“What happened after you saw Daiemon?” Sano said.
“I went back to Koheiji. He was in his room.”
“What did you do then?”
“I don’t remember.”
Okitsu ducked her head. Sano bent down to peer into her face. Her eyes were so wide with terror that rings of white showed around the pupils. Her story now suggested that she and the actor had been apart long enough for him, as well as her, to kill Makino-if Daiemon hadn’t.
“There’s something else you neglected to tell my chief retainer,” said Sano. “Yesterday he visited Rakuami, your former master. Rakuami said you hated Senior Elder Makino so much that you tried to commit suicide rather than be his concubine. Is it true?”
A gulp that ended in a retch convulsed Okitsu; her arms wrapped tight around her stomach. “No.”
“Then Rakuami was lying?”
“No!”
“Either he lied about you, or you hated Makino. Which is it?” Sano said.
“I didn’t hate him. I mean, I did at first, but…” Okitsu babbled, “After I’d lived with him awhile, and he was so kind to me, I was grateful to him, and I didn’t hate him anymore, I loved him very much…”
She’d told Sano what he needed to know about her feelings toward Makino. “You said you knew Daiemon from parties. Were they parties at Rakuami’s club?”
“I don’t remember,” Okitsu said. She moaned while clutching her stomach.
“Was he a client that you entertained for Rakuami?”
“I don’t remember.”
Her favorite answer didn’t convince Sano, for he observed the blush that reddened the back of her neck above her kimono: Even Okitsu, who must have served many men at the club, hadn’t forgotten that she’d served Daiemon. “When was the last time you saw him?”
Okitsu moved her head from side to side, then up, then down, as if trying to catch thoughts that sped and jumbled in her mind. “It was-it was the night Senior Elder Makino died.”
“Think again,” Sano said. “Was it yesterday evening instead?” No.
“Where were you last night?”
“I was… with Koheiji.”
Her favorite alibi didn’t convince Sano either. “He went out alone. You left here after he did.”
“I was with him. I was!” Okitsu began sobbing.
“Did you meet Daiemon at the Sign of Bedazzlement?” Sano said. “Were you his mistress?”
“No!”
“Did you go to him there last night? Did you stab him to death?”
“I didn’t meet him! I didn’t kill anyone!”
A terrible stench of diarrhea arose: Okitsu’s bowels had moved. Ibe grimaced in disgust. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. He and Otani and their troops herded Sano and his men outside, where they gathered on the veranda. Hemmed in by his watchdogs, Sano stood at the railing. In the garden, the sand was pocked by raindrops, the boulders dark and slick with moisture. Distant war drums throbbed; distant gunshots cracked die cold air.
“The girl lied about seeing Daiemon the night of Makino’s death,” Ibe said. “Her alibis for both murders stink like fish ten days old.”
Sano agreed, but he said, “That doesn’t mean she’s guilty.” And he didn’t think she was. She seemed incapable of stabbing or beating a man to death-at least without help. Yet she could be the common factor in both murders, if indeed they were connected.
“Why else would she lie?” Otani said with disdain.
“To protect someone else,” Sano suggested. “To hide secrets that have nothing to do with the murders.”
“Well, as far as I’m concerned, she’s as good as guilty,” said Ibe, “and so is the widow.”
“Arrest one or the other,” said Otani.
“Choose now. Waste no more time,” Ibe said.
Sano didn’t budge, although he could feel the pressure of their wills against his and he envisioned Masahiro, tiny and helpless, surrounded by their thugs. “Not yet,” he said. “Not based on such flimsy evidence.”
Ibe expelled a curse. “You’ve got two women who hated Makino, had the opportunity to kill him, and gave unsatisfactory accounts of their actions on the nights of his murder and Daiemon’s. What more do you want?”
Sano wanted to assure himself that he wasn’t persecuting an innocent person, subverting justice, and compromising his honor, but he didn’t expect his watchdogs to have any sympathy for that. “At the very least, I must prove what the women were up to during the time when Daiemon was killed. That means tracing their whereabouts last night. Until I’ve done that, I’ll not arrest anyone.”
Ibe and Otani leaned over the railing and looked at each other across Sano. He discerned their reluctance to use the threat they held over him. Cowards both, they were as afraid of hurting Masahiro and provoking Sano’s wrath as Sano was of having his son harmed. A deadlock paralyzed everyone. In a lull of battle noises, Sano heard rain trickling down a drain spout.
Finally, the watchdogs exchanged nods, their expressions churlish. “All right,” Ibe told Sano. “You can trace the women’s whereabouts. But no dragging your feet.”
Sano felt little relief. Could he keep stalling his watchdogs until he solved the crimes-and before impatience forced them to make good on their threat?
In the meantime, war might destroy them all.
On a fallow rice field outside Edo, the two armies clashed. Matsudaira horsemen charged at mounted troops from the Yanagisawa faction. Banners marked with their leaders’ crests fluttered on poles worn on their backs. Hooves pounded the earth; lances skewered riders on both sides. Foot soldiers whirled and darted, their swords lashing their enemies. Gunners at the sidelines fired volleys of bullets. Arrows sizzled through clouds of gunpowder smoke. Men fell, amid howls of agony, in mud already strewn with corpses and darkened by bloodshed.
From the combatants rose savage cries of exultation as they shattered the peace that had stifled the warrior spirit during almost a century of Tokugawa rule. Atop high terrain at either end of the field, generals on horseback surveyed the action. They called to the commanders, who conveyed their orders to the troops via braying conch trumpets and thundering war drums. Soldiers charged, attacked, retreated, regrouped, and counterattacked. Scouts scanned the battlefield through spyglasses, counting casualties.
The victor would be the man who had a large enough army left after the battle to maintain himself in power over the regime.
At the Matsudaira estate, black mourning drapery festooned the portals. A notice of the clan’s bereavement hung on the gate. Inside a wooden tub in a chamber in the private quarters, the naked corpse of Daiemon reposed. Matsudaira womenfolk dressed in white poured water out of dippers filled from ceramic urns into the tub. They wept as they bathed Daiemon, washing away blood from the wound in his chest, tenderly wiping his handsome, lifeless face.
Lord Matsudaira squatted nearby, his head propped on his clenched fists. He wore battle armor, but his golden-horned helmet lay on the floor beside him. As the women prepared his nephew for the journey to the netherworld, grief tortured his spirit.
Someone knelt beside him, and he looked around to see Uemori Yoichi, his crony on the Council of Elders. Uemori was a short, squat man in his fifties, with sagging jowls. He said, “Please pardon my intrusion, but I thought you would want to hear the latest news from the battlefield.”
“Yes? What is it?” Lord Matsudaira said, momentarily distracted from his torment.
“Casualties are estimated at two hundred men,” Uemori said, “with more than half of them on Chamberlain Yanagisawa’s side.”
Grim satisfaction filled Lord Matsudaira. He rose and walked to the corpse of his nephew. The women had lifted Daiemon from the tub and laid him on a wooden pallet. As they dried his body with cloths and sobbed bitterly, Lord Matsudaira gazed down at Daiemon.