Kamakura Inn

by Marshall Browne

  “I’m sorry about your wife, Inspector. You’ve been having it rough.” He stared, unblinking, at the policeman.

  Aoki nodded. “I’m back on duty,” he said to clear that up. He thought, If he knew I’d been at the Hokkaido ryokan, he’d be really sparking. The waitress came, and they each ordered coffee. Aoki’s eyes flicked around the room. “I’m trying to get a fix on the identity of a yakuza. A big fish, in his fifties, who keeps his hand in at enforcement. Gets a kick out of that. He likes knife work, and he’s a Go-player. Maybe operates out of Osaka. I can’t disclose the name I know him by, but it’s false anyway.”

  Aoki watched Minami pour two packets of sugar into his black coffee. Twelve months ago Minami had written a series of articles on the yakuza. Aoki had gotten copies of them all then. He remembered that one of the pieces, referring to the nation’s banking woes, had been headlined “The Yakuza Recession,” the same phrase his classmate Shimamura had used. But Aoki hadn’t gone near the journalist during the Fatman investigation; with the constraints they had, it’d been amazing that they’d put together a case against Tamaki at all.

  “It’s a guy I’ve come across, as I said, using a fictitious identity. I need to identify him, see where he fits into the gangster world, and into the case I’m running.”

  Minami nodded brusquely and stirred his cup. His glance said, Which is?

  “This man’s a highly unusual type.” He described Saito’s appearance. “Maybe he’s a daimyo with a taste for keeping his hand in on enforcement for extra-special cases. A guy with power. Educated. He comes across as an expert on business and the economy.” Aoki thought for a moment, then said, “He’s quick with a haiku, as maybe he is with a knife. He compares our economy with the wild forests that once covered the country. Kind of a black humorist when he talks to you.”

  Minami frowned. Aoki watched the journalist’s face. Was something stirring in his brain? “A Go-player,” Minami murmured, still working on the sugar.

  “I’d say of professional standard.”

  The journalist put down the spoon. “I’ve looked into a lot of the yakuza’s dark alleys, but there’s an infinity of ‘em to look into. Nothing you’ve said connects with anything I know.”

  Aoki sat back. His left hand brushed his cheekbone, finding the mole. The journalist sipped the coffee and took in the detective’s disappointment.

  Aoki meshed his hands. How much could he say without risking Minami’s picking up on the ryokan case? He decided. This hadn’t been released to the media yet. “The liver’s been cut out of a victim, and it’s missing. A neat job. There was no chance of using it for a transplant—so why would anyone do that?”

  The journalist’s hand with the cup in it had frozen halfway to his lips. He was staring hard at the policeman. He put down the cup. “Now, that does ring a bell.”

  Aoki leaned forward. “Yes?”

  “About three years ago, there was a piece in the Osaka Shimbun. Something bizarre. More than that. A refrigerator containing human body parts was found in a suburban apartment. The owner of the place, a single man who lived alone, had disappeared. Neighbors called the police, and they opened the fridge. The cops must’ve got a horrible shock. It held a human kidney and a liver. The theory was they’d stumbled on a supplier of aphrodisiac snacks to a super-exclusive clientele. A batch of really sick bastards. There’d been a case like it in Hong Kong in the seventies. This newspaperman, Nagai was his name, nosed around and came up with a follow-up piece, which posited one of the snackers was a top yakuza. It gave no names as to perpetrator or informant, but Nagai had a good reputation, and his sources had always been considered reliable. “

  Aoki swallowed, and the contents of his stomach shifted audibly. He was seeing the half-crazed anger on the face of Chef Hatano. “You said ‘had.’ “

  Minami gave him a steady look. “Yeah, a week later Nagai was found dead, minus his sex organs and his liver. “

  Aoki stared at the journalist for a long moment. “And?”

  “It was a dead end. Nagai’s murder wasn’t solved that I know of, nor was the supplier ever found. Bits of him might’ve been in that refrigerator.”

