Miss Sato watched the man leave; I, on the other hand, had not taken my eyes off of her, or let her get too close to me, for the briefest instant. “What do you mean, you’re a ninja?” In 1924, this was not a word known to the general public, but my baritsu teacher back in Oxford had told me of the secret Medieval cult, thankfully long faded into obscurity. Still, if this crazy female envisioned herself as a ninja assassin, maybe Holmes ought to keep his gun in his hand.
“We call ourselves ‘shinobi,’ ” she answered. “Or for women, sometimes, kunoichi. But like the arrangement of my names, I use what a Westerner might know.”
“Enough grammar. Why are you here?”
“I told you, I am going home.”
“But why else? Ninja are hired assassins. Who is your target?”
“Russell—” Holmes started, but Miss Sato held up her hand to him.
“ ‘Ninja’ means ‘spy,’ ” she said carefully. “We deal in information, not death. Yes, some of us have killed. Some of us steal, when that is necessary. And some are for hire, like ronin—you know the word ‘ronin’? Samurai without masters? But many of us are not assassins, and not for hire. Mr Holmes.”
I had thought the silence profound before she spoke his name. If she knew his name, then … The damnable thing was, her voice sounded so reasonable. And for certain, she knew how to fight.
I shook my head. “The ninja died off centuries ago. They’re folklore, like the Knights of the Round Table. Romantic stories of invisibility, special equipment, walking up walls—all that kind of nonsense.”
“Yes. And no. If we are invisible, it is because we are below notice. We use the tools we have at hand, and our most important skills are those of deception—to look like someone who belongs in a place. We only walk up walls if there is no easier way to get inside.” She smiled; I did not.
“Although since at times there will not be an easier way,” Holmes spoke up, “acrobatic training can come in handy.”
I could not help a quick glance sideways. “Holmes, surely you’re not taking this person’s claim seriously?”
“Our own Templars were officially disbanded in 1312, but do you imagine they actually packed their things and went meekly home? All the confusion and romantic twaddle has allowed them to hide in plain sight up to the present day. Why not the same thing in Japan?”
I thought about it for a moment, thought about the times Sherlock Holmes had openly admitted to being Sherlock Holmes precisely in order to be laughed off—then my mind snapped back to the central question here. “Whether or not there’s an organisation behind her changes nothing. If she’s here to kill someone, we need to lock her up until we get to Hong Kong and can hand her over to the authorities.”
“I am not here to kill anyone,” she said.
Holmes asked, “Then what are you after?”
She turned her gaze onto Holmes. “Without consulting my superiors, I may not give you any details of my task. But it involves the sale of an object that could be … compromising.”
“The Earl of Darley,” he said. His grey eyes looked like chips of ice. “You … know him? Before this?”
“We have had dealings.”
“Ah, so. I was told there were rumours about his past.”
“Who told you?”
Again, the apologetic smile, but no reply.
He came at it from a different tack. “You knew who we were. And you knew that Russell and I would be onboard this ship.”
“I … Yes, I was told, but only at the last minute.”
I added a question. “Is that why we were first delayed, then offered good cabins on a sailing two days after we’d planned to leave?”
“I do not know.”
I did, curse it. Not many were familiar with my gastric vulnerability—and hence my willingness to wait for the chance of a deck cabin at the ship’s centre. One man, however, knew me well. “Mycroft.”
I was watching her closely, but she did not react. Either she was very, very good, or she did not know the name.
However, if Mycroft Holmes had wanted to nudge his brother and me towards a case of international blackmail—a case with what promised to be important players—he could easily have arranged a lack of comfortable cabins until the day he wished us to depart. And one might think Mycroft could tell us directly, but being five thousand miles away, we might prove difficult to control. In any event, Mycroft never issued orders when he could achieve his results invisibly.
At last, I took my eyes off the self-proclaimed ninja and turned them on my husband, searching for deceit. “This is not something you and your brother arranged?”
“Russell, I have not been in touch with Mycroft since the end of the Khanpur case.”
I loved my brother-in-law, but I was growing a bit tired of his methods.
When at last I looked back at Miss Sato, she appeared puzzled, but ventured no questions.
“Well,” I told her, “just don’t call him ‘Holmes’ in the hearing of others. And I go by ‘Russell’—‘Miss,’ generally. So, what is this object you’re looking for?”
“I cannot tell you that.”
“Have you searched Darley’s rooms for it?”
“And his trunks in the hold. I did so before we reached Colombo.” Holmes stirred. “Is that why you’ve been acting the poltergeist?”
“The what?”
“Sneaking around the ship every night, removing things from one room and putting them in another?”
“Lord Darley looks like a man who would not notice if his rooms had been searched by a water buffalo. If that dullness is an act, then to establish a ship-wide pattern of disturbances might cause him either to dismiss the search as coincidence, or to retrieve the … object, to keep it close at hand. Two of those whose cabins I entered had been in brief conversation with Darley. I thought they might be associates. Also,” she added, “the skills you call ‘sneaking’ require constant practise. Three weeks without using them could make me dangerously clumsy.”
