CHAPTER EIGHT

THE WHITE WAKE

The parrot perched on a thin cotton towel spread across Old Jug Face’s shoulder. As usual when he was nervous, he searched under the second cloth tied around her head as a kerchief. When he found her pendulous earlobe, he nibbled it and murmured to her.

“Centipede says you’re the best.” Old Jug Face’s dubious expression was understandable. Hanshiro didn’t look prosperous. He didn’t even look solvent. He grunted noncommittally.

“The best is required for this situation,” Old Jug Face hastened on. She didn’t want to offend him. Centipede said he was particular about the jobs he accepted. She shuffled along, close on his tabi-clad heels as he crossed the room where Cat had entertained her last guest.

“People in high places want her kept here. Out of the way,” Old Jug Face whispered. She knew that servants, both her own and a few sent by Lord Kira to spy, were listening intently in the nearby rooms.

Hanshiro grunted again. Kira was at quite a disadvantage. The shgun disapproved of him. Members of the upper class ridiculed him. The rabble despised him.

If the mistress of the Perfumed Lotus was telling the truth, Lord Asano had had an outside-wife and child. Kira must fear that the daughter would coalesce a vendetta among Asano’s former retainers. The fact that Asano’s daughter had disappeared on the monthly anniversary of her father’s death must have Kira agitated.

Hanshiro stood in the doorway between Cat’s small dressing room and the bedchamber. They were both tidy. The soiled quilt and the blowfish were gone. After Hanshiro had inspected the single slice of fugu and its garnish of dead flies and cockroaches, servants had cleared it away.

Hanshiro read the titles of the books on Cat’s shelf. They consisted of classics and all five volumes of Musashi’s Book of Five Rings instead of the usual bawdy romances.

Pretensions of intellect, he thought. He unrolled a scroll and studied the calligraphy. An exceptionally good hand for a woman. The characters were drawn with a boldness that was almost masculine.

“Is she kurage, a change of saddles?”

“No, she’s not a habitual runaway. This is the first time she’s disappeared. All her clothes are still here and at the Carp.”

Hanshiro was bored. He had heard this story many times before, with only the slightest variations. Women had no sense. They ran away with the first man who rolled his eyes, waved his cucumber of love, and pledged his everlasting devotion. As soon as he lured them out of the Yoshiwara, he resold them elsewhere.

The dressing room was elegantly furnished, but that was to be expected. According to what the mistress had reluctantly divulged, the courtesan named Cat had come from a good family. Her mother’s people had been of noble stock, sturdy of arm, strong of spirit, but empty of purse. She was probably pampered. Spoiled. Vain.

“I don’t know how this happened.” Old Jug Face was still frantically sorting through possible ways to avoid blame for the disaster. “Centipede says he saw Lady Asano’s guest near the Great Gate at the hour of the Rat, but he didn’t see her. Of course there was an unfortunate accident at the gate last night.”

Hanshiro didn’t even bother to grunt. He had drawn both arms inside the capacious sleeves of his rumpled, dusty-black jacket and crossed them over his taut stomach. He poked one hand through the frayed diagonal of the neck opening and scratched the dark stubble on his cheek. The beard, streaked with a few wiry gray hairs, blurred the angles of his high cheekbones and strong jaw, but his dark, brooding eyes glowed clear and sharp and with an intensity that bordered on the savage.

He obviously hadn’t been to a hairdresser in a long time. The wide strip of scalp from his forehead to his crown was supposed to have been shaved. Instead it bristled with a half-inch pelt. The long black hair around it had been caught up into a shaggy whisk at the crown of his head and carelessly wrapped and tied with a cord of rice straw.

He was slightly taller than average and solid, with muscular arms and shoulders and big hands. He was forty-one, born in the year of the Tiger. In a lifetime of adversity he had learned that he could depend only on himself.

Hanshiro didn’t like to ask questions, but now and then they were the quickest if not the best way to get answers. He didn’t want to waste any more time on this job than necessary. He was tired of cases involving runaways. He had taken this one because the story of the young woman’s downfall had piqued his curiosity.

“Your servants have checked everywhere?”

“Oh, yes.” Old Jug Face’s parrot muttered to himself and scanned longingly for his cage. “She’s not in the district.”

