Kamakura Inn

by Marshall Browne

  Now, maybe, it gave him his chance.

  The night he’d come out here after Tokie’s death, had he had this confrontation in mind? He couldn’t remember; he’d been in too much of a daze to know what he’d been doing. There’d been a cop on his tail then, and was his mind any clearer tonight? He wanted the man in court, exposed, and put away as a common felon. Yet the fact was that he was untouchable. Realistically, bringing him to justice seemed to have a snowball’s chance in hell, now that the political power brokers had killed the investigation. So was he just easing his honest cop’s conscience with the justice bit? The only way with Tamaki was a bullet, and it was the only way that would ease the pain in his heart about Tokie. Yet maybe he could force him to come clean—get it all out into the press, through Minami. . .

  The police kiosk was lit up, vague figures moving in its lighted interior. Aoki went in the opposite direction, as he had on the last visit, and walked up the dark street beneath old maple trees, whose branches were nearly skeletal against a sky strangely clear for late fall. A breeze sighed. A stand of bamboo whispered back. Nature was being its enigmatic self. He walked silently, the .45 a heavy drag in his pocket.

  The house took shape in the darkness. How many Friday nights had he and colleagues watched here in vain for clandestine visitors, for a new element in Tamaki’s variegated agenda to surface? Another world from his luxury high-rise apartment in Roppongi, strung with security gadgetry. But no one had come; no new element had surfaced.

  Aoki blinked. The two stone lanterns at the gate were lit. The Fatman, or someone, was here. The house had a narrow frontage but went back a long way in a series of rooms to the garden. The hall was hard-packed earth, as were the passages. An elderly maidservant was usually in residence; once, when she went shopping, Aoki had looked the unlocked place over, roaming through the rooms, looking for papers. He’d found none. The woman had never been here Friday nights.

  Maybe the bastard came to plot the political strategy for his faction; to steer it to ascendancy, and himself to the prime ministership. They said he’d quit the Diet to run as a prefectural governor when it seemed his chance at prime minister had gone. The prospect had revived, and he’d reentered the Diet. Full circle; the Fatman being his convoluted self.

  Aoki stood next to a tree trunk. No voices, no music, only the breeze. He waited. It didn’t seem so cold here; the mature trees hemmed the houses in, their big roots prowling under the mossy ground. With the dense vegetation, the neighboring properties seemed more remote than they were. He opened his overcoat and transferred the .45 to his belt. Careful of his footing on the mossy stones, he entered the tiny front garden, slid back the door, and stepped into the hall.

  There was light deep in the house. Softly he walked the dusky passage, pausing at each threshold to check each dark room. He was moving past artifacts of old family life, of historical Japan. His heart was cold, his breaths short and controlled. The light ahead was drawing him like a moth. Grimly, he thought, A deadly moth.

  The living room was deserted. For a sickening moment Aoki thought he’d come into a trap. Then he noticed that the door to the garden was open. He took a deeper breath and edged through it.

  The garden was only about twenty yards long but had an illusion of spaciousness. The dark figure stood ten paces away, in profile, gazing up through the trees at the sky, hands folded on a great belly: a gross silhouette communing with the night, absorbing a big harvest moon.

  Aoki thought, Or considering Superintendent Watanabe’s surprising exit? He would’ve heard of it.

  Aoki’s eyes smarted with strain. He moved forward, and his shoe hit a rock. The uplifted face swung around and saw the intruder against the light of the room. “What the hell! What—” He moved with surprising speed and commitment across the space between them. Aoki’s hand raced to his belt. Tamaki pulled up, shoulders thrust forward, his face peering at the intruder. “You!” he snarled. “What’s the meaning of this?”

  Aoki’s hand was inside his opened overcoat. He gazed at the wheezing, overbearing figure. “The meaning? I can understand you’d be surprised to see me, Governor. Though you must’ve heard

  I survived the ryokan.”

