Then her mouth opened, emitting a moan that wandered the range from high notes to low, and back again. Sano stared, transfixed by the ritual’s powerful erotic quality. Aoi’s moist lips, her moans, the quickening rise and fall of her bosom, and the sheen of sweat on her face all made him think of a woman succumbing to sexual pleasure. He could even see her nipples, large and erect, pressing through her kimono. Warm blood pooled in his loins. His overwhelming desire to touch her increased. Then she spoke.
“… my son. Promise …”
The voice was that of an old man, weak and cracked with mortal sickness. Aoi’s features took on a startlingly familiar cast. Sano sat forward so quickly that he almost lost his balance and fell onto the altar. Shock banished arousal as he recognized his father’s voice and visage.
“Be the living embodiment of Bushido.…”
Even as Sano reeled with the blow of hearing his father speak through Aoi, his mind cast about for a rational explanation. At his house, she must have noticed his father’s memorial altar and known of his recent bereavement. But how could she evoke the essence of someone she’d never met, and speak words that he alone had heard? All doubts about her mystical abilities vanished in a flood of pure joy.
“Father,” he whispered, eagerly reaching out to grasp his sire’s elusive, longed-for presence.
To his intense disappointment, Aoi’s face became her own again, and she lapsed back into the wordless moaning. She unclasped her hands and picked up Kaibara’s pouch. Her eyelids lowered. Pressing the pouch between her palms, she rubbed the fabric against her nose and mouth and put her tongue to the dangling netsuke, as if physically extracting Kaibara’s spirit from his belongings. She lowered the pouch to her lap and spoke in a high, querulous whine.
“In the last year of my life, I was plagued by great sorrow. Death came as a welcome release. Why must you now disturb my well-earned sleep?”
“I—I want to know who killed you,” Sano faltered, startled by the fresh shock of having the spirit address him directly. And in a voice he could easily attribute to the frail, elderly Kaibara, whose remains he’d viewed in the morgue.
A long, tremulous sigh. “Why does it matter? What is done is done.”
“Your murderer must be prevented from killing again,” Sano said. “Please, Kaibara-san, tell me what happened last night. Did you see your killer?”
A long pause. Sano noticed with amazement that Aoi had assumed Kaibara’s characteristics. Her body shrank into itself, her jaw slackened, her eyes dimmed. And were those new wrinkles creasing her face and neck? The candles sputtered. The incense smoke now filled the hollow with a thick, pungent haze that made Sano dizzy and his eyes water. The sound of more dogs barking echoed up and down the hill. Then Kaibara’s voice issued again from Aoi’s mouth:
“It was dark. Foggy. I could not see his face. But he was very tall. And he walked with a limp …”
“Which leg?” Sano demanded.
“… the right …” As Kaibara’s voice faded, the old-man cast fell away from Aoi, leaving her face blank of all personality.
“Kaibara!” Sano resisted his impulse to clutch at the departing spirit. “Come back!”
With the slow, deliberate movements of a priest during a sacred ceremony, Aoi replaced the pouch on the altar. She unfolded the paper from around the dead eta’s lock of hair, which she rubbed between her finger and thumb, then cupped in both palms and sniffed. Recovering from the disappointment of losing contact with Kaibara, Sano waited tensely for the eta’s spirit to appear.
Aoi’s facial muscles tightened; her eyes darted from side to side with a feral wariness. Her shoulders hunched, and she held her arms close to her sides, hands clasped to her bosom. Sano gasped as he recognized the characteristic cringing posture of the eta.
A sudden gust of wind stirred the pine boughs overhead. The candles flickered; one of them went out in a hiss of singed wax. Aoi’s lips moved.
“… sorry … please, master, I don’t mean to offend you. Forgive me!” This time the voice was hoarse, guttural, and laced with fear. Aoi bobbed a series of rapid bows, while her gaze flitted from Sano’s face to the swords at his waist.
“I won’t hurt you,” Sano hastened to assure the spirit. “I just want you to tell me who killed you.”
