The Iris Fan

15

In the bustling Nihonbashi merchant quarter, the narrow street that sloped down to the Sumida River was oddly quiet. The snow had stopped falling, and the wind carved drifts in the streets. Shop doors were closed behind indigo curtains that hung halfway down the entrances. Smoke rose from chimneys. A few men bundled in cloaks and hoods loitered outside. As Sano rode down the street, they appeared not to look in his direction, but he knew they were watching him. A window opened as he passed a shop, and he heard dice rattle. These shops were gambling dens. One of the men outside raised a tobacco pipe to his mouth. Blue tattoos decorated his bared wrist. This street was a haunt of gangsters.

Sano’s instincts went on high alert. Gangs controlled the gambling dens, operated illegal brothels, ran protection rackets, and killed people who crossed them. The tsunamis and the Mount Fuji eruption had driven them from devastated areas into Edo, and the incidence of gang-related violence had soared. Sano knew his patrol guard’s uniform wouldn’t protect him. Gang initiation rules required the novices to kill before they became full-fledged members, and killing a Tokugawa soldier would score them extra points. Sano thought of the battle he’d lost last night. Years ago he could have beaten single-handedly a whole mob of gangsters. Now he hoped they didn’t sense his fear.

Midway down the block, two young gangsters leaned against the wall of the Shark Teahouse. Daggers and clubs hung from their sashes. The law permitted only samurai to carry swords, but that was of little comfort to Sano. Above the entrance hung a shark’s jawbones with rows of sharp, pointed teeth. Sano dismounted and tied his horse to a post. The gangsters eyed him as he ducked under the curtain. The door grated open. An old man peered out.

Sano introduced himself. “Did you send me a message?”

The man stood back for Sano to enter an empty room in which two cushions sat on opposite sides of a low table that held two cups. A sake decanter warmed on a charcoal brazier. Sano wondered if Lord Ienobu had set him up to be murdered in a way that would look like a random crime, and he had an urge to run, but his inner voice whispered, Stay.

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.”

“The Mount Fuji eruption.” Sano remembered the faint roar and minor earth tremors, a rain of pebbles, and the fumes. Although Edo was distant from Mount Fuji, the effects had been dramatic. Yoshisato must have been in the zone near the volcano.

“Yes.” Yoshisato said, “I was tied up. I wriggled off the road, into the woods. The trees protected me from the rocks, but I could hardly breathe. I rolled down a hill. At the bottom there was a cave. I crawled in. The air was better there. I chewed the ropes off my wrists and untied my ankles. If I went outside, I would suffocate or get killed by the rocks, so I stayed put.”

Sano imagined the unbearable suspense Yoshisato must have experienced, waiting for Ienobu’s men to come after him.

“The rocks kept falling until the next morning. When I came out of the cave, the woods were covered with ash. The air was like the breath of hell. I tore off a piece of my kimono and tied it over my face. Then I started walking. I never saw Ienobu’s men again. Either they were dead or they’d run away because they were afraid to tell him they’d lost me.”

The eruption that had killed many and caused so much suffering and damage had been wonderful luck for Yoshisato. Sano asked, “How did you survive afterward?”

“That first day I found some people dead on the road. A merchant and some servants and a samurai bodyguard. Their noses and mouths were full of ash. I stole the merchant’s money and the bodyguard’s swords. I traveled from village to village, living on the money until it ran out.” Yoshisato said without pride or guilt, “Then I started robbing live people.”

The shogun’s heir had become a bandit.

“I made my way to Osaka.” That was a market city, some thirty days’ journey from Edo. “It was big enough to hide in. I fell in with a gang.”

Now Sano understood the new difference he’d sensed in Yoshisato. Had Sano not been so shocked to see him, he would have identified it at once. During his time with the gang, Yoshisato had killed-he’d bloodied his hands, crossed a line. That changed a person, Sano knew. He’d crossed that line, too.

“The gang was a major one, with its fingers in every illegal business in Osaka,” Yoshisato said. “I eventually became the boss.” Sano intuited that Yoshisato had killed the former boss. Once he’d thought Yoshisato would make a good shogun despite his dubious origins; now Yoshisato had demonstrated his leadership ability by taking over a gang.

It sounded like exactly what Yanagisawa, his father, would have done in his position.

Sano’s distrust of Yoshisato grew. “So you’re a gang boss. You have a new life. Why did you come back? Are you tired of beating up people who won’t pay you protection money?”

Yoshisato grinned; he answered as if flinging a challenge at Sano. “I’m here to reclaim my rightful place as the shogun’s heir.”

He was as ambitious as Yanagisawa. “Why did you wait so long?”

“Do you think Lord Ienobu would just let me stroll into town? He’s got the army scouring the country for me. In the early days, I tried several times to come back, but there were soldiers at every checkpoint along the highway. They were detaining every man who looked the slightest bit like me. Ienobu wants to find me before I can tell the shogun I’m alive. I had to wait until my disguise was good enough.” Yoshisato opened his kimono and rolled up his sleeves. His arms and chest were covered with tattoos of demons and lucky symbols.

“The soldiers never suspected that the shogun’s dead heir was hiding under those,” Sano said. “Am I the only person who knows you’re back?”

Yoshisato nodded.

“Why did you reveal yourself to me? Why not Yanagisawa?”

“I don’t want to talk about Yanagisawa.” Before Sano could ask why, Yoshisato said, “I need a favor from you. Will you take me to the shogun?”

Surprised that Yoshisato would ask him of all people, Sano said, “You know I don’t believe you’re the shogun’s son. Why do you think I would help you get yourself reinstated as the heir?”

“Because you’ve dedicated your life to seeking truth and justice. The truth is that I’m alive. The shogun deserves to know. The truth is that even though I wasn’t murdered, Lord Ienobu had me kidnapped and held prisoner for years. He deserves to be punished. And you’re the one person I can trust to deliver him to justice.”

Sano smiled glumly. Yoshisato had him pegged. He could guess what Reiko would think of all this. And the fact that Yoshisato was alive had other ramifications. Sano hesitated a moment before he said, “Let’s go.”

Yoshisato smiled as if he’d known Sano would agree; he rose.

“Not so fast. Have you heard what’s happened?”

“No…?”

The news hadn’t trickled into town yet. “The shogun was stabbed last night. As of a few hours ago he was still alive, but he’s seriously injured.” Sano added, “It’s a good thing you didn’t wait any longer to come back. If the shogun dies before he finds out you’re alive, then Lord Ienobu wins.”

And now that Lord Ienobu couldn’t be convicted of Yoshisato’s murder, Sano’s hopes of defeating him hinged on proving he was responsible for the attack on the shogun.