Eric Van Lustbader is the author of French Kiss, Zero, Shan, Jian, Black Heart, The Ninja and The Miko, all bestsellers. He lives in New York City and in Southampton, Long Island, with his wife, editor Victoria Schochet Lustbader.
By the same author
Novels of Asia:
The Ninja Black Heart The Miko Zero French Kiss
The China Maroc Novels:
Jian Shan
Novels of America: Sirens
The Sunset Warrior sequence:
The Sunset Warrior Shallows of Night Dai-San
Beneath an Opal Moon
ERIC VAN LUSTBADER
White Ninja

GRAFTON BOOKS
A Division of the Collins Publishing Group
LONDON GLASGOW TORONTO SYDNEY AUCKLAND
Grafton Books
A Division of the Collins Publishing Group
8 Grafton Street, London W1X 3LA
Special overseas edition 1990
First published in Great Britain by
Grafton Books 1990	•
Copyright © Eric Van Lustbader 1990 ISBN 0-586-20953-0
Grateful acknowledgement is made to Doubleday & Company, Inc., for permission to reprint the hatku by Soseki from An Introduction to Haiku by Harold G. Henderson. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Special mention must be made of the editorial contribution of my wife, Victoria, who really outdid herself on this one. Is there anything like an editorial Medal of Honor? If so, she deserves one for her work on White Ninja.
Printed in Great Britain by Collins, Glasgow
Set in Times
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
White Ninja is the third novel in a series - beginning with The Ninja and continuing with The Miko - about the life of Nicholas Linnear.
All the books are interrelated, but they are by no means interdependent. Still, the novels may be seen as being akin to concentric circles, and are meant to complement one another.
This is for Henry Morrison,
my friend as well as my agent,
without whom . . .
The winds that blow -ask them, which leaf of the tree will be next to go!
soseki
He that fleeth from the fear
shall fall into the pit;
and he that getteth up out of the pit
shall be taken in the snare . . .
         JEREMIAH 48:44
AUTUMN
Tokyo
He awoke into darkness. Outside, it was noon. In the Kan, a businessmen's hotel on the seedy outskirts of Tokyo, with the steel shutters closed like a raven's claw over the window, it was as black as the grave.
The image was apt. The room was hardly larger than a coffin. The ceiling and the floor were both carpeted in the same deathly shade of grey. Because there were only four feet separating them, any light created an unwholesomely vertiginous effect upon the unwary guest when he awoke.
But this was not the reason why, when rising from the futon bed, Senjin did not light a lamp. He had a far more compelling reason to remain in the shadows.
Senjin thought of his mother as he always did when he was either drunk or homicidal. He'd had two mothers, really, the one who had borne him, and the one who had raised him. The second mother was his aunt, his mother's sister, but he always referred to her as Haha-san, mother. It was she who had suckled him at her breast when his blood mother had had the effrontery to die a week after he was born from an infection his long labour had caused. It was Haha-san who had cooled his childhood fevers and had warmed him with her arms when he was chilled. She had sacrificed everything for Senjin and, in the end, he had walked away from her without even saying goodbye, let alone thank you.
That did not mean that Senjin did not think about her. With his eyes open, he remembered venting his anger against the white, marshmallow-like softness of her
breast, of her giving while he took, of his overstepping his bounds time and time again, and of her loving smile in response. He hit out, wanting only to be hit back in return. Instead, she drew him again into the softness of herself, believing that she could swallow his rage in the vastness of her serenity.
He was left with this dream, like scoria upon the blackened side of a long exhausted volcano. Senjin watching while Haha-san is repeatedly raped. Senjin feeling a kind of despicable satisfaction that borders on rapture, and which, without any physical means, rapidly brings him to a powerful climax.
For a long time, Senjin watched the milky beads of his semen slide down the wall. Perhaps he dreamed. Then he turned onto his back, and got up. In a moment, he was dressed, moving as silently as a wraith. He did not bother to lock the door behind him.
Late afternoon. In the street, the sky was the colour of zinc. It was as dense as metal, as soft as putty. Industrial ash turned the air to syrup. White filter masks were much in evidence, not only among the cyclists whining by, but also over the mouths of pedestrians fearful of lung damage.
Daylight had torn the neon night down, but what had it replaced it with? A colourless murk, aqueous and acrid, the bottom of a sunless sea.
He had many hours to kill, but that was all right. It was how he had planned it, emerging from an anonymous lair, travelling solely by foot, also anonymously, creating a path through the maze of the city only he could know or follow.
Despite his surroundings, he felt galvanized, ten feet tall, monstrously powerful. He recognized the signs, as familiar and comfortable as a well-worn shirt, and he smiled inwardly. He could feel the slender bits of metal lying along his bare flesh beneath his clothes. Warmed by
his blood-heat, they seemed to pulse with a life of their own, as if his burgeoning strength had infused them with a kind of sentience. He felt like a god, a heroic avenging sword sweeping through Tokyo, about to excise a disease that was rotting it from within.
Down narrow streets he went, a man of silence, a singular icon of brutality and death. He crossed puddles of stagnant water from which arose like a miasma the stench of fish innards. Like oil slicks, they threw back the rainbow colours of the fluorescent dusk.
It was evening by the time he made his way towards the doorway of The Silk Road. It was festooned with multi-coloured neon, garish plastic flowers and cheap glitter tacked against faded crepe paper. Seen from a distance, the entire entrance was made up to resemble the inner petals of an enormous orchid or, if one's mind ran to such images, a woman's sexual organ.
Senjin passed through the glass doors into a space filled with reflected light. It was like being inside a prism. Revolving disco lights refracted blindingly off walls and ceiling, both covered in mirrored panels. The result was as momentarily disorienting as had been Senjin's coffin-like hotel room. He felt at home here.
American rock music was playing at such a volume that the speaker diaphragms were taxed to their limit. The result was a thick, heavy sound, furry with bass and electronic distortion.
Senjin walked across the black rubber floor, identical to that used in children's playgrounds. He passed a bar consisting of columns of coloured water bubbling through plastic tubes. The top was Plexiglas.
He caught the eye of the manager, who turned away from him, hurrying to the sanctuary of his office deep in the back of the building. Senjin found an empty table stageside and sat down. He waved away the waitress as she began to weave her way towards him.
Senjin looked around him. The club was packed, mostly with businessmen out on their companies' expense. The atmosphere was dense with the fumes of cigarettes, Suntory Scotch and the sweat of anticipation. Senjin's tongue emerged from between his lips, licked at the air as if tasting the mingled scents.
The minuscule stage before which Senjin sat was teardrop-shaped Plexiglas, one of several on three different levels. The revolving disco lights spun off the scarred surface of the Plexiglas, sending distorted rainbows sparking through the club.
Eventually, the girls emerged. They wore oddly demure robes that covered them from throat to ankle so that they had the aspect of oracles or sibyls from whose mouths the fates of the men in the audience would soon be made manifest.
Apart from their faces, one could not see what they looked like at all. One had, rather, to trust those gently smiling faces that looked like neither angel nor vixen, but were suffused with such a maternal glow that it was impossible to find them intimidating or frightening. Which was, of course, the point. Trust me, those expressions said. And, automatically, one did. Even Senjin, who trusted no one. But he was, after all, Japanese and, whether he chose to believe it or not, he was in most ways part of the homogeneous crowd.
Senjin concentrated his attention on one of the girls, the one closest to him. She was as startlingly young as she was beautiful. He had been unprepared for her youth, but far from disconcerting him, her age somehow heightened his own anticipation. He licked his lips just as if he were about to sit down to a long-awaited feast.
The music had changed. It was clankier now, more obviously sexual in its beat and in the insinuation of the brass arrangement. The girls simultaneously untied their robes, let them slip to the Plexiglas stage. They wore
various forms of street clothes, most of them suggestive in one way or another. Strobe lights flashed. In unison, the girls began to strip, not in any Western bump-and-grind fashion, but in a series of still-life tableaux, freeze-frame images held on the video of the mind. The poses, as the garments came off, were increasingly wanton, until, at length, the girls were naked.
The music died with most of the light, and Senjin could hear a restive stirring in the audience. The scent of sweat outmuscled all others now.
The girl in front of Senjin had flawless skin. Her muscles had the firmness, the roundness of youth. Her small breasts stood out almost straight from her body, and the narrow line of her pubic hair would have revealed more than it concealed were it not deftly hidden in shadow.
Now the girl squatted down. In her hands were fistfuls of tiny flashlights imprinted with the name of the club, The Silk Road. She offered one to Senjin, who refused. But, immediately, there was a mad scramble over his back, as the businessmen lunged to grab flashlights from her hand.
When the flashlights were gone, the girl bent her upper torso backwards until her nipples pointed up at the mirrored ceiling where they were replicated over and over. The bizarre image looked to Senjin like the statue he had once seen of the teat-bellied she-wolf who had suckled Romulus and Remus.
Balancing herself on her heels as deftly as an acrobat, the dancer began to part her legs. This was the climax of her act, the tokudashi, colloquially known in leering double entendre as 'the open'.
Senjin could hear the clickings all around him as the tiny flashlights came on, insect eyes in a field of heaving wheat. Someone was breathing heavily on his neck. He was sure that every man in the club was concentrating on that one spot between the girls' legs. The flashlight beams probed into those inner sanctums as the girls moved about
the stage, keeping their legs remarkably wide open. It was a discipline to walk this way, as difficult to master as diving or golf, and no less deserving of admiration.
Senjin watched the muscles in the girl's legs bunch and move as she slowly scuttled around the entire perimeter of the stage as easily as if she were a contortionist in a circus. All the while, her face was as serene and in control as if she were a queen or a goddess under whose spell these mortals had come. As long as she held her legs apart for the most minute inspection, this girl- and the others above and around her - maintained a magnetic power as hard to explain as it was to define. Senjin, totally uninterested in that spot of female sexual potency, wondered at its hold over others.
The lights came up abruptly, dazzlingly, breaking the hushed, florid silence. The rock music blared anew, the girls were reclothed in their robes, once again mysterious, their faces now devoid of any emotion or involvement.
But Senjin was at that moment too busy to appreciate the dancers' splendid manipulation of emotions. He was already wending his way through the red-lighted warren of the club's backstage corridors.
He found the cubicle he was looking for and, slipping inside, melted into the darkness*. Alone in the tiny space, he set about taking stock. Against the rear wall he found the window, grimy and paint-spattered with disuse. It was small, but serviceable. He checked to see if it was locked. It wasn't.
Satisfied, he unscrewed the bare bulbs around the large wall mirror. There were no lamps or other sources of illumination in the room. He reconsidered and screwed one bulb back into place.
When Mariko, the dancer who had been the object of Senjin's attention, walked into her dressing room, she saw him as a silhouette, as flat and unreal as a cut-out. The single bulb threw knife-edged shadows across his cheeks.
She did not, in fact, immediately understand what she was seeing, believing him to be the image on a talento poster one of the other girls had put up in her absence.
She had been thinking about power - the kind she possessed here, but apparently not elsewhere in her life. There was a paradox lurking somewhere within this synergistic puzzle of power, but she seemed at a loss to discover what it was or, more importantly, how it might help her attain a higher status than was now accorded her.
She had yet to learn the secret of patience, and now she never would.
Senjin detached himself from shadows streaking the wall as Mariko opened the door. He was against her, pressing himself along the entire length of her as if he were a malevolent liquid poured from the shadows.
Mariko, still half-stunned that the poster image had come to life, opened her mouth to scream, but Senjin smashed his fist into it. She collapsed into his arms.
Senjin dragged her into a corner, and pulled apart the flaps of her robe. There was now a small blade, warm from his own blood-heat, lying in the palm of his hand. He used it to economically shred her clothes, denuding her in precise, co-ordinated quadrants. Then he arranged the strips just the way he wanted.
For an instant, Senjin's baleful eyes took in the full measure of this glorious creature, as if fixing an image in his mind. Then he knelt and swiftly bound her wrists above her head with a length of white cloth. He tied the other end around a standpipe, pulling the cloth tight so that Mariko was stretched taut.
He withdrew an identical length of cloth, wound it around his own throat, slipped it around the standpipe, calculated distances, knotted it tight. Then he unzipped his trousers, and fell upon her flesh without either frenzy or passion. It was not easy to effect penetration, but this kind of grinding pain acted as a curious spur for him.
Senjin at last began to breathe as hard as the men in the club had done during Mariko's act. But he felt nothing from either his or Mariko's body in the sense of a sensual stimulus. Rather, he was, as usual, trapped inside his mind and, like a rat within a maze, his thoughts spun around and around a hideous central core.
Flashes of death and life, the dark and the light interwove themselves across his mind in a flickering, sickening film that he recognized all too well, a second deadly skin lying, breathing with malevolent life just beneath his everyday skin made of tissue and blood.
Unable to bear the images and what they symbolized any longer, Senjin dropped his upper torso and his head. Now with each hard upthrust inside her, the noose was pulled tighter and tighter around his throat.
As he approached completion, his body was deprived of more and more oxygen and, at last, sensory pleasure began to flood through him as inexorably as a tide, a thick sludge of ecstasy turning his lower belly and his thighs as heavy as lead.
Only at the point of death did Senjin feel safe, secure upon this ultimate sword-edge, this life-death continuum made terrifyingly real. It was the powerful but tenuous basis on which Kshira, Senjin's training, was built. At the point of death, he had learned, everything is possible.
Once one has stared death in the face, one comes away both with one's reality shattered and with it automatically reconstructed along different lines. This epiphany - as close as an Easterner will ever come to the Western Christian concept of revelation - occurred early in Senjin's life, and changed him forever.
Dying, Senjin ejaculated. The world melted around him and, inhaling deeply from Mariko's open mouth, he gathered to him the susurrus, unique to every human being. Greedily, like an animal at a trough, he sucked up her breath.
He rose, unwrapped with one hand the cloth from his throat as, with the other, he mechanically zipped his trousers. His expression was empty, eerily mimicking Mariko's expression when, at the end of her show, she had faced her audience.
Now that the act was over, Senjin felt the loss,
the acute depression, as pain. He assumed one must
necessarily feel incomplete when returning from a state
of grace.
His hands were again filled with the slender bits of steel that had lain like intimate companions along his sweaty flesh. What he had done with Mariko's clothes, Senjin now did to her skin, shredding it in precise strips, artistically running the steel blades down and across what had.once been pristine, and was now irrevocably soiled. Senjin chanted as he worked on Mariko, his eyes closed to slits, only their whites showing. He might have been a priest at a sacred rite.
When he was done, there was not a drop of blood on him. He withdrew a sheet of paper from an inside pocket and, using another of his small, warm blades, dipped its tip into a pool of blood. He hurriedly wrote on the sheet, this could be your wife. He had to return the tip to the blood twice in order to complete the message. His fingers trembled in the aftermath of his cataclysm as he blew on the crimson words. He rolled the sheet, placed it in Mariko's open mouth.
Before he left, he washed his blades in the tiny sink, watching the blood swirling in pink abstract patterns around the stained drain.
He cut down the length of cloth that had bound him to the standpipe. Then he went to the sooty window and, opening it, boosted himself up to its rim. In a moment, he was through.
Senjin rode a combination of buses and subways to the centre of Tokyo. In the shadow of the Imperial Palace,
he was swept up in the throngs of people, illuminated by a neon sky, clustered like great blossoms swaying from an unseen tree. He was as anonymous, as homogenous within society as every Japanese wishes to be.
Senjin walked with a step dense with power yet effortless in its fluidity. He could have been a dancer, but he was not. He passed by the National Theatre in Hayabusa-cho, pausing to study posters outside to see if there was a performance that interested him. He went to the theatre as often as possible. He was fascinated by emotion, and all the ways it could be falsely induced. He could have been an actor, but he was not.
Passing around the south-western curve of the Imperial moat, Senjin came upon the great avenue, the Uchibori-dori, at the spot which in the West would be called a square, but for which there was no corresponding word in Japanese. Past the Ministry of Transportation, Senjin went into the large building housing the Metropolitan Police Force. It was, as usual at this time of the night, very quiet.
Ten minutes later, he was hard at work at his desk. The sign on the front of his cubicle read: captain senjin
OMUKAE, DIVISION-COMDR, METROPOLITAN HOMICIDE.
Under the knife, Nicholas Linnear swam in a sea of memory. The anaesthetic of the operation, in removing him from reality, destroyed the barriers of time and space so that, like a god, Nicholas was everywhere and everywhen all at the same moment.
Memory of three years ago became a moment of today, a pearling drop of essence, distilled from the' blurred seasons passing too swiftly.
Nicholas spreading his hands, palms up. Hook at these, Justine, and wonder what they're for besides inflicting pain and death.
Justine slides one of her hands in his. They're also
gentle hands, Nick. They caress me and I melt inside.
He shakes his head. That's not enough. I can't help thinking what they've done. I don't want to kill again. Voice trembling. I don't believe that I ever could have.
You never sought out death, Nick. You've always killed in self-defence, when your insane cousin Saigo came after us both, then when his mistress, Akiko, tried to seduce and kill you.
Yet way before that, I sought out the training, first bujutsu, the way of the samurai warrior, then ninjutsu. Why?
What answer do you think will satisfy you? Justine says softly.
That's just it, Nicholas cries in anguish. / don't know!
I think that's because there is no answer.
Swimming in the heavy sea of memory, he thinks, But there must be an answer. Why did I become what I have become?
A flash of spoken word, uttered long, long, ago: To be a true champion, Nicholas, one must explore the darkness, too. Immediately, he rejects the remembered words.
He sees the stone basin in the shape of an old coin that lies within the grounds of his house. He recalls, in a starburst of memory, taking up the bamboo ladle in order to slake Justine's summer thirst. For a moment, the dark belly of the basin is less than full. Then he can see carved into its bottom the Japanese ideogram for michi. It symbolizes a path; also a journey.
His journey out of childhood and into the ranks of the ninja. How rash he had been to rush into that hideous darkness. How foolhardy to put himself into such moral peril. Did he think that he could learn such black, such formidable arts without consequence? A child, unthinking, unknowing, hurls a stone into the middle of a pristine, sylvan pond. And is astounded by
the change in the pond's appearance because of that one act. All at once, the calm, mirrored skin of tree and sky is shattered as ripples advance outwards from the trembling epicentre: Images of tree and sky waver, distorted out of reality, then disintegrate into chaos. And down below, the mysterious fish, hidden in veils of shadow, stir, squirming towards the surface.
Was it not the same with Nicholas's decision to study ninjutsu?
He floats. Time, like sensation, is wholly absent, banished to another, weightier realm, but recalling michi, he thinks of the stone basin on the grounds of his house north-west of Tokyo. Before it was his, it had belonged to Itami, his aunt; Saigo's mother. In his battle with Akiko, she had sheltered him, had aided him, and he had come to call her Haha-san, mother.
Itami loved Nicholas, even though - perhaps partly because - he had killed Saigo, who had stalked Nicholas, murdering Nicholas's friends as he had come ever closer to killing Nicholas.
Saigo was totally evil, Itami says. There was an uncanny purity to him that in other circumstances might have been admirable. I wished him dead. How could it be otherwise? Everything he came in contact with withered and died. He was a spirit-destroyer.
If it had been the same with Akiko, Saigo's lover, she would surely have succeeded in destroying Nicholas. But her purity of purpose, her flame had encountered Nicholas's spirit, and had flickered in its power.
Akiko, as part of Saigo's continuing revenge had, through extensive plastic surgery, taken the face of Nicholas's first love, Yukio. But against her will, Akiko had fallen in love with Nicholas. Because of her vow to Saigo, she was trapped into seeking Nicholas's death and, in the end, Nicholas knew he would have to kill her in order to save himself. But as he had confronted her, he
had wondered whether he could bring himself to kill her for she, too, had engendered strong, dangerous feelings in him.
Even now, suspended in nothingness, he is not certain of what he would have done, had not the gods intervened. The earthquake that hit north of Tokyo opened up the ground on which Akiko stood. Nicholas tried to save her, but she slipped away, down into the darkness, down into the shifting shadows beneath the rippling crust of the earth.
I am not proud that I destroyed Saigo, your son, Nicholas says.
Of course not, Itami says. You acted with honour. You are your mother's son.
Itami is eighty when this exchange occurs, three years ago, an hour before the gods will take Akiko to their bosom in the centre of the earth. Six months later, Itami is dead, and Nicholas, weeping at her funeral, thinks of cherry blossoms at the height of their ethereal beauty, falling to the ground, where they are trampled under the feet of gaily scampering children.
Sadness, unlike sensation, remains with him, bending his inner gaze to the slowly beating heart of his tiny daughter, blue-skinned, as fragile and translucent as a Ming vase. Kept alive by tubes and pure oxygen for three cruel weeks while she struggles valiantly to cling to what fragment of life was willed her, she finally expires.
As if in a movie, Nicholas watches in mute despair Justine's mourning. He had not thought it possible for a human being to shed so many tears. For months, her anguish is absolute, blotting out the entire world around her.
And how does Nicholas mourn? Not with tears, not with the self-absorbedness of body and spirit that the mother - within whose body the new life grew and who
already shared with her that mysterious, intimate bond,
soul abutting soul - must most wickedly shed like a serpent's dead skin. He dreams.
He dreams of vapour curling. Lost, no direction home, he falls through vapour. Gravity drags at him with'such an inexorable pull that he knows he will drop a great distance. He knows that he has just begun to fall. And, knowing that with an absolute certainty, he wants nothing more than to stop falling. And cannot. He falls. He screams.
