The Drowning God

by James Kendley

  She slid back into the chair across from Chief Nakamura’s desk. It was the only decent room in the building, but it afforded her no privacy. Takuda and Suzuki bowed low, and they held the position to acknowledge her grief. After a few seconds, she turned away from them.

  Suzuki tugged on Takuda’s sleeve, and they walked slowly out of Nakamura’s office toward the interrogation room, where the corpse was laid out on the steel-­topped table.

  “The poor woman just wants to be left alone,” Suzuki said, “but I didn’t want to pray over her husband’s body without her permission. Thank you for taking me to see her.”

  Kuma shuffled aside and tried to melt into the wall as they neared the door of the interrogation room. They had to squeeze past his belly.

  The smell hit them as they opened the door.

  There is a cloying sweetness to the corruption of a human corpse, a sickening odor that clings to the palate and ruins the next few meals. It’s not unlike the reek of spoiled pork. Takuda knew the smell, unfortunately, and he also knew the sharper, fishy undertone. Lee Hunt had not died a natural death.

  The village doctor, Fujimoto, looked up at Takuda. The doctor had not aged well. “You again,” he said.

  “Me again, Doctor.” He stepped toward the table with a nod to the patrolmen who flanked the door on the inside. “You knew it was only a matter of time.”

  Suzuki crossed behind Takuda and took up a station at the far end of the room. He unrolled a thin cushion, knelt, and began reciting the sutras.

  “Hey, Priest,” the doctor called out. “Did you bring any incense? It would help with the perfume.” He was obviously drunk. He looked around as if seeking approval from the patrolmen. He should have known better. Kikuchi and Inoue stared straight ahead, showing their embarrassment only in the stiffness of their necks.

  Fujimoto gave an exaggerated shrug. “Useless. You see, it’s just like that fool Nakamura to leave three men guarding a corpse, if you count Kuma as a man.” He reached under the sheet and lifted the corpse’s arm by the wrist and dropped it on the table. “This one won’t try to escape.”

  “Doctor Fujimoto, you’re drunk on the job, and you should go home,” Takuda said quietly.

  “I had a ­couple before they called me,” he said, offering Takuda a jar of mentholated gel. “I’m not performing surgery tonight. Not on him, anyway.”

  Meeting the doctor’s challenging stare, Takuda declined the gel. A dab under his own nostrils would help cut the stench. This time, though, Takuda didn’t need it. He was getting used to awful smells.

  The doctor shrugged and put the gel away. Then he whipped the cover off the corpse’s face.

  The victim’s battered features were twisted in an expression of torturous pain. The sightless blue eyes were wide with terror.

  Takuda almost looked away. It was shocking, especially with the whiteness of the skin. Aside from the patches of lividity and bits scrubbed raw by river rocks, much of the skin was ridiculously white, white as a fish’s belly, white as if it had been bleached. As a child, Takuda thought “white” was a political euphemism for Europeans, much as “yellow” was used to describe Asians even though they were actually anything between the color of cream and the color of bricks. He had believed this until he saw a television program that featured British schoolchildren playing on a lawn. They were as white as paper. That had disgusted him, but this pale corpse was simply pathetic, a broken bit of another family tragedy, stiff and cold on the interrogation room table.

  Takuda pulled the sheet down farther. Aside from abrasions and scraping, the corpse appeared whole. There were five parallel slices down the calf and a gaping wound just under the ribs on the right side. Just as he had expected. Takuda felt his fists flex and tighten of their own accord.

  The man had been lured to his death. He and his wife had planned to swim in the upper reaches of the Naga River. The current was dangerous at this time of year, and only ignorant strangers or truant children would be foolish enough to swim in such a flow. He had heard something, his wife said, a whispering voice that she had been unable to hear. He had seen something, perhaps a child. He had suddenly disappeared as if pulled beneath the surface. He had surfaced once but slipped into the river again. His corpse was dragged from the first gate almost eighteen hours later.

