Death at the Crossroads (Samurai Mysteries) Read online

  Showing an agility and balance that amazed Jiro, the samurai nimbly made his way down the hillside to the road. When he arrived at the crossroads, the two guards actually took a step back from him, as if to make sure they were out of his reach.

  Seeing that the apoplectic Nagato was in no shape to talk, Ichiro presumed to address the samurai.

  “I’m Ichiro, the village headman for Suzaka,” he said. “This is Magistrate Nagato and two of his men. As you can see, we are here to investigate what happened to this murdered man.”

  The samurai gestured in Jiro’s direction with his chin. “And who is he?”

  Surprised, Jiro stammered his name. He was used to being treated as part of the background and not acknowledged or recognized by those who were clearly his betters. The samurai was obviously a ronin. But even a masterless samurai was still a samurai. If he cared to, he could cut down Jiro or any peasant with his sword with no fear of penalty by the law.

  Introductions handled to the samurai’s satisfaction, he asked, “Now, what do you want to know?”

  “What’s your name?” Nagato Takamasu inquired, finally regaining enough control to talk. At the tone of Nagato’s voice, the samurai gave the Magistrate a hard stare. “I, ah, I need your name for my report to the District Lord,” Nagato stammered, giving his head a quick bow to show there was no disrespect intended in the question. “I’m the Magistrate of this District.”

  The samurai stopped and looked up the hillside. Jiro followed his gaze but could see nothing except the wind rustling through the pine trees that covered the mountain’s slope. “I am Matsuyama Kaze,” the samurai said.

  Jiro thought it unusual that the samurai’s name should be “Pine Mountain Wind,” when that was just what he was looking at. Jiro wondered if the Magistrate would notice the coincidence and decided that Nagato Takamasu was a man who didn’t notice much, despite his two names. Anyone with two names was either from a samurai or noble family. If they became a District Lord, they became a “great name,” or Daimyo. For the mass of peasants, merchants, and others who made up the rest of Japanese society, only one name was deemed sufficient. If this caused confusion, they were commonly given some kind of identifying tag, such as Jiro the charcoal seller.

  “And what do you know of this?” the Magistrate said, pointing at the now-disturbed body lying at their feet.

  “He’s dead.” Jiro thought the samurai had a hint of a smile when he replied, although his face remained serious.

  “Yes, yes, of course he’s dead,” Nagato said, “but do you know how he died?”

  “An arrow.” Although Matsuyama Kaze kept a serious visage, Jiro was now sure there was a twinkle in his eye. He’s playing with the Magistrate, Jiro thought. The Magistrate literally had the power of life or death, and the idea of manipulating him for sport seemed inconceivable.

  “Of course, of course. I can see that. An arrow killed him. But do you know how he was killed?”

  “Only what my eyes tell me. I didn’t see the murder. When I came up the path, I saw Jiro squatting over the body, examining it. He saw me and got frightened, leaving his charcoal basket behind and running away. I decided to stop for awhile to see what would happen next. I thought it might be interesting. It was.”

  “Yes, yes, I understand all that. But do you know anything except what you saw?”

  Kaze smiled. “Apparently some men can’t even understand what they do see. It’s foolish to ask me about things I did not see.”

  The Magistrate wasn’t sure if he had been insulted or not, and paused for a few moments to see if he could figure it out. He couldn’t, so he turned his attention back to the body. He circled it several times, mumbling, “Yes, yes,” to himself as he looked things over. Finally, he stopped, put his hands on his hips, and announced, “Well, of course, it’s obvious.”

  No one, including Kaze, encouraged the Magistrate to explain what was so obvious. He did so anyway. “This man is a stranger. Certainly not from our village. He was obviously walking along the path and bandits shot him in the back and robbed him. Yes, yes, it’s all very clear.”

  Kaze started laughing. Irritated, the Magistrate turned to him and said, “I am the Magistrate.”

  “Yes, you are,” Kaze said, “and one of your functions is to assure that justice is done. That won’t happen if you can’t even see where a man was killed.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “How many men walk around with only one sandal?”

  “None! What a ridiculous question!”

