Rendezvous at Kamakura Inn

by Marshall Browne

  Aoki needed to speak to this woman who stood before him; instead, he stared at the shape of her head, her neck, the curve of her cheek, seeing her sister as she’d kneeled in the doorway of the Camellia Room. He blinked hard, sending the picture flying. Then he crossed to the counter and said quietly, “Could I speak with you?”

  The slender woman’s eyes moved slowly to his as if suddenly registering his presence. “Of course. Please come into the office.”

  Aoki followed her. A copper kettle purred on a brazier. Account ledgers were neatly stacked on a wooden chest. She offered him a seat beside an old-fashioned desk. A single sheet of paper lay on it, and Aoki glanced at it: a menu. He said, “I wish to introduce myself more formally. I’m a senior detective with the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, at present on leave.”

  She gave a brief nod. His occupation wasn’t news, but from his first minute here he’d known that. He hesitated. Was it his curiosity or his ingrained police mentality that was making him take a step like this? Though fate might be the guiding hand at work, as Saito claimed.

  “As a junior detective, I was on your mother’s case.” This time her eyes reacted. Yeah, Aoki thought, when she heard that prolonged cry her blood must have run cold. His had; even Saito had seemed momentarily paralyzed. Yet she’d emerged from her trancelike state and was watching him now, her eyes clear and acute.

  Aoki paused. “I presume the police haven’t interviewed you for quite a while. With the hindsight of seven years, have you had any fresh thoughts on what happened?”

  A long moment. “No.” Unemotionally spoken; she seemed to be staring at him out of her past, the unchallenged mistress of it.

  “No theories at all?”

  “None.”

  “Tonight’s the seventh anniversary.”

  “You’re well informed.”

  No inflection in her voice. Seven years ago, Superintendent Watanabe must have given her and her sister a hard time as he’d questioned them. Aoki glanced down at the menu—quite a banquet, seven courses, hungry guys. His eyes stopped at the last. Vegetable dish: Chestnut dumplings with fern shoots and pickled plums. He said, “The two gentlemen from Tokyo being here must’ve brought back unhappy memories.”

  “The subject’s never far away.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “It surprises me you’d have them here.”

  He thought she wasn’t going to answer; then, almost in a whisper, she said, “This ryokan has a 250-year tradition of hospitality. It’s an obligation that stands above personal feelings.” Her gaze was unwavering. “They were here once before, on the first anniversary.”

  Aoki absorbed this. The first year, then a gap of six. He frowned. All that Saito had said to him struck him as accurate, yet he had an even stronger impression now that the Go-player’s agenda, for some reason, was to push him down the wrong path. He had similar thoughts about the owner of the mountain ryokan, but, staring at her pale face, into those steady eyes, he couldn’t be sure of a thing.

  In the Camellia Room, Aoki found jazz on the radio. He owned no books and not much other stuff, just a big collection of jazz records. It had been his interest since his teenage years, the only real one outside his work. Only half-humorously, Tokie had said once, “You could pack your life in two suitcases and disappear.” But she was the one who’d disappeared. He turned down the radio’s volume.

  He’d seen photographs of the bloodstained clothing and the other items recovered from the Central station locker. He screwed up his brow. A light green silk kimono finely embroidered with gold thread, an obi with gold cranes in flight, a beautiful amber crescent hair ornament, and a purse containing the valuable diamond ring Ito had given her at their engagement. Everything she’d been wearing that evening when they had dinner, Ito had confirmed. Only an antique ruby ring, inherited from her mother, had been missing.

  Aoki smoked a cigarette, puzzling over the locker and its contents. Did they stand for the abandonment of a wretched, dishonored life, and a payback? Or murder, or suicide? He yawned. He could still taste the sake on his palate, and his eyes were dead-heavy. It had stopped snowing late in the afternoon.

  Aoki was weary, but he had an urge to leave the Camellia Room, to walk the corridors, the staircases, through the dark halls, as though a door might open and lead him into a secret chamber where the mysteries at the ryokan would be graphically displayed on whiteboards, a place like the incident rooms at headquarters.