  “What? Get out, you’re babbling like a madman!” Tamaki moved again, to pass the madman and get to the phone. Smoothly Aoki brought out the big revolver and stuck its long barrel into the huge gut. The Fatman leaped back, letting out a hiss, then became still again. The light from the room gleamed on his eyeballs.

  “Keep very still,” Aoki said. “I’m going to put some questions to you—

  “Finished.” The word sprang from the thick lips. “You imbecile, you fucking imbecile! You don’t have the faintest fucking idea who or what you’re up against.” The big plump fingers opened and closed in the night air.

  “Like you.”

  The ex-governor gasped. “You! You think you can arrest me? You’ll be crushed! A fool for a second time. You must have a brain to survive, Inspector.” Loaded with contempt and anger, shoulders hunched, he peered at the detective. Aoki stared back at the face a yard from his own. Naked power was pouring from the politician, flowing in sweat from his brow; clearly it was beyond his comprehension that a single bullet could take it all away. He’d survived too often, and too much. Aoki’s brain was sorting out the options.

  “What are these fucking questions?” A gush of breath, ripe with brandy.

  “Who killed Eichi Kimura? Cut out his eyes, cut off his tongue, his ears?”

  Tamaki gestured angrily. “Ha! Nothing to do with me.”

  Aoki lowered the gun’s barrel from the man’s chest and trained it on his private parts. Audibly, he drew back the hammer.

  “Maybe it was the yakuza,” Tamaki said in a harsh whisper that finished in a quaver of fear.

  New note, Aoki thought. His brain seemed to be clicking away like clockwork. “I’ll count to five,” he said. “Then you get the first one in the balls. “

  “All right. It was Watanabe’s idea. Kimura was a troublemaker, a muckraker who had to be stopped, for the good of the party.”

  “For the good of the party . . . Who did it?”

  “How in hell do I know? One of Watanabe’s contacts.” The lies spread across the serene garden’s aura like a stain of factory pollution in a clear night sky.

  “And I only shot Watanabe in the heart!“

  “Shit,” Tamaki breathed.

  “Who instructed Saito to finish me off at the ryokan?”

  “Who the hell is Saito?” Fear and anger and genuine-sounding surprise were in his voice.

  Aoki thought, It figures. The Fatman would never’ve known the name of the assassin, and “Saito” was a transient identity anyway. Tamaki was truthful about one thing, though; in the cool serenity of this garden, he was. Nothing would ever be brought home against him. It’d be hard enough even if witnesses had seen him personally standing over Kimura’s body, a bloodstained knife in hand. Swiftly the witnesses would’ve disappeared: paid off, frightened off, or killed. Probably he’d have gotten rid of his classmate Watanabe in the end. The superintendent had known too much.

  Aoki’s eyes were burning now from his unblinking vigilance. Even if he forced Tamaki to write down and sign a confession, duress would be claimed, and believed, and Hideo Aoki, the damaged, half-insane cop with psychiatric-ward time to prove it, following his bitter, misguided vendetta, would be sedated and dragged off to the oblivion of a sanatorium. If he made it that far!

  This is the rocklike truth of the matter, Aoki, he thought bitterly. The situation was precisely what he’d already known it to be.

  Tamaki’s heavy breathing was filling the garden. As if sensing the detective’s indecision, he said, “Listen, Aoki, I can understand the shock of your wife’s death. Allowances can be made—”

  In a surge of pain, Aoki thought his heart was going to burst. This scum alive, and his wife dead! “I can’t stand your life,” he snarled, his mind in a bloody haze, and pulled
the trigger.

  The click of the misfire made an inoffensive sound. Tamaki swayed back, then broke into a shocked laugh. “Shit! Your tricks don’t frighten me, you nobody cop—” He grabbed for the gun. They wrestled for it, swaying backward and forward. Tamaki was surprisingly strong. Aoki drove his head up into the contorted, hard-breathing face. Crunch! Tamaki screamed and reeled away, blood streaming from his nose. Aoki had been forced back onto a sand garden. He pulled the trigger again, and the explosion cracked against the rocks and reverberated away into the night. The Fatman shuddered, and blood spurted from the hole in his kimono. For a moment he kept his feet, then crashed down on his side. At Aoki’s feet, great gut heaving, he exhaled a long bubbling breath. Beneath his robe the thick legs kicked spasmodically, once, twice, then were rigid.

