A door had banged closed upstairs somewhere.
The Japanese didn’t know he was finished yet. He was starting to inch over toward where he had dropped the knife. Hollinger jumped in between, kicked it out of his reach once and for all, hauled him to his feet by the collar of his sweater, hauled off and dropped him with a remarkable final blow.
The girl had collapsed into a chair, and was breathing with a pitiful burgeoning-out and sinking-in of her body at the waist. He found a water-tap in a western-style kitchen adjoining the room, filled the hollows of his hands, came back and wetted her throat with it. He did that three or four times until that awful breathing was nearly normal again.
“Attagirl,” he said. “You’re hard to kill — like me.”
She managed a wan smile. “The only reason it wasn’t all over with by the time you got here was that she had to get it out of her system first — rub it in that he’d been hers, not mine. She dragged me around on a Cook’s Tour of the house, with a speech for every memento—”
“Who was she?”
Her gaze fell before his. “His wife,” she said slowly, “poor thing. Legally married to him by the Shinto rites—”
He shook his head at her. “What a rat he was,” he said. He turned. “She’s still in here someplace — I heard her go upstairs.”
She reached out, caught him by the arm. “No,” she said with a peculiar look, “I don’t think so. She — loved him very much, you see.”
He didn’t at all. A whiff of sandalwood incense crept down the stairs, floated in to them, as if to punctuate her cryptic remark.
The police-watch came trooping in on them at this point, with a great flourishing and waving of clubs, hemmed them in against the wall.
“Now you get here,” Hollinger greeted them ungratefully.
“Hai!” said the cocky little detective, and pointed to the professional hatchet-man on the floor. Immediately two of the cops started whacking him with their clubs. Then they turned him over on his face, lashed his hands behind him with rope, and dragged him out by the feet — a nice Oriental touch.
They had, evidently, been playing steeplechase, picking up the traces Hollinger had been leaving all night long. They had the battered Stolen Hours proprietor, the furled wall-paper, the Russian, and the first taxi-driver, the one who must have gone back and betrayed the girl’s hiding-place to Denguchi.
The detective, puffing out his chest like a pouter-pigeon, said to her, “So you do not kill this man. Why you not stay and say so, pliss? You put us to great trouble.”
“We put you to great trouble?” Hollinger yelped.
“Iss grave misdemeanor. Run away from question iss not good. You must come and give explanation before magistrate.”
“Why, you little pint-sized—!”
She quickly reached out and braked his twitching arm against his side. “Don’t you ever get tired of fighting?” she murmured.
“What fighting? I didn’t have one good man-sized fight all night, only guys that bite you, grab your thumbs, and jump you from behind curtains!” he said aggrievedly.
“Where other woman?”
The sandalwood, like the troubled spirit of one departed, hovered in the air about them. They found her upstairs, behind the locked door, kneeling in death on a satin prayer-pillow before a framed photograph of the man Evelyn Brainard had come out to rob her of. A pinch of incense sent a thread of smoke curling up before it. Her god. Forward she toppled, as the ritual prescribed, to show she was not afraid of meeting death. Hands tucked under her, clasping the hari-kari knife.
She looked pathetic and lovely and small — incapable almost of the act of violence that had been necessary in order to die.
To have interfered, the sailor somehow felt, staring in from the doorway, would have been the worst sort of desecration. He looked at the weak mouth and chin pictured inside the frame. Too cowardly to hurt either one, he had hurt both, one unto death. A pair of love birds were twittering in a scarlet bamboo cage. A bottle of charcoal-ink, a writing brush, a long strip of paper with hastily-traced characters, lay behind her on the floor.
The detective picked it up, began to read.
“I, Yugiri-san. Mist of the Evening, most unworthy of wives, go now to keep my honored husband’s house in the sky, having unwittingly twice failed to carry out my honored husband’s wish—”
The girl had stayed downstairs. “Don’t tell her, will you?” Hollinger said when the detective had finished translating the death-scroll for his benefit. “She doesn’t have to know. Let her go on thinking the woman was the one tried to get rid of her, through jealousy. Don’t tell her the man she came out to marry hired a murderer to get her out of his way, because he didn’t have guts enough to tell her to her face. It’s tough enough as it is.”
The detective sucked in his breath politely. “This was — fffs — great crime, to make it seem another had done it.”
“It was — fffs — great pain-in-the-neck while it lasted,” the sailor agreed.
It was getting light in Tokyo when they left the police station, walking slowly side by side. They had their shoes at last, and that was almost the best thing of all.
“I guess,” she said ruefully, linking her arm in his, “I pretty well messed-up your shore-leave for you.”
“Naw,” he assured her, “you made it. Absolutely! That reminds me, keep the night of November third open, will you?”
“November third? But that’s six months away!”
“I know, but that’s when we get into Frisco Bay.”
“I will,” she said. “I’ll keep November third for you. There isn’t any night that I wouldn’t keep for you — ever.”
“Well, I’ll borrow a minute from one night now.” Hollinger said. He took her in his arms.
Afterword to “Death in the Yoshiwara”
“Death in the Yoshiwara” (Argosy, January 29, 1938) is the only Woolrich pulp story set in Japan and a gem of pure whizbang action writing that will remind older readers of a Republic Pictures cliffhanger serial, while its protagonist will no doubt strike younger generations as a prototype of Indiana Jones. The climax of course comes straight of Madama Butterfly and demonstrates yet again how profoundly Woolrich was influenced by seeing Puccini’s opera in Mexico City when he was a boy.
Endicott’s Girl
Jenny hadn’t come home by the time we were through our meal. I couldn’t wait because I had to get back to the precinct-house. As I left the table, I growled. “Wonder where she is?”
My sister said, “Oh, she’s probably having a soda with her girl friends. She only went out a minute or two before you got back.” Her school books were there on the radiator, so I didn’t have to be told that.
I looked at the books fondly on my way past. “Duncan’s Elements of Trigonometry” was the title of the top one. I shook my head and snorted. Now, what earthly good was it filling a pretty eighteen-year-old girl’s head with junk like that? In one ear, out the other. Bad enough to ladle it out to boys... There was a tiny light-blue handkerchief, so thin you could see through it, caught between the pages. I pulled it out, held it between my thumb and forefinger, and chuckled. Now, that was more like it. That was what a girl should be interested in, not trigo-what-ever-it-was. There was a little colored design of a kitten stitched on one corner, and there was an intermingled odor of honeysuckle and chocolate. She probably took candy to school, wrapped in it, I thought as I laid it back again between the pages of the book. I walked on into my bedroom.