“Of course it is, sōsakan-sama,” Governor Nagai said placatingly. “We must work together to save the city.”

“I’m glad we agree on something.” Still, Sano wondered whether Nagasaki’s administrators wanted Spaen’s murderer caught, or had reason to sabotage his investigation. Had they staged the attempt on his life? If so, why? Because Chamberlain Yanagisawa had ordered it?

Now Sano hoped that pursuing the murder’s Christian angle would lead him to the truth he must find, in spite of the danger.

Nagasaki jail was a complex of tile-roofed buildings set on multiple levels of a terraced slope near the edge of town. Guard towers rose from the surrounding high stone walls. In the adjacent neighborhoods, tumbledown shacks lined narrow alleys down which ragged peasants toiled and reeking open gutters flowed. Jails were places of death and defilement, where no one went voluntarily. Only the poor, who could afford no better accommodations, would live nearby.

As Sano dismounted outside the jail’s ironclad gate, he surveyed the crowds and saw a familiar figure: the paunchy guard from his mansion. Coincidence might have brought the guard here, but Sano guessed that the man was spying on him.

Or waiting for a chance to kill him?

“I wish to see the official in charge of eliminating Christianity from Nagasaki,” Sano told a gate sentry.

“That would be Chief Persecutor Dannoshin Murashige. I’ll take you to him.”

Sano secured his horse at the gate and followed his escort into a large compound, where more guards patrolled earthen paths between buildings with cracked plaster walls. Screams and groans issued from tiny, barred windows. The guard took Sano through passages, up flights of stone steps, and through other gates to the prison’s uppermost level. Here, neat, freshly plastered barracks with dark woodwork and latticed windows surrounded a small courtyard. Sano’s escort led him to the largest building, into a room where samurai knelt in rows before a dais. Upon it stood a low desk from behind which presided Chief Persecutor Dannoshin.

Stout and middle-aged, Dannoshin had pale, moist-looking skin and the soft flabbiness of a man accustomed to rich food and no physical exercise. Puffs of fat surrounded his narrow eyes; a double chin girded his neck. His mouth was full and red, the corners upturned in a perpetual smirk. Wearing a glossy cream silk kimono printed with mauve irises, he looked like an idle bureaucrat. Yet Dannoshin’s authoritative manner imposed an air of military discipline upon the assembly.

“We must increase our efforts to banish Christianity from Japan.” His voice, a heavy, deep monotone, brooked no resistance. To a group of men seated to his right, he said, “You shall administer the Anti-Christianity Oath to two hundred citizens a day instead of the usual one hundred.”

“Yes, Honorable Chief Persecutor,” the men chorused. They filed out of the room, taking portraits of the Christian deity for the oath takers to trample, and scrolls for them to sign.