Rendezvous at Kamakura Inn

by Marshall Browne

  The Kabuki-like scene in the kitchen flashed back. Last year his father had taken Tokie to Kyoto to see the Kabuki plays. In his father’s opinion, Kyoto had the best atmosphere for them. Tokie wore her finest kimono to compete with the famed finery of the local ladies. Aoki stayed home, immersed in the case of a proprietor of a dry-cleaning firm who had stabbed a moneylender to death and clammed up. His own bit of Kabuki. He nodded to himself. As for the ex-husband, her father? The investigation was beginning to pulse stronger in Aoki. He’d get that fellow alone . . .

  At a slight sound, his head whipped around to the door. Paler than before, Kazu Hatano stood there holding a wide-eyed Mori by the hand.

  Chapter Fourteen

  SHAKING WITH NERVES, MORI LOOKED at her employer for reassurance, but, except for holding her servant’s hand, Kazu Hatano was unresponsive, apparently lost in thought. Aoki glanced at her, then gave the middle-aged room maid a friendly nod. “Mori-san, last night, did Mr. Yamazaki ask you to arrange for the company of the geisha?”

  “Yes, sir.” Her voice was barely audible.

  Aoki breathed in, nodded again. “Did she go to his room?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “You arranged the appointment?”

  “Yes, sir, for nine o’clock.” Her breathing was coming in shallow puffs. She darted another frightened look at her mistress.

  Aoki sighed to himself, but he was patient with her. Little by little he heard that she’d gone off duty at eight thirty, and what she’d done then. She repeated that she hadn’t seen the geisha go to the room. Aoki stared at her for a long moment, then gave her permission to leave. With a hurried bow, she fled the office.

  He turned to Kazu Hatano. “You can see why it’s vital to talk to your sister.”

  With a start, Kazu Hatano emerged from her thoughts. “We will continue our search.” She looked away quickly, but Aoki caught the gleam of tears.

  The inspector went out to the hall, trying to interpret that. Lies were as prevalent here as the icy drafts penetrating the ill-fitting window frames. Granted, the place was a labyrinth, yet it was unbelievable it would take so long to uncover the sister. If she was alive. That pulled him up. He should look over the sister’s room.

  The terrified Mori had brought back to him an image of Ito’s trembling hands—and his anger and sarcasm. Had the media stories regarding the banker’s complacency over his wife’s affair with Yamazaki been another fiction? Yamazaki’s murder had the seals of both jealousy and revenge. Last night, the banker had been enraged on two occasions; this morning, his agitation could equally well have indicated a murderer fearful of discovery or a person appalled by the death of a close associate. Yet maybe the killing was for an entirely different reason. For sure, the banker knew more than he’d said. Aoki ran his tongue over his sore lips. Whatever the answer, the cruel cry that had sinuously traveled the corridors might’ve been the trigger for the murder.

  Had he and Yamazaki known that their meals were being prepared by Hatano, their predecessor in Madam Ito’s bed? Aoki rubbed his jaw. How much of this, of the past and the present, was in the reticent Kazu Hatano’s beautiful head?

  Minutes later Aoki slid back the door of his room. The charcoal glowed bloodred in the kotatsu. He lit a cigarette and glanced at his watch: The second hand swept past 6:00 P.M. He switched on the radio and was back in the company of NHK. The transmission was much worse than before.

  . . . Tokyo Citizens Bank continues to send shock waves . . . new speculation . . . allegations . . . yakuza connections . . . informed sources advise Bank of Japan . . . turned up substantial loans to front corporations controlled by gangsters . . . bank recently withdrew from a commitment . . . property developments in Yokohama . . . Yakuza client facing crippling losses . . . police search . . . Ito and Yamazaki still hampered by weather conditions . . .

  Aoki switched it off and gazed into space. He’d heard enough. Someone inside the Citizens Bank was leaking. The Bank of Japan played close to the vest; there was no way it would’ve released information about an investigation so soon. He stubbed out the cigarette.

