“. . . I don’t know.”
If he wasn’t the suspect sighted outside the convent, maybe he was the one Hirata’s witness had seen by Shinobazu Pond. “Did he have teeth missing?”
“Couldn’t see,” whispered Tengu-in. “The light . . .”
The daylight behind the man must have left his features in shadow. “What happened next?” Reiko asked.
The nun’s gaze shifted rapidly; her eyelids lowered.
“Then you woke up,” Reiko prompted, anxious to prevent Tengu-in from withdrawing beyond her reach. “You were in a place filled with clouds.”
“Clouds,” Tengu-in echoed in a voice like the wind sighing.
“You couldn’t move. The man was there.”
A low, fearful whimper resonated through Tengu-in. Her body quaked.
“He nursed at your breasts,” Reiko suggested. “He called you ‘dearest mother,’ and ‘beloved mother.’ ”
Again Tengu-in’s head tossed.
Reiko ventured, “He forced you to suck on him. He said you were naughty and beat you?” Tengu-in mumbled something Reiko couldn’t hear. “What was that?”
“Pray,” whispered Tengu-in. “He made me pray while he had me.” Her voice rose to a loud, shrill pitch: “Namo Amida Butsu! Namo Amida Butsu!” I trust in the Buddha of Immeasurable Light. She was praying to be delivered from this life of suffering and reborn into the Pure Land, a heaven of beauty and enlightenment. Her voice trailed off while her lips kept moving. Her eyes closed as she withdrew behind the barrier of her private hell.
“I’m bringing these prisoners in for interrogation,” Sano told the sentries outside Edo Jail. Behind him, the two suspects knelt in their oxcart, their wrists and ankles bound with rope, guarded by Detectives Marume and Fukida and Sano’s other troops. Above him loomed the jail’s high, mossy stone walls and guard turrets. “Let us in.”
The guards obeyed. Sano and his entourage crowded into a courtyard surrounded by barracks. His soldiers brought in the oxcart and unloaded the two prisoners. His party marched into the dungeon, a building whose dirty, scabrous plaster walls rose from a high stone base. It was a reflection of Edo Castle in a dark mirror—one edifice designed to safeguard the regime’s highest society, the other to cage its lowest.
The interrogation rooms, situated along a dank passage that smelled of sewers, had ironclad doors with small windows set at eye level. Hirata marched the young suspect with the missing teeth into one room. Sano, Marume, and Fukida took the other suspect into a room at the passage’s opposite end. Shouts, moans, and weeping emanated from the rooms in between. Sano’s room was just large enough to hold four people and swing a sword. Dim light seeped from a barred window near the ceiling. The walls were marred with cracks and gouges, discolored by old bloodstains. Marume and Fukida shoved the suspect down on the straw that covered the floor. Sano smelled urine on the straw, which was trampled and grimy; it hadn’t been changed since the last interrogation. He stood over the suspect.
The big man stared at the wall behind Sano, his gaze sullen beneath his heavy brow. His unshaven face was mud-streaked from his tussle with the detectives. Sweat plastered his blue kimono against his muscles. He hadn’t uttered a word since he’d been captured.
“What’s your name?” Sano asked.
The suspect tightened his jaw. Marume kicked his thigh and ordered, “Speak up.”
“Jinshichi,” the suspect said. His deep voice was thick and raspy, as if he’d swallowed sand mixed with pitch.
“Well, Jinshichi,” Sano said, “you’re under arrest for kidnapping my cousin.”
“Didn’t kidnap anybody.”
He spoke with conviction, but Sano didn’t believe him. Something about the man didn’t smell right.
“Let me refresh your memory,” Sano said. “My cousin is the woman you met at Awashima Shrine. She’d gone there with her new baby. You hid in the bushes and called to her that you were hurt. She came to help you. You took her and left the baby.”
“I never,” Jinshichi said, adamant.
“You gave her a drug that put her to sleep.” Sano kept his voice calm, but anger mounted inside him. “You locked her up.”
“Never.”
