Dreaming Spies (30 page)

Holmes and I moved out of the Imperial that same night, to a lovely quiet traditional ryokan just outside the geisha district. There, on Sunday morning, an invitation was delivered, by a uniformed footman who walked across our tatami in stockinged feet to deliver the ornately calligraphed missive. He bowed, took a few steps backwards, bowed again,
and stood waiting. Lacking a gold-and-ivory letter opener, Holmes thrust his thumb under the flap of the suede-textured envelope. Several layers later, he came to the meat of the matter.

“We are invited to call upon the Prince Regent at his home, at two this afternoon.”

“If he tries to give us a medal I’m going to throw it in his face,” I said. The corners of my eyes kept catching on objects they imagined to be shiny black shoes.

“You will not.”

“Holmes, you go.”

His grey eyes held mine. “Sato-san might have been the closest that young man had to a friend.”

After a minute, I sighed. “Two o’clock is fine.”

The Palace was a short walk away, although once we had shown the guards the invitation and proved that we were neither assassins nor, worse, photographers, the walk up the long drive from the street took almost as long. The Akasaka Palace was a vast neo-Baroque monstrosity built for the Prince Regent fifteen years earlier. Together with the Imperial Hotel, Tokyo now had a complete set of lessons in the things to avoid in Western architecture.

Up the steps, through the columns, up to the door, through echoing marble and several hundredweight of gilt into a room that would have pleased that other Sun King, Louis. We were parked in a room that looked about as Japanese as I did, with painted ceiling, gilded swags on every exposed inch of plaster, and a pair of massive crystal chandeliers. I eyed them, considering the nature of earthquakes, and declined the damask-and-gilt chairs that lay beneath.

I anticipated a long wait, but to my surprise, in under a minute the door came open.

Looking very small and pale, Haruki Sato stepped in. The muted cotton fabric of her kimono instantly shifted the room from merely gaudy to frankly vulgar.

I was pleased when she led us outside, into the gardens.

The moment we turned down the manicured paths, the Palace and the
city beyond faded from all awareness. Here, it was all about the shape of the patches of lawn among the trees, the descent of the tiny stream, the odour of moss, and the intense emerald and scarlet of the unfurling maple leaves.

And above all, the cherry blossoms.

“I am sorry,” I said. “About your father.”

“You should not be. He was privileged to serve his Prince. And unless the afterlife is a cruel place, his body no longer causes him pain.”

We walked, pausing on a bridge over a pond. Haruki-san pulled a bit of rice-cake out of her sleeve’s pocket and crumbled it over the water. A swirl of enormous, brilliant orange and silver carp rose from the muddy depths, all jewelled scales and wide mouths scooping up the crumbs. When the bits were gone and the fish dispersed again, we, too, went on, still in silence.

Around the next corner, Prince Hirohito was seated upon a silken carpet among a stand of blossoming cherry that would have made Hiroshige weep. To one side was a beautifully woven rectangular basket, its top shut. The Prince was wearing a kimono, rather than the Western dress he preferred; a few petals had floated onto his shoulders and hair.

His dark eyes rose to watch us approach. We stopped a distance away, and gave him formal bows.

“Please,” he said. “Sit.”

We knelt at the far side of the carpet. Haruki-san took up a position halfway between us. He said nothing for a time, his gaze wandering to one side, where a sturdy lichen-covered rock nestled comfortably between the trunks of a pair of cherry trees. One side of its weathered surface had a slight starburst pattern beneath the lichen, as if someone, a thousand years before, had tried to carve a flower there.

After a time, he gave a small sigh, then turned to speak to Haruki-san in his soft voice. When he had finished, she bowed and turned to us.

“His Highness wonders if you have participated in our tradition of hanami?”

“Blossom-viewing?” I shook my head. “No, although I’ve seen a lot of people doing so in the parks.”

“It marks spring. It is also a recognition of the transience of beauty, and of life. The blossoms quickly pass, and summer comes. You would not like a Japanese summer,” she added. “Very hot, very humid, very hard.”

The Prince spoke up again, and after a bow, she moved obediently to open the wicker box—which was, to my surprise, the picnic basket it resembled. But a far cry from English sandwiches and thermoses of tea.

Sake, cold or hot, and tiny lacquered boxes containing a myriad of delicacies savoury and sweet. It was too lovely to eat, but our host gestured at the trays Haruki-san had laid out, so we put a few of the little gems on our plates and accepted cups of sake.

When his cup was empty, he raised his eyes. “Thank you,” he said in English. “For what you did Friday night.”

“We did nothing,” Holmes told him. “We failed. A good man died because of it.”

The young man shook his head gently, and spoke, Haruki-san translating. “A good man died achieving his highest desire, to serve his Emperor.”

“We—” Holmes started, then stopped at a tiny motion from Haruki-san’s fingers. One did not argue with an Emperor. Well, most of us did not.

But as if he had heard my thought, the Prince Regent’s features suddenly twisted into an expression that looked remarkably like regret. He said, in English this time, “In Mojiro-joku, Sato-san make me angry. It is hard for a man, to make his Prince angry. It is good for a prince, to have a … friend, who make him angry. Life will be … more empty, without Sato-san.”

The three of us sat stunned by this regal admission, until he went on in Japanese, Haruki-san automatically resuming her translation.

