Assassin by Ted Bell

them in grace and skill and artistry.
    Snay had made it plain to the four rikishi that if he were ever able to defeat any one of them, the penalty was instant banishment from the palace. It was a fate only Ichi desired. No amount of wealth or women could salve Ichi’s broken heart. Night and day he longed for Michiko, an angel who’d come to earth to bless him with peace just before his abduction. While his honor forbade deliberate loss in the dohyo, in sumo parlance a feigned Tsuki dashi, it did not, he’d come to feel, forbid the death of a master who held him captive and whom he did not honor.
    And so, every morning when the sun rose over the high palace walls, and the thin mountain air was crystalline with light made radiant by the snowy mountain peaks looming above him, Ichi would walk alone in the gardens, consult his heart, and listen carefully to the song of the splashing fountains. He waited for the pure and innocent voice of Michiko. Surely one day the waters might whisper the secret way in which Ichi might escape his prison and find his way back to her heart. And so return to the source of the sun.

Chapter Five
London
    “A NOTHER PINT OF STOUT, THEN, C HIEF?” D ETECTIVE I NSPECTOR Ross Sutherland asked Congreve above the hubbub at the bar. The two men had dashed out of the Prince Edward Theatre, escaping before the final curtain had even touched the boards. They then made their way through a cold, drenching rain to the nearest pub in Old Compton Street. Ducking inside the Crown and Anchor, they were now more or less comfortably situated at the bar.
    “No thank you. I really should be pushing off, Inspector,” Congreve told his companion, glancing at his watch. “Time to knit up the raveled sleeve of care, I believe.”
    “Not your brand of poison, that musical, was it, Chief?”
    Someone, Ambrose Congreve couldn’t for the life of him remember who—his pal, Fruity Metcalfe, perhaps—had recently told him he would enjoy an enormously popular musical entertainment called Mamma Mia.
    He hadn’t.
    “I’m aware that many actually enjoy the sort of thing we’ve just had the misfortune to witness. A blatant, sugar-coated confection, cynically calculated to appeal to the LCD.”
    “LCD?”
    “Lowest common denominator.”
    “Shoe fits, I suppose. I rather enjoyed it, myself.”
    “Rubbish! It was about a wedding, for God’s sakes, Sutherland. A wedding! How could anyone, now that I think about it, I think it was Sticky Rowland, suggest something about a bloody wedding? Confound it, man! Is there not an ounce of, of, what’s the word, left in this world?”
    “Propriety?” the junior New Scotland Yard man said, not quite sure it was the word Congreve had been searching for.
    “Propriety, exactly. Decency! It’s been only what, two weeks since the—since Victoria’s—wedding. Well. What’s a chap to do but turn to drink? I will have another pint if you don’t mind.”
    Sutherland caught the eye of the Crown and Anchor’s portly barman. “Half of bitter, please, and another pint here,” he said, looking at Congreve out of the corner of his eye. The old boy was positively morose, he thought, putting another fiver down. Having caught his own reflection in the smoky mirror above the bar, Sutherland was startled to see how weary he himself appeared.
    Inspector Sutherland, a man in his early thirties, was, like his companion, on semipermanent loan from the Yard to Alex Hawke. Ross Sutherland, a Scot from the Highlands north of Inverness, stood somewhere just short of six feet. He had a lean, lanky frame, with a healthy, ruddy complexion, a pair of keen grey eyes, and straw-colored hair kept close-cropped like his brush-cut American cousins at the CIA. Were it not for his broad Highland accent, and an occasional fondness for loose tweed jackets, the former Royal Navy flying officer turned Scotland Yard inspector might easily be mistaken for an American.
    But the face he now saw reflected looked