A Slight Trick of the Mind Read online

  Their amicable, easy exchange carried on through the morning and into the afternoon—while exploring goods at a village bazaar (Holmes purchasing an ideal letter opener: a kusun-gobu short sword), and witnessing an unusual spring fertility festival in another village, the two chatting surreptitiously as a procession of priests, musicians, and locals dressed like demons paraded down the street: the men hoisting erect wooden phalluses, the women embracing smaller carved penises swathed in red paper, the spectators touching the tips of passing phalluses to ensure good health for their children.

  “How remarkable,” commented Holmes.

  “I thought you might find this of interest,” said Mr. Umezaki.

  Holmes grinned slyly. “My friend, I suspect this is much more to your liking than mine.”

  “You're probably right,” agreed Mr. Umezaki, smiling while his fingertips reached out for an oncoming phallus.

  But the ensuing evening was like the one before: another inn, supper together, rounds of sake, cigarettes and cigars, and more questions regarding Matsuda. Since it was impossible for Mr. Umezaki to know everything concerning his father—especially after the questioning went from the general to the specific—his replies were often indefinite, or answered simply with a shrug, or by saying, “I don't know.” Still, Mr. Umezaki didn't begrudge the probing, even if Holmes's inquiries brought back unhappy memories of childhood and the agony of his mother's grief. “She destroyed so much—almost anything my father had touched. Twice, she set fire to our house, and she also tried persuading me to join her in a suicide pact. She wanted us to walk together into the sea and drown ourselves; it was her idea of avenging my father's wrong against us.”

  “I take it, then, that your mother has a distinct dislike for me. The woman can hardly contain her contempt—I sensed it early on.”

  “No, she isn't very fond of you—but, honestly, she isn't very fond of anyone, so you needn't take it too personally. She hardly acknowledges Hensuiro, and she dislikes the path I've taken in life. I haven't married; I live with my companion—she blames these things on my father's abandonment of us. In her mind, a boy can never become a man unless he has a father to teach him what it means.”

  “Was I not, supposedly, decisive in that choice of abandonment?”

  “She thinks so.”

  “Well, I must take it personally. How could I not? I pray you don't share her feelings.”

  “No, not at all. We are different creatures of reason, my mother and I. I hold nothing against you. You are—if I may say—a hero of mine, and a newfound friend.”

  “You flatter me,” said Holmes, proffering his cup for a toast. “To newfound friends—”

  Then surfacing on Mr. Umezaki's face throughout the evening was a trusting, attentive expression. Indeed, Holmes perceived the expression as one of faith: that Mr. Umezaki—in speaking of his father, in relating what he knew—believed the retired detective might shed some welcome light on the disappearance, or, at the very least, provide a few insights once the questioning had concluded. Only later, when it was clear Holmes had nothing to reveal, did a separate expression become evident—a sorrowful face, somewhat morose. Canker and melancholy, thought Holmes, after Mr. Umezaki berated a waitress who had accidentally spilled fresh sake on their table.

  Subsequently, on the last leg of their trip, there came long periods of introspection between the two, punctuated only by the exhalations of tobacco smoke. On board the train headed for Shimonoseki, Mr. Umezaki kept busy by writing inside his red journal, and Holmes—his thoughts now preoccupied with what he had learned of Matsuda—stared out the window, following the course of a slender river that curved alongside steep mountains. At times, the train wound near country residences, each house having a single twenty-gallon barrel set beside the river's bank (the words on the side of the barrels, Mr. Umezaki had explained earlier, meant “Fire-Prevention Water”). Along the way, Holmes observed various small villages, with mountains towering beyond them. To reach the summits of those mountains, he imagined, was to stand above the prefecture and command a breathtaking view of everything below—the valleys, the villages, the distant cities, maybe the entire Inland Sea.