  The yakuza. That was something to think about; they didn’t tolerate anyone crossing them. Retribution could be brutal, but since the onset of the storm, it had been impossible to get anyone into the ryokan, and it was highly unlikely they’d have a sleeper at this remote place. Besides, Ito, who must’ve made the decision to cancel the loan on the Yokohama project, was still alive. Yet the killing had the pro stamp, though what hit man would play around with sexual organs like that? As for the surgical cut across the gut—

  He stared around the Camellia Room. He felt caged in the snow-besieged ryokan, suffocated by the multiple speculations insinuating his every brain cell.

  Saito appeared to be extracting maximum stimulation from the situation. Aoki had checked with Kazu Hatano; Saito had given an Osaka address, all right. When Aoki could, he’d look into it. His fingers touched the scrap of paper within the kimono.

  Inspector Aoki cleared his throat. She looked up quickly from a ledger. Here he was again! Was that what the look meant? The black hair, smooth as water coming over a weir, had that bluish shine and the same gold ornament. The scrap of paper was in his hand. “Excuse me, I have a question about the scroll in Mr. Yamazaki’s room—” He stopped. Her face had shot up in response to his “excuse me,” and for an instant he’d seen a simpler, worried woman. He came forward and handed her his note. “Please tell me about this.”

  He watched her eyes widen in surprise as she read, then let the hand holding the note fall to the desk. “It’s an old Zen motto. The scroll doesn’t belong to the ryokan.”

  “You mean it’s replaced another?”

  “Yes. It’s been brought from outside.” Her face had become even paler. “It is not something we would have here.”

  Aoki nodded. Nor would any inn proprietor. Two exhortations to murder; not a restful sentiment for guests. If the killer had done it, was the motive the same as for the severed genitalia left on display beneath it?

  Maybe Yamazaki had brought it in himself. The fellow’s personality, apparently, had been weird enough to play private jokes like that. He cursed under his breath.

  He’d seen no signs of searching going on, though if they were doing any at all, it would be in parts beyond the guest areas. He gave a slight bow and left. None of the staff had turned up at the office asking for him.

  He paused outside the office, a deep frown on his brow. Too much was going on in his head. He was missing the usual discussion and interaction with a colleague—just like he was missing his badge and gun. Bleakly, he considered what to do next. He reached into a pocket for the lip salve. As he applied it, as if sent to him as a respite, the fine blue veins on the back of Kazu Hatano’s hands came into his mind’s eye.

  Aoki descended the stairs at the southwest corner. Something was impelling him to undertake these explorations. Perhaps he was half-expecting to ferret out the missing sister, but he met no one and heard no human sounds, only the creaking of timbers and the fainter whining of the wind. He could hear his own breathing. It was the same scenario: dusky, wood-paneled corridors with many doors; small, empty rooms; ceilings almost scraping his head. His slippers moved softly over dully glimmering floors polished for centuries by a legion of departed maids. An empty, but clean, labyrinth. How did they keep up all the floor polishing? Was it ever filled with guests, even in spring? It was so dim in places that occasionally he flicked on his flashlight. At last he turned a corner into a day-lit gallery and realized that he was on the other side of the snow-drowned courtyard, opposite the cunningly built nightingale floor.

  Aoki stopped dead. A voice was chanting, hands clapping, and he smelled the cloying odor of incense. A Shinto ritual. Abruptly its sounds ceased, replaced by footsteps. Ito came out of the gallery and walked quickly past, his eyes fixedly ahead. The detective might not have existed. Akoi watched him go. Ito saying prayers!

  The inspect
or turned and entered the gallery. The shrine was built into an alcove, filling the space from floor to ceiling, gilded and ornate, red and gold—a family altar.

  A shrine to appease a restless spirit, Tokie said.

  I’m afraid so, his father commented.

  Aoki stared at it as the voices faded in his head. Had Ito been praying for his wife, for Yamazaki—or for rescue from the Fatman’s clutches?

  “So he’s gone. The Don Juan of the Tokyo finance world has stepped through the curtain—minus his sexual equipment.”

  Saito spoke in a pragmatic voice. They were in the anteroom. Aoki looked at him, hard. He’d located this man’s room on a lower level than Ito’s, about two minutes’ walk from the Azalea Room in the northeast part of the ryokan: the Chrysanthemum Room. “Do you recall the information submitted to the police by Madam Ito’s friend, identified as Person Y—the Kobe incident?”

