The Flower Master (Rei Shimura #3) (19 page)

"Please, will you take these flowers?" I blurted in an attempt to get Miss Okada to look at me, and not the sloppy assortment of goods coming out of my backpack. "I went to the administrative office to present them to Mrs. Koda, but she was not there."

Miss Okada nodded absently, because she was staring at the doorman. I followed her line of vision to the doorman's hands, which were opening the box containing the ikebana container. Once the suiban was revealed in its pink glory, he started to cover it again.

"Just a minute," Miss Okada told the doorman. "May I see that piece?"

"Certainly," I said, although I wasn't sure whether she was asking permission of the doorman or me.

She turned the piece over immediately, and looked at the Kayama seal on the underside. "Why, this is Kayama ware!"

"That's right. I wanted to show it to somebody here. I was thinking of Natsumi-san."

"She is not here today. Won't you sit down for a minute, Miss Shimura? I will telephone Mrs. Koda to come downstairs and assist you."

Settling down on a steel bench, I stared at the Kayama School's massive sandstone sculpture, sensing that I was between a bunch of rocks and a very hard place. I should have stuck to one excuse for being in the school instead of making three. Now it was up to Mrs. Koda to figure out the truth. Perhaps she would go straight to her desk, count the tablets in her medicine vial, and realize I'd stolen one. If not, she'd see the smudged tissue I'd foolishly left in the recycling container, or notice that the photocopier was warm. Or was I being paranoid?

Miss Okada was still on the phone, keeping her eyes on me. The receptionist bowed slightly, signifying the end of one telephone call, and then made another call to somebody. She kept her eyes on me the whole time. I looked away, trying to seem fascinated by the sandstone sculpture.

After five long minutes Mrs. Koda arrived via the elevator. She was wearing a skirt and sweater topped by a traditional quilted jacket, and with her slightly bent posture, she looked like a cozy grandmother out of Japanese folklore. She smiled comfortingly at me and bowed but did not come close. She was intent on examining the suiban, which Miss Okada had moved to her receptionist's desk, the same place where Norie had left the pruners to be wrapped.

Her eyes brightened, and she half smiled when she turned over the suiban and looked at the seal. Mrs. Koda said something to Miss Okada that I couldn't hear before she came to me.

"Please." I jumped up and offered her my place on the bench.

"Sit, please. There is room for us both," she said. "First of all, thank you for your kind letter. I felt so bad when you became ill at the exhibition. I was such a terrible person to suggest you drink the tea! I never would have dreamed it was tainted by poison."

"The poison was in the sugar, not the tea, so it actually was my sweet tooth that was at fault." I usually disliked the back-and-forth exaggerated apologies that were key to Japanese etiquette, but today I wanted to do it for a while.

"No, my selfish demand led to your violent illness. There is no doubt about that." Mrs. Koda looked at the flowers I'd laid on the table. 'Those are much lovelier than the azaleas I sent you. It is difficult to get quality flowers outside our regular school supplier."

So she hadn't bought the azaleas at My Magic Forest? Maybe she was secretly environmentally conscious or she was living on a tiny salary. It was likely that the Kayamas paid their employees poorly, keeping their fabulous wealth to themselves.

"Oh, the azaleas were outstanding." I tried to manufacture a compliment soulful enough for someone who believed that flowers were conscious beings. "I made an arrangement in a blue-and-white hibachi, and the freshness and beauty of your flowers set against the old pottery made up for my poor skill as an arranger."

"Do not doubt your ability. You see into the hearts of flowers, remember?" she chided. "Although I agree that the container one chooses adds a grace note to any arrangement. The suiban you were carrying today, for instance, was designed in the 1930s, breaking with the ornate nineteenth-century tradition of Japanese ceramics."

"Oh. Is it valuable?" I'd thought the price Mr. Ishida had charged me was reasonable.

"I think so. Only one thousand of these Kayama ware containers were fired at a kiln in Kyushu that did work for our school. Then came the war, and our school kiln was turned over to make military goods. After the war, there was no money for making or buying ikebana containers until the late 1950s, when we began using different techniques in order to illustrate the school philosophy, Truth in Nature."

