Dreaming Spies (24 page)

Incredulity slowly dawned. I looked from daughter to father. “You do not intend for Darley to walk away from this!”

“His Highness would find the memory … unpleasant,” Sato-san replied.

My eyes sought out Holmes. He looked almost as troubled as I felt. It was one thing to detest a blackmailer, but to condone cold-blooded murder …

“We will find an alternative,” he said in the end, his voice tight.

Sato-san excused himself shortly after that, limping away to join the Prince Regent while Haruki-san supervised the conversion of dining room into bedroom. We walked down the hall to the communal facilities
and brushed our teeth, then down the outdoor walkway to visit the benjo. We succeeded in changing our footwear the correct number of times, and stepped back into our quarters without hearing the suck of embarrassed breath that came when one of the maids was witness to some major faux pas.

Holmes and I settled beneath the bedclothes, and blew out the lamp. After a time, I became aware of a play of light on the roof, a stone lamp reflecting off one of the garden pools. I could hear voices, too: once, the laughter of Haruki-san’s father. Later, a different voice raised in anger, followed by a slamming screen and footsteps in the courtyard.

Holmes was not asleep, no more than I was. “How much of today’s talk are we to believe?” I asked.

“Rather a lot of it, I should think.”

“But not all.”

“Verisimilitude may be woven from lies.”

“So what if we just say we’re not going to help them?” I said.

“Do you want to refuse?” Holmes asked in surprise.

“Not necessarily. But one can’t help thinking that Westerners who are privy to a dangerous secret are not in the most secure of positions.”

“You think Sato-san would pull out his sword and behead us if we turned him down?”

“I think he could. Don’t you?”

“I know he could.”

“Reassuring.”

“My dear Russell, our host is not about to leap in and murder us before we’ve had a chance to refuse him.”

And with that, Holmes turned on his side and was soon snoring.

Sleep took somewhat longer, for me.

The next morning, His Highness left the village, climbing into a gleaming Rolls Royce that I would have thought too large for the roads. His guards closed in around the frail, stooped figure with the dark suit and
the mask of obedience. The entire staff of the inn lined up in deep obeisance, including the inn’s two English visitors, but His Highness walked past as if we were not there. He seemed oblivious of anything but his motor—or, was his neck stiffer than it had been, his lack of a parting glance deliberate? Had last night’s angry voice been his?

When the sounds of the engine had faded to nothing, Sato-san eased back onto his heels; with the sound of a breeze through standing wheat, the others rose to scatter in all directions. Haruki-san put her hand on his arm, but the innkeeper shrugged her off, turning his dark gaze on Holmes and me. The previous night’s good cheer was gone: the man appeared to be aching, although whether the pain was from his back or from drink, I could not have said.

“The time has come, for me to ask.”

“We will help you,” said Holmes.

“Why?”

Holmes raised an eyebrow. “Do you need to know why?”

“A man must understand the tool in his hand, before he trusts it not to break.”

Holmes nodded, not in the least offended at being compared to a tool. “I am sure your Emperor and his Prince Regent are fine men; however, I have less interest in helping them than I do in stopping a wicked man.”

“So you do not see this ransom as mere business?” Sato-san asked. “Until we are certain that Lord Darley is unaware of the book’s hidden contents, we need to regard this as extortion. Blackmail, not merely fencing stolen goods. The earl has a history of blackmail, and to my mind, there is nothing more evil. Such a man preys on the vulnerable. He turns morality back on itself. To rid the world of one such, I will take your case.” Our host’s eyes shifted to follow a small naked child, wandering down the road in pursuit of a chicken. Then he stood—allowing us to follow his example, to my relief. “My daughter tells me that you understand honour. This has not always been my experience with outsiders.”

“The English gentleman’s code of conduct is little different from bushido,” Holmes replied.

“Although in all fairness,” I pointed out, “one can’t assume that all Englishmen are gentlemen.”

“Granted,” Holmes said. “But in this case, Russell and I understand the duties one has to a client.”

I clarified: “We will do all that we can for your Emperor.”

“Would you die for him?”

