James Maxted 03 The Ends of the Earth

by Robert Goddard

  ‘My father learnt something in Paris earlier this year that made him determined to come here and right a great wrong dating from that period. Any idea what it might’ve been?’

  ‘None. It’s far too late to make accusations against Tomura about Okuma and the Tsarevich. I can’t imagine what might have got into Henry’s head. It’s all water under the bridge.’

  ‘Evidently not, since it’s got my father killed – and Kuroda too.’

  Hodgson could not refute that. ‘Something to do with Lemmer, perhaps?’ he offered.

  ‘He’s certainly involved. But Tomura’s at the centre of it. It’s about the Farngolds.’

  That drew a doubtful look. ‘Really?’

  ‘Have you ever met Claude Farngold’s son, Jack?’

  Hodgson conducted further mopping with his neckerchief while he mulled the question over. Then: ‘Yes. I have. Several times. He came to the legation seeking information about his father’s death. Late eighty-nine, that would have been. He was referred to the legation by the consulate in Yokohama. Personable young fellow. I sent him to see Kuroda. The next occasion was shortly after Henry went home in ninety-one. Young Farngold was hoping to speak to him. It was obvious he hated Tomura. Small wonder when you consider he had cause to suspect Tomura had murdered his father and also blamed him for his sister’s death. He seemed to think she’d been neglected, whether with good reason or not I couldn’t say. At all events, he continued to bear a grudge against Tomura. Some years later, I heard he’d been arrested for making a nuisance of himself at Tomura’s house here in Tokyo, though I don’t think any charges were levelled. The last time I saw him would have been … the autumn of 1917. He was looking for Henry – again. He’d changed a lot, I remember. Not simply older, but … worn out, dishevelled, a little deranged, it seemed to me. I told him Henry was with the embassy in Petrograd. He said he’d write to him there. What about I don’t know.’

  ‘That’s the last you heard of him?’

  ‘No. Kuroda came to see me late last year. He said he was looking for Jack Farngold, who was reported to be in Tokyo, possibly as a patient in a lunatic asylum. He hoped I might have heard something about him. I hadn’t. Kuroda explained he was making his inquiries on behalf of Marquess Saionji. That struck me as odd. We didn’t know then Saionji was going to head Japan’s delegation to the peace conference. He was semi-retired, although still officially an advisor to the Emperor. I wondered why he should be interested in Jack Farngold.’

  ‘Because he was interested in Count Tomura and the threat posed by Dark Ocean.’

  ‘Yes.’ Hodgson nodded, conceding the point with a downward glance. ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Now Kuroda’s dead. And so is Jack Farngold.’

  ‘What?’ Hodgson looked at Max in obvious astonishment. ‘Jack Farngold’s dead?’

  ‘Murdered last night. Here in Tokyo.’

  ‘How do you know this?’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. What matters is that Tomura’s back in Japan and so is Lemmer. Now Jack Farngold’s dead and a friend of mine is in custody charged with his murder. Two other friends are being sought by the police. They came here to help me get to the bottom of the Farngold mystery. Killing Jack Farngold is the last thing they’d be party to. They must have walked into a trap: Tomura disposes of an old enemy and blames it on them.’

  ‘Are the police looking for you as well?’

  ‘No. No one knows I’m in Japan – except you.’

  ‘Good Lord.’ Hodgson shook his head thoughtfully. ‘This is … frightful.’

  ‘I need your help, Mr Hodgson. So do my friends.’

  ‘Well, I …’

  ‘Do you know anyone senior in the police force?’

  Hodgson nodded. ‘Fujisaki. He worked under Kuroda for a number of years. A sound fellow.’

  ‘Can you speak to him and find out exactly what happened? That would be a start.’

  ‘I’ll telephone him as soon as I get back to the embassy.’

  ‘It might be wiser to call on him in person.’

  Hodgson frowned at Max. ‘Why?’

