The Ends of the Earth (40 page)

‘
Konnichi wa?
’

The door slid open. A woman gazed out at him. She was thin, grey-haired and stooped, wearing a frayed yellow
yukata
. Her face was gaunt and hollow-cheeked, her eyes deeply sunk, but pale blue – like his own. She opened her mouth to speak, but no words came.

The woman looked all of sixty or seventy, though Max knew Matilda Tomura was actually in her early fifties. He did not doubt it was her. He did not doubt that, for the first time since he was newly born, he was looking at his mother.

‘Hello? Are you … Matilda?’

The use of English seemed to amaze her. She gaped at him in speechless astonishment. Max imagined she was amazed as much as anything by the fact that she did not know who he was. A new face in the long years of her imprisonment had to be a rarity.

He reached for the handle of the door. It would surely be locked. But he would try to open it anyway.

As he pulled the handle down, he saw the woman raise her hand and look alarmed.

But the warning was too late. The section of floor he was standing on vanished beneath him. And he fell.

MAX WAS STILL
semi-conscious when the guards pulled him out, more aware of the throbbing in his head, which had struck the wall of the pit as he fell, than of the manhandling he received. They bundled him into the cell and handcuffed him by his right wrist to one of the bars.

There they left him for some tract of time he could not measure as he drifted in and out of consciousness. Awareness slowly returned, along with the knowledge that they had taken his gun, knife and bandoleer, along with his knapsack. He probably still had his invisibility pin, though. He wondered if it had sensed his scepticism.

A face formed blurrily in front of him, then dissolved, then formed again. Once his eyes had regained the ability to focus, he realized the woman he now shared the cell with – Matilda Tomura, née Farngold, his mother – was sitting on the edge of the dais, staring at him.

‘Do you … know who I am?’ he slurred.

He had to repeat himself several times before she understood. And then she merely shook her head. She did not know.

‘My name … is James Maxted. James … Maxted.’

That also took an age to sink in. But she recognized the name. He saw her mouth it and nod.

‘I was born … in May 1891.’

Her eyes widened.

‘I was born here. In this castle. You remember that … don’t you?’

‘Maxted?’ She formed the name awkwardly, as if unused to speaking. ‘James … Maxted?’

‘Yes.’

‘Born … here?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then—’

The sliding door from the passage was suddenly opened. The cell filled with torchlight. Matilda Tomura scurried back to the doorway of the room at the rear. Max turned and saw Count Tomura Iwazu, flanked by guards, glaring through the bars at him.

He was dressed in a dark red kimono, loose trousers and a black outer coat. His bearing was as Max recalled from their encounter in Marseilles – straight-backed and square-shouldered. So was his demeanour – proud, scornful, simmering with violent inclinations. Behind him, shrinking back, dressed in a similar outfit, was the Count’s arrogant, insecure son, Noburo. And at the rear of the group stood Ishibashi, the ever-present factotum, bulky and impassive, also in a kimono.

‘Lieutenant Maxted,’ said Tomura levelly. ‘Will you not stand to speak to me?’

With some effort, Max rose. He slid the handcuff up the bar until it struck a cross-bar and would go no further. He had to bend to one side to accommodate it.

‘How did you enter the castle?’ Tomura demanded.

‘By the main gate. I don’t think you pay your men enough, Count. They’re surprisingly bribable.’

‘You lie. Was it the tunnel?’

‘What tunnel? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘It does not matter. We have you now.’

‘Congratulations.’

‘You should have given up after your Arab friend died and Hashiguchi Azenbo’s model was destroyed. It was madness to continue.’

‘I never could take no for an answer.’

‘We will find out who helped you enter. When we do, we will kill them. But we will not kill you, Lieutenant Maxted. There is no death for you here. Except the death of old age.’

‘You mean to keep two prisoners now, Count? Is that it?’

‘Yes.’ Tomura smiled at Max. ‘You came for your mother. You have her.’ He looked towards Matilda. ‘Old above her years. Shrivelled in her mind and her body. She cannot look at me. She cannot speak to me. She is broken. As you will be broken.’

‘She’s your
wife
.’

‘No. Noburo’s mother is my wife. This creature is nothing to me.’

