Rendezvous at Kamakura Inn

by Marshall Browne

  The cat sat outside his door gazing up at the image of the camellia. She came to Aoki and brushed against his legs, and he stroked her. “You were doing some killing last night,” he said, “before you bunked down with me.”

  Six months ago, a rainy night in Ginza. Aoki’s classmate Shimamura was a thin fellow in a rumpled suit. At their junior high school he’d been a ball of energy, nicknamed “Mexican Jumping Beans.” He worked at the Ministry of Finance. The MOF people were the cream—graduates of Tokyo University. Aoki was seeking a specialist’s perspective as to how persons such as ex-governor Tamaki might interface with the yakuza—and the banking system. He couldn’t mention Tamaki’s name.

  Shimamura’s hair was plastered to his head; the poor brilliant guy couldn’t manage to get himself an umbrella. Aoki signaled for a towel.

  After they’d passed over schooldays and downed the first beer, his friend had been surprised at the subject Aoki raised. He sat back. “Straying into new territory, aren’t you, Hideo?”

  Aoki shrugged. “It’s become a hot issue. My bosses have focused on the political middlemen in action between the banks and the yakuza, the guys who’re the movers and shakers.”

  Shimamura frowned, as though at an unpleasant vista.

  “What does the MOF think about it?” Aoki asked bluntly.

  The bureaucrat gazed into his beer, then raised his eyes to Aoki’s broad, tough face. “Hmmm . . . What I say is off the record.” Aoki nodded. Shimamura put his beer glass aside. “It’s not as simple as you’ve depicted it. Sometimes politicians are the go-betweens. Some of ’em have smoothed the introductions of the yakuza to the banks, but plenty of times, the yakuza deal direct.”

  He blinked a few times. “Listen, a banking catastrophe’s been looming for over a decade. No one in government or big business wants the degree of the problem out in the open. No one knows what to do without causing a systemic collapse. They’ve been propping up weak banks, merging ’em with stronger ones, arranging phased write-downs of bad debts. None of this gets anywhere near the heart of the problem.”

  Shimamura kept his voice low. “There’re still trillions in gray-area loans on the books. It wouldn’t take too much to terminate our banking and financial world.” His thin hands were locked together.

  Salarymen were coming in, bar-girls were appearing at their sides, and the room was filling up with smoke and noise. Shimamura glanced around and leaned closer to Aoki. “Maybe up to half the bad debts still on the books involve the yakuza. Somebody’s called our economic woes the ‘yakuza recession.’ Not exactly wrong. The borrowers either have strong links to the yakuza or are directly controlled by them. Most of these loans will never be recovered.

  “How did this wonderful situation come about? In the 1980s big corporations were raising loans overseas, and some of our banks, to keep up their growth, started courting the gangsters, pushing loans down their throats. The yakuza saw it as a way to get into legitimate business. A lot of ’em invested in real estate at the crazy highs, and they’ve dropped an immense bundle. Now they’re not paying back their new banker friends, and the banks are fighting to stay afloat.” He sat back, picked up his glass, and drained it.

  Aoki studied him. How did a forthright, abrasive guy like his friend, who wore awful suits, get into the MOF? In their student days, Shimamura often started fights he could never win. Frequently, Aoki had to step in to finish off what his friend had started and save him from being beaten up, collecting black eyes and split lips himself for his efforts.

  Shimamura said, “The government’s paralyzed. They’ve got to risk letting some of the worst cases crash, support the stronger cases. The ones that’ve been deepest in with the yakuza and the dirty politicians should be in the former category. But they can’t face up to doing it.”

  A girl approached, bringing more beer.

  “The fellows of my generation are kicking the problem around among ourselves, but our bosses are sitting tight, gray suits, old gray minds—gray loans.” He grinned painfully.

  That was it. They drank more beer and revisited their youth, recalling old teachers and classmates. When they got up to leave, Shimamura turned suddenly to Aoki. “Bix Beiderbecke!”

  “ ‘Krazy Kat!’ ”

  They grinned at each other over the old jazz memories, over the old addiction, and parted with a warm handshake. It was 11:00 P.M. Walking away through streets ablaze with eye-aching neon, Aoki observed a flock of kimonoed women from the bars seeing their customers into black limousines, customers who weaved unsteady courses; doubtless some of them were bankers, some of them yakuza.