  “Then why does this man have only one sandal? Men wear two sandals or go barefoot, like Jiro.”

  Peering down at the body, the Magistrate said, “Yes, yes. I see what you mean.” Looking at the guardsmen, he said, “Find the other sandal.”

  “Don’t bother,” Kaze said. “It isn’t here. It was lost where the man was killed.”

  “He probably lost it running to this spot. Just because the sandal isn’t here, that doesn’t mean that he wasn’t killed here.”

  “Your circling of the body erased any footprints, but before you came I looked at the path. There were prints from a horse and prints of bare feet and sandals from people who have walked through this crossroads. There are no prints of one bare foot and one sandaled foot. This man was not killed here.”

  “But it’s ridiculous to think he was killed elsewhere. Why would a bandit kill a man and go to the trouble of moving him to this crossroads?” the Magistrate asked.

  “Why would a bandit leave the man’s money?”

  “What? He still has his money?”

  “Check his money pouch.”

  The Magistrate pointed to Ichiro to execute Kaze’s command. The village headman bent down and found the dead man’s money pouch, held to his kimono sash by a short cord ending in a wooden toggle, designed to prevent the cord from slipping out of the sash. Instead of the usual carved ivory netsuke, this toggle was just a plain square of wood with a hole drilled in it.

  Ichiro hefted the pouch, then looked inside. “It’s true, Magistrate-sama, there is money in here. Several copper pieces and even one silver piece.”

  “Yes, yes, very strange. How did you know that, samurai?”

  “I looked,” Kaze said.

  “You seem to know a lot about this for a man who said he came upon the body after the charcoal seller here discovered it.”

  “You would also know a lot more if you looked. For instance, see the man’s sash? How it’s wound around him?”

  The Magistrate stared at the body for several minutes. Jiro also looked. A long sash was wrapped several times around the body. Despite its length, it seemed to be a little loose. Jiro wasn’t sure what the samurai was talking about. The Magistrate echoed Jiro’s bafflement. “I don’t see anything,” he said.

  The samurai sighed. “You can hold a lighted candle to a man’s face, but even if he feels the heat, you can’t make him open his eyes to look at the flame.”

  “Here, here,” the Magistrate said. “I’m getting tired of these remarks of yours. They don’t make sense, and I think they might be disrespectful.”

  The samurai gave a short bow. “I have the deepest respect for the position of Magistrate,” he said. “It is an important function and vital to keeping order in a district. If any of my remarks have offended you, I am sorry. They are simply reflective of the caliber of the actions and words I’ve seen before me.”

  The Magistrate blinked a few times, not sure if he had been apologized to or insulted again. Finally he said, “Yes, yes, well, I’ll have to report this to the District Lord to see what he thinks. His manor is next to Suzaka village. This is all very unusual, very unusual. Samurai, I’ll require you to stay until our Lord decides what to do about this whole situation.”

  “Is there a teahouse in Suzaka?”

  “No, but you can stay with the charcoal seller.”

  Jiro didn’t want the Magistrate extending an invitation to this ronin. He didn’t want a guest impo
sed on him, especially a strange ronin. “Excuse me, Magistrate-sama, but my house is too meager for a samurai.”

  “Nonsense,” the Magistrate said. “He has to stay someplace. He certainly can’t stay with me or at the Lord’s manor. Your farmhouse is as good as any.”

  “But perhaps the samurai would object to staying at such a lowly dwelling?”

  “Oh no,” Kaze said with a smile. “Two nights ago I slept in the bottom of a boat I was in, and last night I slept in an open field. I’m sure your house will be quite adequate.”

  “But—”

  Jiro’s last try at an indirect protest was cut off by the Magistrate, who said, “Good, good. It’s all settled then. Let’s go into the village. I have to report this to the Lord. You two men stay here and bury the corpse,” the Magistrate said to the guards.

  “You’re not going to take the body into Suzaka? Maybe someone in the village will know this man. Just because he’s a stranger to you, that doesn’t mean others won’t know him,” Kaze said.