And awakens, his body coiled and sweat-soaked, and cannot return to sleep. Night after night bolting awake, licking his salty lips, staring at the ceiling, at the vapour curling.
Nicholas had come to Japan with Justine's father to merge their computer chip manufacturing arm with that of Sato International's. Now, in desperation, Nicholas throws himself into his new work, the reason he has stayed on in Japan after Akiko's death. The hellishly complex merger has been consummated, and the business of the chip manufacturing has to be co-ordinated with Sato International. Nicholas and Tanzan Nangi, the vast conglomerate's head, have become friends.
Together, they are manufacturing a revolutionary computer chip, known as a Sphynx t-pram, a totally programmable random access memory chip. The ramifications in the computer industry of such a discovery are staggering - and so have been the profits. IBM has tried to deal itself in, offering the services of its infinitely expandable research and development department in exchange for the chip's secret; similarly, Motorola has offered them a lucrative partnership. But the chip's design is strictly proprietary, and, to Nicholas's and Nangi's surprise, no one has come near to duplicating the amazing chip.
Nicholas and Nangi have decided to go it alone.
With Justine so withdrawn, Nicholas spends more and more time with Nangi, and, he supposes, it would have continued that way for a very long time, had it not been
for his headaches. Not the headaches, really, so much as their cause: the tumour.
It is benign but, because it is growing, it needs to be removed. This cause for alarm is what breaks their dead daughter's spell over Justine. Finding she is still needed, Justine returns to life. Waiting for the results of the tests, the operation, the two of them find a new intimacy. But, Justine tells him, she is taking precautions. She is not yet ready to return to the psychic ordeal of pregnancy.
The anaesthesia is like a carpet upon which Nicholas walks in slippered feet, in a direction unknown to him. In that sense, it is like life, and unlike michi, the path, also the journey, which are known.
Nicholas, gazing upon the angelic face of his daughter, who lives again and forever in the theatre of his mind, for the first time openly wishes to abandon michi, his path, his journey. He wishes to change his karma. In the past, he has bent his fate as if it were an alder staff. But now he wishes to break it in two, turning it into an instrument of his own will.
This is what he longs for as, with an open heart, he tries to capture the spirit of his dead daughter, to observe her in the same manner hi which he monitored her slowly beating heart. To gather to him like tender blossoms the pitifully few days of her life in order to know what made her strong, what made her cry, what caused her to laugh.
But it is impossible. Even floating god-b'ke in othertime, otherplace, the essence of her passes through his trembling fingers like grains of sand disappearing into the heart of the desert. And here, in front of only one witness - himself - he does what he could not do for two years.
He weeps bitter tears for her ...
He awoke to a whiteness so pure' that for a moment his blood seemed to congeal, thinking of vapour curling, falling without end, dropping like a stone down a well.
His scream brought the nurses running, their rubber-soled shoes squeaking on the polished linoleum floor. It brought, Justine awake with a start, her heart lurching because she had not even been aware that she had fallen asleep at his side, holding his hand. She had done that unconsciously, the pad of her thumb against the branched blue vein on the back of his hand, feeling the slow pulse of blood there as, three years before, she had listened for the slow pulse of her doomed daughter's heartbeat.
The nurses brushed Justine away, not with any animosity, but with the cool indifference born of efficiency that was so much more difficult to bear, since they were making it perfectly clear to her how useless she was now.
Nicholas, in the frantic thrashing of new consciousness, had torn out both the IV drip and the catheter. .The nurses clucked over him, whispering to him in Japanese which, in three years, Justine had only managed to learn on a rudimentary level. She found herself resenting the added intimacy of these young Japanese women who bathed him, shaved him and took care of his bowel movements.
She stood in a corner, a larger figure than any of the nurses, trying to peer over their shoulders, terrified that something untoward had happened to Nicholas, angry that she was reduced to standing helplessly aside.
What if he should die? She clutched at her throat as her heart turned to ice. It was winter; there was snow on the ground. She had not taken off her coat even though it was warm in the room. Justine was always chilled now.
Dear God, save him, she prayed. She was not religious, did not even now know whether she actually believed in God. But for now she could do nothing more than pray, which at least held a measure of solace because it was something only she could do for Nicholas, and she held that knowledge close to her as a child does her teddy bear when night brings moving shadows close to her bed.
'Is my husband all right?' she asked in halting Japanese.
'There is no cause for alarm,' the woman Justine identified as the head nurse said.
Hospitalese was the same the world over, Justine thought. No one offered an opinion on anything, ever.
As she watched the nurses go about their arcane ministrations, she wondered what she was doing in Japan anyway. In the beginning, she had readily agreed to staying on here. It was, after all, what Nick really wanted and, in any event, her boss, Rick Millar, had wanted to open a Tokyo branch of his advertising agency. It seemed perfect, like the happy ending of a novel.
Reality had turned out to be something quite different. For one thing, she was a foreigner, and opening a business - any business - that was not wholly Japanese-owned was a formidable task. In fact, looking back on it, Justine recognized that she would not have been able to open the agency in the first place had it not been for the influence of Tanzan Nangi and Nick.
She was amazed at how much power Nick had here. After all, he was a foreigner as well. Except that the Japanese she had met treated him with the deference they reserved only for their own kind. It was partly Nick himself, of course, but the respect also came because he was the Colonel's son.
Colonel Denis Linnear had commanded a section of the British forces in Singapore during World War II. It was there that he had met Nicholas's mother, Cheong. After the war, he was assigned to General MacArthur's SCAP occupation headquarters staff in Tokyo because of his expertise in understanding the Japanese mind.
The Colonel had been an extraordinary man, and the Japanese had recognized this quality in him. Their ministers had gravitated to him as moons will to a planet. When he died, his funeral was as well attended as that of a Japanese emperor.
For another thing, she was a female, and no matter how much was written concerning the strides women were making in Japan, they were still treated as second-class citizens. They were tolerated in the work place, but advancement was all but unheard of. The fact that she, a woman, was heading up a company made hiring all but impossible. No Japanese man of any talent would apply for a job because he couldn't take the venture seriously, and she quickly found out that when she hired all women, she got no clients. No one would take the agency's products seriously. Within eighteen months, she was out of business.
'Sorry, kid,' Rick Millar had told her over the phone. 'I know you did your best. Not to worry. Anytime you want to come home, you've got your old job back. Good VPs are hard to find.'
Home.
Staring into Nick's pale face - what she could see of it through the mysterious and intimidating swathes of bandages - Justine knew that she wanted to go home.
BOOK I
Twilight/ Usuakari

Through the shutters it came,
autumn's own shape
the warp of the candle flame.
Raizan
SUMMER, PRESENT
Tokyo/East Bay Bridge
Tanzan Nangi, chairman of Sato International, could pinpoint the onset of the attack almost to the second.
In his offices at the summit of the striking, triangular Shinjuku Suiryu Building, fifty-two storeys above the thrumming hive of downtown Tokyo, Nangi stared out at the concrete and glass skyrises. His gaze also took in the potted plant on his windowsill with its deep green leaves and its tiny purple buds: a dwarf purple gem rhododendron. The first blooms of summer. He had noticed their budding this morning just at the moment of attack.
As it happened, Nangi had been accessing data from his computer terminal when the virus began to unspool. Somehow it had been injected into his company's mainframe, entwining itself throughout the software systems until a prearranged trigger released it and it began to eat Sato's core data.
Even as he dialled his computer technicians on the intercom, Nangi watched in horror as the data that had been coming up on his screen began to unravel, turning into some alien gibberish that was useless to him or, as it turned out, anyone else hi the company.
The technicians were at a loss as to how to combat the virus. 'It's a nondiscriminatory borer,' they told him, 'which means that it constantly mutates. Even if we pinpointed its weakness at any one moment in time, by the time we could implement a formulaic antidote, the virus would already have mutated into something else.'
'How did it get into the system?' Nangi asked. 'I
thought we had a foolproof, state-of-the-art anti-virus security lock on the system.'
'We do,' the technicians informed him. They shrugged. 'But hackers have an infinite amount of time and a seemingly inexhaustible hunger to crack security locks.'
Nangi was about to make a caustic remark concerning the technicians' hunger, when the data he had been accessing began creeping back on to his screen. Quickly, he scrolled through it, verifying that it was intact. Then he began accessing other data at random.
After that, he let the technicians take over. To everyone's relief, it was soon determined that the software programs were back on line. The virus had disintegrated. Nangi counted them lucky on that score. On the other hand, their core data had been penetrated. Nothing had been accessed, so a professional data raid was discounted; the hacker theory was probably the right one. Still, Nangi had been disquieted. Even now, the computer security system was being overhauled. Nangi could not risk the network being compromised again.
The virus attack had occurred first thing this morning. The day had gone downhill after that.
Now Nangi curled his gnarled hands around the jade dragon head of his walking stick until the flesh went white. Blue veins like ropes filled with sailors' knots pushed the tissue-thin skin outwards.
Behind him, the weekly meeting of Sato International's senior management continued with its agenda. Suggested by Nicholas, this meeting was concerned first with synopsizing the division heads meeting that had taken place the day before, and second, with aligning the division successes, failures and needs in with the keiretsu's - the conglomerate's - overall goals, which had changed drastically ever since they had won the right to manufacture key components for the production model of Hyrotech-inc's so-called Hive computer, which was now
only in prototype. The prospect of burgeoning profits was not the only benefit of this deal; it was the enormous face Sato International gained - the only Japanese company to be involved in the Hive project.
Nicholas, Nangi thought. It had been Nicholas who had negotiated the deal with the American firm, Hyrotech-inc, designated by the federal government to manufacture the revolutionary new computer.
But Nicholas's contributions went far beyond the Hyrotech-inc deal. Before Nicholas's involvement in Sato International, Nangi had been aware of the need to integrate all of Sato's konzern- that is, the conglomerate's individual companies - into a smoothly working whole. But it had been Nicholas who had pointed out that this could and should be taken a step further, integrating division schedules at the home office in Tokyo.
In a way, Nangi had realized, this had been a very Japanese idea, because it gave each division a heightened sense of being integral to the whole. Within three months of inaugurating the new meetings, Nangi had been gratified to see a 20 per cent increase in productivity among his division heads. He had been well pleased and, in an extraordinary gesture, had shared this pleasure with Nicholas.
He had taken Nicholas out to his favourite restaurant, •a place so expensive that it was virtually a private club for the highest echelons of the industrial sector - no minister of Japan's omnipresent bureaucracy could afford its prices. But food was not the reason one went to this restaurant - it was the atmosphere: discreet, exclusive, confidential, perfect for long drunken evenings.
For a Japanese to allow a Westerner to get drunk with him was a rare privilege indeed. For a people so studiously rigid in their social behaviour, going on 'drunks' was almost the sole source of release. It was felt that when drunk a Japanese could say anything - express feelings
normally taboo, become maudlin, sentimental, even cry
- it was the liquor, after all. Everything was acceptable, and all lapses were forgiven.
It had been in the middle of his drunk with Nicholas that Nangi had begun to understand the qualities that men older than he had seen in Colonel Denis Linnear, why Nicholas's father had not been considered an iteki
- a barbarian - like all the other men in the American occupation forces. Colonel Linnear had been special; and this quality of being attuned to the Japanese psyche, while still being Western, was present in Nicholas as well, never mind that he was half-Oriental, half-English. Tanzan Nangi, hero of the war, until ten years ago
-Vice-Minister of the all-powerful Mill, Ministry of International Trade and Industry, then founder and chairman of the Daimyo Development Bank, which ultimately owned Sato, and now head of Sato International, never thought that he would love a Westerner. Frankly, he had not thought such a thing was possible. But he saw during that long night that, without quite knowing it, he had come to love Nicholas as one normally only loves a son.
Nangi, one of a handful of the most powerful men in Japan, felt no shame in this love. Nicholas possessed great hara - the centralized force so prized by Japanese. He also was an honourable man - Nicholas had proved this to Nangi three years ago when he had done all in his power to protect Seiichi Sato, Nangi's long-time friend, and when he had refused under torture to reveal the secrets of Tenchi to the Russians. Tanzan Nangi knew that Nicholas's heart was pure. This was the highest honour a Japanese could accord another human being.
Nangi had, as was proper, showed little outward concern when Nicholas had gone into the hospital. But it had been a great blow to Nangi, both personally and professionally, to have Nicholas so rudely taken from
him. Justine had not understood his actions, of course, believing that, like hers, his place was at Nicholas's side. This misapprehension on her part had put quite a strain on their already fragile relationship. It saddened Nangi that she could not see that the way he could serve his friendship with Nicholas best was by managing Sato International to the best of his abilities. With Nicholas incapacitated, it was Nangi's duty to the company to shoulder both men's jobs to keep the konzern running smoothly.
It saddened Nangi, too, that Nicholas should be married to someone like Justine, who was clearly unable to comprehend the subtle nuances of life hi Japan. It did not occur to him to examine his responsibility in Justine's education.
Now, as Nangi stared out of his office window, unmindful of the meeting's babble going on behind him, he felt a terrible foreboding, as if the computer attack had been an omen, a change in the wind. Because now he could feel a typhoon on its way, dark and malevolent and intent on his destruction.
In fact the analogy was quite literal, because the typhoon was specific; the force had a name: Kusunda Ikusa.
The call had come just an hour ago. An hour and a lifetime, Nangi thought. Now everything had changed. Because of Kusunda Ikusa.
'Mr Nangi? This is Kusunda Ikusa.' The voice had come down the telephone line, hollow and impersonal. 'I bear greetings from the new Emperor.'
Nangi had gripped the phone' tightly. 'I trust His Imperial Majesty is well.'
'Well enough, thank you.' There was the slightest pause to indicate that the pleasantries were at an end. 'There is a matter we wish to discuss with you.'
By 'we' Nangi was unsure whether Ikusa meant the Emperor himself or the group called Nami. But then again it was said that Nami - the Wave - carried out
the new Emperor's will. Its members had certainly done so with the old Emperor up until the moment he went to his final, glorious reward. Nami, it was said, was the true heart of Japan. It knew the will of the Japanese people far better than did any prime minister or any bureaucratic ministry. Nami defined power in Japan, but that did not mean that Nangi had to accept its ideals.
Nami was composed of a group of seven men -all of whom had ancestral ties to those families which had been most influential'in Japan before and during the war in the Pacific. They were neither businessmen nor politicians. Rather, they saw themselves as above such mundane concerns.
Nami was interested only in the overriding directive of makoto - ensuring that the moral and ethical purity of heart of Japan was kept intact. But Nami's rise to power was itself an example of how purity could be compromised. During the early 1980s, Japan's roaring economy was based to an overwhelming extent on the worldwide success of its exports - cars and high-tech hardware and software. Four years ago, however, the yen began to strengthen to such a degree that Nami became alarmed. They saw - quite correctly - that a stronger yen would make exports more costly and, therefore, the breakneck rate of exports necessarily had to fall.
In order to avoid any resulting precipitous drop in the Japanese economy, Nami had recommended the creation of an artificially induced land boom inside Japan. Nami reasoned that switching the base of the country's economy from an external source to an internal one would insulate Japan from the coming export shock.
And while they were proved right in the short term, the danger was now increased that the boom could go bust overnight. Nangi distrusted artificial means to any end. What could turn an economy on its ear overnight could itself be displaced just as quickly. Japan was now
sitting on the economic equivalent of a swordblade.
If Nami's climb to almost unimpeachable power had come with the unqualified success of the land boom, it was consolidated earlier last year with the death of the old Emperor. No one trusted a successor to be able to keep the Emperor's image as the son of Heaven alive.
But Nami's direct involvement in the affairs of the country was ominous. In Nangi's opinion, its rise hid a cabal of grasping, power-hungry individuals who had allowed then: power to warp the true meaning of makoto, purity of purpose. On the contrary, makoto had made the members of Nami arrogant, blinding them to national problems and the flaws of the Japanese as a whole. Overbearing arrogance and self-delusion were very much American traits; the fact that they had rooted themselves so firmly in the centre of Japan was of great concern to Nangi.
And now that the new Emperor needed guidance, Nami's power had at last come to the fore. The Imperial succession, though it had been a media event of unprecedented proportions in Japan, was of little concern to Nami, as was the new Emperor, Hirohito's son. After the old Emperor had died, it had been Nami which, in the shadows behind the Imperial throne, had really succeeded the son of Heaven.
And while Westerners saw the Emperor as a mere figurehead, wielding only ceremonial power as did the Queen of England, Nangi knew differently. He knew that the Emperor's will defined the word 'power'.
'Of course, it will be my privilege to serve the Emperor's will in any way I can,' Nangi said, almost by rote. 'Would you care to meet me at my office? I have a free hour tomorrow, if it would be convenient. Say, at five in the after—'
'This conference is of the utmost urgency,' Ikusa broke in.
As an ex-vice-minister of MITI, Nangi knew the ministry code words; he had used them Once or twice himself, in an emergency. Now he knew two things of vital importance: this was not a social call, and it presaged some dire crisis. But for whom? For Nami or for himself?
'I will neither come to your office nor suggest that you come to mine,' Ikusa said. 'Rather, I can offer a relaxing hour at the Shakushi furo. Are you familiar with this bathhouse, Mr Nangi?'
'I have heard of it.'
'Have you been there?' Suddenly, like a gap opening in an opponent's armour, the strain in Ikusa's voice was evident to Nangi.
'No.'
'Good,' Kusunda Ikusa said. 'I myself have never visited it, but I will meet you there at five tomorrow, since that is also a convenient time for me.' In the interval Ikusa created, Nangi noted the other man's insistence on dominance. At this early stage, it was an ominous sign. Ikusa broke the silence. 'I wish to underscore the need for absolute discretion in this matter.'
Nangi was offended, but kept his tone of voice clean of emotion. There were other ways to make the affront known and, at the same time, to begin to test the mettle of this man. 'I appreciate your obvious anxiety,' Nangi said, knowing that Ikusa would hate himself for having betrayed even a glimmer of tenseness. 'Rest assured I will take all required precautions.'
'Then, at this time, there is nothing more to say. Until five.' Ikusa broke the connection, and Nangi was left wondering whether his choice of rendezvous venue was deliberate. Shakushi meant a dipper or a ladle, a typical name for a bathhouse where one was soaped and rinsed with ladled water. But Shakushi had another meaning: to go strictly by the rules.
Cotton Branding, walking down the wide, scimitar-shaped beach, dug his toes into the wet sand each time the chill surf lapped over his ankles.
A salty wind was blowing. With a spider-like hand, he wiped an unruly lock of thin, sandy hair out of his eyes. Somewhere behind him, he heard the thwop-thwop-thwop of the helicopter rotors, that most familiar harbinger of summer on the East End of Long Island.
Branding was a tall, stoop-shouldered man in his late fifties with pale blue eyes dominating a face whose obvious' lineage more or less paralleled that of the Kennedys. He possessed the open, almost innocent look - much like an actor on a billboard in the heartland - of the American politician. He wore his authority openly, like a soldier's medal, so that anyone seeing him pass would say: there goes a power-broker, a deal-maker.
He was perhaps less handsome than he was attractive. One could picture him commanding a fast sloop out of Newport, head into the rising wind, knowing eyes squinting against the sun. But he exuded a unique kind of scent, a precious attar, which was a product wholly of power. Lesser men wanted to be near him, if only to stand in his shadow or, like Douglas Howe, to bring him down to their level. Women, on the other hand, wanted only to be a good deal nearer to Branding, snuggling into his warm skin, the better to inhale the intoxicating aroma of supremacy.
But, as must be the case in the modern world, to a great degree Branding owed his power to his friends. While he had many acquaintances among his political brethren, his true friends resided in the media. Branding cultivated them with precisely the same fervour that they pursued him. He was, perhaps, aware of the symbiotic nature of the relationship, but he was a politician, after all, and had willingly dived into a sea of symbiosis when he had entered his first election campaign.
The media loved Branding. For one thing, he looked good on TV, for another he was eminently quotable. And, best of all, he gave them the inside stories - their lifeblood - as they were breaking. Branding was savvy enough to make them look good with their producers or their editors which, in turn, made the producers or the editors look good with the owners. In return, the media hounds gave Branding what he needed most: exposure. Everyone in the country knew Cotton Branding, making him much more than New York's senior Republican senator, chairman of the Senate Fiscal Oversight Committee.
In one sense, Branding was unaware of the breadth of his power. That is to say, he was unused to taking full advantage of it. His wife, Mary, recently deceased, had been especially fond of pointing out his devastating effect on women when he walked into a crowded Washington room. Branding never believed her or, perhaps, did not want to believe her.
He was a man who believed in the American system: executive, judicial, legislative, a careful counterbalance of powers safeguarding freedom. He understood that in becoming a senator he had put one foot into a kind of professional Sodom, where colleagues were regularly indicted for all manner of fraud. These people disgusted him and, as if he saw in their heinous behaviour a personal affront to his unshakeable faith in the system, he was quick to hold news conferences vilifying them. And here, too, his ties with the media gave him an enormous advantage.
Influence-peddling, on which he was regularly quizzed, was another matter entirely. The very threads of the legislative fabric of the American government were woven into the pattern of barter: you vote for my bill and I'll vote for yours. There was no other way to do business on Capitol Hill. It was not the way Branding himself would have chosen, but he was nothing if not adaptable.
He believed in the innate good he was doing - not only for his own New York constituents but for all Americans. And, although he would never openly admit to thinking that the ends justified the means, that was, in effect, how he had chosen to live his professional life.
