The Fire Kimono (4 page)

“Fascinating. I’ll be glad to try.” Dr. Ito called through the open door of the morgue, “Mura-san!”

His assistant came out. Mura’s gray hair had turned silver, and deep lines etched his square, clever face. He was an eta-one of Japan’s outcast class that had a hereditary link with death-related occupations such as butchering and leather tanning. Other citizens shunned them as spiritually contaminated. They did dirty work like collecting garbage and nightsoil. They also served in Edo Jail as wardens, corpse handlers, torturers, and executioners. Dr. Ito had befriended Mura across class lines, and they’d worked together for more than twenty years.

On Dr. Ito’s orders, Mura lugged the barrel into the morgue, which was lit by lanterns and furnished with cabinets, waist-high tables, and stone troughs for washing the dead. Mura pried up the lid. Everyone peered inside at the jumble of dirty brown bones. The only one Sano could identify was the skull.

“Can you tell anything from that?” Marume said doubtfully.

“Perhaps,” Dr. Ito said. “First we must wash the bones.”

Mura fetched buckets of water and filled a trough. He gently removed the bones from the barrel, immersed them, and scrubbed them with a brush. He did all the work associated with Dr. Ito’s examinations that required handling the dead. The dirt came off the bones, but the brown stain from the earth persisted. When Mura was finished, the skeleton lay on the table like pieces of a puzzle.

“Now we put him together,” Dr. Ito said.

He hung a scroll on the wall, an ink drawing of a human skeleton, the bones labeled. Referring to the chart, Dr. Ito picked up the bones with tongs and assembled Tadatoshi’s skeleton. Some small bones from the hands and feet were missing; perhaps they’d been lost at the graveside. But when Dr. Ito had finished, the skeleton appeared almost whole. A moment passed in silence as everyone contemplated the structure that had once supported a human body.

“From the size I deduce that this was a child,” Dr. Ito said.

“Tadatoshi was fourteen when he disappeared,” Sano said.

“He must have died not long afterward. That is to say, he didn’t live to grow up before expiring at the shrine.” Dr. Ito’s gaze moved over the skeleton. “Cause of death can be difficult to determine when the flesh and organs are gone. Let us take a closer look.”

Dr. Ito produced a large, round magnifying lens mounted on a wooden handle. He walked around the table, peering at the bones, pausing to study features through the lens. His eyebrows rose, and he pointed at a thighbone. “Observe this marking.”

Sano, Marume, and Fukida crowded around the table. The marking was large enough for Sano to see without the lens. It appeared to be a crack in which black dirt remained stuck.

“Here’s another,” Dr. Ito said, “and another.” He indicated similar markings on the ribs, the arm bones.

“They look like the cracks in oracle bones,” Fukida said.

The serious, scholarly detective was referring to the animal bones used in magic divination rituals. Fortune-tellers heated pokers in fire and applied them to the bones, causing cracks to form. By interpreting the shapes and patterns of these cracks in the “oracle bones,” they read the future.

“Could they be breaks from a fall or other accident?” Marume asked.

“Unfortunately not,” Dr. Ito said. “They are cuts. From a sword blade.”

Sano hadn’t expected the death to have been an accident. If it had, then why bury Tadatoshi in an unmarked grave and let everyone think he’d perished in the Great Fire? The breath gusted from Sano as the idea of murder entered the picture.

“Are you sure?” he asked, wanting to be absolutely certain before he opened a box of troubles.

“Yes. I’ve seen cuts like these many times.”

So had Sano seen many sword wounds, but in flesh, not on bared bones after the body had decomposed. Dr. Ito turned over hand and arm bones with his tongs, displaying more cuts. “He acquired these when he tried to protect himself.”

Sano envisioned a boy flinging up his arms as a sword slashed at him, the blade opening bloody gashes. His screams echoed across the years. “Then he was hacked to death.”

Dr. Ito nodded. “This is definitely a case of murder. I’m curious about the swords buried with Tadatoshi. Why would the killer leave them as a clue to his identity instead of letting him remain anonymous and forestalling an inquiry into his death?”