Hanshiro put his arms back through his sleeves. He was left-handed, and as he knelt, his right hand moved reflexively to his side. He intended to push his long-sword’s sharkskin-covered hilt down so its tip would swing upward away from the tatami; but his long-sword was in Centipede’s care.

Hanshiro’s blunt index finger and thumb closed delicately around a few black silken threads lying on the dark green binding where two mats met. When he held the hairs up, they hung down a foot and a half on each side of his fingers. Old Jug Face stared at them as a mouse would watch a snake. Her own stubby fingers were interlaced under the light mauve apron she wore over her brown checked robe. Her hands were clenched so tightly that white ellipses formed at the knuckles.

Old Jug Face was almost thirty-nine in a profession where the foot soldiers were dismissed as middle-aged at twenty-five. She had struggled to fortify herself a comfortable redoubt here. She made a hundred mon in squeeze from every ichibu a customer spent on food. She made a percentage on the maids’ and servants’ tips and the courtesans’ fees. Now she was terrified that Lord Kira would have her turned out, as she herself had turned out women too old to attract trade.

“The woman’s guest probably didn’t leave,” Hanshiro said.

“But Centipede saw him, just before the metsuke …” The possibility of a link between Cat’s disappearance and the fire that had consumed Lord Kira’s cousin hit Old Jug Face. She looked like a crow that had just flown headlong into a wall.

In a daze she plucked the parrot off her shoulder. When she cradled the bird in her arms he struggled briefly, sneezed, then subsided. Hanshiro could tell that his latest employer was staring straight into the leer of her own mortality. He wasn’t given to jocularity, but he almost smiled at the look on her face.

Hanshiro went to the rear wall panel and slid it open. He looked up and down the back corridor. No woman, especially none of Cat’s rank, cut off three feet of her hair unless she intended to become a nun.

“Was she religious?” he asked without turning around.

“Not particularly, although she read the holy scriptures each day.”

“And the fugu, the blowfish?”

“A terrible accident.”

“You had an unusual number of accidents here last night.”

“Nothing like that has ever happened in the Perfumed Lotus before. My fugu man is a qualified fish surgeon. Never in his …”

Hanshiro held up a hand to quiet her. He wasn’t concerned with what was probably a murder. He wasn’t being hired to solve that. Nor did he want to be. Missing people weren’t usually very interesting, but they were more interesting than dead ones.

“No one else was with her?”

“Her little maid slept in another room last night.”

Hanshiro prowled the narrow back corridor toward the dark doorway to the storeroom. He walked with a straddle-legged swagger and a slight limp. If the long, divided, pleated skirts of his hakama had been new and crisp, they would have flared almost to the wall on either side. But this hakama was limp and faded from black to a streaked bluish gray. The hems had raveled into a pale fringe. Even the tips of the fringe were frayed.

Behind him Hanshiro heard the rustle and squeak of women. He knew the maids were fluttering like radiant butterflies behind the paper walls, trying to see and hear. He could picture them whispering behind their sleeves. For a morning, at least, they had more on their minds than hairdos.

Hanshiro stood in the doorway of the storeroom and tried to conjure up the image of Cat, the woman who was to have been Lady Asano. He tried to form her from her handwriting and from the scent that lingered in her rooms. Was she a fugitive or a victim or a murderer?

The sun shone through cracks in the wall and painted gilt stripes on the sacks and barrels. Dust motes frolicked in the sunbeams. When his eyes adjusted to the gloom, Hanshiro saw the traces of Butterfly’s broom and the trail of the quilt. He saw the freshly scattered dust, lighter in color than the rest, on the sake barrels. Cat’s white wake, left in her flight.

He thought of the old poem.

To what shall I compare this world?
To the white wake behind
A ship that has rowed away at dawn.

Hanshiro rapped the sides of the sake barrels with the pry bar. He opened the rear one and peered inside. The corpse was naked. Was Lady Asano wearing the guest’s rented clothes?

“Here,” he grunted.

“The woman we seek?” Old Jug Face’s blocky silhouette filled the lighted doorway.

“No.” Hanshiro felt something that was almost admiration, but not quite. After all, she couldn’t have done this herself. She had an accomplice.

He crossed one possibility off the list. She might be a fugitive and/ or a murderer, but she probably wasn’t a victim. Yet.