This strict, almost Puritan morality was, after all, the genesis of Branding's antipathy towards his fellow senator, Douglas Howe, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. It was Branding's opinion that, ever since Howe gained that lofty position, he had been throwing his weight around not only the halls of Congress but the Pentagon as well. But this was apparently not enough for Howe. It was said that the senator had meticulously gathered sensitive intelligence on the private lives of a certain number of generals and, from time to time, exercised this extortionate control over them. The abuse of power was, in Branding's mind, the most heinous crime of all and, as was his wont, he had spoken out on more than one occasion against Howe's misuse of the public trust.
Mary, of course, had counselled a more diplomatic course. That was her way. Branding had his. When they had quarrelled, it had been around their differing approaches to life.
Still, Cotton Branding had always striven to keep the professional and the personal separate. Now Douglas Howe had closed that division, threatening to lead Branding down a treacherous and potentially disastrous road.
Howe was using his own public forum to denounce Branding, and the work Branding was doing with the Advanced Strategic Computer Research Agency. Lately, the verbal fight had turned dirty. Allegations of cover-ups, misuse of the public's money, fraud and boondoggling were becoming the norm; the two were rending each other limb from limb, and privately, Branding had begun to wonder whether either of them would survive.
Within the past two weeks, he had come to the conclusion that in this instance Mary had been correct. Accordingly, he had cut back on the public speechifying, concentrating his efforts on another front. He and his media cronies had got together in private in an effort to amass a case against Douglas Howe's misuse of the public trust.
Howe and Mary: they were the only two people Cotton Branding had thought about for months.
Until Shisei.
He had met her - could it be only last night? he asked himself incredulously - at one of those innumerable social gatherings that for many formed the structure of summer on the East End. Inevitably, Branding found these fétes to be boring. But in his line of work they were strictly de rigueur, and it was at these times that he missed Mary's presence most keenly. It was only now, in her absence, that he recognized how palatable she made these masques.
'Masque' was Branding's private, ironic name for these summer parties. They were affectation personified; evenings where appearance was all, and content virtually nil. If one looked smashing, if one was seen talking to the right people when the photographers came, that was all that mattered, save if one boorishly abrogated social custom, say by bringing an undesirable such as a commercial literary figure or a Jew.
These Draconian requirements left a bitter taste in Branding's mouth, and often when he would get fed up or one too many drinks would loosen his iron-bound super-ego, he would confess to Mary that he would dearly love to hold one of his famous press conferences in order to expose what he called 'this medieval infrastructure'.
Always, Mary would laugh in that way she had, defusing his righteous anger, making him laugh along with her. But, during his infrequent black moods, when he was off brooding on his own, when he had to resist following
his father's besotted fate, he longed to have that righteous anger back, and was secretly and ashamedly angry at her for having robbed him of it.
The masque at which he met Shisei - or, more precisely, when he became aware of her - was a morbid affair attended by people compelled to talk at length about their memories of Truman Capote in commemoration of his death. Listening to their anecdotes, meant to be funny but which, in fact, were merely sad, Branding felt relieved that he had never met the author.
Still, for Branding, the time had not been ill-spent. He had invited two of his best media friends: Tim Brooking, New York's best investigative reporter; and one of the on-air personalities of the TV networks' most popular investigative news show, and the three of them had talked on and off about the state of electronic journalism.
These were evil times for television news divisions, brought on by the demise of the television networks, sold to non-media conglomerates eager to increase profit margins whatever the cost. The networks had only themselves to blame, the on-air personality lamented. With cable and VCR use eroding their Nielsen numbers, they had turned more and more to independent producers to supply programmes. More and more the local stations controlled what went on the air. Quiz and infotainment shows such as Entertainment Tonight were far more lucrative than network news shows during the hour before prime time. Further, satellite feeds picked up by local news and the increasing prominence of Ted Turner's CNN all-news cable network were making the three network news shows redundant. As of now, they all knew, not one network maintained an investigative news team for its nightly broadcasts, and foreign bureaux, once the pride of American TV, were being closed as fast as was practical.
As they spoke informally, it occurred to Branding that they were looking at him in a certain way. With a start, he realized that there was about their manner to him the same deference he reserved for the President of the United States.
Branding felt wanned, honoured. He was well aware that one basis of his friendship with these men was their mutual usefulness. On the other hand, he was not so naive that he couldn't tell the difference between these serious newsmen, and the majority of their brethren, who were too lazy, bored or stupid to know what journalism was all about.
Branding's mother had once said to him: 'Choose your friends with care. These are the people who will talk about you most.' Branding had never forgotten those words.
At last, the topic reached the real reason for their meeting: the continuing 'field research' into Howe's professional conduct. Branding knew that he was on thin ice, that he was using up hard-won favours in order to keep the informal investigation going. There was, as yet, no hard evidence, and the on-air personality, the more impatient of the two, wondered aloud whether there ever would be.
Branding, who had just flown in from Washington after addressing the National Press Club, assured them that there would be. He also spoke to them about his favourite topic - the one he had spoken of in his address - the Hive Project.
At Washington's Johnson Institute, a team was putting the finishing brushstrokes on Hive, the advanced strategic computer that Branding's Ascra bill would fund over the next five years. The Hive Project was a revolutionary kind of computer that could reason, could create strategies. Branding hoped to install the Hive in every government agency: National Security Council, CIA, FBI, Pentagon, and so forth. The advantages of using such a system,
which was far beyond anything any other nation had achieved, would be immediate and staggering, not to mention the ramifications for national defence as well as for a comprehensive anti-terrorist response and controlled tactical forays into the Middle East or elsewhere if the need arose.
Now, Branding's people had given him some information. Someone had been nosing around the Johnson Institute team members, appropriating without permission computer records of their private lives - bank accounts, loans, that sort of thing. To Branding, this smacked of Douglas Howe. He told the newsmen that if he could link the unauthorized computer snooping to Howe they would have a basis to go forward. The two men concurred. Branding could see the greed filling them; they could already see the scoop playing out in their minds.
The masque wound down, and so did the men's discussion. It wasn't until much later in the evening, after the three had split up, that Branding caught sight of Shisei.
She was standing against the marble fireplace in the living room, and Branding remembered thinking how like marble her skin was. She wore a clingy, black sleeveless blouse and silk trousers of the same colour. Her startlingly narrow waist was cinched by a wide crocodile-skin belt with an enormous matt red-gold buckle sculpted into what appeared to be a free-form design. Her tiny feet were enclosed by high-heel crocodile shoes. It was not a typical East End summer outfit, and therefore Branding liked it and her. He remembered thinking: this woman's got guts. Not only for her sense of clothes style, either. She wore her glossy black hair long on top, in an ultramodern sculptured manner. A short fringe across her wide forehead was dyed a shocking blond.
When he was closer to her, he saw that she wore no jewellery - not even earrings - save for a square-cut
emerald ring on the middle finger of her right hand. Either she wore no make-up or it had been applied so skilfully that it was invisible.
For a long time, Branding studied her face. He fancied himself a student of the human condition, therefore faces were important to him. He saw in Shisei something remarkable. Though her body was that of a mature adult, her face, a perfect oval, had an odd purity, bordering on innocence. Branding was at a loss to understand why until, with an unsettling lurch, it occurred to him that she had the kind of androgynous perfection of beauty only a child could possess.
Watching her, he was reminded of a night when his mother had taken him to see Peter Pan on Broadway. How enthralled he had been with the young, dewy perfection of Mary Martin, how secretly ashamed he had been of that feeling because she had been playing the part of a male
- albeit a magical one.
Now, in this restored Revolutionary farmhouse in East Bay Bridge, he felt anew that odd, almost compulsive quickening of his blood that was so disturbing, and all the more intense for that forbidden component.
It was not merely the youth - Branding was as sexually unmoved by young girls as he was by homosexuals - but rather what that dewy freshness represented, a kind of ultimate, malleable state. Though he did not yet know it
- and perhaps never would - Shisei's face, in the flicker of a heartbeat, by turns encompassed all that the female represented to the male: slut, virgin, mother, goddess.
Who could fail to fall in love with one such as she? Certainly not Cotton Branding.
'Is it possible we haven't been introduced?' he said in his most affable tone of voice.
Shisei looked af him with the wide apart eyes of a fawn. 'Anything's possible. But you look to me like an old friend.' She told him her name.
He laughed. 'I believe I would have remembered that.'
She smiled, as if drawn in by his ironic amusement. 'Then I must be mistaken,' she said. 'Perhaps it's because I have seen you on television. I feel as if I already know you, Senator Branding.' Her voice was light, musical, and it pleased him, despite an accent so heavy that he had at first thought she had said, I feel as if I already own you.
'Call me Cook,' he said. 'All my friends do.'
She looked at him quizzically, and he laughed. 'It's a nickname,' he said. 'I grew up in a large family. We all took turns with the chores, but I was the only child who enjoyed cooking or was any good at it. I kept that chore, and got the name.'
A band was playing, out on the brick deck, amid the Tuscan terracotta pots filled with Martha Washington geraniums and globular English yews, and they went out into the star-filled darkness. The night was typically wet but, because of a breeze, not uncomfortably so.
'Do you think,' Shisei asked as they danced, 'that these are desperate times?'
The band was playing a tune Branding did not recognize, something with a sinuous beat. 'Desperate in what way?'
She smiled sweetly, showing him just a bit of her tiny white teeth. 'One need only look to the Middle East, to Nicaragua, to the Midwest here in the States where it is said another dust bowl is forming or to the oceans here and in Europe where it is no longer safe for fish to live or for humans to swim. Already I have read a dozen reports about restrictions on consumption of seafood and fish.'
'You're talking on the one hand about ideological antipathies and on the other about ecological catastrophes,' Branding said. "The only thing the two have in common is that they've been part of our world virtually since the dawn of time.'
'But that is my meaning,' she said. 'Desperation is
only dangerous when it is looked upon as commonplace.'
'I think you've got that wrong/ Branding said. 'It's evil that is most dangerous when it becomes commonplace.'
'Are we speaking practically,' Shisei asked, 'or morally?'
Her body had become entwined with his, and Branding felt her flesh through her thin clothes. He was especially aware of the muscles of her legs, and the heated juncture of her thighs as she rubbed against him like a cat.
He looked down at her, was struck again by the innocence of her face. Its sunny, careless expression belied her body's actions. It was as if he held two people in his arms, one who existed before the dawn of sexual desire, the other rapt in it.
'I suppose I was speaking theoretically,' Branding said a bit thickly. 'Real life has proved that evil is always banal.'
Shisei put her head in the hollow of his shoulder, the way a child might when she is tired or in need of affection. But she was not a child. Branding felt with a start the hardness of her breasts. The erotic charge was like an electrical current running through him, and he missed a step, almost stumbling over her tiny feet.
She looked up into his face and smiled. Could she be laughing at him?
'As a child,' she said in time to the music so that she might have been singing, 'I was taught that banality was in itself evil or - in any event - not acceptable.' A light sheen lay along the skin of her arm, like the dew on the geranium petals. It seemed to Branding to highlight the tender firmness of her flesh. "There is a Japanese word -kata. It means rules, but also the proper form to maintain. Do you understand? Banality is outside kata, not of our world.'
'Your world?'
'In Japan, Senator, training is everything. Kata is all.
Without them both, chaos would surely ensue, and man would be little better than the ape.'
Branding had heard many stories of Japanese prejudice, but had never thought much of them. Now, hearing that bias first-hand, it rankled. He was a man who disliked prejudice in any form - it was one of the reasons he disliked this crowd; why he had had so many bitter fights with his father, the blue-blood Brahmin; and why, after college, he had never returned home. It was in his nature to struggle against such ignorance.
'Surely you mean laws,' he said, attempting to understand her. 'Laws are what make mankind civilized.'
'Mankind,' she said, 'enacts laws to suit individual purpose. Kata is equal among all Japanese.'
He smiled. 'Among all Japanese, perhaps. But not among all people.' He realized too late that his tone as well as his smile was the kind he used when, years ago, his daughter said something amusing but essentially foolish.
Shisei's eyes sparked, and she broke away from .him. 'As a senator I assumed you would be sufficiently intelligent to understand.'
Branding, standing with her on the patio with couples in movement aft around them, was all too conscious of the stares they were getting. He held out his hands. 'Let's dance.'
Shisei studied him, unmoving. Then she smiled, as if having taken in his embarrassment, she had been amply repaid for his unintentioned insult. She moved smoothly, effortlessly into his arms. Again, Branding felt the heat of her body insinuate itself erotically against him.
The band had switched to the kind of smoky ballads Frank Sinatra loved to sing.
'What kind of music do you like?' Shisei asked as they slowly circled the patio.
He   shrugged.   'Cole   Porter,   I   suppose.   George
Gershwin. As a kid, I used to love to hear Hoagy Carmichael play. Do you know "Sweet and Low Down"?'
'I love Bryan Ferry, David Bowie, Iggy Pop,' she said as if he had not answered her. 'Am I going too fast?'
He knew what she meant. 'I've heard of them,' he said, somewhat defensively.
'Energy,' Shisei said, 'is the kick I need with my champagne.'
He studied her face and, feeling his heart beating fast, wondered that his adrenalin had started running. It was after midnight, a time by which he would normally have said his goodnights, and been driving back to his wind- and salt-weathered house on Dune Road, bored and slightly depressed, as if contact with these people was somehow pernicious. He found much to his surprise that he had no inclination to leave.
He wanted to continue dancing, to keep her in his arms, but she said, 'I'm hungry.'
The clams casino and the lobster had already come and gone. They picked over what was left: cold charcoal-broiled chicken, slightly limp salad, corn on which the butter had congealed.
Branding watched with fascination as Shisei ate like a little animal, hunched over her plate. Her long gold-lacquered fingernails speared into the flesh of chicken and corn. She ate quickly, economically and voraciously. She seemed to have forgotten his presence or the presence of anyone else, for that matter.
When she was done she sucked the fat and juices off each slender finger in turn, her full lips distended outwards. It seemed such a blatantly sexual gesture that Branding was taken aback, until the innocence and unself-consciousness of her expression reassured him. Shisei wiped her mouth on a paper napkin, and her eyes met his.
Branding reacted as if he were a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Then he reminded himself that she could not read his thoughts. He smiled that thoroughly synthetic smile politicians perfect that means nothing to them.
'When you do that,' Shisei said, tossing the crumpled napkin aside, 'you look as stupid as a puppet.'
For a moment, Branding was so stunned he could think of nothing to say. Then, angry, he flushed. He set his plate aside, and got up. 'You'll excuse me.'
She reached out, took his hand in hers. 'Are you so easily driven away? I would have thought that a senator of the United States would be open to the truth.'
Gently but firmly he unwound her fingers from his. 'Good night,' he said hi his frostiest tone.
Now, the morning after, as he strolled down the beach, his feet already numbed by the Atlantic, Branding tried - and failed - to turn his thoughts away from Shisei. He wondered if he would ever see her again. He thought he recognized something dangerous, perhaps even destructive in her. But there was something delicious in that knowledge as well, like standing at the edge of an abyss or playing chicken in a souped-up hotrod. Coming closer than anyone else to disaster and dancing away unharmed was, after all, the object, the trophy of excitement he -and other teenagers hike him - had tried to hold on to for as long as possible. Like Peter Pan desperately trying to hold on to his reckless youth.
Oh, Christ, Branding thought. What in God's name is happening to me?
But he already knew that it was nothing in God's name.
Justine, coming out on to the engawa, said, 'There's a letter for you. It's got a Marco Island, Florida, postmark. I think it's from Lew Croaker.'
Nicholas looked up from the patch of ground where
he had been watching the afternoon shadows creeping
along the ground. He took the letter from her without
any expression.	v
'Nick?' Justine sat beside him on the Japanese porch. She did not touch him. 'What is it?' Her eyes changed colour, from hazel to green, as they often did in times of emotional stress. The red motes in her left iris were fired by the sunlight. Her long legs were crossed at the knees, the dark mane of her hair was swept back across her shoulders. Her skin was creamy, as lightly freckled as a teenager's. Her nose, slightly too wide, gave her character, her plump lips adding a note of sensuality. The years had been kind to her; she looked very much as she had on the day Nicholas had met her ten years ago on the beach at West Bay Bridge on the East End of Long Island, when she had been a lost little girl. Now she was a woman, a wife, briefly, a mother.
Nicholas passed the letter back to her, said, 'Read it,' with such a total lack of inflection that another flood of anxiety washed over her. Ever since he had come home from the operation at the hospital - nearly eight months now - he had seemed a different person. He did riot like the meals she prepared for him with what she knew were his favourite foods; his sleep patterns had changed. Always a sound sleeper, except after the baby had died, she often heard him up-and pacing the floor at three in the morning. Worst of all, he had not worked out, even minimally, since recovering from the operation. Instead, he came out on the engawa each day and sat, staring into the dust, or he drifted through the gardens with a blank expression on his face.
At one point, she was so concerned that she phoned his surgeon, Dr Hanami. Nicholas saw the doctor, who had removed the tumour, once every two weeks, and he assured her that there was nothing organically wrong. 'Your husband has sustained a major trauma, Mrs
Linnear,' Dr Hanami had said with the surety of God. 'Nothing permanent, I assure you. It is not caused by his anti-seizure medication. Whatever your husband is going through is temporary and purely psychological. His powers of recuperation are quite remarkable. Whatever this minor problem is it will pass in a matter of time.'
But Justine knew better. She knew how much psychological stress Nicholas could take since she had been with him through the time Saigo had stalked them both. She knew how well-prepared Nicholas had been for that stalking and assault, and how cleverly he had managed to outmanoeuvre Akiko, Saigo's former lover. An operation was hardly enough to cause this reaction in him.
Justine slit open the envelope, unfolded the typewritten letter. It was from Croaker, Nicholas's best friend. Lew Croaker had been a detective lieutenant in the NYPD when Justine met him. He had been assigned to the mysterious murders that Saigo had been committing. A year after Nicholas had killed Saigo, Croaker had come to Japan to help his best friend Nicholas in apprehending a Soviet agent who was after Tenchi, Tanzan Nangi's ultra-secret oil-drilling project with the Japanese government. In fierce combat with a particularly powerful agent, Croaker's left hand had been severed. Since that time, Nicholas had been racked by guilt, feeling that Croaker would never have been there except for him. Justine knew better, just as she knew that Croaker did not blame Nicholas for what had happened. Nicholas, so Eastern in so many ways was, in this instance, terribly Western.
' "Dear Nick and Justine," ' she read. ' "Greetings from Marco Island. I suppose you're wondering why we're not still in Key West. Well, the simple truth is that I got bored at the End of the Line. That's what the natives call Key West. It's a strange place, even for Florida, which is a goddamn weird state any way you slice
it. You've got to be a serious drunkard or a real dropout to stay there. So, we left.
' "Here on Marco Island, the fishing's fine and Alix is becoming an expert with marlin. I've bought a little boat, and we've been chartering it out. Making a living at it, too, though I doubt I'll ever get rich. On the other hand, I've busted so many boats out here trying to smuggle coke into the country, the Coast Guard's given me honorary commander status. Once a cop, always a cop, I guess.
' "I keep waiting for Alix to tell me she misses New York and the modeling scene, but she hasn't - at least up till now.
' "Nick, my new hand works! That doctor you set me up with at Todai Med Center in Tokyo was a wiz. I don't really know what it is on the end of my left wrist, but it's amazing! It works so well, in fact, that Alix has taken to calling me Captain Sumo.
' "The strength in this new hand is awesome! It took me nearly two months before I could control the power in it. Another four months and I got dexterity. It seems to be made of a composite of titanium, graphite and some kind of polycarbonate, all wrapped up in an airtight sheath. I'm only sorry you and Justine were away when I was in Tokyo getting it put on." '
Justine paused here, risking a glance at Nicholas. When they had got back from their trip to Bangkok, where several of the Sphynx components were being manufactured by a Sato International subsidiary, she was furious that they had missed Croaker's visit. Hadn't Nicholas known, she wondered, when his friend would arrive? After all, Nicholas had been the one to set Croaker up with the surgeon at Todai. Then she had wondered whether Nicholas had purposely taken them on the Bangkok trip at just that time. She had begun to suspect that he did not want to see his friend, and
certainly had no desire to look at some prosthetic that would remind him of his guilt.
' "Anyway, enough about me,"' Justine continued reading. ' "What's with you two? I trust you've gotten over your rough time." ' Justine stopped, unable for a moment to continue. She became aware that Nicholas was looking at her, and she made herself smile as naturally as she could.
She cleared her throat, dropped her gaze to the letter. ' "I can't believe it's been months since I last wrote. Can't believe that we haven't seen each other in years. Any chance you can take time out for a vacation? I know a great boat you can stay on, and Alix would love to see you. How about it? Best, Lew."
'You know,' she said tentatively, 'this sounds like a great idea.'
'What?'
'Taking Lew up cm his offer. I think it would be terrific to get back to the States for a little while.' She had said nothing to him about her own increasing desire to return to America. 'We could fish, swim, relax. Just laugh and have fun. And we'd be with good friends.' She poked at the letter with her finger. 'I don't know about you, but I'd like to see for myself why Alix is calling him Captain Sumo.'
It had been meant as a bit of levity, something to break his morbid mood, but she knew as soon as she said it that it was a mistake to refer to Croaker's new hand. Nicholas flinched as if she had struck him, and he got up and went into the house.
For a moment, Justine sat staring straight ahead at the shadows of the huge cryptomeria that had for so long entranced Nicholas, Then, very carefully, she folded Croaker's letter and slid it back into its envelope.
Inside the house, Nicholas stood in front of the open fusuma, the sliding doors leading to his workout room.