  In the ryokan, reliving this, Aoki had been pacing the room. Now he stopped. Ito and Yamazaki would be returning to an inferno. Yet maybe they’d seen the Fatman coming. Maybe they’d come here to work on a counterattack, and the weather had stepped in to play a deadly, delaying hand. Nonetheless, they might have a plan.

  Again he felt dizzy and sick to his stomach from the uncertainties. He’d been away from the job too long.

  Maybe Madam Ito had taken her own life, and Ito or Yamazaki had sought to cover this up with the bloodied clothes to avoid the disgrace of the ménage-à-trois coming out—although it had come out anyway. Even that made more sense than Saito’s theory that she was alive, but there was no conclusive evidence for either proposition. He wished again that he had that mountain of a dossier. He knew it would’ve been raked over and over. However, a vital piece of information might be buried there, waiting for the right brain to interpret it. His brain kept darting into alley after alley. Hyper-fucking-active! In this strange place, maybe it was being funneled toward the heart of the case.

  Aoki’s eye fell on the bonsai plants. One of them was missing, the sick one. It must’ve died. Shit!

  Chapter Twelve

  INSPECTOR AOKI AWOKE IN DARKNESS. He checked his watch with the flashlight: 5:15 P.M. The maid would not have wished to disturb him to light the lamp. He’d had no lunch; instead, he’d fallen into a deep and dreamless sleep. He pulled the quilt over his head. Presently he’d take a bath. Right now he felt drowsy, but his mind was again picking up the case.

  Two maids at a Kyoto ryokan had told a reporter how Yamazaki had thrown Madam Ito to the floor in a violent outburst; how they’d heard her pleading as he’d perpetrated “terrible acts” on her; how the next day, she’d kept to her room, hiding her bruised face. Aoki doubted the story’s veracity. In his opinion the MOF official would disdain such conduct, and it had come out that that paper was paying for information, much of which couldn’t be verified.

  It was weird, how these unchronological recollections were bombarding him—as if they’d been stored in the ryokan’s guts, as much as in his mind, waiting for him and now were being pulled out by a mysterious hand, like rabbits from a hat. Crazy thinking. He sat up. He must stay pragmatic, yet flexible. Carefully, he extracted sleep from his eyes with his fingertips.

  He was no stranger to violence. He’d come to know himself, in that respect. He frequently dealt with scum who inflicted deadly harm on their victims and escaped justice. The frustration had occasionally boiled over in him. A few times he’d gone out of control. Once, a pimp-cum-pusher had been mocking and reticent about giving him an address. Smack! Aoki slapped him with bone-jarring force. The man, grinning, spat a mouthful of blood on Aoki’s suit. The red haze smoldering in Aoki exploded. One-handed, he pinioned the guy against a wall by the throat, tore open the man’s trousers and seized his testicles, and twisted with all his strength. Afterward, he’d taken a few deep breaths and rejoined his partner, and they’d gone to the address.

  He stared at the Camellia Room. How long had the ryokan been in the Hatano family? He put on a yukata and went to the bath.

  Aoki had washed and immersed himself when Yamazaki entered the bathhouse. The second time they’d shared the bath. Obviously Chairman Ito followed a different bathing routine. They floated in the steamy atmosphere. It was the stone bath, and the water temperature wa
s higher than in the other. The detective noted that the MOF man’s testicles were low-slung, potent-looking. Aoki shut his eyes. Today, he had balls on the brain.

  “Abominable weather,” Yamazaki said.

  “But pleasant here,” Aoki replied.

  The tall man began to talk languidly about food, then about the specialties of Kamakura Inn. “You know about these places, do you, Inspector?’ Aoki grunted noncommittally into the steam. “Ah. Well, each provincial daimyo had to leave his wife and children in Tokyo, virtually as hostages, and the daimyos themselves were required to live there every alternate year. As they moved to and from, each traveled with a retinue of a thousand or more servants—at great expense, to keep them short of funds.” He chuckled. “The shoguns were very creative, very cautious in many ways. On his travels a daimyo stayed in honjin—the forerunners of ryokans like this one.”

  “This one isn’t on a major road,” Aoki ventured.

