“That’s not to say someone couldn’t remember her, and think her family is loaded,” Kovac said. “You see?”
He led the way down the hall to Lucien Chamberlain’s study. “Watch your step. The crime scene unit has already processed the scene, but I still don’t like to mess up bloodstains and footprints if I can help it.”
Sato tiptoed around the dried bloody shoe prints like a cat.
“Charlie tells us Diana is bipolar,” Kovac said. “Do you know if she’s on medication?”
“You’d have to ask her,” the professor said, his voice chilly. He was about done with the subject of Diana. He looked pointedly at his watch. “Can we get on with this? I have an appointment in an hour.”
“Sure,” Kovac said. “We’ll get the insurance report on the values, but I want you to look at what was taken and tell me if you think the thief knew the significance of what he was stealing.”
“Okay. Let’s start here,” Sato said, gesturing to an empty display case. The glass had been shattered. A brass plaque described the missing item as SAMURAI MEMPO—JAPAN—CIR. 1800. “Mempo was the mask worn by the samurai in battle,” he said. “This one covered the entire face and was made from leather with a detachable iron nosepiece. It’s lacquered white on the outside with red accenting the lines of the face, and lacquered bright red on the inside. The hallmark of these masks is a terrible grimacing facial expression, meant to intimidate the enemy. The missing one also had a horsehair mustache. They added those so that decapitated heads on the field of battle wouldn’t be mistaken for women’s heads and discarded.”
“There were women on the battlefield?”
“More than you would think. There were actually female warriors—onna-bugeisha. They participated in battles a lot more than the history books say. The remains of a hundred and five bodies at the Battle of Senbon Matsubaru in 1580 were recently DNA tested. It turned out thirty-five of them were women.”
He shook his head at a memory. “Lucien and I actually argued about it. Misogynist that he was, he tried to find every alternate explanation he could to diminish the significance of the onna-bugeisha. And yet, he has their weapon of choice in his collection—the naginata. Fucking hypocrite,” he muttered.
Kovac looked up at the wall to a thing that appeared to be a spear on one end and a curved sword on the other, and imagined a pack of angry women armed with them.
“He also chose to adamantly ignore the samurai practice of wakashudo,” he said with disgust. “Ridiculous homophobic dinosaur.”
Kovac raised an eyebrow. “There were gay samurai?”
“They didn’t label people that way. Like the Spartans, they accepted and actively encouraged relationships among the warriors. Wakashudo literally means ‘the way of the young men.’ It was a normal part of a mentor-student relationship among warriors. It wasn’t until Westerners and Christian missionaries came to Japan that homophobic attitudes were imposed on the society.
“Opening to the West was the demise of samurai culture in every way,” he continued. “And the Victorian attitudes of Westerners kept details like the onna-bugeisha and wakashudo—truths they didn’t approve of—out of the history books.
“That’s where Lucien’s soul lived—in Victorian times,” he went on. “He was rigid, judgmental, sexually repressed. The irony, of course, is that the Victorians were secretly some of the most sexually deviant, fucked-up people ever.”
“Do you think Chamberlain was that, too?” Kovac asked. “Deviant? Some of what I see in Diana’s behavior makes me wonder if there’s a history of abuse.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Sato said, but he looked away as he said it. “Anyway, back to the mask—I recently saw one for sale that was not quite as old or quite as nice as this one. The guy wanted three grand for it.”
“Is there a black market for this kind of stuff?”
“Sure, for the ultra-rare pieces. Men all over the world are enamored of the samurai and their culture. Wealthy men like expensive toys. But the average bozo thinks samurai and ninja are cool, too. So, a common thief might take that mask or a sword or dagger just because it excites him, not because he understands the historical or monetary value.”
He went to a blank spot on the weapon wall and tapped a finger on the brass plaque. “This was a kubikiri tanto, a head-cutting knife from the middle of the Edo period. Rare. Valuable. The blade is seven to eight inches long, with the cutting edge on the inside of the blade. This would have been carried by a high-ranking samurai, who had the honor of removing the heads of slain enemies in the field as trophies. A hard-core martial arts movie groupie might know what it is. But it’s rarely seen in Western collections, so a knowledgeable thief would definitely want it.”