Aoki went to his room and put on thick rubber-soled walking shoes, then the cable-stitch sweater she’d knitted. He transferred his pistol in its holster to his belt. He’d prepared two envelopes for the disks. They bore a miscellany of postage stamps he’d taken from a tin. He put on his overcoat and left the flat, leaving the lights on. He wouldn’t be coming back. In the portico, he stared at the bonsai plants. They’d survived their trip to the mountains; he could do nothing more for them now.
The streets of Kamakura were windswept. People were mainly inside bars and restaurants; just a sprinkling in the streets, innocent citizens going about their business. Ones who weren’t innocent were there, too, but out of sight. He felt it even stronger. He walked fast and reached the station in ten minutes. He turned a corner onto the concourse, quickly slipped the two envelopes into a mailbox, then bought a ticket from a machine and went onto the platform.
Five minutes to wait. Twenty or so persons waiting. Aoki sat on a bench and stared at a chrome-framed vending machine. The colorful cans and bottles were in pristine rows, waiting for coins. How many times had he stared at these gleaming refreshment machines? All his life he’d used them, would rank as a gold-class customer if such existed. He watched a youngish, shaved-skull monk in a red robe, with steel-framed glasses, feed in coins and retrieve a can, then turn away flipping it expertly in his hand. A vending-machine-savvy monk.
He’d waited on this bench with Tokie. He remembered once she’d laid her hand on his arm, a gesture of affection, an attempt at communication. He’d deliberately ignored it, committed to his street world, his street thoughts, his tough persona. She’d flitted through his life like a painted butterfly on a screen or a fan. He’d never once held her hand. Well, he would tonight, as they climbed Mount Fuji.
His eyes kept moving. The train was coming. Aoki took a seat where he could see the entire carriage. At Central station he’d take another train, then a taxi to the base of Mount Fuji, where he’d start their walk.
He gazed out the window at the dense suburbs, and without warning, the picture of Saito began to emerge. Fragments came slipping toward him fast, twisting and jerking, as though under pressure, to be slotted into his mind’s eye like pieces into a colored glass window. Like Go stones onto a board. In twenty years of dealing with criminals, he thought he’d seen it all. The pathologically violent, the devious and corrupt, and the rest of it, but Saito had transcended it all. He was the arch-criminal, the user of Kazu Hatano’s devil’s gate. A psycho who played the grimmest games of all, who relished blood and brutality and everything right out to the limits of existence. A joker to whom haiku and Zen mottoes on scrolls were black-edged embroidery.
Inspector Aoki gazed at the Tokyo night and let it wash over him like an incoming tide. In this trade, in this life, there was always deeper and darker, waiting to be found out. Compared to this fiend, the Fatman had been almost an apprentice.
The train arrived at Tokyo Central station at 8:47 P.M. He wasn’t thinking about anything now except their walk. He fed in coins and extracted a ticket from another machine. Fifteen minutes to wait. He bought a paper cup of coffee from a dispenser and stood sipping it with his back to the wall near the kiosk, watching the concourse. Salarymen starting their homeward trek passed in review, most of them glum, a few red-faced and boisterous. The Tokyo life: a daily three or four hours of deadly earnest commuting, maybe relieved by a manga comic, or evening alcohol. Life . . . ?
Inspector Aoki drained the cup, crumpled it, and dropped it in a trash can. Ten minutes to wait. He walked across the concourse to the men’s room, entered, and urinated against porcelain. The train journey would take about one hour.
He turned and found a large man in his path, motionless, staring at him with great concentration.
“Ahh!” Aoki went for his belt, but the snub-nosed automatic was already in the man’s hand. The punch in the chest turned Aoki halfway around, and as he fell the sound of the shot exploded with deafening force in the white-tiled space. He was on his back, his pistol still in his belt. He tried to lever himself up on an elbow, trying to reach it, but couldn’t. The big man was moving toward him, the automatic extended, reaiming.
All feeling was flowing out fast through Aoki’s extremities; his eyes were blurring. Mount Fuji was in the mist. In that mist the red-gowned monk was launched in the air, a human missile heading for the man who was still sighting his gun on Aoki. Then a red robe was flying and a suit was being propelled into the gurgling urinals.
~ * ~
Chapter Twenty-Six
FOR THE SECOND TIME THAT fall, Aoki reentered his life. This time he found himself in the intensive care unit of Shibuya Hospital, though that detail only became fully apparent to him the next day. A nurse, a blur of white face and white gown, told him he was going to be fine. He seemed to remember her voice talking to him in a misty past. Five days he’d been here, she said.
The next day, he was moved from the ICU to a private room. Later, the nurse from the ICU came down to see him there. “You should know,” she said, “that Miss Kazu Hatano was here each day. She sat by your bed for the time permitted.”
Aoki felt that he was adrift in a boat on a lake, like the fishermen painted on the scroll in the ryokan’s corridor outside the anteroom, and only dreamily took in what she said.
He was properly awake the following day, and recent events began to come back. The shooting was the first: the guy with the gun, the red-gowned monk. Then the Aoyama building; exposing himself to the security camera had been careless. What was going on with Saito-Oto? He’d sent one of the disks to the director general, the other to the journalist Minami—five days ago? He lifted his head from the pillow to look out the window at a misty sky—as if to check that days still passed . . .
Then ex-governor Tamaki, in his moonlit garden, stepped forward. Aoki dropped his head back on the pillow. By now, they’d have checked out the DNA from the Fatman’s garden; he guessed there would’ve been enough of his blood on the floor of the station urinal to run a hundred tests. He gazed across the room at a picture that resembled the one at the mental clinic.
