The Cloud Pavilion (31 page)

The walls, floor, ceiling, and windows of the cabin were padded with gray cloth. It glowed silver in the light from a metal lantern suspended from the ceiling. The cloth was ripped in many places, hanging in tatters. There Sano could see white cotton bulging behind the fabric.

He was in the pavilion of clouds.

This was the place where Chiyo had been raped, which she’d described to Reiko. The strange décor plus the drugs explained her memories. The cabin had been furnished to keep sounds from escaping. Sano let out his breath.

He heard someone else breathing fast and hard.

He wasn’t alone.

The veils of ripped cloth that dangled from the ceiling partially hid a bizarre tableau in the corner. A naked man with a shaved head lay on his stomach, his muscular legs splayed, arms and hands propping up his body, on a mattress on the floor. His face was turned toward Sano. He didn’t move, as if by remaining motionless he could remain unnoticed. His eyes gleamed with lust, silvery reflections, and fright.

It was Joju.

Under him was the nude, emaciated body of an old woman. She lay on her back, her head hidden by the cloth. Alongside her withered limbs and bony torso, a spread of ruddy color glowed, staining her pale, sagging skin crimson. At first Sano thought it was blood and Joju had murdered the shogun’s wife. His heart seized. Then she stirred and moaned. Sano saw that the color was Joju’s red brocade stole.

“Get up, Joju,” Sano said. “Put on your clothes. You’re under arrest.”

The exorcist slowly pushed himself upright. Sano could see him wondering how much trouble he was in and how to get out of it. His penis withdrew from between the old woman’s spread legs. It was limp and shriveled, dripping with semen and blood.

He’d finished the rape.

Sano was dismayed to realize that he’d arrived too late.

But not too late to catch Joju in the act.

Joju yanked his saffron robe out from beneath the woman, who moaned softly. She must have been sedated with the same drug used on Chiyo, Fumiko, and the nun. He pulled the robe over his head and said, “Why are you arresting me?” He’d recovered a semblance of his suave poise. “For having relations with an illegal prostitute?” He uttered a hollow imitation of his boisterous laugh. “That’s a minor offense. I’ll be let off with a fine. My reputation won’t even suffer with the people who matter. You might as well not waste your time.”

“I’m arresting you because you violated the shogun’s wife and you’re a party to her kidnapping. For that, you’ll be executed.” Sano glanced at the unconscious Lady Nobuko. Her breasts were flat pouches; her rib cage jutted beneath translucent skin laced with blue veins. White pubic hair barely covered her crotch. She looked pitiful and vulnerable. “Now get up.” Sano beckoned. “Step away from Lady Nobuko.”

Joju didn’t move. “You think this is the shogun’s wife?” He laughed again, louder. “Well, it isn’t.”

He pulled aside the dangling cloth that hid the woman’s head. Her hair was white, her face as soft and wrinkled as wadded rice paper. She must be in her seventies, much older than Lady Nobuko. The woman Gombei and Jinshichi had kidnapped was someone else. Surprise, disappointment, and confusion stunned Sano.

“Who is she?” he said.

“I don’t know. Who cares?”

“Where is Lady Nobuko?” Sano demanded.

“I’ve no idea,” Joju said.

If the two oxcart drivers hadn’t kidnapped her, then who had? What was happening to her at this moment? Sano had been so sure he would find Lady Nobuko here!

“Why don’t we just agree to call this a misunderstanding, and you let me go?” Joju said. “If you don’t tell anybody what you saw here, then I won’t tell the shogun that you persecuted me and flubbed the search for his wife.”

“How dare you try to bargain with me?” Sano’s consternation quickly turned to rage.

Joju had raped this woman, no matter that she wasn’t Lady Nobuko. And Sano had noticed the similarity between her and one of the previous victims. She was near the same age as the nun, and the unblemished whiteness of her skin indicated that she came from the same high class. Sano remembered his brief glimpse of Joju’s penis, now hidden beneath the saffron robe, and further enlightenment struck.

“The blood on you isn’t this woman’s,” Sano said. “It’s your own. You’re covered with running sores. It was you who raped the nun. You gave her your disease and drove her to suicide.”

The look on Joju’s face showed his downslide from confident expectancy into apprehension as Sano spoke. His guilt was as obvious as if words describing his crime had been inked on his face, and it was clear that he could tell that Sano had no intention of letting him go. He suddenly snatched at something under the red stole beside the old woman. It was a knife with a shiny steel blade and a black lacquer handle. Even as Sano rushed to grab it and lash his sword at Joju, the exorcist held the blade to the woman’s throat.

“Leave me alone, or I’ll kill her,” he said.