  “What for? It’s a needless effort. Here we just bury dead strangers by the side of the road. That’s our custom. Yes, yes, that’s the proper thing to do.” The Magistrate started waddling off toward the village.

  The samurai didn’t immediately follow, and both Jiro and Ichiro were torn between trailing after the Magistrate and making sure the samurai would go.

  Almost to himself, the samurai said, “What kind of place is this, where the bodies of strange men are so common that you have a custom for how you bury them?”

  He stuck his sword into his sash, adjusting it carefully, then started down the path toward the village with the headman Ichiro trailing. Curious, Jiro looked up the hillside, then down the path at the retreating figures of the Magistrate, the ronin, and the village headman. He decided to satisfy his curiosity and started scrambling up the hillside to the place where the samurai had been sitting.

  When he got to the tree trunk, he picked up the piece of wood the samurai had been carving. It was a piece of a limb as tall as a hand and as big around as a spear butt. From this hunk of wood, the samurai had carved a statue of Kannon, the Goddess of Mercy. The statue wasn’t finished. Only her face and shoulders were emerging from the rough bark, but Jiro marveled at the delicate beauty and serene expression staring up at him.

  Kannon’s eyes were lidded slits, and her smooth cheekbones framed a tiny mouth with perfectly formed lips. As always, she was patient and inviting, ready to extend her mercy to any supplicant sincere enough to ask for it. That the hands of a man could evoke a living representation of the Goddess from a common piece of wood was a source of wonder for Jiro, who was used to much cruder representations of the Gods and Goddesses that inhabit the Land of the Gods.

  Jiro looked down the slope and saw the two soldiers scraping out a shallow grave by the side of the road. From his vantage point the crossroads and all that occurred there was spread before him like a scene framed by tree trunks and branches. Where the samurai had placed the Kannon, the Goddess could look down on the slain man and all who traveled this place, extending her mercy to weary travelers on dangerous roads. Jiro placed the half-formed statue back on the branch, just where the samurai had left her. He clapped his hands together and bowed, asking the Goddess to extend her benevolence to him, too.

  The men digging the grave looked up at Jiro’s clap, but didn’t have enough curiosity to see what the charcoal seller was doing. Slipping and sliding, Jiro made his way down the slope that the samurai had so nimbly navigated just a few minutes before. After loading the spilled charcoal into his basket and hoisting the basket on his back, Jiro scurried down the path that led to Suzaka village.

  CHAPTER 3

  A spider sits and

  waits in an iridescent

  web. Poor little moth!

  “Sooooo?”

  Nagato hated this. Lord Manase loved subtlety and indirectness. Nagato was just a rough country samurai, and he knew it. He was at a loss as to how to deal with this peculiar master, who kept such strange customs and who talked with such an odd accent. Now, after reporting the murder at the crossroads and the encounter with the samurai, the Lord was expecting Nagato to make some comment, but Nagato could get no hint of what kind of comment the Lord was expecting from his one-word question.

  “It was probably the work of Boss Kuemon, Manase-sama,” Nagato said.

  “Sooooo?”

  That response again. They were sitting in the Lord’s study. For some reason, Lord Manase preferred a study with sturdy wooden shutters, instead of the usual paper shoji screens. The result was a dark and gloomy place, with deep shadows like a cave. Lord Manase sat in the center of the room, surrounded by books and trinkets. When the servants of the manor gossiped with village people, they talked of the Lord’s scholarship, how he would sit in his study late into the night, as a single candle flickered in a large metal candlestick sitting on the floor, and peruse ancient texts. The Lord loved fine things and lived and dressed in opulence, but his habits were monkish and austere. Past lords of the small district had always been rough country samurai, interested in hunting, eating, and gathering concubines. A bookish lord was something outside the realm of experience.

  Nagato always found the effect of the dark study, crammed with books, unsettling. It was made all the more unsettling by the strong perfume the Lord wore. The servants said that Lord Manase seldom bathed. In this, he was just like the hairy barbarians from the far-off country of Europe, creatures that Nagato had heard of, but never seen. Lord Manase used a variety of perfumes, both purchased and invented by himself. The perfume combined with the memory of candle smoke and the grassy smell of old tatami mats made a suffocating, heavy, and complex atmosphere that Nagato found quite unbearable.

