The Death Ceremony

by James Melville

  "You're right, you know. He's right, Governor. Thelma—that's Lady Hurtling, of course—Thelma's in something of a state. It's a good thing we're staying at the Miyako, they have a proper drill for VIP protection. You'll remember, Governor, the Prince of Wales stayed there, in sixty-eight I think it was, before your time, of course. We generally go to one of the inns at Nanzenji when we come to Kyoto, they've known me for years at the Kikusui, but this time it's quite true, as the Superintendent here points out, we're at the Miyako."

  Otani looked at Inspector Mihara, who nodded in response and moved forward to address the two ambassadors. "If you will come this way, Your Excellencies, we will arrange for your cars to be called at once. I can detach men on motorcycles to escort you to your hotels." Otani could not understand his English but it sounded stilted, not like that of his own trusted assistant Kimura.

  The black man beamed. "Don't worry about me, Inspector," he rumbled. "Nobody after me. Not in Japan, anyway. Just at home." He chuckled fruitily and slapped Sir Rodney on the back. "You just take care of Sir Rodney here."

  "As you wish, Your Excellency." Mihara turned to the Governor and reverted with evident relief to Japanese. "Governor, may I have your authority to arrange for plainclothes officers to provide a security watch at the hotel?"

  "Yes, yes. Do that." The Governor seemed to fear, probably rightly, that he was being taken for granted and now began to take ostentatious command, urging Hurtling and the Ghanaian forward towards the door.

  Otani was the last to leave the room, and, as he did so, held back to take a last look round. Swiftly crossing to the spot where the Grand Master had been kneeling when shot, he glanced down at the tatami. The blood had soaked through the woven grass surface of the tatami leaving little trace behind, but the sight of the lacquer tea container on its side, its lid having rolled free and a small quantity of powdered tea having spilled, was somehow even more shockingly disturbing, as was the disorder of the cushions discarded by the guests as they had hurriedly left or been shepherded from the room. Otani had not been told what they had done with the body, and had little curiosity about it. There would of course be an autopsy, and the bullet would no doubt be recovered from the victim's skull. It might prove to be of some value in the investigation, but then again it might not.

  He looked round the room again. Something was troubling him, but he could not put a finger on it, and after musing without effect for a while he made his way back to the waiting-room in search of Hanae.

  At the sight of her husband she rose eagerly from her kneeling position beside the massive bowl of the hibachi with a smile. Then her eyes widened as she looked him up and down and the words came out in a suppressed wail.

  "Darling . . . that was your best suit" Otani's mouth twitched as he looked at her. He had noted her use of the past tense.

  Chapter 3

  I THOUGHT I OUGHT TO LET YOU KNOW, EVEN though it won't be a matter for us, of course. I was not unimpressed by the senior Kyoto man on the spot. Mihara his name was." Otani leant back comfortably in his chair and surveyed his two colleagues. The winter sun sent a shaft of brilliance across one corner of the big, shabby old office and showed up the frayed areas here and there on the venerable brown linoleum which Kimura regularly urged him to have replaced with the smart new-style carpet tiles he had specified for his own cubby-hole of an office on the ground floor.

  Although it was already the eighth of January, this was their first extended meeting since the New Year holidays which legally consist of New Year's Day only, but which, in strict practice, extend over at least the next two days while all banks and commercial offices are closed, and by immemorial custom for most people peter out only around the fifth or sixth of the month with the round of New Year parties and inspiring speeches by company presidents and lesser bosses to their staff. Otani had indeed himself only recently addressed a gathering of his headquarters officers: he had not much enjoyed it and was glad that he could now revert to his normal unobtrusive routine, seeing only a handful of his senior colleagues at all frequently. Of those, Kimura had a significant part of his confidence, while Noguchi had virtually all of it.

  Inspector Jiro Kimura, chief of the External Affairs Section, was conventionally tailored that day, in a dark-blue pinstripe suit, pale-blue shirt and knitted blue tie. His fingers were laced delicately round one knee, and the gleaming polish of the shoe poised in mid-air reflected the sunlight. "I've heard of Mihara," he now conceded judiciously. "As a matter of fact, he's my opposite number there. Needless to say, he has only a handful of foreign residents to worry about compared with my people in the Kobe area."