  While surveying that scenic terrain, Holmes mulled over all Mr. Umezaki had told him concerning his father, forming in his mind a basic portrait of the vanished man—someone whose presence he could almost summon from the past: the thin features and the tall stature, the distinctive shape of his gaunt face, the goatee of a Meiji intellectual. Yet Matsuda was also a diplomat-statesman, serving as one of Japan's leading foreign ministers, before disgrace shortened his term. Even so, he endured as an enigmatic character, known for his skill with logic and debate, and for his vast understanding of international policies. Most notable among his many accomplishments was a book documenting Japan's war with China, written while he was residing in London and detailing, among other things, the secret diplomacy that occurred prior to the war's outbreak.

  Ambitious by nature, Matsuda's political aspirations began during the Meiji Restoration, when he entered government service despite his parents' wishes. Considered an outsider because he wasn't associated with any of the favored four Western clans, his abilities were impressive enough that eventually the governorship of a number of prefectures was offered to him, and while in that post, he made his first visit to London in 1870. On the heels of resigning his gubernatorial position, he was selected to join the expanding Foreign Ministry, but his promising career ended three years later as his dissatisfaction with the clan-dominated government found him plotting its overthrow. The failed conspiracy led to a lengthy imprisonment, where—rather than languishing behind bars—he continued doing important work, such as translating Jeremy Bentham's Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation into the Japanese language.

  After his prison release, Matsuda married his girl-like wife, and in time she gave him two sons. Meanwhile, he spent several years traveling abroad, frequently coming and going from Japan, making London his European home base, while journeying often to Berlin and Vienna. This was a long period of study for him, his main interest being constitutional law. And while he was widely considered to be a scholar with a profound knowledge of the West, his beliefs were always those of an autocrat: “Make no mistake,” Mr. Umezaki had said on that second evening of questioning, “my father believed a single, absolute power should rule its people—I think this is why he preferred England to America. I also think his dogmatic beliefs made him too impatient to be a successful politician, let alone a good father and husband.”

  “And you imagine he remained in London until his death?”

  “It's more than likely.”

  “And you never sought him out while attending school there?”

  “Briefly, yes—except it proved impossible to find him. Frankly, I didn't try hard enough, but I was a young man and taken with my new life and new friends—and felt no urgent need to contact the man who had abandoned us long ago. In the end, I deliberately gave up on any effort to locate him, feeling somehow liberated in that decision. He was, after all, of another world by then. We were strangers.”

  Yet decades later, Mr. Umezaki confessed, he would come to regret that decision. Because now he was fifty-five—only four years younger than his father had been when they last saw each other—and he fostered a growing emptiness inside himself, a black space where the absence of his father dwelled. Moreover, he was convinced that his father must have shared the same empty place for the family he'd never see again; with Matsuda's passing, that murky, vacuous wound had somehow found its way into his surviving son, eventually festering within as a frequent source of bewilderment and distress, existing as an unresolved problem of an aging heart.

  “Then it is not just for your mother's sake that you require some answers?” Holmes had asked, his words suddenly tainted by intoxication and weariness.

  “No, I suppose it's not,” answered Mr. Umezaki with a degree of despair.

  “You are really seekin
g the truth for yourself, correct? It is—in other words—important to grasp the facts of the matter for your own well-being.”

  “Yes.” Mr. Umezaki reflected for a moment, peering into his sake glass before glancing again at Holmes. “So what is the truth? How do you arrive at it? How do you unravel the meaning of something that doesn't wish to be known?” He kept his eyes on Holmes, in the expectation that such questioning would produce a definitive starting point; if Holmes responded, the disappearance of his father and the greatest pain of his childhood might begin to be dealt with.

  But Holmes was quiet, seemingly lost in thought; his inward expression as he sat thinking generated an optimistic twinge in Mr. Umezaki. Without a doubt, Holmes was sorting through the vast index of his memory. Like the contents of a file buried deep inside a forgotten cabinet, the once-known specifics surrounding Matsuda's forsaking of his family and homeland would, when at last retrieved, give way to an invaluable amount of information. Soon Holmes's eyes would close (the old detective's ruminating mind, Mr. Umezaki felt certain, was already reaching into that cabinet's darker recesses), and almost imperceptibly, a faint snoring would then be heard.