  “What was that?” Behind a bamboo fence, someone called.

  Aoki pocketed the revolver and went quietly and quickly out through the house. No one had rushed into the street. Swiftly he retraced his steps. The cut on his head had reopened, and he dabbed up blood with his handkerchief. A big mistake. The magnitude of what he’d done remained to be dealt with. Right now he felt he’d completed a Herculean task, broken out into a big space. He went, a shadow along the street.

  ~ * ~

  Inspector Aoki was home in two hours. He’d walked to a station one stop nearer Tokyo Central. On the way he’d wiped off any prints and dropped the revolver down a deep storm drain. If it was ever found, it’d be a dead end. The American firebombs had wiped out half of Tokyo in 1945; he was confident no records would exist showing whom it’d been issued to sixty years ago.

  He had a freezing shower, then sat in the living room without turning on the light. Despite the violence of his feelings, he’d never visualized himself at this point. Now, it seemed to have been destined for such a closure. Programmed, like Saito’s last moves in the 1938 Go match.

  When he’d shot Watanabe, he’d taken a one-way highway— then the DG, for his own reasons, had given him an escape route. There could be no escape from what he’d done tonight.

  But he’d join Superintendent Motono’s team tomorrow. The Fatman would be front-page news by then. The ex-governor’s enemies were legion, and Aoki would speculate as much as anyone else about that. He held a towel to the reopened wound on his head. He’d left his blood in the Fatman’s garden, maybe on his corpse. Probably the die was cast now for Hideo Aoki. However, he must get some sleep and have a clear head for tomorrow. He’d play out his cards to the bitter end.

  He half-expected to hear their voices in his sleep, but he sensed they’d finally gone. He sat up in the dark. They’d been lingering in a halfway house, getting him through his grief and guilt and the breakdown, showing him that other world. Now they’d passed on. To where? His father had believed in an afterlife of the spirit; Tokie’d never said. He felt a warm sensation and, listening intently, as sometimes he heard a distant break of jazz, heard the notes of an Osaka samisen.

  ~ * ~

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  INSPECTOR AOKI WAS AWAKE AT six. He felt refreshed and calm. There was no food in the apartment, so he drank the last of the Colombian coffee and smoked a cigarette while he listened to the news on the radio. Nothing about Tamaki. Was the ex-governor’s body still lying undiscovered in his garden? Before seven he walked to the station, bought a hamburger and ate it slowly, seated at a bar. Probably the cut on his head should’ve been stitched the first time. This morning he’d crudely applied Band-Aids to it. As he ate, nerves began to shoot in him. “But, after all,” he told himself, “what is going to happen, will. “

  On the platform, he looked at the front pages of two papers. Nothing there, either. Overnight, the yakuza had visited a mobster in the hospital, sans flowers, and put half a dozen bullets into him as he lay in bed. A couple of gangs settling a dispute, the police hypothesized. “It was like a yakuza movie,” a shocked fifty-five-year-old male patient told the reporters.

  Aoki grimaced. Just like my life. He discarded the papers.

  He arrived at headquarters at 8:30 A.M. and reported to Superintendent Motono. A squat, gray-headed man in his midfifties, the senior detective blinked and raised his eyebrows. Minimal bows were exchanged. They’d never worked together before.

  “Why didn’t you respond to my calls?” Motono’s voice was even, but his eyes had narrowed as if he were peering into a smoky room.

  “I had urgent matters to follow up when I got back from Hokkaido.”

  “Which took you to see colleagues in Osaka.”

  Aoki nodded. Someone from Osaka had been on the phone. He’d expected it.

  “We’ll go into that in a moment. Have you heard the news?”

  Aoki stared at his superior. “What news?”

  “Yukio Tamaki’s been found murdered—forty-five minutes ago.”