  But maybe not, Aoki thought. Had he heard about this case? It must be buried somewhere in the relentless flow of mayhem in his memory.

  The journalist sipped his sugar-saturated brew. “Though Nagai’s theory was that the supplier got scared and ran off.”

  Aoki stared into his coffee cup. How had the Osaka journalist linked that grim refrigerator with the yakuza? To one man? Did Osaka CIB still have an open file? Did they know more than had broken in the papers, but couldn’t prove it?

  “What about Governor Tamaki?” Minami asked, abruptly shifting ground. “Putting him in charge of the Diet banking committee was like letting the fox in with the ducks.” He watched Aoki.

  “Another case that’s stone dead.”

  “Yeah, like my poor colleague Kimura.” Minami shook his head sadly. “With him, it was a case of the Fatman snapping his fingers, and the yakuza going into action, wasn’t it?”

  Aoki didn’t reply. Minami smiled. Aoki knew he was considering whether Aoki had found a connection between the mysterious man he was trying to identify and the equally shadowy figure in Nagai’s article.

  Aoki asked, “Is the big Go competition on in Osaka right now?”

  “Yeah.”

  Ahh. Aoki swallowed coffee. Minami’s eyes were trying to penetrate his brain, the way the reporter tried to see into everyone’s. The detective looked away. Minami must be wondering what he was up to. Gutted by his bosses over the Tamaki investigation, suspended and under the care of head doctors, his wife a suicide, the journalist colleague who’d blown the whistle on the shelving of the Tamaki case murdered. What was going on now? Minami was the industrious, patient type. His suit and his hair might be rumpled, but his brain wasn’t.

  Their coffee cups had been refilled, and the journalist drained his, noisily sucking down the residue of sugar. He said, “If a story breaks, I hope you’ll think of me first.”

  “I will,” Aoki said. “And many thanks.”

  ~ * ~

  It was 1:32 P.M. when Aoki arrived at Tokyo Central station. He checked the departure time for the next bullet train to Osaka. Fifteen minutes. The Fatman’s Club gold badge danced into his mind as he waited on the platform, followed by Minami’s grotesque story about the Osaka journalist’s murder. What were the connections to all the stuff in his head? Yamazaki’s missing liver? It might be more significant than the excised genitalia, which had probably been Saito’s ploy to point to Ito’s jealous rage; a cuckold’s cry from the heart. However, he’d gotten to know Ito better than that.

  Going out through Tokyo suburbs, a picture of Chef Hatano slicing fish from the backbone came to him. Had the bastard gone into that horrendous sideline after his restaurant failed? Aoki’s mouth tightened at the thought. The dragnet had failed to yield anything more on Saito, Hatano, and the two women who’d left the ryokan as he lay unconscious in the secret room.

  Speeding south, it occurred to Aoki that all his moves since coming down from the mountains had the stamp of predestination. He lit a cigarette, took out the slim book he’d bought at a bookstore, and began to leaf through it. The Master of Go. Here and there, he picked up a move that Saito had replicated. The 1930s breathed from the pages, as past centuries had from the ryokan.

  He put it aside and watched the evening lights appearing in the darkening landscape.

  The bullet train slid into Osaka at 4:45 P.M. He asked for directions at the station’s information desk. The clerk wrote them down. Aoki went out into the gray city, the gray air; another great Japanese urban-scape sprawling to all horizons, rebuilt after World War II, devoid of its prewar individuality, according to his father. The old man had come here for the Bunraku puppets. Aoki visualized him flitting through the streets to the historic theater, his mind immersed in the plots of the old plays. Surprising him, the title of one jump
ed into his mind: Love and Suicide.

  He sniffed. Odor of sewage. It was much worse in summer.

  He’d turned his cell phone off. Superintendent Motono was on the back burner.