Her English, I noted, had become remarkably fluent. “Did you search our rooms?”
“That, I did not think wise.”
Small favours. “What about Miss Roland?”
“The girl who jumped from the ship the first night?”
“Jumped—how do you know that?” I demanded.
For the first time, her complacent demeanour failed. She looked down at her hands. “I saw her.”
“You saw … and you did not stop her?”
“I was walking the railings of the sun deck. The upper decks were dark, but there was sufficient light below that a figure crossing the open part of the promenade deck caught my eye. She took off her shoes, climbed the railings, and stepped off. No hesitation, and no one nearby. I don’t know why the watch didn’t see her, except that she was at the very back. And she went down immediately, with only the one splash—she must have weighted her pockets. Even if I had run to the bridge and they’d put down a boat, they’d never have found her.”
“You could have thrown a lifebuoy,” I exclaimed. “These modern ones with the magnesium flares—what if she changed her mind the moment she stepped off?”
Her dark eyes stayed down. “She did not come up. Not even briefly.”
“Was it you who searched her cabin?” Holmes asked.
She did not reply.
“How did you know which it was?” I asked her.
“She left the key in her shoes. I took it, and threw the shoes over the side. There was also … a note.”
“A suicide note?”
She nodded.
“You took it?”
She looked up at last. “I could not leave it for the purser to find. The letter named Lord Darley. Without it, Darley would hear of her disappearance, and would no doubt know that she was missing because of him, but even if he were to suspect suicide, no one else would have any reason to connect him to her. With the letter, his passage would be interrupted by controversy, and possibly an investigation. I c
ould not risk that.”
“Where is the letter?”
“I destroyed it.”
“What?” My outrage woke the attendant from his half-doze, but I waved him away. “You had no right to destroy the poor woman’s final words!”
Her chin was up, her voice even as she replied, “I could have hidden it, yes. Instead, I assumed responsibility for it.”
“What do you mean by that?” Holmes demanded.
She considered her reply, then came to it obliquely. “In the West, suicide is a shameful act, one of failure and weakness. A sin. To my people, taking one’s life can be the ultimate weapon against defeat. It is the most powerful blow one can make against one’s enemy, when pure honour asserts victory over the shame of compromise. For any Japanese person, but especially for a Samurai, shame is far worse than death. The stories we tell our children, the events that glorify names and that give their essence to our most moving plays, are those filled with the triumph of suicide. Of course,” she added with a wry smile, “it helps if one believes in reincarnation.”
“But to destroy—”
She cut me off. “This is my way of explaining that Western eyes might have seen Miss Roland’s letter as a plea for forgiveness. The letter was written to her sister. In it, she named her sin, and named her blackmailer. It went on for three pages, and was both highly detailed and deeply emotional. Were the case to go to court, Darley’s lawyers would not have found it difficult to create the image of a flighty and deeply troubled female. He would have walked away with nothing but some gossip to stain his garments.
“Instead, by destroying the words, I have assumed their burden.”
“What, you intend to avenge her death? A complete stranger? You said you didn’t intend to kill anyone,” I pointed out.
“Miss Russell, a living enemy may be made to suffer more than a dead one.”
“So you’ll just torture him.”
“Physically? No. But I promise you, I shall find a punishment that fits the crime.”
The cold edge to her words caught my attention. I did not shiver, not quite.
Holmes stepped in. “Miss Sato, Russell and I are inadvertent participants in this case. Nonetheless, I hold a special loathing for the blackmailer as a species, and an unresolved history with this one in particular. If and when you care to reveal the details of your own involvement—namely, your master and the object you seek—we might agree to be used as consultants. However, I will not work blind.”
“The moment I receive permission, I shall tell you all. And in the meantime …” She glanced over at the clock on the wall. “You ought to sleep. Our lesson begins in three and a half hours.”
I looked at Holmes; he looked at Miss Sato. She rose, waiting to see if we would object to her leaving.
Anyone else and I would say, Leave, no matter—where will you go, on a ship in the midst of the China Sea? But this woman could hide anywhere, then slip away in any port she chose.
Holmes nodded, and let her go.
“You’re sure?” I asked before she reached the door.
“If she is working against us, it is best to know before we reach Japan.”
“The real question being, with her aboard, will we reach Japan at all?”
“It does promise a certain piquancy to the remainder of our journey.” I wondered what he would say if I proposed that we took turns keeping watch while the other slept.
Somewhat to my surprise, and relief, only dreams disturbed my sleep, not a knife between the ribs.
Twenty-four and a half days, Bombay to Yokohama. Five hundred eighty-six hours pressed about by humanity. One hundred eighty hours spent sweating amongst the bed sheets; eighty-four hours in the dining room; nineteen and a half hours of language tutorials with Miss Sato; ten hours reading Shakespeare aloud with an extremely mixed group of amateurs; and seventeen hour-long afternoon salons on topics from tea to theatre. Between my morning dunk in the cold-water swimming baths and the last flicker of light from the open-deck cinema show, I kept irritability at bay with compelling reading material or, as time went on, physical activity: some forty hours spent pacing the decks to keep from leaping off them, twenty or so hours on the cycling and rowing machines in the gymnasium, and regular matches of deck tennis and quoits—played with my right hand, lest I win too often. I even spent a cumulative two and a quarter hours playing tennis against young Roderick Farquhar before his supply of balls finally came to an end.
