Rendezvous at Kamakura Inn

by Marshall Browne

  Aoki’s hand was inside his opened overcoat. He gazed at the wheezing, overbearing figure. “The meaning? I can understand you’d be surprised to see me, Governor. Though you must’ve heard I survived the ryokan.”

  “What? Get out, you’re babbling like a madman!” Tamaki moved again, to pass the madman and get to the phone. Smoothly Aoki brought out the big revolver and stuck its long barrel into the huge gut. The Fatman leaped back, letting out a hiss, then became still again. The light from the room gleamed on his eyeballs.

  “Keep very still,” Aoki said. “I’m going to put some questions to you—”

  “Finished.” The word sprang from the thick lips. “You imbecile, you fucking imbecile! You don’t have the faintest fucking idea who or what you’re up against.” The big plump fingers opened and closed in the night air.

  “Like you.”

  The ex-governor gasped. “You! You think you can arrest me? You’ll be crushed! A fool for a second time. You must have a brain to survive, Inspector.” Loaded with contempt and anger, shoulders hunched, he peered at the detective. Aoki stared back at the face a yard from his own. Naked power was pouring from the politician, flowing in sweat from his brow; clearly it was beyond his comprehension that a single bullet could take it all away. He’d survived too often, and too much. Aoki’s brain was sorting out the options.

  “What are these fucking questions?” A gush of breath, ripe with brandy.

  “Who killed Eichi Kimura? Cut out his eyes, cut off his tongue, his ears?”

  Tamaki gestured angrily. “Ha! Nothing to do with me.”

  Aoki lowered the gun’s barrel from the man’s chest and trained it on his private parts. Audibly, he drew back the hammer.

  “Maybe it was the yakuza,” Tamaki said in a harsh whisper that finished in a quaver of fear.

  New note, Aoki thought. His brain seemed to be clicking away like clockwork. “I’ll count to five,” he said. “Then you get the first one in the balls.”

  “All right. It was Watanabe’s idea. Kimura was a troublemaker, a muckraker who had to be stopped, for the good of the party.”

  “For the good of the party . . . Who did it?”

  “How in hell do I know? One of Watanabe’s contacts.” The lies spread across the serene garden’s aura like a stain of factory pollution in a clear night sky.

  “And I only shot Watanabe in the heart!”

  “Shit,” Tamaki breathed.

  “Who instructed Saito to finish me off at the ryokan?”

  “Who the hell is Saito?” Fear and anger and genuine-sounding surprise were in his voice.

  Aoki thought, It figures. The Fatman would never’ve known the name of the assassin, and “Saito” was a transient identity anyway. Tamaki was truthful about one thing, though; in the cool serenity of this garden, he was. Nothing would ever be brought home against him. It’d be hard enough even if witnesses had seen him personally standing over Kimura’s body, a bloodstained knife in hand. Swiftly the witnesses would’ve disappeared: paid off, frightened off, or killed. Probably he’d have gotten rid of his classmate Watanabe in the end. The superintendent had known too much.

  Aoki’s eyes were burning now from his unblinking vigilance. Even if he forced Tamaki to write down and sign a confession, duress would be claimed, and believed, and Hideo Aoki, the damaged, half-insane cop with psychiatric-ward time to prove it, following his bitter, misguided vendetta, would be sedated and dragged off to the oblivion of a sanatorium. If he made it that far!

  This is the rocklike truth of the matter, Aoki, he thought bitterly. The situation was precisely what he’d already known it to be.

  Tamaki’s heavy breathing was filling the garden. As if sensing the detective’s indecision, he said, “Listen, Aoki, I can understand the shock of your wife’s death. Allowances can be made—”

  In a surge of pain, Aoki thought his heart was going to burst. This scum alive, and his wife dead! “I can’t stand your life,” he snarled, his mind in a bloody haze, and pulled the trigger.

  The click of the misfire made an inoffensive sound. Tamaki swayed back, then broke into a shocked laugh. “Shit! Your tricks don’t frighten me, you nobody cop—” He grabbed for the gun. They wrestled for it, swaying backward and forward. Tamaki was surprisingly strong. Aoki drove his head up into the contorted, hard-breathing face. Crunch! Tamaki screamed and reeled away, blood streaming from his nose. Aoki had been forced back onto a sand garden. He pulled the trigger again, and the explosion cracked against the rocks and reverberated away into the night. The Fatman shuddered, and blood spurted from the hole in his kimono. For a moment he kept his feet, then crashed down on his side. At Aoki’s feet, great gut heaving, he exhaled a long bubbling breath. Beneath his robe the thick legs kicked spasmodically, once, twice, then were rigid.

