He’d never concede it but his heart, as the ballads would have it, was pure. He believed in the steadfast virtues. Goodness wasn’t a matter of perspective and he’d seen too much suffering to want to see more of it in the world. But the wrong kind of hoping led to bitterness, and bitterness led only to the gutter. He’d seen it in the Union field hospitals, men giving up. His own talent was strength. He could contract his flesh down into a packed solid so dense that a single punch could crack a brick wall and not even split a knuckle. A bullet on a battlefield would lodge shallowly in his flesh, painful but harmless. Yet it felt to him, every time he used his talent, like the very walls and ceiling and even the open sky was closing in on him, a tremendous weight, so that he couldn’t breathe. This being, Dr. Berghast had told him, a common condition on the continent, known to the new generation of mentalists as claustrophobia—a side effect, it seemed, of what he could do. He’d learn to live with it, Berghast had told him. Aye, he’d agreed, but how? Simply by going on, Mr. Coulton, Berghast had replied. Just simply by going on.
Well, he knew something about that, about going on.
He woke in the morning in the rickety old inn, high over the misty Tokyo harborfront, and he sat up at once, his nightshirt already damp. He glared around the empty room.
Something was watching him.
He felt it.
In fact, he’d been feeling it for weeks now, ever since they disembarked in Tokyo, before that even, while hugging the jungle coast on that creaking old bark up from Singapore, standing at the ship’s rails, watching the sailors clamber through the rigging in the haze. As if some presence stalked them. He’d caught flashes of something from the corner of his eye, movement, a blurred figure, but when he turned to look, always it was gone. Lately it had got worse, more intense, the hairs at the back of his neck prickling so that he’d whirl around suddenly, at unexpected moments, trying to see whatever it was that followed, and Jacob would look at him like he was mad.
He got dressed now, uneasy, thinking about it, and he folded up the tatami and left it there on the dark gleaming floor. He could hear the innkeeper’s wife running a brush over the stairs. Jacob’s room was tidy, empty: had a habit of going his own way, that lad did.
Despite everything, he should’ve felt pleased. They’d been hunting the Onoe girl for weeks, on the thinnest of leads, trying to track her down in a humid city wracked with cholera. And now they’d done it; and they had only to convince her to go with them, and they could be gone, out of the damn country, back to the world they knew.
Coulton reached for his hat and suddenly paused, hand in the air. It’d been turned on end, upside down, left standing like that in a way he’d never do. He wondered if the innkeeper’s wife had been in while he was sleeping, or if Jacob had done it, but neither seemed likely. Had he left it like that, in his tiredness? Maybe.
He ate a breakfast of rice and grilled fish out of the little wooden box left at his door, using his fingers, ignoring the peculiar little sticks for eating, and then he went out. The streets were eerily quiet.
In his billfold he’d kept an address for a brothel in the Yoshiwara district and he went there now, past the elaborate three-story gabled buildings, their wicker balconies, their horned tile roofs. There were a few Japanese in dark little suits, with silk hats, looking strange to Coulton’s eye. But most of the men adrift in the street at that hour wore dark kimonos, or rough trousers, and went about in groups of two or three.
The brothel he sought, House of the Yellow Blossom, was dim, musty, deserted. A woman sweeping out the entrance stopped and looked at him a long sullen moment and then disappeared into the gloom, and then in her place appeared, fixing her hair, wearing a bright red robe with a white sash, a young girl, who said something in rapid Japanese.
Coulton took off his hat, shook his head.
“I’m looking for this man,” he said. And gave her the paper he’d been given.
She bowed, took the paper, bowed again. And then she retreated into the house, and Coulton stood and paced and opened the door to peer back out at the muggy daylight in the wide street. At last the man he sought appeared, a middle-aged man with a beard already gray, a sour expression in his eyes. He was wearing a robe, blinking in the brightness.
“Captain Johannes?” said Coulton.
The captain grimaced, reached into his pockets, withdrew a pipe. “You’d be the Cairndale fellow,” he said.
“Aye.”
“The one wantin ship out to the Singapore colony.”