Kaze turned and started walking out of the area, remembering to hobble and lean heavily on his stick.
CHAPTER 13
The master is death.
It conquers the finest hands
and the keenest mind.
" Inatomi.”
“What about Inatomi?” Ieyasu asked, fixing his eyes on Toyama.
Toyama was so anxious to parade his idea before Ieyasu, he had blurted it out at the first opportunity. Yoshida, Okubo, and Honda, who were also at the conference, looked at him peculiarly, because such an outburst was both unseemly for a samurai and a sign of lack of control.
Toyama licked his lips, then he cleared his throat. “You said yourself, Ieyasu-sama, that the distance for the assassination attempt was extremely long for a musket ball to carry, and that only a gun by Inatomi Gaiki could be used. Inatomi’s guns are rare and expensive, and he probably hasn’t made too many of them. This Matsuyama Kaze is a ronin, and could never afford a gun by Inatomi. He may be the assassin, but there may also be others in the plot. Inatomi lives nearby in Ueno. I think we should go to him and ask him who has bought his guns. It may not give us the exact plotters, but it will give us a list that we can examine. By concentrating on Matsuyama Kaze, we may be allowing equally guilty parties to escape.”
“Ridiculous!” Honda exploded. Toyama actually flinched. “Knowing who has an Inatomi gun tells us nothing. I have one of his guns myself, and so does Ieyasu-sama.”
“No,” Ieyasu said quietly. “It’s actually a good idea. Our efforts to find this Matsuyama have so far failed.” Yoshida blushed. “It might be good to try another approach. Sometimes you’re too direct, Honda. It you’ve assaulted the front of the castle a dozen times with no success, walking through the back door is the best thing you can do.”
“It’s just a total waste of time,” Honda objected. “I’m still against it.”
Ieyasu ignored his blustery general. “Yoshida-san.”
“Yes, Ieyasu-sama!”
“Take a squad of men to the gun maker’s house. Toyama-san is right. I do think only a gun made by Inatomi could have been used in the assassination attempt. Get me a list of who Inatomi-sensei has sold his guns to. He takes such care with the manufacture of his weapons, I don’t imagine he’s made that many of them. If nothing else, the list will give us a basis for identifying lords who may be in conspiracy with this Matsuyama Kaze.”
“I’ll be happy to send my men,” Okubo offered.
“No, I want Yoshida-san to do this,” Ieyasu replied.
“Immediately, Ieyasu-sama!” Yoshida got to his feet and strode out of the room.
Honda glared at the retreating daimyo, while Toyama basked in the thought that his idea had been a good one.
Two hours later, Kaze trudged up a hill in Ueno, still disguised as an old man. After seeing the assassination site, he also had come to the conclusion that only a gun by Inatomi Gaiki could have been used, and he wanted to talk to Inatomi. He stopped for a moment, leaning on his walking stick and getting his bearings.
He walked over to a roadside shop and asked directions to Inatomi-sensei’s house. Kaze used the title sensei, which meant teacher, to indicate that he knew that Inatomi was also a master.
Getting directions, he made his way down the road to the house of the well-to-do craftsman. He stopped at the door and entered. The house would be a sales outlet as well as a residence, so he had no compunction about entering. The entryway was a dirt square, surrounded by the house floor, which was a raised wooden platform. Here visitors were expected to stop, remove their sandals, and get properly greeted by servants or a member of the craftsman’s family.
He called out, “Sumimasen! Excuse me!”
Silence met his greeting. This was unusual. A craftsman’s house was always occupied, because it was also a place of business.
“Sumimasen!” Kaze shouted, thinking that perhaps he wasn’t heard the first time. Again, no response.
Kaze sat on the raised floor and removed his sandals. In the air he smelled smoke. It wasn’t the pleasant smell of a charcoal fire, but something more acrid and pungent. He decided to investigate. Fire was the great fear of all Japanese households. With paper and wood houses, this fear was not idle. Every Japanese city had periodic and disastrous fires, and in the pantheon of crimes, arson was considered the most heinous, next to treason.
As Kaze walked through the house, there was an unnatural silence to it. The house was a large one, one that would house a master, several apprentices, and a support staff of servants. In such a house there would always be a natural buzz of activity as people went about the business of daily life. This house was lifeless, and Kaze wondered where its inhabitants were, and why they had abandoned the house during the middle of the day, leaving a fire burning.
He walked from the entry into a sitting room, where Master Inatomi probably greeted important guests and conducted business. It was a spacious, twelve-mat room with a beautiful wooden rack along one wall. On the rack was a matchlock musket, made by Inatomi-sensei.
Kaze’s weapon was the sword, and he was an expert at judging a blade with a single glance. He was not as familiar with muskets, but even his relatively inexperienced eye could see that this weapon was also a work of art. The barrel was a sleek tube, with decorative engraving on its side. The matchlock mechanism was as finely made as a delicate porcelain sakè flask. A curved piece of steel held a rope fuse, which was lighted when the gun was to be fired. When the trigger was pulled, the lighted match was pushed into a hole and ignited the gunpowder in the barrel. The short wooden stock was beautifully grained and shaped, and polished to a high gloss. The weapon was an expert amalgam of deadly function and aesthetic craftsmanship.
Past the sitting room, Kaze entered a hallway. It went the length of the house to the back. It was there he found the first body.
It was a woman in her late thirties. She appeared to be a maid, dressed in a common gray kimono. She was lying on her face, one hand twisted behind her back, reaching for the terrible cut that stretched from her neck to her waist. Someone had cut her down as she ran. Kaze checked briefly to make sure she was dead, then continued walking down the hallway.
In a room that was an office, he found the source of the smoke. The room had sliding screens along two walls. These were shoved back, revealing shelves. If the room was used as a bedroom, the futons, pillows, and other sleeping gear would be kept on the shelves, ready to be brought out each night at bedtime. In this room, the shelves were used to store various papers, either folded or rolled into scrolls. Most of the papers were knocked off the shelves and spread on the floor. Kaze glanced at them, using his walking stick to move them slightly so he could get a better look at them. They seemed to be a mixture of personal correspondence, business records, and diagrams of matchlock gun designs. In the center of the room was a copper box, filled with sand and used to burn charcoal in the winter. The smoke came from this box.
Kaze walked over and looked at the ashes left smoldering in the box. The fragile paper embers were still red. The flames from the paper burnt in the box had only recently died. Kaze surmised they were business records, perhaps listing who owned the guns made by Inatomi Gaiki. Obviously, someone else had realized that the choice of weapon would form a link that might lead to the assassins, and they had taken steps to break that chain.
He found another dead woman in the kitchen, but didn’t find the real carnage until he walked out of the back door of the house.
At the back of the house was a garden in the Chinese style. The carefully shaped azalea bushes were woven between serpentine paths of clean, white gravel. The yard was encircled by a high, bamboo fence. Against one wall of the fence were large rocks, chosen and artfully placed to give the illusion of a distant mountain range. It was a fine garden, perfectly in keeping with the artistic sensibilities Kaze saw in the craftsmanship of the musket.