He was a formidable, almost intimidating figure: wide, powerful shoulders above the narrow hips of a dancer and the long sinewy-muscled legs of the serious athlete. His face was rugged, angular, handsome and magnetic without being in any way classically beautiful. His eyes were long and upswept, testament to his Oriental blood. His cheekbones were high, his chin was solid and as Western as his English father's had been. His thick black hair now had traces of silver through it which Justine loved. He had about him both a sense of quiet and of danger.
He almost passed by the doorway, then Lew Croaker's words came back to him. One-handed Lew. Stop it! he told himself irritably. You have more than enough on your mind without playing guilt games with yourself. In the back of his mind was the thought that this form of guilt was peculiarly Western, and he despised that in himself. He wondered whether his father, the Colonel, had ever felt this Western.
In a way, Justine was right. What had happened to Croaker was his karma. But she was also wrong. Because Nicholas knew that somehow he and Lew Croaker had been born under the same sign. Their karma were inextricably entwined. Like Siamese twins, what happened to the one seemed to affect the other. He did not think it a coincidence that Croaker's letter should arrive at just this moment.
Reluctantly, Nicholas went into the workout room, and put on his black cotton gi. It seemed a lifetime since he had had it on, and it felt oddly uncomfortable. As if that were some kind of omen, he shivered. What was the matter with him? Nothing felt right.
The workout room smelled of straw and slightly of stale sweat. Nicholas saw the padded pole, the hanging rings, the wooden floor-to-ceiling trellis he had made himself, bolted to one wall, and the rough-hewn crisscrossing
wooden beams above his head through which he used to climb, swing and hang by his crossed ankles.
He closed his eyes, trying to conjure up the numerous times he had been in here, practising the complicated exercises associated with his martial arts specialties, aikido and ninjutsu. He could quite clearly remember being hi here, working up a sweat, but he could not, could not for the life of him, recall what it was he had practised. Christ, he thought, abruptly exhausted, it's not possible. This cannot be happening. But it was, and a curious dread crept through him, a thief stealing his resolve.
His knees grew weak, and he had to sit down. Slumped against the padded pole, Nicholas remembered the last battle as one does a spectacular but long gone lover, with an awe tinged by the suspicion that memory had distorted its import, magnifying its significance.
He remembered the pain that Koten, the Japanese sumo, the Soviet agent who had cut off Lew Croaker's hand, had inflicted on him using the dai-katana, the Japanese longsword his father had given him on his thirteenth birthday.
Nicholas feinted right, then came in beneath Koten's guard. But the sumo let go of the dai-katana with his left hand, slamming the forearm into Nicholas's chest. Nicholas hit the floor hard.
Koten laughed. 7 didn't hear you scream that time, barbarian, but you will soon.' The dai-katana swooped down, its finely honed tip splintering the polished wooden boards at Nicholas's feet.
Koten laughed again as Nicholas came at him, a human mountain attacked by an insect who possibly could sting, but nothing more.
He countered Nicholas's oshi, using the hilt of the sword, instead of returning oshi for oshi as Nicholas had expected. He felt the crushing blow on the point of his shoulder, felt the resulting grinding of bone and
the audible pop of dislocation. Pain ran like fire down his arm, rendering his right side totally useless.
'This is what Musashi called Injuring the Corners, barbarian,' Koten gloated. 'I'll beat you down in small strokes. I'll make you scream yet.'
He ran at Nicholas, feinting with the long sword, employing oshi now to throw Nicholas hard on to the floor. He knelt over him on one knee. The blade sizzled downwards, cutting a vicious arc through the air.
Desperately Nicholas twisted, raising his left arm so that it broke inside Koten's upraised arm, deflecting the blow out and away from him. But because of the injury to his shoulder, he was unable to complete the suwari waza move.
Instead he was obliged prematurely to release Koten's arm to deliver an atemi, a percussive strike, with his left elbow. He heard the answering crack as ribs caved in beneath the blow.
Koten cried out, twisting his body up and away, at the same time slashing back towards Nicholas's body with the sword.
The steel blade was Nicholas's first priority. He made contact with Koten's forearm, gliding his left hand along the flesh. At the bottom of the wrist, he broke inwards, twisting. The bone snapped.
Now they were even in a way; Koten was obliged to drop the two-handed grip on the sword, his right arm hanging loose and ungainly at his side.
But his second attack could not be stopped, and he used a shoulder throw to Nicholas's right side. This time Nicholas cried out. He rolled away, scrambling, directly into a powerful tsuki that forced all the air from his lungs. His head went down and he began to wheeze reflexively as his lungs tried desperately to regain the oxygen denied them.
A second vicious tsuki to his sternum rocked him
backwards. In an instant, Koten's massive bulk was over him, his weight pressing on Nicholas's chest, further denying him air. Bile rose into Nicholas's throat. This was the enormous danger in sumai - the form of battle sumo of which Koten was a master. Its territory was in bringing the superior weight to bear in an area close to the ground, increasing the strength of the sumai warrior exponentially.
Koten brought- the bright bladepoint against Nicholas's black cotton &. Koten leaned forward, bringing pressure down on to Nicholas's chest. Beginning the first cut, skin rupturing, peeling back like the rind of a fruit. Blood welling, dark and hot.
Nicholas's mind was screaming for surcease. Reaching back for the 'no mind' of the Void, he allowed the organism to work on its own. His left arm shot straight up, the fingers together and as rigid as any swordblade ever forged. Into the soft spot of flesh joining Koten's chin and throat.
Nicholas struck as he had been taught kenjutsu, as he would have done a sword strike: with all his muscle, mind, and spirit. He thought not of Koten's flesh but rather of what lay beyond it.
The kite struck through flesh and cartilage. The sumo was dead before sensation could reach the brain and register.
Afterwards, exhausted in spirit, sick at heart at what the violence in his life had engendered, Nicholas had taken the dai-katana and thrown it into a lake not far from where he now lived. It had vanished immediately, taking with it the last vestiges of a life he was determined to leave behind.
Now Nicholas ripped apart the black cotton of his gi, feeling with his fingertips the raised horizontal scars on his chest, proof of the wounds he had received from Koten. For without that assurance surely he would have thought this memory nothing more than a dream.
Abruptly, he heard a sound in the room, and his head
snapped up just as if he were expecting an attack from an enemy.
He saw Justine, walking barefoot across the tatami mats towards him. He said nothing as she crouched beside him. Her eyes searched his dark face, but she did not touch him.
'If you are in such pain,' she said softly, 'the least you can do is let me help you.' .
He was silent for a time. 'There's nothing you can do,' he said finally.
'You mean there's nothing you'll let me do.'
His head was down, his face in the shadows he created.
'You're being foolish, Nicholas.'
'Since you're so sure of yourself, so be it then.'
Justine sat back on her heels, contemplating him. 'You helped me when I was in pain. Why won't you let me . . . ?'
'It's not the same.'
'Isn't it?' She shrugged. 'Well, maybe not.' She touched him now, her fingertips on his forearm for just an instant. 'You know, Nick, for a long time after ... the death, I had no interest in sex. Well, that must have been fairly obvious.'
'Neither of us were prepared to go on that way then,' he said.
She waited for a moment, to let him know that he must allow her to finish. He knew from experience how difficult it was for her to speak her mind, or her heart, in personal matters. She said, 'My abhorrence of sex -well, not sex so much as the ultimate fruit of sex; that it had brought us such pain instead of joy - lasted longer than it should have, longer than was normal.'
She caught the look in his eye, and said, 'Yes, Nick, I knew what I was doing, what I was doing to the two of us. But, you see, I couldn't stop. In retrospect, I think it might have been a perverse kind of penance, a feeling
that crept over me, a malaise. I was certain that, after what happened, you would no longer find me attractive. No - ' She put her hand over his mouth. 'There's no need for you to tell me otherwise.' She smiled. 'It's all right. Really it is. Whatever I did, I did to myself. You were not a cause; you were only affected. I'm sorry about that.' She settled nearer to him. 'I wish ... in a way, I wish we could go back in time, so I could deal with my own pain more effectively, and not allow it to spill over. I - '
'You had every reason to feel as much pain as you did,' Nicholas said.
She looked at him oddly. 'What about your pain, Nick? She was your baby, too.' She said it quietly, and had not meant to inject an accusatory note into her voice.
'I don't want to talk about it. Whatever I feel about her is private.'
Justine was taken aback. 'From me? I'm your wife, Nick!' She was dimly aware that her voice was rising, but she could not seem to stop herself. 'We made our daughter together. She was ours.'
'It does no good to belabour the obvious.'
Justine's anger abruptly burst through. 'Oh, stop it! It's so unreal, the way you are able to suppress everything. Love, hate, resentment, anger. What did you really think about me when you saw me wallowing in my self-pity day after day? Surely, from time to time, you must have been angry, hurt at my closing you out. And, speaking of that time, I don't even know what you felt after the baby died. You never cried - at least not in my presence; you never talked about it, even when I got up enough courage to bring up the subject. Did you bury it so deeply inside you that you now feel nothing at the passing of that tiny spirit?'
'I see,' Nicholas said, 'that you've returned to your habit of playing judge and jury in condemning me.'
'No, damnit! I'm giving you a chance to explain yourself.'
'You see?' he said more easily than he felt. 'I am, in your eyes, already guilty, because in order to calm you down I now have to explain my actions.'
'I'm perfectly calm!' Justine shouted.
'Your face is red,' Nicholas pointed out.
'Go fuck yourself!' She jumped up. She began to walk out of the room, then turned back to him. 'You engineered this fight. I want you to remember that!'
Their gazes met, and Nicholas knew she was right. Why couldn't he bring himself to tell her how he felt then - when their daughter had died - or now?
And suddenly he knew, and the knowledge, like a stone lodged in his throat, made him break out into a sweat. It was because he was afraid. He was afraid of the fear that was like a living thing growing inside him.
Senjin Omukae picked up the phone, and sent for Sergeant Tomi Yazawa. While he waited, he lit a cigarette and, inhaling deeply, blew smoke at the ceiling. He stared out of the small window of his cubicle at the ancient Imperial castle where the Tokugawa shoguns had commenced the longest and surely the most paranoid suzerainty in Japan's history, approximately 250 years.
On the other hand, the Tokugawas had been canny rulers. Aware that they must ruthlessly destroy any hint of rebellion against their rule as near to its infancy as they could manage, they conspired to import from China a form of Confucianism suitable to their needs. This branch of religion stressed duty and loyalty above all other traits. Initially, in its purest Chinese form, this meant loyalty to one's father and mother, but the Tokugawas, like most Japanese, could not resist tinkering with the original product. The result was that duty and loyalty came to include one's shogun - namely the Tokugawas themselves.
If this was a self-serving revision, it was not wholly so. Senjin knew that before leyasu Tokugawa, the first shogun, Japan was a wholly feudal nation, prey to constant internecine warfare between regional warlords known as daimyo. leyasu Tokugawa changed all that, uniting by blood and battle an entire nation, and thus immeasurably strengthening it.
But, on the other hand, Japan's absolute dependence on the rigid caste system began with the Tokugawa shogunate, who saw this, too, as a way of effectively controlling the majority of the population.
In a way, Senjin mused, not for the first time, the Tokugawas were control freaks. Just like me.
He heard a discreet cough and, swivelling around to face the door to his cubicle, he saw Tomi Yazawa standing on the threshold. He beckoned. 'Come in, Sergeant.* It was Senjin's habit never to refer to any of his staff by their name, only by their rank. To his way of thinking, it gave him the proper degree of control, while making it clear to his people where they stood not just with him, but within the family of the police department.
'How are you progressing with that murder-rape case? Mariko something.'
'Poor abandoned thing. No one at the strip club seemed to know her last name,' Tomi said.
'Quite so.' Senjin did not ask her to sit down. It was his feeling that subordinates should stand in his presence. He drummed his fingers on the top of his steel desk. 'Have you any progress to report?'
'No, sir.'
'None at all?'
'I know you have read the master file as well as my weekly updates.'
'And the message found on the corpse, "This could be your wife"? Have you made any progress with that?'
'Some. I've determined that the victim was unmarried,
and that she dated. Her men friends never came to the club, and in interviews with the other dancers it became dear that Mariko had no confidantes there. In fact, the dancers did not much care for her. They said she thought that, essentially, they were dirt. Mariko was apparently filled with high-flying dreams.'
He grunted. 'She was in the wrong business, then.'
'Apparently so, sir.'
Senjin regarded Tomi Yazawa. She was a small, powerful woman, yet with all the requisite female curves. She had a strong face, dominated by large, glossy black eyes, more uptilted than most. Her hair was long, also glossy under the office lights, pulled back tightly from her face, wrapped in an elaborate knob atop her head. Senjin knew from experience that she was very smart, which was why he had assigned her to Mariko's murder. If she didn't find anything, no one would.
'It's been, what, eight months? I think it's time to close the file on the Mariko murder,' Senjin said.
'Sir, may I point out that I have been the only officer assigned to the case.' Tomi was staring at a point on the wall approximately a foot above and to the left of where Senjin sat. 'I know what it's like to be alone in the world. The victim Mariko may seem like no one to you, to the department, but she was a human being hi many ways no different from me. I would very much like to continue on the case until it is solved.'
"The Metropolitan Police Department does not care what you would like, Sergeant,' Senjin said. 'It has its procedures and its manpower problems irrespective of your desires.' He watched with satisfaction as a deep flush crept up Tomi's cheeks. 'Do I have to remind you who it was who allowed you these months free rein on a homicide we both suspected was unsolvable from day one? Be grateful for the time I have given you on your own private crusade.'
'Yes, sir,' Tomi said. 'I appreciate your understanding, It's just that when she was alive, Mariko had no one to help her. I wanted her to know that she had someone now.'
'You've done what you could, Sergeant. You have your duty now.'
'Yes, sir.'
Senjin suddenly stood up, moved so that he was directly in Tomi's line of sight. 'The men don't like me much, do they, Sergeant?' he said.
'Sir?'
'Is it my age?' Senjin asked in a tone of voice that precluded an answer. 'In just over six weeks I will be twenty-nine. Am I too young in their eyes to be commander of the Homicide division?'
'Age is irrelevant to talent, sir.'
Senjin was looking directly into Tomi's eyes when she said this, and he had a sudden premonition. He had the uneasy sense of having allowed another predator into his territory, and he wondered whether he had misjudged Tomi Yazawa's intelligence. Senjin prided himself on not underestimating his enemies. But, then again, this detective sergeant was not his enemy. At least, not quite yet.
'Is it their perception, perhaps, that, despite the department's findings, I lack the talent to run this division, Sergeant?'
'No, sir, it isn't.'
Senjin nodded. 'Now we're getting somewhere.' He waited a moment. 'Well, speak your mind, Sergeant. There are only the two of us here.''
'What about listening devices?'
Senjin cocked his head and smiled to himself. Yes, he thought, she's not only smart, she's quick. He liked that. It was going to be a treat running her.
Senjin came around from behind his desk. He stood so close to her that he could hear her breathing, smell
the perfume of her skin. 'There are none in this cubicle.' He searched her eyes. 'Are there any on your person?'
'I'm clean, sir.'
'Well, then,' Senjin said, 'by all means proceed.'
Tomi took a deep breath, but the intake of oxygen seemed to do little good. His proximity had flustered her. She had suddenly become very aware of him as a human being - a male human being. She liked watching him from a distance. Up close, he had the effect of making her feel drunk. Her nostrils flared, filled with his musk. With an effort, she pulled herself together. 'Begging the commander's pardon, does he know the origin of his name, Omukae?'
Senjin grinned without warmth. 'Pretend I don't.'
Tomi nodded, 'An omukae is a messenger from another world. A kind of demon.'
'Or an angel.'
'Yes,' Tomi said, trying to get moisture into her mouth. 'Or an angel. But, either way, an omukae is not of this world.' By not of this world, Senjin knew she meant Japan. 'It is the opinion of some of the staff that the commander - ' She paused, mired in the rigid social structure that made it something of a sin to criticize one's superior.
'Yes, Sergeant,' Senjin said in a voice of steel. 'As I have said, you have my permission to speak your mind.'
'It is the opinion of some of the staff,' Tomi began again, 'that the commander sometimes performs his duty as if he were, indeed, an omukae. As if he cares more about himself than he does the division or the department itself.'
Tell me, Sergeant, is that your opinion as well?'
Tomi was disconcerted. This juxtaposition of formal conversation and close proximity, intimate eye contact, was leaving her breathless. Don't let him see - 'To give you a perfectly honest - '
'Wait,' Senjin said sharply, silencing her. 'That was an unfair question. I withdraw it. You see, Sergeant, you and I share something. We are, each in our own ways, outcasts in the department. The series of unfortunate and untimely deaths of division commanders combined with the rapid advancement of my career in the field to bring me into prominence in Homicide. Perhaps unwanted prominence, as far as some are concerned, hm?'
Tomi said nothing. She was immensely grateful that her commander had omitted discussing her own plight inside the department, knowing that they both understood its inherent nature. She was also thinking of the incident that, as Senjin had indicated, had brought him into prominence. For months, a clan of particularly homicidal Yakuza seemed to be operating right under the noses of the Tokyo police. All efforts to apprehend the members of this clan had been unsuccessful.
Until Senjin Omukae had gone clandestinely undercover. Clandestine, meaning unknown to the department. He had discovered an astonishing web of graft, extortion, cover-up and, ultimately, murder being perpetrated by certain officers of the Homicide division who were conspiring with the oyabun - the boss - of the Yakuza clan. Senjin had, virtually singlehandedly, brought them all down.
The department owed him an enormous debt. Because of his work, the affair was handled internally. The intrusive media never got wmd of the scandal and, thus, no further loss of face was incurred. As it was, Tomi knew, many resignations were tendered within the department.
Senjin broke away from their intimate orbit, went back behind his desk. Tomi felt a mixture of relief and loss, which further disturbed her.
Senjin thought a moment, pulling languidly on his cigarette, which was almost finished. 'Individualism in the pursuit of justice,' he said at length, 'is no longer a
social crime. That is my considered opinion, and you are free to repeat that to the staff.'
Senjin took a last puff, ground out the butt in an ashtray. 'But since you've brought up the subject, I might as well enlighten you. Our duties here are varied, but more or less our most vital function is to keep Tokyo as free as possible of terrorist incursion. Unless you were asleep through your orientation courses, you know that terrorists don't think like the rest of our citizenry. They act in a chaotic fashion; they are anarchic - which means that they think like individuals. My duty - our duty, Sergeant - is to apprehend these terrorists before they can do any damage. I have found that by far the best way to do this is to learn to think like one. And my record - and the record of this division since I joined it five years ago - bears out the wisdom of my strategy.' His gaze met Tomi's again. 'Have I made myself clear?'
'Perfectly, sir.'
'Good/ Senjin said. He swung away, stared out of the window again. 'Now that the Mariko case is closed, I have another assignment for you. Have you heard of a man named Nicholas Linnear?'
'Yes,' Tomi said. 'I think everyone in Tokyo has.'
'Not just in Tokyo,' Senjin said cryptically. He turned to look at her. 'Well, Linnear-san is your new assignment. Surveille him at close range. Protect him.'
'Sir?'
'Wipe that look of astonishment off your face, Sergeant,' Senjin said, approaching her again. 'This morning we intercepted a coded Red Army transmission. Twenty minutes ago, the code was broken. Here's the message.' He handed her a sheet of flimsy, and when Tomi reached for it, her fingers brushed his. Momentarily, their eyes met. Then, hurriedly, Tomi concentrated on reading the message typed on the paper. While she was doing that, Senjin went on. 'It seems as if Linnear-san is the target
of a Red Army termination directive. As you see, he is scheduled to be assassinated in one week's time.'
The Shakushi furo was in Roppongi, that glittering section of Tokyo where the foreigner could feel not quite so alien, and any Japanese over the age of eighteen was distinctly uncomfortable. The bathhouse was, at least by Tokyo standards, not far from Nangi's office, along a side street bristling with avant-garde cafes and discos which by midnight would become the throbbing heart of the city. On the corner, across the street, was an audio-video department store whose fifteen-foot windows were made up entirely of synched television screens on which a pair of talentos were posturing in the manner that these days passed-for a performance. Talentos were that peculiar form of modern-day Japanese media star who had many talents but were master of none. They were like fads in clothing and hairstyle; they came and went in the blink of an eye.
Inside the bathhouse, Nangi bought a numbered-key on an elastic band then, proceeding to the interior, began slowly to undress. This was not as easy for him as it was for most people. During the war, something had happened to the nerve synapses in his legs, making their movements jerky, seemingly semi-coordinated. Using his dragon-head cane, he carefully lowered his whippet-thin body on to the polished wooden bench that ran in front of the line of metal lockers.
As he undressed, he wondered how Kusunda Ikusa would react to his face. No doubt Ikusa had been fully briefed. He would know about Nangi's right eye, the lid forever frozen half-open over a useless orb, clouded a milky blue-white. He might even have been shown a photograph of Nangi's face. But it. would be that first moment when Nangi peered with his good eye into Kusunda Ikusa's face that Nangi would know what this
man was made of, and whether he could be bested in a psychological contest.
Nangj sat very still for a moment. He longed for a cigarette. But on the day Seiichi Sato had been buried, Nangi had given up smoking. Not as a penance, but as an eternal reminder - like a flame above a brave soldier's grave - of his friend's spirit. Every time he longed for a smoke, he remembered Seiichi all over again. It had been Seiichi's older brother who, during the war, had sacrificed himself to save Nangi. Now, with Seiichi dead, no one other than Nangi himself knew that, not even Nicholas.