  ‘Lemmer must have got wind of what my friends were doing here and alerted Tomura. There was treachery somewhere along the line. It’s impossible to say who is or isn’t one of Lemmer’s spies.’

  ‘How do you know I’m not?’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘No. Of course not. But—’

  ‘I had to take the risk of confiding in you, Mr Hodgson. I have nowhere else to turn. Will you help me?’

  ‘I’ll … do what I can, certainly.’

  ‘Don’t mention me to anyone. Lemmer mustn’t learn I’m in Tokyo.’ Or alive, Max refrained from adding, assuming Dombreux had persuaded Lemmer he was dead. ‘When did you last meet Lemmer yourself?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Probably at some reception or other back in ninety-one. He left Tokyo not long after Henry.’

  ‘And you’ve never seen him since?’

  ‘No. Heard of him, of course, by reputation. And there were reports he was in this region a couple of years back. Why he’d risk a journey to the Far East in the middle of the war I can’t imagine. Rumours put him in China, which didn’t declare war on Germany until August of 1917. And that only held for the Peking government. Sun Yat-sen down in Canton stayed neutral. There were suggestions the Germans were funding his régime. Perhaps that’s what Lemmer was up to.’

  ‘It won’t have been all he was up to.’ Max turned over in his mind what Nadia had told him about working for a Japanese businesswoman based in Korea known as the Dragonfly. One of Nadia’s tasks, arranged by the Dragonfly to oblige Lemmer, had been to lure Jack Farngold into a trap. He had been seized and sent to Japan. And now he had been killed. ‘Lemmer remains an active enemy of His Majesty, Mr Hodgson. Remember that. It’s not just me you’ll be helping. It’s your king and country.’

  ‘But the government Lemmer served no longer exists. The Germans have accepted defeat. They signed the peace treaty.’

  ‘Which is why he’s here, seeking another government to serve.’

  ‘The Japanese wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘Which Japanese do you mean? Marquess Saionji – or Count Tomura?’

  Hodgson took a moment to absorb the enormity of what Max had said. ‘If this is true …’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘I must alert my superiors.’

  ‘Not yet. I need you to promise me you’ll alert no one until we’ve learnt what happened last night and have had a chance to decide the best course of action.’

  ‘But this is a gravely serious matter.’

  ‘Yes. Which is precisely why it must remain between us for the moment. You’ll be in danger yourself once you show your hand.’

  ‘Like Henry.’ The possibility dawned darkly on Hodgson’s countenance. ‘And to think I expected my last few months before retirement to be uneventful.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Hodgson.’

  ‘You’d better call me Cyril, Max. Now we’re in this together.’

  ‘You’ll speak to Fujisaki this afternoon?’

  ‘If I can.’

  ‘Then we should meet later. Shall I come to Uchida Apartments?’

  Hodgson arched his eyebrows in surprise. ‘You know where I live?’

  ‘I know your address, yes. It came from the same source as the copy of your report I read. But I’ll need directions.’

  ‘Where are you staying?’

  ‘Not sure. Let’s say I’ll be starting from here.’

  ‘And we are starting from here, aren’t we, Max?’ Hodgson glanced around the park. ‘I suppose I should have known, when I heard of Henry’s death, then Kuroda’s …’ He rubbed his forehead. ‘Perhaps I did know, on some level I preferred to ignore. The past, hey? It remembers you better than you remember it.’

  MAX COULD SEE nothing for it but to bide his time until he spoke to Hodgson again. He booked into the Station Hotel at Tokyo Central, using one of the several fake passports. He was Jam
es Greaves as far as anyone was concerned, occupation unspecified.

  An anxious afternoon and early evening slowly passed. It was stiflingly hot in his room, but he knew unnecessary wandering was a risk he could not afford to take. Waiting was one of the hazards Appleby had warned him about, without offering anything in the way of a solution. ‘You’ll get used to it,’ he had said. But Max had not got used to it – yet.

