‘That is the highest art,’ he said, slapping his hand on the pillar.
‘But what is the difference, then, sir?’
‘After a time the samurai cannot tell his own face from the ferocious mask he wears and the whore has forgotten the young girl’s simple heart …’ He shut his eyes and sighed. ‘How sad, young Take. How sad.’
‘The actor, sir?’
His teacher was smiling again.
‘He’s no better. Maybe worse because he should understand. An actor who cannot tell himself from the part is soon locked away.’
Takezo remembered and felt a longing to see the old man again. Put it on his list of things that would never happen.
“Maybe all real love is first love,” he murmured, not really aware he spoke.
“What’s that?” wondered the samurai, Sessu, still on the floor by the body, looking up at the ronin’s back where he’d paused at the doorway, lean and tall.
“Do you know who murdered her?” Takezo asked, not turning.
“Murder? What …”
“I don’t really want to know why,” he said, because it might be his fault.
“Why do you …”
“Hideo clan,” scoffed Takezo. “Better call it Reiko clan.”
He expected the other to leap up and draw or at least shout. He would have almost welcomed a moment of violence. He was surprised at the response.
“There is something,” the man said, not loud.
Takezo turned and went past the body to the open window and parted the split light cloth curtain with a brush drawing on it of a flower more or less emerging from or maybe turning into loose, gracefully bold calligraphy. He leaned there, side on to the kneeling samurai without having to see her, listening to outside and in at the same time.
“Something?” he urged.
“I am loyal to my clan.”
“Why mention it, then?”
“Bold to say anything you like.”
The ronin shrugged. Outside was quiet. He heard the lady of the house out in the garden, talking and was answered by a deep male voice, then a higher-pitched one that might have been Yazu. The outside air was still, heavy and dead. Incense and candle smoke hung in the room. Upstairs someone was plucking a samisen, the mournful twang dull and distant.
“Yes, yes, someday I’ll certainly be killed. Meanwhile, what do you mean to tell me? You’ve already said you’re loyal.”
Again, under-reacting, Sessu responded:
“Yes, I am loyal. But something is not clear.”
Takezo almost guffawed, hearing that.
“Impossible,” he said. “Please, speak or don’t, but try not to mention loyalty, again.” He could just see the young man, head hanging, caught in inner conflict. “If it might help, please explain.”
“I told her the daughter ran away to escape something shameful and dangerous,” he sort of blurted.
“Which daughter?”
“Osan. The child of my lord and lady.” The young man sighed and kept his face bent as if bowing at Miou’s body.
“You told whom?”
“Miou.” He began to shake with soft sobs. “Maybe they killed her because of me.”
“Why not kill you?” Takezo wondered, half to himself, hearing Yazu’s voice saying something he couldn’t make out and the woman saying: yes.
“I don’t care if they do. I was drunk and spoke too much.”
“Hard to believe that could happen,” said the cynical detective. “Don’t blame yourself too much. Miou had a way with conversation.”
The young man stood up, this time.
“Careful what you say about her!” he hissed.
Takezo felt a little sicker, now, because it was possible. That was her job. He had a feeling whoever tried to pay for the funeral had a hand in her death. Shook his head and sighed. Sessu pushed his arm which normally would have been risky.
“Careful,” said Takezo. “She had another background.”
“Apologize,” Sessu demanded. “Don’t hint that she was a criminal.”
“Not that. Not that. She worked for ninja.” That stopped the young samurai. “What was the disgrace?”
“Always more to things than we see,” Sessu said and Takezo bowed a nod. “A man, high in the clan – I do not know his name – was trying to force Osan into disgraceful …”
“Yes?”
“Relations.”
“The chamberlain?”
The young man shrugged.
“Don’t know,” he said.
That would explain a few things, Takezo thought. She was using the foreigner to reduce the effect on her clan… she didn’t expect to be killed… if she was… still the question…
He heard Yazu’s voice and then his steps on the porch. He’d come in, Takezo was certain, and tell him the policeman had understood and relented, and did his sensei want him to help find the culprit.