Holmes answered this one. “We’d prefer not to. However, that is a part of one’s commitment to a client.”

“Would you make a fool of yourself?”

Holmes laughed. “It would not be the first time.”

Haruki-san spoke up. “Would you kill?”

Three sets of eyes converged on me, but when it came to that question, I was far from untried. “
My
hand will not hesitate. What about yours?”

I might have touched a live wire to the young woman. Her chin snapped up, her face went dark, but her father merely looked amused.

“There comes a time to test one’s tool,” he said. “That time is now.” He added something to Haruki-san, and walked off.

“Come,” she told us.

We had seen something of the village the previous afternoon, since the onsen was at the northern end of it. It was busier now, either because it was earlier in the day or because it was drier. Businesses lined the road, with greengrocers’ displays of the familiar and the unknown, shops with pots, shops with rolls of bright fabric, shops with farm implements. The women’s clothing was more subdued than in the city, and fewer men wore Western dress, although even here, a number of them had bowler hat and brogues above and below their traditional garb.

The village shrine lay on a narrow street behind the main thoroughfare, a small, simple wooden structure that appeared to have grown from the earth. In typical Japanese fashion, it was an easygoing composite of Shinto and Buddhist, with a
torii
gate rather in need of paint, an upright slab of mossy granite carved with flowing characters, and half a dozen statues of local kami spirits and Buddhas in the lotus position.

Next door to the shrine stood a wooden building that might have been built at the same time, although it was considerably larger and lacked the statues. The wooden doors along its deep verandas were drawn shut, but for one. A curious glance revealed a simple rectangular expanse of rather worn tatami with no inner walls.

I recognised it, although I had not until that moment realised how pale an imitation my one in Oxford was. “This is a
dojo
,” I said.

“Jujitsu and karate are national sports,” Haruki-san said. Two sports she had claimed, back on the
Thomas Carlyle
, to know nothing about.

Was this Sato-san’s idea of testing each other’s mettle? Well, there’s nothing like throwing a person around to cement a friendship.

Haruki-san led us past the structure to a smaller building at the back. This one was far more heavily built than the usual Japanese posts and beams. Its walls were of closely fitted stone and its door was on hinges, rather than sliding. It had one of the few locks I’d seen in the country. She drew a key from the sleeve of her kimono and worked the mechanism. We followed her inside.

High, narrow windows revealed a storage room with stone floors, wooden cabinets covering two of the walls. The third wall was hung all over with weapons: spears, axes, vicious little sickles, maces with barbed ends. The wall on either side of the door seemed to be draped with body parts—which, on closer examination, became sections of armour, from chain mail waistcoats to heavy leather arm protectors.

Haruki-san started pulling open the armoury’s cabinets, revealing yet more objects of mayhem: wood, steel, bamboo, leather; small to massive; dull to bright. Some of them were chained together.

I stood gazing down at a drawer filled with flat metal stars possessing from three to six points, each of which resembled a double-sided razor. I had handled
shuriken
—gingerly—in my Oxford dojo, but there was no way to sheathe them, and throwing them always seemed to me a great way to lose a finger, if not a hand.

My contemplation was interrupted by a voice from the door. One of the inn’s maids knelt there with an armful of dark blue clothing, very like the pyjamas Haruki-san had worn on the night we caught her walking
the ship’s Marconi wire. On top were tabi of the same cloth, large enough for Western feet. She bowed, separated the clothes into two piles, bowed again, and left.

Haruki-san finished opening the cabinets, bowed, and went to the door.

“You have six minutes to choose your weapons and change your clothing. When you hear the knock, enter the dojo through the door directly in front of you.” She pointed towards a slid-back panel at the large room’s corner. “Your task is to walk out the door at the front.”

I narrowed my eyes at her voice, which had become a little too eager, a bit too pleased with herself. She intended to make me pay for questioning her commitment to death. Would she kill? I could hope she didn’t decide to demonstrate her capabilities on me.

