Kamakura Inn

by Marshall Browne

  ~ * ~

  Aoki descended the stairs at the southwest corner. Something was impelling him to undertake these explorations. Perhaps he was half-expecting to ferret out the missing sister, but he met no one and heard no human sounds, only the creaking of timbers and the fainter whining of the wind. He could hear his own breathing. It was the same scenario: dusky, wood-paneled corridors with many doors; small, empty rooms; ceilings almost scraping his head. His slippers moved softly over dully glimmering floors polished for centuries by a legion of departed maids. An empty, but clean, labyrinth. How did they keep up all the floor polishing? Was it ever filled with guests, even in spring? It was so dim in places that occasionally he flicked on his flashlight. At last he turned a corner into a day-lit gallery and realized that he was on the other side of the snow-drowned courtyard, opposite the cunningly built nightingale floor.

  Aoki stopped dead. A voice was chanting, hands clapping, and he smelled the cloying odor of incense. A Shinto ritual. Abruptly its sounds ceased, replaced by footsteps. Ito came out of the gallery and walked quickly past, his eyes fixedly ahead. The detective might not have existed. Aoki watched him go. Ito saying prayers!

  The inspector turned and entered the gallery. The shrine was built into an alcove, filling the space from floor to ceiling, gilded and ornate, red and gold—a family altar.

  A shrine to appease a restless spirit, Tokie said.

  I’m afraid so, his father commented.

  Aoki stared at it as the voices faded in his head. Had Ito been praying for his wife, for Yamazaki—or for rescue from the Fatman’s clutches?

  ~ * ~

  “So he’s gone. The Don Juan of the Tokyo finance world has stepped through the curtain—minus his sexual equipment. “

  Saito spoke in a pragmatic voice. They were in the anteroom. Aoki looked at him, hard. He’d located this man’s room on a lower level than Ito’s, about two minutes’ walk from the Azalea Room in the northeast part of the ryokan: the Chrysanthemum Room. “Do you recall the information submitted to the police by Madam Ito’s friend, identified as Person Y—the Kobe incident?”

  As Saito looked at him for confirmation, Aoki remembered. Yamazaki and Madam Ito had visited Kobe, staying at a hotel in the hills. While she was out, he arranged for another female friend, from his rich gallery, to come to their room. He “arranged” to be in this woman’s arms, in her body, precisely at the time Madam Ito returned. She rushed from the room and cut her wrists in the hotel ladies’ room with a nail file. She’d spent several days in a Kobe hospital. The hospital stay had been substantiated; the story about the other woman hadn’t been.

  “A torture point,” Saito said. “She’d never loved either of her husbands, so the papers said, but Mr. Yamazaki was a different matter. She was intelligent and must have known what kind of man he was. Nonetheless, concerning him, she had no power over herself.”

  How had Ito reacted to the attempted suicide? At the time, they’d kept it out of the news. Aoki recalled that a paper had written a sly comment on the MOF man’s morals: “Each night, Mr. Yamazaki lies down on a new tatami mat.”

  Aoki studied this student, or addict, of sensational crimes. What a recall for detail he had.

  “I continue to hear interesting things on my radio.” Saito’s big hands rested loosely on his knees. Aoki waited, his own hands behind his back. “They’re saying now a trillion has blown clean out of the bank’s books like chaff. Of course, it was gone long ago, but they’ve kept the lid on that. The amazing thing is the government might let it go down.” He gave a harsh chuckle.

  Aoki pulled out his pack of cigarettes, wondering if Saito had heard the report at six about the bank’s yakuza links.

  “And isn’t it even more amazing that as the bank crashes, the chairman’s trapped at a mountain ryokan, incommunicado, and the supervising MOF official lies murdered in the same ryokan?” He looked up at the detective.

  Aoki was unresponsive, thinking. Ito and Yamazaki had made reservations at the ryokan for three nights only, so their absence from Tokyo was enforced by the weather. An act of God, as they said in the West. Even so, with the bank in the shithouse, how could they have afforded to be absent for even one hour?

