Gai-Jin (59 page)

In the same instant he felt her fingers stop. “What is it, Lord?” the masseuse asked, frightened.

“Nothing, nothing. Please continue.”

Her fingers obeyed, but now their touch was different and there was tension in the room.

It was an eight-mat room, the futons stuffed with down, the tatami of good quality and shojis recently renewed with oiled paper. In the tokonoma niche was an oil lamp, flower arrangement and small scroll painting of a vast landscape, its only habitation a tiny cottage in a bamboo grove, with an even tinier woman forlorn in the doorway, peering into the distance—a love poem beside it.

So lonely, filled with so much hope for her man’s return.

Hiraga was drifting into sleep when the screen door slid back. “Excuse me, Lord.” The servant knelt and said uneasily, “So sorry, there is a low-class person outside who claims to know you, asks to see you, so sorry to disturb you, but he is very insistent an—”

“Who is he? What’s his name?”

“He … wouldn’t give a name, and he didn’t ask for you by name, Lord, but kept on saying: ‘Say to the samurai: Todo is the brother of Joun.’”

Instantly Hiraga was on his feet. As he slipped on his yukata, he asked the masseuse to come back tomorrow at the same time and dismissed her, moved closer to the two swords he had borrowed until the shoya could obtain better, and knelt in a defensive-attack position facing the door. “Send him here, and keep everyone else away.”

The slight, dirty young peasant with a tattered kimono grovelled along
the passageway and went onto his knees outside the door. “Thank you, Lord, thank you for seeing me,” the youth mumbled, then looked up and beamed inanely, his front teeth missing. “Thank you, Lord.”

Hiraga glowered at him, then gasped with disbelief: “Ori? But—but it’s impossible!” then peered closer and saw that his tooth had just been blacked out as part of his disguise, in this light the illusion perfect. But no mistaking that Ori was no longer obviously samurai: his topknot and been cut off and all hair on the back and sides of his head roughly trimmed to the same length as the two-week stubble that covered his pate. “Why?” he asked helplessly.

Ori grinned and sat close to him. “Bakufu are looking for ronin, eh?” he whispered, keeping his voice down against ears they both knew would be listening. “I’m not less a samurai but now I can pass any barrier, eh?”

The air hissed out of Hiraga’s mouth with admiration. “You are right. You are brilliant,
sonno-joi
doesn’t depend on a hairstyle. So simple—I would never have thought of it.”

“It occurred to me last night. I was thinking about your problem, Hiraga, an—”

“Careful. Here my name’s Nakama Otami.”

“Ah, so that’s it! Good.” Ori smiled. “I did not know what to use, hence the code.”

“Have they found Todo and the others?”

“No, no, they are still missing. They have to be dead. We heard Joun was executed like a common criminal, but still don’t know how he was caught.”

“Why come here, Ori? It’s too dangerous.”

“Not like this, nor at night, and I needed to test the new Ori and to see you.” Squeamishly he ran his hand over his head stubble, scratching his scalp, his face freshly shaven. “It feels awful, and dirty, somehow obscene, but never mind, now I am safe to get to Kyōto. I will leave in two days.”

Hiraga stared at his head, fascinated, still bewildered by the astonishing change. “If anything makes you safe that should, except that now all samurai will take you for a common man. How can you wear swords?”

“When I need swords I will wear a hat. When I am disguised I have this.” Ori slipped his good hand into his sleeve and brought out a two-shot derringer.

Again Hiraga’s face lit up. “Eeee, brilliant! Where did you get it?”

“Fujiko. She sold it to me, with a box of cartridges. A client gave it to her as a present when he left Yokohama. Imagine! A low-class whore with such a treasure.”

Hiraga held it carefully, weighing it in his hand, pointing it then lifting the catch to see the two bronze cartridges neatly in the barrels. “You could certainly kill two men before you were killed, if you were close enough.”

“One is enough to give you time to run off and get some swords.” Ori
peered at Hiraga. “We heard about the soldiers. I wanted to see if you were all right.
Baka!
We will go to Kyōto together and leave this place to the dogs until we can come back in force.”

