Autumn Bridge (61 page)

A maid entered and said, “Mr. Stark will see you now, Mr. Tsuda.”

Makoto Stark was standing in the garden next to the arrangement of rocks and stones. Tsuda had expected to be received in a more formal manner, this being their first meeting. It was often said of Americans that they favored informality to a fault. This was apparently true. Keeping his disapproval from his face, Tsuda bowed.

“Mr. Stark, it is a pleasure to meet you at last.”

“Thank you, Mr. Tsuda.”

Makoto extended his hand. After the briefest of hesitations, Tsuda took it and shook it vigorously.

“Your father, the senior Mr. Stark, has spoken of you often. In that distant way, I almost feel that I know you.”

“Then the advantage is definitely yours. The more I learn of myself, the less I know.”

He said it as if it bothered him, not as the usual convention identifying self-discovery with the void. That caused Tsuda to refrain from replying with the conventional words about the liberating nature of Mushindo meditative practices. He didn’t think Makoto was talking about meditation.

“It’s so, yes?” Tsuda said, which was an even more conventional remark, applicable to virtually any situation, and meaning variously, Yes, No, Maybe, I agree, I disagree, I don’t know what you’re talking about, You have my sympathy, Please continue, Please stop… Tone was important in setting the meaning; so, since he was unsure of what Makoto meant in the first place, Tsuda made his as vague as he could in order to obscure his own meaning, which in fact he did not have at all. Instinctively, he feared Makoto would move the conversation onto dangerous ground. He hoped the young man would not be too American about it if he did — that is, too specific and too blunt. That hope was immediately shattered.

“Mr. Tsuda, how well do you know my parents?”

“Mr. Stark and I have been in business together — primarily import and export, and banking — for close to fifteen years. We meet once a year, usually in Honolulu in recent years. A convenient midway point for us. I have never had the honor of meeting Mrs. Stark.”

“How about before she became Mrs. Stark?”

Tsuda was beginning to regret meeting Makoto at all. He said, “I was not then familiar with Mr. Stark or Lord Genji on a social basis. I had no occasion to meet the future Mrs. Stark.”

“I see.” Makoto noticed Tsuda’s discomfort and mistook it for a physical one. “Oh, excuse me, Mr. Tsuda, let’s go in. I forget that not everyone enjoys standing in gardens as much as I do.”

The interior of the palace was almost entirely Western in design and furnishing. Makoto had not yet seen it in its entirety — he had been a guest here for only two days, and the palace was vast — but so far as he knew, there was only one small wing of traditional Japanese design. It said something about Genji that he spent most of his time in that part of the palace.

Tsuda accepted Scotch instead of sake, though it was rather early in the day for it. He had developed a preference for Western liquors.

Quite abruptly, Makoto said, “Did you know Heiko?”

“Heiko? Do you mean the famous geisha? I knew
of
her. Everyone did in those days.”

“You were never her patron?”

“I?” Tsuda laughed. The Scotch was cheering him up quite rapidly. “Even if I could have afforded it — which I could not even if I sold everything I owned and stole everything belonging to everyone I knew — someone of her exalted stature would never have deigned to entertain someone like me. No, only lords enjoyed that privilege.”

“Including Lord Genji?”

“Yes. They were lovers. That’s no secret. Their romance was like a storybook adventure. I don’t doubt that one day there will be a Kabuki play about it.”

“Tsuda, what are you doing here?”

Lord Saemon paused at the doorway. The maid leading the way went to her knees to wait for him. Saemon was dressed, as was his habit these days, in an elegantly tailored English suit. His hair was closely trimmed, not unlike the style lately favored by the Emperor. He had no beard, but compensated for it with a luxuriant Bismarckian mustache.

“Lord Saemon,” Tsuda said, getting to his feet and bowing. “I am here as a guest of Mr. Stark.”

“Mr. Stark?”

