Black Lotus

11

Hirata splashed through the puddles in the courtyard of police headquarters, peering from beneath his umbrella at the crowd huddled in the dripping rain. He wondered what had brought so many people here in such bad weather. Under the eaves of the main building, he handed his umbrella to a servant; then he entered the reception room. It was packed with more people standing against pillars and seated on the floor, some puffing tobacco pipes, amid a loud babble of conversation. The warm, stuffy air was thick with smoke. Several doshin stood guard. Hirata elbowed his way up to the platform where the clerks sat elevated above the crowd.

“Why are all these people here?” he asked the chief clerk.

Uchida grinned. “They’re responding to your notice asking for information about the dead woman and boy at the Black Lotus Temple.”

“All of them?” Hirata, who had come to check on whether the notices had gotten any results, gazed around the room in astonishment.

“Every one,” Uchida said, “and the folks outside, too.”

The nearest bystanders spread the news that the man who’d issued the notices had arrived. The crowd surged toward Hirata waving hands and shouting pleas.

“Quiet!” Hirata ordered. “Stand back! I’ll see you one at a time.”

Doshin coaxed and shoved the mob into a line that snaked around the room, while Hirata sat atop the platform. He saw the shaved crowns of samurai among the many commoners. He tried to count heads and stopped at a hundred. Surely all these people couldn’t be connected with the two mystery victims.

The first person in line was a frail, stooped peasant woman. Looking anxiously up at Hirata, she said, “My grown son joined the Black Lotus sect last year. I haven’t seen or heard from him since, and I’m so worried. Is he dead?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know,” Hirata said. “The people in the fire were a woman and a little boy. That was explained in the notice.”

“I can’t read,” said the woman. “I came because I heard you were looking for anyone with family members who disappeared at the temple.”

“No. My inquiry doesn’t include adult males.” Hirata realized that his message had been distorted while spreading through the largely illiterate populace.

“Maybe my son is still alive, then.” Hope brightened the woman’s wrinkled face. “Please, will you help me find him?”

“I’ll try.” Hirata wrote down the woman’s name, where she lived, and her son’s name and age. Then he stood on the platform and addressed the crowd, explaining the purpose of his notice and describing the victims. “Everyone who’s here about missing persons who don’t fit those descriptions should come back later and make a report to the police.”

Rumbles of disappointment stirred the crowd, but no one got out of line. A man with the coarse appearance of a laborer stepped up to the platform. “My daughter is missing,” he said.

“How old is she?” Hirata asked.

Before the laborer could answer, a burly samurai shoved him aside and said to Hirata, “I refuse to wait any longer. I demand to speak to you now.”

“Get in line,” Hirata ordered. “Wait your turn.”

“My three-year-old son disappeared in the spring.” The samurai, whose garments bore a floral crest that marked him as a retainer of the Kane clan, stood firm. “His mother took him shopping in Nihonbashi. She lost him in the crowd. Storekeepers saw three Black Lotus priests putting a little boy into a palanquin. They stole my son.”

“They stole my daughter, too,” said the laborer. “She was playing outside. The priests and nuns are always in our street, inviting people to join the sect and giving the children candy. When they left that day, they took my girl with them.”

“How do you know?” Hirata asked, intrigued by the accusations.

“Other children have disappeared after the Black Lotus visited. Everyone knows the Black Lotus steals them,” said the laborer.

Shouts rang out along the line: “They took my child, too!” “And mine!” “And mine!”

Amazed consternation jolted Hirata. It hardly seemed possible that the sect was involved in so many disappearances. Had mass delusion infected these people?

“When I went to the temple to look for my son, the priests threw me out,” said the samurai. “I went to the police, and they said they would look into the matter, but they’ve done nothing. I came here hoping you could help me.”

Hirata took pity on the samurai, whose son’s age fell in the range Dr. Ito had specified for the dead boy in the cottage. He wrote down the samurai’s name and information, then turned to Uchida. “This is going to take forever. Will you help out?”

“Of course,” Uchida said.

Hirata announced, “Everyone who’s here about missing children and the Black Lotus sect, form a new line.”

A general shift divided the crowd in two roughly equal portions. Hirata remembered the story that Sano had told him this morning, about a novice monk who’d accused the Black Lotus of imprisoning followers. Sano should be interested to hear of this new development.

Hirata and Uchida spent the next several hours on interviews. Many people wanted to talk about missing relatives who bore no resemblance to the murder victims, just to register complaints about the Black Lotus sect.

“With so many incidents, why didn’t the police begin investigating long ago?” Hirata asked Uchida.

“Maybe they didn’t know about the situation,” Uchida said. “It’s news to me, and I thought I knew everything that happened around town.”

Upon questioning the citizens, Hirata learned that most had reported the disappearances to local doshin instead of coming to police headquarters.

Perhaps the higher officials hadn’t yet reviewed the reports and discerned the magnitude of the problem or a connection between the incidents. But Hirata, who knew about the rampant corruption in the police force, suspected a cover-up.