  As Saito looked at him for confirmation, Aoki remembered. Yamazaki and Madam Ito had visited Kobe, staying at a hotel in the hills. While she was out, he arranged for another female friend, from his rich gallery, to come to their room. He “arranged” to be in this woman’s arms, in her body, precisely at the time Madam Ito returned. She rushed from the room and cut her wrists in the hotel ladies’ room with a nail file. She’d spent several days in a Kobe hospital. The hospital stay had been substantiated; the story about the other woman hadn’t been.

  “A torture point,” Saito said. “She’d never loved either of her husbands, so the papers said, but Mr. Yamazaki was a different matter. She was intelligent and must have known what kind of man he was. Nonetheless, concerning him, she had no power over herself.”

  How had Ito reacted to the attempted suicide? At the time, they’d kept it out of the news. Aoki recalled that a paper had written a sly comment on the MOF man’s morals: “Each night, Mr. Yamazaki lies down on a new tatami mat.”

  Aoki studied this student, or addict, of sensational crimes. What a recall for detail he had.

  “I continue to hear interesting things on my radio.” Saito’s big hands rested loosely on his knees. Aoki waited, his own hands behind his back. “They’re saying now a trillion has blown clean out of the bank’s books like chaff. Of course, it was gone long ago, but they’ve kept the lid on that. The amazing thing is the government might let it go down.” He gave a harsh chuckle.

  Aoki pulled out his pack of cigarettes, wondering if Saito had heard the report at six about the bank’s yakuza links.

  “And isn’t it even more amazing that as the bank crashes, the chairman’s trapped at a mountain ryokan, incommunicado, and the supervising MOF official lies murdered in the same ryokan?” He looked up at the detective.

  Aoki was unresponsive, thinking. Ito and Yamazaki had made reservations at the ryokan for three nights only, so their absence from Toyko was enforced by the weather. An act of God, as they said in the West. Even so, with the bank in the shithouse, how could they have afforded to be absent for even one hour?

  Saito said, “Citizens caught up in the bank’s demise are legion. Ito’s the figurehead upon which waves of hatred will be advancing, and Yamazaki, complicit in the disaster, shares the blame. They were locked together in a deadly embrace.”

  Aoki stirred from his thoughts. Deadly embrace? A new thought came: The two might never have intended to return from this rendezvous, might’ve made a pact. For sure, they’d been locked together, but Ito was still here, and Yamazaki’s exit hadn’t been suicide.

  Fiercely, he frowned at the fire. More likely, they’d been working out a plan to save the bank. Key in the fast-moving Fatman in his banking committee role, the snowstorm, and a hand with a razor-sharp blade—and that’d hit the scrap heap.

  Saito shrugged. “And perhaps, after all, nothing has been discovered or decided about Madam Ito.”

  Aoki was only half-listening. The Fatman and his yakuza friends wouldn’t want the bank to go down. Until recently it must’ve been a goose laying golden eggs. He said tersely, “Yamazaki’s murder has put her case into the background.”

  This man’s story that the pair had been engaged in a retrospective on the missing wife and mistress could be total bullshit. Yet Yamazaki’s horrible simulated wailing was back in his head.

  Aoki turned and moved closer to the fire. Whatever had been discussed between the two men each night now resided solely in the mind of Ito.

  Saito picked up a black stone from the bowl. “According to my maid, the twin sister has disappeared.” He placed the stone with precision. “Disappearances seem to run in the family.”

  Aoki moved his eyes away from the dark, craggy face, the thick, glossy hair. News ran through this place like an electric current. What about the electricity, the phone? He gave an impatient nod and left the anteroom.

  Massaging the cold from his fingers, he couldn’t decide whether to speak to Ito again, whether to risk trampling the ground for the local CIB, who must surely be here tomorrow—

  He was staring down a corridor as if at a suddenly revealed vista: the chef, Hatano, hurrying through a remote corridor of the ryokan last night. The fellow Superintendent Watanabe had fingered for Madam Ito’s disappearance, the fellow who’d been mad with jealousy when she’d married Ito—according to Watanabe. In sending that awful sound through the ryokan last night, had Yamazaki stepped into that deadly quicksand, and was Ito the next in line?

