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.
“I’ll win this war in your name,” Lord Matsudaira promised. “You won’t have lived or died for nothing. And when I rule Japan, I will expose Chamberlain Yanagisawa as the scoundrel and murderer that he is.”
Chamberlain Yanagisawa and his son Yoritomo stood in a watchtower on the wall of his compound. They gazed through the barred windows, across Edo. Mist and smoke obscured the field where the battle raged. Distance muffled the blaring of conch trumpets. Yanagisawa inhaled deeply, his keen nose detecting the faint, sulfurous odor of gunpowder. He imagined he tasted blood in the air. Exultation pulsed alongside dread inside him.
“I’ve heard that some of our allies have defected to Lord Matsudaira,” said Yoritomo. “That he has three troops for every two of ours, and more guns. Things are bad for us, aren’t they, Honorable Father?”
Yanagisawa nodded, for he couldn’t deny the truth. “But don’t despair. We’ve other weapons against Lord Matsudaira besides troops and guns.”
He looked out the open door, which led to an enclosed corridor that ran along the top of the wall. Some twenty paces down the corridor, in the dim light from its tiny windows, stood his wife. She watched Yanagisawa with such intensity that he could feel her gaze like flames licking his body. He smiled slyly to himself as he turned back to Yoritomo.
“There are other ways to destroy our enemy than fighting on a battlefield.” Yanagisawa laid a reassuring hand on his son’s shoulder. “When we’re finished, we’ll control the regime.”
And he would be above the law, immune to evil consequences from the murder investigation.
27
A party that evening in the reception hall of Senior Elder Makino’s estate mocked the threat posed by the war.
While Koheiji played the samisen and sang, male servants beat drums. Okitsu and two maids danced in a circle,