Sano froze, his sword still raised.

“Drop your weapon.” Joju’s voice and gaze were steady with determination. So was his hand holding the knife.

Sano let his sword fall. It landed noiselessly on the padded floor. Disarmed and immobilized, he cursed himself for underestimating Joju. He knew the exorcist was a fraud and a rapist, but hadn’t thought him capable of murder.

“Walk out the door and don’t come back,” Joju said.

The boat rocked; the door slid open. In came the sounds of feet pounding the deck and blades clashing. Sano heard Marume shout, “Take that!” The detectives must have climbed aboard the boat. Thuds shook the cabin’s wall as bodies bumped it. Sano realized that when Chiyo had been imprisoned in the cabin, the door must have opened long enough for her to hear the rain and thunder outside. Then the boat rocked again and the door slid shut, sealing Sano and Joju in eerie quiet once more.

“Be sure to take your men with you,” Joju said.

This was a situation that Sano had faced too many times before: A criminal held an innocent person hostage in a ploy to gain his freedom. Counterstrategies that Sano had used in the past raced through his mind, but he couldn’t gamble that old ideas would work again.

“Very well,” Sano said, thinking fast. He couldn’t let the woman die even if she wasn’t the shogun’s wife. Inspiration arose from his experience with Joju. He backed toward the door, then paused, his chin lifted and his eyes alert, as if at a sudden sound. “Did you hear that?”

Jirocho didn’t speak the words that would spare Nanbu and save Fumiko. Reiko saw her face briefly sag with disappointment, then transform into a murderous scowl. Fumiko wrenched her body forward. Her sudden movement swayed Nanbu off balance. She thrust her fist backward, between his widespread legs. At the same moment Jirocho raised his hand; he started to speak. Nanbu uttered a bellow of agony. He dropped his sword, let go of Fumiko, and staggered. He sank to his knees, clutching his groin.

“What—?” Jirocho said, his hand still raised, the words he’d meant to speak forgotten. Everyone else stared at Fumiko.

She stood over Nanbu, her face a picture of grim triumph. She held a knife that she’d kept hidden under her sleeve. Reiko gazed at her in awe. Her pose brought to mind a samurai who’d slain his worst enemy in battle. Perhaps Jirocho would have given in to Nanbu, but he hadn’t acted soon enough, so Fumiko had taken matters into her own hands.

Blood pumped from the wound she’d inflicted on Nanbu. He roared, a sound as fierce and inhuman as the din of barking and howling that the dogs now commenced. He pressed his hands to the wound, but the blood spilled over them. As his men rushed to help him, he toppled and fell.

Reiko had seen death too many times before. She saw it coming now, in the blankness that obliterated the terror and pain on Nanbu’s face, in the inertia that gradually stilled his body. His men saw it, too. Before his last tremors ceased, the cry burst from them: “Avenge our master’s death!”

They rushed at Fumiko. This time Jirocho didn’t hesitate. “Save my daughter!” he shouted.

His gang fought Nanbu’s men and dogs. Fumiko watched her father pick up a club and deliver merciless blows to the enemy troops around her. Her eyes brimmed with adoration. Reiko saw only seven or eight of Nanbu’s men left, and only four dogs; the gangsters had killed the rest. Someone bumped into her. It was Ogita, desperately trying to thread his way through the battle, out of the cemetery. He was alone; his guards had died. He collided with grave posts as he neared the gate.

Chiyo stepped in front of it.

“Get out of my way!” he shouted.

She didn’t move even though her expression was filled with terror. Reiko couldn’t let her friend face Ogita alone. Leaving the gang to defend Fumiko, she ran to Chiyo.

“Who are you?” Ogita was saying.

Chiyo didn’t seem to notice Reiko standing by her side. She frowned in dismay and puzzlement as she beheld Ogita. “Don’t you know?”

“If we’ve met before, I don’t remember, I’m sorry,” Ogita said impatiently. “Now please move.”

“You had me kidnapped. You—you had relations with me while I was drugged.” Chiyo’s voice shook. “And you don’t even remember me?”

Ogita narrowed his eyes, took another look at Chiyo. Recognition dawned. “Oh. Yes.” A lascivious smile crept across his face. “It’s a pleasure to see you again. But I’m in a bit of a hurry, so if you don’t mind—”

“I do mind.” Chiyo was so pale that Reiko feared she would faint, but she bravely stood her ground. “You will not leave until you explain to me why you did it.”

“Enough of this nonsense.” Ogita lifted his hand, perhaps to push Chiyo out of his way, perhaps to strike her down.

Chiyo snatched the dagger from Reiko. She brandished it at Ogita and cried, “Don’t you touch me!”

