The Watchmaker Of Filigree Street Part 22

The man jumped and held up the gun.

'If you're afraid of him now, I wouldn't like to imagine what he will be like if you kill me,' he said quickly. Hiding behind Mori's name became no less shameful when the man let his hand fall again.

Looking anguished, the man took out the piece of paper instead and came across to show him. As he did, the earth gave a little shrug, the last of the aftershocks, and the pear tree crashed down an inch from the horse. The horse shrieked and bolted. The man stared at the tree. Ito took the piece of paper from his hand.

It was a list of names, dates, and times. There were five. The final name was listed by today's date, beside which was the time, nine forty-seven. Ito pulled out his watch. The minute hand was just now easing to nine forty-eight.

'Is your name Ryosuke, then?' he asked into the echoing quiet. It was not silence; the broken tree trunk was still clicking, and the air was full of insects disturbed by the fall. A waltz reached them quite clearly from the open doors of the club. There was a shadow of earth in the gra.s.s. The tree had fallen so hard that it had ploughed a harrow.

'Yes.' The man pulled his gaze away from the tree again. 'I should find my horse,' he said in a faraway voice.

'Wait. Who are these others?'

The man looked at him strangely. 'Don't you know?'

'No?'

'They came after you too. He killed them all.'

Ito stopped following him. 'What?'

'I've got to find-'

'Wait!' Ito called after him, but he did not wait, and because the horse had run into the denser trees near the lake, he disappeared within twenty yards, into the dark.

The offices of the Choya Newspaper Company were closed by the time he arrived. Having made a good deal of money from being leery of the new government, they had acquired a grand brick building in Ginza, in sight of the clock tower, with high pillars and a fine arched doorway. The door was locked, but there was a lit window on the ground floor. When he tapped on it, a young man came out with a fountain pen stuck under the left strap of his braces. He stopped still when he recognised his visitor.

'All due respect, Mr Ito, sir, but you cannot come and shout at us for reporting the news, however unfavourable it happens to be for the government-'

'I'm not here to shout at you, I'm here to ask if I might look at your archives. Particularly obituaries, if you keep them. I'm terribly sorry for the late hour, but I'm afraid it's urgent and newspapers keep altogether better records than the ministry does.'

'Oh, of course,' the young man said, perplexed. 'We keep everything in the cellar. I'll just unlock ... '

Ito followed him inside, down a shallow flight of steps to a cold cellar. Leaving behind two lamps, the young man retreated, and Ito had to explore a little to get his bearings. Six or seven years' worth of papers had been stored in wide drawers flat, first and uncorrected editions. They were in good order, and it did not take him long to find the broadsheets for the dates on the note.

The newsprint crackled as he sifted through it. Because the cabinets were wood and the drawers not sealed, the summer damp had got inside a few, and in some places sheets were stuck together, rendered so thin that they looked and felt like a single page that had been over-printed twice. It was on one of these that he found the first name. He had to bring the sheet right out and hold it over a light box to read it properly. He had expected a shooting or a mugging, but the man in question had been struck by lightning. He had been poaching birds in the grounds of the Palace, it said, and the lightning had struck him through his rifle.

The second man had been killed in a traffic accident in Kojimachi. By then, Ito's eyes were beginning to sting from the close focus and the difficult light, but he found the third too. Caught in the crossfire of a robbery, again very close to Kojimachi, perhaps two streets away from Ito's own house. He vaguely remembered hearing of it at the time, but not in detail. Of the fourth man, though, there was no mention, even in the days surrounding the one on the note. He sat back and pulled off his spectacles, and looked over at the enormous cabinets. It would take his entire staff weeks to sift through everything in search of one name, and even as he tried to think of ways to do it, he could see it was hopeless. But three was enough to be getting on with. Three men dead in accidents, a fourth unaccounted for and a fifth whose possible accident had been predicted to the minute. Ito sat gazing down at the crumpled note, translucent over the light box. He had always a.s.sumed that Mori's knack for pre-empting things was subconscious.

