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.”
“Calcutta, actually.”
“I don’t cross to Calcutta,” said the captain. “Free ports only. I can get you to Singapore. But there’s plenty of barks out from there. Steamships too, you want to book passage all the way through to England. Were you wantin to come in, talk it over?”
Coulton peered past him, into the interior. “Is there any need?”
The man grinned suddenly, showing two missing teeth. “Your employers already give me all I need. Unless there’s a change of plan. There ain’t a change of plan, now?”
Coulton thought about the girl, about what Jacob had said the night before. He looked at the captain, his gray eyes. “Give me one week more,” he said. “Keep yourself reachable, like. I’ll let you know if there’s any change to be made.”
“I’ll be here, waitin. It don’t hurt me none.” He winked. “Unless I pay them to. Three passengers, was it?”
“Does it matter?”
The captain shrugged. “Not to me.”
Before going out that morning, Coulton had rolled a ball of rice in a tissue paper and stuffed it into the pocket of his coat, and now, like an indigent, he drifted along the street in the shadow side, unwrapping the sticky rice and eating it with his fingers. He caught the unsettled stares of passersby and smiled angrily. It didn’t matter what part of the world he was in. Folk just liked to look down on other folk.
In the afternoon he went back across the old quarter, through the cholera-stricken streets, past the sweltering shop fronts, empty now, dark figures huddled far at the back, the bodies wrapped in white cloth and left out in the yards, the rustling of crows lifting and circling and dropping again back down, the reek of sickness everywhere. At the ancient overgrown house where Maki-chan lived, he paused, then rapped sharply on the doorframe, and waited.
She fascinated him, true. Dr. Berghast had provided the introductions. She was a witch by local custom but Coulton knew an educated woman when he met one and there was in Maki-chan something formidable and attractive. She spoke a near flawless English. She knew things she shouldn’t. She greeted him in the warm darkness and bowed and gestured that he follow her and then, shuffling in her tiny slippers, led him to the pavilion in the overgrown garden.
A tea had been set out, as if she’d been expecting him. The pot was still hot.
Coulton pulled from his waistcoat pocket a little leather drawstring purse. It clinked in his fingers, heavy with coin. He held the purse out but she did not take it and after a moment, uncertain, he set it on the floor between them.
“It’s what we agreed on,” he said. “It’s all there, like. You maybe want to count it?”
She made no move to do so. She only inclined her head, then again met his eye with her steady dark gaze. Her eyes, he thought, were beautiful.
He cleared his throat. “It weren’t what it looked like, yesterday,” he said lamely.
Her expression didn’t change.
“The girl,” he tried again. “She’s a queer one, aye. But not so queer as all that.”
She wet her lips, and he fell silent. Then she said, in clear precise English: “You are, I think, an unusual man yourself, Coulton-san.”
Coulton felt a heat rise to his cheeks. He wasn’t an easily embarrassed man but there was something in this woman’s gaze that unsettled him. He didn’t answer. His knees were cramping from kneeling already and he shifted uncomfortably, trying to get the blood moving.
“It was not only Komako-chan, who surprised me yesterday,” she said. “I did not expect Berghast-san to send talents to me.”
Coulton looked at her in surprise. “You know about … talents?”
“The unseen world is all around us, Coulton-san. Though we do not often glimpse it.” She kneeled very still with her delicate hands folded one atop the other in her lap. “My obaa-san used to say, we are each of us a house,” she murmured. “Here.” She tapped her breast. “And here.” She tapped her forehead. “And every house will have its visitors. We must be gracious hosts.”
Coulton felt himself starting to frown. “Talents,” he said, “ain’t like a person coming to call. It’s just a part of a person, like a hand is. Or a thought is.”
“Have you ever observed a water droplet roll into another?” she replied. “They are two, and then they are one. When a guest enters a house, it becomes the house.”
Coulton studied her quietly. He didn’t know quite what to say. Maybe it didn’t matter. He wondered for a moment if she were a talent herself, if she had a gift also. Everything in this country seemed to go unsaid. After a long silence he asked, “How is it you come to know Dr. Berghast, like?”
Maki-chan smiled, and elaborately folded back her sleeves, and poured out the tea, taking her time with each gesture. “Oh, there are talents here too, Coulton-san,” she said at last, again as if she could read his thinking. “It is not only your part of the world that knows of them. Though we do not gather above an orsine here, and we have no glyphic to help us find others. They must find us. But if this Onoe girl was revealed to Cairndale, then it is to Cairndale she must go. A glyphic’s claim must be respected.” The witch paused. “You did not imagine yours was the only such refuge in the world?”
He hadn’t thought about it, in truth. He’d only always just gone where he was told, collected what kids he was told to collect. He knew there were talents in Paris because Berghast corresponded with them; but elsewhere in the world? He felt a sudden quick flare of anger, thinking that Berghast hadn’t seen fit to inform him. Made him look foolish, it did. He frowned and he turned the little cup in his fingers and he blew on it to cool it. “So who is it you work for, then?” he asked.
Again, that smile. “Ah. I have been honored to work for you, Coulton-san,” she replied.
It was no kind of answer. The little cloth purse with the strange Japanese coins in it still sat, untouched, on the floor between them. But Coulton felt something shift in that moment, a delicate balance, as if the payment had at last been accepted, and he marveled again at the precise customs of that land.
* * *
It was dark when Coulton got back to the inn. There was still no sign of Jacob and he cursed under his breath and then, standing with the inner screen open behind him, paused and turned slowly. He had the same creeping feeling, the feeling that someone was there.
“Hello?” he called softly.
The corridor was dark, the warm floor in shadow, the stairs and the polished railing visible in the gloom.
“I can feel you, like,” he growled. “Don’t think I can’t.”