The Flower Master (Rei Shimura #3) (15 page)

"She carefully checked the date on the eggs and asked if I had any that were refrigerated. Refrigerated! Who refrigerates eggs?"

"When did she leave your store?" I asked, not wanting to offend him with my opinions on egg safety.

"About two hours ago. And it's cold enough outside that you don't need to worry about her groceries spoiling, neh?"

I couldn't explain my true worries. Instead I brought up the message I'd received.

"Oh, that's a poem by Basho, the most famous haiku poet of all," he said after he'd heard it. "I know because I had to memorize his works when I was in junior high school."

"How can it be a haiku it the first line has only four syllables?"

Mr. Waka laughed and said that there were five kanji and hiragana characters used to compose the first line. I couldn't have known about the kanji used to originally write the poem, since the letter I 'd received was written completely in hiragana.

"I still can't put together the meaning," I said. "The verbs in the first line, yotte nemu, don't seem to go together."

"You don't know yotte? Yotte nemu?"

"I know that nemu means 'sleep.'"

"Yotte nemu means getting so drunk that you fall asleep, like the cherry blossom drunks that are spending all day and evening in Yanaka Cemetery! If you want to practice yotte nemu, go there."

Now I could fully translate the message. I wasn't going to bother with an English five-seven-five formulation because I wasn't teaching a poetry class. I came up with:

Intoxicated
Slumbering amid pinks
Laid out on a rock.

My first feeling was annoyance that the poetry sender believed I'd fainted at the ikebana exhibition because of alcohol intoxication. And was saying the cultured Japanese equivalent of nah-nah-nah.

But as I continued thinking, I became paranoid. Perhaps somebody wanted to see me laid out on a rock. Or even dead, lying amidst the flowers decorating a coffin. I remembered the coffin in my dream from a few nights before. Obviously my subconscious was trying to tell me that I was at extreme risk.

I ended my conversation with Mr. Waka and telephoned Lieutenant Hata. He was out, so I left a message with a secretary. I placed the letter and envelope in a plastic bag, the way I'd seen it done on
Furubata Ninzaburo
, a cop show that used to run on television. I hid the bag in the yukashita, the cut-out hiding place in my kitchenette's floor. I was on my knees, just putting down the lid, when Norie came back.

"I shouldn't have left you!" she exclaimed. "Are you hurt? Where is gas heater? It's cold in here."

"It's in the closet. I'm fine. It's just that my stomach hurts too much to stand up straight." I would tell her about the ominous poem later.

"I'm going to give you some more of the painkillers Tsutomu left for you. I'm sorry I didn't make up the futon for you to take a rest. I've been such a terrible caretaker, but I'll try to make up for it with a good, healthy dinner."

"What's that going to be?" Was she talking about her light-as-air vegetable tempura or my favorite noodles dipped in sesame dressing? I was beginning to see the advantages of having my aunt in-house.

"Okayu!" She was talking about very bland rice porridge. The last time I'd tasted it was at a Zen temple. While the monks and old people had eaten it with relish, I'd barely been able to get it down my throat. "I found some of the ingredients at your Family Mart, but I also had to travel to Seibu department store to get the right kind of pickled plums. It will be a small meal, because Tsutomu said that we must not test your weak stomach."

I would have to eat a lot of it—and show dramatic improvement in energy—to get her off my case. I offered to remove the stones from the pickled plums and she agreed, helping me sit down at the tea table with a knife, a cutting board, and the jar of pickled plums. Reaching into the Seibu shopping bag, I pulled out the receipt, gaping at the amount my aunt had spent.

"Now I have enough goods to cook for you for a week! The question is, where will I store it all? I'm going to have to use the yukashita."

"No! It's a bit crowded down there," I said, thinking of the haiku letter I had hidden in its depths.

She looked panicked. "Oh, I need a cool place to leave the vegetables. Tsutomu was pointing out that we Japanese must change our food storage habits. Eggs should be stored under refrigeration, and rice should not be left warm in the rice cooker for longer than a few hours. I must remember all these things, or Tsutomu will send me away and send you back into the hospital."