When he sat back, he thought that his watch was wrong. He had been there only for an hour and a half; it was not yet midnight. He stood up slowly, stiff, and put everything back before making his way up the stairs. The young journalist nodded as he saw him out, his fountain pen hooked over his pocket this time. Ito stepped outside into the cool air, knowing that he would have to walk back. The street was deserted now. The rickshawmen had long since got cold and gone home, and the trains had stopped an hour ago. It was less than a mile, but he was tired and felt disproportionately grateful when hooves clopped along beside him, and a black horse huffed at a firefly that had looped too close to its nose. The firefly veered off and, to Ito's tired eyes, left behind a trail of light.

'Mr Ito?' the driver said.

Ito looked up. 'Yes?'

'To the Rok.u.meikan?'

'Oh, thank G.o.d. You did well to recognise me in the dark.'

'Well, I was told to pick up the man on the steps of the newspaper office, and there was only you,' the man laughed.

Ito fell quiet. 'I don't suppose a Mr Mori made the reservation.'

'Didn't get a name, sorry. Do you still want the carriage?' he added anxiously.

'Yes yes.' Ito climbed up and lapsed on to the leather seat.

As the cab stopped gently on the gravel drive, he saw Mori on the balcony. He was working at something by lamplight. Although he must have heard them, he did not look down. Threading his way through the foyer and the crowded stairway, where people had lined the rail to watch the dancing from above, Ito went up to him. Even the white men didn't have to duck to pa.s.s through the chrysanthemums.

Mori's lamp shone over the cogs spilled across the table top. Among them were sparks that cast rainbows. Ito sat down opposite. Under Mori's hands, the octopus was recognisable but split open, and there was a galaxy of clockwork inside. Parts of it glittered different colours to others, some bigger, some tiny and buried deep, all making winking networks of shapes that shifted and clicked softly, like something sleeping.

'You were planting gra.s.s seeds under that tree six months ago,' Ito said at last.

'Yes,' Mori said to the octopus. He was wearing gla.s.ses; Ito could see the clockwork reflected in the lenses. The rainbow-making sparks were diamonds. As he clicked another cog into place, a new section of the workings began to spin. The moving bearings threw more bright specks inside the casing.

'Those other men, the ones on the list. They were all near the Palace or in Kojimachi. They were going to kill me, weren't they?'

'Yes.' He was still speaking to the clockwork. Ito could not have said when it had begun, but he became aware then that the mechanisms were singing. It was a strange noise, one that made the hairs on his arms p.r.i.c.kle. It was the after-tone of a struck tuning fork. 'The last one believed me and went to a monastery in Kyoto.'

He was speaking as he always did, dry and clear.

'Why would you let me find out about this?' Ito said at last. He felt like he had when he had broken his wrist. Altogether worse than pain was that maddeningly clear vision of having not tripped, not broken anything, when logic held up a lamp in the straight tunnel that time drove humans through, and showed that the walls were made of gla.s.s. His chest was stiff with the dismay of it. He could still see what would have happened if he hadn't chased the man to the pear tree. He need only have decided, as he often did that, like gravity and wives, Mori was one of those things best trusted and not over-scrutinised. He realised Mori was waiting for him to finish the question.

'You can kill a man by planting gra.s.s seeds in the right place. What can I possibly do now that I know that? Take your word for it that Kiyotaka Kuroda won't one day persuade you that world war is a good idea?' He could hear his voice rising but couldn't stop it. 'He's on the edge of it already. I should lock you up and throw away the key.'

'It was necessary to frighten you. Now you won't send anyone after me when I go to the ship,' he said. 'There's no point stabbing a man when you can arrange for him not to be in the way in the first place.'

'Oh, how philanthropic of you! Are you going to enlighten me about London now? What's there? What's so d.a.m.n important?'

'A friend, like I said.'

'There isn't.'

'He hasn't met me yet.'

'I can't let you go anywhere.'

Mori let his breath out. The last of the clockwork across the table was gone now. He clicked the octopus's hatch closed and the thing shifted, waking, and wound its tentacles through his hands. He lifted it into his lap. 'I'm sorry about this. It's the only way to make you change your mind.'

