Rendezvous at Kamakura Inn

by Marshall Browne

  “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 disgrace 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.

  Still concentrating on the formations before him, Saito said, “Are you bitter?”

  Aoki exhaled his breath softly.

  “Is my question impertinent?”

  “No.” Retired was the entry against the man from Osaka’s name in the register. Did retired businessmen become hobbyists on the nation’s crime spectaculars, Go-players, and commentators on the financial world? Was that it?

  Aoki touched his mole. Lateral thinking, or was it surreal? In these frozen mountains his ideas, his theories, were changing direction like wind shifts. He cleared his throat. “I wouldn’t say bitter. Hatred for the system.”

  Saito’s eyes swept the board. “Ah, the system. Weren’t you a little naive? I mean, a TMP investigator of your experience taking on ex-governor, ex-minister Tamaki, the ruling party, and ultimately your own superiors in the police? From a base of no power whatsoever!” His eyes had become slits. “It’s the move a samurai with no wish to live longer might have made in his world.”

  Aoki reddened. What choice had he had? He’d been under orders, and then Tokie had played her hand, and down he’d spiraled. His own case was beginning to feel like one he’d studied at the academy, not his life. He had several questions in his mind to put to Saito, but they should wait till the prefecture cops arrived. The same with Ito—and with Hatano.

  “No comment?” Saito threw him a calculating glance.

  Samurai! He’d just been doing the job he’d been assigned to. This man had misread the situation—just as Tokie had apparently seen him as engaged in a noble cause against corruption in high places. Sure, he’d wanted to see justice done, to do a pro job, but it’d been his personal angst, after putting in a horrendous amount of work and driving himself and his team into the ground, that had hit him like a pile driver.

  Click-click. Saito’s hand was in the bowl of black stones. “Your superiors went down like rice stalks before the wind. It was unfortunate your wife took it to the journalist. No—tragic. Hatred of the system? Ito and Yamazaki are icons of it, of the same tarnished caliber as Tamaki. ‘The gray men who destroyed your life.’ I quote the Tokyo Shimbun.” Aoki grimaced; quite a bit of such stuff had been printed. Saito smiled cryptically. “Not bitter?” His voice resona
ted disbelief.

  Aoki was becoming angrier. Damn his teasing questions. Was this Osaka fellow saying his mind might be off the rails, that he might be targeting this class of guy? That was crazy, because it was only about Tamaki. If he could ever drag the ex-governor under the spotlight of justice, he’d do it; if not, there was another option, and that was where the Go-player’s thinking had gone. Even ahead of his own!

  Aoki held up his hands and studied them in the firelight. They were bloodred. He realized that, in his subconscious, he had made an appointment with Tamaki of that kind—if he could find no way to bring the Fatman before the law. He gazed at the Go board. The Go-player had cut very close to the bone.

  Saito looked up. “The wonder of our country is that the old ways survive. From the furthest mountain village to the quiet suburban garden, the old Japan remains, despite the chaos of the markets. It goes on singing its song like the evening wind in pine trees, even in the records of the Go association! Change, with all its clatter and racket, might seem the main game, but in the end it’s an echo of history.”

  Aoki stared at the big, hunched, black-kimonoed figure. In a burst of energy, the fire crackled and sparks flew.

  Saito said, “The match finished on December 4. The last session was intense, close combat. All their combined art was in the moves. Each reached for stones with great rapidity. ‘The sky clouded over from shortly after noon, and crows cawed incessantly’—Kawabata’s words about this phase.”

  Aoki frowned. The cawing of crows was a death knell. His father had said that once.

  “The last play was Black 237. At forty-two minutes past two it was over, and the Master had lost.”

  Saito smiled up from the board as though the old dead master had just died again, under his hands.

  Ito entered the room and went in to dinner. Aoki followed. The bank chairman sat at the table he’d shared with Yamazaki, having a solitary banquet, a farewell to the ryokan and this bizarre and tragic interlude, Aoki thought. And to fame, reputation, and fortune. Tomorrow, or the next day, the road would be open, and the outside world would pour down on them like an avalanche.

  Inspector Aoki walked through the semidarkness checking out the status of things. He stood in the shadows near the mouth of the corridor that led to Ito’s room. Ito had retired, and the squat and muscular Shoba was seated on a chair outside the door, settled for the night. Aoki retraced his steps. Ito was taking precautions. Was that a mark of his innocence?

  He lingered on the small landing on Ito’s floor. Mounted on the wall near his head was a sword, a samurai weapon. Even in the dusk the elaborate enamel-and-gilt scabbard glowed. He gazed at it.

  The Go-player has the killer instinct. You used that phrase, Hideo, one of the few times you talked to me about your work. That is a murderous match he is playing—one of the turning points in the history of Go, when a way of art, of symmetry, surprise, and nobility, was smashed like a beautiful ceramic bowl.

  His father!

  It became merely a test of strength, a testimony to victory and defeat.

  In the freezing, empty stairwell, Aoki said, “But this man just replays a match that originated with others.”

  Replays this match year after year. There are a myriad classic matches to choose from. The voice sounded weary.

  “So—what are you saying?” Aoki said urgently. “That he’s a killer in real life?”

  But the old man was saying nothing more.

  What had been smoldering in his subconcious burst into flame in Aoki’s mind like the anteroom fire, knocking his father’s voice clear out of his head. There was no missing sister—not here at Kamakura Inn. Another lie! Kazu Hatano had been the geisha who’d come to his room!

  Capter Sixteen

  KAZU HATANO THE GEISHA! IN the dark of the Camellia Room, with the somehow softer voice telling him that she was the sister, in the height of passion, could he’ve been fooled? Aoki had returned to the corridor outside his room, a cigarette dangling from his lip.