Nangi remembered the Buddhist ceremony, hollow for him, said over Seiichi's grave, necessary in this land of Buddhists and Shinto spirits. He remembered saying a silent prayer in Latin as the joss sticks were lighted, and the priests began their singsong litany.
Afterwards, emptying his silver cigarette case into a nearby trash bin, Nangi had taken the train back into Tokyo, and had found himself at his church instead of at his office.
The war had changed Nangi in many ways: it had lost him an eye, the full use of his legs; it had cost him his best friend; but no outcome was more profound than his conversion to Catholicism. Drifting alone on a raft in the middle of the Pacific, with the sight of Gotaro's death still a fresh wound in his mind, he had cast about for solace, and had found his own spirit wanting. God was not a concept recognized by either Buddhist or Shintoist, but God was what Nangi had needed during that time, and it was to God he had prayed. After the war, the first item he had sought out was a Bible.
Years later, when Seiichi's funeral was over, Nangi had entered his church, sat in the confessional.
'Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned . . .'
He had felt calm then, composed. He had been sad, but God was with him, and he took solace in that
thought But, sometimes, as now in the steam-filled bathhouse, Nangi had his doubts. He did not know whether Catholicism had made him stronger or weaker. It was'true that in times of trial his faith in God had buoyed him. But, at other moments, as now, he had begun to be concerned by his reliance on the rote of Catholic litany, the adherence to the gospel according to Rome. These things, too, had taken on a hollow ring. On the one hand, he understood that part of his faith meant subservience to God's will, and to the dictates of the Church; on the other hand, he sometimes felt much as a self-aware addict does, faced with the ascendancy of the outside force of the drug, that his own will was slowly seeping away. This frightened him.
What was worse, he felt constrained from confessing his doubts to his priest. That alone, he knew, was a sin in itself. But he could not bring himself to admit to his failing, not with the doubt inside him that it was a failing at all. Did this mean that he had failed God, or that God had failed him?
He did not know and, often now, he wondered if there was any difference between the two possibilities. In his confusion, he found it impossible to take communion, and this further increased his sense of isolation, of an almost Roman foreboding, a perception of a moral twilight falling upon him and those around him.
Nangi's good eye refocused on the closed metal door in front of him. He brought his mind slowly back into the present. He centred, breathing deeply, knowing that he would need all his resources to face Kusunda Ikusa successfully.
Naked, Nangi turned the key in the locker, slipped the key around his wrist. He leaned more heavily on his cane than he might normally have done were he not in a public place. He had learned long ago that a clever man could derive indirect benefits from his physical disabilities.
The war hero was still a powerful image in Japan, and Nangi had put himself into the habit of exploiting every advantage he could.
His good eye, in its odd triangular setting, blazed as he set off down the humid, tile-lined corridor. The floor was composed of wooden slats beneath which drains set in concrete leached away the water. The sound of his cane striking the slats echoed in the hallway.
Inside a small chamber, a young woman took Nangi's cane and, as he sat beside a steaming tub, knelt to ladle water over him while another young woman soaped and scrubbed his body with an enormous natural sponge. He was sluiced with deliriously hot water.
Cleaned - purified, the Shintoists would say - Nangi was helped to his feet, given back his cane, and directed out the other side of the room.
Kusunda Ikusa was waiting for him.
Nangi was stunned. He had been unprepared for how young Ikusa was. Certainly under thirty, a mere baby by Nangi's standards. Could one so young truly represent Nami and, by extension, the Emperor of Japan?
Perhaps Ikusa had once been a sumo. His thickly-muscled legs were bowed beneath the weight of his wide frame. Great rolls of pale flesh cascaded in widening layers from beneath his arms to the tops of his thighs. But, for all that, he seemed as deadly and streamlined as a bullet.
His head was hairless, dark and stippled over the sections of scalp where hair would have been. He had tiny, feminine ears and the kind of bowed mouth one often found on simpering geisha or female impersonators. But the coal-black eyes set like gems in that wide, suety face seemed to generate beams of invisible light that probed the darkest recesses of the soul. He possessed great hara - great inner strength - and Nangi was instantly wary of him.
Tanzan Nangi, it is an honour to meet you,' Kusunda Ikusa said with a slight formal bow of his head. 'I bring the presence of Nami. When I speak it is with the voice of Nami, all as one.'
Hits ritual greeting was delivered in a deep, almost grating voice, oddly inflected with the singsong tempo of the Shinto priest.
'Kusunda Ikusa, it is an honour to meet you,' Nangi replied in kind. 'The presence of Nami is felt, its voice heard.'
Kusunda Ikusa nodded, satisfied that the preliminary rituals had been properly observed. He lifted an arm dense with muscle and fat. 'I have reserved a private space so that we may speak freely.'
He led Nangi into the pool area, an enormous place with an overarching ceiling dim with height. The pool was echoey, filled with hushed, murmuring voices which were nonetheless thrown back and forth in the space by the curved, tiled ceiling and walls.
Ikusa stopped at a small alcove. Tiny, pale green wavelets licked at the green tiles. Seven feet into the water, a pebbled glass screen had been erected. Light passed through this translucent barrier, bringing with it anonymous shadows moving slowly, somnolently in the enormous pool beyond.
Ikusa slipped effortlessly into the water, and Nangi, placing his cane on the tiles beside the pool, climbed in with some difficulty. Nangi wondered whether Ikusa's choice of venue was deliberate. Nangi had to put his physical disability on public display.
For a time, they floated in the deliciously warm water, shedding like dead skin the memory of the frenetic world outside. Here, they were at peace, enwombed in the buoyant water. This was, at any rate, the atmosphere that Ikusa apparently wished to manufacture.
Nangi closed his good eye and, gripping the side of
the pool, thought of nothing. He did not open his eye, or focus his mind until Ikusa cleared his throat.
Then he saw those laser-beam eyes contemplating him, and he blinked as if he could not bear their scrutiny. Reflected light coming off the water in patches illuminated Ikusa's face as if it were a screen upon which sun and clouds chased one another in ever changing patterns.
And, indeed, it was a land of screen, reflecting more than light. Nangi knew that he would need to read that face if he were going to hold his own in this conference.
'Nangi-san,' Kusunda Ikusa began, 'Nami wishes to speak with you concerning a matter of the utmost urgency.'
'So you indicated in our telephone conversation,' Nangi said neutrally.
'Nami has some concerns - some significant concerns - regarding the way you run your business.'
Nangi showed nothing on his face. 'I was not aware that Nami had any reason to scrutinize Sato International.'
'Two events made it necessary,' Ikusa said. 'The first is your involvement in Tenchi. The exploratory oil release programme is government-sponsored, so it is natural that Nami should be involved.'
When Nangi saw that Ikusa was not immediately prepared to continue, he closed his good eye again, as if he were alone, relaxed and meditative. He did not care for the way this meeting had begun: there was already an accusatory tone hi Ikusa's voice, non-specific and, therefore, particularly offensive. Now Ikusa was deliberately baiting Nangi by failing to provide the second reason for Nami's interest in Sato International.
It occurred to Nangi that, from the first, Ikusa's tactic had been to provide offence. What did he mean to gain by this? Was it merely an attempt to establish control, a sense of territory? Or was there another, more sinister motive?
Nangi cleared his mind, aware that one could spend all one's time asking questions, when what he needed to do was to watch Ikusa, listen to him as Nangi sought to draw him out. Only then would the answers come.
'Three years ago,' Ikusa said at last, 'the Tenchi project came within a hair's breadth of being compromised by the Russians. Since then, Tenchi has yielded significantly less than had been initially projected.'
Nangi stirred the water. 'True enough. But in the first place, it was Nicholas Linnear who almost single-handedly kept Tenchi's secret from the Soviets. In the second place, we have found that the shale at die bottom of the ocean near the Kurile Islands is significantly more dense than is normally found offshore. Our geologists are now convinced this is so because of the large number of earthquakes here. The make-up of the underlayers of shale is quite different.'
There was silence for some time. The moving shadows painting themselves across the pebbled glass screen were diffuse. Combined with the soft lapping of the wavelets, they provided a kind of sensory film on to which one could imprint one's own interpretations.
'Nami has read your geologists' reports,' Ikusa said in a tone that implied disapproval.
Nangi was aware that he was being baited again. Ikusa had made no allegations against either Nangi or Sato International. Nor, Nangi suspected, would he. Did Ikusa know anything? Nangi asked himself. Or was he on a fishing expedition? That would explain the baiting. Lacking anything of a substantial nature, he might be relying on Nangi himself to provide Nami with any evidence of wrongdoing.
'Then,' Nangi said, 'Nami knows that we are making every effort to bring Tenchi up to full capacity.'
Tenchi,' Ikusa said languidly, 'is just part of the issue.' He paused, beating the water in front of him with his
feet, so that ripples spread outwards. When they readied Nangi, he said, 'The origin of Nami's concern - anxiety would not be too strong a word under the circumstances - lies elsewhere.'
He only had to be patient, Nangi knew, and Ikusa would tell him the real reason for this meeting. Nangi had secrets - deeply buried, it was true, but he was still vulnerable, as everyone who harboured secrets was vulnerable. Despite his best intentions, Ikusa's form of interrogation was seeping into him. He knew he must redouble his own efforts not to let his own anxieties do Ikusa's work for bun.
Nangi speared the other man with his good eye. 'Whatever it is you need to know,' he said, 'it is my wish to provide.'
'Even though your own personal philosophy does not often run parallel with Nami's?'
'I know where my duty lies,' Nangi said evenly. 'In the same concentric circles where every Japanese's duty lies. Emperor, country, company, family.'
Ikusa nodded. 'There can be no doubt,' he said. 'But in what order, one wonders?'
Nangi said nothing, aware that Ikusa was waiting for Nangi to indict himself.
Ikusa said, quite disrespectfully, 'If your heart is pure, Nangi-san, you have nothing to fear.'
Nangi saw that this was to be a trial by fire. He also saw that mere neutrality on his part was not going to work; Ikusa was too smart for that. Nangi knew that in order to draw the other man out, he needed to go on the offensive. But this tactic was a double-edged sword: it was, in itself, fraught with danger, and it could be just what Ikusa wanted; for the more Nangi spoke, the more he revealed of himself and his own strategy.
'Public sincerity,' Nangi said, after some deliberation, 'is no substitute for nobility.' He was tired of being the
subject of discussion. 7/i o haru is perfectly fine,' he said, using the Japanese term for sticking to one's position even after it had been proved wrong, 'for sixteenth-century Tokugawa ronin or romanticized Yakuza but, in this complex present, I have found iji o haru used, more often than not, as a subterfuge to grab a handful of personal power.'
Ikusa blinked, clearly surprised by Nangi's forceful attack. He knew perfectly well that Nangi had just now put into question not only his, Ikusa's, motives, but the motives of Nami as well.
'Nami is beyond both criticism and reproach,' Kusunda Ikusa said rather stiffly.
'Betrayal,' Nangi replied carefully, 'is never sacrosanct. It must be ferreted out wherever its insidious roots take hold.'
Kusunda Ikusa stirred and, for an electric instant, Nangi thought he was going to be attacked. Then the big man settled back in the water. Wavelets from his agitation reached the edge of the pool, splashing water on to the tile surface of the lip.
True,' Ikusa said, 'betrayal at any level cannot be tolerated.' And Nangi noted with some satisfaction the strangled tone of his voice. 'And that is why we have met, why we are here now.'
'Betrayal.' Nangi rolled the word around in his mouth as if it were a wine whose provenance needed deciphering. He was wondering whose betrayal Ikusa meant, and what that betrayal entailed. He did not have long to wait.
'Nami's concern,' Kusunda Ikusa said, impaling Nangi with his stare, 'lies with your iteki partner, Nicholas Linnear.'
Beyond the translucent glass screen, now beaded with moisture, shadows continued to move, their indistinct outlines a perfect counterpoint to this strange meeting.
Very carefully, Nangi said, 'Nicholas Linnear is the subject of Nami scrutiny?'
'Just so,' Ikusa said, a trifle pompously. He had meant to shock Nangi with his statement and, now that be had been assured that he had succeeded, he was again on solid ground. He liked that, and Nangi made a note of this weakness. 'You must understand, Nangi-san, that for a decade Nami has chafed beneath the harness the Americans - and, indeed, the world - have placed around our necks. Over and over we have been reminded that we are a defeated, an impoverished country. Is this not a form of brainwashing? And what happens when even the strongest man is a victim of decades of forced indoctrination? He begins to believe what he has been told to believe. That is what has happened to Japanese of your generation.'
Kusunda Ikusa lay in the water, huge and as bloated as a toad gorging itself on insects. His youth seemed somehow obscene to Nangi, as if in Ikusa the opportunity for experience and learning was wasted.
Ikusa continued his monologue. 'But people such as myself - members of a younger generation - have grown up knowing only a Japan with a vital economy,' an ever-strengthening monetary unit. Now the tables are turned, Nangi-san. Now it is we who are invading America, buying up real estate, record companies, banks, electronic businesses. It is the Japanese who are, in effect, keeping afloat an America that is awash in fiscal debt. For years we have bought their government bonds. Now we are snapping up their corporate bonds and, very soon, we will own these corporations as well. In all areas, we see a distressing lack of quality in American products. The world which, I have read, once laughed at a Japanese-made product, now laughs at American-made items. I have been told that the Americans taught us everything we know about engineering and quality control. I find that difficult to believe.'
Ikusa's face trembled with a kind of inner rage, as if he himself had been personally insulted by these world events, as if he were outraged Japan. 'America, iris true, still possesses an awesome array of natural resources, which we will never have. And the might of their military forces is terrifying. But, ask yourself, Nangi-san, is America the same nation that occupied us in 1946? No. Illiteracy and,crime are problems that increase with each year. America is now struggling with the downside of mongrelizing its population. Its open-door policy to immigrants will be its ultimate undoing. Fiscally, it has a debt it cannot possibly support. Bank failures are on the increase and, as we know, they create a snowball effect. America is a country in serious decline.'
Nangi said, 'Even granting that all you say is true, I cannot see what any of it has to do with Nicholas Linnear.' .
Ikusa grunted, and his great body heaved, setting a fresh set of wavelets in motion. 'Nicholas Linnear's parentage may be English and Oriental, but he is an American now. One, I might add, with ties to the American intelligence community. Never forget that he was employed by a major American spy apparatus when he was captured by the Russians, and tortured.'
Ikusa paused here, allowing the last word to hang in the air as if it were an accusation.
Nangi said, 'Linnear-san endured much pain and suffering in order to keep the secret of Tenchi safe from the Soviets.'
Ikusa smiled, as if he had expected this response and was gratified that it had been spoken. 'Your loyalty to this mongrel is well documented, Nangi-san.'
Nangi sat very still. He had to use every ounce of his self-possession to keep from making a rash statement that might, hi Ikusa's eyes, condemn him. 'As I told you,' Nangi said in a calm voice, 'I know where my duty lies.'
'Americans/ Ikusa said as if Nangi had not spoken, 'are masters of lies and deception. When they are your enemies, they defeat you; when they are your friends, they exploit you.'
Nangi, listening closely, knew that Ikusa had moved from the general to the specific: he was speaking about Nicholas.
'The merger between Sato International and Tomkin Industries never should have been allowed.' Kusunda Ikusa's head moved in small increments, taking in not only Nangi, but the surrounding environment as well. 'For one thing, Tenchi is too vital to Japan's future security and independence from foreign sources of energy. I need not remind you that the fact that Japan has been totally dependent on others to provide fuel has made us terribly vulnerable. This was the spur for Tenchi's creation.' Ikusa's questing eyes had settled upon Nangi again. 'Another reason why the merger was a mistake is that your company, Nangi-san, is privy to too many secrets - industrial, governmental, even military - to have an American so intimately involved. You have already put us in peril. It is unreasonable to think that you can continue in this vein.'
Nangi said nothing, though he now knew what was to come. Let Ikusa say it out loud, he thought. I will not help him in any way.
'Nami believes that this unsafe association with the American - both business and personal - must be ended,' Kusunda Ikusa said. "The sooner the better.'
Nangi said nothing. Apparently, Ikusa felt it advisable to speak for him. 'You have thirty days to dismantle the merger between Sato International and Tomkin Industries. But I will insist that all Tomkin personnel be immediately excluded from any and all involvement in Tenchi. This, of course, includes Nicholas Linnear.'
Nangi felt as if he had been handed a death sentence.
'What about the Sphynx computer chip kobunl That is our first full joint venture with Tomkin. It is they who brought us the Sphynx t-pram technology. The profits are enormous.'
'The kobun will naturally have to be dissolved,' Ikusa said, his eyes again on the environment.
'Without Tomkin's involvement,' Nangi said, 'we will be left with nothing: The technology is strictly proprietary.'
Kusunda Ikusa's eyes slid towards Nangi. 'If the Sphynx t-pram chip is as profitable as you claim,' he said, 'you'll find a way to, ah, appropriate the technology.'
'I will not steal from my friend.'
'I believe,' Ikusa said slowly and carefully, 'that you need some time to think this through.' He lifted a hand, almost in benediction. 'You need to see clearly who your friends are.' ,
Nangi was silent. He felt impaled upon a rock, waiting for the carrion birds to arrive to pick his bones clean.
Ikusa said in what in anyone else would be construed as a benevolent tone of voice, 'You have already said several times that you know where your duty lies, Nangi-san, so, at this juncture, there seems no need to remind you.' Nevertheless, Ikusa did. 'Duty to one's Emperor, one's country, one's company, one's family. That is the proper order.' Ikusa closed his eyes, as if at last he could enjoy the heated water. 'Do your duty, Nangi-san. Nami - and your Emperor - command you.'
Cotton Branding awoke with a strong sense of sexual tension. He had an erection that even urinating couldn't dissipate.
He had dreamt of Shisei.
Of music and her legs and especially what was between them. They had made love dancing to the music, circling the formal brick patio while the band watched. Branding
flushed as the dream came flooding back to him. He doused his head in cold water, as if that would drive away the wanton images.
He thought of his wife, Mary, just two months dead, seeing again in his mind the footage of her being pulled out of their collapsed Mercedes, hit head on by an eighteen-wheel truck that, out of control, had jumped the divider on 295 into Washington. The on-the-scene television reporter had said that the police had to use acetylene torches to get her out of her twisted metal and glass coffin.
Branding, hanging limply over the custom sink, gagged, vomited up what little was left in his stomach from last night. That did it for his erection. The dream, too, was gone.
He took a shower, then, dressed in seersucker shorts, an emerald polo shirt and huaraches, he padded into the kitchen. The room was huge, as was every room in the house and, though it was still early, filled with brilliant light. Out of the window, across the dunes, the blue Atlantic curled and sucked at the beach.
Coffee had been made automatically by some West German machine Mary had ordered from the Williams-Sonoma catalogue. Branding had never seen the sense in it, but this morning he was grateful for its presence. He put a frozen croissant into the microwave and, when it was warm, dropped it on to a paper plate.
He went out on to the balcony, and while he sat sipping and nibbling, he stared at the extension phone. Above his head, gulls wheeled and cried to each other. He tasted neither the coffee (which was quite good) nor the croissant (which was not). He was thinking about whether to call Tippy North, the masque's hostess, to ask her if she knew Shisei's phone number or even her last name. It had been three days since he had met Shisei; an eternity.
At that moment, he heard the front door bell ring. He looked at his watch. It was barely eight o'clock on a Sunday morning. Whoever it was must have the wrong house. He continued to stare at the phone, no longer concerned with the charade of eating. The door bell rang again. He ignored it. He was in no mood for company and, furthermore, whoever it was had a hell of a nerve bothering him at this hour.
Gulls dipped low along the shoreline, and mist lay close in the hollows between the dunes, waiting for death by sunlight. If he squinted, he could see the dried remains of a horseshoe crab, its black prehistoric shell looking ominous on the clean white sand.
He heard footsteps on the wooden stairway up from the beach, and he turned his head. Someone was coming towards the house along the walkway the DEC had made him build across the dunes in order to preserve them.
Sunlight struck the figure as it emerged from the mist. The light fell obliquely, burnishing the figure as well as blurring its outline. At first he thought the person was nude. Then, as it drew closer, he saw that the figure wore as skimpy a bikini as he had ever seen. Really, the figure was all flesh.
It was Shisei.
He was so stunned that he did not answer when she said, 'Why didn't you answer the bell?'
It was as if she had walked right out of his dream.
'Cook,' Shisei said. 'You said I could call you Cook.'
'Did I?' Already it seemed as if he had violated a sacred trust. Thinking of his ongoing senatorial war with Douglas Howe, he knew that he should have nothing to do with this woman. Yet he did not send her away. Instead, he devoured her with his eyes.
Seeing the look on his face, Shisei extracted a white cover-up from the multi-coloured hemp satchel she carried, slipped it on.
Branding discovered that his need for her was so powerful it was akin to the ache one develops from an animal bite. He felt red and sore, filled all over again with the wretched pangs of yearning he had experienced as a teenager.
'Is there any more coffee?' Shisei said.
An oval of sand clung to her calf, a contrast to her smooth skin which was somehow so erotic that Branding almost doubled over with the ache in his lower belly.
'I'll get you some,' he said thickly.
When he returned, she was draped over a chair she had brought to a position directly across the pebbled glass table from his. He handed her a cup, sat down. Her unbuttoned cover-up had fallen-open. Her body was absolutely hairless. There was something eerily fascinating about the endless expanse of cool, tan smoothness. She was, so exposed, even more of a child. Like almost all Americans, Branding equated body hair with 'maturity.