  ~ * ~

  Osaka police headquarters loomed up in a blaze of lights. The taxi dropped Aoki at the door, and he entered the building. Police and others were coming and going in the main foyer. Over the years, Aoki had dealt with officers here, but standing at the desk, his badge in hand, he found out that his contacts had been transferred away or retired. He was directed to the third floor, and ten minutes later, he was sitting in a cubicle with a young detective who showed no surprise at this Tokyo colleague’s request. The three-year-old case was brought up on a screen. “Dead end,” Minami had said, and this status was confirmed.

  The young policeman shrugged. “Nothing done on it for over a year.” A rash of NO SMOKING signs had invaded the building, so Aoki was suffering. No one who’d worked on the case was available. Aoki brooded on his cigarette-less hands. Old cases did come out of the woodwork, did get a new life, did get solved. Take Madam Ito’s, though the police computers weren’t going to show that, if it rested with him.

  “What about the file?” Aoki asked. “And the one on Nagai’s murder?”

  They arrived in twenty minutes, and Aoki was left alone with the two dossiers.

  They were in living color: red meat fresh from the butcher’s block. Expressionless, he examined the graphic photographs of the refrigerator’s contents. Devil’s smorgasbord. That thought came, and with it the devil’s gate, and he heard the lilting, husky accents of Kazu Hatano’s voice. His memory seemed attuned now to voices from the past.

  He searched for a photo of the missing refrigerator owner, Okura. None. No background on the guy at all except what his neighbors had known, and that was hardly anything, which probably meant “Okura” was a false identity. He checked; they had prints from the apartment.

  Then he was looking at the serious face of the Osaka Shimbun reporter, Nagai. A risk-taker, but his face didn’t show it. Had Nagai worried that this might be his final assignment?

  He opened the murder file and flicked through the pages. A suspected gangster hit; no suspects; cross-references to the other file on the desk. He sighed and went back to that, turning to the progress summaries of the investigating detectives. Accustomed to such files, he worked quickly. He found nothing on the journalist’s source for the body-parts/yakuza piece. Either Nagai hadn’t committed this to writing, or it’d been lost or destroyed. There was a batch of yellowing newspaper clippings. He scanned them. No clues there—

  It was folded in three, and he almost missed it: dated 1998, from an obscure northern magazine. He began to read it, and in a moment it had his complete attention. He finished and sat back, thinking about the former colonel of the Japanese Imperial Army by the name of Oto, who’d been tried for vivisection and cannibalism at the Tokyo War Crimes Trials after the war, and acquitted. Several witnesses hadn’t lasted the distance. Colonel Oto had died in 1998, which had clearly prompted the piece.

  Aoki gazed out at the cold city lights. What had brought this to Nagai’s attention, and how did it connect to the Osaka case and the unnamed yakuza identity? Had the 1998 piece on this Oto presented a new angle for the Osaka reporter on the body-parts case? Though he hadn’t used it in his article, maybe he’d intended to. Somehow, maybe it’d opened up the top yakuza’s identity—sent him probing in a fatal direction. Whatever, when the original material he must’ve had disappeared this was overlooked.

  Aoki stared down at the file. It seemed truncated, like a serial story missing the last installment. That feeling had come over him. Inside the back cover were printed boxes that recorded where the file had been, who’d signed for it, and the dates in and out. Idly he glanced at the last box.

  He blinked. The last place it’d been was the Osaka district prosecutor’s office. June 4, 1999. A name had swum up at him. He frowned. What was this? The next moment he had it: It was the name of the senior prosecutor he’d read about in yesterday’s paper, indicted for taking bribes from gangsters.

  Aoki whistled. That guy! If it’d gone to the DPO there must’ve been a prosecution brief—or some communication, maybe from the police, seeking guidance. Or the DPO—this corrupt official— had called for it. June 4, 1999. Nagai’s article on the body parts and the unidentified Yakuza daiymo’s involvement had been published on May 15.

