“Safe enough, provided you go in the daytime, take a maid with you, and don’t venture into unsavory parts of town. By the way, I brought you another patient.” He explained briefly about Harada.
She nodded, then took his arm. “Come! I have someone waiting to talk to you. The painter of the pretty scroll has called. I left him giving a drawing lesson to your son.”
An irrational fear seized Akitada. “You left him with Yori?”
But the scene which met his eyes was harmless enough. The defrocked monk, dressed in a decent gray robe, his short hair brushed back, knelt next to Akitada’s son. Both held ink brushes and were bent over a large sheet of paper.
The boy looked up and a broad smile lit his face. Jumping to his feet, he ran to his father and wrapped his arms around his thighs. “I’m painting,” he cried. “I painted cats. Come see!”
Akitada nodded to Noami, who bowed with unexpected politeness.
“I called, sir,” he said in his grating voice, “to see if you wished me to proceed with the screen for your lady. Since you were not here, it was my great fortune to meet the beautiful lady herself and your charming son.”
The compliments were courteous, but Akitada did not want this man near his family. “It was good of you to come,” he said brusquely, “but we have not really had time to consider the matter.”
Yori tugged at his sleeve.
“I was perhaps a little unreasonable about the price,” Noami suggested.
Still easily shamed by money problems, Akitada felt the color rise to his face. “No, no. I have been too busy to consider and will let you know when we make up our minds.” He hoped Noami would get the idea that the visit was over.
But the painter lingered. “Young Yori has something to show you,” he reminded Akitada.
Reluctantly Akitada allowed his son to draw him over to Noami’s side. The sheet of paper was covered with pictures of cats. Some were admirably true to life, their catlike postures sketched with consummate skilclass="underline" a cat jumping for a mouse, a cat staring down into a fishbowl, a cat toying with a beetle, a cat hissing, and a cat eating a bird. The others were childish copies by Yori, painstakingly executed, the black-on-white scheme enlivened by vivid touches of red.
“Your son has a lively sense of color,” Noami commented, his eyes watching Akitada’s face.
The red touches looked like blood, were meant to be blood. Yori had got the idea from the just-killed bird and applied a thick layer of red grease paint from his mother’s cosmetics to the bird and to the face of the cat. Pleased with the effect, he had then given all the other cats red muzzles. He pointed, quite unnecessarily. “Blood! Cats eat birds and mice and they get blood on them.”
Tamako came to take a look and clasped her hand to her mouth.
Noami chuckled, a dry coughlike sound. “A boy after my own heart,” he said, and put a hand on Yori’s shoulder. “So young and already so observant. What a man you will be someday!”
Tamako jerked up the child. “It is time for his nap,” she cried, and ran from the room, Yori protesting loudly.
Akitada looked at the painter with hatred in his heart. Controlling himself with difficulty, he said coldly, “We won’t keep you any longer. And there is no need to return. I will send for you if we decide on the screen.”
Noami nodded. “I am told you saw the hell screen at the temple?”
“Yes. It is greatly admired.”
The painter cocked his head. “But not by you?”
Akitada said stiffly, “I do not hold with the Buddhist theory of hell.”
“Ah! I, on the other hand, have problems with the Western Paradise.” Noami stepped closer and fixed Akitada with his deep-set, burning eyes. “What pleasure can be so great that it matches pain? We all suffer the agonies of hell, but none has tasted the joys of paradise.” With that he turned and walked out.
When Tora felt well enough to begin his investigation two days later, he dressed in the worst clothes he could find: baggy pants, liberally stained and torn in places; a ragged cotton shirt; a quilted jacket with unmatched patches, tied about the waist with a hemp rope; and old straw sandals. He untied his long hair, rubbed it with some greasy lamp oil, and wrapped a rag around his head. Finally, putting a scowl on his unshaven face, he left.
He was headed for the western city, where poor people, criminals, and outcasts lived in tenements, abandoned ruins, or squatters’ shacks in open fields. There was the heart of the underworld of the city, the refuge of gangs and notorious criminals, of vagrants, beggars, cripples, and the insane.
The day was overcast and cold. Tora walked at a comfortable pace to avoid undue strain to his recent injuries and thought about Yukiyo. She had tried her best to describe her ordeal. In a shamefaced whisper, she had spoken of her wounds, the horrible disfigurement of her face, the deep slashes across her breasts and abdomen. The monster had taken pleasure in the cutting, it seemed, but was not bent on killing her, or he would have stabbed or disemboweled her. Appalled by the viciousness of it, Tora had wondered if she encountered a demon instead of a man. His small size, his superhuman strength and cruelty, and his acrid stench all pointed to it. But Yukiyo had shaken her head stubbornly. He had been a man. As for the smell, it been more like hot lacquer or lamp oil, maybe.
Some sort of craftsman, thought Tora as he walked. It was not a useful clue. There were too many of them in the city. Tora planned to retrace Yukiyo’s steps that night, beginning with the place where she had met the slasher, at a cheap brothel. She had been soliciting there without any luck, but as she was walking away a hooded figure had reached out from an alley and drawn her into the shadows. In a hoarse whisper, the man had offered to pay her thirty coppers to go home with him. Thirty coppers was wealth; it would pay for food for weeks, and she had agreed eagerly.
They had walked a long way, through a warren of back alleys in the far western city wards. Once she had glimpsed the roof ornament of a pagoda, and not long after that they had come to a grove of bamboo and entered an empty unlit house. There, in the darkness, he had given her a cup of wine. After that she remembered nothing until she woke in another alley in horrible pain, looking up into the horrified eyes of people who found her half-naked and bleeding.
Tora found the brothel easily. It was a rickety wooden building with the impressive name Crane Terrace. A cheap wineshop occupied the street level and a few rooms above served prostitutes and their customers. The entrance was remarkable only for the stained and torn door curtain with a misshapen bird painted on it. Tora noted the narrow passage along the side of the building. Here, among the remnants of broken sake casks and vegetable peelings, the slasher had lurked that dark night, catching his victim by the simple expedient of grabbing her arm as she passed by. Tora shook his head. Even a half-starved whore should have had the good sense to run.
He ducked under the curtain into the semidarkness of the wineshop. A thick, fetid vapor of food smells and smoke almost took his breath away.
He stood on a dirt floor. On his right, a set of steep stairs led above. Straight ahead a fire pit was putting out the smoke and the indescribable smells from a large cauldron stirred by a shaggy-haired hag. On his left, a one-eyed brute sat next to a keg. Three ragged creatures eyed the newcomer blearily. The innkeeper growled, “Wine’s a copper, take it or leave it. For another copper, you can eat.”
Tora suppressed his revulsion. “Wine,” he said gruffly, joining the three guests.
“Show me the money first!”
Tora dug out a copper coin. The man snatched it from his hand, held it up to his eye, and nodded. Dropping the coin down the front of his shirt, he dipped out a measure of dark, cloudy liquid from the keg. It was easily the worst wine Tora had ever tasted and almost choked him. “I’m looking for a girl,” he said when he found his voice.