Reiko was as amazed as Ogita looked. Never had she thought Chiyo would have the courage to confront her rapist, let alone threaten him. But she came from the same clan as Sano. The same samurai blood ran in her veins.

Ogita recoiled, his gaze darting between Chiyo’s tense, white face to the weapon in her hand, caught between her and the battle that still raged on. “All right, if you must know: I did it because I wanted to. And because I could.” He smiled at her shocked expression. “Are you satisfied?”

Such fury blazed in her normally mild eyes that Reiko almost didn’t recognize her. Her lips moved, but she could find no words to convey her offense at Ogita’s callousness.

“No?” Ogita laughed mockingly. “Well, maybe once wasn’t enough for you. Would you like to do it again sometime?”

Reiko gasped in indignation. Chiyo flinched as if Ogita had slapped her and said, “Because of what you did to me, I’ve lost everything.” The dagger trembled in her hands. “My children, my husband, and my honor.” Tears glistened in her angry eyes. “And you think it’s a joke.”

“I don’t if you don’t,” Ogita said patronizingly. “I’m sorry if you’re upset, but it’s water under the bridge, so let’s just forget about it, all right?” He extended his hand to her, waggled his fingers, and said, “Give me that dagger.”

Chiyo hesitated. Reiko saw her habit of obeying men weaken her desire to stand up to Ogita. Then she gulped a deep, quick breath, as if she’d jumped off a cliff over the ocean and had to fill her lungs before she hit the water. She swiped at Ogita with all her might. The motion sent him skipping backward and her spinning in a clumsy circle. Ogita chuckled half in shock, half in amusement.

“So you want to play rough?” he said. “Normally, I like a woman with a little fight in her, but I’ve got to go.”

He veered around Chiyo toward the gate. She stumbled in front of him, awkwardly swinging the dagger, totally untrained in combat. Reiko watched in amazement as Chiyo’s determination made up for lack of experience. Chiyo chased Ogita straight into the battle. He ran sideways, trying to keep an eye on her and the fighters. Reiko ran after them and grabbed a sword from a dead samurai. How she regretted talking so much about justice! Chiyo had taken Reiko’s words to heart. She displayed the recklessness of a warrior on a suicide mission. She seemed oblivious to the swords and spears slicing the air around her. Her desire for revenge on Ogita might get her killed.

Perhaps she wanted death as much as revenge.

Would that Reiko could save her from herself!

Ogita tripped over a bloody corpse. It was Nanbu’s. Ogita fell. He sprawled on his stomach over Nanbu. He tried to get up, but the blood was slippery, and he fell again.

Chiyo advanced on him, the dagger raised high. The change that came over her was so startling that Reiko froze in her tracks. Her face was as serene and as hard as a stone Buddha’s. Ogita looked up at her over his shoulder as he struggled to rise. All the terror he’d caused her in the pavilion of clouds now glazed his eyes. He opened his mouth to protest, or beg.

Chiyo slashed the dagger down. The blade cleaved deep into Ogita’s back. Uttering a pitiful croak, he stiffened. He went limp as he died, lying across Nanbu, his conspirator in sinful crimes.

The unnatural serenity deserted Chiyo. Her face crumpled; she sank to her knees beside Ogita and Nanbu; she began to sob. Reiko moved to console her, but Fumiko came running, cut in front of Reiko, and threw her arms around Chiyo.

“Don’t cry,” Fumiko said. “They were bad men. They deserved to die.”

Now Reiko saw that the battle was over. Nanbu’s men and dogs all lay lifeless amid the graves. Only Jirocho and some ten gangsters, and Lieutenant Tanuma and Reiko’s other guards remained standing. They were disheveled, bruised, and bloody. In the smoke from the crematoriums and the dropped lanterns whose flames smoldered in the weeds, they looked like survivors of some dreadful catastrophe.

Chiyo wept as though purging all the emotion from her spirit. Reiko felt tears of release sting her own eyes. Jirocho left his gang, walked slowly over to Fumiko, and laid his hand on her hair. He swallowed hard and blinked.

“Don’t cry,” Fumiko said as she began to sob herself. “It’s all right.”

“Hear what?” Joju frowned, impatient and threatening, his blade firm against the old woman’s throat.

“There’s somebody here in this room with us,” Sano said.

“There’s only you and me and her, and you’ll be gone soon,” Joju retorted.

Sano gazed around the cabin, lifting his hand, feeling the air. “It’s somebody from the spirit world.”

Contempt twisted the priest’s mouth. “Don’t try that on me. I’m the expert at all the tricks. You’re just an amateur.”

