Authors: Laura Joh Rowland
A gust of wind ruffled the trees and wisteria vines in the courtyard where they stood. Thunder shuddered the overcast sky, and raindrops hissed onto the gravel-covered ground. The lady-in-waiting said, "It's going to storm. Let's hurry inside."
She ushered Reiko into the low building. Here, Reiko knew, no men except the emperor were allowed. As she and her escort walked through the corridors, maids lowered the wooden rain doors along the exterior wall. Mullioned paper partitions defined a series of chambers. Through their open doors Reiko saw young women sipping tea and grooming themselves. They smiled at her and bowed. The emperor apparently had many consorts besides Lady Asagao, with many attendants to serve them. Chatter and laughter filled the air.
Lady Asagao had a suite at the center of the residence. Entering this, Reiko saw rain doors and sliding paper panels standing open to a garden landscaped with willows and lawn. Painted landscapes decorated folding screens that divided the suite into three sections, each crammed with furniture and personal articles. In the dressing area, an alcove held built-in cabinets whose drawers and shelves spilled colorful clothing. Lamps burned on a low table littered with combs, brushes, jars, and a mirror. Shoes lay scattered on the floor. The lady-in-waiting pointed to a wooden stand that displayed a lavish emerald silk kimono embroidered with pink lilies.
"This is your costume," she said to Reiko. "May I help you change?"
"Oh, no, thank you, that's not necessary," Reiko said. "Don't trouble yourself."
"It's no trouble," the lady-in-waiting said with a smile. "I'm honored to serve you."
"Oh, but I'm sure you're very busy. And really, I can manage alone."
The young woman hesitated.
"It's all right," Reiko said. "I won't disturb Her Highness's things, and I'll call you if I need help."
After the woman left, Reiko waited a moment to make sure she was gone, then hastily closed the doors to the corridor and the exterior wall panels. Her heart raced in panic because she didn't know how much time she had to search the chamber before Lady Asagao returned. Nor did she know exactly what she hoped to find, except proof that Asagao was someone other than who she seemed.
Reason told her to look for letters or other personal papers. Reiko sped around the folding screen into the central area of the suite, which appeared to be a parlor. A samisen, musical scores, and playing cards lay on the tatami. Furnishings consisted of low tables, lanterns, floor cushions, an iron chest, and a writing desk. The desk was a flat, square red lacquer box. On the slanted lid lay four small, clothbound books. Reiko opened one. She scanned the pages and recognized lines from the play she'd performed in yesterday. She tossed the scripts aside and lifted the desk's lid. Inside, empty jars, frayed writing brushes, and an inkstone covered with dried, flaking pigment lay amid piles of crumpled papers. Reiko snatched up the papers and riffled through them. Some were theater programs. Others were copies of classic poems-probably childhood calligraphy lessons. If Asagao had written anything later or more revealing, Reiko didn't find it.
Rain clattered on the tile roof; the wind rustled through the garden. Reiko flung up the lid of the iron chest. Inside were dolls and other toys apparently saved from Asagao's youth. Hearing female voices nearby, Reiko froze, holding her breath. Then came a series of thumps as maids lowered the rain doors outside the suite. Darkness shadowed the parlor. The maids moved on. Reiko exhaled in relief. Closing the chest, she hurried around the folding screen into a sleeping area.
There a futon and light summer blanket lay beside discarded night robes. Reiko yanked open drawers and doors in the wall cabinet and found bedding, charcoal braziers, lamps, and candles. Chests contained winter quilts. The only unusual discovery was a stash of wine jars in a cupboard.
Reiko rushed back to the dressing area. She rummaged through the clothes in the cabinets. The scent of lily perfume issued from silk robes and sashes. Touching these personal things made Reiko guiltily aware that detective work often violated courtesy. As she examined drawers of fans and hair ornaments, she wondered whether she'd breached Asagao's privacy for no good reason, because she found nothing she wouldn't expect of a rich, pleasure-loving, and harmless young woman. But then she pulled open the door of a compartment level with her face....
A sour metallic smell billowed out, familiar and disturbing. Reiko's breath caught. As her heart began pounding, she peered into the compartment. Its contents lay far back in the shadowy recesses. Slowly she reached inside. Her fingers touched fabric that had an odd texture-smooth and soft, with stiff patches. She drew out a bundle of heavy mauve silk and thinner white cloth, both blotched with reddish-brown stains.