More happy were the forty or so hours spent in conversation with Miss Sato, in various rooms and on various decks, over topics as widespread as Shinto family gods, the centrality of shame in Japanese psychology, and the English love of dogs and mistrust of baths. We enjoyed lengthy meanders through concepts basic to our two nations: heroism (Admiral Nelson, and Japan’s Forty-Seven Ronin); beauty (Which garden had more, Versailles or Katsura? Which tea pot, Georgian silver or 400-year-old clay?); social responsibility (bushido having much in common with the chivalric code); apologies (how a Westerner’s apology accepts wrongdoing, whereas in Japan it may merely acknowledge a rift—and we agreed that the Englishman’s habit of apologising when someone walks into him bridges this East-West divide). On a more personal level, we made mutual confession of our odd training, how Holmes would set challenges for me at unlikely moments, how her father’s motives were rarely made clear until long after the event.
Those forty hours made the remaining five hundred forty-six almost worthwhile. Were it not for a certain reluctance between us, some inexplicable but definite barrier to intimacy, I might almost have called her “Friend.”
Holmes, on the other hand, occupied many of his spare hours playing cards in the smoking room, under the premise that thwarting one criminal activity is better than none at all, and if he couldn’t lay hands on the blackmailer among us, at least he could foil the card shark.
Card games being a nocturnal activity—Thomas Darley’s kind of card games, that is; the earl wasn’t much given to long nights over the tables—I had grown accustomed to a late-evening ritual: while I prepared for bed, Holmes prepared for cards. We stood at our mirrors, I brushing my teeth and he making subtle changes in appearance and manner. When my skin had been cleansed of the day’s salt air and his hair combed to evoke a man wistful over lost youth, we wished each other a happy evening and walked in opposite directions, me for my bed and book, Holmes for his table of avaricious opponents.
As one might have expected, he spotted early on how young Darley was cheating, and how Monty Pike-Elton was assisting. His initial impulse surprised me: he wondered if he shouldn’t have a quiet word with the purser about the young man’s chicanery.
He decided against this approach for several reasons. First and foremost was that doing so would open a writhing can of worms in the form of humiliation and public shame, with the entire ship quite aware that “Robert Russell” was at its root. Since an open declaration of hostilities would complicate any future advance Holmes might want to make on Lord Darley, blackmailing earl, clearly this would never do. A lesser consideration was the knowledge of how unpleasant the remainder of the voyage would be—not only for Holmes, but for me, baking under the unremitting glares of the Darley family and friends.
In the end, his deciding consideration was neither of these. Rather, it was the question of how effective exposure would be as a tool of actual reform, or whether the long-term results would be nil. Surely on the next voyage, young Darley would simply resume his fleecing of the innocent?
So instead, Holmes decided to stamp down any future impulse to card-sharkery on the part of Thomas Darley: to make the young man hesitate at the very impulse, not fully trusting his ability to pull it off. And that would take a more convoluted approach than just a murmur in the purser’s ear.
It also took a good two weeks of nightly labours in the smoke-filled room over the cards, establishing Robert Russell as a wealthy man with more luck than skill, whose failure to succumb to the Darley tricks was a matter of happenstan
ce, not cause for wariness.
Naturally, this drove the viscount to ever-greater efforts, to the extent that if he really had been playing Bobby Russell, he’d have been caught. But Holmes continued in blithe bonhomie, drinking and jesting and not quite losing.
It came to a head on a Saturday night as we approached Hong Kong. The British colony would see a longer stop than usual, with most of the ship disembarking for everything from visiting a tailor (one could order a suit and have it delivered in Tokyo) to taking a picnic up Victoria Peak to spending the day at the Happy Valley racetrack. Lord Darley (I knew from an overheard conversation) had arranged for an afternoon’s riding with the Hong Kong Jockey Club, for himself and his wife.
The holiday atmosphere that prevailed whenever we were due into port affected the card players that night. The bottle of old brandy Holmes bought for the table loosened things up a bit more—and although it cost him hard to watch the lovely stuff being swigged down the throats of young men like gin from a bathtub, he had his revenge, because this night, old man Russell won, and won, and won some more. The game finally came to an end at 2:40 in the morning when the steward politely declined to subsidise the young man’s further efforts.
Thomas Darley’s friends had run out of ready cash some time before. Now, they kept the newly impoverished viscount from pummeling the steward, pushing Tommy back into his chair and thrusting into his hands a glass with the dregs of the brandy. Holmes just leant back, playing with the heavy gold watch that five minutes earlier had been strapped around young Darley’s left wrist.
“I thought he was going to pass out,” Holmes told me the next morning. “He was not too drunk to realise just how much he’d lost, and it came crashing down on him that he’d have to go crawling to his father if he wanted the steward’s debt paid.
“I gave each of the others a few bills to compensate them for their own losses, then sent them away and had the steward bring us coffee.
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