  “What was that?” Behind a bamboo fence, someone called.

  Aoki pocketed the revolver and went quietly and quickly out through the house. No one had rushed into the street. Swiftly he retraced his steps. The cut on his head had reopened, and he dabbed up blood with his handkerchief. A big mistake. The magnitude of what he’d done remained to be dealt with. Right now he felt he’d completed a Herculean task, broken out into a big space. He went, a shadow along the street.

  Inspector Aoki was home in two hours. He’d walked to a station one stop nearer Tokyo Central. On the way he’d wiped off any prints and dropped the revolver down a deep storm drain. If it was ever found, it’d be a dead end. The American firebombs had wiped out half of Tokyo in 1945; he was confident no records would exist showing whom it’d been issued to sixty years ago.

  He had a freezing shower, then sat in the living room without turning on the light. Despite the violence of his feelings, he’d never visualized himself at this point. Now, it seemed to have been destined for such a closure. Programmed, like Saito’s last moves in the 1938 Go match.

  When he’d shot Watanabe, he’d taken a one-way highway—then the DG, for his own reasons, had given him an escape route. There could be no escape from what he’d done tonight.

  But he’d join Superintendent Motono’s team tomorrow. The Fatman would be front-page news by then. The ex-governor’s enemies were legion, and Aoki would speculate as much as anyone else about that. He held a towel to the reopened wound on his head. He’d left his blood in the Fatman’s garden, maybe on his corpse. Probably the die was cast now for Hideo Aoki. However, he must get some sleep and have a clear head for tomorrow. He’d play out his cards to the bitter end.

  He half-expected to hear their voices in his sleep, but he sensed they’d finally gone. He sat up in the dark. They’d been lingering in a halfway house, getting him through his grief and guilt and the breakdown, showing him that other world. Now they’d passed on. To where? His father had believed in an afterlife of the spirit; Tokie’d never said. He felt a warm sensation and, listening intently, as sometimes he heard a distant break of jazz, heard the notes of an Osaka samisen.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  INSPECTOR AOKI WAS AWAKE AT six. He felt refreshed and calm. There was no food in the apartment, so he drank the last of the Colombian coffee and smoked a cigarette while he listened to the news on the radio. Nothing about Tamaki. Was the ex-governor’s body still lying undiscovered in his garden? Before seven he walked to the station, bought a hamburger and ate it slowly, seated at a bar. Probably the cut on his head should’ve been stitched the first time. This morning he’d crudely applied Band-Aids to it. As he ate, nerves began to shoot in him. “But, after all,” he told himself, “what is going to happen, will.”

  On the platform, he looked at the front pages of two papers. Nothing there, either. Overnight, the yakuza had visited a mobster in the hospital, sans flowers, and put half a dozen bullets into him as he lay in bed. A couple of gangs settling a dispute, the police hypothesized. “It was like a yakuza movie,” a shocked fifty-five-year-old male patient told the reporters.

  Aoki grimaced. Just like my life. He discarded the papers.<
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  He arrived at headquarters at 8:30 A.M. and reported to Superintendent Motono. A squat, gray-headed man in his midfifties, the senior detective blinked and raised his eyebrows. Minimal bows were exchanged. They’d never worked together before.

  “Why didn’t you respond to my calls?” Motono’s voice was even, but his eyes had narrowed as if he were peering into a smoky room.

  “I had urgent matters to follow up when I got back from Hokkaido.”

  “Which took you to see colleagues in Osaka.”

  Aoki nodded. Someone from Osaka had been on the phone. He’d expected it.

  “We’ll go into that in a moment. Have you heard the news?”

  Aoki stared at his superior. “What news?”

  “Yukio Tamaki’s been found murdered—forty-five minutes ago.”

  Aoki widened his eyes. “Shit! How? Where?”

