“Perhaps you would make a few inquiries for me?” He regarded her with somber caution.
The last thing Reiko had expected was for Sano to ask for her help, and glad surprise stunned her. But contradictory emotions forestalled the agreement she longed to give him. She wanted to restore the partnership that had been a cornerstone of their marriage, but she was terrified that she would make a mistake and cause Sano more trouble.
Now she saw disappointment, and guilt, in Sano’s eyes. Averting his gaze, he stacked empty dishes on his tray. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t involve you in this bad business. After what happened to you at the Black Lotus Temple, I won’t blame you if you want to give up detecting for good.”
He thought the experience had scared her off detective work, Reiko realized. He thought her a coward! Anxious to correct his misperception, Reiko said, “I’m not afraid of what will happen to me. I’m afraid of what I might do!”
As Reiko poured out her fears and explanations, Sano saw how much their reticence had hidden from each other. They’d sworn to put the Black Lotus case behind them, but Reiko hadn’t been able to do so any better than he had. Self-recrimination had eroded her spirit, and though she protested that danger didn’t scare her, Sano believed that facing death at the temple had undermined his wife’s valiant courage.
She abruptly fell silent, her head bowed in shame and anguish. Compassion toward her filled Sano.
“You need to make a fresh start,” he said. “This investigation will give you the opportunity.”
Reiko lifted her face to him, and he saw trepidation as well as hope in her eyes. “But I interfered with your investigation into the Black Lotus murders,” she said. “I disobeyed you. I opposed you in public. Can you really forgive me enough to work together again?”
“I said I did, and I meant it.” Sano trusted that her mistakes had taught Reiko a valuable lesson. What she needed was to go on from there. “Besides, if things had been the other way around, and I had made mistakes that upset you, I would want another chance.”
A sigh issued from Reiko. She stood, and Sano could see yearning in her face, and apprehension like chains shackling her body.
“Women often know more about what goes on in Edo than do men,” Sano said, “and you can get facts from them better than I can. Now that the shogun has forbidden me to interview the family and associates of Lord Mitsuyoshi, I need a discreet way to learn what enemies he had and what might have provoked his murder.” Sano coaxed, “If you want to be a detective, you have to start again sometime. Please take the chance now, when I need you most.”
“I suppose I could try.” Eagerness vibrated beneath Reiko’s tentative words. “Tomorrow I’ll begin asking questions. Maybe I can also discover what became of Lady Wisteria. I know women who follow the Yoshiwara gossip, and they may have ideas where she could be.”
The conversation suddenly became a landscape of perilous chasms around Sano. He’d never told Reiko about his affair with Lady Wisteria. He assumed that Reiko assumed he’d had lovers before her, because men enjoyed the freedom to satisfy their desires at will. However, he and Reiko had a tacit agreement never to discuss the women in his past, because they liked to believe they were kindred spirits bonded in exclusive togetherness. And although Sano didn’t think an affair that predated their marriage should matter, he worried about how Reiko would feel if she learned about him and Wisteria at a time when their union was troubled. If he said he’d freed Wisteria, his wife might think there’d been more to the affair than just a few nights of sex. Furthermore, honesty was integral to their relationship, and keeping a secret from Reiko bothered him.
Reiko shimmered with an exuberance she couldn’t suppress. “What is known about Lady Wisteria? Have you any information on what kind of person she is, or about her past, that might help us find her?”
Sano couldn’t tell Reiko that he’d personally known Wisteria, because she would wonder why he hadn’t mentioned it sooner, and might guess the reason. Now he had second thoughts about involving Reiko in the case. He got to his feet, stalling while he thought what to say.
“Wisteria came from Dewa Province,” he said, remembering what Wisteria herself had told him, on their first night together. “Her father was a farmer who sold her to a brothel procurer because his crops failed and he couldn’t support all his children.”
These were facts he could have learned in Yoshiwara today, and Reiko seemed so absorbed in the case that she didn’t notice his agitation. “Then Wisteria probably has no family in Edo,” she said, “but since she’s a popular tayu, her business must be the subject of much talk. I’m sure I’ll find someone who can tell me about her.”
Reiko embraced Sano with an ardor typical of happier days. “I’ll help you solve this case, and things will be as they were before.”
Sano held his wife, hoping that their bad experience on the Black Lotus case wouldn’t repeat itself, and Reiko need never learn more about Wisteria than would benefit the investigation.
6
Unbroken snow covered the empty streets of Edo. Shutters sealed the windows and storefronts of buildings. Stray dogs cowered in alleys, where puddles glazed to ice as the night’s cold deepened. On the banks of canals, itinerant beggars slumbered beside smoldering bonfires. Starlight shimmered along the black curve of the Sumida River, and boats moored at wharves stood as if frozen. Night had paralyzed most of the city, but in certain areas of the Nihonbashi merchant district, life flourished most busily after dark.
A ramshackle building situated between a public bathhouse and a noodle stand housed a nameless gambling den. Inside sat peasants and samurai, gangsters with arms and chests covered by tattoos, and even a few priests in saffron robes. They dealt, shuffled, and flung down cards. Shouts and laughter accompanied the games. Piles of coins shifted, while slovenly maids served sake. Tobacco smoke from the gamblers’ pipes filled the room with an acrid haze that wreathed the ceiling lanterns.
Beyond a curtained doorway, in the dim back room of the gambling den, Lady Wisteria sat on a straw mattress. Her head was wrapped in a blue kerchief, and her lovely eyes gleamed with anxiety in the light that shone through the curtain. She shivered beneath her cloak as she listened to the clink of coins and the men’s raucous voices. Whenever arguments and curses erupted, she winced. Her fearful gaze roved the bare rafters, the sake urns that lined the walls, and the barred window.
A day had passed since Wisteria had left Yoshiwara, and she’d traded one prison for another. This pause between her old life and new seemed almost harder to bear than had the prospect of years in the brothel. Impatience unfurled in her like a growing thistle plant. Her solitude frightened her, and she puckered her sensuous mouth in an ironic smile. How often had she yearned for solitude! She’d not anticipated how defenseless she would be.
The silhouette of a man appeared on the curtain. Alarmed, Wisteria shrank into the corner. Then he flung aside the curtain and entered the room, carrying a large bundle tied in a cloth. He was short but powerfully built, his shoulders broad beneath his cloak, and his calves knotted with muscles in his leggings. His neck resembled a stone column, and his face was all hard lines and angles: slanted brows that met over a bladelike nose; chin and jaws hewn; hair in a topknot crowning a slab of a forehead.
“That’s a poor welcome,” he said, striding toward Wisteria with a quick, animal grace. His eyes, dark gashes in his face, looked everywhere at once, watching for threats, calculating his next step. “Something wrong?”
Wisteria breathed easier, though not quite in relief. “Lightning,” she said. “You startled me, that’s all.”
She rose to meet him, feeling the attraction that his strange, mercurial beauty inspired in her, and fear of his edgy temper. “Where have you been?”
“Out,” he said curtly, his brows slanting farther downward. “I had business to take care of.”
He didn’t like accounting for himself to anyone, Wisteria knew. “I’m sorry for asking,” she said. “It’s just that you were gone all day, and I’m afraid to be alone.” In the outer room, a brawl had started; the sounds of punches, crashes, coins scattering, and loud cheering clamored.
Lightning laughed. “You’re safer than you were last night.”
Wisteria wished she could believe him. Though she’d traveled far away from the room where Lord Mitsuyoshi had died, life outside the walls of Yoshiwara promised new hazards. The police would have begun looking for her by now. And while she’d escaped her brothel master, she was now at the mercy of Lightning, nicknamed for the way
