Kamakura Inn

by Marshall Browne

  The maid brought in a bottle of Cutty Sark, disinterred from some distant storage cabinet, glasses, and a jug of water and placed them on a side table. Saito drew back, and his hand made the whiskey bottle seem half-size. “So? Such things can be arranged. I don’t dispute she’d become an embarrassment to each, and they contemptible to her. The newspaper reports brought that out, but the police couldn’t prove there’d been a murder—as you well know.” He poured the whiskey into the glasses.

  Aoki nodded slowly, considering “as you well know.” This man knew who he was! As did the woman on the front desk, as did the two men in the dining room. What had he walked into? He took up his glass and said, “A missing person for seven years? And why those clothes in that locker, identified as hers? “

  Saito’s fleshy lips pouted. “Did you know this match lasted for nearly half a year, was reported by the novelist Kawabata for the newspapers?”

  Aoki’s eyes narrowed. The man’s mind was running on twin tracks. He didn’t know this—after all, 1938. He’d heard of Kawabata but never read anyone’s novels. He guessed his father had read them. He drank half the whiskey at a gulp and impatiently glanced through the open door to the dining room. The two men from Tokyo were still deep in food and conversation.

  Saito said, “What is especially interesting is that they’ve turned up here, of all places.” The dark eyes were set back deeply under the projecting brows. “What does that mean?”

  Aoki didn’t reply. Yeah, he thought. But why is this man so deep into it? If he was one of those busybodies who avidly followed lurid crimes, what a bonanza to find yourself under the same roof as two key figures in a famous case.

  “Perhaps you’ll play chess with me tomorrow. I trust you aren’t planning to leave for several days. Heavy snow will fall tonight.” Eyeing the other, Aoki downed his drink and rose to his feet. He wished to get away and think about the situation. He bowed a good night and went out into the dim, breezy corridor hung with ancient calligraphy scrolls, which scraped and whispered against the wall, as if reciting their messages. The electric light in the whole ryokan was feeble.

  In the hall, fallen maple leaves lay on the floorboards. Aoki noticed how they flared bright red in the dusk, like the flames in the heart of the fire. He realized he was seeing some things with fresh eyes. Mountain air? New surroundings? His nervous state? His father had once told him that the brain functioned better in cold weather. “Winter’s the best time for calligraphy,” he’d said.

  Aoki sighed. The weariness he’d felt earlier had returned, like a drug. Maybe he’d sleep better tonight.

  The squat, sumo-like man had disappeared.

  The woman who had greeted him came out of her office, and Aoki saw that she’d changed into a dark blue kimono flecked with white. She said, “A kotatsu has been put in your room, sir. I do hope you’ll be warm enough. It’s always colder before a snowfall.” The same lilting mountain accent the taxi driver had. Her face, with only a trace of lipstick when he’d arrived, had been made up for the evening. The freckles under the eyes had vanished beneath white pancake makeup; the red-painted lips were vivid and precise. But she’d retired deeper into herself, if that was possible—into old traditions. “Ah, except the eyes,” Aoki told himself. They were cool, assessing, on guard, and very human.

  Tokie had had much of this, but beneath it she had been modern in many ways.

  Another fragment of the old case had emerged from his memory—the part that connected to the ryokan. Was this woman one of the missing Madam Ito’s twin daughters, possibly the inheritor, with her sister, of the ryokan? If she was, what did she think of them being there: the banker Ito, her mother’s reportedly complaisant second husband, and Yamazaki, Madam Ito’s seducer, who’d been extensively questioned by the police about her disappearance? He’d find out her name. Tonight, there was a lot more in the air than an approaching snowstorm.

  Her attitude modest and attentive, she was waiting on his pleasure. In a flash, he decided that she had the essence of this remote mountainous region, for him—yet another unusual thought. Was he turning into a poet?

  He said, “The man sitting here earlier, who is he?”

  “Shoba-san, Mr. Ito’s man.”