  The superintendent was still peering at him in that way. “Shot. At his family house in Hakone. Your old adversary, Inspector Aoki.” Motono moved a sheet of paper on his desk. Superintendent Watanabe’s untimely end would be sizzling away in the TMP building like an overcooked steak. Aoki knew that. That was the expression on Motono’s face, but doubtless the DG had decreed a blackout. Now they had the Fatman, another interesting sector of this inspector’s past.

  “Well, Tamaki’s not our worry. Superintendent Shimazu and his team have been assigned. Let’s talk about our worry, and I trust I’ll hear it all, including what happened on your trip to Osaka.”

  For half an hour, Aoki described the three murders at the ryokan; he talked at length about Saito and his wide-ranging dialogues but said nothing concerning the denouement of the Madam Ito mystery, though, of course, the old case came up as he described his interaction with Saito. Then he told Motono what he’d found out about the Osaka body-parts case and the journalist Nagai’s murder. He omitted the district prosecutor and Colonel Oto from the Imperial Army. He needed to look further into those angles. Finally, he covered the confrontation at the Go competition.

  Motono interrupted with a few questions but mainly kept quiet, his eyes either on Aoki’s face or on the sheet of paper in front of him. He looked as if he were considering the career of Inspector Aoki equally with the triple murders and the rest of it.

  Aoki sat back, at last lit a cigarette, and lowered his gaze to the desk surface. The room was overheated, and his body felt moist. Motono was almost as Sphinx-like as Watanabe had been, yet he gave off more human vibes.

  “Human-offal eating, Go matches, and Zen mottoes? Hmm, a fellow of extra-special tastes—and a mystery man,” the superintendent said, impassive. “But that chef, Hatano, no longer is.”

  Aoki’s eyes flicked up.

  “Forensics found a match with the prints taken at the ryokan in the central records. They’re the same as those in that specialty butcher’s flat in Osaka. As you say, the fellow calling himself Okura, who disappeared at the time of Nagai’s murder.”

  “Ahh . . .” Aoki released breath in a long sigh. There it was. Motono had been looking into the Osaka body-parts case this morning. He’d given no sign of it when Aoki reported on his visit to Osaka police headquarters. Aoki said, “What about the prints in Saito’s room at the ryokan?”

  “No match there.”

  “What else have they found?”

  “The obvious things. They’re looking into hairs and fibers and blood.” He paused. “And the whereabouts of Yamazaki’s missing part. Also the whereabouts of that sister and the other woman. The prefecture report is a series of questions, yet they talked to you, Inspector, didn’t they?” He studied the cut on Aoki’s head.

  Aoki was silent.

  “Very well, I want you to go and brief our team. Then get your report down on paper. The DG’s demanding it. I’m making you my deputy on this one. I want you to go after this Saito and this Hatano, or whatever their names are. I want you to report to me twice a day, A.M. and P.M., and if I find your cell phone switched off—”

  He stared meaningfully at Aoki, then reached into a drawer for the service pistol and pushed it across the desk. It’s being passed around like a hot coal, Aoki thought.

  He left Motono’s office and went downstairs. Where could he restart with Saito? The Kobe address would be a fake. And Hatano? As for cold-as-mutton Tamaki, when would they question Aoki himself about his past with the Fatman, about his movements last night? They surely would. That was certainly on Motono’s mind, as it would be on Superintendent Shimazu’s.

  He gazed at his hands. The yakuza’s Yokohama deal had apparently been the catalyst that’d sealed Chairman Ito’s fate. Maybe that was where to start.

  Aoki gave twenty-odd detectives the same briefing he’d given the superintendent; they already had their assignments. Then he went to a desk and began to write his report. As he typed it out, the ryokan came alive again in his mind. When he was about half done he phoned the young detective in Osaka and asked a question about the Osaka district prosecutor who’d been arrested three days ago. The cop called back in twenty minutes. Aoki nodded to himself when he heard what he had to say.

  At 11:10 A.M. the internal phone rang, and Superintendent Motono said, “Never rains but it pours. We’ve found Hatano—or a fellow of that name, who answers the description—on a slab at the central morgue. He was filled with bullets last night at Shibuya Hospital. A yakuza hit. He’d just had an eye operation. They’re printing the corpse, but you get out to the morgue and identify him. I’m sending men to the hospital.”

