All sorts of different sounds came through the paper partitions: the clamour of customers in the noodle shop, the servant girls slipping up and down the stairs, his neighbour – a rice trader – snoring in the next room. All this noise was quite usual and it did not prevent the inspector from falling asleep, even though he was a light sleeper. When a cockroach fell off the ceiling on to the straw mats, Asagawa opened his eyes immediately, and his hand automatically slid in under the wooden pillow, where he kept his revolver. The inspector was woken a second time by the tinkling lid of the china teapot that he always put beside the head of the bed. An earthquake, but only a very small one, Asagawa realised, and went back to sleep.
But after he was woken for the third time, he was not allowed to go to sleep again.
Something extraordinary was happening in the noodle shop. He heard someone yelling in a blood-curdling voice, furniture smashing and then the owner shrieking:
‘Asagawa-san!’
That meant he had to go down – Emiko wouldn’t disturb him over anything trivial. It must be the foreign sailors getting rowdy again, like the last time. Just recently they had taken to wandering around the native districts – the drink was cheaper there.
The inspector sighed, got up and pulled on his yukata. He didn’t take his revolver, there was no need. Instead of a firearm, he grabbed his jitte – an iron spike with two curved hooks on its sides. In the old days a jitte was used to ward off a blow from a sword, but it was also useful for parrying a knife-thrust, or simply hitting someone over the head. Asagawa was a past master in the use of this weapon.
He didn’t leave the file in the room, but stuck it in the back of his belt.
To the inspector’s relief, it was not foreigners who were getting unruly, but two Japanese. They looked like ordinary chimpira – petty thugs of the lowest kind. Not Yakuza, just loudmouths, but very drunk and aggressively boisterous. The table had been turned over and a few bowls had been broken. The old basket weaver Yoichi, who often stayed until late, had a bloody nose. There weren’t any other customers, they must all have run off – all except for a fisherman with a face tanned copper-brown by the wind, sitting in the corner. He wasn’t bothered at all, just kept picking up noodles with his little sticks without even looking around.
‘This is Asagawa-san, a big police boss! Now you’ll answer for all this!’ shouted Emiko, who seemed to have suffered too – her hairstyle had slipped over to one side and her sleeve was torn.
It worked.
One chimpira, wearing a red headband, backed away towards the door.
‘Don’t come near us! We’re not from round here! We’ll go and you’ll never see us again.’
And he pulled out a knife, to stop the policeman from interfering.
‘What do you mean, you’ll go?’ Emiko squealed. ‘Who’s going to pay? Look at all the crockery you’ve broken! And the table’s cracked right across!’
She threw herself at the bullies with her fists up, absolutely fearless.
But the second brawler, with deep pockmarks on his face, swung his fist wildly and struck her on the ear, and the poor woman collapsed on the floor, unconscious. Old Yoichi pulled his head down and went dashing headlong out of the eatery.
Asagawa would not have let the scoundrels get away in any case but, for Emiko’s sake, he decided to teach them a serious lesson.
First of all he ran to the door and blocked the way out, so that they couldn’t get away.
The two men glanced at each other. The one with the red headband raised his knife to shoulder level and the pockmarked one pulled out a more serious weapon – a short wakizashi sword.
‘Right, together!’ he shouted, and they both threw themselves at Asagawa at once.
But how could they compete with a master of the jitte! He easily knocked the knife-thrust aside with his elbow, grabbed the blade of the sword with his hook, tugged, and the wakizashi went flying off into the far corner.
Without wasting so much as an instant, Asagawa smacked the man with the red headband across the wrist, so that he dropped the knife. The pockmarked man retreated to the counter and stood with his back to it. The other chimpira cowered against him. They weren’t kicking up a racket now, or waving their arms about; both their faces were ashen with fear.
Asagawa walked unhurriedly towards them, brandishing his weapon.
‘Before you go off to the station, I’ll teach you a lesson in how to behave in decent establishments,’ he said, furious at the thought that he had been denied his sleep.
Meanwhile the copper-faced fisherman drank the remains of the broth from his bowl and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. He leaned down, picked up the wakizashi, weighed it on his palm and suddenly flung it, without any swing at all.
The blade entered the inspector’s back slightly above the calico-bound file.
Asagawa looked round with an angry and bewildered look on his face. He swayed, barely able to stay on his feet.
Then, with the speed of lightning, the chimpira in the read headband pulled a short, straight sword out from under his clothes and jerked it from right to left, as easily as if he were batting away a fly: the inspector’s head leapt off his shoulders and went rolling merrily across the floor.
For a few seconds,
Already off the shoulders,
The head still lives on
THE PHOTOGRAPH OF HIS WIFE
If you wrote the word ‘Bullcox’ in the syllabic alphabet, you got five letters: bu-ru-ko-ku-su. But in the circle at the centre of the mysterious diagram, there were only two. That, however, did not mean a thing: the Japanese loved to shorten foreign words and names that were too long, leaving just the first two letters. So the letters in the circle should be ‘bu-ru’.
The doctor put the notebook that he had taken out the day before on the desk. It contained his five-year-old notes on the history of the Japanese ninja, including the secret alphabet of this clan of professional assassins, carefully copied out from a certain ancient treatise.
The green lamp shone with a peaceful light and the cosy shadows lay thick in the corners of the study. The house was sleeping. Both his daughters, Beth and Kate, had already said their prayers and gone to bed. Following a long-established custom very dear to Twigs’ heart, their father had gone to kiss them before they fell asleep – Beth on the right cheek and Kate on the left.
His elder daughter had turned out a genuine beauty, the very image of his dear departed Jenny, thought Twigs (this same thought visited him every evening when he wished his daughters good night). Kate was still an ugly duckling, and if her big, wide mouth and long nose were anything to go by, she was never going to be a good-looker, but he was less worried about her than her elder sister. Beth was the silent type, all she ever wanted to do was read novels, but Kate was bright and lively, the kind of girl that young men liked. The same thing had happened several times already: Beth acquired some new beau and then, before you could blink, he switched his attentions to the younger sister – she was jollier and easier to be with.
In order to keep their correspondence secret, the medieval ninja did not use the standard hieroglyphs, but a special alphabet, the so-called ‘shindai letters’, a very ancient form of writing reminiscent of the marks left by a snake crawling across wet sand.
Right, then, let’s take a look at how the symbol for ‘bu’ is written in these squiggles. There it is.
And now ‘ru’. It looks like this.
But what do we have in the circle? Quite different symbols. The first one looks like three snakes.