When Old Jug Face looked inside the barrel, she gave a strangled scream and pressed her hands to her painted mouth. She looked around in panic, trying to figure out how she could hide this from the authorities and knowing she couldn’t.

Without another word Hanshiro strode toward the back door. The madam had given him a list of Cat’s regular guests. He would start with them.

Old Jug Face scurried after him. “Find her before she bothers Lord Kira, and I’ll pay you extra.”

And add the cost to Lady Asano’s debt, Hanshiro thought.

When he reached the back stoop, the Perfumed Lotus’s sandal man appeared on the run around the corner. Lowly as his job was, he was a master at it. He carried Hanshiro’s tattered, muddy straw footgear without a hint of distaste. Hanshiro stood on the back stoop while the sandal bearer tied them over his worn tabi, then bowed repeatedly and disappeared.

The broad eaves of the two brothels almost met overhead. Hanshiro looked down the gloomy alley to the ribbon of sunlight at the end, to the slice of bustling street life visible there.

It was happening as it usually did.

Hanshiro was always alert; but once the chase started something stirred and stretched inside him. Something yawned and flashed long, ivory fangs and a pink predator’s tongue. Something sniffed the odors on the eddies of the wind and rumbled hungrily far back in its throat.

When he was twenty-five Hanshiro had joined the ranks of unemployed samurai called rnin, which meant, roughly, “men adrift on life’s seas.” In the fifteen years since then he had earned a precarious living in the shifting, elusive field of endeavor called the Water Trade. The Water Trade was made up of gamblers and procurers, of sake-and-bathhouse proprietors, aunties, courtesans, prostitutes, and entertainers.

Hanshiro found lost things—people, treasure, honor. Enough people, treasure, and honor were misplaced in the Yoshiwara to keep him busy full-time. He didn’t often have the sums of money necessary to patronize the assignation houses, but he was a familiar figure here nonetheless.

Hanshiro went directly to the Great Gate, where he planned to exchange his numbered wooden ticket for information as well as for his weapon. Centipede’s assistant knew better than to retrieve Hanshiro’s sword. He stood back, bowing, while Centipede himself accepted the ticket and went into the gate house.

Even though Hanshiro’s Kanesada blade was in its scabbard, Centipede carried it on a silk cloth laid across both palms. He bowed low over it when he held it out. The bow was more out of respect for the curved, slender, two-hundred-year-old length of silvery-blue steel than for its present owner. Mortals passed into other existences, but the spirit of a sword like this endured forever.

With the trailing edge of the silk cloth, Centipede lovingly polished the horse roundels of mother-of-pearl inlay on the copper-and-gold-flecked lacquered ground of the scabbard. The crows circling the round brass hilt guard represented the New Shadow school of strategy.

Centipede sighed. “The inferior new blades can’t match those of the Kot masters.”

Hanshiro grunted. He knew that if he kept silent, Centipede’s curiosity would do most of his work for him.

Centipede had acquired his nickname in his youth when he had been so fast with two swords, he’d looked as though he had extra arms. Like Hanshiro, he was a rnin. His master had died in the bed of a famous kabuki actor during the great Fire-of-the-Long-Sleeved-Garment forty-five years ago. The ignominy lay not in the fact that the lord had died with ano mono, “that thing,” splitting the melon of another man, but that he had died in bed instead of in battle. The tragedy had given rise to a lot of sly poetry about the heat of his passion.

A true warrior observed a quota of one lord per lifetime, and the government forbade loyal retainers from following their masters into the spirit world. Besides, the country had been plagued by peace since Tokugawa Ieyasu had taken power a hundred years ago. Warriors, especially unemployed ones, were as welcome as fleas in a low-class inn, and about as plentiful. Since the gay life in the Yoshiwara had always suited Centipede, he had decided to make a career of his hobby.

Now his hobby was accumulating rumors. He had quite a large collection of them, but he shared it with very few people.

Centipede left his assistant in charge of the gate. The district was deserted by all but merchants’ clerks and service people at this hour anyway. He invited Hanshiro into the tiny gate house for a cup of tea.

As he poured, Centipede drew air in through his teeth with a hissing noise. He was concentrating on finding the best way to start the conversation. He was mortified that his carelessness had allowed Cat to disappear. He even felt responsible for the accidental death of the metsuke, and he suspected the two events were related somehow.