She paused at an odd contraption I had dismissed as a kind of Oriental decoration: a length of heavy bamboo in a frame, suspended over a wooden bucket of sand. She filled a scoop with the sand, levelling it off precisely before she poured it into the open end of the bamboo tube. When she let it go, it sank on its hinge. A dribble of sand began to leak out.

When it was empty, the length would tip and knock against a crossbar.

“Six minutes.” She bowed, and walked away.

I looked at the trickle of sand. I could always just block the hole …

No, that was an unworthy thought for an English gentlewoman. Strictly speaking I was neither—but the shoes were mine to step into.

Or, the tabi. I turned to the clothing. The morning being chill and most of my wardrobe in a hotel storage room in faraway Tokyo, I had dressed by putting on a yukata over my own trousers and shirt. And really, the blue outfit the maid had given us would not be any more invisible in a dim room than my own black trousers and dark green woollen pullover. I merely replaced my white tabi with the navy blue ones, and let it go at that.

Holmes had traded his white shirt for the dark blue tunic, and was
now buttoning on his own tabi. “Holmes, what does a fight to the death have to do with retrieving an old book?”

“I shouldn’t think anyone will die,” he said.

“No, just blood loss and brisk amputations.”

“Some of the armour may fit you.”

I was tempted by the massive leather breastplate with the raised neck, but I imagined it might be difficult to move in it.

“What about you?” I asked.

He bent over a metal hoop set into the wall and started pawing through the sticks it contained, like a restaurant-goer in search of his umbrella. When he found one he liked, he drew it out, practising its weight with a few jabs and swishes. His preferred weapon was a singlestick; lacking that, a riding crop. My own favourite weapon was strapped to my ankle.

I looked at him. “Holmes, are we honestly about to go up against two trained assassins in a dark building?”

“Just think of it as an examination for your
practicum
.”

“A comforting thought when I lie on the floor with a broken leg.”

“Remember: they do not know us. To them we are merely outsiders, with few skills and little experience.”

“So, you propose that we take them by surprise.” It didn’t seem to me much of a plan, but when he looked over his shoulder at me, he was grinning.

“My dear Russell, whyever not?”

I laughed. “All right, but you may need to summon a cup of English tea to bring me out of my concussion.”

We chose a few bits from the cabinets, then crept from the armoury and across the mossy earth to the dojo’s veranda. Like all such, it was sturdy and made not a creak as we eased our weight onto its boards. The sun was on the other side, so our shadows were not a concern. We took up positions on both sides of the dark opening.

I closed my eyes, so as to let my pupils expand as much as possible, and strained my ears as if I might hear the waning dribble of grains of
sand through the bamboo timer. As we waited, I sought to reach that state of relaxed tension that prepares a body for sudden demands. I listened to my breath, I felt the cold spring air against my face …

The device gave an almost imperceptible pause of sound, then a hollow
clok
. Before the echoes died, we dove through the door, flinging aside the noisy clacking sticks we had brought as distraction and sprinting across the tatami towards the opposite corner.

We might have made it, had the building been as we had seen it. In the interim, the open space had gained a pair of shoji half-walls, effectively converting a clear room into an arena designed to confuse strangers and conceal defenders. The space was further cluttered by some odd tangle of machinery hanging from the beams and a large trunk. I dodged to my right, loath to dive through a paper wall into some unseen threat—and from behind the wall burst Haruki-san, sword raised.

She was incredibly fast; the sword slashed down while she was still mid-air. Had it been steel, I would have lost a hand—even a solid wood practise sword might have cracked bones. But it was a bamboo, and merely left me with numb fingers.

I jabbed her with my own weapon, a stick much like Holmes’. My superior reach forced her back a few steps, while I tried to think as fast as she moved.

For all the Satos had known, Holmes and I would enter the arena bristling with razor-sharp steel. That they had chosen bamboo for defence meant—

My attempt at reasoning was cut off by her instantaneous recovery and advance. Armed only with a flexible stick, her reach a foot shorter than mine, she nonetheless managed to deliver two brutal blows to my torso before I fought her off. There followed a blur of attack and counterattack that seemed to last far longer than the few seconds of actual clock-time. I was relieved to see, when we both backed off a step, that she was panting as hard as I.