“Samurai. Don’t know his name.”
“What did he look like? Describe him.”
Aoi’s eyes blurred in fearful remembrance. “Big. Strong. Bad leg. And he was scarred.”
“A scar? Where?” That the Bundori Killer had a visible identifying mark seemed too good to be true.
She shook her head impatiently. “Not just one. All over. Face. Hands.” Her mouth worked as the inarticulate spirit struggled to say what he meant.
Sano hazarded a guess: “He was scarred from the pox?”
A vigorous nod; a look of relief in the fearful eyes.
“What else? Tell me more.”
But the spirit lapsed into an incoherent muttering that soon faded. Aoi shed the eta’s feral guise and subservient posture. Sano watched with mounting excitement as she replaced the hair on the altar and picked up the label. Would he now learn the tall, lame, pockmarked samurai’s identity?
Aoi fingered the label, and a deep shudder convulsed her body. Fixing her stricken gaze on some distant scene visible only to her, she whispered, “The soldiers are on the march again. Soon they will arrive at the destined battle site. He will draw his sword. And then—”
With a shriek, she hurled the label away from her. The paper swirled in brief flight, then drifted downward. Sano thrust his hand out to snatch it away from the candle flames.
“Look out!” he shouted as concern for the evidence overcame his fear of disrupting the ritual.
In a fumbling movement devoid of her customary grace, Aoi stood. Her knees upset the altar, scattering candles and incense burners across the clearing. Her groping hands knocked Sano’s away before he could rescue the label or other relics.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded, angry as well as confused.
“Fire, fire!” she cried. Her trance had dissolved; her voice was clear and sharp, her face alert and filled with dismay.
Sano looked down and saw the fallen candles smoldering in the dried pine needles that covered the earth. He jumped up and started to stamp out the fires. In her haste to help, Aoi darted into his path. They collided full tilt, face to face, with a stunning crash. Instinctively Sano threw his arms around her to keep them both from falling.
He felt his insides turn to molten heat. Her body was warm, firm, and pliant, her breasts soft against his chest. His breath caught as a surge of desire hardened his manhood and intoxicated his senses. For the long moment during which he held her, he read in her wide eyes, parted lips, and rapid breathing a need that matched his own.
Then, with a quick wrench of her body, she broke his embrace. She knelt before the upset altar, face averted, arms hugging herself.
Sano finished extinguishing the fires. He righted the altar and reassembled the candles and burners on it, along with the label—charred on one end; the hair—a few strands missing; and the pouch. As he resumed his place, he found himself shaking. His heart thudded; his body still clamored with desire. The rapid succession of strong emotions he’d just experienced—the shock of hearing his father’s voice, elation at getting the killer’s description, and the excitement of the ritual’s abrupt, chaotic end—had left him totally drained and exhausted.
“Are you all right?” he asked Aoi.
Without looking at him, she nodded.
“What happened?”
Now, when she faced him, he saw that although her face was paler, she’d regained her composure. “Forgive me for behaving so badly. Sometimes objects speak to me of the places they’ve been. The people who have touched them. The emotions they’ve absorbed. That paper made me see and feel disturbing things.”
Judging from her cool manner, they might never have touched. “You
talked about soldiers marching, and someone drawing a sword,” Sano said, trying to vanquish his lingering arousal by concentrating on business. “Was it the Bundori Killer?”
Aoi shook her head. “I don’t know. But I sensed a great battle lust in him.”
A new thought distracted Sano from his body’s need. “Maybe the killer considers the murders acts of war, like the shogun does,” he mused. “But was Kaibara his enemy, or Araki Yojiemon?” The battle scenario fit Araki’s time better than the present. “And if it was Kaibara, why not put that name on the label?”
“Maybe he wanted them both dead.”
Sano realized that Aoi didn’t know who Araki was. “General Araki died at least a hundred years ago,” he explained.
“Then perhaps the killer connected the two men in his mind. And attacked the living one.”