  Saito said, “Citizens caught up in the bank’s demise are legion. Ito’s the figurehead upon which waves of hatred will be advancing, and Yamazaki, complicit in the disaster, shares the blame. They were locked together in a deadly embrace.”

  Aoki stirred from his thoughts. Deadly embrace? A new thought came: The two might never have intended to return from this rendezvous, might’ve made a pact. For sure, they’d been locked together, but Ito was still here, and Yamazaki’s exit hadn’t been suicide.

  Fiercely, he frowned at the fire. More likely, they’d been working out a plan to save the bank. Key in the fast-moving Fatman in his banking committee role, the snowstorm, and a hand with a razor-sharp blade—and that’d hit the scrap heap.

  Saito shrugged. “And perhaps, after all, nothing has been discovered or decided about Madam Ito. “

  Aoki was only half-listening. The Fatman and his yakuza friends wouldn’t want the bank to go down. Until recently it must’ve been a goose laying golden eggs. He said tersely, “Yamazaki’s murder has put her case into the background. “

  This man’s story that the pair had been engaged in a retrospective on the missing wife and mistress could be total bullshit. Yet Yamazaki’s horrible simulated wailing was back in his head.

  Aoki turned and moved closer to the fire. Whatever had been discussed between the two men each night now resided solely in the mind of Ito.

  Saito picked up a black stone from the bowl. “According to my maid, the twin sister has disappeared.” He placed the stone with precision. “Disappearances seem to run in the family.”

  Aoki moved his eyes away from the dark, craggy face, the thick, glossy hair. News ran through this place like an electric current. What about the electricity, the phone? He gave an impatient nod and left the anteroom.

  Massaging the cold from his fingers, he couldn’t decide whether to speak to Ito again, whether to risk trampling the ground for the local CIB, who must surely be here tomorrow—

  He was staring down a corridor as if at a suddenly revealed vista: the chef, Hatano, hurrying through a remote corridor of the ryokan last night. The fellow Superintendent Watanabe had fingered for Madam Ito’s disappearance, the fellow who’d been mad with jealousy when she’d married Ito—according to Watanabe. In sending that awful sound through the ryokan last night, had Yamazaki stepped into that deadly quicksand, and was Ito the next in line?

  Aoki began to pace up and down, hardly aware he was doing it. If that was the way it was playing, it tossed out Saito’s sardonic take, that Ito was the one who’d exacted revenge on his wife’s seducer— as well as his own emerging thoughts about the yakuza. Watanabe couldn’t have predicted any of this.

  He pulled up and stared into the darkness at the end of the corridor. His boss’s agenda in sending him here continued to float like smoke in his head, but what if Watanabe had known that Madam Ito’s ex-husband was here, that the three men closest to her disappearance had suddenly assembled at the ryokan? Had the superintendent, in his convoluted way, thrown his best investigator into the situation, like bread on the waters, hoping for a breakthrough?

  ~ * ~

  Chapter Fifteen

  “WATANABE-WATANABE-WATANABE,” AOKI MUTTERED in the Camellia Room. He smacked his right fist into his left hand. He backed off, took in air in a deep breath. Figuring out his boss’s reason for sending him to the ryokan was like trying to grab hold of smoke, but all his experience, his sixth sense, told him that it was at the heart of what was being enacted here. Maybe what he’d just thought about his boss’s agenda was right on. Yet they’d tracked him out to the Fatman’s Hakone house that night, and the police shrink, obviously, had reported his paranoia about the ex-governor’s escape from justice, and his part in Tokie’s death, and the journalist Kim
ura’s death; and his grief and guilt about Tokie. The surveillance they’d put on him showed their concern about how dangerous he might be, but did he need to go down deeper yet to uncover Watananbe’s agenda?