'Oh, do your worst, I think you'll find-'

'Your wife is unknowingly but extremely allergic to bee stings,' Mori interrupted, quietly.

Ito fell still. 'No.'

Mori only watched him, as if he were very far away.

'Get out !' Ito exploded, and didn't care that it made the court ladies jump.

Mori did as he was told. The octopus sat with its beak on his arm. Ito half thought it would wave, but it didn't. Once they were gone, he leaned forward against his elbows and pushed his hands through his hair. He had always prided himself on his politics. Not left or right or old or new, but the mechanics of it: compromise, diplomacy, and the avoidance of war, which was what happened when statesmen failed. War was punching the clock instead of looking at the broken mechanisms. He had never failed like that in his life. He normally made fun of people who flew into rages. He closed his eyes and waited for his heart to subside, but it cantered on and on.

The balcony door opened and Kuroda came through, looking left and right. Ten to one already.

'You've just missed Mori,' Ito said. 'He's gone to England.'

'Mm,' he said, unbothered, and began to turn inside again.

'Kuroda,' he said suddenly.

'What?'

'About Korea.' He had to pause and feel his way around the idea. 'It frightens you. Why does it frighten you?'

The admiral looked as though a dog had sat up and talked. 'The Chinese, of course.'

'Why? We have the treaty-'

'b.a.l.l.s. Ask your British friends what they think about treaties.'

Ito took a deep breath. 'Just ... come here a moment and tell me what would be best.'

'What d'you mean?'

'I mean I'm not a military man. I need someone to explain.'

Still frowning, Kuroda bent into Mori's seat and etched a map on the mahogany table top with his penknife. Ito winced, but stopped when Kuroda pointed it at him to ask if there was something he wanted to say. When the dawn came, the clouds were like smoke. He thought of trains and ships, and Mori probably already on the sea. Now that he was calmer, he was confused. Mori was rich enough to persuade anyone who followed him to stop, without giving himself away. He sighed. Kuroda gave him a salt cellar to hold in place of the Russian fleet and told him to pay attention.

TWENTY-TWO.

LONDON, OCTOBER 1884.

The Kensington house had a narrow garden and eight pear trees. They stood four on either side of a flatter patch of gra.s.s that had once been a gravel path, which still crunched in the most worn-down places. After weeks of the to-ing and fro-ing of painters and carpenters, the garden was the only aspect of the house that remained as her aunt had left it. The nettles were as thick as the gra.s.s and ivy stuck an octogenarian rake to the wall of the outhouse, which had a little stained gla.s.s window in the door. Grace had spent all summer catching her hems on things that stuck or stung, and trying not to look too closely into the branches of the trees, where alarmingly big crows had made their nests alarmingly close to head-height. Thaniel, who had been efficient in all other aspects, was oddly unwilling to put it all to rights. Even on chilly days, he sat outside with his j.a.panese dictionary pinned down with a rock rather than come indoors. Whenever she brought it up, he mumbled and found something else to do.

That was not to say he fabricated things. There was plenty to do, and it was made more difficult by the workmen, who were typical of their breed and imbued with a mortal fear of speaking directly to a lady. The house had been cluttered with the acc.u.mulated rubbish of her aunt's lifetime, and to clear it alone had taken weeks. Then the crumbling floorboards had been taken up and replaced, and then the laboratory kitted out, and the gas lines seen to, for her aunt had still run on oil. Piece by piece the house had become bright and new again, but still Thaniel kept to the garden, and still did nothing to it. Because they could only go on Sat.u.r.day afternoons with her father having flatly forbidden her to go alone and Thaniel at work in the week and rehearsals on Sundays he managed to drag it out. Two Sat.u.r.days before the wedding, the cold came down fast and the garden whitened. Powdery snow hazed about the trees whenever the wind blew. She was working between two Bunsen burners lit on blue flames, but she knew better than to light a fire upstairs for when he arrived. She might as well have tried to settle a deer there.

