by Soji Shimada
Kumi couldn’t come up with a response right away. There was a moment of chilling silence.
“What the hell do you mean by you can’t forgive me for Sasaki?”
Kumi’s composure was gone. She didn’t have the energy any more to feign politeness.
“Oh, I think you know.” Eiko’s voice turned dangerously soft. “How you employed that professional box of tricks of yours to seduce that innocent young man.”
“Just a minute! ‘Professional box of tricks’?”
“Isn’t sleeping with men your profession?”
Kumi was sensible enough not to lose it at this point. She was clearly fighting back the urge to yell something. Instead, she laughed defiantly.
“Now you mention it, I did notice you throwing yourself at Sasaki’s stretcher. Kind of embarrassing, really. Reminded me of a bar girl fawning all over her patron. Very impressive.”
It was Eiko’s turn to be lost for words.
“But that’s the irony, isn’t it? You forbid other women to go near your darling Sasaki, but you never even slept with him? What century are you from? You’ll never get anywhere with that kind of thinking. If you thought of him as your man, why didn’t you just put a leash on him?”
Both women were on the point of exploding in fury. Kiyoshi and I felt in physical danger. We were on the point of getting up and running for our lives, but Eiko’s pride stopped her from going too far.
“It’s impossible to keep my dignity around someone like you.”
Kumi laughed scornfully.
“You call yourself dignified? Try losing a bit of weight. That’d give you more dignity.”
Eiko took her time before responding.
“I’m going to ask you straight. Was it you who killed Sasaki?”
Kumi was dumbfounded.
“What the…?”
The two women glared at each other.
“Are you crazy? How could I have killed Sasaki? What motive could I have had?”
“I don’t know how, but I know you had a motive.”
“What?”
“To stop me getting him.”
Kumi laughed again, this time more shrilly. But her eyes didn’t join in. They stayed fully focused on Eiko’s face and showed no sign of amusement.
“Please stop making me laugh! Why would you imagine I’d need to kill Sasaki? I liked him, but he was madly in love with you? Is that it? Oh, that’s priceless! I didn’t care about him at all, and he didn’t care about you at all either. Why would I want to kill him? In fact, the one who might want to kill him is you! Isn’t that right? Because he was attracted to me.”
“Don’t talk rubbish.”
Finally, the situation had reached its most frightening point.
“I can’t believe a dirty whore like you would even dare to set foot in this house. Get out! Get out of my house now!”
“Believe me, there’s nothing I’d like better. If only I could get permission from the police to leave. I’ve had more than enough of this house with its serial murders and a woman constantly stomping around like a sumo wrestler. And that hideous piercing voice.”
For quite a time after that the two women exchanged a barrage of insults that I couldn’t possibly write down here. Kiyoshi and I kept perfectly still and tried to merge into the scenery.
Eventually, the door was slammed so hard the whole wall shook, and Eiko was left alone. For a while she stood there shell-shocked, but then finally summoned the presence of mind to scan the room. And, of course, her eye fell upon the two accidental spectators. The blood drained from her face and her lips began to tremble.
“Good afternoon,” said Kiyoshi boldly.
“Have you been there the whole time?”
She seemed to be feigning calm, even as she knew the answer to her question. Or perhaps she really did think that we had somehow crept in through the window while she’d been engaged in her battle.
“Could you not have let me know you were there?”
“Well, we… we were too afraid to say anything.”
This was not the sensible thing to say on the part of Kiyoshi, but we were lucky. Eiko barely seemed to lose her cool at all. It was almost as if she hadn’t understood Kiyoshi’s meaning.
“It’s quite unforgivable that you didn’t say a thing. So you just sat there and listened?”
Kiyoshi glanced at me as if to say, Don’t just sit there. Help me out.
“We didn’t mean to listen,” he said.
“But we were worried,” I said, ignoring Kiyoshi.
“Yes, about the outcome,” Kiyoshi quickly added.
“The outcome? What did you think might happen?” she snapped.
My shoulders began to tremble.
“Why were you lurking there listening to our conversation?”
Privately I objected to the word “conversation”.
But Eiko’s voice was getting shriller. I was frantically preparing a pretty good excuse that I hoped might help to improve the atmosphere in the room. I felt confident that I could do something. Had I been alone, I might have succeeded.
But it’s no good when your friend has no common sense whatsoever. Right then the man sitting next to me decided to say the most inappropriate thing that any human being could possibly have come up with, negating all of the effort that I’d made up to that point.
“So… which one of you do you think won?”
Eiko’s shoulders immediately stopped trembling, and she summoned up a deep voice from deep in her belly.
“You despicable man! You’ve no manners at all.”
“Yes, I’m very used to being called that,” said Kiyoshi with a smile. “And my manners are so lacking that until just now I was under the impression that a library was a place to read books.”
I elbowed him in the ribs and whispered urgently to him to shut up. But it was too late and things could not have got any worse. Eiko didn’t speak another word—she just glared at Kiyoshi, then headed towards the door. As she opened it, she turned to face us as if she were searching for the wickedest curse to put on us. But then, as if she had been unable to find the words, she left, closing the door behind her.