  He grimaced at this thinking and left his room. Coming down the staircase he crossed a lamp-lit corridor. A man came hurriedly out of it without warning and nearly collided with him, a man in a chef’s white uniform. Aoki jumped back, as did the man, then face-to-face they regarded each other for a moment. With a half-bow, the white-coated man stepped around Aoki and hurried down the staircase.

  Aoki stood transfixed, staring after him. All kinds of things were coming together in his head, but the key one was the front page of a Tokyo daily at the time of Madam Ito’s disappearance, showing separate photographs of the faces of four persons: Madam Ito in all her mature beauty; her husband, Ito; her lover, Yamazaki; and underneath that trio the identity-card-type shot of a man with a white scar over his left eye, her ex-husband, Hatano. The face of the man Aoki had just been staring at.

  Aoki turned and went straight back to his room.

  Inspector Aoki awoke at 3:10 A.M. instantly clearheaded. He wondered what had wakened him, and listened; just the faintest stirring of coals in the kotatsu. The memory of the incident late last night jumped into his mind. What in the hell was Hatano doing back at the ryokan? The ex-husband had been thrown out by Madam Ito, who’d then divorced him, long before she’d met Ito. Watanabe had tracked the chef down in Osaka and tried to pin his ex-wife’s disappearance on him. It hadn’t worked, and presumably he’d dropped from sight. Now he was here! The interesting questions were: Did Watanabe know he was here? Did Ito and Yamazaki? For sure, Kazu Hatano knew. For an hour, before he’d slept, Aoki had turned this over and over in his mind, wondering if there had been something to Watanabe’s last line of inquiry: that Hatano and his daughters had conspired to take Madam Ito out of circulation.

  Aoki threw back the quilt, put on his padded kimono and slippers, slid back the door, and played his flashlight beam into the corridor. Stepping out, he paused and listened again. The frigid air stung his cheeks, sharp as razor nicks.

  The cat’s eyes flashed. He started. It was sitting there, watching him. It came forward, rubbed its body against his legs, and meowed softly, a lonesome sound. Briefly, he stroked its back.

  He set off, walking quietly through the ryokan to the anteroom. He seemed to be on a mission of an indeterminate nature, but he was wide awake.

  In the anteroom nothing had changed, except that the last log had burned to ashes. He looked toward the windows and did see change. Huge icicles resembling daggers hung from the eaves. Daggers that could pierce your heart. Astonished, he stared at them, then swept his eyes over the snow-lit room. On the Go board, the stones were frozen in their own unique killing formations, just as Saito had left them.

  He retraced his steps to the hall, descended the stairs, and took a corridor. Another exploratory move on this unclear mission. Ahead, a door was partially open, the ghost-flower painted on it glimmering in the beam of his flashlight. Within, there was an incandescent glow like one from a bedside lamp. Aoki paused, then slid open the door fully and peered down the flashlight beam.

  His breath came out in a long hiss. The light had jumped with his reflexes but now held steady on the naked figure. Between the slender legs last seen afloat in the stone bath, the white bedding on the floor was drenched with blood. Mouth open, Aoki stared at the carnage. Probably the stab through the heart had been first, then the work down below; maybe a couple of swift slashes, then a more deliberate one—a big cut across the abdomen. Aoki smelled strong odors. He moved the flashlight, checking the room, and found the alcove and what was missing.

  The long penis and
the pendulous testicles, raw and bloody as butcher’s meat, were displayed in a lacquer box beneath the hanging scroll, artistically arranged—as much as the objects would allow. The gaping wound on the abdomen looked surgical, and instantly Aoki knew an organ had been removed; he’d seen enough autopsies. He stared at the butchery as though mentally photographing it. He’d witnessed much more chaotic rearrangements of human bodies; this seemed highly organized in comparison.

  Yamazaki’s eyes were open. The bleeding had ceased. It was useless to check for life; the MOF official’s arrogant spirit, his leasehold of power, had been terminated, his elegance despoiled. It was going to create a sensation. With this ending, Yamazaki would be less of a forgotten man than if his career had merely finished in humilating ignominy.

  This was Yamazaki’s room, but it was the one Ito had stepped out of to peer after him. Aoki could feel a fluttering pulse beneath his left eye. He fumbled for his cigarettes and lit one quickly, tucking the flashlight under his arm. He wasn’t as inured to scenes of sudden death as he’d thought.

