“Please, may I suggest, I have some special oil from China that will help heal your cuts and bruises quickly?”
He smiled. This was an often-used ploy to gain extra money. “Good, use it.”
“Oh, but you smile, honored samurai! It is not a trick to get more money,” she said at once, her fingers kneading his back. “My grandmother who was also blind gave me the secret.”
“How did you know I smiled?”
She laughed and the sound reminded him of a lark sailing the dawn air currents. “A smile begins in many parts of the body. My fingers listen to you—to your muscles and even sometimes to your thoughts.”
“And what am I thinking now?”
“About sonno-joi. Ah, I was right!” Again the laugh that disconcerted him. “But don’t be afraid, you have said nothing, the patrons here have said nothing, I will say nothing but my fingers tell me you are a special swordsman, the best I have ever served. Clearly you’re not Bakufu, therefore you must be ronin, ronin by choice because you are a guest in this house, therefore shishi, the first we have ever had here.” She bowed. “We are honored. If I were a man I would support sonno-joi.”
Deliberately her steel-hard fingertip pressed a nerve center and she felt the tremor of pain go through him and it pleased her that she could help him more than he knew. “So sorry, but this point is very important to rejuvenate you and keep your juices flowing.”
He grunted, the pain grinding him to the futons yet strangely pleasing. “Your grandmother was also a masseuse?”
“Yes. In my family at least one girl in every second generation is born blind. It was my turn in this lifetime.”
“Karma.”
“Yes. It is said that in China today, fathers or mothers will blind one of their daughters so that when she grows up she will find employment for all her life.”
Hiraga had never heard this but he believed it and was incensed. “This is not China and never will be and one day we will take China and civilize her.”
“Eeee, so sorry to disturb your harmony, Lord, please excuse me, oh so sorry. Ah, that’s better, again so sorry, please excuse me. You were saying, Lord … civilize China? As Dictator Nakamura wanted to do? Is it possible?”
“Yes, one day. It is our destiny to gain the Dragon Throne, as it is your destiny to massage and not to talk.”
Again her laugh was gentle. “Yes, Lord.”
Hiraga sighed as her finger released the pressure point and left a pervading, soothing glow in place of pain. So everyone knows I’m shishi, he thought. How long before I’m betrayed? Why not? Two koku is a fortune.
Getting into this haven had not been easy. When he had strode into the quarter there was an aghast silence, for here was a samurai, a samurai without swords, looking like a wild man. The street cleared except those nearby who knelt and awaited their fate.
“You, old man, where is your nearest ryokan—Inn.”
“We don’t have one, Lord, there’s no need, Honored Lord,” the old shopkeeper muttered, his fear making him gabble on. “There’s no need as our Yoshiwara is nearby, bigger than most cities with dozens of places you can stay in and over a hundred girls not counting maids, three real geisha and seven trainees. It’s that way …”
“Enough! Where’s the house of the shoya?”
“There, Lord.”
“Where, fool? Get up, show me the way.”
Still enraged, he followed him down the street, wanting to smash the eyes that watched from every opening and crush the whispers in his wake.
“There, Lord.”
Hiraga waved him away. The sign outside the open shop that was filled with goods of all description but empty of people announced that this was the residence and place of business of Ichi Ryoshi, shoya, rice merchant and banker, the Yokohama agent for the Gyokoyama. The Gyokoyama was a zaïbatsu—meaning a closely knit family complex of businesses—immensely powerful in Yedo and Osaka as rice traders, saké and beer distillers, and all-important, bankers.
He took hold of himself. With great care and politeness he knocked, squatted on his heels and began to wait, trying to dominate the pain from the beating he had taken from the ten-man patrol. At length a strong-faced, middle-aged man came out into the open shop, knelt and bowed. Hiraga bowed back equally, introduced himself as Nakama Otami and mentioned that his grandfather was also shoya, not saying where but giving enough information for him to know it was the truth and that, perhaps, as there was no ryokan to stay at, the shoya might have a room for paying guests that was not being used. “My grandfather also is honored to have dealings with the Gyokoyama zaïbatsu—his villages sell all their crops through it,” he had said politely. “In fact I would like you, please, to send my pledge to them in Osaka, and would be grateful if you would advance me some cash against it.”