“It’s a thought,” Sano admitted, intrigued by her suggestion. The connection between Araki and Kaibara bore looking into when he questioned Kaibara’s family tomorrow. “But then why kill the man whose hair I brought you? He was an eta, with no conceivable link to two high-ranking samurai.”
Interest animated Aoi’s features as she rose promptly to the challenge. “And who better than an eta for a samurai to kill when he wants to test a sword or practice his technique?”
“Of course!” Sano regarded her with growing admiration. “The killer wanted to murder Kaibara, but he’d never taken a man’s head or prepared a trophy. So he practiced on a victim for whose murder he would never be punished, if caught.”
Discovery of Aoi’s perceptive intelligence increased Sano’s attraction to this mystic whose shocking, erotic ritual had yielded valuable clues. And her shining eyes, the eager forward tilt of her body, reflected her enjoyment of their collaboration. Fleetingly Sano thought of his prospective bride, about whose character and appearance he knew nothing. Then he forgot her as he sought a way to further his relationship with Aoi.
“Let’s meet again tomorrow night,” he said, enthusiastic in his pleasure at having a beautiful partner with whom to discuss his work. “I think your ideas will help me understand and catch the killer.”
But strangely, his enthusiasm caused Aoi to withdraw into her former calm, aloof stillness. “As you wish,” she said remotely. She scooped up the pouch, lock of hair, and label, and held them out to him, bowing.
It was a dismissal. She wanted him gone. Though Sano knew that a man of his position could order her to do anything he wanted, he would honor her wish. He couldn’t think of her as an inferior to be used at will. She’d already given him more than he’d expected: insight into the killer’s motives; a description of the man for whom to search. Reaching out, he accepted the relics.
Their hands touched. Hers was warm despite the cold night. From the faint blush that colored her cheeks, Sano suspected that the brief contact had stirred her desire too. But although he turned to look back at her as he left the clearing, she wouldn’t return his gaze.
Perhaps tomorrow he would begin to know her—and to draw from her the same response she awakened in him.
9
A low-lying fog veiled the city when Sano rode out through the castle’s western gate early the next morning. Ahead, he could discern only the rooftops of the banchō. The district where the Kaibara clan and other Tokugawa hatamoto lived looked like a village in a painting, floating on a lake of mist against hills softened by white haze.
This pleasant impression quickly faded as he entered the banchō. Hundreds of small, ramshackle yashiki stood crammed together, each estate surrounded by a live bamboo fence. Thatched houses rose above the leafy stalks. The smells of horse dung and sewage permeated the air. These Tokugawa vassals, however long and faithfully they’d served their lord, were by no means Edo’s richest citizens. Rising prices and the falling value of their stipends kept them poor compared with their landed superiors and the affluent merchant class. Signs of poverty abounded: half-timbered walls bare of whitewash or decoration; plain, roofless wooden gates, each with a single shack for a guardhouse; the simple cotton garments and unadorned leather armor tunics of the samurai who occupied the guardhouses and thronged streets barely wide enough for four men to walk side by side.
Sano stopped a passing samurai and asked the way to Kaibara’s yashiki. But as he edged his horse through the crowds and down bumpy dirt roads, he quickly lost all sense of direction in the banchō’s tangled maze. Sano remembered an old saying: “One born in the banchō might yet not know his way around it.” Finally, after asking directions again and losing his way several more times, he arrived at the Kaibara estate. There, outside a gate hung with black mourning drapery, waited Hirata. His wide, suntanned face looked ruddy with health, and a boyish eagerness lit his eyes at the sight of Sano.
After they’d exchanged greetings, Sano said, “Find out if anyone saw Kaibara leave the banchō the night he was murdered, or saw anyone following him. Particularly a large, pockmarked samurai with a lame right leg.”
