“So, then, you’ll do that for me? Oh, how happy!” cried Tsuya, and, in her wild exultation, she danced about; lastly flinging herself against his chest blotched over with bloody clods.
Shinsuké who had gathered himself into a stony lump, like a dead body, in an attitude of deep thought, was now left alone and aside, as Tsuya set about to dispose of the corpse, without his aid. As a first thing, she slipped her hand into the bosom and pulled out a purse holding a hundred ryo which, in her words, the dead man would not need for his trip to Hades. All pieces of clothing, carefully peeled off, were done into a tight roll, bound up with a piece of string. It was her idea to take away from the spot any and all things that might serve as evidence of the crime. As a last thing, she took the razor and cut the face of the man all over, who was finally buried in the mire of the paddy field. The remains were now beyond any possible recognition, should it chance to be discovered.
More unfrequented ways were carefully picked, as they turned back for the Naka-cho. Late that night, the two fugitive figures crawled into their home.
Part V
Search for the whereabouts of Tokubey, made at large and at length by his henchmen, had proved quite fruitless. Ashizawa admitted to the inquiry that he had wounded the man, who, however, took to his heels with his two companions. Tsuya’s account was that the three of them, while fleeing in fright of officers’ possible pursuit, lost one another on the way; he had not been seen since then. Even if he had made his way out of trouble, she opined, there would be very little chance of his surviving the wounds he had suffered.
Abiding in their luck, which was little short of the devil’s own, the couple had neatly pulled the wool over the eyes of the world. Nothing more to check them, they plunged into a life of gaiety and laughter. Her methods were oft subject to whispered comments, and yet the name of Somékichi continued to rise in fame. To the girl at the zenith of her career, life seemed to be a cup never to be drained.
One morning, about half a month or so after the night of the last murderous deed, the front lattice door of the Tsuta-ya was opened and admitted, on a voice of morning greeting, a caller who was of all callers the least expected, Kinzo of the Narihira-cho. Shinsuké who was just then seated over a brazier and a bottle of drink for his morning repast in the adjoining room, sped upstairs the instant he caught the sound of his voice.
A parley ensued downstairs between Tsuya and Kinzo. “I know no man of that sort,” she retorted, insisting on her ignorance in a manner that was more brusque than it was tart.
“If you will say he is not here, I am not going to waste my time or yours, about that. When the man himself is disposed that way, it would do him little good, even if I got him by forcing a search through your house. So, I’m going to say to you a good morning; but here is something, Somékichi-san, that I’d wish you to tell to this man Shinsuké, should you fall upon him by any chance. Tell him this straight and right, please, that my word is always good, I would never break what was sealed with a true man’s words—even if he broke his part of the promise. He can put himself at ease, because nothing will ever leak through my lips. But tell him that, if he wants so much to live, I want him to live straight and right, not to disappoint the man who trusted him, not to do anything that means cropping his own life—in a word, to change himself into a new man. I think he’s been doing little good, since going away from my place. I wish he would take himself in hand from this on, at least, and turn his back upon the way he has been following. It’s my honest wish and you will tell him, as straight from my heart, just to oblige this old man.—My regret for taking up so much of your time, and my wish for a good day to you.” And Kinzo took his leave.
“Shin-san, it went off fine!” Tsuya came upstairs, proud of the way she had dispatched the matter. But when she found him glum and cheerless, she suggested: “If you are so worried, what of doing away with that old man, too?”
“Thought of it myself; but to kill him, that man of all men—I think God’s vengeance would be too heavy!” he shook his head, heaving a sigh.
It was a fact that his mind had become, these days, a prey to haunting ideas wherein the killing of a man and the taking of his money invariably loomed prominent. The man and woman whose lives were welded in much blood and crime seemed to feel themselves alive only to a filmed sense of life, without new stimulation of bloody intensity. He could not cast his eyes on a man’s face but he conjectured a vision of the same being laid low in a hideous corpse. He could not overcome the ominous presentiment that there were yet to be one or two more lives to be dispatched at his hands, somehow.
Just about this time, the business of the boatman Seiji began to bring him into the professional life of Tsuya. What with his thriving business, and with unaccountable earnings of illicit description,