  “This kind came later. Nonetheless, honjin were its prototype. One like this was for rich merchants who wanted to get away to enjoy the hot spring, the solitude, the change in the seasons. Our co-guest seems to fit that bill, doesn’t he?”

  Aoki had no comment. What he’d heard was some of the story he’d tried to remember from his father.

  They luxuriated in the warmth. The crippled bank was away on another planet. Tokyo. Out of the steamy silence, the MOF man said, “I note your interest in Go.” Aoki grunted, noncommittal again. “Our co-guest is possibly a high-grade player.”

  Aoki thought for a moment. “He says he plays as a spiritual discipline.”

  Yamazaki laughed, a gurgle of phlegm. “D’you believe that? In the old days, that might’ve been true for some. I think this fellow sees it as a test of strength—a sedentary martial art.”

  The detective nodded to himself.

  When Aoki returned to his room, the kotatsu had been refueled and stoked up. He looked down at it, thinking. After his wife’s funeral, he hadn’t changed the routine that he’d adopted since his suspension. The surveillance on him had been reinstated. Moving from the coffee shop to the park and his observation of the neighborhood’s juvenile and geriatric life to the bar must’ve become wearisome to his anonymous police watchers. However, Watanabe had been right to upgrade their vigilance, and the police shrink had been right to ring an alarm bell. After Tokie’s death, hatred for the Fatman had been implanted in his brain like a rock placed in a raked sand garden. Another crook who was escaping justice and retribution! Nonetheless, he was incapacitated, and powerless.

  Watanabe. He stopped in the middle of dressing. Whatever it was the superintendent had in his sights, Hideo Aoki was expendable. With a jolt, Aoki knew that.

  Before, he’d felt something coming. Leaving the room, he smelled a smell he couldn’t identify, and there was a foul taste in his mouth. He grimaced, uneasy. He heard an echo of music, a calming melody. From a samisen! Tokie had played the instrument. Was she trying to talk to him in that way, too?

  It seemed all his senses were hyper, including the sixth.

  In the anteroom, Saito was surrounded by guttering candles; the room had become a grotto of slippery light and shadow, a feast of mysteriousness. The Go-player appeared as immersed in it as Aoki had been in the bath. Locked in battle, the stones glinted. “Ah, you reappear, bathed and fresh for the evening. For the anniversary night! And they are here!”

  Aoki stared at Saito. So! He knew about it, but that figured.

  “How does a detective’s mind view it?”

  Aoki gave a shrug. The bank’s predicament was overshadowing everything. How could it be otherwise for these guys? Financial life and death.

  Aoki went in to eat his dinner. He wore a clean padded kimono, which had been laid out in his room by invisible hands from the ryokan’s underworld, maybe Mori’s. He would be especially watchful tonight. The sensation he’d had in the corridor outside his room had shaken him up. He did feel alert, and fresher.

  Ito and Yamazaki bowed to him as they went to their table. Ito looked grim but more in charge of himself, and Yamazaki had the same cool demeanor. Side by side the tall MOF official and the stubby bank chairman were an incongruous pair, yet their minds must be pretty well in tune. Yamazaki was just as exposed to the banking drama as Ito. An MOF official absent on a junket with a bank’s delinquent chairman when it crashes! Any ordinary official would be sweating blood.

  The unseen chef and kitchen staff had been hard at work. Aoki stared across the room. More out-of-sight inhabitants of the ryokan. The dishes came and went for the anniversary banquet. It must be that. Aoki drank three small flasks of sake, and the warm scented alcohol lulled his brain. In the far corner, they conversed as they ate and drank, the same guarded talk. They didn’t look in his direction, but Ito, at least, had revealed that he was agitated about Aoki’s presence, and Yamazaki had talked to him in the bath.

  Aoki’s fingers stroked his mole. He’d drunk more than he’d intended.

  At nine, he went out to the anteroom to play chess with Saito. He was annoyed with himself for agreeing to it. How could he concentrate on chess? They played beside the Go board. Aoki received a rook’s handicap and lost the first game in fifteen minutes; the next lasted only ten. They stared at the board, at the last massacre.

  Saito jerked his head toward the dining room. “Why doesn’t the food choke them, Mr. Aoki? Two of the chief players in our catastrophic financial system, as blameworthy as hell. In medieval days our country was covered by entangled forests. These days the myriad banking bad debts are those forests—even more dangerous.”