  Aoki widened his eyes. “Shit! How? Where?”

  The superintendent was still peering at him in that way. “Shot. At his family house in Hakone. Your old adversary, Inspector Aoki.” Motono moved a sheet of paper on his desk. Superintendent Watanabe’s untimely end would be sizzling away in the TMP building like an overcooked steak. Aoki knew that. That was the expression on Motono’s face, but doubtless the DG had decreed a blackout. Now they had the Fatman, another interesting sector of this inspector’s past.

  “Well, Tamaki’s not our worry. Superintendent Shimazu and his team have been assigned. Let’s talk about our worry, and I trust I’ll hear it all, including what happened on your trip to Osaka.”

  For half an hour, Aoki described the three murders at the ryokan; he talked at length about Saito and his wide-ranging dialogues but said nothing concerning the denouement of the Madam Ito mystery, though, of course, the old case came up as he described his interaction with Saito. Then he told Motono what he’d found out about the Osaka body-parts case and the journalist Nagai’s murder. He omitted the district prosecutor and Colonel Oto from the Imperial Army. He needed to look further into those angles. Finally, he covered the confrontation at the Go competition.

  Motono interrupted with a few questions but mainly kept quiet, his eyes either on Aoki’s face or on the sheet of paper in front of him. He looked as if he were considering the career of Inspector Aoki equally with the triple murders and the rest of it.

  Aoki sat back, at last lit a cigarette, and lowered his gaze to the desk surface. The room was overheated, and his body felt moist. Motono was almost as Sphinx-like as Watanabe had been, yet he gave off more human vibes.

  “Human-offal eating, Go matches, and Zen mottoes? Hmm, a fellow of extra-special tastes—and a mystery man,” the superintendent said, impassive. “But that chef, Hatano, no longer is.”

  Aoki’s eyes flicked up.

  “Forensics found a match with the prints taken at the ryokan in the central records. They’re the same as those in that specialty butcher’s flat in Osaka. As you say, the fellow calling himself Okura, who disappeared at the time of Nagai’s murder.”

  “Ahh ...” Aoki released breath in a long sigh. There it was. Motono had been looking into the Osaka body-parts case this morning. He’d given no sign of it when Aoki reported on his visit to Osaka police headquarters. Aoki said, “What about the prints in Saito’s room at the ryokan?”

  “No match there.”

  “What else have they found?”

  “The obvious things. They’re looking into hairs and fibers and blood.” He paused. “And the whereabouts of Yamazaki’s missing part. Also the whereabouts of that sister and the other woman. The prefecture report is a series of questions, yet they talked to you, Inspector, didn’t they?” He studied the cut on Aoki’s head.

  Aoki was silent.

  “Very well, I want you to go and brief our team. Then get your report down on paper. The DG’s demanding it. I’m making you my deputy on this one. I want you to go after this Saito and this Hatano, or whatever their names are. I want you to report to me twice a day, A.M. and P.M., and if I find your cell ph
one switched off—”

  He stared meaningfully at Aoki, then reached into a drawer for the service pistol and pushed it across the desk. It’s being passed around like a hot coal, Aoki thought.

  He left Motono’s office and went downstairs. Where could he restart with Saito? The Kobe address would be a fake. And Hatano? As for cold-as-mutton Tamaki, when would they question Aoki himself about his past with the Fatman, about his movements last night? They surely would. That was certainly on Motono’s mind, as it would be on Superintendent Shimazu’s.

  He gazed at his hands. The yakuza’s Yokohama deal had apparently been the catalyst that’d sealed Chairman Ito’s fate. Maybe that was where to start.

  Aoki gave twenty-odd detectives the same briefing he’d given the superintendent; they already had their assignments. Then he went to a desk and began to write his report. As he typed it out, the ryokan came alive again in his mind. When he was about half done he phoned the young detective in Osaka and asked a question about the Osaka district prosecutor who’d been arrested three days ago. The cop called back in twenty minutes. Aoki nodded to himself when he heard what he had to say.