“That’s a good question.” As Sano gazed down at the skeleton, the sword cuts seemed to glow red and give off smoke like cracks burned into oracle bones. He had a disturbing sense that the message they portended for him was pure bad luck.

“My cousin Tadatoshi was murdered?” the shogun said in dismay when Sano delivered the news to him that evening. “How did you find out?”

He lay facedown in bed, covered by a quilt below the waist, while a physician inserted acupuncture needles into his bony, naked back. He suffered from muscle aches, joint pains, heart palpitations, and other ailments real or imagined, and he tried every treatment known to man. The chamber was hot from the many charcoal braziers he needed to keep warm, and smelled of medicines. Sano was thankful that he didn’t have to watch the herbal enema.

“I made some inquiries,” Sano said, deliberately vague on details. He was glad Lord Matsudaira wasn’t present to ask questions. “I’ve also assured that Tadatoshi’s remains have safely reached the mausoleum.”

Mura had repacked the skeleton in the barrel, and the porters had carried it to Kannei Temple. There, Hirata had sneaked the skeleton into the trunk. Tomorrow the priests would give Tadatoshi a proper cremation and burial.

“But he cannot rest in peace,” the shogun said, wincing as the needles stung him, “not until justice is done. Sano-san, find out who killed him.”

“Of course, Your Excellency.” Sano’s code of honor demanded justice for the murdered relative of the master he was duty-bound to serve even while he battled Lord Matsudaira for control of the regime. “Tadatoshi’s killer must be punished-if he’s still alive.”

“If so, I shall help you catch him,” the shogun said with uncharacteristic, decisive vigor. Lately he had spells during which he tried to take part in court business. Sano thought he’d become aware that he’d left too many important affairs to his officials and begun to regret how little control he had over the government. “Is there something I can do to, ahh, further your investigation?”

“Perhaps there is,” Sano said. “I need to understand Tadatoshi. Can you tell me what kind of person he was?”

The shogun puffed up with pride because Sano was truly consulting him, not just pretending. That didn’t happen often. He frowned in an effort to remember. “Well, ahh, it was a long time ago when I knew him. His father used to bring him to play with me. Many children were brought.”

Sano figured their parents had wanted to ingratiate them with their future ruler.

“Tadatoshi was rather, ahh, shy and quiet.” The shogun flinched as the physician twiddled the needles between his fingers, stimulating the flow of energy through nerves. “He liked to wander off by himself. Once he did it during a visit to me. The servants turned the castle upside down, searching for him. They found him in the forest preserve. But I’m afraid he’s, ahh, mostly a blur. I can’t recall what he looked like.”

At least Sano had the beginning of a portrait of the murder victim. Maybe Tadatoshi had wandered off one time too many, and met his killer. “Do you remember the day he disappeared?”

“I could never forget it,” the shogun said with passion. “It was the day the Great Fire started. There had been no rain for almost six months. A strong northern wind was blowing.”

He and Sano listened to the wind keening outside, rustling the trees. This winter and spring had also been abnormally dry and windy, and fires had broken out around town.

“Late in the afternoon, we heard that a fire was burning through the city,” the shogun continued. “Everyone was afraid the fire would reach the castle. My mother wanted to run for the hills, but we were told that the fire brigades would surely put out the fire before it could reach us.”

Edo’s fire brigades had consisted in those days of four small regiments levied from the daimyo. They’d proved grossly inadequate to combat the Great Fire. Now four squadrons of three hundred men each were managed by Tokugawa bannermen and assisted by the police. The townsfolk had organized their own brigades. Edo had learned its costly lesson.

“A servant from Tadatoshi’s house came and asked whether anyone at mine had seen my cousin,” the shogun said. “He’d wandered off. But we hadn’t seen him. The next day, a second fire started and came toward the castle. There was so much confusion that we forgot about Tadatoshi. It was days later when we heard he’d never been found.”

Days later, when the city lay in ruins, the Tokugawa regime had been too busy trying to feed and shelter thousands of homeless people to search for one lost child from a minor branch. Law and order had disintegrated. It had been a good time for somebody to kill Tadatoshi, bury him, and get away with it because he would be presumed a victim of the fire.