I nodded, wondering where she was leading me.

"It is impressive that you managed to find one of the 1930s containers."

"It was just blind luck, and it wasn't expensive at all," I assured her, before realizing that my careless words made it sound as it I didn't value the school artifact.

"Did you say that you bought the suiban?" She sounded surprised.

Just then the door to the stairs banged open. Takeo Kayama emerged in his old Greenpeace T-shirt and Levis. He looked as if he was planning to do manual labor of some sort. The thought of Che's garden work opportunity flashed in my mind, but of course Takeo didn't need to work for money.

Takeo spoke to Mrs. Koda without even looking at me. "She had it in her backpack?"

"I believe so. We were just talking about how she bought it," Mrs. Koda said.

"I'll take care of it now." He shifted his gaze to me as if that were painful. "Come up to my office. Well take the elevator this time."

So he'd seen the broken flower heads I'd dropped on the stairs. Connecting me with them was pretty easy, given that the opened bouquet was lying on the table by the door.

"Takeo-sensei, will you excuse me? I'm feeling rather tired," Mrs. Koda murmured.

"Of course. Do you want me to take you upstairs?" His voice softened.

"No, I will just have a cup of tea and then return to my work. Don't worry about me." I picked up my backpack and smiled artificial thanks at the doorman for setting off the whole annoying chain of events. Then I followed Takeo, who was carrying my suiban into the elevator. We stepped in, and I kept my eyes on the floors lighting up. Three, four, five . . . soon we were at nine, the floor that Lila had told me had a private entrance to the Kayamas' personal penthouse.

"Get out," he said when I didn't move.

"I was waiting for you. In this country, it's customary for men to step in and out of elevators ahead of women."

"Were you planning on hitting the door-close button and escaping? Perhaps sneak out on one of the middle floors and switch to the stairs? Unfortunately, you'd run into the doorman again, and he's not going to let you leave without my permission."

"Not if I get the right exit." I stalked out of the elevator ahead of him. "In a building this size, you need more than one staircase to meet the fire code and more than one exit to the outdoors. There are other routes through the building that are less well marked."

"That's right," he said as he followed me off. "In fact, you're about to discover the route to my office."

"Is it in your family apartment? There's a set of stairs that can be reached from a smaller hallway that stems off this main one."

"I live in the country, not here." He looked at me hard. "Walk to the left. It's the fifth door."

This section of the building was more elegant than the efficiently decorated administrative office on the second floor, and the bare, sunlit classrooms on four. The walls in the hallway on nine were a deep cinnabar color and decorated with small spotlights that fell upon small framed paintings. I recognized an infinity net painting by the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, and a small striped picture that looked like something by Mark Rothko. Could it be? I stopped dead in my tracks.

"Yes, it's a Rothko," Takeo said. 'Tm surprised you didn't take it."

I continued down the hall.

"Don't play games. You know the off-limits sections of this building very well."

"I heard about the path to your apartment from a fellow student. She'd been invited up for a dinner once."

"Lila Braithwaite," he said in a flat voice as he opened a nondescript door. I went into what looked like his office, thinking nothing bad could happen to me. Mrs. Koda, Miss Okada, and the doorman knew I was in this jumbled-up office with walls lined with framed photographs of weeds and wildflowers, a desk with a computer terminal, and a couple of club chairs upholstered in ancient brown cotton. The room was the antithesis of the spare, minimalist design of the Kayama Kaikan.

Takeo picked up a stack of
National Geographic
magazines towering on the seat of one of the chairs and motioned for me to sit. I did, falling deeply into the chair, the springs of which had probably been broken thirty years ago.

"You and I have something in common. I also buy old furniture," I said, unable to hide my amusement. "So which is your favorite Sunday shrine sale?"

Takeo's voice rose an octave. "It's not from a flea market! This is furniture from the original building my family lived in. The chairs were in my mother's suite."

Once again my American openness had gotten me into trouble. I felt terrible to have knocked his family heirloom.

"You're not here to appraise the furniture, anyway. I want to hear from you about what you were carrying in your backpack."