  Aoki sat, gazing across the busy room. Could it really be the angry, fish-slitting bastard? The news item he’d read coming in on the train flashed back. He slipped the disk of his report into his pocket, put on his overcoat, and went on his way.

  Hatano, all right. The chef’s face was stamped with the anger of his last moment—though the guy’s face had never showed anything except an evil temper. Aoki counted six bullet wounds on the naked corpse. The left eye was surgically bandaged. Go stones were as lethal off the board as on it! The attendant slid the tray back into the wall; the autopsy was to be done at 1:00 P.M.

  In his overcoat, a cigarette stuck between his lips, Aoki paced the room. Had Saito—he couldn’t think of him as Yamamoto, his Osaka Go-competition identity—had the chef, with his dangerous knowledge, taken out? Blasted full of holes in a hospital bed? That would’ve tickled Saito’s crazy funnybone. Sans flowers, all right. Had he put his damned wig back on and done the job himself? The last thought came without a trace of humor.

  Aoki gave the central morgue’s room a long stare. He might’ve sealed the chef’s fate when he revealed to Saito that he knew of his grotesque culinary obsession, of Colonel Oto—if that was his obsession, and if there was a connection with the dead colonel. He shrugged. Whatever the reason, Hatano deserved his fate. Aoki turned on his heel and left. He’d go to the hospital and see what they’d turned up on the killing.

  He was heading for the subway when his cell phone rang. He answered it on the move and pulled up. For a second he couldn’t believe the voice he was hearing. “Where are you?” he gasped. Instantly he was breathing hard.

  They were fifty yards away, in the coffee shop next to the public health building that accommodated the morgue. Almost in a dream, he retraced his steps. He entered through the revolving door. The dream evaporated, and excitement was pulsing in him.

  Kazu Hatano and her twin sister rose from their table as one, bowing. Spellbound, Aoki stared at them, then belatedly responded. His eyes were wide, and the skin of his face felt tight. His left hand had gone to the mole on his cheekbone. They had on street clothes. Coats and hats. Each different, but to Aoki the faces were identical. Sad and worried faces. He pulled out a chair. This was a shock—and a wonder.

  Kazu Hatano was on the left; now he could see that. The stamp of the manager-proprietor gave her an air of authority. Her sister, who’d been in his arms, was soft and self-effacing. Kazu Hatano smiled, a brief shadow of a smile, doubtless at the exp
ression on his face. “We’ve come here to attend to the formalities for our father. You know about that?” Aoki nodded quickly. “And we wish to talk to you.” She hesitated. “The time’s come for that.”

  The familiar voice with its mountain accent seemed to be filling Aoki’s head.

  She looked down at the handbag in her lap, then brought out a paper-clipped sheaf of papers and put them into his hand. “This is a copy of a document our father made two days ago, relating to his connections with Mr. Saito. The man you know by that name.” Aoki continued to stare into her eyes. “He intended to send it to Mr. Saito—telling him that if anything happened to him, the original would be put into the hands of the police. Unfortunately, before this could be done—”

  Aoki’s mind had moved into gear. The chef had had bad timing throughout.

  “Our father has done terrible things.” Her voice had dropped. “Things we could never have imagined, that can’t be forgiven. Much of it forced upon him by Mr. Saito.” She paused; this was an ordeal. “Too much. We can’t discuss it.” The freckles were covered up this morning, but as if he had X-ray vision Aoki could see each one of them. Her eyes showed her pain; nonetheless, they were unwavering. “We could only bear to read a part of it.”

  Aoki nodded, glanced through the four sheets of paper, then nodded again. He folded the document in two and put it in his breast pocket.

  She said, “My father asked me to find a lawyer. To accompany him to the interview.” What an experience for her, for the lawyer, Aoki thought. “The original is in a safe place and can be provided. My phone number is here.”

  The sister wasn’t going to speak, that was plain. Aoki couldn’t stop himself staring at her beautiful red-painted lips. The face was inscrutable behind makeup, having thoughts he couldn’t even guess at.

  Kazu Hatano placed a small sheet of green paper before him. “Mr. Saito may be found here. Under this name.”

  Aoki stared down at the Aoyama address. Oto! His mouth fell open. That name. His true identity? The one at rock bottom for him to slot back into? He looked up at her. “How did they find your father?”