“Yedo is nearer than Osaka, Otami-san.”
“Yes, but Osaka is better for me than Yedo,” Hiraga said, not wanting to risk Yedo where there could be leaks to the Bakufu. He noted the cool, unafraid appraisal and hid his hatred, but even daimyos had to be careful when dealing with the Gyokoyama or their agents, even Lord Ogama of Choshu. It was common knowledge that Ogama was heavily in debt to them, with years of future revenue already pledged as security.
“My company is honored to serve old customers. Please, how long would you wish to stay in my house?”
“A few days, if it would not inconvenience you.” Hiraga told him about Tyrer and the problem of the soldiers, only because he was sure the news had preceded him.
“You may stay at least three days, Otami-san. So sorry, but you must be prepared to leave quickly in case of a sudden raid, by day or night.”
“I understand. Thank you.”
“Please excuse me but I would like an order signed by this Taira, or better the chief of the gai-jin, ordering me to open my house to you, in case or when the Bakufu arrive here.”
“I will arrange it.” Hiraga bowed his thanks and hid his irritation at the restraints. “Thank you.”
The shoya ordered a maid to bring tea and writing materials and watched while Hiraga wrote the pledge that asked the amount be deducted from the account of Shinsaku Otami, the secret code name of his father. He signed it and sealed it with his chop, signed and sealed the receipt for Ryoshi, who agreed to advance half the amount at the usual interest of two percent per month, for the three months that would be needed to send the paper to Osaka and complete the transaction. “Do you want the money in cash?”
“No, thank you, I still have a few oban,” he said, exaggerating, down to his last two. “Please open an account for me, deduct the charges for my room and food. I need some clothes, swords, and could you please arrange a masseuse?”
“Of course, Otami-san. About clothes, the servant will show you our stock. Choose what you want. As to swords for sale”—Ryoshi shrugged—“the only ones I have are trinkets for gai-jin and hardly worth your trouble but you may see what I have. Perhaps I could obtain proper ones for you. Now I will show you your room and your private entrance and exit—there is a guard here, by day and by night.”
Hiraga had followed him. Never once had Ryoshi commented on his nakedness or bruises or asked any questions. “You are welcome and honor my poor house,” he had said, and left him.
Remembering the way it was said suddenly made Hiraga’s skin crawl-so polite and grave but underneath so deadly. Disgusting, he thought, disgusting that we samurai are kept in poverty by corrupt daimyos and Shoguns and Bakufu and forced to borrow from these low-class zaibatsu who are nothing but filthy, money-grubbing merchants who act as though their money gives them power over us. By all gods, when the Emperor has regained power there’ll be a reckoning, merchants and zaibatsu will begin to pay ….
In the same instant he felt her fingers stop. “What is it, Lord?” the masseuse asked, frightened.
“Nothing, nothing. Please continue.”
Her fingers obeyed, but now their touch was different and there was tension in the room.
It was an eight-mat room, the futons stuffed with down, the tatami of good quality and shojis recently renewed with oiled paper. In the tokonoma niche was an oil lamp, flower arrangement and small scroll painting of a vast landscape, its only habitation a tiny cottage in a bamboo grove, with an even tinier woman forlorn in the doorway, peering into the distance—a love poem beside it.
Waiting,
Listening to the rain
Beating on the rain
So lonely, filled with so much hope for her man’s return.
Hiraga was drifting into sleep when the screen door slid back. “Excuse me, Lord.” The servant knelt and said uneasily, “So sorry, there is a low-class person outside who claims to know you, asks to see you, so sorry to disturb you, but he is very insistent an—”
“Who is he? What’s his name?”
“He … wouldn’t give a name, and he didn’t ask for you by name, Lord, but kept on saying: ‘Say to the samurai: Todo is the brother of Joun.’”
Instantly Hiraga was on his feet. As he slipped on his yukata, he asked the masseuse to come back tomorrow at the same time and dismissed her, moved closer to the two swords he had borrowed until the shoya could obtain better, and knelt in a defensive-attack position facing the door. “Send him here, and keep everyone else away.”