  In a rush of air, as if he’d been cued in, steady on his feet, though his round face was red from alcohol, Ito entered the hall. He went to the woman and inquired about an outside line for his room phone. She responded. He turned and peered at Aoki for a long moment, then bowed. “My condolences on the tragic loss of your wife.”

  Aoki’s face tightened in amazement. Then he blinked at the change in the woman, subtle, yet to his trained eye distinct. Her body had stiffened as she gazed with a deep intensity on the banker’s flushed face. Under her gaze Ito dropped his eyes and turned away to descend the stairs.

  Lighting a cigarette, Aoki walked the shadowy corridors to his room. Hatred, subtle but malicious, had been in that look, hardly a thing for a ryokan proprietor to show a customer! But then, if his guess was right, he was also her stepfather.

  He shook his head, suddenly the old case seemed to be hemming him in from all sides, minute by minute, to be flaring into life.

  ~ * ~

  Inspector Aoki reached his room and paused, hand on the door, again amazed that he and Ito had simultaneously arrived at this dot in the mountains, each with his particular knowledge of the other.

  There was a slight movement farther along the dim corridor. Aoki peered in that direction and was surprised to make out a cat sitting there, watching him. Abruptly it came forward. Aoki didn’t know much about cats but had nothing against them. He lowered his hand, and tentatively the cat sniffed it.

  “What are you doing?” he said. Hunting time, he thought. This place would be a paradise for mice, and cats. He stroked it briefly and then slid open the door, with its aged painted camellia.

  A padded kimono had replaced the other on the futon. The charcoal brazier to warm his feet and hands glowed in the electric light. The temperature was dropping, all right. He’d drunk the large whiskey quickly, and it had affected him. His bed had been remade. He butted the cigarette in an ashtray, sat on a cushion, and gazed into the alcove at the other dusky camellia.

  This ryokan was steeped in tradition, foreign territory to him. Tokie and his father, the traditionalists, would’ve been at home here. His loved ones, and all they stood for, had slipped through his fingers, seemingly in an eyeblink. Aoki stood up in the small room and held out his hands, confirming that they were shaking. His misery, his defeat, came crowding up on him. Ex-governor Tamaki. He turned away from the alcove, but whichever way he turned, the Fatman’s face was over his shoulder, hard and contemptuous, an untouchable, a winner.

  Aoki took a deep breath. He needed another Cutty Sark, but he fumbled in his bag and found one of the six chocolate bars he’d extracted from a vending machine at Tokyo Central station. He peeled off the silver wrapper and bit into the candy. On the wooden chest, the five orphans looked forlorn. He touched the moss around their tiny roots. Barely damp. He trickled water from a glass onto each; he’d have to remember to do this daily.

  Aoki heard a sudden rush of wind and lifted his head as it whined past the eaves. It had come from nowhere, and even as he listened it grew in force. The charcoal fire in the kotatsu shifted in an uneasy sound. The faint smell of ash was in the room. He glanced at his watch: 11:15 P.M. One whiskey and his head felt fuzzy. The altitude? No, fatigue. He undressed and put on the yukata to sleep in.

  The wind was howling around the ryokan now like a predator who’d cornered prey. Aoki, a stranger to mountain country, had never heard anything like it. He lay down on the padded mattress, and his mind looped back to Watanabe. Had the head of the investigation seven years ago been keeping his eye on the chief suspects, Ito and Yamazaki, all the while? Had the superintendent known that the two men were coming here and thrown Aoki back into the case for his own purposes? But if so, why hadn’t his boss filled him in?

 
Frowning, he thought back to what he’d known of the superintendent’s involvement in the case that, reportedly, had permanently stalled his promotion. Plenty of cops had unsolved cases on their records, even high-profile ones, but they still got promoted. The case had run into a dead end, and Watanabe had turned his focus onto her ex-husband, Hatano, a chef in Osaka. So far as Watanabe had been concerned, the man, a violent type who’d been sent packing years before by his ex-wife, had been furious at her marriage to the rich banker. Watanabe had become obsessed with the idea that the woman was the victim of her ex’s jealousy. Hatano had made a few drunken threats, but Watanabe’s terrific efforts had found no hard evidence to support a prosecution, especially without a corpse. Even so, he’d relentlessly kept on down that track, despite mounting criticism from his superiors. Finally, he’d become convinced that the twin daughters, who would inherit the ryokan, had conspired with their father in a murder. At that point, he’d been taken off the case.