Hiraga shook his head and told what really happened, then about Tyrer and discovering the enmity between the French and English, adding excitedly, “This is one of the wedges we can drive between them. We get them fighting amongst themselves, let them kill each other for us, eh? I must stay, Ori. It is only the beginning. We must learn all they know, be able to think like them and then we can destroy them.”

Ori frowned, considering the reasons for and the reasons against—though he had not forgiven Hiraga for forcing him to lose face and remove her cross, he still had to protect
sonno-joi
. “In that case, if you are to be our spy, you will have to be like them in every way, and burrow into their society like a bedbug, outwardly become friends, even wear gai-jin clothes.” At Hiraga’s blank look he added, “Why not? That will further protect you, and make it easier for them to accept you,
neh?”

“But why should they accept me?”

“They should not, but they are fools. Taira will be your spearhead. He can arrange it, order it. He could insist.”

“Why should he?”

“Barter Fujiko.”

“Eh?”

“Raiko gave us the key: gai-jin are different. They prefer to bed the same woman. Help Raiko to wrap him in their net, then he is your running dog because you are his indispensable go-between. Tomorrow tell him, even though you were furious with the soldiers, it was not his fault. With great difficulty you sneaked back to the Yoshiwara and arranged Fujiko for him for tomorrow evening and ‘so sorry, Taira-sama, it would be simpler for me to arrange these trysts if I had proper European clothes to pass the barriers, and so on.’ Make her available, or not, get him on her barb, and twist it. Eh?”

Hiraga began laughing quietly. “Better you stay here and not go to Kyōto, your counsel is too valuable.”

“Katsumata must be forewarned. Now, the gai-jin woman?”

“Tomorrow I will find out exactly where she is.”

“Good.” The wind picked up and a gust passed through the house, crackling the paper in the frames and setting the oil flame dancing. Ori watched him. “Have you seen her?”

“Not yet. Taira’s servants, a filthy lot of Chinese, don’t speak any language I can understand so I could not find out from them, but the biggest building in the Settlement belongs to the man she is to marry.”

“She lives there?”

“I am not sure but—” Hiraga stopped as an idea barreled into his head.
“Listen, if I could become accepted, I could go everywhere, could find out all about their defenses, could go aboard their warships and …”

“And on a certain night,” Ori said at once, jumping ahead, “perhaps we could capture one, or sink one.”

“Yes.” Both men glowed at the thought, the candle fluttering and casting strange shadows.

“With the right wind,” Ori said softly, “a south wind like tonight, with five or six shishi, a few kegs of oil already planted in the right warehouses … even that is not necessary: we can make incendiaries and start fires in the Yoshiwara. The wind would jump those fires into the village and those would spread to the Settlement and burn it up!
Neh?”

“And the ship?”

“In the confusion we row out to the big one. We could do it, easily,
neh?”

“Not easily, but what a coup!”

“Sonno-joi!”

THURSDAY, 16TH OCTOBER
:

“Come in! Ah, good morning, André,” Angelique said with a warmth that belied her anxiety. “You’re very punctual. All’s well with you?”

He nodded, closed the door of the small ground-floor room adjoining her bedroom that served as her boudoir in the French Legation, once more astonished that she appeared so calm and could make small talk. Politely he bent over her hand and kissed it, then sat opposite her. The room was drab with old chairs and chaise and writing desk, plaster walls with a few cheap oils by current French painters, Delacroix and Corot. “The army taught me, Punctuality is next to Godliness.”

She smiled at the pleasantry. “La! I didn’t know you had been in the army.”

“I had a commission in Algeria for a year when I was twenty-two; after university—nothing very grand, just helping to crush one of the usual rebellions. The sooner we really stamp out the troublemakers and annex all North Africa as French territory the better.” He waved absently at the flies, and studied her. “You look more beautiful than ever. Your—your state suits you.”

Her eyes lost their color and became flinty. Last night had been bad for her, the bed here in the untidy, seedy bedroom uncomfortable. During the dark time her anxieties had overridden her confidence and she had become increasingly nervous about leaving her suite next to Struan and all her comfort, so hastily. In the dawn her humor had not improved and again
the all-consuming idea pervaded her:
men caused all her woes
. Revenge will be sweet. “You mean my marriage state to be, no?”