  Uchida Apartments were part of a large red-brick Western-style building on a corner site one street away from the main shops of Ginza. The walk there had reminded Max how much more foreign he felt in Tokyo than he had in Shanghai. Japan was a world he knew little of. A misstep would be easy to take. A woman had caught his eye at the last crossing and he had not been sure why, though he felt he should have been. The city was crowded. But he knew he was conspicuous nonetheless.

  He pressed the bell numbered six and heard the door-latch click. Entering, he was mildly surprised by the modesty of the interior. There was a line of mail boxes and a flight of plain stairs. He started up them.

  A Japanese woman who was clearly Mrs Hodgson was holding the door of the apartment open when he reached it. She was wearing a richly patterned kimono and looked much younger than her husband, though Max allowed for the possibility she had simply aged better. Her open, smiling features would once have been quite lovely. And some of their loveliness remained.

  ‘Maxted-san,’ she greeted him with a bow. ‘Yokoso. Please come in.’

  The apartment he entered was a mixture of Japanese and Western in its furnishings and decorations. He was relieved of his coat and hat and shoes. Mrs Hodgson showed him into a drawing room, where Western style prevailed, though the feeble tinkling of a wind-chime out on a balcony, to which the doors stood ajar, conveyed a hint of the Orient. He politely declined the offer of tea.

  ‘Hodgson-san is not here,’ Mrs Hodgson explained. ‘But soon he will be back. Will you wait for him here?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘There is whisky.’ She pointed to a drinks tray on a table in a corner of the room. ‘Please have some.’

  She left then and Max went to help himself to a Scotch. The wind-chime stirred only occasionally. There was noise of traffic beyond it: the rumble of tyres on cobbles, the squeal of a tram, the blare of a horn.

  He sat down and drank some of his whisky. His gaze wandered to the pictures on the wall. There were several framed photographs of Europeans gathered in a social setting. Max rose and took a closer look, pondering whether they were of Hodgson’s colleagues at the British legation. He suspected they were, these smiling English gentlemen and ladies in their smart evening dress. Differences in the men’s beards and moustaches and the cut of the ladies’ gowns suggested the photographs had been taken some years apart, perhaps spanning the thirty years or so of Hodgson’s time in Japan.

  Max wondered if he would see his parents’ younger faces staring back at him from one of the groups. He inspected what appeared to be the earliest photograph. It showed a group of twenty or thirty couples in evening finery, assembled before the camera in a brightly lit ballroom decorated with ribbons and balloons. The ladies were arrayed in elegant silk dresses of varying shades, bustled and bowed and cinch-waisted, with generous displays of décolletage.

  Suddenly, he saw his mother, looking young and grave and icily beautiful. There she was, with her hair drawn up as Max could only remember seeing it in her wedding portrait. A brooch he did not recognize was gleaming at her breast. Her gown was dark and lustrous – purple, perhaps, a colour she had always liked.

  And there too, beside her, her arm in his, was his father, clearly younger, but also somehow less confident than the man Max had last seen in Paris four months before. He was glancing away from the camera a little oddly, as if distracted or simply unprepared for the closure of the shutter.

  ‘Max,’ came Hodgson’s call from the doorway, breaking into his reverie.

  ‘Ah.’ Max turned away from the photograph. ‘There you are.’

  ‘Sorry not to have been here when you arrived.’

  ‘No matter. I was looking at these pictures.’

  ‘Ah, those. A few of the legation’s New Year’s Eve balls. It’s become something of a tradition, actually. We’ve held it at the Imperial ever since … well, ever since the hotel opened.’

  ‘I see my parents in this one.’

  ‘Yes. That would be right.’ Hodgson walked across to where Max was standing and looked hard at the photograph. ‘Their … first year in Tokyo. 1889, it must have been. The others take us through to just before the war.’

  ‘Are you in all of them yourself?’

