray kimono touched with red silk on the breast; his height, perfect grooming, and obvious composure under pressure gave him a power-edged elegance. An ivory-handled dagger, with a razor-sharp blade . . . Aoki grimaced. He was turning into a damned poet, sponsored by his family and the ryokan.
Yamazaki said, “The Master’s play was affected by his bad health. The match was his swan song. After all, no one goes on forever.” The nasal voice was as thick as syrup. Aoki’s eyes narrowed. Yamazaki knew which match was being replayed. Saito smiled but said nothing. The MOF man gave an acerbic smile and went in to breakfast.
Saito asked, “Will we have our game of chess this evening?” Aoki bowed his agreement and went to the hall.
“This storm is really something,” Kazu Hatano said, coming out of her office. “A different world from Tokyo, isn’t it? It’s a great inconvenience for our guests.” Yes, it most certainly is, Aoki thought. Even at her most businesslike her voice intrigued him. She studied him, as though expecting a request, but he had no requests to make. Today she wore a dark blue kimono flecked with wh
ite, like falling snow against a night sky. Did she ever wear Western clothes? She lingered behind the counter. “Of course, now I must worry about fresh food.”
Fresh food? What was she thinking about the seventh anniversary? It had to be in her mind. Amazingly like her sister, and where was the sister right now? Doubtless this woman knew of her visit to the Camellia Room; the charge would be on his bill. He glanced up. Under the snow’s weight, the roof was emitting creaks as though a vise were being tightened on unseasoned wood.
From the bench, Shoba’s eyes flicked at him, then away. The gray, snowy daylight hardly penetrated the small windows, yet the red birthmark on the bodyguard’s head shone like a beacon in the gloom. “Beyond this place, the real world still exists,” Aoki told himself as he headed back to his room. The twin sisters must have some idea of the circumstances of their mother’s disappearance, might know it all. If alive, how would she look today? She’d be in her early fifties. At some point he was going to question Kazu Hatano about the case, but he needed an opening, and the circumstances and timing would have to be just right. Even then, it might be a useless attempt.
Ito waited on a landing, his expression stern and peering, his thick lips working over his teeth. He raised a small hand to stop the detective. His breath hissed. “Mr. Aoki, why are you here?”
An ambush. Aoki was startled at the impoliteness. The man’s dark eyes were gleaming at him from their fleshy pouches. “I’m on vacation.”
“Vacation?” The banker stared at the detective for a long moment, scrutinizing Aoki’s face even more intensely. “Ah, yes.” He nodded to himself and moved on up the stairs, stiff-backed with tension.
Aoki went to his room. Vacation! Even in his own ears it sounded false. The banker was wire-tight with nerves. Join the club.
Rendezvous at Kamakura Inn Page 9