  Aoki pulled a cigarette from the pack, lit up, and exhaled spasmodically. He could hear the stream flowing again; the ice was melting. He gazed into the alcove. The ryokan must’ve borne witness to a host of tragic events, and the MOF man’s murder was merely another in the stream of time. Like clockwork, this new way of thinking was rolling out of his brain, almost as a respite from the other grinding thoughts. Carefully, he brushed his lips with his fingertips. Kazu Hatano’s face had flashed fear and worry—and the hint of a straightforward woman. Her missing sister must be the foremost worry. Unless . . . He stubbed out the cigarette and left his room.

  At 3:20 P.M. he stepped through the door into the ryokan’s subterranean area. A minute later he stood in the kitchen’s doorway. His eyes swept the large space. The Kabuki cast had vanished. Only two persons present, each frozen, staring at him. The woman kitchen-hand dropped her eyes first. “Carry on with your work,” Aoki said. The chef was filleting a large fish. He made a short, smacking sound with his lips, then lowered his eyes to the task. Hard, wary eyes, and his face had flooded with color. Zip-zippp—a slight but sinister sound. Aoki watched the razor-sharp knife slice a fillet from the backbone. The man’s hairless, wiry forearm flashed over the rich flesh. He was concentrating on his knife work; his face had become closed. Adept. Two dark shadowy spots stood out on his forehead. Fast. His latex-gloved hands flipped two fillets onto a stainless-steel tray; he flicked a trace of blood off the metal with a cloth, then washed and dried the gleaming blade.

  Child’s play for a man like this to excise Yamazaki’s genitalia; to display them in the black, lacquered box. The thought chilled Aoki. Though thrusting a knife into living human flesh mightn’t be so easy.

  No stoves were lit yet, and the room was like a meat locker. The chef crossed his arms and regarded Aoki. His black eyes didn’t deviate from the detective’s face.

  “Why did you come back here?” Aoki said.

  The chef looked at the woman and pointed to the door. She stopped beating eggs and went out. When it came, his voice was rough and intense. “That’s my business.”

  Aoki nodded slowly. “I know who you are. I suggest you answer the question.”

  The man’s face had turned dark. His tongue licked over his lips.

  “How long ago, Mr. Hatano?”

  He lifted his eyes and stared beyond Aoki. “Two years.”

  Aoki had expected a longer period. “Before that?”

  “I had a restaurant in Osaka.”

  For a long moment Aoki considered this, continuing to gaze at the man’s face. What had brought him to the mountains—a business failure, filial duty? His daughters? Aoki knew there’d be a story behind that, but this man wasn’t going to say anything more, and he was in no position to force him to. “Where were you going last night?”

  “To my room.” Hatano’s gaze dropped to the spotless bench. The two shadows on his forehead were dark as bruises. His mouth was small and tight-lipped: a fish’s asshole of a mouth. Aoki nodded, turned, and left, the sound of the knife slicing the raw fish still in his head.

  In the corridor, he stopped. Three Hatanos at the inn, but one missing. The chef’s take on his missing daughter wouldn’t differ from Kazu Hatano’s. Family business.

  Aoki turned his head sharply. A snatch of jazz: Bix Beiderbecke, playing “Tiger Blues.” He remembered his classmate Shimamura, the innumerable concerts they’d attended together in their youth. Lost days. There was no jazz here; it was the ryokan playing its tricks, or his damned nerves.

  He went on along the corridor and stepped back into the public domain. At the foot of a stairway he paused, pulled out a chocolate bar, and bit off a piece, chewed, and meditated. Yamazaki, in a speech to the Bankers’ Association, had attacked the yakuza as “a cancer in corporate life.” Big surprise, though perhaps he’d been laying down smoke over his own complicated official activities. If the yakuza had placed an assassin in the ryokan, it could only be with the aid of someone here. He was back to that.

  Aoki swallowed the delicious chocolate. The time factor was too short. Revenge and retribution at the hands of the cuckolded Ito stayed on the screen as a motive. Ditto with Hatano. As for Kazu Hatano, loathing for Ito exuded from her every atom; he hadn’t observed her face-to-face with Yamazaki.