He decided on noncommittal. “There was some excitement here last night.”

“So there was.” Hanshiro was a master at noncommittal.

The two sipped in silence for a while.

“She’ll have a difficult time hiding,” Centipede observed. “She’s very beautiful.”

“A bell cricket is kept in a cage because of its song.”

“The bannerman must be worried.” Centipede couldn’t resist mentioning Kira’s lower rank.

“Keisei,” Hanshiro said, and Centipede laughed.

Beautiful women were called keisei, “castle falling in ruins,” because they often led to the destruction of men and kingdoms. One had destroyed Hanshiro’s young lord in Tosa fifteen years ago. The young man had squandered his portion of his family’s fortune for the favors of an arrogant, fickle courtesan. His father had posted an act of disownment. Humiliated, impoverished, cut off from his family, the young man had shaved his head and become a mendicant monk. And so, indirectly, a beautiful woman had ruined Hanshiro also and changed the course of his life.

By the end of the hour of the Dragon, Hanshiro had learned a great deal. He had left just enough rumors with Centipede to pay for the information. More important, he had listened to the old man’s reminiscences of the times long past. He had shared with him the anomie of living among samurai obsessed with money and the acquisition of goods.

Finally, Hanshiro stuck his long-sword’s scabbard into his sash at a precise angle to the right of his short-sword. He passed silk cords through the loops of the scabbards and secured them to the sash. He bowed and left Centipede brooding over his fifth cup of tea.

Hanshiro knew which people to talk to along the route into the city. He met with success at the fifth try.

When he reached the eel seller’s stall he bowed low and actually gave a flicker of a smile. He had sought information here often, and he knew that this one required more than money. To get full value from her he had to show he shared her sense of cosmic irony. “Did you see a slender commoner in a Nakagawa Freight uniform pass here last night? A little after the hour of the Rat?”

The old woman stared at him blankly, her eyes wide as an owl’s. “My hearing is bad, Your Honor.”

Hanshiro added ten paper-wrapped mon to the pile in his palm. The eel seller slipped them into her sleeve. Then she went back to tending her rack of charring eels. “I might have. My sight is not very good, either.”

Hanshiro patiently added ten more coins.

“Ten more would help my memory.” She smiled fondly at him as he wrapped the coins. She smiled at him the way a cat smiled at the hand holding the fish entrails.

“Yes, I saw her. A young woman dressed as a dirt-eater. Very convincing. But she smelled of camellia oil, and she reached up to arrange hair that was no longer on her head. Also, her hand was uncallused.”

“Who was with her?”

“No one.”

“No one?”

“No one.” The old woman grinned toothlessly at him. “But for the insignificant sum of ten more coppers, my memory might improve enough to tell you where she went.”

Hanshiro complied.

“When she left here she was reading a playbill.”

“Which theater?”

“Alas, coppers enough to choke a priest wouldn’t improve my rheumy old eyes that much.”

Hanshiro bowed low and gave her ten more coins, for luck. She handed him half a section of bamboo heaped with rice and with a savory eel lying across the top. He ate as he headed for the theater district.

“Tosa-san,” she called after him. When he returned she spoke in a much lower voice. “There’s one you should beware of.”

“One of Uesugi’s men?”

“No, although Kira’s son’s toadies are on the prowl after your pretty dirt-eater. This is a young westcountryman. A rnin like yourself. From Ak, judging by the accent. He’s been asking questions.”

Hanshiro paused a moment. The westcountryman was probably from Asano’s estate in Ak, or one of Asano’s neighbors, perhaps hired by Kira because he knew what Cat looked like.

Hanshiro left the eel seller with something better than coppers. He smiled at her. She probably appreciated the rarity of the gift.

He went to Shichisaburo’s theater, the Nakamura-za, first because Shichisaburo was on the list given to him by the mistress of the Perfumed Lotus. Also, Centipede had told him the actor wasn’t actually matching his bird to Cat’s nest when he arranged assignations with her. Something was amiss in that.

Besides, Shichisaburo was a versatile actor, and Hanshiro liked his style. He hadn’t adopted the vulgar new “rough stuff” method of acting so popular with Edo’s merchants and samurai. Hanshiro agreed with the theater critic who said Shichisaburo was like patent medicine, good for everything.