I let out a long groan. It was a while before I could speak.
“You’re outrageous, you know that? You have absolutely no common sense whatsoever.”
“I’ve heard it a thousand times.”
“And I’m sick of saying it! What a great New Year this is turning out to be.”
“It’s okay to be outrageous once in a while, don’t you think?”
“Once in a while?! So you’re saying that I just happen always to be with you on those ‘once in a while’ occasions? Are there any times you leave the house and don’t cause trouble? I don’t think I can think of a single one! Just put yourself in my shoes for once. Imagine how I feel. Every time I try my hardest to keep a situation from getting out of hand, you manage to wreck everything, just for fun, for your own amusement.”
“Understood. I’ll be more careful next time.”
“Next time? Ha! Next time! If it happens again, I know what I’m going to do.”
“What’s that?”
“It’ll be the end of our friendship.”
There was an uncomfortable silence. But then I decided we’d better focus on the case again.
“Anyway, forget about that for now. How about this case? Are you going to solve it?”
“About that…” he murmured.
“Pull it together!” I said. “And if you decide to do a runner in the night, I’m not going with you. I don’t want to freeze to death. But anyway, we’ve found out something this afternoon. We can more or less rule out those two women.”
The hammering downstairs had stopped by now.
“There’s one more thing that’s perfectly clear to me now,” said Kiyoshi.
“What?” I asked, hopefully.
“It’s going to be a while before our hostess lets us move out of that freezing cold storeroom of a bedroom.�
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I couldn’t help wishing he’d thought of that before opening his mouth.
SCENE 6
The Salon
That evening, despite my doubts, we were provided with dinner.
The guests had now been cooped up in the Ice Floe Mansion for a whole week, and they couldn’t hide any longer how exhausted they were. What’s more, among them (or in someone’s case, inside themself) was a homicidal maniac, and they were constantly living with the fear that the knife with the white string attached might end up in their own heart next.
Tonight, however, it was the police officers who were having the hardest time hiding their exhaustion. They looked at least ten times more haggard than even Kiyoshi had predicted, and anyone seeing the way their shoulders sagged couldn’t help but feel sorry for them. All the way through dinner, and even when it was over, not one of them spoke a word. If any one of them had opened his mouth to speak, doubtless he would have simply repeated the same phrases that they had said a hundred times already. I had to be constantly vigilant to make sure that Kiyoshi didn’t turn to them and ask them if they’d found so much as a rat’s nest in their search.
“What in God’s name is going on in this place?” said Okuma, making it one hundred and one times.
Nobody had a response. Ozaki and the others had put so much into the search that they could barely lift a hand to drink their tea. If Ozaki had opened his mouth right then, nothing good would have come out.
“We know nothing,” said Ushikoshi, his voice barely a whisper. “We have to accept it. Why was there a metre of string attached to those hunting knives? Why were there two stakes out in the snow the night of the first murder? As for the three locked rooms, especially the second two, we have no idea how it was done. And they only get more impossible as the murders go on. It’s just not feasible to commit a murder in such a perfectly impenetrable room! It’s impossible! So we stripped away the walls, the ceilings and the floors. And found nothing! Even the heating pipes were untouched.
“We know absolutely nothing. We’ve gained nothing. I’m left believing it was all done by some sort of evil spirit. My daily reports to HQ are torture for me to make. If there is anyone at all who thinks they can give me any sort of explanation that makes any sense at all of this freak case, then I will bow deeply and listen to whatever he has to say. If such a person exists.”
“I don’t think they do,” said Ozaki, massaging his own right shoulder.
And those were the only words he spoke all evening.
Kiyoshi and I were in conversation with Kozaburo. In the very short time that we had been guests at the Ice Floe Mansion, Kozaburo Hamamoto appeared to have aged about ten years. He wasn’t usually very talkative, but he did enjoy talking about music and art, and on these topics he seemed to have regained a little of his vitality. Kiyoshi must have taken note of my earlier complaints, or perhaps it was because of his own loss of confidence, but he had stopped baiting the detectives and was relatively subdued.
When it came to music it seemed that Kiyoshi and Kozaburo had surprisingly similar tastes. They’d been discussing Richard Wagner’s brash theatricality for close on an hour.
“Wagner was really ahead of his time. His music broke through the norms of the age, upset its harmony,” said Kozaburo. “A true revolutionary.”
“Right, right. At the time his music was considered truly avant-garde in England and other European countries. Even now he’s treated as something modern.”
“I agree. But he could only make it because he was under the patronage of Ludwig II.”
“I suppose you could see it that way. Wagner was demanding impressive sums of money from him. Without Ludwig II as a patron, after The Ring none of his greatest masterpieces would have been possible. He was deeply in debt, constantly being forced to flee different countries. If he hadn’t been rescued by Ludwig, he would probably have rotted away in some village in the middle of nowhere.”
“Well, that’s possible, I admit. But he still would have written his scores.”
“Just now you said something about harmony?…” Kiyoshi asked.