  The bitter chill in the air had invaded his heart. The severed genitalia were on display, but what of the other organ that appeared to have been taken? He exhaled smoke and moved the beam of light over more of the room. Big drops of blood had stained the tatami, but most of it was on the bed. Aoki stepped back. His dinner was churning in his stomach.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ENTRANCE FORBIDDEN. POLICE. AOKI SEALED the Azalea Room and placed the notice, written on a piece of cardboard torn from the bonsai carton, outside the door. Suspended from duty, he had no authority to do this—in a strict sense, no authority to do anything—but it was the automatic action of an experienced CIB detective.

  The ryokan remained mute and freezing and steeped in predawn darkness. He looked along the corridor. What hole had the perpetrator crept away to?

  Grim-faced, Aoki returned to his room and lifted the phone. Dead. The place should begin to come to life about six. He had no idea where the proprietor’s quarters were, nor Ito’s room, and he wouldn’t blunder around in the dark, maybe disturbing evidence.

  He lit a cigarette, noticing that his hands were shaking. Tension had locked his chest muscles rigid. Flexing his shoulders several times, he tried to relax, but Yamazaki’s slaughtered corpse was a vivid picture in his head. His street smarts had warned that something bad was coming. Whatever Watanabe’s reason was for sending him here, it had transported him back to the Madam Ito case, and now it had spiraled downward into murder. His boss couldn’t have foreseen this. Whatever his agenda was, had this brutal murder advanced or derailed it?—Staring at his disarranged bed, he shook his head. Maybe it’d been the murderer slipping along the corridor that woke him up. Or the cat.

  He switched on the radio and found NHK. Nearly 5:00 A.M. Impatiently he waited for music to finish, then heard the world headlines. The latest on the bank soon came:

  The Tokyo Metropolitan Police disclosed that a man answering the description of Hiroshi Ito, chairman of the Tokyo Citizens Bank, was seen at Tokyo Central station boarding the 7:45 A.M. bullet train for Akita on Sunday. He was accompanied by a man who police say may have been Haruki Yamazaki, an official of the Ministry of Finance. The MOF advises that Mr. Yamazaki is temporarily away from his office. At the bank’s annual general meeting last year, allegations about a connection to the yakuza were leveled at Mr. Ito. These were denied. Mr. Yamazaki, in a statement issued by the MOF, confirmed that the allegations were groundless. Fresh police inquiries indicate the men may have traveled to a mountain inn in Hokkaido. Since Tuesday the region has been blanketed by heavy snow, and the inn is presently cut off from all communication.

  Aoki grimaced. Yamazaki was cut off, for sure, but at last the cops had gotten a fix on where the two were.

  At 6:00 A.M. he went upstairs. The brazier was out in the hall, though the oil lamp there was still alight. He turned it up. No one was stirring yet. Where was Kazu Hatano in the labyrinthine building, and Ito—and the murderer? Where was the ex-husband, Hatano? The brief and startling late-night encounter with him was stark in Aoki’s mind. He paced the hall, rubbing his hands and swinging his arms. Kazu Hatano had had a shock last night, and this wasn’t going to improve matters.

  At 6:30 A.M., in a swishing of kimono and a sliding of slippers on boards, Kazu Hatano emerged from a corridor and stopped dead. Her hand raced to her throat, as though she were seeing an apparition. Aoki stepped forward. “Mr. Yamazaki is dead. In his room. I regret to tell you, murdered.”

  A soft gasp. She was gazing at him, very disturbed but not deeply shocked. Aoki could read nothing more than that. She turned, entered her office, and checked the phone, then shook her head at him. From the door, he said, “The room must not be entered by anyone. Please instruct your staff. How do I get to Mr. Ito’s room?”

  “The Lily Room. I’ll show you.” Her voice was barely above a whisper.

  Aoki found the banker, fully dressed, hands joined behind his back, gazing at the frosted windowpanes. The fusuma door was open, and Aoki observed the small man for a moment. The room stank of rancid pickles. Aoki cleared his throat. Ito’s face swiveled around on his plump neck.

  “Sir, I’m sorry to tell you, Mr. Yamazaki is dead. Murdered.”