And yet, at the same time, she was much less the child. The bikini was three minuscule triangles of gold and chocolate animal-striped spandex. Everything underneath was as good as revealed. The shape of her body had nothing behind which to hide, and it was impossible to pretend that there was anything girlish or immature about it.
'I'm surprised to see you,' he said.
Her eyes, as dark as the coffee she was sipping, regarded him openly. 'I wanted to see where you live. It will tell me much more about you than you could yourself.'
He noticed that she said nothing about how the evening at the masque had ended. It was clear she had no intention of apologizing. 'Why are you so interested in me?'
'That.is a suspicious question.'
'I'm not suspicious,' Branding said, not altogether truthfully. 'Merely curious.'
'You are powerful, handsome, intelligent,' Shisei said. 'Why shouldn't I be interested?'
'My wife is dead sixty days.'
'Why should that make a difference to either of us?'
'Besides anything else, there is a period of mourning to be observed.' With the politician's glibness, he returned one of her own terms. 'Kata.' The proper form. 'And I am currently in the middle of a life-and-death struggle with Senator Douglas Howe. He's smart and unscrupulous, and he's got smart and unscrupulous people around him. That's bad enough. But even worse for me, he has a great deal of money and influence behind him. I can't afford to give him any ammunition with which to smear my name.'
Shisei smiled, and nodded. 'I understand.' She put down her empty cup and rose to leave. 'Thank you for the coffee and for your frankness.'
He had been wrong. Her skin was not like marble. It was like the first golden peach of summer, one that you could not wait to bite into, to taste the sugary, perfumed flesh while the sticky juices ran down your chin.
Impulsively leaning forward over the glass table, Branding took her hand. 'Don't go,' he said, astonished at what he was proposing. 'Stay a while.'
... took two hours to untangle the victim from the mass of metal, the reporter was saying again, inside Branding's mind, as the television camera tracked in for a close-up -a close-up of Mary. His Mary. Dear God!
He closed his eyes. Stop this, he reprimanded himself. What good does it do? Mary made that same trip religiously twice a week all year long. How could you have prevented it? How could you have protected her? The answer was that there was nothing he could have done. Which was, of course, what made the guilt so excruciating. Often, he felt crucified by it.
'I'll stay, if you like.' It was, from Shisei's throat, purely a neutral statement.
He dropped his hand from hers. Til leave it up to you.'
She strolled along the old-fashioned wrap-around porch. It was the place that Mary had loved the best, the one she had designed with the architect. Every eight feet, massive wooden pillars rose up to reach the overhang, which-served as an exposed balcony from the second floor.
Suddenly curious, Branding said, 'You never told me what you do.'
'I'm a lobbyist,' Shisei said. 'I work for various international environmental groups.'
Thinking of all the lobbyists honeycombing the Washington political arena, he said, 'That must be tough work.'
She smiled. It's impossible, really. But someone's got to do it. Anyway, we Japanese have a long history of championing lost causes.'
She put her arms around a pillar, swung herself off her feet in startling mimicry of what Mary used to do when she was happy with her charity work or satisfied with an important bill's passage.
Branding stood up, following Shisei down the porch. He watched her, a puppy at play, her face relaxed and unconcerned, and he was filled with an odd joy that was tinged with the kind of wistfulness one feels on the first crisp day of autumn. It was, in fact, such a strange emotion that Branding mentioned it to Shisei.
She stopped as if he had physically grabbed hold of her. On bare feet, she came across the porch to where he was standing. 'In Japan,' she said, 'everyone waits for three days in April, for the cherry blossom viewing. During that time, the air is suffused with their perfume. Some go to the parks and the countryside on the first day when the cherry blossoms are in the first blush of youth. Others go the second day when the vigour of the mature blossoms is at its height. But everyone goes the third day when, like heavenly rain, the blossoms begin to fall. We
watch them drift to the earth so that we may not forget the fleeting nature of all of life's most beautiful creations. We feel both elation and sadness. In Japanese, it is called mono no aware, the pathos of things.' She touched him. 'Now, I think, you have felt the same thing.'
Branding did not wait for nightfall to take his cherry blossom to bed. Indoors, with the backwash of the hazy day turning the rooms incandescent, her eyes were glittery. Shisei approached him, and slowly undressed him. He did nothing, urged to momentary passivity by her eyes and, possibly, something in her manner.
With agile hands, she peeled off his polo shirt, unbuttoned his shorts. Now he was naked and she was not. Branding found that he liked it that way, drinking in her bareness while imagining what those tiny covered bits of her looked like.
He could see the outline of her nipples, but he did not know their colour or texture. He could see beneath the spandex the shadow of the vertical crease he ached for, but he did not know its true shape. There was so much to learn, and so little time before the fragrant petals dropped to the earth.
She stared at him in much the same way a man will drink in the sight of a naked female form. Branding had never before seen a woman do this. He felt excited by it, and wondered how some women could be so offended by being considered sex objects. He found the experience ego expanding.
Shisei stared into his eyes, compelling his attention. She was very close to him; he thought he could feel her heat, remembered the press of her mount against him as they had danced, and got hard. Then he felt her fingers on him, enclosing him. Her fingers did not stroke him. They squeezed him; he got bigger and bigger.
'You're ready,' Shisei said. 'So fast.' She said it in a way that made Branding's mouth water.
She shrugged off the cover-up, stepped out of her bikini, and Branding drank her in as she had, moments before, done to him.
'Turn around,' he said thickly.
But Shisei shook her head, advancing on him. Now he felt her against him without any intervening material. She lowered her head, sucked on a nipple, and he gave out a little gasp as a line of pleasure traced itself from chest to groin. Then she climbed upon him, entwining herself about him as if she were worshipping a giant phallus. Branding groaned.
They made love to music by Grace Jones, an album that Branding's daughter had left behind one summer. He had never listened to it, but Shisei found it in among the George Shearing and the Bobby Short records, and put it on. The singer's voice was by turns as soft as the inside of a fruit, as hard and shiny as chrome on a sports car.
Branding had never made love to music; Mary had needed undisturbed quiet in order to relax sufficiently for sex. He found the music at once exhilarating and disturbing, almost as if he were making love. to two women at once - or, more accurately, as if they were making love to him, one with her mouth and her sex, the other with her voice.
Then, sweat-sheened, Shisei sank all the way down on him, and he forgot about everything else.
Afterwards, he said with an ironic smile, 'I wonder what would have happened if you'd found a David Bowie album instead of this one by Grace Jones.' He was exhausted; she was amazingly dexterous, extraordinarily powerful. He felt as if he had just spent two hours working out at the gym. It was, he thought, a delicious land of exhaustion.
'I masturbate to David Bowie,' Shisei said. 'Do you masturbate, Cook?'
'That's an odd question.' He was astonished by her power to shock him.
'Do you think so?' she said. 'Why? It is merely a parameter of what makes you you - one of many.'
He sat up, swung his legs over the side of the bed, determined to break the mood. He was uncomfortable when she spoke like this, with the cutting directness of a child. But she was not a child. 'Here in America,' he said, 'it is not something easily spoken of.'
'Not even among man and wife?'
'We are not man and wife, Shisei. We are strangers.' And then, because her penetrating gaze compelled him, he added, 'Sometimes not even among man and wife.'
'That is senseless,' she said. 'It is natural, like the naked body. Like sex. And yet Americans are ashamed.'
'From what I understand, there are many subjects not openly talked about in Japan.'
'Shall we speak about all of them now?'
Branding did not believe her. 'What about kataT
Shisei moved on the bed, taking between her calves the printed top sheet, flicking it on to the stained wood floor. 'I. have been taught that if something is beneath the ice, if you sense it but cannot see it, it is still there, moving, disturbing the currents.' She opened her thighs, redirecting Branding's gaze. She arched her back. 'Come here, Cook. I do not think that I have finished with you - nor you with me.'
When Justine had stormed out of Nicholas's workout room, she went into the kitchen. It had been close to dinnertime, but she had realized that she could not remember what it was she was going to prepare. Besides, she had not been hungry, and as for Nicholas, she had thought, if he's hungry, let bun get his own dinner.
Having come to that conclusion, she found that she was no longer comfortable anywhere in the house. She
went outside, down the engawa steps, past the huge cryptomeria. In the last of the light, she wandered the grounds, until she found herself at the stone basin where, more than three years before, Nicholas had taken her on their way to this house.
I'm thirsty, she had said then, and she was thirsty now. She stopped, took up the handmade bamboo ladle, drank from it. She stared down into the bottom of the basin, made out the Japanese character for michi. A path; also a journey.
Was her destiny here, in Japan? Was that the only direction in which her path lay, the sole destination of her life's journey? Could such a thing be possible? She had always thought that life's journey had many paths, a multitude of destinations. Well, then? But she tried to imagine her life without Nicholas, and all she felt was a terrible loneliness that she knew she could not bear. Living somewhere apart from him would be torture, she knew, because her mind and her heart would always be wherever he was. She did not want to live the rest of her life as an emotional cripple.
But, on the other hand, she knew she could not continue the relationship as it was. She had relied on Nicholas. He was her anchor, her safe haven, especially here in Japan where she knew no one and, moreover, was increasingly coming to feel that she was unwanted. In the beginning, everyone was friendly - no, she corrected herself, polite was the right word. Every person Nicholas or Nangi introduced her to was so damn polite Justine couldn't stand it. No one could consistently be that polite, she suspected, and really mean it. And yet, Nicholas had repeatedly told her that the virtue of sincerity was extremely important to the Japanese.
What, then, was she missing? Was she crazy in her belief that she would never be allowed into the inner social circles of even Nicholas's closest Japanese acquaintances? She did not think so.
Again, she felt as if she were missing something vital, some kind of Rosetta stone which, once deciphered, would explain the inexplicable Japanese to her.
And now, Justine understood that she needed Nicholas's help more than ever. She could not allow him to push her away. She had to persevere. She knew in her heart that whatever difficulties both of them might encounter, they could survive them only if they stuck together, and did not tolerate this eerie estrangement in their relationship.
Justine allowed herself one brief moment to feel the fear that her estrangement from Nicholas engendered in her. Then, she did her best to clamp it off. She listened, instead, to the sounds of summer all around her.
In a moment, she had drunk her fill. She replaced the ladle on the stone basin, and immediately the carved michi disappeared. Justine turned, and went through the twilight, taking a different route back to the house.
Inside, she heard Nicholas in the workout room. She could hear his deep exhalations as he hit the padded pole over and over again with knuckles as hard as steel.
She exhaled deeply, as if she had been holding her breath for a long time, felt how much tension she had been holding in her upper body. For months, she had ached with worry for Nicholas. She passed by the workout room now and thought, Everything will soon be all right. He's starting to get back to his old self.
Nothing could have been further from the truth, however. Nicholas knew it the moment he threw the first of the aikido atemi. It was clumsy, out of skew, the result
-not only of being rusty, but of something more pervasive, something sinister.
The unthinkable had occurred. Nicholas had suspected it months ago. Now he was sure.
In the first few weeks after the operation, there had been a great deal of pain. Out of reflex, Nicholas had
sought to dissipate it through his martial arts training. There was a way to open, internally, the endorphin channels in order to damp down on the brief, immediate pain one experiences in hand-to-hand combat. For more lasting pain, such as he had, there was another way.
Getsumei no michi. The Moonlit Path. Akutagawa--san, one of Nicholas's sensei, had said, In Getsumei no michi you will experience two immediate insights. One, all sensation will gain in weight and significance. You will, in effect, simultaneously see the skin and what is beneath it. Two, there will be an awareness of light even when there is none.
What Akutagawa-san had meant, Nicholas had learned, was that Getsumei no michi allowed him to combine intuition with insight. He could hear lies spun in the air; he could make his way through the most labyrinthine enclosure blindfolded. Getsumei no michi was a return to man in his most elemental state, long before the layers of civilization accreted, stifling his primitive power.
But Getsumei no michi was much more. It was, in effect, a haven, the source of Nicholas's inner strength and resolve. In Getsumei no michi all things were made clear to bun. Without it, he was far worse than deaf, dumb and blind. He was defenceless.
When, in pain in the hospital, he had sought surcease in Getsumei no michi, he had found none/ His connection with that mystical state was not only severed, but his knowledge of the state itself was gone altogether. It was not a question simply of memory. Nicholas could remember what Getsumei no michi was, could even conjure up what it had felt like to be there, and that proved the most painful realization of all. A person born blind looks upon life differently than one who has had his sight taken from him. Cruelly, Nicholas was aware of what he was missing, and the knowledge ate at him like acid.
Still, because he had been so weak after the operation,
he could not know for certain if the damage were irreparable until he returned home and began his twice daily workouts. Physical proof was required that he had been reduced to the status of mere mortal. Which accounted for his moods, his anxiety and his sleepless nights. Quite simply, he was terrified to confront the truth. As long as there was a shred of hope that he was wrong, and in time Getsumei no michi would be returned to him, there was something to hold on to. But after the first atemi was struck, when he would know absolutely whether or not he had been abandoned, he knew that there would no longer be room for hope, only reality.
Now it had happened; his worst nightmare come true. He was like a man naked beneath a blinding sun with no protection, nowhere to run.
He had never been aware of how he relied on his* godlike state until it had been stripped from him. How dull and uninteresting, real life seemed with its reliance on the five under-developed senses.
Who knew how long Nicholas would have continued to sit on his engawa contemplating light and shadow, refusing to come to terms with his fate, had not Lew Croaker's letter arrived, had he not asked Justine to read it, had she not been curious about Croaker's new hand.
That had cut it. In the face of what his friend had gone through - and was still dealing with - Nicholas felt abject and foolish for putting off what he knew was inevitable.
He had gone into his workout room and, staring 'hard at the padded pole, had begun his preliminary breathing exercises, had, without thinking, assumed the ready position, and had struck out. ' The first atemi, the basic percussive blow of aikido, was struck. And it was as if he were a rank beginner. The form remained, ingrained in his musculature, but there was nothing behind it: no conviction, no mind-set,
no purity of purpose. Instead, Nicholas's mind was a chaos of conflicting thoughts and images deflecting and reflecting off one another in wild concatenation.
Nicholas, mechanically striking the padded pole over and over, was in shock. He could not quite believe it was happening. Getsumei no michi gone. His mind no longer part of the benevolent Void, emptied in order to absorb fully each clear thought, but rather a babble of mutually antagonistic currents, each seeking its own independent end.
And that was how Justine found him, collapsed on to the tatami mats, his chin lolling on his sweat-streaked chest.
He heard her enter, heard her little gasp of horror and, lifting his head, he saw the look of pity in her eyes, and could not bear it.
'Get out!' he shouted. And, because he had unconsciously used kiai, the samurai's war shout, Justine felt as if she had been physically assaulted. She recoiled, reeling in bewilderment. 'Get the hell away from me!'
When Tomi Yazawa shut the door to Commander Omukae's office behind her, she was trembling. She stood still for one long moment, composing herself. The realization that she had revealed to a man she did not know well, more than she had revealed to anyone else in the world, shocked her. More, it shamed her. No matter that Senjin Omukae had given her permission to speak; she should have kept her mouth shut. Why, then, had she spoken? And why had she spoken the truth instead of a well-crafted, face-saving lie?
Tomi did not know, but she suspected that her weakness of resolve had had something to do with Commander Omukae's beautiful face. She shuddered as she recalled the moment when he had stood up, moving into her line of sight. She knew then that he had trapped her as surely
as if he were a hunter with a snare. She had had no recourse but to look directly into his face for the whole of the interview.
The experience had been terrifying. She had felt somehow naked - obscenely, glowingly naked - beneath his penetrating gaze. And although she had fully meant to create some kind of fabrication to answer his questions, she found as she was about to speak that she could not. It was as if Commander Omukae possessed an invisible hand that had entered her mind, drawing out from her against her will that which he wanted to know.
And yet ... Tomi was racked with guilt. Commander Omukae was her champion in the police department, which certainly did not appreciate a female moving through the ranks of its detectives. Were she a man, Tomi knew, she would already have made the rank of lieutenant, would already have been leading her own squad. This was part of what Commander Omukae had meant when he had said, We are, each in our own ways, outcasts.
The fact that she was on important assignments at all was due entirely to Commander Omukae. He, of all the officers of superior rank that she had encountered, treated her as an intelligent human being. He had even praised her work once or twice, the last time not more than a month ago when her diligent surveillance had at last paid off, and they had taken down a major importer of MAC-10 submachine pistols for the Red Army.
Before that, there had been the female terrorist who was about to board a Korean Air flight at Narita Airport armed with plastic explosive. Tomi had taken her into custody in the ladies' room at the very last minute. The knife wound Tomi had received during that fracas had been superficial, nevertheless Commander Omukae had put her in for a valorous commendation. No matter that his recommendation had been turned down, Tomi
thought, as she walked thoughtfully back to her desk.
Commander Omukae was her champion in the department, the only male she thought knew her worth. And yet, Tomi was deathly afraid of him. Why? For one thing, he was not like anyone else, and that, to a Japanese, was a concept filled with suspicion. In Japan, everyone strove to be anonymous, to be a part of the crowd. Everyone wore the same colours, black, shades of grey, shades of white or cream. Only when one dressed on formal or religious occasions in traditional Japanese attire was any hint of colour permitted. Everyone strove to do his best for his country, for his company. This was not, as Tomi once heard a Westerner describe it, self-sacrifice, but rather, duty. Every Japanese understood the nature of duty, that without duty life would be chaotic and, therefore, meaningless.
Every Japanese save Senjin Omukae. And the Red Army terrorists, of course. As she blindly shuffled her paperwork back and forth over her desk, Tomi contemplated the link Commander Omukae had made between his thinking and that of the Red Army. It was interesting -intriguing, even. But Tomi suspected that there was more to the way he saw life than merely putting himself in his enemies' shoes.
That was also part of what he meant by, We are, each in our own ways, outcasts.
She recalled her early life, the rigorous training her mother had put her through. For as far back as she could remember, Tomi had been in charge of washing the rice. The first few times, when she had allowed several grains to escape her control and slide down the drain, her mother, watching her like a hawk, had pulled her roughly from the sink and spanked her.
When she was older, she was always the last to eat. Her father, silent and inattentive at the table, and her older brother, arrogant and aloof, would invariably
receive the major portion of food. Afterwards, her mother and she would finish whatever remained. There was rarely enough to satisfy the two of them.
Once, when she was especially hungry after dinner, Tomi had asked her mother why they must eat this way. Her mother said, 'Be content with what you have. Your father and brother work hard all day. It is our duty to see that they are strong and fit for their work. We women do nothing but sit at home all day. What need do we have for much food?'
Tomi remembered one evening when she had suggested to her mother that her brother help them out in their kitchen chores, which were so numerous, Tomi often found herself overwhelmed. Her mother was horrified at the thought. 'Goodness,' she had cried, 'what puts such thoughts into your head? If we allowed such a thing, the neighbours would assume that our habits were so poor and slovenly that we needed male help.'
The male presence in Tomi's farmland household was massive, hovering over every hour of the day, occluding even days shining with a sparkling sun.
When Tomi was tekireiki - of marriageable age -
she was in Tokyo, at school. One evening, as she was
preparing for her final exams, she received a call from
her brother. Tomi's father had died some years before,
and her brother was now the head of the family. In many
ways, he was far worse than Tomi's father had ever
been. Whereas the father was merely content to keep
the family together and running efficiently, the brother
was interested in exerting control. Tomi had taken the
call with a sinking heart. Her brother informed her that
he had selected a suitable husband for her, and that she
was expected home as soon as possible in order that the
particulars of arranging the wedding could be properly
and formally effected.
Tomi knew that she had come to a nexus point
in her life. She understood that what she said to her toother would change her life forever. She straggled with her inner demons. As if it had a will of its own, her mind scrolled back over the strict training her mother had given her, and she felt her resolve weakening, the desire to give in to the authority figure, to submit to the structure of life almost overwhelming her with its brute force.
Then she saw the face of her mother, time-worn and pale, rarely smiling, certainly never laughing. And Tomi knew that her mother had never really lived. Rather, she had expended her life in the service of her family, a slave to the unending demands of her husband and her son, hemmed in by the constant criticisms of her neighbours and relatives. Tomi saw that she would rather slit her wrists than carry on that tradition.
So she said into the phone, 'I am not coming home.' She had dropped the receiver into its cradle, and had run for the bathroom, making it just in time as her dinner came spewing out of her mouth.
Later, after cleaning herself up, she had crawled weakly into bed, and had sat for the rest of the night with the covers drawn up to her chin, the lights on in her room, shivering uncontrollably as if she had the flu.
It was this irrevocable break with her family, with her life - as traumatic for a Japanese as the loss of a leg or an arm - that had come to mind when she was summoned to the crime scene at The Silk Road. Seeing poor, pathetic Mariko and what had been done to her by an unknown hand had .touched Tomi in her innermost depths. During the ensuing months of meticulous investigation, Tomi came in some curious way to see her as a kindred spirit, less lucky by far than she, yet so similar that Tomi was driven to find her murderer.
She opened Mariko's file, went through it for what seemed the thousandth time. Who had done such a
terrible tiling to the poor girl? What kind of mind was capable of such bestiality?
Tomi tried in the manner of Commander Omukae to put herself in the mind of the murderer, but she found herself incapable of conceiving such a warped mind-set.
She continued to turn the pages of despair, Mariko's despair. So many mysteries here, and she had no solutions for any of them. Who killed Mariko? Why? What did the bloody note, this could be your wife, mean? Who was it meant for? The police? Who else was expected to find her? Was there any significance in the forensic report of tiny flakes of rust found in the wounds of the girl's thorax? Did Mariko have a current boyfriend and, if so, who was he?