“The night before that man’s party,” the Prince Regent continued, “my old friend came to meet me here, in the garden. Sato-san always admired this rock, and told me many times that it was in the wrong place, here. ‘The Chrysanthemum needs other flowers,’ he would say. I think he wanted me to give it to him, for his own garden in the hills. I would tell
him that he was a peasant who did not deserve an Emperor’s Chrysanthemum.” The smile on his face was sad, the insult fond.

He withdrew his gaze from the mottled stone, to ask in English, “Have you been to Kyoto?”

“Mostly the train station,” I replied.

“Take them to Kyoto,” he said to Haruki-san. “Come back and tell me how beautiful it is.”

So she did.

Many months later, the Chrysanthemum followed us, brought halfway around the world by a ninja’s cousin, from an Emperor’s garden to an Englishman’s flowerbed.

Oxford in the spring:

Tints of pale pink and yellow

But rarely scarlet
.

I laid the revolver on the kitchen table as I hurried over to where the daughter of the Emperor’s Fool stood bleeding onto my pantry floor.

“How bad is it?” I demanded.

“It looks worse than it is,” she said. I had my doubts—even in her dark blue clothing, I could tell that she was spattered with blood from shoulder to shoe—but her face was no paler than usual and her pain looked more like embarrassment than physical distress.

“Come and sit down,” I told her.

“Close your curtains first,” she said.

I started to ask questions, then shut my mouth and went to switch off the belching kettle and secure my windows—picking up the gun as I crossed the room.

When we were invisible to anyone standing on the back step, I pulled out a chair for her, stuck the gun in the back of my belt, and placed my largest pan under the hot-water tap. As the pan filled, I dug through cabinets, wondering how long it took for Japanese tea to go stale.

Not that someone in Haruki’s—Haruki-san’s—no,
Haruki
. This was
England, and as the automatic bowing had fallen from my shoulders, so had the “san” left my lips: not that someone in
Haruki’s
condition was likely to complain at stale tea.

I placed the tea in front of my guest, shut off the tap, and went to fetch my well-stocked first-aid kit. When I came back, she had tried to get out of her shirt, but in the end, it proved not worth saving. She let me slice it open with the kit’s scissors, and we looked at what lay beneath.

I’d thought it would be a knife-slice, because of all the blood, but if so, it had been a terrible blade. The injury was, as she’d said, not deep, but the skin seemed to have been savaged.

“What did this?”

“One of your British iron fences.”

Ah. For a woman of her training to fall into a fence-rail … No wonder she was embarrassed.

However, the physical effects of the injury had to be considerable. The metal point had jammed into her arm at a shallow angle, lifting a flap of skin the size of a child’s palm. It had bled like crazy, but nothing seemed to be missing. If she could avoid infection, the edges would heal together.

“We need to—”

“No hospitals. No friendly nurses. This is a simple wound. I am sure you have a needle and thread.”

I made a face. “Haruki, there’ll be a generation of filth in there.”

“You do it. You can stitch it. I would have done it myself if I could reach it.”

She would, too. I shook my head at the source of all that blood, then lifted the kit’s hidden drawer.

She watched me pinch off a small pellet of the opium paste. I thought she was going to refuse it, so I just stood, holding it out. After a minute, she took it between two bloody fingers and placed it on her tongue, washing it down with tea.

I brought the steaming pan over to let her rinse her good hand, drying it with the pristine kitchen towel Miss Pidgeon had set out on the counter. I then wrapped the towel around her lower arm to catch the ongoing dribble.

“When did you last eat?” I asked.

“This afternoon.” But the drug was already beginning to work—that testified to an empty stomach. I raised one eyebrow. “Breakfast,” she admitted. “Tea and rice.”

Wordlessly, I refilled her tea-cup, then ladled Miss Pidgeon’s soup into two bowls, and sawed off some of the fresh bread in the bin. I ate mine; she ate half of hers. I took my time, eating a second slice of the bread. When I walked back from putting my bowl into the sink, her gaze had lost its focus.

To a large extent, it is easier to bear pain than to cause it. Washing the wound created as much distress—to both of us—as I had anticipated, and I was no more skilled a seamstress when it came to flesh than I was at fabric. By the time I had snipped the last length of thread and wrapped her arm in gauze, we were both drenched in sweat. My hands, I thought, were shaking more.

I constructed two fresh cups of tea, then said, “Stay there.” I trotted upstairs for one of Holmes’ old bath-robes—a man’s robe being shorter than my own—then stripped her down, sponged her off, and wrapped her in the worn plaid. I led her to the ground-floor guest room, pulling the bed-clothes to her chin.

“I will be here. I have a gun. You sleep.”

Back in the sitting room, I ran a hand through my hair, surveying the chairs, the low-burning fire, the calm books. It felt like days since I had brought my things through the front door: according to the clock, it was little more than an hour.

I dumped several ounces of brandy down my throat, cleaned up the carnage in the kitchen, and went through the house, checking the windows and doors. I then stirred up the fire and settled onto my favourite chair, a blanket around my shoulders. The gun was in my lap.

I dozed, on and off. No sound came from the next room; no platoon of ninjas crashed through my windows. Only the ordinary noises of an Oxford night.

At dawn, I rose. Haruki-san had pushed the covers from her shoulders, but I left them, for fear of waking her. In the dim room, I could see no signs of fever.

I put on the kettle, pulled back the curtains, made some telephone calls. Then I took my mug of tea out into the garden—only when I stepped down to the paving stones, I went open-mouthed with astonishment.