  15

  IT WAS HOLMES —after waking at his desk with numbed feet, and then taking a stroll outside to bolster his circulation—who discovered Roger on that late afternoon, finding him very near the beeyard and partially concealed amid the adjacent pasture's higher grass. The boy was stretched out upon his back, arms along his sides, lounging there and gazing upward at the slow-moving clouds far above. And before stepping any closer or saying Roger's name, Holmes, too, pondered those clouds, wondering what it was exactly that held the boy's attention so rigidly—for nothing extraordinary could be spotted, nothing at all save the gradual evolving of cumulus and the expansive cloud shadows that periodically muted sunlight and swept across the pasture like waves rushing over a shoreline.

  “Roger, my boy,” Holmes eventually said, lowering his stare while wading forward through the grass, “your mother has, unfortunately, requested your help in the kitchen.”

  As it happened, Holmes had had no intention of venturing into the beeyard. He'd simply planned a brief walk around the gardens, checking the herb beds, yanking the occasional weed, patting down loose soil with a cane. Except Mrs. Munro had caught him as he went past the kitchen doorway, wiping flour on her apron, asking if he might be good enough to fetch the boy for her. So Holmes agreed, although not without reluctance, because there was still unfinished work awaiting him in the attic, and because a hike beyond the gardens inevitably became a protracted but welcome distraction (once setting foot within the beeyard, he was sure to remain at the apiary until dusk, peeking into hives, rearranging the brood nest, removing unneeded combs).

  Some days later, however, he'd realize that Mrs. Munro's request was a dismally fortuitous one: Had she gone for the boy herself, she'd never have looked any farther than the beeyard, at least not initially; she'd never have observed the high grass trampled into a fresh trail in the pasture, or—then traveling alongside that narrow, curving course—noticed Roger resting motionless, facing such massy white clouds. Yes, she'd have shouted his name from the garden pathway, but with no answer forthcoming, would have imagined him being elsewhere (reading at the cottage, chasing butterflies in the woods, maybe picking shells off the beach). She wouldn't have grown suddenly concerned. A troubled expression wouldn't have spread on her face—as her legs parted the grass, as she went to him and repeated his name.

  “Roger,” said Holmes. “Roger,” he whispered while standing over the boy, pressing a cane gently against his shoulder.

  Ultimately, when locked again inside his study, he'd recall only the boy's eyes—those dilated pupils transfixed on the sky, somehow conveying rapture—and he'd think little more of what had been quickly fathomed there amid the gently shuddering grass: Roger's swollen lips and hands and cheeks, the countless weltlike stings that formed irregular patterns on the boy's neck, face, forehead, ears. Nor would Holmes ponder the few words he had then uttered while crouched by Roger, such gravely spoken words that, if heard by another, would have rung impossibly cold, unimaginably callous.

  “Quite dead, my boy. Quite dead, I fear. . . .”

  But Holmes was well acquainted with death's unwelcome arrival—or at least he wished to believe so—and hardly did its sudden visitations surprise him anymore. During the long expanse of his life, he'd knelt near a multitude of corpses—women, men, children, and animals alike, often complete strangers, though sometimes acquaintances—observing the conclusive ways in which quietus had left its calling card (blue-black bruises along one side of a body, discolored skin, curled fingers frozen with rigor, that sickly sweet smell inhaled into the nostrils of the living: any number of variations but always the same undeniable theme). Death, like crime, is commonplace, he'd once written. Logic, on the other hand, is rare. Therefore, maintaining a logical mental inclination, especially when facing mortality, can be difficult. However, it is always upon logic rather than upon death that one should dwell.

  And so, too, amid the high grass was logic brought out like a shield of sterling armor to repel the heartbreaking discovery of the boy's body (forget the slight dizziness Holmes felt taking hold, or the trembling of his fingers, or the befuddling anguish that was starting to blossom in his mind). Roger being gone was of no importance at the moment, he convinced himself. What mattered now was how Roger had reached his end. But without even examining the body—without even bending, studying that inflamed, swollen face—the scenario of Roger's demise was understood.