  The wounds were familiar. The murderer of his brother and his son was still killing. If Takuda had to destroy the whole cult, household by household, he would do it. He would start that very night.

  The doctor motioned to the patrolmen. “Pick him up and take him to my office. We’ll do a proper autopsy in the morning.” He leered at Takuda. “That will give everyone time to be more professional.”

  Suzuki chanted in the background. The patrolmen didn’t move.

  Takuda said, “Doctor, the body will undergo autopsy down in the city, and there will be an official inquest.”

  The doctor smirked. “I understand. I do need to take some samples. When they autopsy this poor foreigner, they’ll find a hole where his liver used to be. Half his intestines will have been sucked out his anus as if they were noodles, and the slices in his leg will be full of unidentifiable toxins. They’ll call it death due to drowning, even without water in his lungs. They’ll write that they found postmortem soft tissue loss due to freshwater eels. Eels! They’ll say those five parallel cuts on his leg were from rocks.”

  Takuda felt his heart slowing in his chest as blood rushed to his head. The doctor swabbed the cuts in silence.

  “Doctor, I’ll need to talk to you about all this when you’re sober.”

  “You’d better catch me before noon, then. Right, patrolmen?” He cackled at Kikuchi and Inoue, who stood a little straighter and stared straight ahead.

  “You’ve seen wounds like these before.”

  The doctor sighed. “I’ve seen your son. I’ve seen others. Now I’ve seen this one.”

  “Sober up and tell me what you know.”

  “Look, Detective, I don’t really know anything. Every time I had a chance to learn something, I drank instead, just to be sure I never really knew what was happening. The chief chooses to be blind and deaf, the sergeant chooses to be fat and stupid, and I choose to be drunk.” He grinned. “You chose to leave.”

  “I’m back.”

  The doctor’s grin faltered. He packed away his swabs with the exaggerated care of the profoundly inebriated. “I don’t really know anything, but if—­I’ll help if I can.”

  He covered the corpse with an almost reverential delicacy. He bowed to Takuda, ignored the young patrolmen, and walked unsteadily out of the interrogation room. There was the sound of his soft collision with Sergeant Kuma, then muffled curses. The door closed with a soft click.

  Suzuki chanted on. One of the young patrolmen swallowed loudly.

  “You’ve done a good job here. You looked where I told you?”

  They bowed. They seemed to want to speak.

  “You don’t have to choose sides. You’ve done your jobs. Leave now,” Takuda said. “It’s about to get worse.”

  Kikuchi and Inoue walked quickly, but they didn’t quite make it. They almost ran into Nakamura on the way out.

  The chief stepped in with his chin held high, perhaps to reduce the wattles on his wrinkled neck. He regarded Takuda with cold, expressionless eyes.

  “You’ve dismissed our doctor, Detective Takuda.”

  “He says he doesn’t know anything about this victim’s wounds even though he’s seen them before.” Takuda pulled off the sheet and pointed to the cuts on the corpse’s leg. “Don’t tell me you’ve never seen these before.”

  “I may have seen a familiar pattern. Tragically, some ­people unfamiliar with the water safety question cut themselves on river rocks.”

  “The rocks in this river were already smooth in the days of the woolly mammoth.”

  �
��I don’t have your grasp of geology. I cut myself on a rock just last summer. The pattern was similar.”

  “Where, Chief? Show me the scar.”

  “I don’t have time for this.”

  “How do drowning victims get the same cuts time and again? Exactly the same cuts, with no sharp rocks in sight. Measure the scars on my face against the ones on this corpse’s leg.”

  “Grief has driven you mad. You should go back to the city.”

  “Not until the water safety question is solved, Chief. Not until it’s solved once and for all.”

  Nakamura’s eyes narrowed to slits. He turned as if to storm out, but he decided in mid-­turn to walk out slowly, in a stately manner. He was silent until he opened the door to find Kuma blocking his exit. “Get out of the way, you fool.”