  Otani smiled briefly. "I may say that he looked very smart, Kimura-kun. In uniform." Otani looked up at the ceiling as he continued. "Whatever became of the uniform I'm told you wore while I was away in England?"

  There was a snort from the third man in the room and Otani transferred his gaze to him blandly. "Come, come, Ninja," he chided him. "The last—and come to think of it the only time I ever saw you in uniform was in 1964 when you were Divisional Inspector for the harbour police and you took the Mayor on an inspection tour. Nearly drowned him, too, didn't you?"

  "Wish I had. What put it into your head to go to Kyoto anyway?

  "Ninja" Noguchi had known Otani too long to rise to his occasional teasing in the way that the much younger Kimura invariably did, and as Otani's senior in age by several years had the privilege of saying whatever he liked to him. Although not very tall, he looked like a cross between a retired sumo wrestler and a day labourer. Inspector Hachiro Noguchi, chief of the Drugs Section, was already over retirement age, and Otani was waging a so far successful battle to keep him in harness. His latest communication to the Personnel Division of the National Police Agency, who wanted to send a man in his late forties from Nagasaki, had countered their offer with a proposal to retire Noguchi formally but give him the status of full-time "consultant", and Otani reflected with satisfaction that it would take them at least six months even to think about that one, much less say yea or nay to it.

  That day, Noguchi was wearing his usual grimy and capacious trousers, once the lower half of a suit, secured to his bulging belly by a vast leather belt which looked as though it had once formed part of the harness of a carthorse. Over a faded blue shirt minus a collar, he wore a tattered cardigan in a startling design of multi-coloured diamonds.

  "I told you. We were invited. It's quite an honour, you know, Ninja. I must admit that I probably wouldn't have bothered on my own account, but I didn't want to disappoint my wife ..." This was an outrageous misrepresentation of the true state of affairs, since Otani had been only too glad to have a cast-iron excuse to escape from the house at Rokko for the best part of a day during Rosie Winchmore's stay, while Hanae for her part had been initially quite cool about the prospect. Moreover, she had pointed out that they would have to take a monetary gift with them and that this could not decently be less than ten thousand yen, representing housekeeping money for at least two days, possibly three with luck. They had in the end presented fifteen thousand, since the Grand Master himself was to officiate.

  "Bit of excitement for you, anyway, guy getting killed like that." Noguchi raised a massive hand to refuse a refill of his cup of green tea as Otani replenished his own from the old tin kettle on the battered tray and pointed it enquiringly at his two lieutenants. Noguchi had barely touched his first cup, but then he hardly ever did. Kimura's watch suddenly emitted a series of bleeps, and he hastily fumbled at it, trying several of the numerous buttons before managing to silence it.

  Otani raised an eyebrow quizzically, but made no comment. "It was certainly unexpected," he said to Noguchi. "And an extraordinary way to plan an assassination. What still bothers me is how it was conceived. How the fellow aimed, I mean. There was no source of light within the room to produce shadows against the shoji paper, and certainly no video camera anywhere that I could see ... in any case, it's inconceivable that anyone could have rigged one
there without the staff of the place knowing. Then again, how could he know where the ambassador would be sitting? It was in doubt right to the last minute." Otani sighed rather disconsolately. "Anyway, it's obviously a matter for the Kyoto force. I suppose I might have to submit a statement, but that's all. Now, gentlemen, we must think about our work. We have a full meeting of all section chiefs this afternoon, and I just want your views on one or two of the matters likely to come up, so that I'll have a good idea of the consensus I ought to steer people to .

  The next hour passed satisfactorily enough, and it was noon and time to think about lunch almost before Otani realised it. At the end of their conference he asked Kimura and Noguchi if either of them had brought a boxed lunch they might wish to fetch to join him for his own midday meal, but neither had. No interest was ever expressed by anyone in headquarters about Noguchi's private plans, and he melted away in his customary disconcerting style. The minor mystery of Kimura's unusually sober rig was cleared up when he volunteered that he had a lunch appointment with one of the staff of the American Consulate-General, adding hastily that it was strictly business, and promising without fail to be back in time for the staff meeting at three.