"Wouldn't the back garden be cold enough for the vegetables? I left a tansu out there that I'm refinishing. If you wrap up the vegetables, you could just put them in a drawer. I don't think insects would get in."

"But it's been raining! How can you possibly leave furniture outside?"

"It hasn't been refinished yet, and it's under plastic." All wrapped up, like the secret I was not ready to share with her.

* * *

The next morning I felt much better. In fact, I had rolled out of the futon and started walking toward the bathroom before I remembered how I hadn't been able stand up straight the day before. Tom's painkillers had worked.

After serving me a breakfast of properly refrigerated okayu that I hadn't been able to finish the night before, Aunt Norie began a big cleanup of my apartment, using a rag duster she'd brought from her home, and a trusty bottle of My Peto household cleaner.

I was feeling pretty firm on my feet, so I pitched in, and at the end of it all I asked Aunt Norie whether she'd be taking an afternoon train home.

She shook her head vigorously. "I plan to stay the entire week. Why stay in Yokohama, where criminals broke into my garden shed? No, I'm not returning until Uncle Hiroshi comes back from Osaka."

"But you have a life in Yokohama. Students who take flower-arranging classes in your home, a son who needs you to cook for him—"

"All changed," Aunt Norie said cheerfully. "I've given my students your address. In fact, at one o'clock this afternoon a few students are coinming by. Do you have your lesson book? You can work with us as well."

"Aunt Norie, I made three flower arrangements when you were gone yesterday," I pointed out. "I don't need to go to the school, when I can study from home."

"Yes, and from looking at them I can tell that you were under the influence of painkillers. Today, since you're so nice and strong, you can rearrange them. Although I suggest you let me dispose of the bittersweet. It's drooping, and I found some nasty insects on it."

That's because Takeo gave it to me, I thought. She was as prejudiced toward him as he was to her. "I'll try to attend your class, but Tsutomu wanted me to visit the hospital. Then I have a couple of work appointments."

"Just because you can walk to the bathroom, it does not mean you can walk to the train station, especially up and down stairs."

"I'll be fine—"

"But you catch motion sickness so easily. You've been that way ever since you were a toddler."

"Not with your good breakfast in my stomach." I patted it for emphasis. "If Lieutenant Hata calls, please tell him to try me this evening."

I set off with my aunt's worried blessing, a plastic bag, and a fresh handkerchief. As the TV news had promised, the sun was shining, and the cherry trees that lined the road going through Yanaka Cemetery were in full frothy splendor. A pink carpet under the trees revealed how the rain had knocked down many blossoms. A shame, but it was the way of the season.

I took the stairs down to the station slowly, which was easy since rush hour was over, and rode out to St. Luke's for my checkup. After a lab tech took a blood sample, an internist poked at various places and told me I was in recovery. After he was done, I went to the emergency room to find my cousin.

"You look so much better today than yesterday!" he greeted me with a wide smile. "Are you ready for lunch?"

After nothing but okayu, I certainly was ready for a real lunch. Tom exchanged his white coat for a suit jacket and we walked a few blocks to Tsukijii, the wholesale market where huge fish were laid out in the early morning, then sold off to Tokyo restaurateurs. By this hour everything had been sold, but there were a number of modest, bustling restaurants open for business.

"The best thing for you is well-cooked food," Tom said sternly. "I know a good ochazuke shop. My colleagues and I eat there regularly, and I'm sure they observe proper food hygiene."

Soon we were sitting at a well-scrubbed counter with the dish in front of us. Ochazuke was a bowl of bouillon with rice and seaweed floating inside. It was only slightly more interesting than my last two meals of okayu.

A small green blob of wasabi paste accompanied the dish. As I used chopsticks to mix it into the soup, Tom shook his head. "You will aggravate your stomach, which is temporarily weak. Don't do it."

"The dish is so mild otherwise," I protested.

"I'd think that after your poisoning, you would want things that are mild."

"It wasn't any particular food that made me sick, it was ant killer! If I stay out of the flower-arranging business, I should be okay."