By noon, Uchida had compiled forty listings of missing young boys. Hirata amassed even more possibilities for the dead woman, but no one had recognized the jade sleeping-deer amulet found on the body. The line seemed endless; as people left the room, more streamed in from the courtyard. With a sigh, Hirata greeted the next person in line.

It was a carpenter in his thirties, who carried a box of tools. His eyes and mouth turned down at the corners in a permanently sad expression; wood shavings clung to his cropped hair. He took one look at the amulet and began to weep.

“That belongs to my wife. It was made by her grandfather, who was a jade carver.” The carpenter wiped his eyes with a calloused hand. “Chie used to wear it on a string around her waist for good luck.”

Hirata experienced a thrill of gratification, tempered by pity. “My sincere condolences,” he said, climbing off the platform. “Please come with me.”

Over the crowd’s protests, he led the carpenter to a small vacant office with a barred window overlooking the stables. Hirata invited the carpenter to sit, and served him tea.

“Tell me about your wife,” Hirata said gently.

The carpenter clutched his tea bowl in both hands and drank thirstily, as if drawing sustenance from the hot liquid. Then he spoke with sorrowful nostalgia: “Chie and I have been married twelve years. We have two sons. My business has prospered. Chie had learned the art of healing from her mother, and she earned money by treating sick neighbors. We were very happy together. But four years ago, everything changed.”

Grief twisted his face. Hirata poured him more tea. He gulped it, then said, “Nuns from the Black Lotus Temple came to our street. They said that their high priest could show us the path to enlightenment and invited us to the temple. I was too busy working, but Chie went. And she came home a different person. She went back to the temple again and again. At home, she spent hours chanting. She stopped keeping house. She ignored the children. She wouldn’t let me touch her. I begged her to tell me why she was acting so strangely, but she wouldn’t talk. I scolded her and ordered her to do her duty as a wife and mother. I forbade her to leave the house.

“One night, she ran away. She took all our money. I knew she’d gone to the Black Lotus Temple.” The carpenter explained sadly, “It had happened in other families, you see. The high priest would cast a spell over people, and they’d forsake everything to join him. He would steal their souls and all their worldly property.”

“And you just let your wife go? For four years you did nothing?” Hirata couldn’t believe this.

“I tried my best to get Chie back!” The carpenter’s eyes blazed with his eagerness to convince; his words rushed forth: “I asked the neighborhood headman and the police for help, but they said there was nothing they could do. I went to the temple and begged Chie to come home. She refused. The priests told me to stay away. But I went back the very next day, with the children. Chie wouldn’t even look at them. The priests chased us out. I vowed never to give up, but then…”

Despair quenched the carpenter’s animation. “Bad things started happening. My brother fell off the roof of a house we were building and broke his leg. Later, some thugs beat me up. Then there was a fire in a cloth shop where I was doing repairs. It burned all the goods, and I had to pay for the damage. I borrowed from a moneylender and went deeply into debt.

“Soon afterward, a Black Lotus priest came to my house. He said my bad luck was caused by a spell that the high priest had cast upon the enemies of the sect. If I didn’t stay away from the temple, worse misfortunes would befall me. I’d heard of the same thing happening to other people who tried to get relatives out of the temple. I couldn’t risk my family’s safety or livelihood. So…”

A ragged sigh issued from the carpenter. “I let Chie go. I hoped she would someday regain her senses and the sect would lose its power over her. But now my hope is gone. I’ll never see my wife again in this world.”

Hirata contemplated what he’d just heard. Assuming that the carpenter was telling the truth, how did this scenario relate to the murders? While the superstitious part of Hirata believed in magic spells, the policeman in him thought it more likely that human hands had caused the carpenter’s troubles. The Black Lotus must have sent members to menace people who interfered with their business. They used violence and fire as weapons. Perhaps they’d strangled Chie and tried to burn her body in the cottage; but if so, then why?

He posed the question to the carpenter, who said, “I don’t know. My Chie was a good, kind woman who loved helping people and would never have hurt anyone. But maybe she changed during those four years at the temple. Maybe she made enemies.”

Hirata wondered whether these might include an orphan girl named Haru. Thinking of the two other victims, he said, “Did your wife know Police Commander Oyama, the man whose body was found in the fire?”

“If she did, she must have met him after she ran away, because I’ve never heard of him before.”

“Have you any idea who the dead child was? You said that you and your wife have sons…?”

“Chie left both our sons behind. So the dead child isn’t ours. I don’t know who it is.” The carpenter bowed his head over his empty tea bowl. “I’m sorry I can’t be of more help.”

“You’ve been a tremendous help,” Hirata said. The carpenter had put a name to the mystery woman, and he’d also identified her as a Black Lotus member, known to the priests and nuns who’d denied knowing her and claimed that no one was missing from the temple. Surely their lies and their dark reputation implicated them in the murders.

Hirata wrote down the carpenter’s name and the location of his home. “I’ll do my best to deliver your wife’s killer to justice,” he promised, then escorted the man out through the reception room.

The crowd hadn’t diminished at all. Ascending the platform, Hirata braced himself for more tales of woe. He had an uneasy feeling that the fire and murders represented a tiny part of a larger evil. Almost certainly, the case involved much more than a troublesome orphan girl.