  Left to himself, Otani went over to his desk and retrieved his own lunch-box from the top of the small filing cabinet to one side, where he had placed it under that morning's edition of the Kobe Shimbun to protect it from the sun. It was a simple affair of black lacquer, which had once belonged to his father, the stiff-necked old scientist who had so deplored his only son's failure to follow in his academic footsteps. The original quality of the lacquer had been so good, and it had been so lovingly cared for, that it still looked beautiful, and Otani always took it into his hands with satisfaction mingled with a touch of curiosity over what Hanae would have put in it for him that day.

  "Something from the mountains and something from the sea" had become their catch-phrase at home since reading the run-away best-seller about Totto-chan, the little girl at the window whose early education at a uniquely liberal experimental school near Tokyo before and during the Second World War had so caught the imagination of the Japanese public. The enlightened headmaster's insistence that the lunch-boxes of his charges should contain these essential elements summed up Hanae's instinctive thinking anyway, she was pleased to realise.

  Quite often the snowy bed of cooked rice which usually occupied one-third of the space inside had a pickled plum in the centre, making a symbolic hinomaru rising sun, like the Japanese flag. Then in addition there was generally a morsel of grilled fish or perhaps a shrimp, as well as burdock, some tofu and inevitably pickles. Otani always looked forward to lunch-box days.

  He took a pair of throwaway chopsticks in their paper wrapper from the packet he now kept in one of his desk drawers, having decided quite arbitrarily one day that the washable lacquer kind he had always previously used were unhygienic, even though he still ate with them quite happily at home. Then he bore box and chopsticks over to the low coffee-table and resumed the seat he had occupied earlier while talking to Kimura and Noguchi.

  He removed the lid and stopped short, frozen in the act of laying it down beside the box, and stared aghast at his lunch. The tofu was there. There was also a piece of pumpkin, and three neat cylinders of cooked spinach next to some perfectly ordinary marinated squid. It was the rice that filled Otani with horror. It was brown.

  Chapter 4

  I DON'T CARE WHAT SHE THINKS," OTANI SAID HOTLY,

  "I want proper rice from now on. White rice." He was speaking in a passionate undertone to Hanae as she prepared their evening meal in the kitchen to the accompaniment of sploshing sounds and tuneless singing from the bathroom where, Otani had said to Hanae, it sounded as though Rosie Winchmore was not so much taking a bath as doing somersaults in it. Hanae tried to calm him down.

  "She means well, darling. I've tried to explain to her, and I think she understands now that she shouldn't have thrown the cooked rice in the refrigerator away. But by the time I had to get your lunch ready there was only the unpolished rice she'd brought in the house. I was hoping you might not notice . .

  "Not notice1? Why, it was inedible—" Otani broke off as the bathroom door was flung open and Rosie emerged, stark naked except for the small towel which is normally all that is to be found in Japanese bathrooms and which she was holding before her in a sketchy and unsuccessful attempt at modesty.

  The vision lasted no more than half a second as she caught sight of Otani and hastily scuttled back in with a stifled scream, and Hanae, whose back had been turned, remained in ignorance of what had caused the disturbance. Otani coughed and withdrew from the kitchen. From the safe distance of the living room, he raised his voice so that Hanae could still hear him. "I think Rosie-san needs a yukata." Then he sank down limply on to a cushion and closed his eyes for a moment. It was all too much. He supposed that his subordinate Kimura had naked young women all over his manshon flat as a regular thing, but would gladly have forgone the luxury himself. He sighed and picked up the remote-control switch of the television. It was nearly six-thirty, and he might as well look at the news, put out as he was by having been prevented by Rosie from having his own bath immediately on returning home, as was his usual custom.