The slight, dirty young peasant with a tattered kimono grovelled along the passageway and went onto his knees outside the door. “Thank you, Lord, thank you for seeing me,” the youth mumbled, then looked up and beamed inanely, his front teeth missing. “Thank you, Lord.”
Hiraga glowered at him, then gasped with disbelief: “Ori? But—but it’s impossible!” then peered closer and saw that his tooth had just been blacked out as part of his disguise, in this light the illusion perfect. But no mistaking that Ori was no longer obviously samurai: his topknot and been cut off and all hair on the back and sides of his head roughly trimmed to the same length as the two-week stubble that covered his pate. “Why?” he asked helplessly.
Ori grinned and sat close to him. “Bakufu are looking for ronin, eh?” he whispered, keeping his voice down against ears they both knew would be listening. “I’m not less a samurai but now I can pass any barrier, eh?”
The air hissed out of Hiraga’s mouth with admiration. “You are right. You are brilliant, sonno-joi doesn’t depend on a hairstyle. So simple—I would never have thought of it.”
“It occurred to me last night. I was thinking about your problem, Hiraga, an—”
“Careful. Here my name’s Nakama Otami.”
“Ah, so that’s it! Good.” Ori smiled. “I did not know what to use, hence the code.”
“Have they found Todo and the others?”
“No, no, they are still missing. They have to be dead. We heard Joun was executed like a common criminal, but still don’t know how he was caught.”
“Why come here, Ori? It’s too dangerous.”
“Not like this, nor at night, and I needed to test the new Ori and to see you.” Squeamishly he ran his hand over his head stubble, scratching his scalp, his face freshly shaven. “It feels awful, and dirty, somehow obscene, but never mind, now I am safe to get to Kyōto. I will leave in two days.”
Hiraga stared at his head, fascinated, still bewildered by the astonishing change. “If anything makes you safe that should, except that now all samurai will take you for a common man. How can you wear swords?”
“When I need swords I will wear a hat. When I am disguised I have this.” Ori slipped his good hand into his sleeve and brought out a two-shot derringer.
Again Hiraga’s face lit up. “Eeee, brilliant! Where did you get it?”
“Fujiko. She sold it to me, with a box of cartridges. A client gave it to her as a present when he left Yokohama. Imagine! A low-class whore with such a treasure.”
Hiraga held it carefully, weighing it in his hand, pointing it then lifting the catch to see the two bronze cartridges neatly in the barrels. “You could certainly kill two men before you were killed, if you were close enough.”
“One is enough to give you time to run off and get some swords.” Ori peered at Hiraga. “We heard about the soldiers. I wanted to see if you were all right. Baka! We will go to Kyōto together and leave this place to the dogs until we can come back in force.”
Hiraga shook his head and told what really happened, then about Tyrer and discovering the enmity between the French and English, adding excitedly, “This is one of the wedges we can drive between them. We get them fighting amongst themselves, let them kill each other for us, eh? I must stay, Ori. It is only the beginning. We must learn all they know, be able to think like them and then we can destroy them.”
Ori frowned, considering the reasons for and the reasons against—though he had not forgiven Hiraga for forcing him to lose face and remove her cross, he still had to protect sonno-joi. “In that case, if you are to be our spy, you will have to be like them in every way, and burrow into their society like a bedbug, outwardly become friends, even wear gai-jin clothes.” At Hiraga’s blank look he added, “Why not? That will further protect you, and make it easier for them to accept you, neh?”
“But why should they accept me?”
“They should not, but they are fools. Taira will be your spearhead. He can arrange it, order it. He could insist.”
“Why should he?”
“Barter Fujiko.”
“Eh?”
“Raiko gave us the key: gai-jin are different. They prefer to bed the same woman. Help Raiko to wrap him in their net, then he is your running dog because you are his indispensable go-between. Tomorrow tell him, even though you were furious with the soldiers, it was not his fault. With great difficulty you sneaked back to the Yoshiwara and arranged Fujiko for him for tomorrow evening and ‘so sorry, Taira-sama, it would be simpler for me to arrange these trysts if I had proper European clothes to pass the barriers, and so on.’ Make her available, or not, get him on her barb, and twist it. Eh?”