“Mr. Makoto Stark,” Tsuda said, “the senior Mr. Stark’s son. He is visiting with Lord Genji.”

“Ah.” Saemon stepped into the room. “At last we meet. I have been looking forward to making your acquaintance for many years, Mr. Stark.”

“Why?” Makoto said.

Saemon blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

Tsuda had never seen Saemon taken by surprise in all the years he had known him. This was a first. Not even such a wily son of a wily spy chief was prepared to deal with Americans. Tsuda suppressed his smile as best he could.

“Why have you been so interested in me? I am no one. Many years ago, I was even less.”

“Well, naturally, I would be interested, Mr. Stark, since you are the child of — the son of — the only son of — a very important friend of Japan.”

“A friend of Japan,” Makoto said. “I have never heard him called that before, and I have heard him called many things. You know him well, then?”

“Better than most who can claim an acquaintance, but not as well as his close friends.”

The maid who had led Saemon into the palace now knelt at the doorway.

She said, “Do you wish to wait here, Lord Saemon?”

“Yes, if Mr. Stark and Mr. Tsuda have no objection.”

“Quite the opposite,” Tsuda said. He drew a chair for Saemon and bowed. “In fact, you may be able to help Mr. Stark where I cannot. He was asking about Heiko. You and your father both knew her, I believe?”

“Heiko,” Saemon said, and smiled. “My father knew her well, I only in passing.”

Tsuda was glad he had introduced a subject that pleased Lord Saemon. He was a very powerful man, likely to be a minister in a future cabinet, perhaps even Minister of Finance. For a banker like Tsuda, the Minister of Finance was the closest thing to the earthly spokesman of the gods.

“What is your interest in Heiko, Mr. Stark?” Saemon declined Tsuda’s offer of Scotch and accepted a cup of tea from the maid. “During her heyday as a geisha, you would have been—” He halted abruptly as if something had occurred to him. To cover the pause, he sipped his tea before continuing. “You would have been very young.”

“More accurately, I would have been nonexistent. I was born in 1862. I understand her career ended a year prior, along with her residency in Japan.”

“Yes, I recall,” Saemon said. “She went to California, accompanied by your father. The circumstances surrounding her departure were rather mysterious.”

“Those circumstances being?”

“I don’t know that I should speak of them. I would be in the position of repeating rumors. Nothing was ever definitively established.”

“I’m willing to settle for rumors.”

“Very well. With your indulgence, then.” Saemon bowed. “Heiko was thought to be an agent of the Shogun’s secret police. That would explain her frequent contact with my father, since he was at the time the chief of that organization. It also goes a long way toward explaining her departure from Japan, since she would be less vulnerable to retaliation by those she might have injured in that capacity. However, it doesn’t explain why she should have received your father’s protection. The senior Mr. Stark was a close friend of Lord Genji, then as now, and Lord Genji and my father were mortal enemies.”

“Were they? I understood you and Lord Genji to be friends.”

“We Japanese have endless webs of vengeance stretching across the centuries. If we do not wipe them away, we will never catch up with the West. Lord Genji and I have left the past behind.”

“How enlightened of you both,” Makoto said.

To Tsuda, he did not sound sincere. But that might only have been the effect of the slight oddities in his Japanese speech. Tsuda refilled his glass and continued to listen. So far, he had not learned anything. But it seemed that important revelations might be made at any moment — revelations that could lead to profit.

“Please continue,” Makoto said.

“Then there was the massacre shortly before Heiko left. An outcast village without any strategic value was burned to the ground and all its inhabitants slaughtered. They posed no threat to anyone, nor were they of any value, dead or alive. Very strange.”

“Outcasts?”

“An evil of the Tokugawa era, now outlawed. There are no outcasts anymore. All Japanese have equal rights under the law, just as in any civilized country of the West.”