“The situation at that time in European cities just before the appearance of Ludwig II or Wagner, had reached a certain state of harmony, I believe. For example, the perfect architectural balance between the use of stone and glass and wood.”
“Aha. I see.”
“The layout and concept of the ideal cities of the day resembled a giant stage setting. In other words, a city was like a theatre, in which the common people were to go about their daily lives as if it were one great performance.”
“Huh.”
“In that environment, the technological development of glass as a new building material was the most important facet of this theatrical construction and one that added to its beauty. But you couldn’t make anything substantial with it. The leaning tower that I’ve built here couldn’t have been made in those days. And wouldn’t have been. Not only the architects and city planners, but also painters and musicians created their work with an implicit understanding of preserving harmony.
“And then, along came technological advancements that included the construction of strong steel frames and huge plates of glass, as well as the invention of trains. And that was when the giant that was Wagner made his appearance in Bavaria.”
“Interesting. You say he arrived to destroy the perfection of the Gothic period.”
“Right. And ever since, Europe has been racked with troubles. They’re still suffering today.”
“And what was the role of Ludwig II, the pure-hearted boy king, in all this? He copied King Louis of France and he took Wagner in. Was he just a frivolous airhead?”
“No, I think it was just the tendency of Bavarian people at the time. Society wanted to make Ludwig II appear a lunatic so they changed the definition of normal. It wasn’t only Ludwig II who liked to mimic France. Ludwig I had already created his own version of the Arc de Triomphe in Munich.”
“But what interests me most right now is you, Mr Hamamoto.”
“Me?”
“You don’t seem like Ludwig II. This mansion is no Herrenchiemsee Castle. A man of your intelligence doesn’t build a house on the farthest tip of the northernmost island of Japan for no reason whatsoever.”
“Aren’t you overestimating me? Or perhaps you are overestimating Japanese people in general. There are monstrosities like Herrenchiemsee Castle in Tokyo. How about the State Guest House—Akasaka Palace?”
“Are you saying this mansion is a kind of Akasaka Palace?”
“Yes, I suppose it is.”
“Well, it doesn’t look like it to me.”
“I guess that it’s the same way that you don’t look like a frivolous airhead to me.”
The two men lapsed into silence for a while. Eventually Kozaburo spoke.
“Mr Mitarai, you’re a mysterious man. I have absolutely no idea what you’re thinking.”
“Oh, really? Well, I suppose I am a little more difficult to comprehend than those police officers over there.”
“Do you think the police have comprehended anything?”
“Their minds haven’t changed since they arrived at this mansion. They’re like a Gothic façade. The house won’t collapse without them.”
“And how about you?”
“How about me in what way?”
“Have you seen the truth of this case? Do you know the name of the killer?”
“The killer’s identity is quite plain for all to see.”
“Oh! And who is it?”
“Didn’t I already say? It’s the doll.”
“I can’t believe that you mean that seriously.”
“Ah, you too? At any rate, this is a very elaborate crime. And it seems that the game is already underway. To bring it to anything but an extraordinary climax would be insulting to the artist who created it.”
ENTR’ACTE
Because of the threatening letter he’d received, from the night of the 1st of
January onwards, the decision was made that it was too dangerous for Kozaburo to sleep alone in his isolated room in the tower. Instead, he was to sleep in Room 12 with Sergeant Okuma and Constable Anan as his bodyguards. This was not a decision easily reached, but to write here in detail about all the fuss it caused would be too much trouble, so I’m leaving it at that.
The next day, the 2nd of January, there was no sign of any crime having been committed. The police officers spent the whole day unsuccessfully trying to put the rooms they’d pulled apart back to their original condition.
Kiyoshi and the detectives didn’t appear to be speaking to each other at all, but Chief Inspector Ushikoshi came to ask my opinion. Not being able to rely on Kiyoshi, I had given the case some thought and come up with four issues that had to be resolved.
The first was the strange twisted shape of Kazuya Ueda’s body with arms in the V-formation above his head.
Second, the knife in Eikichi Kikuoka’s back—the fact that it wasn’t in the left side where his heart was, but in the right. Was there any significance to that?
Third, the fact that Ueda and Kikuoka’s deaths were on consecutive nights. I found that extremely strange. The killer could have taken as much time as he or she needed, but it seemed as if he’d been in a rush. If he’d left an interval after murdering Ueda, he’d have been more likely to find a moment to catch the detectives off guard. Waiting for that moment would have been the more logical thing to do.
In fact, because a murder had just been committed, there had been four police officers staying the night at the mansion. If the murderer had waited two or three nights more, at least Constable Anan would have been gone. Why didn’t he wait? Why attack when the police were at their most vigilant? It was surely important to work out the reason the killer committed a crime at the most dangerous moment.
And then the final issue: number four. This house has a unique layout with two staircases—one in each of the east and west wings. In theory, if you wanted to get from Room 1 or 2 to Room 13 or 14, you’d have to go through the salon on the ground floor—but is that correct? Many people had escaped suspicion because of this theory. But were we missing something…?