  Easily. In the semidarkness and slipperiness of this world, it was hard to take a firm grip on anything, yet a doubt about it nagged at him. Impulsively, he turned to go back to the office.

  Ten minutes later he was shown into a small bedroom on a lower level. The sister’s room. The maid whom Kazu Hatano had instructed to bring him here lit the oil lamp and went out to the corridor to wait. He glanced around. The only personal item in the room was a framed photograph on a table. He gazed at it. The twin sisters. For sure, they looked identical; who was who, he couldn’t tell. He grunted and opened the wardrobe. It held female clothing, including several elaborate kimonos. He moved the hangers and sighed. Here it was, the azure kimono dappled with the deep red leaves. He’d begun to think that he might have dreamed that night. But who had been wearing it?

  Dinner was well over, and presumably Chef Hatano would’ve finished for the night. Aoki had consulted the floor plan Kazu Hatano had given him and knew where the father’s room was. He’d decided to step over the line of his suspension and go for the guy. The bastard had clammed up earlier. “Let’s see what we can do about that,” Aoki muttered as he descended the stairs.

  Minutes later, a door slid open and the wiry man’s eyes flicked over the detective. Aoki thought tensely, With the speed of his filleting knife. A modest room, from what he could see past the blocking figure. He said, “I want to ask you some more questions.”

  Hatano said nothing. His face was shadowed, yet the two dark patches on his forehead stood out. Aoki coughed, clearing away the last cigarette. “Okay, what did bring you here two years ago?” Forcefully he said, “And I want to know what happened in Osaka, or here, for you to make the move.”

  Aoki scrutinized the face before him. Every gram of this man exuded anger and menace. Did he have a tongue? The detective snarled, “I haven’t got all night; I’ve got murder on my plate—not fancy-cut sashimi.”

  The chef came to life, exhaling a violent hiss through his teeth. “Murder. So what! There’re other things as deadly.”

  Aoki blinked at the force of the man’s breath. He’d hit a nerve. “So?”

  “Sssss—I owned a restaurant. My food was the best in Osaka, but you’d need a palate to know that. Yet I went bankrupt. So what? It happens, but it always happens if the loan sharks’ve got you by the balls.” He thrust his torso forward. “You cops should look into them. Banks don’t want to know the small businessman, so desperate fools take a month’s loan to get over a cash-flow glitch at forty-nine fucking percent a month! Fifteen times the legal limit! The glitch is longer, you’re trapped in a fucking repayment-borrowing cycle, business and house go down the tube, and maybe your fucking sanity.” He spat out, “These sharks are business-killers, life-destroyers!”

  The savage bitterness came directly into Aoki’s face. Of course, he knew about the small-business warfare in the nation. It bred crime. But it didn’t shift murder from dead center in his mind. What Hatano said sounded like the truth, but the whole truth? This chef seemed like a candidate for deeper and dirtier problems, including his ex-wife’s disappearance and maybe Yamazaki’s brutal demise.

  Aoki rocked slightly on his heels. Their faces were eighteen inches apart. He was at home dealing with this kind of shit, unlike the Itos of the world. “So you dragged your ass back here.”

  Hatano’s eyes burned in the gloom. “Bankrupted, personally fucked, where else d’you go but back to your family?” He had locked his right fist in his left hand. He sneered, “There’s a lot of people I could take a knife to, but they’re in Osaka.”

  The snarled phrases seemed to be curving through the air at Aoki like knives. He’d picked up the slur about his plebeian food choices. He frowned. He’d thought of something. “What was the name of this amazing restaurant?”

  “Osaka One.” Hatano almost choked on the words, as if reluctant to speak of the dead.

  Aoki gave a brusque nod. “So you’re an expert on that kind of mayhem, but what’s your take on t
his murder? Right in the bosom of your family, a family with a lot of interesting history.”

  Hatano’s small mouth had snapped shut.

  “What’s your take on your long-missing wife, your missing daughter?”

  But the chef had clammed up again. A rush of blood to the head had brought the Osaka debacle spilling out, but family matters were something else. Now his eyes said, Fuck off. Aoki grunted, turned his back on Kazu Hatano’s father, and headed uphill through corridors, stairways, and semidarkness. It was 8:25 P.M.

  Her office was quiet with the stirring of the charcoal fire when Aoki knocked and entered. His heart was going faster. She was there, seated at the desk; seemed always there. Presumably she slept, ate, washed and groomed herself, had conversations, but in any of those manifestations she was a mystery to Aoki.

  He decided, Quiet with her thoughts—and what thoughts! She wore the dark blue kimono. Was it she or her sister who’d worn the azure one with the deep red leaves—in the Camellia Room?

  Face-to-face again! The thrill that had surged through his system at 3:45 P.M.—he knew the time precisely—hadn’t subsided, but now it was mixed up with everything else in his mind. Had he had this woman in the most intimate way, or had he not? It was amazing to him that he didn’t know. He cleared his throat. “Your sister?”

  “We’ve concluded our search. She hasn’t been found.”

  “And the maid was the last to see her—at eight thirty last night?”

  “Yes.”

  Unconsciously, he was shaking his head. “No doubt the local police’ll bring in sniffer dogs.”

  She watched him impassively, so calm in the face of yet another family disappearance—such an incriminating disappearance—and of his discovery that her father was here. That flash of the inner woman last night, the decent and troubled persona, seemed a total illusion. Now she was impenetrable.

  She studied the desktop, then looked up. “Governor Tamaki was here in the spring with a party from Tokyo.” Aoki blinked hard. Tamaki here! “The Fatman’s Club came for three days. Only one fat man, really.”