"Yes, I've heard the final report from Lieutenant Hata. Still, it's better for you to eat meals that have been prepared by my mother using hygiene guidelines, or to ask our opinion of the restaurants you visit. You must be careful where—and with whom—you eat."

"What do you mean by with whom?"

"Takeo Kayama." He curled his lips around the name, looking as if he had tasted something bad. "My mother says that he came to your apartment, hoping to take you on a date to the countryside."

I smiled at my cousin and said, "Tom, you and your mother are disturbed anytime anyone shows interest in me. You can't expect me to believe this one' s any worse than the others. At least he's Japanese!"

"Rei, I know Takeo from my time at Keio University."

"How? You're six years older."

"Yes, but I was working as an intern at the campus hospital. I knew him well."

"What, from his medical record? Did he have a sexually transmitted disease or something? If so, I can tell you not to worry. We haven't done more than have a beer together, okay?" I snapped.

"Rei-chan, you know that, by law, I cannot violate the confidentiality of a medical record. I would also never judge a person's morality by his or her health. But I received the true picture of Takeo's character on the night I was called to give first aid at a campus riot."

This made me sit up straight, almost forgetting the nagging ache in my belly. "A riot at the sedate private university that our family so admires?"

"Yes. Grandfather certainly would have been furious, had he still been alive. It all happened when some undergraduates protested a rise in tuition. They decided to cause the administration trouble by eliminating the university's water supply. A large group planned to flush all the toilets on campus simultaneously so that the university's water supply would be gone."

"So Takeo flushed a toilet. That sounds like a fairly harmless prank."

"No, he was on the other side. He was the president of the students' environmental club. In the interest of water conservation, he asked the students to protest in some way other than toilet flushing. The group would not, so in a last-ditch attempt to stop them, Takeo and his friends borrowed weapons from the kendo club and stormed the lavatories, threatening to hit the students who flushed the toilets."

"Wow! Isn't that really dangerous?" I knew Kendo as a martial art that involved charging an opponent with a length of bamboo bound with cord: weapons powerful enough that kendo athletes were always required to wear protective helmets.

"Yes. And because Takeo was the ringleader, he was the one charged with responsibility for the fights that broke out between students in several lavatories on campus. Many students were hospitalized, including one who was in a coma for a week." Tom looked at me. "Takeo was never charged with attempted murder, although I thought he should have been. However, he was kicked out of Keio. I don't think he has any kind of university degree."

"He must have finished up in California," I said, remembering the horticulture program he had mentioned.

"No offense to you, Rei, but an American degree doesn't carry much weight here. After leaving Keio, nobody would hire him but his father, I'm sure."

"Thanks for the intelligence, Tom." I looked away from his scowling face.

"You'd never guess a guy who played with flowers all day could be so violent, neh?"

"He certainly does break the stereotypes." I toyed with a few grains of rice that were stuck on the side of the bowl. "Do you think he could have killed Sakura?"

Tom sighed. "I don't know. But seeing him at the Kayama Building, he spoke so arrogantly to the police, the same way he spoke after the lavatory riots. There's a saying that a mature rice plant lowers its head, but he certainly didn't. He hasn't changed."

"I wonder if that's why your mother doesn't like him."

"I didn't tell her. She has always admired the Kayama family so much. I could not be the one to break her illusion."

"She must have heard something somewhere. She definitely doesn't like Takeo." I still wanted to know the rest of the story. "So what happened at Keio with the toilet-flushing protest?"

"Actually, the fights provided enough of a distraction that only fifty or so toilets were flushed at once, so there was no crisis in water supply. Takeo's idea worked, but at a terrible human cost."

I was silent for a minute, digesting the story. "What happened to the other students who were working with Takeo?"

"Nobody else was expelled. Takeo admitted the riot was all his own fault."

"That's very Japanese," I said, thinking about a news story from a few years ago about three companies facing bankruptcy. The three CEOs, all friends, had gone to a hotel, taken a last drink together, and then hanged themselves, taking responsibility for the failure.

"How can you call that Armani-wearing hypocrite Japanese?" Tom snorted.