  A sharp hiss came from the banker. His heavy-lidded eyes popped wide open; then the lids dropped again, like shutters.

  Aoki was startled. “I must ask you some questions—”

  The banker was staring glassily at him. Aoki moved forward and peered into his face. Amazing! In the space of a microsecond, the moon-faced man had shut down. He seemed totally out on his feet. Aoki withdrew from the room to find a maid to bring tea for the shocked man.

  At breakfast, the malignant atmosphere of disaster hung over the snow-besieged inn. Mori hadn’t turned up with Aoki’s tea, and the dining-room maid had the fumbles, clattering dishes on the lacquered table. When the detective came out to the anteroom, Saito was standing beside the Go board, peering out the window as if to a point beyond the range of his eyesight. He swung his eyes to Aoki. This morning Aoki was a student of eyes; the big man’s were dark and contemplative.

  “So! Something has happened.”

  Aoki nodded curtly. “Who told you?”

  “My room maid.”

  Aoki scrutinized the Go-player’s face. “Did you hear anything last night?”

  Saito smiled sardonically. “The nightlong roar from these frozen mountains, the timbers creaking in this old place, nothing else. Will you investigate, Inspector Aoki? Can you investigate, or will you leave it to the prefecture police?”

  Aoki didn’t respond. The new fire crackled in the room.

  Saito shrugged. “And Mr. Ito?”

  “In his room.”

  “Doubtless considering his own situation.” That word “situation” was meaningful in Aoki’s ears. “Emasculation?” Saito pondered aloud.

  Aoki gaped. “Who told you that?”

  “My room maid. The people here already have all the details.”

  The detective rubbed his jaw. What in the hell? He turned toward the windows. His mind had gone off on a tangent—back to other murders, seemingly of this type. Crimes of passion: male and female perpetrators. Crimes of revenge: ditto. He’d found a severed penis in an alley where a vengeful wife had thrown it, held it in his handkerchief as they’d raced to the hospital with the amputee-victim. Speeding through the dark city, to the accompaniment of a siren, another man’s cock in your hand . . .

  Saito broke into his thoughts. “On December 1, the Master played chess and billiards. The night before, he’d played mah-jongg till midnight. Was he escaping from a match that he was losing?” Saito’s voice was pragmatic, his eyes fixed on the board.

  Aoki blinked in amazement. Was this guy for real? For himself, the match had been relegated to the 1930s—where it belonged—but in Saito’s mind, clearly, it had parity with the vicious drama played out last night.

  Aoki shook his head, g
ave a perfunctory bow, and left the anteroom. Investigate? That was the mode he’d fallen into. Suspension or not, it was what he was trained to do. Grimly, he thought, What I am going to do. Well, he’d quarantined the room, though ineffectually. He felt certain that no human being could’ve left the ryokan. However, the snow would begin to thaw soon, and their isolation couldn’t last much longer. The local CIB would want the crime scene left undisturbed, and he couldn’t afford to make more mistakes, so he’d have to tread carefully. He traced his tongue over his split lips.

  For the second time, he entered Kazu Hatano’s office. She rose and moved to the center of the room, one slender hand resting on the desk. Aoki’s eyes settled on that delicate white wrist below her kimono sleeve—delicate, but strong, too. She would do some of the physical work of running the ryokan. He said decisively, “I’m starting an investigation. When the local police can get through, they’ll take it over.” He paused. She was without makeup, a different and far more beautiful woman. “Please give me a complete list of everyone in the ryokan, their occupations, how long they’ve been here, and the rooms where they slept last night.”

  Aoki dropped his gaze to the dark, polished wood of the old desk. There’d been no knife in the Azalea Room and no apparent blood spots in the corridor, and he’d examined the environs closely. A few minutes ago, from the hall, he’d looked out to the vestibule and seen the snow shutters locked in place. He’d found out yesterday that the other entrances were snowed in even deeper than the front door.

  He looked up sharply. “Do you have any information that might assist me?”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  Hmmm, an automatic response. His fingers stroked his right cheekbone. The faces of Ito and his bodyguard came to him. What had that blazing row—from Ito’s side, anyway—been about in Yamazaki’s room, the Azalea Room?