  Aoki looked at his watch. He’d been lost in the arcane and nasty case for two hours. He’d noted that a detective named Ishi had run the body-parts investigation early on. Ishi might know about that last transit the file had made. He closed the dossiers. He had to get out and have a smoke.

  The young detective stood in the doorway. “How’d it go, Inspector?”

  Aoki’s eyes narrowed. “Nagai’s article pointed to the yakuza, to one unnamed top gangster, but there’s nothing in the investigation reports that ties that in. Or in his murder investigation.”

  The Osaka detective’s face was blank. He had this week’s headaches on his plate. Aoki sipped water from a paper cup. He didn’t want to let it go. “I think I might have a new angle. Is Assistant Inspector Ishi still around?”

  The Osaka detective winced. “Died last year. Stomach cancer.”

  Aoki’s eyes drifted away to the slit-like window. Framed in it, lights flowed away into darkness in curving patterns like bright yellow wheat thrown out of a bucket. The computer hadn’t revealed any comparable crimes. No more refrigerators. If Okura was Hatano, had he fled to the mountains when Nagai’s Osaka Shimbun piece came out? Or when the reporter had been murdered? The case stank of disappearance and collateral death. Maybe the perpetrators, the gourmets, were still out there in this Osaka night, snacking away. No. Instinct told him that the special dining had been very occasional—for obvious reasons.

  Aoki rose and patted his pockets. “Thanks. I’ve got your name card. I might be in touch. “

  In the main foyer he checked his cell phone. Two messages: An irritated Superintendent Motono demanded his presence at headquarters, and Minami’s cautious voice said, “When I got back I looked up the archives. Nagai had the job of covering Go competitions nationwide for the Osaka Shimbun. He was a good player himself.” A slight pause. “I’ve heard from police contacts re this Hokkaido ryokan case that the MOF guy’s body had the liver and certain appendages removed. You haven’t been taking a hot-spring health cure by any chance, have you, Inspector?”

  Aoki gazed across the foyer without seeing it. Go seemed to be hovering over his life. He shook his shoulders and grunted, “Huh! Health cure!” But then, maybe in a way it was that. For sure, his mind had traveled into new territory; that was one of the few indisputable facts in his convoluted world.

  ~ * ~

  The competition venue was a short taxi ride away. Gazing at lights and traffic, Aoki let his mind range over recent events and into the future. Probably this move would be futile. Common sense said that Saito would’ve gone to ground or transferred to another identity. Yet, instinctively, Aoki knew that Saito was an individual with a fatalistic attitude toward his existence; not much would stand in the way of his obsession with Go, with anything. He loved danger. Aoki was sure of that. Doubtless he was a fugu-fish eater, too, eating the flesh a fraction away from the venomous liver—making his lips and tongue burn and tingle . . .

  This was a premier competition in the nation. The man was addicted to the game, supremely arrogant, and probably considered himself untouchable, so maybe the odds weren’t so loaded against his turning up here.

  Saito and Hatano had murdered Ito and Yamazaki—and the bodyguard, Shoba. Now, maybe, the bastards were fitting into this Osaka body-parts case. Gently, he touched the cut on his head. Hatano’s prints would be all over the ryokan, and Okura’s were on file.

  But even if he could be found, how to flush Saito out from under the wing of the yakuza? If they could track down Hatano, maybe that’d be a way th
rough that warped and macabre bastard’s defenses. Little fish to catch the big one. In his career, Aoki had never encountered a problem anywhere near as hard as this.

  A traffic light laid a bar of red into the taxi’s interior, and the driver’s white gloves shone against the steering wheel. A sweet lily fragrance suffused the cab. Aoki’s head fell forward. He jerked his body upright. He’d been drifting into a dream. “A person must follow his star, especially into the unknown”—his father. Yeah! Saito was a way station on the route to the Fatman. Ex-governor Tamaki was the ultimate destination. His hatred for Tamaki had been suppressed by the madness at the ryokan, but now it was back, pulsating in his mind, and he was wide awake.