  Takuda and Reverend Suzuki were alone. “Hey, Priest. You wanted to take a walk tomorrow? You wanted to show me something upriver? Well, I’m ready. Officer Mori has taken over my paperwork, so I’m ready to listen to anyone who’ll tell me something useful.”

  Suzuki didn’t answer. He didn’t even open his eyes. He just continued to chant.

  Takuda didn’t really care. He reached for the sheet to cover the body, but he noticed something strange. The victim’s face had relaxed, and the eyes were clear. It was not the slackness that comes with the lessening of rigor mortis. It was the relaxation that comes with the cessation of suffering.

  He turned to look at Suzuki. Can the chanting ease the pain of the tortured dead?

  He covered the corpse. It did nothing to help me keep my tongue with the chief. No chanting is powerful enough to keep me from making a fool of myself.

  Then again, perhaps it gave me the strength to finally say what must be said.

  He bowed his head as Suzuki chanted on. No matter how the chanting works, we’re going to need it. Things will only get worse from here on out.

  CHAPTER 14

  “This is where Lee Hunt disappeared,” Detective Takuda said.

  He and Reverend Suzuki stood on the riverbank. It was Friday, only three days since the attempted abduction of Hanako Kawaguchi. The morning sun sparkled on the Naga River, churning and roiling in its narrow bed. The river had carved a course meandering over the centerline of the older bed, a wide trough of ruts and boulders. The flow was much reduced by the construction of the southern dam, but the river apparently still had the power to carry off a full-­grown man.

  Especially with a little help.

  “The current dragged him north,” Takuda said. “His wife said he kept going under, even though he seemed to get handholds. She said he caught a boulder and almost made it to the bank.”

  “He probably caught a handhold there,” Suzuki said, pointing to a boulder just before a bend in the river. “Maybe again down there.” He started downstream with long, rock-­to-­rock leaps. At each landing, his long, skinny arms sank slowly as his trailing shirttail caught up with him. He seemed to float down like a crane choosing its roost.

  “Where are you going, Priest?”

  Suzuki turned, teetering on a boulder. “I thought we would see where he tried to get out.”

  “There’s nothing to see downstream. There’s nothing more to know about the victim. He’s cooling in a locker in the city, and they won’t find anything to change anyone’s mind about the water safety question. They never do.” Takuda pointed upstream, southwest. “We’re going in there. That’s where we might find something new.”

  Suzuki nodded slowly, almost sadly. When he reached Takuda’s side, they turned together and faced the next bend, the mouth of the darkest corner of the Naga River valley.

  The southwest corner of the valley was in perpetual twilight. It was a place of moss and stagnant pools. No one lived there. In that corner of the valley, the struggle between light and darkness had been lost millennia before. Hundreds of meters below Eagle Peak Temple, the river had carved its own hollows and caverns, places that had never seen full sunlight. Takuda peered ahead into the dim ravine. He could see nothing. He had never been there himself, and he didn’t think he had ever met anyone who had. It was so far from the daily life of Oku Village that he felt somehow surprised it really existed.

  The stunted trees drew closer as they followed the bend of the river south and left the sunlit world behind.

  The ravine continued to narrow and deepen. The river ran swift and sullen in its older channel, trapped in the stony roots of the mountains. The river had dug deep, and soon the west bank was too steep for walking, so Takuda and Suzuki climbed the slippery, leaf-­covered clay to the foot of the mountain. Even ten meters above the surface of the water, they were still in shadows.

  “There was a trail here once,” Takuda said. “The footing is still pretty good. A lot of ­people walked into darkness here.”

  “This is an old, old trail. When ­people first came here, this was probably the riverbank. See, there are the old stone lanterns.”

  At the inside edge of the path lay toppled stone lanterns, black and green with slime and moss. Takuda saw that they were not hollow, and they had never actually produced light.

  “Eagle Peak Temple originally set these up as a reminder to Buddhists that this was a path to evil,” Suzuki said. These lanterns were placed along the path to represent the light of dharma.” He stopped and pulled the underbrush aside to reveal a toppled stone lantern. Its base had crumbled, and the top had split. “These were erected in the fifteenth century. This is the power of the light of faith. The cultists kept the path clear all these years, but they never had the heart to throw the lanterns into the river. There, you can see where they lead.” He pointed upstream.