“Of course,” he said after the barest pause, and she wondered, aggravated, what was the matter with him and why he was so boorish and distant like last night when the music had gone on and on, without his usual touch. He had dark rings under his eyes and his features seemed sharper than usual.

“Is anything wrong, my dear friend?”

“No, dear Angelique, nothing, nothing at all.”

Liar, she thought. Why is it men lie so much, to others and to themselves? “You were successful?”

“Yes and no.”

He knew that she was twisting on the spit and of a sudden he wanted to make her squirm, wanted to fan the flames to make her scream and pay for Hana.

You’re mad, he thought. It’s not Angelique’s fault. That is true but because of her, last night I went to the Three Carp and saw Raiko and while we talked in our mixture of Japanese and English and pidgin I suddenly felt that the other had just been a rotten nightmare and that any moment Hana would appear, the laugh in her eyes, and my heart would swirl as always and we would leave Raiko and bathe together, play there, eat in private and love without haste. And when I realized the truth, with Hana gone forever, my entrails and brain crawling with spawning worms, I almost vomited. “Raiko, got to know who three clients were.”

“So sorry, Furansu-san, I said before: her mama-san is dead, people of house scattered, Inn of Forty-seven Ronin dead.”

“There must be some way to find th—”

“None. So sorry.”

“Then tell me the truth … the truth, of how she died.”

“With your knife in her throat, so sorry.”

“She did it? Hara-kiri?”

Raiko had answered with the same patient voice, the same voice that had told the same story and given the same answer to the same questions a dozen times before: “Hara-kiri is the ancient way, honorable way, the only way atone a wrong. Hana betrayed you and us, owners, patrons and herself—that was her karma in this life. There is nothing more say. So sorry, let her rest. Her fortieth day after her death day, her kami day when a person is reborn or becomes a kami has passed now. Let her kami, her spirit, rest. So sorry, not speak of her again. Now, what other thing can I do for you?”

Angelique was sitting straight in her chair as she had been taught from childhood, disquieted, watching him, one hand in her lap, the other fanned against the flies. Twice she had said, “What do you mean, yes and no?” but he had not heard her, seemingly in a trance. Just before she had
left Paris, her uncle had been the same and her aunt had said, “Leave him be, who knows what devils inhabit a man’s mind when troubled.”

“What trouble is he in, Aunt-mama?”

“Ah,
chérie
, all life is a trouble when what you earn won’t pay for what is needed. Taxes crush us, Paris is a cesspit of greed and without morals, France is rumbling again, the franc buys less every month, bread has doubled in half a year. Leave him be, poor man, he does his best.”

Angelique sighed. Yes, poor man. Tomorrow I will do my best and talk to Malcolm, he will arrange to pay his debts. Such a good man should not be in Debtors’ Prison. What can his debts amount to? A few louis …

She saw André come back into himself and look at her. “Yes and no, André? What does that mean?”

“Yes, they have such a medicine, but no, you cannot have it yet because y—”

“But why, why ha—”

“Mon Dieu
, be patient, then I can tell you what the mama-san told me. You cannot have it yet because it cannot be taken until the thirtieth day, then again on the thirty-fifth day, and also because the drink—an infusion of herbs—must be prepared freshly each time.”

His words had ripped the simplicity of her plan apart: André was to have given her now the drink or powder that he had obtained last night, she would take it at once and go to bed, saying she had the vapors.
Voilà! A
small stomachache and in a few hours, a day at the most, and everything perfect.

For a moment she felt her whole world twisting but again managed to put on the brakes: Stop it! You’re alone. You are the heroine whom the forces of evil have ensnared. You must be strong, you have to fight alone and you-can-beat-them! “Thirty days?” She sounded strangled.

“Yes, and you repeat it on the thirty-fifth. You must be accurate and th—”

“And what happens then, André? Is it fast, what?”

“For God’s sake, let me finish. She said it’s—it usually works at once. The second draft isn’t always necessary.”

“There’s nothing I can take immediately?”

“No. There isn’t anything like that.”

“But this other, she said it’s successful every time?”

“Yes.” Raiko’s answer to his same question had been, “Nine times in ten. If the medicine does not work, there are other ways.”