Father Hachimachi, or whatever his name is, would be out of his depth here…
“Complicated,” the ronin commented.
“I must go,” said Sessu, heading out.
“I must drink,” said the detective. “A lot.”
“Is that wise? You seem to be in danger.”
“I’m empty, young samurai,” was the answer. “I must fill myself with something.”
Twenty-Nine
On the quay at Edo
A half moon was rising behind long, thin clouds on the bay horizon. As cool a spot as would be found in the city. As Captain Yoshi came down the long dock he looked not-quite-furtively behind him towards the dark shadows of shore. His footsteps were soft on the smoothly weathered wood. The tide was coming in with a hint of decay.
The next to last moored boat had a long cabin which showed a faint, orange-red glow through slatted shutters. At the point where the steeply curved side made it easy to step on board, a big man was sitting on a stool, sheathed sword resting on his shoulder in the crook of his arm, outlined against the faintly luminescent sea.
The 50 foot long vessel bumped the dock softly, barely rocking in the light breeze and low waves. Lines and thick knotted rope, used to protect the hull in harbor, creaked slightly. The night was still. A fish struck at the surface with a soft, wet pop somewhere close by. Behind them on the dark shore among trees and scattered houses, someone was talking, words softened and unstrung by the soft sea sounds and uneven breezes.
The man stood up and bowed. His clothes were dark and showed no clan insignia. Yoshi responded and nodded his chin at the cabin.
“Inside,” the guard said, looking past the Captain and the land’s end to where moonlight was just touching the water with a spatter of silvery hush. “Beautiful here, Middle-Captain.”
“No time for contemplation,” Yoshi snorted, slipping off his tabi and stepping, barefoot, over the side to the smooth deck.
*
A little before
Inside the boat, Issa and Reiko sat at a floor table drinking warm sake, neither serving the other. He was looking, mainly, at the planked floor, the dull reddish lantern directly behind him so that his face was mostly obscured while hers was dimly lit and made unnaturally ruddy. The cabin was bare except for a rolled-up futon and some unopened cases. The air was close and wetly hot, in there. Both were sweaty and irritable.
She knew he was scowling and didn’t much care. Tapped her golden fan softly on her knee where she sat her heels, facing him at a slight angle.
“Whose fault doesn’t matter,” she was just saying. “No point. If the ring was so important, why didn’t you take it from him when he was in the castle drinking with you? Or when he came to the funeral and crippled our men?”
“Thought it might be a trick,” he replied, not looking up, as if his dim shadow over the plain table might hold a secret. Shrugged. “Didn’t want it to seem too important in case he didn’t really have it and others were involved.”
“You are so clever, Chamberlain Reiko.” She didn’t exactly mock him. Didn’t have to. “I
am but a foolish woman and have no idea, myself, of why it is important. Just a Chinese trinket you pretended belonged to my child.”
“Yes, yes …” He sighed and stared at the empty, one-dimensional dark outline of himself that reached almost to her knees where the fan still made, slow, arrhythmic taps.
“You are so clever,” she repeated, “that you have varnished the floor without leaving a path to the door.” The fan stopped and she leaned towards him a little, eyes seeming amused while her mouth set into a frown. “I thought Osan was dead and I grieved… in any case, you have left me in ignorance.”
“I was not told everything, my dear,” he insisted, not lifting his long face. Much was kept from me. And then this meddler, this miserable, worthless vagabond …”
“Who set Takezo on this scent in the first place?”
“Some devil,” hissed the Chamberlain, clenching both fists where they rested on his thighs. “And, oh, that dog Kame, may he suffer evil rebirths, he gets killed and …”
“Why did she run away? I didn’t chase her.”
“Your daughter …” He shrugged his hands, then rubbed his face, raising his head, this time.
“She suspected us, my love,” she said, turning her face so that half fell into shadow. “She declared she said nothing to my husband, but I think he suspects, as well.”