Now her commander had ordered her to end her investigation, to label the case: dead, unsolved. Tomi did not think that she could do that. Mariko's untouched face stared accusingly up at her from the grisly forensic photos. Was this inhuman mutilation all that would be left of Mariko? It wasn't fair or right.
Duty, Tomi thought grimly as, wiping away an errant tear, she closed the file. She entered Nicholas Linnear's name into her computer terminal, and in a moment, the pertinent data appeared on her screen. She tapped out a request for a hard copy, and the printer went to work. She hardly glanced at the sheets as they emerged, merely folded them and put them into her handbag.
Tomi knew that she had to come to grips with her turbulent feelings for Commander Omukae. She saw his face, saw again the interview in his office, and knew what a botch she had made of it. If only she had said something intelligent to him. Something
Tomi put her head in her hands. She had been fighting the realization ever since she had first seen Senjin Omukae, but now she could not deny the attraction she had felt for him from the beginning. And hadn't he
revealed something of himself to her? We are, each in our own ways, outcasts. That, she knew, was a singular occurrence. What did it portend?
She felt again his presence close and quick in front of her, smelt again his male musk. Those eyes upon her, raking at the core of her, stirring her depths. He had, in one breathless moment, ripped through the fabric of her life, to gaze upon her secret and vulnerable underside. A shiver raced down her spine.
Tomi knew that she was in love with Commander Omukae. Which was too bad for her, because she knew that within the code of the department, there was nothing either of them could do about it. Having once been trapped by life, she had thought that she had been clever enough to escape. Now Tomi found herself trapped again.
For a long time after Justine stumbled out of the workout room, Nicholas did nothing. He closed his eyes, slept, dreamt. Nightmares stalked his uneasy, sweaty sleep. Helpless, chained to a rock, gimlet-eyed cormorants, wheeling and crying above his head, alerted him to imminent danger. Then he could dimly see the outline of his death as it approached like a sleek ship over the shining sea.
At last, towards dawn, he rose and, unable even to bring himself to speak to Justine, confronted his nemesis, the padded pole. He eyed it as if it were his most implacable enemy and, indeed, for this moment, it was.
The face of Akutagawa-san swam into his mind. The moment you begin to hate, the sensei had told Nicholas, is the moment you will lose Getsumei no michi.
He was on a hillside shrouded in mist so thick that day had become night. Somewhere ahead of this young Nicholas was a steep precipice tumbling down a rocky scree to the valley floor. It had taken them six hours of
arduous climbing to reach this spot. One false step and Nicholas knew that he would fall head over heels until either his head or his back, broke upon the spine of the rocks far below.
I can't see, this young Nicholas thought, and yet Akutagawa-san has told me that I must walk this ridge. Find Getsumei no michi, the sensei said. Find the path and you will not stumble or fall.
So, with terror in his heart, the young Nicholas had set out, carefully putting one foot in front of another. There was a metallic taste in his mouth, and his heart was pounding with such force that for a moment he could hear nothing else.
Then, gradually, he began to hear other sounds: the rushing of the wind, the sighing of the tree branches above and behind him. The caw of a kite, circling the sky, riding the currents.
And, abruptly, he could see the bird, through the opacity; not the creature itself, really, but something akin to its shadow against an unseen sun. His head lifted as Getsumei no michi allowed him to 'watch' it soar.
And now he could feel the currents and eddies of the wind just as if they were an ocean's tide. And learning this sculptured landscape, he discerned just where the edge of the ridge rippled and curled, where gnarled tree roots thrust up from the eroded cliffside to trip an unwary traveller, where a stoat crouched, caught - trembling between the rim and the two humans.
Clouds were coming, and he turned his head, aware that rain was not more than fifteen minutes away. He walked along the snaking ridge, more sure of his footing than if it had been a crystal clear day. And he told Akutagawa-san everything he saw and sensed and heard. He had felt like a god, but this he had kept from his sensei, because it smacked of ego, and the essence of all martial arts involved an egoless state.
Getsumei no michi.
I can remember this, Nicholas thought now. Why can't I remember what to do? Don't think, he told himself. Don't ask questions that you can't answer. Clear your mind of all extraneous thought. Now let go of the hatred of your memory loss. Let haragei show you michi, the path, the Way to Getsumei no michi.
He again took up the ready position, this time painfully aware that he did not understand what he was doing, that his mind, cluttered and uncentred, was merely following the lead of his body;
He raised his hands, aligning his ringers into position, and struck out. Again and again he hit the padded pole, his mind afire with a mounting despair, knowing that he had no idea what he was doing. He stopped and, panting, stood staring at the space in front of him as if it, too, had turned against him.
He heard his mother, Cheong, saying to him, You must learn to allow things to seep in, to come into your bones in their own time. Patience, Nicholas. This is perhaps difficult for you. Your father makes it so. He is patient and impatient. Very inconsistent, yes. This is strange to me.
Patience. Yes. Be consistent.
Once more, he set himself and, without giving himself time for second thoughts or doubts, he struck the padded pole. Pain flared, emanating from his hands all the way up his arms, but he continued to strike out, harder and harder, with a kind of desperation as he felt his strength waning, forgetting even his mother's wise counsel, until he was doing nothing more than flailing ineffectually at his own inner demons.
Gasping for air, the sweat running off him in streams, he at last collapsed upon the tatami mats and, hugging the padded pole to him, began to weep.
When Nangi returned to his office the morning after his
meeting with Kusunda Ikusa, he listened to their conversation all over again. Settling down behind his desk, the skyline of downtown Tokyo glowing like a lambent forest in die early summer sunlight, he unscrewed the top of his cane. The carved dragon's head came off, revealing the Workings of a mini-recorder.
He took the micro-cassette from the interior of the cane, put it into the office stereo system. Soon the voice of Kusunda Ikusa came through the speakers, talking of Tenchi, and Nangi's duty to betray Nicholas Linnear.
Nangi sat back in his swivel chair, fought the urge to have a cigarette, and thought of his friend Seiichi Sato. Sato had been a fighter, a fiercely loyal friend, and implacable enemy. For the first time, it occurred to Nangi how alike in many ways were Seiichi and Nicholas.
Nangi knew that he could never have betrayed Seiichi.
He tapped his forefinger rhythmically against his h'ps as he listened again to everything Ikusa said, not merely the words, but the inflection, the intonation as well, in order to glean every drop of information from the meeting. Others, at one time or another, had tried to extort Nangi. All had failed. But Ikusa was another matter entirely. Ikusa was Nami, and Kami was, for better or for worse, Japan.
Nangi felt locked within a cage. In order to get out, he knew, he would have to use the one door. But to do that, he must betray Nicholas Linnear.
The taped conversation was over, and silence fell like an ominous shadow across the room. Nangi took the tape from the recorder, pocketed it. Then he rescrewed the head on to his cane, and left the office.
In the street, he found a public phone, dialled a number and deposited the correct change. After one ting, a recorded message came on. Nangi let it run its course, waited for precisely three seconds, then said one word into the receiver mouthpiece. He hung up.
He waited five minutes, during which time two people
wanted to use the phone. Nangi, his finger on the pips, pretended to speak into the dead receiver. The people went away.
He let go of the pips, dialled the same number. It rang three times, then a human voice answered. Nangi did not give his name, and he was not asked for it. He spoke an address into the receiver, hung up. Then he went back to his office.
Nangi spent much of the day with his technicians, sharing their frustration as they failed to gain any headway in deciphering the nature of the mysterious virus that had attacked Sato International's computer banks. He wished vainly for Nicholas's insightful advice, mourning the loss as if it were a death in the family.
Late in the afternoon, Nangi left the office, went across town. He remembered the Akihabara district of Tokyo with great fondness. In the ashen days following the end of the war in the Pacific, a raging black market had sprung up here, and people who were clever and audacious had made fortunes virtually overnight. This was where Nangi had started his new life, before he learned the discipline of kanryodo, the way of the samurai bureaucrat.
Today, Akihabara was a living monument to Japan's post-industrialist economy. Shops, jammed along both sides of the narrow, winding streets, bristled with electronic hardware of all shapes, sizes and functions, most of them manufactured expressly for export.
Post-punk models with spiked hair and painted faces glowered and sneered out of massive posters that hawked the latest compact disc player or stereo component. On massive TV screens, American women rolled their eyes in ecstasy at the sound of the newest, lightest-weight headphones or portable cassette deck, caressing these electronic marvels as if they were lovers. A cacophony of disparate rock and pop songs emanating from open
doorways and stalls fought with coloured digital displays for attention along the jammed streets.
Akihabara was steaming with people. Which was, of course, why Nangi had chosen it. There was no chance of being overheard - either accidentally or deliberately -'in this fantastic fever-pitched madhouse.
Nangi saw the Pack Rat lounging against a display-packed window. He was watching David Bowie pitching a soft drink on a-large-screen TV. The scene changed to show the ecstatic face of a female talento, a perfect image, a new wave silicon and gallium icon.
The Pack Rat felt Nangi's approach without having to look. He was a tough-looking character, short, dark, with a pock-marked face and a heavy jaw. He was known as the Pack Rat because he accumulated contacts and intelligence like others acquired artefacts. He was a man Nangi had known for many years and trusted implicitly. The Pack Rat was unlike many of the others of his dubious profession: he was not a mercenary, hiring out to the highest bidder. One did not have to look over one's shoulder when one hired him.
The Pack Rat liked Nangi. But even more, he admired him. Many years ago, Nangi had saved the Pack Rat's sister from a serious altercation with the head of a Yakuza clan. The Pack Rat owed Nangi gin', a debt he could never repay.
As Nangi came past him, the Pack Rat detached himself from the window. Soon, however, he had pushed ahead of Nangi and, taking his unspoken cue, Nangi followed the Pack Rat through a tortuous circuit of the district. Nangi lost count of how many times they doubled back on themselves, ducked in and out of shops.
At last, the Pack Rat turned and grinned at Nangi. They slowed their pace. Together, they strolled the streets.
'I've been here a while,' the Pack Rat said, 'seeing if the- environment needed cleaning out.' He meant, he
had checked to see if Nangi was being followed. 'It did.'
Nami.
'I know the source,' Nangi said.
The Pack Rat tensed. 'Is there any immediate danger?' Which meant, Should I find the man who followed you and take him out?
'Not yet.'
The Pack Rat had stopped for a moment, as if he were interested in a shop window display of portable computers. Nangi knew better. The Pack Rat knew that after the last fifteen-minute mad dash, Nangi iieeded a breather. The Pack Rat was courteous.
'How may I be of service, Nangi-san?'
Nangi waited until he was ready to move on. Considering Nami's attempt at surveillance, he did not want to talk, even on these crowded streets, unless they were in motion.
When they had gone a couple of blocks, shouldering aside a host of Germans intent on buying everything in sight, Nangi said, 'We had a serious incident this morning. Our computers were compromised by a virus.'
The Pack Rat was surprised. 'I brought you your system of computer encryptions. I thought it was totally secure.'
'And it was,' Nangi said, moving nimbly through the throng. 'Until today.' As they moved, he handed the Pack Rat a three-and-a-half-inch floppy disk. 'This is a record of the attack.'
The Pack Rat pocketed the disk with the ease of a maitre d' accepting a tip. Til get right on it.'
'I know you will. Even though I have others working on this aspect, they do not have your wealth of resources.' Nangi's cane tap-tap-tapped on the pavement. "There's something else, even more urgent, that I want you to concentrate on. Kusunda Ikusa.'
The Pack Rat whistled a little tune. They paused at a
stall, and he pointed out some items which blinked and flashed, as if he and Nangi were prospective purchasers. After a moment, they pressed on.
'First of all,' the Pack Rat said, 'I want to make certain I heard you right.'
'If you're thinking Kami,' Nangi said, 'you did.'
They passed a flock of black leather jacketed kids in 1950s American hairstyles, complete with Brylcreem and duck tails, dripping metal chains and looking cocky. Clouds of cigarette smoke wreathed them. The two-way flow of pedestrian traffic parted on either side of them, making of their group a kind of island of curiosities.
The Pack Rat said something to them as they passed, and the rockers laughed, giving him thumbs-up signs.
The Pack Rat said to Nangi, 'Do you want the target researched? Catalogued? Indexed?'
'No,' Nangi said. 'I want him compromised.'
The Pack Rat evinced no surprise. 'Do I have a time limit?'
'Yes,' Nangi said. 'Yesterday.'
The Pack Rat grinned. 'Now that's a job to cherish.'
When Senjin Omukae moved, he moved like the sea. He had a way about him that was as sinuous as if his bones could bend instead of break. Women especially noted this, if not consciously, then with a part of their mind still attuned to atavistic behaviour. Men only said that Senjin was dangerous, but women saw in that danger another dimension, one to which they were attracted, perhaps despite themselves. There was a kind of freedom in being so close to danger, as well as a heightened sense of awareness. They saw more, tasted more, felt more, and they fell in love with that supra-clarity, mistaking it for a love of Senjin himself.
For his own part, Senjin did not mind. In fact, he did not make a distinction between the two kinds of love. Love
was for him, in any case, a counterfeit emotion, fraught with self-deceit and laden with a treacherous passion that inevitably led to greed, jealousy and envy.
Senjin laughed. Had he been a bit younger, he could imagine himself a talento, hawking Hitachi or Mitsubishi software, smiling vacuously out at the adoring population glued to their twenty-four-inch cathode ray tubes, dancing when he was told to dance, singing meaningless pop songs in front of thousands of screaming adolescents, being interviewed by NHK-TV in a series of prime-time programmes as eagerly anticipated as the latest soap opera.
He had the kind of face that ad agencies and conglomerate executives fell all over themselves to find, market and exploit: handsome, lineless, with a hint of the feminine in its softness of angles in jaw and brow.
These qualities did not make him any less attractive to the opposite sex. Quite the contrary, Senjin possessed that confluence of features most admired in doomed Japanese heroes down through the ages.
His girlfriends had been many and varied, but they all shared one experience. They had been taken by Senjin to the Kabuki theatre to see Musume Dojoji.
Musume Dojoji was Senjin's favourite play, one which he watched with a mixture of fascination and terror, precisely the kind of attraction-repulsion one feels upon seeing a particularly bloody accident. Wishing to avert one's head, one stares instead, mesmerized, even while one's stomach turns queasy.
Musume Dojoji spins the legend of Kiyohime, a bewitching demon woman, who falls in love with a young Buddhist monk. He is torn by his attraction for her and his vows of celibacy. He deflects her attempts at seduction, first in subtle ways, then, as her pursuit becomes ever more determined, in more overt ways.
Finally, he flees his town altogether. But Kiyohime
will not be denied, and she pursues him, using various magical means to keep him in sight. At last, she turns into an enormous serpent.
The priest, now filled with fear at this supernatural adversary/lover, takes refuge beneath a gigantic bell under which he believes he will be safe.
Instead, the serpent Kiyohime slowly encircles the bell with her oily coils. Enraged that she cannot get to the priest, she rears up and, spitting demonic flames that eat metal, sets fire to the bell, incinerating the would-be lover who had so ill-advisedly spurned her.
Senjin would sit through each performance of this Kabuki play as if for the first time, gripped in the maw of a sickening exhilaration/horror as the hideous denouement approached.
Afterwards, he would take the woman he was with out to a lavish dinner of fugu or Kobe steak, during the course of which he would explore with her the psychological aspects of the play.
It was Musume Dojoji's psychological undertones -or, rather, Senjin's interpretations of them - that most fascinated the doctor. He was, Senjin thought, in many ways like Senjin's endless parade of girlfriends: becoming increasingly frustrated by Senjin's obsession with Kiyohime.
'The demon woman,' Dr Muku said, 'is a familiar figure both in our mythology and in our psyches. It should not be surprising that your, er, subject is fixated on such a creature.'
Of course, Dr Muku did not know that Kiyohime was Senjin's own obsession. Senjin had come to Dr Muku in his official capacity in an attempt to, as he told the psychiatrist, 'obtain a clear psychological profile on a suspect in a multiple murder case'. He had given Dr Muku a fictitious name for his 'suspect'. He needn't have bothered. Dr Muku was not interested in identities; he
was interested in, as he put it succinctly, 'the pathology of crime'.
But, of course, Senjin was acutely aware of identity. His initial contact with the psychiatrist had been via the phone. That had been several years ago, when Senjin had been working on a difficult serial murder case. Always, his meetings with Dr Muku were, at the psychiatrist's behest, utterly private.
'I hope you won't take offence, Commander, but I would rather you did not enter and exit this office through the waiting room,' Dr Muku had said during that initial phone conversation. 'Some of my patients are unnaturally sensitive. Your police aura might disturb not only them, but unnerve my staff as weU. Far better that you use the back door to my consultation room which lets out directly on to the outer corridor. That way, we will be assured that no one will see you and, perhaps, mistake your presence.'
Now Senjin took full advantage of his previous relationship with Dr Muku, day after day, spending an hour with Dr Muku - much as a patient would - spinning, as if he were a Kabuki playwright, concentric circles composed of lies and the truth, or subtle combinations of the two until even Senjin himself often could not distinguish between the two.
This subconscious and unwitting play-acting, of course, suited Senjin's lifestyle. He had built his existence using subterfuge upon subterfuge, manufacturing flecks of artifice as if they were bricks, glazing them with the colours of his imagination, firing them in the kiln of Kshira.
What better - and more dangerous - way to recreate the skein of his life, a movie filmed for an audience of two, than to speak of it in the darkness and the light of this psychiatrist's office?
'The demon woman,' Dr Muku was saying now, 'is, in a very important sense, a figure of innocence.'
'Innocence?' Senjin echoed, despite himself. He laughed. 'I don't see how my suspect would see her as innocent.'
'Well, of course he wouldn't see her as innocent,' Dr Muku said. He was a small man, as compact as a rubber ball, and seemingly as malleable. He had the wide, open face of a child. His salt-and-pepper hair was long and rather wild as if, as part of his morning ablutions, he spent five minutes in a wind tunnel. He wore old-fashioned round wire-rimmed glasses that magnified : raisin-coloured eyes. 'He would see her as wholly evil. But, you see, that is part of his problem.'
Senjin lit a cigarette. 'How so?'
Dr Muku shrugged. 'Clearly, the subject has lost sight of reality. His senses tell him only what he wishes them to tell him. It is as if he has put a filter on them; as if real life is too frightening or complex for him to interface with without this filter of his own design.'
Senjin was inwardly amused by the frailty of Dr Muku's reasoning, built as it was, assumption upon assumption, on lies masking as truth and vice versa. 'Tell me,' he said, 'how do you come to this conclusion, Doctor?'
'It is simple, really,' Dr Muku said. To you and me, the concept of the demon woman of which Kiyohime is an excellent example is not so black and white.' Dr Muku chuckled. 'Or, in this case, entirely black.' He settled his hands across his pudgy stomach. 'The truth of the demon woman myth is this: man sees her as so frightening because when he first sees her, she has the aspect both of his mother and the mother of his children. It is only when he tugs upon her loving, maternal mask that he comes upon the face of the demon woman.' Dr Muku lifted a finger. 'However, the psychoanalyst knows that the aspect of the demon woman is, in its own way, also a mask. And the most interesting thing is that this particular mask is
entirely the creation of the man himself. It is something that he desires; that, in fact, he cannot do without. It is, as Yukio Mishima has told us, a reflection of the male's unceasing sexual passion.'
Senjin almost laughed in Dr Muku's face. Did he know how foolish he sounded? Senjin thought not. Dr Muku was all too wrapped up in Dr Muku as teacher, as healer.
In order to encourage the doctor, Senjin nodded his head, murmuring empty words of praise as he had once done to his Kshira sensei. After all, Dr Muku thought of himself as a master of psychology and, at least for the time being, it was to Senjin's benefit to feed that perception.
On the other hand, Senjin did not want Dr Muku to have an easy time of it. 'Pardon me for interjecting this,' he said, 'but the suspect has shown no signs of violent sexual behaviour.'
'If he hasn't as yet,' Dr Muku said sagely, 'it is only a matter of time before he does. A man so obsessed with the concept of a demon woman must of necessity harbour a deep and violent antipathy towards women. This would, from his point of view, be most satisfactorily transmitted in a sexual manner.'
'He wouldn't just kill them?' Senjin enquired.
'No. Killing is too final, too abrupt to satisfy his rage. He would first need to mutilate his victims in some way, perhaps even in a variety of ways. I would be very much surprised if rape was not among them.'
Senjin kept nodding and smiling. But, in the pit of his stomach, something cold and hard was forming. Dr Muku no doubt would have perceived this sensation as rage. But Senjin knew it was something altogether different. Something entirely outside Dr Muku's ken.
Branding lay upon the rumpled bed. His body felt heavy with lust, his head light with abandon. While his body was
for the moment sated, he found that his mind was not. He watched through eyes slitted by dusty late afternoon sunlight and lust as Shisei climbed naked off the bed.
For a moment, she was silhouetted against the light, and he saw the kind of aura one looks for in eclipses. It was as if the very sun itself was her core and, for the first time, he understood the true meaning of the word radiant. As she turned, the light slid across her like honey. Her luminous eyes, for the moment lighter than the black they had been, paler certainly than the surrounding shadows, reached him where he lay spread-eagled, and he felt paralysed both by excitement and by fright.