  ‘Yes. I think so. But we’ve rather more important matters to discuss, haven’t we?’ Max noticed then how flustered Hodgson appeared. There was a visible sheen of sweat on his forehead. ‘Sorry,’ he said, dabbing himself with his handkerchief. ‘It’s been a hectic evening. Shall we sit down?’

  ‘By all means. Would you like me to fetch you a drink?’

  ‘Thanks. I would. Scotch and soda.’ Hodgson subsided into an armchair. Max poured him the drink and topped up his own whisky, then opened the door to the balcony a little wider before sitting down himself.

  Hodgson took a swallow from his glass. ‘You met my wife. Perhaps I should have mentioned the fact that she’s Japanese.’

  ‘There was no need.’

  ‘Asking me if I’m in all of those photos touched a raw nerve, I’m afraid. I mean, I am, in the ones hanging on the wall. But I missed a couple of balls after we married. My wife wasn’t made to feel entirely welcome, you see.’

  ‘Sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Best forgotten.’ Hodgson took another swig. ‘Now, to business. I’ve just come from a meeting with Commissioner Fujisaki. He keeps rather late hours. And he’s a cautious fellow. Preternaturally so, some might say.’

  ‘Was there anything he could tell you?’

  ‘Yes. Some bad news and some good. The Kempeitai – the Japanese Secret Police – apprehended three men last night and charged them with murdering Jack Farngold in pursuance of a plot to assassinate the Prime Minister.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Their names are Thomas Morahan, Grover Ward and Gazda Djabsu. You know them?’

  ‘Morahan, yes. The others will be people he’s recruited since we last met.’

  ‘The police are looking for two other people: Samuel Twentyman and a Miss Malory Hollander. You know them as well?’

  ‘Yes. They’re friends. But the idea that any of them was plotting to assass—’

  ‘I know. So does Fujisaki. Thanks to his intervention, the assassination charge has been dropped. Morahan, Ward and Djabsu have been handed over to the regular police. They’re being held in Sugamo prison. It’s not exactly the Ritz, but it’s vastly preferable to being in the hands of the Kempeitai, let me assure you.’

  ‘That’s something, I suppose. But did Fujisaki intervene just to oblige you? I had no—’

  ‘He was already involved when I spoke to him, Max. A senior official at the Home Ministry he declined to name asked him to help your friends as best he could. Which he was happy to do once he realized Tomura was mixed up in what had happened.’

  ‘And what exactly had happened?’

  ‘It seems someone called Lewis Everett, who was working with Morahan, betrayed him to the Kempeitai. The police were called to a shop here in Ginza last night. They found Farngold shot dead in an upper room with Morahan and Everett engaged in a struggle. A third person – Twentyman – escaped at that point. Morahan was arrested. Ward and Djabsu were arrested at their hotel in Yokohama soon afterwards. Miss Hollander was to have been arrested as well, but couldn’t be found. So, it was just the three of them who were handed over to the Kempeitai – and not for long, fortunately.’

  ‘We need to know who this senior official at the Home Ministry is, Cyril.’

  ‘Fujisaki wouldn’t be drawn on the point. And he knew I was protecting someone’s identity as well, of
course.’

  ‘Mine, you mean?’

  ‘I couldn’t account for knowing anything about the affair without admitting I was acting on behalf of someone else. I assured him of your bona fides and he accepted my assurance. He hazarded a guess that you were a friend of the men detained and the two fugitives. I could hardly deny it. But nor, in the circumstances, could I press him for further details of who he was cooperating with at the Home Ministry, or what more he was doing for him.’

  ‘He is doing more, then, you think?’

  ‘That’s the impression he gave me. Fujisaki started out working under Kuroda, remember. He knows more about Tomura than most and probably believes he was responsible for Kuroda’s death – the death of a man Fujisaki respected immensely. He won’t shy away from tackling Tomura if he can. But as far as I can tell he has nothing he can actually tackle him with.’

  ‘Maybe I can supply something.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear you say that. Because Fujisaki wants to meet you.’