"I presume you're interested in one thing in particular?" I used sarcasm to hide my growing worry.

"You were carrying an art moderne ikebana container that was manufactured for our school during the 1930s. Only a thousand vessels were made. To find one today is rare," Takeo said.

"That's what Mrs. Koda told me."

Takeo swung his legs over the side of his armchair, as if he was planning on staying there for a while. "Out of the one thousand containers produced, there were two hundred different styles. Five samples were made of each. Some of them were given to teachers as gifts, while others were used at the school. Of course, some of them broke in daily use or disappeared."

I stared at the reddish earth on the bottom of his Frye boots, wondering why they remained so popular in Japan while the trend had died long ago in the United States. Would he care about such things, if he knew? I doubted it.

"Then the war came, and the military government seized many of our things. Metal containers were melted down for bullets, but most of the ceramics—particularly the ones without any gold leaf or elaborate painting—were left. The art moderne containers survived the war, but in the late forties there was no interest in mass-producing the collection. They weren't in fashion anymore, and even if they were, nobody had the money to invest in new ikebana containers."

I pointed out, "The American women who studied ikebana might have."

"No. In the 1940s, leftover things from the thirties were regarded like clothes or furniture from the seventies are for us. Tacky. Besides, my father told me that military wives wanted antiques, pieces of old Nippon to take away with them. Just like you."

The 1970s had been the major fashion influence on Japan for the last five years, but making that point would have muddied what I needed to say. "I'm not trying to take things out of Japan! I'm helping to raise the value of and appreciation for Japanese decorative art treasures. In a sense, my work is cultural consciousness-raising. "

Once the words were out, I could have bitten my tongue. Cultural consciousness-raising. I sounded stupid and Californian.

Takeo stared at me coldly. At last he said, "It amazes me that you would use the excuse of cultural consciousness-raising to justify theft."

"Theft?" I repeated, suddenly realizing why he'd been so mean.

"The only reason the police aren't here is because I can't count on them to tell me everything that you confess. After all, they didn't tell me anything of value after Sakura died."

"What's this about theft? Somebody stole something from the school?"

"You did, Rei. That's why you're here. I want to ask you how you stole the entire Kayama ware ceramics collection and why you cared to do it."

"Takeo." I stressed his first name, given that he had used mine without invitation or even as much as a -san ending to show respect. "Takeo, you certainly have a vivid and creative way of looking at the world. I guess that's why you 're going to be the school's next headmaster."

"You stole that suiban along with our entire art moderne collection. I don't know how you pulled it off, but you did it. Bravo." Takeo spoke in the authoritative manner he'd used when the police arrived at the building after Sakura's murder.

"Go ahead, call the police," I dared him. "I'd be happy to take them to the shop where I bought the suiban this morning."

"You're fabulous at lying, Rei. Your lies are almost as fabulous as your dancing."

That was as blatant an insult as I'd ever received. But I merely raised my eyebrows and said, "Look at my sales receipt." Taking my time, I withdrew my wallet and found the paper Mr. Ishida had given me.

"Don't tell me that your accomplice is old Mr. Ishida!"

"You sound familiar with him." I was surprised.

"Yasushi Ishida was named in several articles that were written about you last year. I think the fact that the venerable expert is now trafficking in stolen antiques will be even more newsworthy, don't you think?"

The issue of theft was being raised again. Trying to sound reasonable, I asked, "Stolen? From where?"

"Our school's archives."

"When did it happen?" I asked.

"About six weeks ago. But you know that already. Why are you asking?" Takeo snapped.

"Six weeks ago I was in Sapporo appraising an estate. For the entire week and two weekends on either side of it." There, I was in the clear.

"Well, I don't know the exact date. You or your friend could have taken the Kayama ware earlier. Its just that I noticed it at that time."

"My first step into this building was two weeks ago, when I came for a students' orientation with Mrs. Koda. She took me all over the school, but not to any archive. Ask her." My words were braver than I felt, as I remembered how suspicious Mrs. Koda had seemed when she'd asked me about the Kayama ware.