Dried blood.
Shocked, Reiko separated the bundle into two garments-a noblewoman's court robe and an under-robe. The blood had darkened the front hems of the garments. Into Reiko's mind came a picture of Asagao, wearing the robes, standing in the midnight Pond Garden. At her feet lay Konoe's corpse, oozing blood. Reiko envisioned the blood spreading across the ground, seeping into Asagao's long robes. Asagao panted, recovering the breath expended in the spirit cry, a look of evil triumph on her pretty face....
Reiko shook her head in confusion. Wind lashed torrents of rain against the building; water dripped and splattered outside; a crack of thunder provoked excited cries from the palace women. The air in the room was hot and still, the atmosphere suffocating.
"Merciful gods," Reiko whispered.
Here was a clue that implicated Lady Asagao in the crime. Yet the discovery was less gratifying than disturbing, because Reiko couldn't believe Asagao was the killer. Holding the robes at arm's length, she gazed at the bloodstains and sought another explanation for them.
Maybe they weren't Left Minister Konoe's blood. Maybe Lady Asagao had accidentally soiled her clothes during her monthly bleeding. However, this looked like too much blood for that, and why only on the hems? Maybe Asagao or someone else had gotten injured and bled on the floor, then Asagao had stepped in the blood. But why hide the garments instead of cleaning them? Then again, if she was guilty of murder, why hadn't she destroyed the evidence?
The quiet sound of a door sliding open jolted Reiko out of her contemplation. With a gasp of surprise, she clutched the robes against her chest, turned, and saw Asagao entering the room. Guilty shame leapt in Reiko.
"Oh, hello, Your Highness," she said brightly. "I was, uh, just about to try on my costume for the play."
Asagao made no reply. All her vivacity had vanished; she seemed a forlorn ghost of her usual self, and her bright makeup a mask painted onto her expressionless face. She looked at Reiko, and confusion wrinkled her brow, as if she couldn't quite remember who Reiko was.
"Your Highness?" Reiko said, puzzled.
Asagao's gaze shifted to the robes that Reiko held, then moved downward to the bloodstained hems. A strange mixture of disbelief, terror, and resignation filled her eyes. With a tiny whimper, she sank to the floor, buying her face in her hands.
The summer storm enmeshed Kodai Temple in veils of windblown rain. As Sano listened to the thunder and watched a draft elongate the flame of the candle he'd lit on the altar in the sanctuary, he felt someone beside him. He turned and saw a nun, who'd entered the room so quietly he hadn't heard her.
The nun smiled. She was of average height and perhaps in her mid-thirties, and wore a loose gray robe. "I am Kozeri," she said. Her soft voice echoed in the shadowy hall. "You wish to speak with me?"
"Yes," Sano said, then took a closer look at the nun. Her high brow and cheekbones and the skull beneath her bare scalp were exquisitely molded. Her ivory complexion gleamed in the lamplight. Her eyes were long crescents beneath heavy, slumberous lids, her smiling lips full and sensuous. Admiration leapt in Sano; his heartbeat and breath quickened. This sudden, physical response to Kozeri caused him considerable surprise. He'd thought that age and marriage had put him beyond the point where a stranger's beauty could captivate him.
Hiding his discomfort, Sano introduced himself and said, "Unfortunately I have some bad news for you. Your former husband, Left Minister Konoe, is dead."
Kozeri stiffened; her smile faded, and she turned away to face the altar. "How did it happen?" she asked.
"He was murdered." As Sano gave details and explained why he'd come, he thought Kozeri's shock seemed genuine and her question logical. But was she disturbed by Konoe's death, or by the arrival of the shogun's detective? Sano said, "I must talk to you about some things that may have a bearing on the crime."
She swallowed hard. "All right."
"How did you happen to marry Left Minister Konoe?" Sano asked, moving over to stand beside Kozeri.
"I'm from the Nakanoin clan." This was a minor kuge family. "When I was fifteen, I married a cousin, but he died." The lamps illuminated Kozeri's profile. "Left Minister Konoe was a widower. He arranged our match with my family."