  Aoki shook his head. Even the smartest operators sometimes ran off the rails. Feeling baffled and remote from civilization, he reached across to switch off the light. Saito’s long, sardonic face emerged in his mind. He wondered if the man from Osaka’s interest in the case went beyond the voyeur’s. He clucked his tongue; perhaps he was getting carried away with it all.

  He thought of something else and switched the light back on and reached out for his wallet and took the news clipping from it again. For the second time that day, he squinted at the faded newsprint. He confirmed what had entered his mind: Madam Ito had disappeared on the evening of October 24, 1993. Today was October 22, 2000. The day after tomorrow would be the seventh anniversary of the night she’d gone missing.

  He switched the light off and lay back under the quilt. Moment by moment, the creaks from the antique timbers were increasing in tempo; the scroll was banging against the alcove wall, the window glass was rattling in the frame, and torn paper panels in the fusuma door were flapping. Aoki sat up as the whole wooden structure shuddered in a fiercer blast, seeming to shift sideways. He felt like a man on a storm-tossed ship that was about to go down without a trace.

  ~ * ~

  Chapter Eight

  AOKI STARTED AWAKE INTO A darkness that was as dense as crude oil. His neck was running with moisture, his heart bounding from the cruel nightmare that came too often. Lying back, he surmised that one night it would kill him with a chest-wrenching heart attack. As long as it was quick.

  Nothing in his past had prepared him for what he’d found in the kitchen that night: not the mayhem that had come his way as a homicide detective, or earlier, as a traffic cop; not the surrealistic scenes in the Tokyo subway the day of the gas attack by the Aum Shinrikyo cult. Nothing. Not even his father plunging forward on the dinner table, his face contorted in his death agony.

  The lifeless fingers of her right hand, slightly inky from the last brushstrokes of her calligraphy . . .

  That horror—deep-set in him, the police psychiatrist said—was a significant part of his problem. “Turn your mind to the future,” the shrink advised. But he’d never get over it.

  Using the bedside flashlight, he peered at his watch: three minutes to three. Outside the covers, the air was freezing on his arm as he reached for a towel and mopped his neck and chest. The charcoal in the kotatsu had turned to ash.

  With a stab of surprise, he realized that the wooden building’s shuddering and the wind’s banshee wailing had ceased. Beyond the walls, in the wake of the departed storm, the absolute silence seemed a roar in his ears.

  Aoki got up and put on his overcoat, slid back the door, and stepped out of the Camellia Room. With the aid of the flashlight, he set out along the corridors. Faint snoring came from a door he passed, the only hint of humanity except for his quiet footfalls, which brought a subtle creaking from the floorboards. He ascended the staircase, went through the dark hall and along the corridor, and entered the anteroom.

  His breath hissed out; his arm came up automatically, as if to shield his face. The room was awash with dazzling white light. Framed in the large window was a dense white curtain of falling snow. On the Go board, the black stones were sharp and lethal, the white ones almost invisible. Shivering, he went to the window and gazed out. Before the nightmare had woken him, the old case had been in an earlier dream, and now it returned like a figure in white walking through these dark and rambling rooms.

  It must have been about sixteen years ago when Ito had met the divorced Madam Hatano. She’d inherited the ryokan from her father. After her disappearance, the papers claimed Ito had wooed her for a year, coming and going from Tokyo. A fresh mountain beauty, they wrote, though the photograph in his wallet was of the more mature woman, fine-featured and delicate. Yet a strong character did show in her face, and a sophistication that went beyond “fresh mountain beauty.” The Mona Lisa smile the photographer had caught heightened the enigma.