This was utterly untrue, as Tsuda and every Japanese knew. The laws had been enacted, not with any intention of enforcement, but only to clothe a naked body whose attributes the Western powers found offensive. If they did not see, they were satisfied. It was not, to Tsuda’s mind, wrong in any way. The purpose of politics was not the attainment of an impossible perfection, a perfection about which no two nations could ever agree in any case, but the smooth functioning of different interests through the wise balancing and meshing of hypocrisies. In this art, the two lords, Saemon and Genji, were masters, each in his own way. How fortunate he was to be in their service.

Makoto said, “Was Heiko an outcast?”

Saemon and Tsuda simultaneously said “What?”

“Excuse me, sirs,” Tsuda said, bowing, red in the face. “I didn’t mean to speak. I was only, that is to say—”

That is to say what? What could be said of such an outrageous, scandalous, insulting, and incredibly dangerous remark? Dangerous not only for the one who had uttered it, but also for those who had heard it. Especially for him! Saemon was a Great Lord — yes, there were officially no more Great Lords, but the prestige, power, connections, loyalties, and reach remained to many of them — he was a leader among veterans of the Restoration, he had powerful friends with similar characteristics, and he knew secrets he could use to pressure those who would otherwise do nothing to help him. Tsuda, in pathetic contrast, was no more than a counter and keeper of monies. Why had he come to see Makoto Stark? What a fool. Perhaps soon he would be a dead fool!

“Why are you surprised?” Makoto said. “The connection seems rather obvious.”

“Not to us,” Saemon said. He said nothing more, and continued to look at Makoto with a calm that seemed out of place in the circumstances.

“All right,” Makoto said, “he’s gone. Say what you have to say.”

“What makes you think I have anything to say?” Saemon said. Tsuda had scurried away like a rat from a building about to ignite in flames. How could anyone who let his fear show so plainly think he could be the equal of men born samurai?

“Please, Lord Saemon. I don’t mind being looked down on for being an American in a Japanese body. But I utterly resent being treated as if I am of diminished mental capacity. I assure you, I am not.”

“No, Mr. Stark, you most certainly are not.”

This was an opportunity of rare dimensions for Saemon. It was also a lethal trap that would take his head instead of his enemies’ if he made the slightest error.

He said, “There is great danger here, Mr. Stark, for all concerned. The danger goes beyond mere truth and falsity. The suggestion that a nobleman of Lord Genji’s rank would ever have touched an outcast is unacceptable. I must urge you never to repeat it.”

“I don’t understand. Ranks have been abolished, and you yourself told me there are no outcasts anymore. Who would care?”

“Everyone,” Saemon said. “Lineage is of paramount importance here. If the lordly blood of the Okumichi clan had been polluted, it would be a stain from which no Okumichi could ever be cleansed. Lives would be ruined. Blood would run.”

“Polluted, you say.”

“That is how it would be viewed.”

“Is that how you view it?”

“Of course not,” Saemon said. “Destiny is in the hands of the individual, not in the dead grip of ancestors.” He chose his words carefully. Whether lies were believed or not depended greatly upon their presentation. “We were born to create ourselves.”

“Were we?” Makoto poured an inch of Scotch into a glass and held it up to the light. He put it down without drinking it. “So what do you advise, Lord Saemon?”

“Talk to your father.” Saemon paused. The future turned on his words, and Makoto’s reaction to them. “I have always found Matthew Stark to be honest to a fault.”

Makoto said, “Matthew Stark is not my father.”

Saemon felt such a surge of joy, his heart began to race. Every effort he had made to discover Genji’s secret had been frustrated for fifteen years. He had suspected at the time that Makoto was Genji’s child, not Stark’s. But when Genji made no move to bring Makoto to Japan, Saemon had given up that line of thought. There was no reason he could think of that would permit Genji to leave his son in America. Heiko an outcast! The answer, as well as the tool to exploit it, had walked right into his hands. Exhibiting no sign of his excitement, he said, “I don’t understand, Mr. Stark. How can that be?”