"Were you willing at the time?" Sano asked, trying to shake the uneasiness that Kozeri's presence engendered, and disturbed to recognize the onset of sexual attraction. Kozeri was a nun and a potential witness in the murder case. He had a wife he loved dearly; since their marriage, he hadn't even noticed other women. What was happening to him?
Kozeri stared into the flames as if trying to see across the years. "It was so long ago." She folded her hands across her bosom, absently stroking the tops of her breasts. "I put the past behind me when I entered the nunnery."
Watching her, Sano couldn't help imagining the softness of her skin, the warm pliancy of her body. Lamp flames guttered in the draft; outside, the rain battered the roof and cascaded off the eaves. With difficulty Sano banished the troubling thoughts from his mind.
"Did you love the left minister?" he asked.
"No." A faint smile lifted the corner of Kozeri's mouth. "I was seventeen when we married. He was thirty-two." She glanced sideways at Sano. "We were never close. I suppose we just weren't suited to each other."
"You never had any children?" Sano asked.
A blush warmed her ivory complexion. "Left Minister Konoe has grown daughters." Sano had interviewed these women along with the rest of Konoe's family; they had firm alibis and no apparent reason to wish their father dead. "But he and I were married only a year." Again Kozeri glanced at Sano. "I suppose there wasn't enough time for us to have a child together."
"You ended the marriage." When Kozeri nodded, Sano said, "Why?"
"I decided that I wanted to devote my life to my spiritual calling."
"Did you have any other reasons for leaving the left minister?"
"No," Kozeri said. "He was a good man who gave me everything a wife could wish for."
Evidently the passion in the marriage had been one-sided, and the spiritual connection a figment of Konoe's imagination. Taking from under his kimono the letters he'd found in Konoe's house, Sano said, "Let me read you something:
" `How could you leave me? Without you, every day seems a meaningless eternity. My spirit is a fallen warrior. Anger corrupts my love for you like maggots seething in wounded flesh. I long to strangle the wayward life out of you. I shall have my revenge!' "
Kozeri shuddered. The heavy lids veiled her eyes. She raised her hand at Sano, as if fending off the ugly words.
"That was written by the left minister, to you," Sano said. "Hadn't you read it?"
"... I stopped reading his letters years ago. When I was a novice, I wrote back, trying to make him understand that I meant to stay here. Then, after I took my vows, the temple returned all the letters unopened." Kozeri pressed her hands against her face. "I'd forgotten what they were like."
"I've read through these," Sano said, riffling the letters. "He sounds violent and spiteful. Didn't he act that way toward you when you were married?"
Kozeri shook her head, absently running shaky fingers down her neck. "He changed after we separated."
Though Sano knew that a broken marriage could compel people to extreme behavior, he didn't believe that a man's basic nature could change so radically. But he also saw how a man could become obsessed with Kozeri. Her enigmatic allure explained Konoe's determination to possess her, and his enraged frustration when thwarted. Sano found himself extremely curious about Kozeri.
Who are you? he wanted to ask Kozeri. What secret thoughts do you banish with meditation and prayer?
Instead Sano said, "Konoe never mistreated you in any way?"
"Never." She turned away from the altar to face Sano. In her eyes he saw a growing awareness of him as not just a bakufu official, but a man. Unspoken questions punctuated her reply, as though she wanted to know about him too.
"What did you think about the left minister's persistent attentions?" Sano was too disconcerted by Kozeri's interest to know whether he should believe her.
"I didn't understand why my husband acted the way he did," Kozeri said. "I felt as though I must have driven him to it, although I gave him no encouragement. At first I was resentful, but after years passed, I came to sec the left minister as a man with a flaw in his spirit. He thought he could have whatever he wanted, and he was too stubborn to accept defeat. I pitied him."
An extraordinarily forgiving attitude, Sano noted. "Still, you must be glad Konoe is dead, because now you're free of the nuisance."
Kozeri gave him an uncertain smile. "Perhaps his spirit now enjoys a peace he never knew in life. But I wouldn't wish murder upon anyone. And I've not had time to absorb the fact that he's truly gone. I suppose I shall rest easier, but I can't help blaming myself for the pain we caused each other."
Sano wondered whether her guilt arose from a different source. Had she played a role in Konoe's death? The room seemed to have grown hotter, and the effort of thinking in Kozeri's presence strangely difficult. "The left minister visited you," Sano said, trying to will away confusion. "When did you last see him?"