  Around the next bend, they looked down upon two irregular stone pillars standing side by side in the riverbed. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of years before, the current had undercut the foot of the mountain, sending a flood of soil and stone into the river. The soil had washed away, leaving a jumble of stones supporting two upright splinters, each twice the height of a man. Before the dam was built, the columns would have appeared to stand alone above the water. Now that the flow was reduced, the river burbled madly over the blackened stones that shored the pillars in place. The pillars themselves were brown below the old waterline.

  “The gate to the Shrine of the Returning Apprentice,” Suzuki said.

  Takuda frowned. The photo from Ogawa’s apartment had been taken from a lower angle, and the waterline had been higher. “I’ve seen a photo of this place taken from the water,” he said.

  Suzuki turned to him. “A photo with a group of men on the stones?”

  “No, no one, just the stones. Why?”

  “I once saw a group photo of the Farmers’ Co-­op taken down there. Everyone in it is dead now.”

  “What were they doing out here?”

  “The Co-­op was a cover for the cult after the war, but I don’t know if the men in the photo were here on cult business. It probably wasn’t a ceremony. Ceremonies were not held so openly. They were seldom held in daylight.” Suzuki looked around. “If you call this daylight.”

  As they drew closer, Takuda spotted the dark lines near the tops of the pillars, probably the rotted remains of rice-­straw rope.

  “Someone must have cut it,” Takuda said. “It’s not so old that it would have rotted through in the middle, and there’s nothing hanging down at the sides.”

  “No,” Suzuki said. “I’ll bet there was never a length hanging between the pillars. You see that at more modern shrines. This is a much, much older form of superstitious animism. They tied offerings directly to the object of worship. If you wanted good fortune from the earth, you bound your offering and buried it in the earth. If you wanted good hunting from the forest, you hung your offering from the tree branches.”

  “If you wanted mercy from the Naga River . . .”

  “ . . . you tied your offering to
the stones in the water. Maybe we can get down there later,” Suzuki said. He squatted on the path and opened his backpack. “Let’s stop and eat lunch.”

  Eat here? Takuda scanned the river below and the mountainside above. He wasn’t hungry.

  “I have to eat every ­couple of hours,” Suzuki said. “It’s my metabolism. I’m hungry all the time these days. Please join me.” He handed Takuda a homemade rice ball and a can of tea. “I don’t want to eat in a place like this either, but I can’t hike on an empty stomach. I get nauseated and cranky.”

  They squatted on the trail because the ground was too damp and nasty. There were no birds, no frogs, no buzzing flies. There was only the rushing of the river below and the sound of their eating.

  Into that stillness, Suzuki said, “I almost died when your little brother drowned.”

  There wasn’t even a polite noise appropriate to such a statement. Takuda continued to eat.

  “I loved your brother like my own brother, and I had been miserable ever since I stole his toy airplane. I hated going to school because I had to see him. He sat a few seats ahead of me, and he never turned around anymore, no matter what I said or did. I was ashamed of myself, and nothing was fun anymore. One day, I wished he would die so I wouldn’t have to see him anymore.

  “Then all of a sudden, he was dead. I was there when they pulled him out of the canal with his leg all cut up and with bloody water gushing from the wound in his side. I knew it wasn’t my fault, of course. Even at that age, I could tell magic from direct causality. But I had stolen from my best friend, and all I had gotten for it was a little shove. Even after I wished him dead, that’s all that happened. It didn’t make sense. There was no balance and no justice and no mercy in the world, your brother was gone forever, and there was no way for me to make it up to him.

  “Then I ran into you, and you beat me badly. That beating made more sense than anything before or since. You cracked one of my ribs, you know, along with the bloody nose and the black eye. It didn’t matter. I slept like a baby that night. It’s difficult to describe what a relief it was.”