He sighed softly, the way he’d done so many times in the past when she’d performed in an extraordinary way. Could it be that he was proud of her? She beamed, thinking she’d done well. A lock of hair had come loose from a lacquer comb and fallen across her eyes during her aerobatics. She pushed it back, not wanting him to see her unkempt.
Suddenly dizzy, she held the Beretta in one hand and attempted to steady herself with the other. She winced when her palm touched the table. It burned as if on fire.
Oda stooped to pick up the polished sheath and slid the blade in before setting it gently on the table in front of her. He stepped away and methodically began to put on his clothes.
Shimoyama swayed, feeling a white heat crawl up her arms. The heat turned to unbearable pain as it moved past her elbows as if she was being attacked by a swarm of wasps. Her mouth hung open, too confused to even scream.
“What… is… happening?” Her words came in breathy gasps.
Oda fastened the buttons of his starched white shirt one by one, head tilted, eyes now glued to her.
“None of this is actually your fault, you know.” He looped a red necktie around his upturned collar. “I do not blame you for Jericho Quinn.”
The Beretta fell from Shimoyama’s hand, thudding to the wooden floor. Red blisters bulged with fluid on her palms wherever she had touched the pistol — as if she’d been branded. He’d put something on the grips before she’d arrived, then driven her to pick it up with the threat of her own sword.
“I… I…” The pain enveloped her shoulders. Tendons in her neck tightened and cramped like steel cables, jerking open her jaw. An enormous pressure began to build in her chest. It seemed her heart would break out of her ribs.
“It is a form of fungus.” Oda smiled as he continued to dress. “A mycotoxin — grown from bat guano I think — but somewhat similar to the Yellow Rain used in Laos. My friends have been able to make this even more potent. A lethal dose can be absorbed through minimal skin contact. Can you imagine the uses for such an incredible poison?”
“You cared for me once…” Shimoyama pitched forward, destroying the harmony of her ivory pen and papers. Cheek pressed against the open pages of her journal, she blinked up at him. “If I am not to blame… why do this to me?”
“I needed to conduct a test, my darling.” Oda pulled the silk tie snug against his collar and shrugged. “And, because you remind me that I am growing old.”
He took his coat from the kitchen chair and disappeared down the stairs without looking back.
Shimoyama felt her throat constrict, like a sob she couldn’t quite finish or control. Unable to move her head from where it lay against the book, she flailed with her right hand, the only part of her that she still felt under her will. Searching blindly, her fingers brushed the cell phone. She gritted her teeth through the acid pain and punched in a number by feel alone — a number that she had not called for a very long time. A trembling finger pressed SEND.
Her heart raced wildly, out of control. Her body tensed, racked with spasms that felt as though they would break her back. A moment later, she fell slack, splayed across the table, completely still. A drop of blood trickled from her nose, creasing the white powder of her cheek to fall with a tiny plop against the pages of the open book.
CHAPTER 56
Each week, with few exceptions, the tattooed woman had at least one new wound. The newest one, a thin scar that ran in a diagonal line from the base of her perfect chin through her lower lip, was just one of many.
Goro had seen them all.
The wound that caused it had bisected her pouting lower lip, leaving it almost, but not quite, aligned. Much like the woman’s soul, Goro thought. It had likely been caused by a sword. He had seen many such wounds tattooing young yakuza soldiers. They grew too familiar with the blade of their forefathers and hit something that sent the weapon bouncing back to bite them. To some, the scars were disfiguring. The woman’s only added a dangerous layer to her beauty.
Some of her wounds were tiny nicks on her otherwise perfect skin. Others were deeper and should have been stitched — but they rarely were. Some were in places that must have been excruciatingly painful, the sort of injury that went well beyond physical wounds.
The stooped old man known as Horiguchi Goro III peered at the young woman’s hip through thick glasses. He sat cross-legged on a flat cushion, leaning over her body in rapt, Zen-like concentration.
Goro was small and bent, with the tiniest wisp of a mustache that was white as an egret feather. Horiguchi had not been his name at birth, but it had been his master’s name, and the master of his master before that. After years of apprenticeship, he was able to take the name himself.
Goro’s thumb and forefinger of his left hand stretched the almost translucent flesh just below the fall of the waist where the body rose again over the wing of the pelvis. The skin was close to the bone here, thin, with little muscle and full of nerves. It was an extremely painful area of the body in which to receive a traditional tattoo, but the woman remained motionless. Their sessions lasted for two hours with Goro piercing her tender skin over and over again with the bundled needles. Never, in the five years since he’d started her tattoo, had the woman flinched or even made a sound.
Goro had placed a small white towel over the young woman’s nakedness. She didn’t care to bother with it, content to lay back on the tatami mats staring up at the ceiling, completely nude while he worked.
He supposed that since he was an old man, she believed him to be immune to such things, but a man too old to be affected by this would be a dead man indeed. She was exceptional in her beauty, and the intricacies of her tattoo required a depth of concentration such a full and inviting vision would not allow. So he covered her when he could, and when he could not because of the tattoo’s location, he thought of each little inch of skin as if it were not connected to any other part of this lovely creature. Had he done otherwise, he was certain she would have killed him.
The traditional Japanese art of hand tattooing was known as tebori—from te, meaning hand, and hori, meaning to carve. In his left hand, Goro held the bamboo tebori stick, twenty centimeters long and roughly the diameter of a wooden pencil. At the end of this stick he had tied a bundle of seven stainless-steel needles in which to hold the ink. They were fanned slightly so the middle three points stuck out a tiny bit farther than the two on either side.
Resting the bamboo tebori over his left thumb, the tattoo master held it with his right hand like a small pool cue, controlling the application by angling the needles this way and that as he inserted them over and over with expert precision. After every centimeter of work, he dipped them again in black ink, a mixture of soot and cooking oil. Lost in the artistic moment, he worked the rich tint under the skin. It did not portray, as much as it became, the gnarled black branches of a blossom-laden cherry tree, snaking down the young woman’s ribs and over the flare of her hip.
His method was the same, whether he was shading a broad area or drawing a thin line — dipping the bundle of needles in thick black ink, working a centimeter of the design, then dipping again. He used a cotton cloth to wipe the flesh free of ink and blood every few seconds so he could check his work.
The needles whispered softly as they always did when he found his rhythm, piercing and pulling out of the skin with a soft sha, sha, sha, sha.
Goro knew that to be a great tattoo artist one not only had to possess an artistic heart, but a deep knowledge of the canvas where that art appeared — the human body. He had been tattooing for nearly forty years and had the nasty black practice scars on his thighs and ankles to prove it. He was very good at what he did, known for allowing the subject’s skin to dictate the form and flow of the design.