  The boy had been stung, of course. Stung repeatedly, Holmes knew upon first glance. Before Roger had succumbed, his skin had become flushed, accompanied by a burning pain, generalized itching. He'd fled his attackers, perhaps. In any case, he'd wandered from the hives into the pasture, likely disoriented, pursued by the swarm. There was no indication of vomit on his shirt or around his lips and chin, although the boy had surely ached from abdominal cramps, nausea. His blood pressure would have dropped, creating a feeling of weakness. The throat and mouth had no doubt swelled, preventing him from swallowing or calling for help. Alterations of heart rate would have followed, as well as difficulty breathing, and probably a notion of impending doom (he was an intelligent child, so he would've sensed his fate). Then, as if slipping past a trapdoor, he had collapsed in the grass and become unconscious—dying, remarkably, with eyes wide open.

  “Anaphylaxis,” Holmes muttered, brushing dirt flecks off the boy's cheeks. Severe allergic reaction, he concluded. One sting too many. The extreme end of the allergic spectrum, a relatively immediate and uncomfortable death. He brought his forlorn stare to the sky, watching as the clouds progressed overhead, aware of dusk's increasing eminence at day's end.

  What mishap occurred? he finally asked himself, struggling with his canes to stand upright. What did the boy do—what provoked the bees so? For the beeyard appeared as serene as it usually did; when crossing the apiary earlier, searching for Roger and speaking the boy's name, Holmes had witnessed no swarm, no agitated activity at the hives' entrances, nothing out of the ordinary. Furthermore, not a single bee hovered in proximity to Roger now. Regardless, the apiary deserved closer consideration; the hives required proper inspection. Overalls, gloves, a hat, and a veil needed to be worn, lest a similar fate as the boy's await Holmes. But first the authorities had to be informed, and Mrs. Munro told, and Roger's body carried away.

  Already the sun was dipping toward the west, and behind the fields and woods, the horizon glowed faintly white in the distance. Going unsteadily from Roger, Holmes made his way across the pasture, forging his own crooked trail in order to avoid the beeyard altogether, stepping through the grass until reaching the gravel of the garden pathway; there, he paused, looking back at the tranquil beeyard and the grassy spot where the boy lay unseen, both places now awash in golden sunlight. Just then, he spoke beneath his breath, flustered at once by the insignificance of his own silent wor
ds.

  “What are you saying?” he suddenly said aloud, pounding his canes on the gravel. “What—are you—” A worker bee whizzed by, trailed by another, restraining him with their buzzing.

  The blood had drained from his face, and his hands shook while clutching at the cane handles. Attempting to regain composure, he inhaled deeply and then turned quickly to the farmhouse. But he couldn't yet proceed, because everything ahead of him—the garden rows, the house, the pine trees—was only vaguely tangible. For a moment, he remained perfectly still, confounded by all around and before him: How is it possible, he questioned, that I've blundered into someplace that isn't mine? How did I lead myself here?

  “No,” he said, “no, no—you are mistaken—”

  He shut his eyes, inhaling air into his chest. He had to concentrate, not just to recover himself but also to vanquish the sense of unfamiliarity, for the pathway was his design, the garden, too—there were wild daffodils nearby; even closer at hand were purple buddleias. If his eyes were to open, Holmes was positive, he'd certainly recognize his giant thistles; he'd see his herb beds. And at last parting his eyelids, he saw the daffodils, the buddleias, the thistles, the pine trees farther on. Then he urged his legs forward, doing so with a fair degree of grim determination.

  “Of course,” he mumbled, “of course—”

  That night, Holmes would stand at the attic window, looking out into the darkness. As if by choice, he'd fail to examine the previous moments that had sent him up into the study, the specifics of all that was said and explained—the brief conversation with Mrs. Munro after he entered the farmhouse, her voice calling to him from the kitchen: “Did you find him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he on his way?”

  “I am afraid so—yes.”

  “About time, I'll say.”