Hiraga began laughing quietly. “Better you stay here and not go to Kyōto, your counsel is too valuable.”
“Katsumata must be forewarned. Now, the gai-jin woman?”
“Tomorrow I will find out exactly where she is.”
“Good.” The wind picked up and a gust passed through the house, crackling the paper in the frames and setting the oil flame dancing. Ori watched him. “Have you seen her?”
“Not yet. Taira’s servants, a filthy lot of Chinese, don’t speak any language I can understand so I could not find out from them, but the biggest building in the Settlement belongs to the man she is to marry.”
“She lives there?”
“I am not sure but—” Hiraga stopped as an idea barreled into his head. “Listen, if I could become accepted, I could go everywhere, could find out all about their defenses, could go aboard their warships and …”
“And on a certain night,” Ori said at once, jumping ahead, “perhaps we could capture one, or sink one.”
“Yes.” Both men glowed at the thought, the candle fluttering and casting strange shadows.
“With the right wind,” Ori said softly, “a south wind like tonight, with five or six shishi, a few kegs of oil already planted in the right warehouses … even that is not necessary: we can make incendiaries and start fires in the Yoshiwara. The wind would jump those fires into the village and those would spread to the Settlement and burn it up! Neh?”
“And the ship?”
“In the confusion we row out to the big one. We could do it, easily, neh?”
“Not easily, but what a coup!”
“Sonno-joi!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THURSDAY, 16TH OCTOBER:
“Come in! Ah, good morning, André,” Angelique said with a warmth that belied her anxiety. “You’re very punctual. All’s well with you?”
He nodded, closed the door of the small ground-floor room adjoining her bedroom that served as her boudoir in the French Legation, once more astonished that s
he appeared so calm and could make small talk. Politely he bent over her hand and kissed it, then sat opposite her. The room was drab with old chairs and chaise and writing desk, plaster walls with a few cheap oils by current French painters, Delacroix and Corot. “The army taught me, Punctuality is next to Godliness.”
She smiled at the pleasantry. “La! I didn’t know you had been in the army.”
“I had a commission in Algeria for a year when I was twenty-two; after university—nothing very grand, just helping to crush one of the usual rebellions. The sooner we really stamp out the troublemakers and annex all North Africa as French territory the better.” He waved absently at the flies, and studied her. “You look more beautiful than ever. Your—your state suits you.”
Her eyes lost their color and became flinty. Last night had been bad for her, the bed here in the untidy, seedy bedroom uncomfortable. During the dark time her anxieties had overridden her confidence and she had become increasingly nervous about leaving her suite next to Struan and all her comfort, so hastily. In the dawn her humor had not improved and again the all-consuming idea pervaded her: men caused all her woes. Revenge will be sweet. “You mean my marriage state to be, no?”
“Of course,” he said after the barest pause, and she wondered, aggravated, what was the matter with him and why he was so boorish and distant like last night when the music had gone on and on, without his usual touch. He had dark rings under his eyes and his features seemed sharper than usual.
“Is anything wrong, my dear friend?”
“No, dear Angelique, nothing, nothing at all.”
Liar, she thought. Why is it men lie so much, to others and to themselves? “You were successful?”
“Yes and no.”
He knew that she was twisting on the spit and of a sudden he wanted to make her squirm, wanted to fan the flames to make her scream and pay for Hana.
You’re mad, he thought. It’s not Angelique’s fault. That is true but because of her, last night I went to the Three Carp and saw Raiko and while we talked in our mixture of Japanese and English and pidgin I suddenly felt that the other had just been a rotten nightmare and that any moment Hana would appear, the laugh in her eyes, and my heart would swirl as always and we would leave Raiko and bathe together, play there, eat in private and love without haste. And when I realized the truth, with Hana gone forever, my entrails and brain crawling with spawning worms, I almost vomited. “Raiko, got to know who three clients were.”
Gai-Jin Page 46