When she heard the ice on the gate crack, she looked up. The laboratory was finished, and as a sort of christening, she had invited Mori to come and see it. She had not seen him since first meeting him, but when she had gone to the post office to send him a telegram, there was already one waiting for her saying that yes, quarter to two this Sat.u.r.day was good. She sent hers anyway, because something about his wording suggested that he hadn't antic.i.p.ated her exactly, but forgotten that he hadn't had the request yet.

Her watch said it was still an hour early, but she climbed up on the bench anyway when she heard the gate and pushed open the window to see. It was an unusual window; mostly it was grisaille gla.s.s, but just off-centre, the glazier had set a circle of bright colours mosaicked together from half an angel and some family crests, scavenged, probably, from a cathedral. The light was bright and cloudy at once, and the gla.s.s put coloured reflections over her arm. Thaniel was by himself.

'Is he still coming?' she called.

'He'll be by when he said,' Thaniel promised. He came toward the window and bent briefly to wave before he took the old ladder and propped it against the nearest pear tree.

'Does he seem put upon?'

'No. Why would he?'

'I had the powerful impression last time that he didn't like me.'

He laughed. 'Why invite him, then?'

'Because I might be wrong and I'd like to know what he has to say about this experiment. He could help. What ... are you doing?'

'I thought I'd work out here for a bit.'

'Really?' she said curiously.

He held up the basket he had just set down by the ladder, angled down for her to see. It was full of golden pears, real gold, or at least a veneer. 'He had them kicking around the attic, so I stole them.'

'Won't he mind?' she said, thinking of all the stolen clothes of Matsumoto's she hadn't returned. She had meant to, but when the end of term had come, she hadn't found the time, and told herself she would see him in London anyway. But then after the Foreign Office ball, he had gone straight to Paris. He hadn't said goodbye. That was a frequent complaint of his friends. Friends were things that he liked to surround himself with for a while, like good curtains, before he moved on and forgot them and bought new curtains elsewhere.

Thaniel waved his hand as he went up the ladder. 'He would have said before I found them if he did.'

While he clipped the pears into the branches by their magnetic hooks, he chatted as usual, but not much, because he was working his way along the garden, away from her. He belonged with the trees. He didn't seem to mind touching the branches, though they were full of moss and old splinters where the wind had snapped off twigs. She wanted to go out too, but she could see that if she did, she would notice the splinters and the moss too much, and it wouldn't be the same for her. She closed the window and climbed back down to the laboratory floor to get on with the labelling of her chemical drawers.

'It isn't that cold,' she heard him say a while later, his voice carrying down from the gate on the small wind. Mori was here, then.

'You don't know anything; you burn in candlelight.' It had been odd to hear his voice when she could see him, but it was bizarre now that she couldn't. It was a foot taller and three shades whiter than the rest of him. She had thought before that he had a northern accent, and perhaps it was still there a little, but it was much more standard now. She wondered if it was conscious or not. 'Mind those. They'll drop if you don't clamp them on well.'

'Why?'

'It's autumn.'

'How do they know?'

'Interior thermometers,' he said.

'Not tiny elves, then.'

'That was my original plan, but they proved difficult to catch.'

'She's in the cellar,' Thaniel laughed.

She put her pen down and pushed her hands together. It was difficult to see where Thaniel found the confidence to joke with him. She wished she had it. She was reasonably sure that Mori would want to help with the experiments whether he liked her or not, for the sake of hurrying along a future he was no doubt bored of waiting for, but it would be better if she could persuade him that she was worth the effort.

Mori was too quiet for her to hear him on the cellar stairs, and so the first sign of his arrival was the turning handle.

He came in slowly, like somebody else's cat. She couldn't tell if that was wariness. He had a strange way of moving anyway, sometimes sudden and sometimes slow, one she had noticed when they first met at the house on Filigree Street. If she had been forced to offer up a theory, she would have said it was what happened when a man could recall being old, but every now and then remembered that he was young still and that there was no need to be careful of his bones. His black eyes caught on the grisaille window, which dotted points of colour into them. His hair was darker than it had been in June.

'Mr Mori, come in.'