This time Reiko raised his clenched fists to his face where they trembled, slightly.
“Thanks to that …” Shut his eyes. “And his idiotic play!”
“Maybe,” she said. “But it is dangerous. I took this risk, yet you seem distant.”
“That fool, Kame,” he snarled. “Ahhhcc! That fool. Puts the ring on the dead woman for safekeeping. Hah!”
“Are you distant? Do you still care?”
“What?”
“Do you still wish to see it through to the end?”
“Of course.”
“With me, to the end?”
Just then a knock at the cabin door. They both started, she said:
“Yoshi.” Then: “Come in.”
The door was already swinging open and the stocky samurai filled the narrow frame. He bowed, not-too-deeply. It was clear, though he was a clan captain, he had some additional power, acting like an equal. Takezo would have noted he was different from how he’d behaved in the presence of the armored lord in the barn.
“Well?” inquired Reiko.
“The plans go forward,” said Yoshi. “With or without the ring.”
“More risk,” said Reiko, looking down at his shadow again.
“Afraid, now?” wondered Yoshi.
“Insolence,” Issa put in. She was watching them both, narrowly. “Is this ring supernatural? Is Nobunaga not a mortal man that you need this talisman to defeat him?” Her disgust and impatience showed. “My daughter ran away. Another is murdered and it’s made to seem Osan.”
“That fool, Kame,” sighed Reiko, shaking his head.
“The fool was he who hired Takezo, in the first place,” she offered with a sneer, sipping from her tiny sake cup and ignoring them both.
“You daughter’s flight was fortuitous,” her lover said, still brooding at the shadow of himself on the table. “A good way to begin action against Izu.”
“Anyway,” said Yoshi, still standing, which was a point of rudeness, “the foreigner will be tried and quickly executed. Then we move against Izu and his allies. Nobunaga will have to respond.” Yoshi bowed with a jerk, rubbed the scar across his nose, looking thoughtfully at Issa. “Takezo will be dealt with.”
“Yes, captain,” she said. “Keep practicing and you’ll master it. Meanwhile, where is Osan?”
“Safe,” said Reiko. To Yoshi: “Keep looking for the ring. Takezo can’t have hidden it so well. Maybe he gave it to his woman, the yujo.”
“That was considered,” said the stocky captain. “She was investigated.”
“Questioned?” asked Reiko, looking at the other, now.
“Yes. She’s dead now.”
“Another dead girl,” said Issa. “And still no magic ring? Is there a price in bodies still unpaid?” She opened and closed her fan with a snap. “Fools.”
Yoshi bristled and glared.
“Insulting,” he said.
She just looked at him.
“You serve our clan, for the moment, captain,” she said, not looking at either of them. “Go, now, and kill more women or whatever you do best for your true master who, no doubt, is a manifest demon.”
“As you say, my lady,” said Yoshi, and went back out, half-closing the door behind him.
“Naruto,” she said to the chamberlain, still not looking at him, “why did Osan run away? Even if she was in love with the foreigner she didn’t have to go anywhere. Are we some rustic court?” Looked at him. “Why are you distant?” she asked, again.
He drank another cup of sake. Then again.
“No more mistakes,” he said.
“I don’t trust our ‘captain.’”
“He’s important. It’s very big. We have everything at stake. Our heads, too.”
She knelt-walked around the table and touched his arm, then his cheek.
“I don’t care,” she murmured, “so long as I have your heart. It’s senseless, but it’s how I feel.”
He nodded, still downlooking.
“Don’t worry,” he told her.
“We’ll end up suicides.”
“No. Don’t worry. We won’t fail.”
Thirty
Two days later
There were lines of blindingly bright light above him. Takezo was flat on his back in damp, acrid darkness.
