There should have been more blood. Blood should have flooded the table and the floor around it if she’d been killed where she sat. There was relatively little. Maybe this was coldhearted of him, but he could deal with details better than the whole picture, a little like Sergeant Shozo’s jigsaw puzzle, except that Harry refused to see the piece in the center or touch the wooden box, not yet. Before the lighter’s flame died, he looked up and found its dim reflection in the mirror ball hanging above, and another glint from a brass post of the velvet rope. Now he knew where he was.
In the dark, Harry climbed to the cockpit over the door and threw on the house lights: whites, cells, spots and mirror ball all at once. The ballroom leaped out of the dark. Michiko and table gained color, focus, dimension. The size of the ballroom, the gilded ceiling and balcony tier made her smaller, braver, a child prodigy playing to an empty house. The parquet shone except for two tracks from the table to the swing door of the women’s restroom.
The ballroom management had kept the restroom’s size and amenities to a minimum to discourage dancers from loitering. The light was out; why bother changing it after the dancing had stopped? A broken window on an airshaft admitted as much dust as light to two sinks with a cracked mirror and two Western toilets without seats that sat in a floor of hexagonal tiles. Blood pooled around a central drain that was stopped with clotted hair. Harry edged around the blood, searching the ceiling and walls for a bullet hole and the floor for a loose button, anything dropped. Just going tacky, the blood bore the imprints of her knees and toes and a man’s shoes, relatively large, a red negative of where she knelt and where he stood.
Harry retreated to the dance floor.
“Tetsu!”
Tetsu was not in his office. Harry found cases of cigarettes, packs of cards, dumbbells, tattoo books, but no sign of blood or disarray. Harry returned to the bathroom door. Had Ishigami surprised Michiko in the bathroom? Had she put the gun down out of reach? Had she meekly sunk to her knees? Did she see the head box? Of course, Ishigami was the man who had peered deeply into her and found the geisha. In some ways, he might know her more intimately than Harry.
Then he set her up. He moved her with her toes dragging to a table in the middle of the ballroom floor and sat her in a chair. There he stretched her arms across the table as if setting the head box down or respectfully offering a gift. Then he locked the front door, which made no sense unless he wanted only Harry to find her. Harry had told her to wait at the ballroom. He was the one man sure to try every door.
Harry pictured it. Wood wasn’t paper, and Ishigami couldn’t punch through the restroom wall, but he could slip through the door, and in such poor light Michiko might not immediately see who he was. It still wasn’t right. Nobody who ever made love with Michiko came away unscathed. There’d be a shot or some of Ishigami’s blood. Overhead, the mirror ball hung like a ghostly daytime moon. Harry remembered her in her sequined jacket. There’d be something.
He approached the table again, circling as he neared, trying to chase the shakes out of his knees. Bullets were different. Once they left a gun they became, to some degree, middlemen between the killer and the victim. There was distance, if only an inch, and at long distance a sniper’s objectivity. A sword, however, never left the hand and was never less than personal. Harry remembered being the butt of bayonet practice at school and how passionately the drill sergeant sprayed spit as he urged students to plunge their bamboo poles through Harry’s wicker armor. How smooth, in comparison, Ishigami was. An artist. Americans wondered how samurai could fight in loose-sleeved kimonos, not understanding how the robes accentuated the sweep and thrust of the sword, and how the final plunge of steel through silk wrapped agony in beauty. Harry thought all this as if each idea were armor protecting him from the simple reality of a headless girl sitting like a sack of potatoes in a chair.
Death changed people, but that much?
Harry tentatively raised the lid of the box. The wood was white wisteria sanded to a sheen that emphasized the glossy black of the hair inside, cut short. He dug his fingers in and lifted. Since the head faced away he first saw damp, matted hair and two wounds down to the skull that must have preceded the final slice. A broad neck. Small ears with thick lobes. He turned the head around to face Haruko. Her eyes were slitted, mouth parted, forehead creased by a frown. It was an expression she might wear if a friend had suddenly accosted her with a a trick question, something she didn’t have the answer for and was still figuring out.
Haruko in her own dress. That explained a lot. After telling Harry on the phone that Michiko had taken the dress, Haruko must have gone after it and found Michiko, and the two must have come to the ballroom together. Why Michiko didn’t wait and Haruko did, Harry couldn’t understand, although it explained why Haruko was taken so completely by surprise. In the murk of the restroom, with no gun and no warning, how could she defend herself from Ishigami?
A reverberation pounded at the back door and died. Harry fought the impulse to run. Where to? The door opened for a man dressed in shadow who moved through the scenery racks, emerged onto the ballroom parquet and peeled his goggles back. It was Gen in a leather coat and helmet. He slowed as he approached the table.
“Harry, what did you do?”
“Nothing.”
“It doesn’t look like nothing. Who is that?” Gen nodded toward the head in Harry’s hands.
“Haruko.”
“The waitress from your club?”
“Yes.”
Harry had a ringing in his ears that he couldn’t place as either alarm or relief. He put the head into the box as gently as he could and replaced the lid.
“Any witnesses, Harry?”
“I don’t know, I wasn’t here.”
“Okay.” Gen followed the trail to the restroom and edged in, careful to stay out of the blood. He emerged breathing hard and shaking his head. “You’ve done it now, Harry.”
“It was Ishigami. If you’d gotten him out of town when I asked, this wouldn’t have happened.”
Gen made a show of looking right and left. “I don’t see Ishigami. What I see is you and Haruko.”
“If I did it, where’s the sword?”
“You tell me. Did you kill her?”
“No, I swear.”
“On what, Harry? What would you swear on?”
“I didn’t do it. Simple as that.”
“Nothing is simple with you.” Gen looked at Harry coldly. “Did anyone see you come in? Tetsu? Anyone?”
“No.”
Gen started twice to say something and finally softened. “Come on.”
THE SUN HAD SET while Harry was in the ballroom. He and Gen rode the motorbike the long way around to Asakusa Park. They joined a circle under a streetlamp watching a storyteller with a box of illustrated slides depicting the feats of the Golden Bat, the same show they had watched as kids. Around them the crowd was in constant motion, from food stalls to fortune-tellers, sandal and kimono shops, stands selling toys, masks, souvenirs. Some people flowed out to the movie-theater row while others restlessly wandered back to the precincts of the temple like a sea that didn’t know which way to go. Harry didn’t know where else to look for Michiko. Would she go to the apartment, the one place where Ishigami was sure to look? Every time Harry thought about her, the ringing in his ears returned like a deafening alarm. He kept moving, hoping to find Tetsu or someone else who might have seen her. In the slide box, the Golden Bat killed an ogre. Harry wiped his hands with his handkerchief. Gen had tucked his motorcycle cap under his arm, but he still drew admiring glances as if he’d parachuted in.
Gen said, “I should be handing you to the police. What happened at the ballroom?”
“I don’t know, but it was Ishigami.”
“You’re sure?”