As he explained how he’d gotten the suspect’s description, last night’s events seemed bizarre and dreamlike. But his belief in Aoi’s powers remained. As the young doshin set off to do his bidding, Sano glanced eastward at the castle. Mist still clung to its foundations, as if the spirits evoked in the ritual hadn’t yet ceased haunting it. Sano wondered what Aoi was doing now, and whether her sleep, like his, had been disturbed by the experience they’d shared …
Banishing this irrelevant thought, he dismounted, approached the Kaibara guardhouse, and identified himself to the elderly sentry posted there. “I must speak to Kaibara’s family.”
“Yes, master.” The guard shuffled toward the gate.
Sano wondered how a man so feeble could be charged with protecting his master’s estate. “Were you on duty the night before last?” he asked.
The guard opened the gate and stood aside for Sano to enter. “No,” he said sadly, hanging his head. “If I had been, I would have kept my master inside and prevented his death.”
This answer perplexed Sano. It sounded as though the gate had been unguarded—surely an unusual occurrence in the banchō, and one that eliminated a possible witness to Kaibara’s departure. And why should a retainer think it necessary to make sure his master didn’t leave home?
“I want to speak to the night sentry,” Sano said. “But first, tell me why you didn’t want Kaibara to go out.”
Shame filled the man’s eyes, and Sano understood: No one had been on duty, and the loyal retainer didn’t want to expose the private affairs of the Kaibara family.
“That will be all, thank you,” Sano said, leaving his horse with the guard and entering the gate. Perhaps the answers to these questions, and others, lay inside the house.
He got an inkling of the truth when he entered the bare, deserted courtyard. The house was fairly large, with a wide veranda and generous entry porch. But cracks veined the walls; broken window lattices rattled in the breeze; weeds sprouted up through the flagstones of the path. No servant came out to greet him, or announce his arrival to the Kaibara, whose failure to maintain their property suggested financial hardship, which would also explain why they lacked men to staff and protect the house.
Once inside, Sano had to pause and compose himself after removing his shoes in the entryway. The smell of incense, the sound of a woman weeping, the hollow drumbeats, the monotonous chanting, and the house’s shuttered gloom all reminded him of his father’s funeral vigil. He steeled himself to enter the main room and observe its occupants with professional detachment.
An orange-robed priest chanted Buddhist scriptures, punctuating them with strokes upon a gourd-shaped wooden drum. Before him stood the coffin—an upright wooden box painted white. A low altar held a funeral tablet bearing Kaibara’s name, a vase of flowers, burning incense sticks and candles, and offerings of rice, fruit, and sake. Although Sano had expected to see many mourners, only two women, one white-haired and elderly, the other about fifty, knelt near the priest. Both wore white m
ourning robes; the younger one wept as she clutched the stoic older woman’s hand. They looked up at the sound of Sano’s footsteps, while the priest continued chanting and drumming.
Sano introduced himself, adding, “I’m sorry to disturb you at such a time, but since the shogun has charged me with the task of capturing Kaibara-san’s killer, I must ask you a few questions.”
The room’s hushed emptiness and musty odor saddened him. Cobwebs laced the ceiling corners, revealing the same neglect as the house’s exterior. Sano sensed a desolation that predated the family’s recent tragedy.
“You were his wife?” he asked the older woman, who nodded. She had a deeply lined face with downturned eyes and mouth, and a hairline so high that her knotted white hair resembled a samurai’s, shaven crown and all.
“Whatever you wish to know, I will tell you if I can,” she said. Her voice had the deep, sexless quality of old age. To the other woman, evidently her maid, she said, “Fetch our honored guest some tea.” Then she fell silent, hands folded in dignified resignation.
Sano knelt opposite her and waited until the maid had placed a tray of tea and cakes before him and withdrawn. The memory of his father’s funeral made it hard for him to swallow, but he managed a few polite bites and sips. Then he said, quietly, so as not to interrupt the rites, “I’ve brought you something that belonged to your husband.”
From under his sash, he took Kaibara’s pouch and gave it to the widow. “Have you any idea who could have wanted to kill him?”
Slowly she shook her head, stroking the worn pouch. “No. You see, my husband had been dead for a long time already.”
Taken aback, Sano said, “I don’t understand.”
Bundori Page 9