“Who might have wanted him dead?” Sano asked.

“I’m afraid I haven’t the slightest idea.”

“Is there anyone else around who knew Tadatoshi?” Sano asked. “Perhaps his immediate family?”

The shogun’s face took on the queasy look that meant he feared being thought stupid. “I don’t know. I have so many relatives, it’s hard to, ahh, keep track of them all. And I see so few people these days.”

Lord Matsudaira controlled access to the shogun in order to cut him off from people who might tell him what Lord Matsudaira was up to and bully him into doing something about it.

“But I’ll help you find out about Tadatoshi’s family,” the shogun said, eager to make up for his ignorance. He called, “Yoritomo-san! Come here!”

When he got no response, the shogun sat up, bristling with needles like a porcupine, and clapped his hands. A manservant appeared in the doorway. The shogun said, “Where is Yoritomo?”

“He left the castle a while ago.”

Annoyed, the shogun said, “That boy is never here when I need him. Ahh, well, never mind. Fetch Dazai.”

The servant hurried off, then soon returned with the shogun’s elderly, longtime valet. The shogun said to him, “Chamberlain Sano wants to know if my cousin Tadatoshi has any family still alive and in Edo.”

Dazai was a repository of knowledge about his master’s clan. “I’m sorry to say that Tadatoshi’s father was killed in the Great Fire. Most of the people in that unfortunate household were.” The disaster had taken its greatest toll among the commoners but hadn’t spared the privileged classes. “But Tadatoshi’s mother and older sister survived.”

He gave directions to their home, and the shogun dismissed him. Sano said, “Maybe they can shed some light on Tadatoshi’s character and his disappearance. I’ll speak to them tomorrow.”

For now Sano had urgent affairs of state to attend to, which he’d neglected for the sake of this investigation. He would probably be up all night working. And he wanted to see how Reiko was faring after this morning’s attack.

As he left the shogun’s bedchamber, he heard the shogun call to his servants, “Wherever Yoritomo is, find him. I desire his company tonight.”

A small, obscure Buddhist temple stood outside Shinagawa, a village that lay a few hours’ journey from Edo along the highway leading west. At past midnight, the temple was deserted, and silent except for the wind that rattled the bamboo canes in the gardens and rang the bells attached to the roof tiers of the pagoda. The worship hall, abbot’s residence, and priests’ dormitories were dark, but a light burned in the window of a guest cottage. Along the moonlit gravel path to the cottage, a man dressed in a dark, hooded cloak hurried through the shadows cast by pine trees. He carried a walking stick and wore a heavy pack on his back. The cottage door opened, lantern light spilled onto the path, and a voice called softly from inside, “Who goes there?”

The man said, “It is I.”

Yoritomo, the shogun’s lover, threw back his hood and stepped into the light. Framed by the door stood Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu, once the shogun’s chamberlain and second-in-command, now a fugitive in hiding. His head was shaved bald; he wore the saffron robe and brocade stole of a priest. His handsome face shone with pleasure at seeing his son. He quickly let Yoritomo into the cottage and shut the door tight.

“Did anyone follow you here?” Yanagisawa asked.

“No, Father, I was careful,” Yoritomo said. “I disguised myself as a religious pilgrim.” He dropped his pack and stick. “I used a false name at the highway checkpoints. Nobody gave me a second look.”

“Excellent.” Yanagisawa didn’t want the powers that were to notice Yoritomo’s frequent visits to the temple; he didn’t want them to know he was here. Better for them to think he was still out of the picture.

After defeating his army and ousting him from the regime almost six years ago, Lord Matsudaira had banished Yanagisawa to Hachijo Island. Yanagisawa had immediately begun plotting his return to the political career he’d built on his intimate relationship with the shogun.

As a young man of great beauty and allure, Yanagisawa had seduced the shogun and become his closest companion and principal adviser. Yanagisawa had thus gained huge authority over the government. For years he’d gotten away with corruption and murder while the shogun remained oblivious. Many people had hated him, but no one had been able to take him down… except Lord Matsudaira.