“ ‘We all have the power to communicate with the spirit world.’ ” Sano quoted the words Joju had spoken to him during their first meeting.

“But only a few of us know how. You’re forgetting the rest of what I said.”

“I seem to have become one of the few,” Sano said, “and I don’t need music or fireworks to hear the spirit. She says she wants to talk to you.”

“You’re stalling.” Joju held the knife firmly against the blue vein visible in the woman’s neck. “Get out.”

“I’m getting a name,” Sano said. “It sounds like . . .” He paused, straining the muscles of his face, concentrating hard. “Okitsu.”

“I don’t know anyone by that name.” But Joju looked as shocked as the moneylender he’d bilked. He obviously remembered Okitsu, the beggar woman Sano had met outside the temple.

“She was once possessed by evil spirits who told her that people were out to get her,” Sano said. “Her parents brought her to you. You performed an exorcism on her.”

“How—?”

“How did I know? She just told me.” Sano cocked his head, pretended to listen. “She says you raped her and got her pregnant.”

Joju beheld Sano with the fearful wonder of a pilgrim hearing a Buddha statue at a woodland shrine tell guilty secrets he thought nobody knew.

Sano gambled that Joju hadn’t bothered to find out what had happened to Okitsu afterward. “She died giving birth.”

“No,” Joju whispered. He evidently didn’t know that Okitsu was still alive and begging outside his temple.

Sano remembered something else Joju had said:
People want to believe in what I do.
He realized that Joju himself believed, and he was as vulnerable to manipulation by false mediums and spirits as his own clients were.

“What does she want?” Joju said reluctantly, unable to help himself. Sano’s knowledge of his past had convinced him that the spirit was real.

“There’s another spirit with Okitsu,” Sano said. “She wants you to meet him.”

“Who . . . ?”

“It’s her son.” Sano paused a beat. “
Your
son.”

“I never had any son.” Joju’s words were less a denial than a plea for Sano to assure him that they were true.

“Now you know better,” Sano said. “He doesn’t have a name because he died while Okitsu was having him. She says she’s been wandering between the world of the living and the world of the dead, carrying him in her arms. She wants to show him to his father. Here he is.”

Sano gestured at the empty air near the bed. Joju’s stricken gaze moved to the spot Sano indicated. Sano blew on the cloth that hung from the ceiling over the spot. The cloth fluttered. The flame in the lantern wavered. Joju gasped. Sano could almost see the vision the priest saw—a ghostly woman holding out a baby. The hairs rose on Sano’s own neck. The power of suggestion was potent indeed.

“I don’t want him,” Joju said weakly to the ghost. “Leave me alone.”

“She’s angry at you for what you did,” Sano said. “You caused her and the baby to suffer and die. You doomed them never to find peace. And now that she’s found you, she wants revenge.”

Joju shuddered as he recoiled from the ghostly mother and child. “Please. Go away,” he whispered.

His hand that held the knife trembled. He seemed to have forgotten the old woman was there, but one slip of the knife could kill her. Sano felt an increasing pressure to gain control of Joju, fast.

“Okitsu says she’s putting a curse on you,” Sano said. “Misfortune will follow you wherever you go. The shogun will turn against you. You’ll lose your temple, your money, and your reputation. You’ll become a pariah begging in the streets. You’ll get every disease known to man. Everybody will shun you. You’ll suffer terribly.”

Joju glared at Sano as if Sano were responsible for the sins he’d committed, the ills he’d brought upon himself. “Make her stop! Make them go away!”

“I can’t,” Sano said. “I’m not an exorcist. All I can do is act as a mediator between you and Okitsu.”

“Then do it!” Panic agitated Joju.

Sano addressed the ghost he’d conjured up. “How can Joju make amends for what he did? What must he do in order for you to lift your curse and cross into the spirit world?”

He pretended to listen. He forced himself to wait and let the suspense build, while Joju watched him with the helpless faith of a drowning man clinging to a rescuer’s hand. At last Sano said, “Okitsu says you must confess your sins.”

“All right!” Joju cried. “I took advantage of her. I got her with child. It’s my fault they died!”

“She says that’s not enough. You have to confess all your sins.” Sano asked, “Did you rape the nun?”

Joju hesitated, clearly aware that Sano had led him onto ground where he must dig his own grave. But his fear of the future Sano had painted overcame caution. With a groan, he sank in his shovel. “Yes.”

At long last Sano had the admission of guilt that he wanted, but he couldn’t stop there. “Okitsu still isn’t satisfied. She says that if you hurt that old woman, she’ll never forgive you. When you die, she’ll lay claim to your soul. You and Okitsu and your child will wander in the netherworld together for all eternity.”