Laura Rowland - The Iris Fan

Sano stepped into the teahouse. The gangsters outside rammed the door shut. He faced the proprietor. “You have something to tell me?”

The proprietor looked toward the back doorway. The curtains hanging over it parted. A gangster stepped through. Compact and wiry of figure, he wore a padded brown cloak. Gray leggings hugged his muscular calves. A dagger in a black lacquered sheath hung at his waist. His hair was cut short; blue and black tattoos climbed up his neck. His face had scars on his rounded chin, his cheeks, and his wide brow. His expression was so fierce that Sano instinctively drew his sword.

The gangster laughed. Its gleeful, sardonic timbre sounded so familiar that Sano’s heart skipped a beat. His face was startlingly familiar, too. “If you want the truth about my murder, you’d better let me talk before you kill me.”

It was Yoshisato.

Shock dropped the bottom out of Sano’s stomach. He felt unbalanced, as if the world had turned upside down. Everything he thought he knew was suddenly negated. His mouth opened as he stared. This tough, tattooed gangster couldn’t be the youth he’d known as the shogun’s heir. He let his sword dangle while his mind argued with his eyes.

“Yes, it’s me.” A mischievous smile played around Yoshisato’s mouth. If this weren’t an illusion, he would be twenty-two now. He was astoundingly more like Yanagisawa, his true father, in manner although not physical features. “I’m really alive.” He held out his hand. “Touch me, if you’d like to check.”

Slowly, in a daze, Sano sheathed his sword. His hand reached out. Yoshisato grasped it. His hand was warm. The back was tattooed with a dragon whose tail curled around his fingers. Sano pulled away as if burned.

“This is a poor welcome back,” Yoshisato said with mock disappointment. He also sounded just like Yanagisawa. “Aren’t you glad I’m not dead?”

Sano was glad because Yoshisato hadn’t burned to death in the fire, because miracles were possible. But he was also aghast. The murder he’d been investigating for more than four years had never happened. He couldn’t lay the blame for it on Lord Ienobu.

“While you make up your mind, let’s have a drink.” Yoshisato knelt on a cushion.

Sano dropped to his knees on the other. They were alone; the proprietor had disappeared. Yoshisato filled their cups. Sano swallowed the strong, smooth liquor. He felt as if he were drinking with a ghost. So many questions tangled in his mind that he couldn’t sort out which to ask first.

“Are those your men outside?” he asked. Yoshisato nodded. The shogun’s heir had reincarnated himself as a gang boss. “Do they know who you are?”

“They know I’m a former samurai. They think my name is Oarashi.” Great Storm. “I’ve been calling myself that for almost two years.”

“You’ve been a gangster for almost two years? The fire was more than four years ago. What happened during the time in between?” Sano slammed his cup down on the table as he realized what a cruel hoax had been played on the shogun, on the whole country. “Why in hell did you let everybody think you’re dead?”

Yoshisato responded with a thin, humorless smile. “It wasn’t my idea. When you hear the whole story, you’ll understand.”

Once Sano had thought Yoshisato a decent, honest man despite his history. Now he was so drastically changed in more than outward appearance. Sano sensed a difference inside him, a new darkness. Unsure whether to trust him, Sano folded his arms. “I’m listening.”

“The night of the fire, I was almost asleep when I heard scuffling and shouting outside. I jumped out of bed, grabbed my sword, and ran to the door. They burst through it, chased me, and cornered me in my bedchamber.” Yoshisato’s voice conveyed none of the terror he must have felt; he could have been reciting what had happened to somebody else. “I fought hard, but it was five against one.”

“‘They’?” Sano prompted.

“The one in charge was Manabe Akira. He’s Lord Ienobu’s chief retainer. I didn’t know the others. I figured they worked for Ienobu, too.”

You think you know so much, but you don’t know anything, said Manabe’s voice in Sano’s memory. Here was the information Sano had gone to Yoshiwara to learn-the role Manabe had played in what he’d thought was Yoshisato’s murder. “There were five men?” His informer had told him that only Manabe, Setsubara, Ono, and Kuzawa had gone out that night. “Not four?”

Yoshisato waved away the interruption. “They tied me up. Manabe poured medicine down my throat, then gagged me. His men carried in three dead bodies-my guards. Suddenly one of the men turned on another and cut his throat. They left him with my dead guards.”

Revelation filled Sano with awe and horror. “After the fire, we found four bodies in the ruins. We thought one was yours. But it was Lord Ienobu’s fifth man.” Lord Ienobu was even more ruthless than Sano had thought. To serve his purpose, he’d sacrificed one of his own. But what purpose? Why had he faked Yoshisato’s death?

“Then they brought in a big wooden trunk,” Yoshisato said. “They put me in it. Things are a little hazy after that. There must have been opium in the medicine. I only remember smelling smoke and hearing the fire bell.”

Korika had set the fire after Manabe and his gang had set their scheme in motion, Sano thought. The arson and the murders had been blamed on her, just as Lord Ienobu had planned.

“When I woke up, I was locked in a cellar,” Yoshisato said. “Ienobu’s men had taken me from the castle and hidden me someplace.”

Sano shook his head, astonished. Lord Ienobu was guilty not of murdering but kidnapping Yoshisato. Sano began to see a solution to a puzzle that had mystified him. “Does Yanagisawa know you’re alive?”

An opaque expression like a coating of ice came over Yoshisato’s face. “I assume so. Lord Ienobu’s men made me write a letter to Yanagisawa. They told me what to say, and I had to put it in my own words. It said I’d been kidnapped and if he ever wanted to see me again, he should cooperate with Lord Ienobu.”

That was why Yanagisawa had allied with Ienobu, his onetime enemy. That was why Yanagisawa had refused to help Sano prove that Ienobu was responsible for Yoshisato’s murder. Ienobu had blackmailed Yanagisawa, and Yanagisawa was trying to save Yoshisato. “But if Lord Ienobu needs you as a hostage to hold over Yanagisawa’s head, then how is it that you’re walking around as free as a bird?”

“Be patient; let me finish. Manabe handed me off to some of Ienobu’s other men. They smuggled me out of Edo. I don’t know where we went. I rode in the trunk and slept. We moved around a lot.”

To hide from Yanagisawa, who must have started hunting for Yoshisato as soon as he’d received the letter, Sano deduced.

“They kept me drugged during the day. They woke me up every night, at a different house or inn or temple. They would untie me and let me eat and wash. I tried to run away a few times, but I was too weak from the opium. They caught me. So I pretended to give up. They stopped drugging me. They let me walk around outside as long as one of them was with me. When we went someplace, I let them tie me up and put me in the trunk. They thought my spirit was broken. I waited for a chance to escape. I was a prisoner for more than two years.”

Sano’s respect for Yoshisato increased. The youth had had the intelligence, patience, and determination to foil Lord Ienobu.

“One day we were on the highway. Ienobu’s men were traveling by horseback. My trunk was carried by porters who didn’t know I was in there. Suddenly I heard a loud roar. The ground started shaking. At first I thought it was an earthquake. Then something started clattering onto the lid of my trunk, as if somebody was throwing rocks at us. The horses were neighing and stomping; Ienobu’s men were shouting. The porters screamed and dropped me. The lid of the trunk popped open. I wriggled out and-” For the first time during his story, recollected fear crept into Yoshisato’s voice. “The sky was red. Rocks were falling from it. Ienobu’s men were groping and stumbling and coughing. Their horses had bolted. The air was full of black ash and smelled like sulfur.”