Aoki slept till evening, when he was awakened by a nurse who was taking his blood pressure. “You’ve got colleagues coming to see you tomorrow afternoon,” she said. “Perhaps they’re coming to give you a medal?”
Aoki was puzzled, wondering what she knew, but he kept silent. They’ll be coming to read me my rights, he thought. He didn’t sleep that night until they brought him a pill; then he went under.
The next day he was fatalistic yet nervous. At 3:00 P.M. Superintendent Shimazu put his head in the door. “Ah,” he said, and stood aside. Director General Omori walked in and strode to the bedside. Superintendent Motono followed him in.
“How are you feeling, Inspector?” the DG asked.
Aoki tried to sit up. “Much better.”
“Much better than some others we know about,” Shimazu said with a touch of humor, pulling up a chair for the DG.
Aoki looked nonplussed.
The DG sat down. “You don’t know?” he said, frowning.
“He’s been in the ICU, unconscious, sir,” Shimazu said, in case it had slipped the CIB chief’s memory.
“Hmmm . . . The daimyo, Oto, alias Saito, et cetera, and two of his men were shot dead on Tuesday night when we attempted to arrest them at Aoyama. “
“One of my men was wounded,” Shimazu said. “Not serious.”
Aoki blinked a few times at the news. He’d need time to think about this.
The DG cleared his throat. “It was extremely irregular to send that disk to the newspaperman Minami.” His voice held a condemnatory tone, though in recent days, since the situation had unfolded, he’d quieted down and his blood pressure had improved. In the uneasy silence, the DG gazed at some mystery in his mind. They all understood that Aoki had not intended to survive that night.
What are they waiting for? Aoki wondered.
The DG placed his hairy han
ds, palms down, on the bed’s white cover. “The daimyo’s death and the information from Hatano have cleared up the ryokan murders case—and Hatano’s. We’re assembling the evidence. Also the Osaka journalist’s—linked to the body-parts case. That prosecutor has tied it up nicely.”
Shimazu said, “Doubtless the reporter Kimura’s death is connected, but unfortunately there are no real leads on that. “ Superintendent Motono hadn’t said a word.
Aoki moved his eyes over the three policemen, waiting.
The DG cleared his throat again. “Governor Tamaki’s murderer is still at large,” he said, as if it were totally unrelated to anything else that had been said. Aoki had put nothing about the Fatman’s death in his report on the disk. Omori shook his head. “Superintendent Watanabe’s tragic accident has shocked us all. “ He got up suddenly. “All right, we’ll expect you back on duty as soon as possible.” He nodded at Aoki. At the door he halted and turned his head, but not his solid torso. “For once, I can feel happy about monks,” he said to them all, then left.
Shimazu frowned at the picture on the wall and rubbed his chin, as though he were carefully assembling phrases in his mind. Fie turned to the man in the bed. “Inspector, certain parties were quite happy to see Governor Tamaki exit the scene. Those parties don’t see any advantage in raking over his past activities.” He shrugged. “Of course, his murder will be fully investigated, but I have to say that we don’t have any promising leads.”
Amazement was sweeping through Aoki. He glanced at Superintendent Motono, who didn’t look happy. Aoki could see on his face his dislike of solutions based on expediency and lies, which flushed questions of morality down the toilet. Obviously the DG hadn’t wanted to be present for this part of the visit.
Then they were gone, too.
The next afternoon most of his old team came out as a group. Assistant Inspector Nishi made a short speech. “Someone finished the job for us with Tamaki,” he said. “Good luck to the guy.” They’d brought out issues of the Tokyo Shimbun in which Minami had broken the story of the ryokan murders and the Osaka case. Aoki’s photograph and Saito’s were together on the front page. The DG was prominently mentioned for his personal involvement in the cases.
Aoki was thinking better now. The government didn’t want the kind of anarchy exposed that saw a police officer taking out a prominent politician. But there’d be a price to pay. Lying there in the long healing nights, he knew that. Shimazu had been careful not to say it, but from now on a number of people would have their eye on him. He’d be a marked man, and you could never know when the politicians might come knocking on his door, with some little commission in mind.
~ * ~
Five days later, Inspector Aoki went home. He was to return to duty shortly, and in the meantime he took his father’s short walks to the temple and spent some time at the bar. He read a headline saying that the Tokyo Citizens Bank had been merged with another city bank. Day by day, the aching of the wound near his heart was fading.
He’d thought a great deal about that last night when he was heading for the slopes of Mount Fuji. Providence, or fate, had intervened in the form of the yakuza and the red-robed monk. The monk had come to see him at the hospital. From behind his steel-rimmed glasses he’d looked Aoki over, as though he owned him. He stayed only a short while and hardly spoke; a Zen karate instructor, Aoki had found out from a police colleague.
Tokie’s bonsai plants had survived. His old uncle had reappeared, like the semi-ghost he was, to serve him in another emergency. The small clipped plants were healthy, although, in tune with their bigger brothers and sisters, they’d dropped their leaves.
One morning the doorbell rang. It was a messenger with a wicker basket. “What is this?” Aoki asked the man.
It’s a cat, sir.
To Aoki’s astonishment, it was.
The tabby cat walked calmly out of the container and rubbed against his legs. Aoki bent down to stroke her. Here was a flesh-and-blood message from the ryokan. From Kazu Hatano, he knew instantly, but how to interpret it? “Well, you’re a detective, aren’t you? “ he muttered. Even as he said that, he remembered that each day she’d been at his bedside in the ICU while he was unconscious—hadn’t the nurse said?
Aoki felt a spreading lightness in his heart.
“Okay, Cat,” he said, “let’s take a look around. I don’t think there are any mice here, but in summer there are nice fat frogs in the pond.”
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Kamakura Inn Page 26