‘Let her go, then.’

Tomura laughed. ‘I will let no one go. Her punishment and your punishment are the same. Life – the whole of the rest of it – buried here.’

Max looked at Noburo. ‘Your father’s mad. You know that, don’t you?’

Noburo said nothing. He stared at Max with a mixture of horror and hatred. The arrogance Schools had spoken of was there too. But there was vulnerability as well. Perhaps Delphine Pouchert had already wrought a change in him. Perhaps Laskaris’s road to revenge had always been the better one to tread.

But revenge had not brought Max to Zangai-jo. He understood that about himself. The primal urge to answer the question his very existence posed was what had brought him, in the teeth of reason. Where had he come from?
Where?
The castle he stood in; the woman he was imprisoned with: they were the grid references of his quest. He was there at last. He had found it. And, having found it, he would never be free of it.

‘It would have been better for you to die in Marseilles,’ said Count Tomura. ‘That would have been clean and quick. This will not be. This will be slow extinction. You will watch your mother live another ten years or twenty years and then die. And then you will live on here alone. Until you die also.’

‘You’ll be dead yourself by then, Count.’

‘Yes. I will. But Noburo will not release you. You can be sure of that. You were born here. You will die here.’

‘I don’t think so. I have friends who’ll come after me.’

‘You have no friends who can rescue you from this. Morahan and his people have left Japan. I defeated them. And I have defeated you.’

‘So you think. Tell me, why didn’t you just stifle me at birth?’

‘That would have been too easy. I wanted your mother to know you had been taken away, to be raised as another woman’s child, without any knowledge of her. That was harder for her to bear than your death would have been.’

‘I have knowledge of her now.’

‘But the price you have paid for it is too high. You have learnt the truth. But you have become its prisoner.’ Tomura inclined his head sideways and squinted at Max, observing him as if he were some exotic specimen in a zoo. ‘These bars, Lieutenant Maxted. Study them well. Study them closely. They will be in your sight every day. Every one of the many days I will keep you here, alive, while to the world you will be … dead.’

Max kept up a bold front until Count Tomura and the others left. Then he sat down at the foot of the bars and contemplated his situation. He had brought his present plight on himself. He knew that. He had gone on when all sense suggested he should stop. He had refused to turn back. He had forced his way into what was now his prison.
That
was his situation.

Matilda Tomura crept over and sat down beside him. ‘James,’ she whispered, gazing at him in awe and disbelief. ‘My … son?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That is who I am.’

She pressed her hand – small, cold and trembling – into his. She looked into his eyes. Eventually, he would have to tell her how her brother had died and all he had done to find her. He would have to tell her everything.

And, if Count Tomura was to be believed, as Max feared he was, there would be ample time to do that. In fact, there would be nothing but time.

MATILDA MOVED AND
spoke – when she spoke – slowly and hesitantly. She stroked Max’s hand and, on one occasion, his cheek. She stared at him for silent minute after minute. It was clear to Max it would take her many days simply to believe he was present. Perhaps she thought he was a hallucination. Perhaps hallucinations had troubled her before. She had been there, in that room, and the room beyond, for twenty-eight years. What effect such protracted confinement would have on someone Max could only guess.

Or, alternatively, he could wait to find out.

How long he would be kept handcuffed to the bars was also a matter of guesswork. A pail was supplied for his use, which suggested it might be for some time. Tomura no doubt intended to prove to him from the outset that he had forfeited all forms of liberty.

The absence of daylight in the castle’s basement was not, in fact, as complete as Max had assumed. Grilles in the ceiling admitted some light, channelled from above, as the day progressed. Activities in the rest of the building reached him as creaks and muffled percussions.

Minutes became hours. His head hurt. He was hungry and thirsty. He was also very tired. At some point, he fell asleep.

He was roused by a rumbling noise he could not identify. Its source, he eventually realized, was a dumb waiter in the wall next to the sliding door he had entered by. Ishibashi appeared a few minutes later and removed from it a tray bearing beakers of tea and bowls of rice. He slid the tray into the cell through a flap and, ignoring Max, called to Matilda, whom he addressed respectfully as
Oku-sama.

