I Parker - The Masuda Affair

He next went back to Rikiju. Skirting garbage and a ragged body, prone on the ground and either drunk or dead, he knocked and heard someone coughing inside. After a long time, Rikiju opened the door a crack and peered out.

‘It’s you again,’ she said without much enthusiasm. ‘I was trying to sleep.’

Tora went in and closed the door behind him. ‘Had a good evening then?’ he asked, turning up his nose at the smell of stale bodies and dirty bedding spread on the floor.

‘No. I’ve been sick, you oaf.’ She sat down on her rumpled quilts and coughed again, great gulping, hacking coughs that seemed to wring her out. When it was over, she pushed her matted hair out of her sweaty face. ‘What do you want? You ever find Hanae?’

‘Yes. What’s wrong with you?’ She looked flushed, but the room was warm.

‘Never mind. What happened?’

Tora leaned against the door and told her.

When he was done, she shook her head. ‘You two get into horrible trouble and manage to get back out. Me, I just have the usual bad luck, only mine doesn’t change.’ She went into another paroxysm of deep, rattling coughing. She staggered up to scoop some water from a wooden pail.

‘You need money?’ Tora fished out a string of coppers and peeled off half. She protested it was too much and staggered back to her bedding. He added half of the remainder to it and laid the money beside her. ‘When did you eat last?’

She licked cracked lips. ‘I don’t know. When were you here?’

He looked at her, aghast. ‘Three days ago? Have you had a doctor?’

‘Don’t be an idiot. If I don’t work, I don’t eat. And I can’t afford a doctor even when I’m working.’

‘All right,’ said Tora, scooping up some of the coins, ‘I’ll be right back with some hot food.’

He left, trotted to the market where he purchased fried fish and a large serving of rice and vegetables, all of which the vendor wrapped in a sheet of oiled paper. Tora spent some of his own money on a flask of good wine. When he got back to Rikiju, she had tidied up the room a little, washed her face, and combed her hair. But the dreadful cough still racked her thin body and she ate little. The wine seemed to help. It put some color into her pasty skin, and she could speak a little more easily. Tora asked her if she’d ever heard of Peony and her maid, the Little Abbess.

To his surprise, Rikiju said immediately, ‘Peony’s dead. Drowned herself in Lake Biwa, but Little Abbess lives only a block from me. Why?’

She was beginning to take a little interest in the world around her, so Tora told her about the case. She was pleased. ‘Nice to know somebody cares,’ she said. ‘Even if it’s a little late for Peony. Men are bastards.’

Tora thought that ungrateful and said so. She tried to laugh, but choked and started coughing again. ‘You’re a friend, Tora,’ she finally managed. ‘Not the same thing. Thank you.’

Tora took his leave, slightly mollified because friends evidently didn’t count as men for her, but he worried. Rikiju did not look like she was getting better. He made her promise to send for a doctor and use the money he had left to pay for medicine.

Little Abbess lived in another tenement like Rikiju’s, but in larger quarters. She had two small rooms and had turned the larger into a seamstress’s shop. A striped curtain covered an opening to what was probably a kitchen area. The room was filled with stacks and piles of multicolored fabric scraps and lengths, mostly ordinary stuff, dyed hemp, some ramie, and linen, but also odd pieces of silk. Tora realized she made a living from buying old clothes and painstakingly removing the stitches. Then she would wash the fabric and sew new clothes from it for those who could not afford to buy lengths of new fabric.

Little Abbess was a squat, middle-aged woman with a bun of thick gray hair, who wore one of her own patched garments. She was busy convincing a middle-aged couple to buy the warm jacket the portly man was trying on. It was brown-and-white quilted ramie and had faded in places. The man’s tiny sharp-faced wife stood by, making disparaging remarks in hopes of getting a better price.

The seamstress abandoned her clients for a moment to bring Tora a patched cushion and ask him to wait a moment. She looked like a motherly type, unlike the harpy who pursed her lips and plucked at the jacket while her fat husband scowled at Tora.

Tora said, ‘By the gods, that’s a very handsome jacket. Looks warm, too. And just the color I like.’ He got up to feel the thickness of the fabric.

The fat man jerked it out of his hand and snapped, ‘It’s mine.’

With the purchase completed, Little Abbess turned to Tora. ‘If you’d like a jacket like that one, I could make you one.’

Tora would not be caught dead in such a thing. ‘Sorry, but I’m broke. Are you the one they call Little Abbess?’

‘Nobody calls me that any more,’ she said crossly.

‘Rikiju sent me. She says you worked for a courtesan called Peony?’

The woman’s face crumpled. ‘My lady’s dead.’

Tora sat down again. This was going to be easier than he had thought. ‘Tell me about her.’

But she was wary now. ‘Who are you? Why are you asking questions? Nobody cared when she needed help.’

‘I’m Tora.’ He tried one of his disarming smiles. ‘I work for Lord Sugawara. We investigate crimes the police can’t figure out, and we think your lady was murdered.’

‘Then you think wrong. She drowned herself. I saw her with my own eyes. Floating in the lake.’ She brushed away angry tears. ‘But you’re right about one thing. It was a crime the way they treated her. To me they are murderers, just as if they’d plunged a knife into her poor body.’

‘Are you sure she killed herself? What were you doing there?’

She eyed him for a moment, then said, ‘I have no time for this. I have a living to make.’ She whisked up a garment and sat down to sew.

‘You can talk while you’re working, can’t you?’

She said nothing, just glowered.

Tora wheedled, ‘Look, I’d buy something, only I’m down to my last few coppers.’ He held up the depleted string. ‘My parents were peasants, and I work for a few coppers just like you. I’m on your side, yours and Peony’s. We can’t let the bastards get away with abusing us. Just tell me if Lord Sadanori is responsible.’

Her head came up. ‘Lord Sadanori?’ She snorted. ‘If she’d stayed with him, she’d still be alive. Good looks aren’t everything in a man. Mostly, they’re poison where a poor girl’s concerned. Go pester someone else.’

Blast the woman. She was insulting. As a rule, Tora had an easy time chatting up females of all ages, but this one was charm-proof. He was not about to give up so easily on his theory, though. ‘What about a guy called Ishikawa?’

‘Never heard that name.’

‘Was your mistress afraid of Sadanori? Or of somebody else?’

‘No.’

‘But he kept her in a house here? A house he decorated for her?’

‘We both lived there, and he treated her like a princess.’

The curtain to the room was flung aside. An old man staggered in, leaning heavily on his stick. ‘You done, woman?’ he wheezed.

‘Just about, Grandfather Shida.’

Defeated, Tora rose. If she had told the truth about Sadanori, his master was right and he was wrong. At least she had confirmed that the Peony in Otsu and the famous courtesan Sadanori had courted were the same. At the door, he remembered to ask, ‘Your mistress had a son, didn’t she?’

She looked up, needle poised, eyes suddenly intent. ‘They found him?’

‘What?’ wheezed the old man. ‘Round? I don’t want my pants round.’ He gave the garment in her lap a poke with his cane.