“Then you raped her,” Sano said, controlling an urge to lash out at Jinshichi for hurting Chiyo, to wipe that hard, defiant look off his face.
“You’re wrong.” If Jinshichi was afraid, it didn’t show.
Standing on either side of him, Marume and Fukida exchanged glances. They looked at Sano, who saw that they had doubts about the man’s guilt.
“You kept her for two days,” Sano said. “When you were finished with her, you dumped her in an alley, as if she were a sack of garbage.”
Jinshichi muttered. Fukida smacked his head, and he said, “Wasn’t me. I’m innocent.”
“I suppose you didn’t kidnap Tengu-in, either,” Sano said.
“Who?”
“The nun. She was taken from the Zj Temple precinct on the first day of the third month. You were seen outside her convent the day before.”
“Couldn’t have been,” Jinshichi said. “Wasn’t there.”
“Then where were you?” Sano demanded.
Jinshichi eyed Sano with incredulity. “That was a long time ago. Damned if I can remember. Working, probably.”
“Working where?”
“Around town. Hell if I know!” Jinshichi grew loud, impatient. “I didn’t do anything wrong. Can I go now?”
“If you really want to,” Sano said. “You can go straight to the court of justice and be tried for two kidnappings and two assaults.”
For the first time, Jinshichi’s face showed fear. It was common knowledge that almost every trial ended with a guilty verdict.
“Better yet,” Sano said, “we’ll just skip the trial and take you straight to the execution ground.”
“But I didn’t kidnap those women.” Jinshichi strained against the ropes that bound him. “I swear!”
Sano burned with rage at the man’s denials. But even though Sano was sure Jinshichi was lying, he couldn’t ignore the obvious reason that the man might not be.
There was a second suspect right down the hall.
In the other interrogation room, Hirata studied the prisoner who knelt on the straw at his feet. “Tell me your name,” he ordered.
“Gombei, Honorable master.” The man bowed and grinned.
He was slender and wiry, the type that was far stronger than he looked. He could probably lift loads as heavy as himself. Even with his wrists and ankles tied up, he exuded a bounding energy. Hirata could hear his rapid heartbeat, his blood swift beneath his skin. Despite his missing teeth, his face wasn’t unhandsome. Long, wavy hair, fallen from his topknot, grazed his shoulders and framed ro guish features. His eyes sparkled with vitality and cunning.
Trained perception and samurai instinct told Hirata that Gombei had plenty to hide.
But even as Hirata prepared to extract Gombei’s guilty secrets, only half of his attention was focused on the job at hand. He couldn’t stop thinking about the presence he’d sensed at Shinobazu Pond yesterday. Who was it? What were the man’s intentions?
Now, half of Hirata’s mind was attuned to the world beyond his sight, waiting for the mysterious presence to return. He believed that even though he didn’t know who it was, it knew who he was. He found himself constantly glancing over his shoulder, sensing that he was being watched. He felt like a coward rather than the best fighter in Edo. The presence had planted a seed of fear in him. Hirata felt the seed growing, feeding on his confusion, against his will.
What would happen the next time he encountered the presence?
There would be a next time, but when?
Gombei’s voice brought Hirata back to Edo Jail and the investigation. “Honorable master, please believe me when I say that I am a decent, honest citizen who’s never broken the law.” He had the kind of earnest, charming manner that Hirata automatically distrusted. “Ask anyone wh
o knows me. My family, my friends, my neighbors, my boss, they’ll tell you that I’m—”
“Quite the talker,” Hirata interrupted. “Well, let’s talk about the little girl you kidnapped.”
Amazement snapped Gombei’s eyes wide. His full lips silently repeated the word kidnapped. “What little girl?”
“The one at Shinobazu Pond.”
“With all due respect, I didn’t do it.” Gombei oozed earnestness. “I would never hurt a child. In fact, I would never even hurt a fly. Except if it’s the biting kind.”
“You were in the area,” Hirata said. “A witness saw you.”
“I’ve done work over there. A lot of people must have seen me. If I may say so, that doesn’t mean I kidnapped somebody.”
“I say you did. You kidnapped that girl, put her in a cage, and raped her.”