  Aoki began to pace up and down, hardly aware he was doing it. If that was the way it was playing, it tossed out Saito’s sardonic take, that Ito was the one who’d exacted revenge on his wife’s seducer—as well as his own emerging thoughts about the yakuza. Watanabe couldn’t have predicted any of this.

  He pulled up and stared into the darkness at the end of the corridor. His boss’s agenda in sending him here continued to float like smoke in his head, but what if Watanabe had known that Madam Ito’s ex-husband was here, that the three men closest to her disappearance had suddenly assembled at the ryokan? Had the superintendent, in his convoluted way, thrown his best investigator into the situation, like bread on the waters, hoping for a breakthrough?

  Chapter Fifteen

  “WATANABE-WATANABE-WATANABE,” AOKI MUTTERED in the Camellia Room. He smacked his right fist into his left hand. He backed off, took in air in a deep breath. Figuring out his boss’s reason for sending him to the ryokan was like trying to grab hold of smoke, but all his experience, his sixth sense, told him that it was at the heart of what was being enacted here. Maybe what he’d just thought about his boss’s agenda was right on. Yet they’d tracked him out to the Fatman’s Hakone house that night, and the police shrink, obviously, had reported his paranoia about the ex-governor’s escape from justice, and his part in Tokie’s death, and the journalist Kimura’s death; and his grief and guilt about Tokie. The surveillance they’d put on him showed their concern about how dangerous he might be, but did he need to go down deeper yet to uncover Watananbe’s agenda?

  Aoki pulled a cigarette from the pack, lit up, and exhaled spasmodically. He could hear the stream flowing again; the ice was melting. He gazed into the alcove. The ryokan must’ve borne witness to a host of tragic events, and the MOF man’s murder was merely another in the stream of time. Like clockwork, this new way of thinking was rolling out of his brain, almost as a respite from the other grinding thoughts. Carefully, he brushed his lips with his fingertips. Kazu Hatano’s face had flashed fear and worry—and the hint of a straightforward woman. Her missing sister must be the foremost worry. Unless . . . He stubbed out the cigarette and left his room.

  At 3:20 P.M. he stepped through the door into the ryokan’s subterranean area. A minute later he stood in the kitchen’s doorway. His eyes swept the large space. The Kabuki cast had vanished. Only two persons present, each frozen, staring at him. The woman kitchen-hand dropped her eyes first. “Carry on with your work,” Aoki said. The chef was filleting a large fish. He made a short, smacking sound with his lips, then lowered his eyes to the task. Hard, wary eyes, and h
is face had flooded with color. Zip-zippp—a slight but sinister sound. Aoki watched the razor-sharp knife slice a fillet from the backbone. The man’s hairless, wiry forearm flashed over the rich flesh. He was concentrating on his knife work; his face had become closed. Adept. Two dark shadowy spots stood out on his forehead. Fast. His latex-gloved hands flipped two fillets onto a stainless-steel tray; he flicked a trace of blood off the metal with a cloth, then washed and dried the gleaming blade.

  Child’s play for a man like this to excise Yamazaki’s genitalia; to display them in the black lacquered box. The thought chilled Aoki. Though thrusting a knife into living human flesh mightn’t be so easy.

  No stoves were lit yet, and the room was like a meat locker. The chef crossed his arms and regarded Aoki. His black eyes didn’t deviate from the detective’s face.

  “Why did you come back here?” Aoki said.

  The chef looked at the woman and pointed to the door. She stopped beating eggs and went out. When it came, his voice was rough and intense. “That’s my business.”

  Aoki nodded slowly. “I know who you are. I suggest you answer the question.”

  The man’s face had turned dark. His tongue licked over his lips.

  “How long ago, Mr. Hatano?”

  He lifted his eyes and stared beyond Aoki. “Two years.”

  Aoki had expected a longer period. “Before that?”

  “I had a restaurant in Osaka.”

  For a long moment Aoki considered this, continuing to gaze at the man’s face. What had brought him to the mountains—a business failure, filial duty? His daughters? Aoki knew there’d be a story behind that, but this man wasn’t going to say anything more, and he was in no position to force him to. “Where were you going last night?”