  Reluctantly he put it all aside and went to the office.

  In the hall, Shoba sat on the bench he’d made his own. He stood up, folded into a bow, his eyes on the detective’s feet. Aoki grunted. Yeah, those hard fists could pound you to a pulp, but how was his knife work?

  “Everything’s up for grabs,” Aoki told himself.

  Kazu Hatano must’ve been working hard to restore the place to equilibrium and settle the staff down, not an easy task with a murdered corpse in situ, not to mention the disruptions from the snowstorm. She looked up from her desk, and a black ringlet of hair escaped and curved down beside her pale cheek. Aoki wished he could enter through those eyes into her thoughts. The mother had been a famous mountain beauty, and the daughter had a comparable allure, though her looks weren’t exactly of the classic type. She rose, her eyes questioning.

  With a shock, Aoki realized that this woman was stirring something in him, that each time he was seeing her in a different light. The slender hand brushed back the ringlet and withdrew down her cheek and under her chin to spread against her throat, revealing her shapely forearm in the kimono sleeve.

  Aoki’s heart was pounding. The simple gesture had aroused his passion. It was as simple as that. He swallowed. “The phone?”

  “It’s still out of order. My housemen are going to start digging out the front door today. The snowplow will already be at work down the mountain. I do hope so.”

  “Your sister?” Heat was moving across his face.

  Her eyes dropped. “She can’t be found.”

  Aoki swallowed hard. “I find that incredible.”

  The shapely shoulders moved in the slightest of shrugs. “It’s the fact.”

  He coughed. The damned tobacco—no, this damned emotion. “Do you have any new thoughts on Mr. Yamazaki’s murder?”

  She hesitated, then gave him a direct look. “It’s connected to the present, not the past. “

  Aoki blinked. “Please be more specific. “

  She shook her head.

  Specific! His eyes flicked away. Information was locked inside her head about her mother’s disappearance, and about Ito and Yamazaki being here, that was for sure—information he needed. “Why did your father come back to the ryokan?”

  Her eyes widened. This had surprised her. “You would have to ask him.”

  He could only gaze at her as he absorbed her reticence. One, maybe two nights to get through, then all of this would be opened up like a can of sardines by the CIB. He hoped fervently it wouldn’t prove personally disastrous for her.

  ~ * ~

  At five, with a sense of relief that the day was ending, Aoki went to the bath. Shoba was waiting in the corridor, and Aoki ignored the man’s bow. The bathhouse was steaming—tonight the stone bath. Ito’s rotund white body was adrift in the water, and his eyes flicked open at the newcomer. Aoki soaped and rinsed and lowered himself in. Immersed, he gazed across at the bank chairman and remembered Yamazaki’s long pale legs, visualized the savage yet clinical cutting that’d been done between them.

  After a few minutes, Ito climbed out and sat on a stool, his stomach subsiding in gross rolls of fat. “Buddha” was right on, Aoki thought. Ladling cold water over his head and body, drying himself, the banker appeared deep in thought. A few times his eyes darted at the Tokyo police officer.

  Was the banker in danger? The question hovered beyond Aoki’s closed eyes as information and priorities shuffled continuously in his brain. After his enforced absence from the force, the di
sgrace that had been unjustly laid on him, it seemed the impetus to throw himself into this case was building in him like a fever.

  ~ * ~

  Saito’s slicked back hair gleamed in the lamplight like old lacquer. He was sipping green tea and, without looking up from his seated position, bowed slightly to the detective. He wore a black kimono devoid of decoration. Aoki realized that these meetings by the Go board were forming a thread of familiarity between them. “The type that adversaries have,” he told himself. He moved nearer the fire and warmed his hands. When would Saito get around to his own case, in depth? When he was ready. The man liked to throw in observations from the margin, stir things up, yet maybe he had come to view the fall leaves, to replay this historic match in seclusion. Maybe he was nothing more than what he said he was, just an eccentric.