“I didn’t!” Gombei bristled with indignation.
He had a combative streak beneath his charm, Hirata observed. He wasn’t as harmless as he took pains to appear. But Hirata couldn’t discern more about the man. Preoccupation had weakened his mental energy.
“If I want a good time, I don’t need to kidnap and force anybody, and besides, I don’t go for children. I like women.” Gombei’s grin turned lecherous. “And they like me. I’ve got a wife, a mistress, and ladies all over town.”
“Not even a big ladies’ man like you can have whoever he wants,” Hirata said. He couldn’t summon the power to see through lies or manipulate Gombei into confessing. He must rely on verbal tactics. “What if you want somebody you can’t get?”
“Pardon me, but I can’t imagine who that might be.”
“How about the chamberlain’s cousin? She’s a high-ranking samurai woman with a new baby. She was kidnapped, too.” Hirata asked, “Do you like to drink mother’s milk straight from the breast while you have sex?”
“What?” Disbelief and outrage lifted the pitch of Gombei’s voice. “No, indeed.”
“How about a sixty-year-old nun? Do you get a thrill out of raping holy women?”
Gombei sputtered. “With all due respect, only a man who’s sick in the head would do such things.”
“Like your friend?”
“You could save yourself a lot of trouble if you would just confess,” Fukida told Jinshichi.
“And save us the trouble of torturing you,” Marume said.
They both knew that Sano didn’t approve of torture because it often produced false confessions.
“Go ahead,” Jinshichi said, his eyes glittering with bravado. “Tell you right now, I say what you want, it’s not true.”
Today Sano would have been glad to make an exception for Jinshichi, but he had at least one other ploy to try. “Maybe you’re right,” he said, in such a quick about-face that Marume and Fukida looked at him in surprise. “Maybe you’re not the culprit.”
“Been telling you all along,” Jinshichi said, half relieved, half wary of a trick.
“Maybe it’s your friend,” Sano said. “What’s his name?”
“Gombei.” The man sneered. “He didn’t do it, either.”
“Somebody did,” Sano said. “Somebody’s going to be punished. Right now my choice is him or you. Which is it going to be?”
“Not him. Not me,” Jinshichi insisted. “Like I said, you got the wrong folks.”
“Your friend is under interrogation as we speak,” Sano said. “My chief retainer is asking him the same kind of questions that I’ve been asking you. What do you think he’s saying?”
Jinshichi shrugged. “That we’re both innocent.”
“Don’t be too sure about that,” Sano said. “He puts the blame on you, he goes free.”
“He wouldn’t,” Jinshichi said staunchly.
“Of course he would, if it means he lives and you die.”
“You’re trying to pit us against each other,” Jinshichi said. “Won’t work.”
“I’m trying to help you see reason,” Sano said. “Any moment, my chief retainer is going to walk in here and say that your friend turned on you. Then it will be too late for you to take advantage of the deal I’m offering.”
Suspicion lowered Jinshichi’s heavy brow. “What deal?”
“Be the first to turn. If your friend kidnapped and raped those women, you tell me everything you know about it, and I’ll let you go.”
Sano hoped this deal would induce Jinshichi to provide details about the crimes that would help him figure out which, if either, man had committed them. But Jinshichi squared his muscular shoulders and set his jaw.
“Forget it,” he said. “Gombei didn’t do it, and neither did I. That’s the truth, no matter what you do to us.”
“What about my friend?” Gombei asked Hirata.
“Maybe he likes little girls, nursing mothers, and old nuns,” Hirata suggested.
Gombei chortled. “Oh, now that’s ridiculous, if you’ll pardon my saying so.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“I’ve known Jinshichi forever. We’re from the same neighborhood. He’s not sick or crazy.”
“People keep secrets even from their closest friends,” Hirata said. “How do you know what goes on in Jinshichi’s mind—or what he does in private?”
“I know he couldn’t have kidnapped the girl or the nun. Because he was with me on the days they were taken.” Gombei’s grin broadened. The gaps where his teeth had rotted out were black holes.