She came and collected her tea and rice with a humble nod of gratitude, then retreated to the rear room. Max took several gulps of tea and ate a handful of rice. He stared at Ishibashi, willing the man to react. But no reaction came.

‘Do you remember taking me to Tokyo after I was born?’ Max asked, as much as anything to break the silence.

Ishibashi’s reply took a long time to emerge. ‘I remember,’ he said, in a low, sonorous voice.

‘Maybe you can tell me when I was born. Was it the fifth of May?’

‘Fifth?’ Ishibashi’s tone suggested he did not understand the word.

‘Yes. The fifth of May, 1891. Is that right?’

Ishibashi shook his head. ‘Not fifth.’ He raised three fingers. ‘Three May.
Go-gatsu mikka, Meiji ni-jyu yon.
Then you born.’

Max, it seemed, was two days older than he had supposed. All his birthdays had been late. ‘How long have you worked for Count Tomura?’ he asked, keen to prolong the conversation.

But Ishibashi did not share his keenness. Perhaps he felt he had already said too much. He pointed to Max’s rice bowl. ‘Eat. No speak.
Subayaku
.’

So Max ate. And drank his tea. He had barely finished when Matilda returned, walking in the halting, stooping way he feared he would become used to. Imprisonment had made her apprehensive and subservient. It had hollowed out the core of her, so that the self-possessed and vivacious young woman Max imagined his father had fallen in love with no longer existed.

She replaced her beaker and bowl on the tray, then replaced Max’s as well. She bowed to Ishibashi and thanked him. ‘
Arigato gozaimasen.
’ He, the servant, had become one of her masters. Max felt bottomlessly sorry for her then. He longed to restore to her all she had lost. But he knew he could not.

Ishibashi took the tray back to the dumb waiter, loaded it in and pulled the bell next to the compartment. A rumbling ascent to some part of the castle’s kitchen began.

Ishibashi paused and looked at Max thoughtfully, though what he was thinking was utterly unknowable. He stood there for a full minute or so, statuesquely still.

Then he turned and left.

The day faded into night. Two guards came to trim the lamps and replace the pail. They did not speak. Max lay down and searched the shadows and patterns on the ceiling for a way out of the trap into which he had blundered. His defiant words to Count Tomura meant nothing inside his own head. He had found his mother, but she was a confused, prematurely old woman who did not know him any more than he knew her. Blood was not always thicker than water. He had thought he could rescue her and shoot his way out if they could not escape undetected. He knew now the idea was exactly what Tomura had called it: madness. His arrogance and his stubbornness had brought him there. And he would probably still be there when they had changed to humility and acquiescence. But the changes, when they came, would avail him nothing. Tomura would show him no mercy. He listened to Matilda, shuffling around the rear room, muttering to herself too quietly for him to catch the words. Occasionally, it sounded as if she was singing, though what the song was Max could not discern. He felt the cold hand of despair on his shoulder. What a fool he had been. What a damned fool.

Max was actually grateful when Noburo came to see him. Taunting an enemy was preferable to contemplating defeat by him. Although, in this case, Noburo clearly intended to do some taunting of his own.

‘You have lost, Maxted. You have
lost
. You are like all Westerners. You think you are superior to us. You think you can come here and take what you want. You are wrong. You will learn that now. You will learn what losing really means.’

Max longed to tell Noburo that Delphine Pouchert was not in thrall to him, as he doubtless supposed, and Louis Pouchert would soon be coming to demand satisfaction. But those surprises would have to wait. The past was a safer topic. ‘When did you find out you were illegitimate, Noburo? It must have been quite a shock. More to the point, when did you find out your father had a legitimate son – but it wasn’t you?’

‘I
am
his son.
You
are not.’

‘I don’t know how Japanese law works, but in English law a son born in wedlock is the legitimate offspring of his mother’s husband whoever actually fathered him.’

Noburo stepped closer to the bars and spat at Max. ‘You are no one here, Maxted. Nothing. Dirt under my boot. Shit of a dog.’

Seizing the moment, Max grabbed at Noburo with his unfettered left hand. But his fingers only brushed the shoulder of Noburo’s kimono as he sprang away. He was alarmed, though, and a little frightened. Max could read that much in his eyes.