  It would have been out of the question to try to hush up the death of so eminent a public figure as the hereditary head of the Southern School of the tea ceremony, one of the unquestioned leaders of Kyoto society and a prominent figure in any public debate on national cultural policy. Nevertheless, the family seemed to have persuaded the Kyoto police to delay releasing the news to the media for some twenty-four hours. Otani was quite surprised at the amount of attention now given to the matter in the national network news. Although slightly more careful than the newspapers, which habitually indulged in speculation as though the concept of libel was unknown to Japanese law, the commercial TV networks were fairly nonchalant as a rule. Otani noted with interest that there was not even the most oblique reference to the theory he had himself advanced: that the British Ambassador had been the actual target. Indeed, although the presence of "distinguished Japanese and foreign guests" at the fatal tea ceremony was freely referred to, the newsreader did not name any of them. Instead several minutes were given up to the showing of film clips of notable events in the dead man's tenure of office as Iemoto following the death of his father nearly forty years earlier. Otani watched, fascinated, as the late teacher was shown welcoming various foreign dignitaries at the entrance through which he and Hanae had passed only the previous day, and ushering them towards the group of venerable thatched buildings which were his official residence as well as the headquarters of a nation-wide organisation with international affiliates, part cult, part educational institution and part business.

  There were also clips of the slain Grand Master in conference with the Prime Minister of Japan, lecturing on the aesthetics of the tea ceremony in Paris, and being awarded the key to the City of Honolulu by the Mayor, himself of Japanese ancestry. There was no doubt in Otani's mind that had it not been for his untimely death the Grand Master would, having comfortably passed the minimum qualifying age of sixty, before long have been the recipient of formal honours from the Japanese authorities; a Culture Prize at least or possibly the Order of the Chrysanthemum.

  Before the announcer turned to the next subject one last picture came on to the screen. It was a still photograph of the new Iemoto, eldest son of the dead man and now eighteenth hereditary head of the Southern School. At thirty-two, it seemed he had for many years served as his father's principal lieutenant with responsibility for the school's finances and administration. Depicted dressed in a Western-style business suit, he looked the rising young executive he was; earnest, bespectacled and conventional. Otani retained only the most fleeting image of the young man as the picture changed to a gory close-up of the latest motorway crash with the camera dwelling lovingly on the bloodstained tarmac and Rosie entered the room, now decently covered in a blue and white cotto
n yukata, which Otani recognised as being one of Hanae's.

  She showed no sign of lingering embarrassment as she sank down on to a cushion near Otani and he resignedly switched off the TV. "I hope you enjoyed your lunch today," she said in her halting Japanese. "I found that you can buy unpolished rice in the ordinary shop! White rice is poison, you know." She suppressed a laugh with an inelegant snort as Otani gaped at her disbelievingly. "I had a funny conversation with the old woman who served me. I asked her if she sold gemmai and she looked very suspicious. Then she nodded and weighed me out one kilo. Then she said, 'What are you going to do with it?' So of course I said I was going to eat it. 'Are you going to cook it first?' she asked me. Honestly!"

  This time Rosie chuckled merrily as Otani sat with a perfectly straight face, quite failing to see anything to laugh at. He entirely understood and sympathised with the old lady's bewilderment that any normal person should wish to buy rice in its original state. "We don't eat rice like that," he said at length. "We don't like it." Rosie seemed in no way cast down, and Otani felt obliged to try a little harder to be sociable, but as he opened his mouth to speak Rosie forestalled him.

  "Mrs Otani was upset with me for throwing away the rice in the refrigerator. Sorry. But now you've actually tried brown rice you won't want to change back, will you? It's good for the body.''

  The transparent sincerity and missionary zeal of the girl affected Otani in spite of himself, and he shook his head gently with a small smile. "Everyone over forty in Japan has tried it, Rosie-san. We ate it like that during the war, but that doesn't mean we liked it. It's impolite, I know, but I'm afraid my wife and I are too old to change our ways now . . . tell me, what have you done today?"

  "Oh, I had an interesting time. I went into Kobe and took the special train to Port Island to have a look round. Then I walked around and looked at the shops and found the place where the old houses the foreigners used to live in have been restored ..."