  As he watched the snow fall on the deeply silent mountain, swinging his arms for warmth, more and more of the case was coming back to Aoki. It was said that she’d also had an air of the demimonde, later; probably that was what had attracted Yamazaki, given his reputation with women. At any rate, the Ministry of Finance official had made his move—”seduced this leading banker’s wife, the owner of a mountain ryokan,” reported one paper, sprinkling spice for the salarymen and their wives. Throughout the case there’d been a shortage of facts, but avidly the media had embroidered what they had. It came out that the affair with Yamazaki had lasted about two years, accepted by her “complaisant” husband. Both men had had several mistresses during the period, and much about that had come out, too. Each was then in his early forties, the libido in its second flowering. It was strange how the raw publicity hadn’t harmed either man’s career.

  Aoki rubbed his hands vigorously; the aching cold was penetrating his bones. For Superintendent Watanabe, the case had been his nightmare. Aoki was realizing, more and more, how it must have been festering in his boss’s mind all these years.

  He should go back to the room before he froze to death, but the partially reconstructed though still essentially mysterious night in October 1993 was relentlessly seeping into his consciousness. Ito and Yamazaki had told the police their stories of that night, as had others, but it all led nowhere. When Ito had reported her as a missing person, given his influence, the police had responded diligently. Then the bloodstained clothes had turned up, and their interest had sparked. It appeared they had a murder investigation on their hands—and Superintendent Watanabe had been up and running.

  Aoki stood like a statue in the snow’s light. If anything, the snowfall was becoming heavier. Crack! Startled, he peered under the eaves into the snowy world. Crack! Crack! The weight of the snow was snapping branches off the trees. It had terminated his thinking, and he was shivering violently now as though he’d caught a chill. He left to find his way back to his room, hurrying toward warmth.

  In the room he warmed his hands in the kotatsu, then found his cigarettes. The lighter flared. He drew in tobacco smoke and immediately felt warmer and more lucid in his thinking. One paper, seeking readership, had speculated that she’d been dismembered and minced up for pig food. It was hard to see the bankerly Ito or the urbane Yamazaki having a hand in such a demise! Yet each had been shown up as ruthless in his profession, and what calculations and fantasies went on behind any person’s professional facade?

  He butted the half-smoked cigarette and returned to bed, keeping the overcoat on.

  When Aoki awoke for the second time, he didn’t know where he was. Then he lifted his head and made out the blurred flower in the alcove. The sound of the stream, like the gale, had died away, leaving an out-of-the-world silence, a pregnant one. He sat up, now alert. In the space of twelve hours his brain had gone from the moribund to the hyperactive. For months, his mind had been dormant except for the gathering stone-hard hatred for Tamaki. It was working again—yet, he felt, not quite reliable. He flung the covers back and walked
to the bath. Thirty minutes later he returned, redfaced and glowing. The cat was sitting outside his door, and he bent down to stroke it. Its yellow eyes turned up to his, assessing him. Another assessor.

  He was dressed when a female voice came from outside the door. It slid open, and the middle-aged maid who’d carried in his luggage was there, on her knees, head lowered in a bow. A lacquered tray with a steaming tea bowl was on the floor in front of her.

  She got to her feet and put the tray beside the bonsai pots, giving them a curious look.

  “What is your name?” Aoki asked. Clearly she was to be his room maid.

  “Mori, sir.”

  “Well, Mori-san, who does that cat belong to? “

  Surprised, she turned to look at the cat sitting in the doorway. “No one, sir, it is the house cat.”

  “What’s its name?”

  “Cat, sir.”

  Aoki smiled, and she bowed and withdrew.

  At 8:30 A.M. he went to the main hall. The mini sumo look-alike was back, seated against the wall, same gray suit, same vacant stare from the tiny dark eyes. The policeman observed him narrowly. A punch from those muscular arms could smash bones. Aoki had his black belt in karate, but he hadn’t practiced since pressure of work had forced him to give up instructing at the boys’ club a year ago.