  Nagato knew enough not to mention this to his master, but when they were locked together in the small, closed study, the pungent scents assaulted his nose. Nagato was desperate to say the right things to his master for many reasons. First, he wanted leave to escape the claustrophobic study. Next, the Lord’s strange speech behavior always made him uncomfortable in any circumstances. And last, and most important, this murder was one he didn’t want his Lord taking an interest in.

  Lord Manase raised his closed fan to his lips, a sure sign he was losing patience with Nagato’s silence. “Perhaps there’s another explanation, Manase-sama,” Nagato blurted out.

  “Sooooo?” This time Nagato could tell the intonation of the single word indicated interest.

  “Yes, yes. Perhaps that ronin killed him.”

  Manase gave a high, tittering laugh. “Whyyyy wooould you think that?”

  Nagato knew he wasn’t clever, but he was certainly cunning. “I noticed many things about the body that indicated it wasn’t killed at the crossroads.”

  “Sooooo?” Now more interest.

  “Yes, yes, Lord. The merchant had only one sandal. The other sandal was not at the crossroads, which meant it was lost where the merchant was really killed.”

  “Aaannd you observed that?”

  Nagato squirmed a bit. Manase might ask that fool of a village headsman, Ichiro, so he didn’t want to lie directly. “I got that information by questioning the ronin.”

  Lord Manase started absently tapping his closed fan into the palm of his hand, a sure sign he was thinking.

  “Interesting,” Lord Manase said.

  “And there’s more, Manase-sama.”

  “So?”

  “I am almost certain it wasn’t Boss Kuemon who killed this merchant.”

  “Honto? Truthfully?”

  “Yes, Lord.”

  “How do you know this?”

  Nagato almost smiled. He had gotten the Lord to communicate with him in full sentences, instead of the single words and subtle movements of a fan or eyebrow that the Lord normally used. “Because,” Nagato said, “when I examined the dead merchant, he still had money in his pouch. Even if for some reason Boss Kuemon would move a body to get rid of it, he would never allow
it to be dumped with money.”

  Nagato felt the Lord look at him with new respect.

  “That’s a very interesting point, Nagato,” Lord Manase said. It was one of the few times he used Nagato’s name, and the Magistrate sat up straighter. “But why do you think the ronin killed the merchant?”

  “He just knows too much about it,” Nagato said flatly. “He said the merchant wasn’t killed at the crossroads, and he said he knew even more about the murder, but he wouldn’t tell me what it was. The only way he could know so much was if he did it himself.”

  Once again the tapping of the fan in the open palm of the other hand. Finally, Lord Manase said, “But I thought the charcoal seller said he saw the ronin coming down the road from Uzen after he found the body.”

  Now Nagato played his trump card, one that had occurred to him only moments before. “The charcoal seller and the ronin did it together. Yes, yes. Maybe he was paid, but for some reason that peasant is lying about how he found the body and the time when the ronin appeared.”

  “That’s a very interesting idea. Frankly, Nagato, I’m surprised you were able to think of it.” Nagato didn’t hear the rebuke, instead he only heard the surprise and pleasure in Lord Manase’s voice. Nagato gave a solemn bow of thanks to his master.

  “Sooo … are you going to arrest him?” Lord Manase said, putting his fan up to his mouth to indicate his boredom with these mundane details of administration.

  Nagato started licking his lips. He gave another bow, this time one of apology. “That might be very difficult to do,” he said. “The samurai seems very strong, and with my men … that is, it seems … ahh …”

  Lord Manase looked at Nagato as if he were an especially interesting variety of cricket. “In other words, you’re afraid to arrest him.”

  Nagato bobbed down again. “It’s not a matter of … well …” He bowed yet another time.

  “All right,” Lord Manase said. “I’ll think about this when I find the time. After all, what’s the death of another merchant? This conversation has gotten very tedious.” Manase flicked his closed fan as if he were knocking away a flea. “Leave now. When I think of something, I’ll tell you.”