The Fire Kimono(35)

Yet Reiko still pitied Etsuko and still hoped desperately to exonerate her. This was no ordinary investigation. There would be no rewards for unmasking this suspect as a criminal.

Now Etsuko looked fatigued and weak. Reiko said, “Well, then, perhaps you’d better rest. We can talk some more later.” She counseled herself to postpone judgment about Etsuko, at least until more facts came to light.


Sano, Marume, and Fukida ducked under the blue curtain that hung across the entrance of a dingy public bathhouse. They paid coins to the attendant, accepted towels and bags of rice bran soap, and strode into a room enclosed by mildewed walls, where naked people scrubbed and poured buckets of water over themselves or lounged in the sunken tub amid clouds of steam. Edo bathhouses came in various types. Some were for families who didn’t have space for tubs at home. In others, illegal prostitutes of either sex serviced male customers. This one, Sano noted, appeared to be a haunt of disreputable men.

As he and his comrades walked among the bathers, he saw ronin with black stubble on their faces and shaved crowns; he passed gangsters covered with tattoos. Sano took care not to look too closely at anyone while he sought the man he’d come to find. A bathhouse like this was ostensibly neutral territory in which the patrons had a tacit agreement to do one another no harm, but they didn’t always stick to the agreement. Surly gazes flicked over Sano. He heard his name spoken quietly and saw Toda Ikkyu, master spy for the metsuke—the Tokugawa intelligence service—sitting in the tub. At least Sano thought it was Toda; the spy had such a nondescript face, perfectly suited to his work. Although they’d known each other more than ten years, Sano never recognized Toda at first glance.

“Looking for me?” Toda said.

The world-weary voice and expression were familiar. Sano crouched and said, “Your people told me I could find you here. I don’t suppose you came for the pleasure of it?”

Toda smiled blandly. “Professional pleasure, one might say. Thank you for not storming in with your whole entourage. That would have foiled my operation.”

Sano and his men had come in garments without identifying crests, and they’d left his entourage down the street. While Marume and Fukida kept a covert watch on the other bathers, Sano said to Toda, “Who are you after?”

“Rebels, as usual,” Toda said. “In particular, the gang that attacked a squadron of Lord Matsudaira’s troops on the highway last month.”

Lord Matsudaira employed the metsuke to hunt down his enemies. So did Sano. The metsuke played both sides of their rivalry, ensuring its own survival no matter which ultimately won. Toda had weathered many political storms, and Sano would bet on him to emerge unscathed from this latest.

“We know who they are,” Toda said, “and we got a tip that they like to meet here. We’re waiting for them to show.”

“We?” Sano said.

“My colleagues are here with me. Don’t bother looking around—you won’t spot them. Neither will our targets.” Toda asked, “What are you after?”

“Information.”

Sano had no qualms about seeking it from this spy who helped maintain his enemy in power. Both Sano and Lord Matsudaira trusted Toda because he favored neither. Toda did his best for them both, for his own good.

“About Colonel Doi?” Toda said.

“How did you know?”

“If I were in your position, I’d go after Doi, too. He’s the one who’s got you and your mother in jeopardy. Take him down, and there’s a big problem solved.”

“So what can you tell me?” Sano said.

“Doi Naokatsu, member of a minor hereditary Tokugawa vassal clan. His father was an accountant to Tokugawa Naganori, father of Tadatoshi. The young Doi was a cut above average from the start, excelled at the martial arts, clever, too. He was appointed chief bodyguard to Tadatoshi at age fifteen, when ordinary samurai are just foot soldiers at the bottom of the ranks. After the Great Fire, with Tadatoshi’s father dead and Tadatoshi presumed to be, most of their retainers became ronin.”

They would have numbered among hordes of other new masterless samurai. The fire had ravaged military-class residences inside the Tokiwabashi and Kajibashi gates. Many Tokugawa vassals who’d had their own retainers had died or lost everything, leaving the retainers homeless and impoverished.

“All those new ronin caused trouble,” Sano remembered. “They banded together in gangs that marauded through the areas that hadn’t burned. They looted shops and squatted in abandoned houses.”

Many other survivors had done the same. The fire had virtually wiped out Edo’s food supply as well as its housing and created a mass famine. Thousands of people who hadn’t been killed by the fire had died of starvation.