He gradually realized the light was close to him… blurred… and the lines seemed perfectly even - which was incomprehensible – not that he expected to comprehend anything. The notion of comprehension was too remote for him to even find the word in his mind… if he even had a mind left to look in…
He was sure he knew his name but there was no hurry in remembering it; how important was that, anyway? What might it change? Something had a foul smell close by and he was a little curious about it… except he was still too far away and there were those bars of unbearable brightness… feeling shrewd, he shut his eyes… better… he sensed there were words for all these things but he didn’t need to look for them, either, yet… because now there was a booming sound coming steadily closer… he reopened his eyes as it was banging right overhead, shaking the lines of light, then booming away, again…
The brightness hurt but he decided it was beautiful, fanning into his private dimness, suggesting infinite space and he felt very comfortable except for the smell which kept intruding like a hard lump in a mattress… and then the booming returned, coming from the opposite direction, then going and, as it passed, somehow blocking, spraying shadows into the sweet rays that bathed him in golden warmth… except it was too warm and there was the smell and then a voice, still far away, making sounds he didn’t know were words yet… and then he did.
“Good morning Jiro Takezo,” he said to himself with a slight groan, lying in a cramped, humid space in a stink of vomit. His own, no doubt. There was no mysterious world of light and dark because he was lying under a board sidewalk somewhere in the city and for how long was unclear.
Cheap lodgings, his mind commented.
The light hurt now. He winced. Things came back to him. Not nice things.
Had an inspiration: reached around the maybe two foot high crawl space until he located the jug that had to be there. He felt sly and more comfortable. What wisdom to leave the sake close at hand. And there was plenty of room to tilt it up to his lips. Not such a bad spot, he reflected, away from the bustle of the town and all the nasty things he didn’t want to think about.
But only a trickle wet his eager, dry and cracked lips, not enough to penetrate the sticky, fuzzy stuff that apparently filled his mouth. Not good. Tossed the worthless jug aside. Thought hard – which hurt – and then knew where to get more.
&nbs
p; The next problem was how to get out because the outside was walled closed by thick support boards and the ones above his head were solid. Well, he hadn’t been born under there, so… pushed, then rolled on his belly and crouched up, heaved… nothing…
Panting, slightly, head throbbing, rolled onto his back again. It was very hot there, now, and the lines of sunlight were painful. No more booming, of what he now realized, had been passing footsteps.
Then he remembered his short sword; drew it and began prying at the planks…
*
Lorenzo Gentile and his quiet, stocky, dark-skinned young bodyguard, Sanada, assigned by Lord Izu, had learned Takezo had been seen in this outskirts area of storehouses where rice, grains, timber, dry goods, metal and so on were collected. No one really lived there besides watchmen and the tavern-keepers. Others mainly showed up to load and unload goods. Gentile thought Izu’s advice: “Look for him and he’ll find you,” could have been better.
On the sunbright, weathered boardwalk in front of them, a swordblade suddenly poked up from the planks, glittering like a mirror.
Coming closer they could see it was being used to loosen the wood. They stopped under the untreated frayed and curling overhang to witness this marvel. A moment later, with a slam from beneath, two boards popped free and clattered aside, followed by the bare head, dirt-smeared torso, arms and shoulders of Jiro Takezo. His hair was madly knotted, askew and greasy; his face muddy, unshaven for days, eyes puffy and, sitting there, breathing hard and sweating, seemed as if he were standing in a hole.
“Maybe,” offered the bodyguard, “he’s an earth devil.”
“Is he nude?” Gentile wondered, vaguely.
Sanada shrugged. He was, typically, fastidious: shaved to the crown of his head below his topknot, neat and clean.
The ronin wasn’t much interested in the blurry shadows observing him. He was getting ready to stand. Braced his palms and heaved upright, up to his knees in the sidewalk. Sheathed his shogo. Grunted, yawned and rubbed his eyes.
“Ahrhh,” he more or less groaned.
Gentile was pleased to see his kimono was caught up around his waist so they were spared any intimate sights beyond the long, smooth upper-body muscles of the handsome, disheveled swordsman.
Dead Blossoms: The Third Geisha Page 19