  Aoki’s head was a little fuzzy, but he caught the flicker of Saito’s smile. The man was amused by it all, was mocking the players—the system. Did he really give a fuck about the critiques he was laying out, or was it all a game, like his Go?

  Saito said, “In your own niche, you’ve looked up the system’s backside, and it’s shit on you.”

  Aoki took out a toothpick and went to work on his teeth. This guy was an outrageous mixture of rough edges and old Japanese culture. His father had had the last, but otherwise his character was as remote from this fellow’s as Hokkaido was from Kyushu.

  The Go-player sat motionless. “What do you think? Are all the facts being laid on the table? Are they emptying their minds of Madam Ito’s case—bits and pieces the police never knew, the papers never dug up? But will it give them an answer?”

  Aoki sucked at his teeth. “How can we know what they’re talking about?” he said harshly. Abruptly, the man’s unrelenting ego was angering him. “They’ll be talking survival.” His face felt flushed from the alcohol.

  “That’s for the daylight hours. Today they’ve exhausted themselves planning a counterattack for when they can get back. Each hour, Ito’s been annoying Madam Hatano about the phone, but fate has cut it off, and fate is controlling its reconnection.”

  To hell with this, Aoki thought. He tossed the toothpick into an ashtray. “How could Madam Ito be concealed here for so long? Somebody would know, and talk.”

  Saito gave the room a sweeping look. “The public areas of the ryokan are like the tip of the iceberg. Beyond them lies a labyrinth, a headache for any searcher. The minds of the builders of these places were complicated! And old servants are loyal.”

  “They would’ve brought in dogs.”

  “Places like this have always known about dogs.”

  The cavorting shadows from the firelight seemed to breathe danger to Aoki. He said, “How d’you know so much about this damned case?” It was the sake talking.

  “I told you before, I’m a collector.”

  Aoki was squinting at the dark face. “Are you an economist?”

  Saito laughed quietly. “Merely a businessman—”

  A wailing sound had begun in the dining room. At first Aoki barely heard it, then: “Oh-oh-oh-ah-eeee.” Higher and higher it went. The hair on the nape of Aoki’s neck crackled. An imitation of a woman coming to her orgasm!

>   It was Yamazaki’s voice!

  The sound cut off. In the dining room Yamazaki was laughing now—unmistakably him.

  Aoki was shocked. He looked at Saito. The man from Osaka’s head was tilted to one side, his face like stone. Without a word Aoki got up and left the room. The sake had cleared from his head. In the corridor to the hall, he thought, the anniversary night. But what dominated his mind was that sound coming from deep in Yamazaki’s throat in the thick voice.

  His brow creased in concentration, he pulled up and stepped aside into an alcove. Neither man had cared for the woman; each had disdained and dishonored her. Perhaps each was here out of morbid curiosity or to probe for an advantage against the other. Perhaps, years ago, Yamazaki had mocked her with that cry. Aoki rubbed his cheekbone. He stepped out of the alcove and continued on to the hall.

  A raucous belch came from behind him. He whirled around as Ito caught up to him. The bank chairman’s face had changed: It was flame-red and contorted, as though flesh and bone were about to explode. He rushed past the stock-still Aoki, almost bumping him, as if the detective were invisible, and lurched into the hall. He pulled up, rocked on his heels, and rapped hard on the counter. Shoba was on his feet, his face alert. Kazu Hatano came out of the office. Aoki drew in his breath. She was moving like a sleepwalker, and there was a look on her face far beyond the one he’d observed when she’d faced Ito before—ceramic-hard and nerveless. From the corridor, he watched, spellbound.

  “When’ll the road be clear?” the banker demanded in a slurred voice.

  “I can’t say.”

  “The phone?” He swayed against the counter.

  “Is not yet in order.”

  “The instant you’re reconnected . . .” His plump hands thudded again on the counter. He gave a peremptory bow, impatiently beckoned the bodyguard to follow, and weaved toward the staircase.

  Aoki gazed after the pair. Had the cuckold stepped out of the shadows? Had that gross simulation unlocked some latent core of feeling for his missing wife? He turned to find the proprietor standing there like a ghost. She’d heard that terrible sound. The ritual dishonoring of her mother had gone through the rambling rooms and corridors like a breath of evil.