Hirata had expected Gombei to trot out a double alibi. “Which days were those?” He hadn’t said. If Gombei knew, that would mark him as the culprit.
“Every day,” Gombei said. “We work together.”
“There must have been times when you were out of each other’s sight. I can ask your boss if he ever sent you to different jobs.”
“Ask him, if you want,” Gombei said with brazen nonchalance.
“Then again,” Hirata said, “why should I bother? I can just ask Jinshichi. He’s right down the hall.”
“Go ahead. He’ll tell you the same thing: We were together.”
Hirata spied a new twist in the case. “Maybe you were in on the kidnapping together, too. That would have made it easier to grab the women and get them into the oxcart.” But Sano’s cousin Chiyo seemed to think she’d been raped by one man alone. “Did you take turns? He raped the little girl, you raped the nun?”
Anger erased the good cheer from Gombei’s expression. “We didn’t do it. I’ll vouch for him. He’ll vouch for me.”
“You’re pretty loyal to Jinshichi,” Hirata observed.
“Yes, indeed,” Gombei said. “Because I owe him my life. We were in the mountains, hauling wood, and my cart ran off the road. I was caught hanging by one hand over a cliff. Jinshichi pulled me up. He saved me.”
“That explains why you would want to protect him. Why should he care about protecting you?” Hirata added, “He can say that you kidnapped and raped those women, and walk out of here a free man, while you go to the execution ground.”
“He won’t. Because he owes me, too. A while back, we went swimming in the river. He got swept away by a current. I saved him.” So there, Gombei’s expression said.
“Old obligations can be easily put aside when new circumstances arise,” Hirata said. “You and Jinshichi each have a chance to tell tales on the other and save your own life. Who’ll be the smart one?”
Gombei shook his head. “Jinshichi and I always stick together. We always will.”
Hirata saw that they had a bond of loyalty as strong as that between a samurai and his master. What threat might change Gombei’s story? “I give up, then. I’ll let Jirocho decide which one of you is guilty or if both of you are.”
Gombei’s wary expression showed that he knew of the gangster boss. “What’s Jirocho got to do with this?”
“The little girl who was kidnapped is his daughter.”
“Well, I’ll be,” Gombei said, astonished. “Anybody who would touch anything that belonged to him is a fool.”
Gombei’s eyes sparkled with fear of what a gangster out for blood would do. But he shrugged, grinned, and said, “Whatever you want. We all have to die sometime.”
Sano, Marume, and Fukida met Hirata outside the dungeon. Jailers escorted new prisoners into the building and led inmates out to go to the court of justice or the execution ground. No one looked happy—not the jailers, prisoners, or Sano’s party.
“What did you get out of your suspect?” Sano asked Hirata.
“Gombei claims he’s innocent,” Hirata replied. “He also says he and Jinshichi are each other’s alibi.”
“Let me guess,” Sano said. “He refused to turn on his friend.”
“Right you are.”
“So did my suspect.” Frustration vexed Sano.
“Those men look like ordinary no-goods, but they’re tougher than the rest,” Marume commented.
Fukida asked Hirata, “Do you think yours is guilty?”
“Yes,” Hirata said, although he seemed uncertain.
“Same here,” Sano said. “But there’s no evidence. All we have is one witness who saw Jinshichi lurking outside the convent, and one who saw Gombei at Shinobazu Pond.”
“Neither man was placed at the scene of the kidnappings at the times they happened,” Hirata reminded everyone.
“Or seen in the vicinity when the victims were dumped.” Sano had had great hopes for solving the case today, but now the investigation had stalled. “And it doesn’t look as if any confessions will be forthcoming.”
“If you want confessions, just say the word,” Hirata said.
Sano remembered that Hirata knew ways of inflicting pain with or without permanent physical damage. There wasn’t a man on earth who could hold out. But Sano said, “No. I’m still opposed to torture. I know those men are guilty, but I won’t act on my judgment, or yours, without proof to back it up.”
That was part of his code of honor, which seemed particularly difficult to uphold today, when he wanted to punish someone for what had happened to Chiyo and the other women.
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