Cotton Branding did not want to take his eyes off her. He had never felt such power being exerted by one person over another on such an intimate level. It was one thing to squeeze out one's influence - either gently oi_ crushingly, as the circumstances dictated - quite another to find oneself in the jaws of such a magnetic whirlpool.
And then - just like that - Shisei smiled, and all the shuddering intimations of power were whirled away on a froth of lightness, innocence and healthy curiosity so that Branding was left breathless, doubting anything dark and sinister had ever existed.
Shisei, in her open cover-up, sat in a straight-backed chair, her legs demurely crossed just as if she were fully clothed and this were a business meeting. She sat with her forearms lying along the black wooden arms of the chair and, even now, with the oblique sunlight spread along their slender lengths, he could discern no hair whatsoever, not even the pale down of youth.
'Shisei,' he said and, still smiling, she turned her head towards him. A thick shaft of the sunlight slipped around the curve of her high cheekbone as if she were being painted by an artist instead of being illuminated by the ending of the day.
Then, in a movement so innocent it startled him,
she put her head back so that he was able to see as an unbroken line the soft underside of her jaw, the hollow of her throat, the abrupt thrust of her breasts. It was a gesture fraught with intimation, a gesture that was erotic and primitive, a kind of unmasking, revealing an intimacy that went beyond lovemaking which, as Branding well knew, could be as impersonal as getting a haircut. It was the kind of gesture that one jungle cat makes to another, an exposure of a vulnerable spot, an ultimate acquiescence that said on a subliminal level, Here, see how deeply I am in your power.
And in that breathless moment, Branding knew that he wanted this woman more than he had ever wanted anything in his life.
He recalled, like the flash from a gemstone held to the light, a moment from his childhood which had been with him, moving beneath the ice of his memory, made shadowy by time. But the presence of Shisei negated both memory and time, and Branding saw in her eyes his past being resurrected like a ghost at a feast.
He had been raised on Beacon Hill in Boston, scion of his father's vast banking fortune. His mother, Bess, was, in Branding's memory, a somewhat intimidating figure. Because she could not completely control her husband, she controlled her sons with a severity none of them forgot.
The times and her husband's will demanded that she could no longer be Puritan in the strictest sense of her forebears, and she resented it. She was deeply, almost obsessively, Godfearing, and Branding remembered being dragged off to her Presbyterian church every Sunday to hear fire and brimstone sermons concerning man's innate sins emanate from the mouths of bearded ministers of considerable ecclesiastical rank. She insisted that he read the Bible over and over until he could quote entire sections to her'on demand.
One day, when he was thirteen, his mother handed him a book. Its title Was Wonders of the Invisible World, and its author was Cotton Mather. Written in 1693, a year after the Salem witch trials in which Mather was involved, it was an eerie tome discussing satanic possession.
When he had finished the book, his mother sent for him. Holding him by his arms, she had peered deeply into his eyes and had said, 'Hie world is Satan's playground, Cotton, never forget that.' She was the only one who called him Cotton, not Cook. After all, it was the name she had given him. 'Work hard, never indulge to excess, above all, be disciplined. Stay on the narrow path that God has ordained for you, and you will be safe. Stray from the narrow path, and all the good that I see within you will wither and die.'
Now, staring into Shisei's charcoal grey eyes, with the heat of summer billowing into the bedroom, Cotton Branding thought again of his mother and of the narrow path. How lucky she would have considered herself to have died before he had chosen politics as his career. She had been so certain that he alone, the firstborn of all her sons, would fulfil her dreams, and become a man of the cloth.
Well, Branding thought now, perhaps she wouldn't mind his choice of careers, after all. He was railing against injustice in his own way. And, working in Sodom, he had resisted all temptation to wander from the narrow path.
Then he looked at Shisei and thought, How can I keep our relationship a secret?
Night had come at last.
St  Theresa's,   the   only   Roman  Catholic  church   in Shinjuku, was situated four blocks west of the Meiji-dori, on a side street just off the Okubo-dori. It was, Nangi thought, still an impressive sight amid
the clean-lined skyrises, the gigantic neon signs of modern Tokyo. Perhaps even more impressive because of its location in the midst of a concrete and steel forest.
Inside, it was cool and dim and quiet. The light, falling through the arched, stained-glass windows, seemed to echo in the vastness. Somewhere, above his head, the choir was practising, the young, sexless voices like a starshower against a night sky.
Day into night-, Nangi thought. Now I lay me down to sleep . . . The outside world - and the inherent secrets it keeps - is, for the moment at least, at bay. And pray the Lord my soul to keep.
He turned, dipped his fingers in the font, crossed himself. He knelt at a pew at the back, staring at the space, hearing in the pauses between the sporadic choral singing, the muffled footfalls, a fragment of hushed conversation, all quickly snuffed out, the silence of God.
He discovered, to his dismay, that there was no solace for him here. He had sinned; he could not take communion. He was cut off from God, and the peace of spirit His protection provided.
Instead, he found the grinning face of Kusunda Ikusa hovering in his mind, like a spectre or a projection. Those laser eyes seemed to have followed him all the way into the sanctity of St Theresa's. Do your duty, Nangi-san. Nami - and your Emperor - command you.
That meant betraying Nicholas. But Nangi owed a debt to Nicholas that he could never adequately repay, not only for the suffering that Tenchi had caused him but also for protecting Seiichi Sato from Akiko for so long. And yet, as Kusunda Ikusa pointed out, Nangi's primary duty was to his Emperor and, by extension, his Emperor's emissary, Nami.
It was at this moment, while Nangi was thus engaged in this moral tug-of-war, that Justine entered the church. She had considered how best to contact Nangi. Visiting
him at the office or even calling him seemed too public to her, and to disturb him at home seemed to Justine beyond the bounds of their uneasy relationship.
She had known about this church, of course, from Nicholas, and it had been Nangi himself who had, in some nearly forgotten conversation, spoken of his ritual visits to St Theresa's.
Desperation, Justine thought as she glanced around the interior, gave one all sorts of previously unrevealed powers. Like dredging up the subject of that discussion. And desperation most closely defined her current state of mind.
Heartsick at being shut out of Nicholas's life, she had, at first, retreated to the opposite end of the house. She wanted to stand up to Nicholas, to make him see how wrongly he was behaving. After all, she told herself, she had done so before. But that had been at home in America. Here, in Japan, she found that she had lost her equilibrium, that without Nicholas as her anchor she lacked the strength to battle on alone.
In the middle of the night, with the rhythmic sounds of Nicholas working out wafting eerily through the house, Justine had considered leaving Japan in the morning.
The pain she felt now, cut off from everything she loved, everything familiar, was like no other she had known. She fought down like unpalatable medicine her anger at Nicholas, unable to come to terms with the helplessness she felt. Here in Japan all her inadequacies, imagined and real, were magnified. And she was in Japan because of Nicholas.
She knew that her love for him was unshakeable, but she also realized that she could no longer endure her own torment and guilt concerning their daughter's death while battling with Nicholas.
She felt beset by foes she could neither see nor understand, and the instinct to flee was enormous, but
there was terror in that as well because it meant running out on Nicholas and she could not imagine trapping herself in such a betrayal. She felt ensnared in a situation that was rapidly spinning out of control.
Long into the waning night she had wept bitter tears, for herself, and for Nicholas.
When dawn had at last come, Justine knew that she was incapable of running away. Under the present conditions, she was also incapable of sticking it out here alone. She needed advice, and she needed it from someone who knew Nicholas as well as she did, someone who could guide her through the deepening maze of Japan. There was only one person she could think of who fitted those requirements: Tanzan Nangi.
Nangi became aware of someone slipping into the pew next to him. As a matter of course, he turned to look at who it was. He was stunned to see Justine.
'Mrs Linnear,' he said, his eyes quickly downcast so that she would not see his shock. 'I did not know that you were Catholic.'
'I'm not,' Justine said, and then bit her tongue. Too late, she realized that Nangi had been giving her a face-saving way of explaining her presence here in church. Of course he had recognized the real reason she had come, but in Japan one never spoke of real reasons. One was too busy saving face. 'That is - ' she began again, then faltered. 'Well, the truth is - ' She stopped again. One never spoke the truth in Japan. Or, if one did, it was cloaked in such a way that it could be interpreted six other ways.
'Please forgive me. I am just finishing my prayers, Mrs Linnear,' Nangi said, bowing his head.
Justine, about to say, 'Oh, I'm sorry!', clamped her jaws shut. Nangi was giving her time to collect her thoughts, to reapproach him in the proper manner, to regain the face she had lost. Justine was grateful to him.
She realized, perhaps belatedly, that her wanting to meet Nangi here was not merely a matter of convenience. She recalled how she had prayed for Nicholas at the moment when he had come out of the anaesthetic. If she did not believe in God, how could she have prayed to him? And, further, how could she have derived any measure of solace from prayer? Justine was coming to suspect that she was not the agnostic that she had all along believed herself to be. Now, beside the silent, prayerful Nangi, she bowed her head, too, asking silently for help and for strength.
By the time Nangi raised his head, Justine was prepared. 'Nangi-san,' she said, forsaking her American inclination to address friends by their first name, 'in the past, we have often not seen eye to eye.'
'I don't think this is so, Mrs Linnear.'
That damned politeness. 'This, I admit, has been mostly my fault,' Justine persevered. She knew she had to go on, that if she stopped for any reason, she might lack the courage to see this through to the end. 'I do not understand Japan. I do not understand the Japanese. I am an outsider here; a foreigner.'
'You are the wife of Nicholas Linnear,' Nangi said, as if this was all she needed to be.
Listen to me! she wanted to scream. Instead, she took a deep breath, said, 'Nangi-san, I wish to learn. I wish to work hard at an elementary level.'
Nangi seemed uncomfortable with this idea. 'This is not necessary, Mrs Linnear. You are already well thought of.'
Justine said, 'I wish, as a child must, to become recognized in this society.'
Nangi said nothing for a time. The choir practice was finished. He could hear the faint rustlings and whisperings of the children as they departed. In the nave, to one side, candles were being lit. Echoes came to him, as soft as raindrops.
'Change,' Nangi said at last, 'is often for the best if it has been preceded by thought.'
'I've thought about this a lot.'
Nangi nodded. 'Have you discussed this with your husband?'
Justine sighed inwardly. Sadness gripped her heart. 'Nicholas and I have not spoken much lately.'
Nangi's head swung around until his good eye was upon her. A Westerner would have said, Is anything wrong? Nangi said, 'I have spoken very little to Linnear-san myself. He seems somehow . . . different. The doctors . . . ?'
Now Justine sighed out loud. 'The doctor is useless in this situation. He says that Nicholas is suffering from a kind of post-operative stress syndrome. I don't believe he has grasped the nature of the situation.'
'Which is?'
'I don't know,' she confessed. 'At least, I'm not sure. But Nicholas's black mood seems to stem from his inability to practise his martial arts.' '
Nangi involuntarily sucked in his breath. Dear God, he thought, protect us now. Through his shock, he felt insinuating again that terrifying premonition of an oncoming storm, malevolent, sentient. He remembered all too well his perception of a moral twilight falling upon him and those around him. 'Are you quite certain of this, Mrs Linnear?'
'Yes,' Justine said without hesitation. 'I saw him in his workout room. He was unable to function.'
'Was there a physical impairment?'
'I don't think so, no.'
Nangi appeared to take her at her word, and now Justine could see the distress in his face.
She was about to say, What is it? Then began to think furiously. 'Are we thinking along the same lines?' she said.
'Perhaps. In the martial arts, Mrs Linnear, the mental often controls the physical. If one's mind is not properly attuned, aligned or trained, one cannot master the martial arts. This is difficult for many Westerners to comprehend.' He gave her a small smile. 'Forgive me, I mean no offence. But you said that you wished to learn. What I say is most basic, and that is part of its power.'
He paused a moment, as if collecting his thoughts. 'When one first begins martial arts training, one is more often than not given the most menial tasks to fulfil. Day in, day out the novice often feels that his life is filled with drudgery. Some students, disillusioned, give up their training. The others - the ones who will eventually go on to become sensei, masters themselves, learn patience and humility. Without these qualities, no form of martial arts skill is possible.
'But the mental aspect goes far deeper and, in Nicholas's case, it becomes everything.' Justine noted Nangi's switch to using Nicholas's Christian name, and wondered what it meant. 'You see, Mrs Linnear, your husband is one of those rare people who have mastered Aka-i-ninjutsu. He is what we call a Red Ninja. He has learned the good side of this specialized martial arts discipline.'
'You mean, there are other forms of ninjutsu?' Justine asked.
Nangi nodded. 'There is the Black Ninja, the Red Ninja's opposite side. Saigo was a Black Ninja. He practised the Kuji-kiri, the Nine-Hands-Cutting. A kind of magic.'
'Like his hypnosis on me.'
'Precisely.' Nangi found himself hoping that her basic knowledge of what Nicholas was would help her accept without fear what he had to tell her now. 'But the Kuji-kiri is only one of many dark and deadly Black ninjutsu.' Shadows fell away from Nangi's face as he turned more
fully towards her. In this light/the deep lines time and the war had etched into his face were more prominent. 'Nicholas has mastered Getsumei no michi, the Moonlit Path. It is a mental discipline that is both his gateway and his solace, his strength and his refuge. You said before that you did not believe that Nicholas had a physical disability resulting from his operation.'
Justine felt the fear crawling like a serpent in her stomach. But, too, she felt curiously empty there, as if the serpent had no substance, but instead belonged to another, less substantial world. 'What are you saying?' she whispered.
'If one is trained in Getsumei no michi,' Nangi said, 'and, one day, one reaches for it, and it is no longer there - ' He paused, as if unsure how to proceed. 'The magnitude of the loss, Mrs Linnear, would be incalculable. Consider the simultaneous loss of all your five senses - sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch - and you will have some measure of what the loss of Getsumei no michi is like. But only a measure. It would be more. Far more.'
'I cannot imagine such a thing.' Justine was sick with shock. 'Is this what has happened to Nicholas?'
'Only he can tell us, Mrs Linnear,' Nangi said. 'But I pray with all my heart that it is not so.'
'After Lew Croaker lost his hand,' Justine said, 'I had the feeling that Nicholas was intent on putting aside his interest in ninjutsu. Isn't it possible that that phase of his life is ended?'
'It will end,' Nangi said, 'only when he is dead.' He pressed his hands together almost as if he wished again to pray. 'You must understand that ninjutsu is not something one just decides one day he will learn. Similarly, it is not a plaything that one can pick up and put down at a whim. It is certainly nothing on which one can turn one's back. Ninjutsu is, rather, an integrated way of life. Once entered, it can never be renounced.'
Nangi turned more fully towards her. 'Mrs Linnear, you no doubt have heard or seen the word michi.'
Justine nodded. 'It means a path or a journey.'
'In a sense,' Nangi said. 'Michi can also mean duty. So when one speaks of michi as a path, it is a path off which one steps only at the most extreme peril. Michi is, in effect, life's journey. Once begun, lliere can be no turning back.'
'But, surely, one is free to change one's life.'
'Oh, yes,' Nangi said. 'But always within the confines of michi.'
Justine's heart seemed made of lead. 'You mean that once Nicholas chose to be a ninja, it was for life?'
'Perhaps ninjutsu chose him, Mrs Linnear.' Nangi's face seemed sad to her. 'We must not discount that possibility. And, if this is so, then Nicholas's karma still lies ahead of him.'
'Why should this be so?, How does ninjutsu come to have so much power over a man?'
Nangi pondered how he should answer her. He decided on the truth. 'Ninjutsu is an ancient art,' he began. 'Older even than Japan itself.'
'The Japanese did not create it?'
'No. We Japanese are not good at creating. Our forte is in refining. Our language, much of our culture has its origins in China. We took the Chinese language, for instance, pared it down, made its ideograms more streamlined. That is Japanese. So it is with ninjutsu. Its origins lie somewhere in China, although, to my knowledge, no one knows precisely where it comes from or from what sensei it developed. Ninjutsu is most likely a synthesis of many ancient disciplines distilled down. Refined. Its extreme age is, for one thing, part of its power. For another, the element of mysticism involved makes it a life's work.' He showed her a small smile. 'One couldn't, to give a Western example, imagine
Merlin renouncing his work, becoming a fanner instead of a magician.'
Justine did not feel at all reassured. On the contrary, she had begun to feel chilled. 'Perhaps if we were to learn more about the origins of ninjutsu, we could understand it better. We could help Nicholas.'
'But that is impossible, Mrs Linnear. You are asking to know the unknowable.'
Justine felt as if they were all in a maze. She reasoned that there had to be a way out. 'You have mentioned Red and Black ninjutsu, whose strictures are, as you've said, more severe than even the Catholic priesthood.' Justine studied him. 'Maybe Nicholas could change from Red to - Are there other forms of ninjutsu?'
'No.' Nangi seemed about to go on, then hesitated.
Justine sensed something. 'Perhaps a student should not be given too much knowledge at once,' she said, learning from him just by watching him. 'But a wife has certain privileges a student does not.'
For a moment, Nangi seemed very old. He was thinking
that perhaps he had underestimated her, after all. By the
force of her intellect and her intuition she had come to the
heart of the matter. He nodded, and his face was once
more in shadow. 'Very well,' he said. 'I spoke the truth
when I said that there were only two forms of ninjutsu,
Red and Black. However, there is a term, Shiro Ninja.
It means White Ninja.'
The silence stretched out for so long that Justine found herself compelled to say, 'White Ninja. What is that?'
'That,' said Nangi with great pain, 'is a ninja who has lost his powers.' He did not, as yet, want to tell her all of it, that for Shiro Ninja the loss of his powers was secondary to his loss of faith. That was something to which Nangi could relate.
Justine  thought  she  was  beginning  to understand
Nicholas's recent behaviour. 'Could this be why Nicholas has chosen to shut-me out?'
'It is likely,' Nangi nodded. 'For someone such as Nicholas, Shiro Ninja is his worst nightmare come true. At such a time as this, he would not want you close to him.'
'Why not? I could help him. He's so alone now, drawn into himself.'
Nangi's eyes seemed restless, roving the nave, the lines of dark wooden pews. 'Please try to understand, Mrs Linnear. He would be vulnerable to assault. Naturally, he would not want you near him at a time like this.'
'Assault?' Justine felt the serpent of fear uncoiling, slithering. 'Saigo and Akiko are dead. Who would want to harm him?'
Nangi said nothing.
Justine, her nerves at hair-trigger level, sensed something. 'What aren't you telling me? Nangi-san, please tell me. I must know. My life is disintegrating and I don't know why. Do you?'
Nangi stared at her out of his good eye, his gaze steady. 'Mrs Linnear, Shiro Ninja, White Ninja, is a wholly created state. Do you understand me? It is a subtle kind of attack. An ultimate attack by someone proficient in Kan-aka-na-ninjutsu, Black ninjutsu.'
"Then there is someone out there; another enemy. A Black Ninja sensei.'
Nangi's good eye closed for just a moment. 'Even Black Ninja sensei do not have sufficient knowledge to induce Shiro Ninja, Mrs Linnear.'
Justine could barely speak. A terror such as she hail never known before had enwrapped her in its coils. She shivered, as if with the onset of winter. 'Who then?' It was a whisper, hoarse and constricted.
'It is not to be spoken of,' Nangi said. 'It is a dorokusai, a thing reeking of slime.'
123
'What is that? For God's sake, Narigi-san, tell me!' 'Patience.' In an extraordinary gesture, Nangi put his hand briefly over hers. 'Let us find Nicholas, Mrs Linnear. Let him tell us what has happened. If he is, indeed, Shiro Ninja, then you will need to know everything.'
Cotton Branding and Shisei ate lobsters he cooked on the gas grill, stir-fried vegetables that Shisei sizzled in an electric wok she found, a salad of local greens, and thick chunks of Italian bread. She arranged it all so artfully it made Branding want to take a picture of it. The stunning visual display somehow made the food taste all the better.
They went through a six-pack of beer,' and he was returning to the refrigerator for a second six-pack before he realized it.
Branding knew that he was besotted - with sex, with food, with the beer - but, mostly, with Shisei. He did not ever want her to leave. He thought that he might be content going with her from bedroom to kitchen and back again for the rest of his life. It was a dream, of course, but a happy dream, an ecstatic dream, and Branding revelled in it.
They spoke of many things. Branding, lolling on the great porch, feeling the wet mist rolling in off the water, hearing it muffle the constant pounding of the surf, contrived to speak as little as possible. He was fairly far gone, but not so far that a tiny central piece of him had not stopped testing her.
During all this long afternoon and evening, Branding, happier than he had ever been since the early days of his marriage to Mary, before the birth of his daughter, whom he loved but who created with her dyslexia an unimaginable chaos and grief, had been more or less waiting for Shisei to bring up the topic of his work and, especially, his upcoming political battle with his personal nemesis, Douglas Howe.
Shisei was, frankly, too good to be true. The fact that she had come into his life at just this moment had embedded itself in his psyche and, like a pearl growing inside an oyster, had festered, prodding him back to reality when the dazzling sheen of his ecstasy had begun to wear off.
It was no wonder that he was becoming paranoid. Branding suspected that Douglas Howe, and Howe's dogged persistence in opposing Branding's Ascra bill, was finally getting to him. Acting on the findings of a five-year report commissioned by the Washington-based Johnson Institute, the Defense Department's Advanced Strategic Computer Research Agency had petitioned Capitol Hill for a four-billion-dollar funding over five years in order to finance the Hive Project. Branding, as Chairman of the Senate Fiscal Oversight Committee, had been the first to see the report, and the first to act on it.
The Hive Project involved constructing a computer that was based not on a single processor, like conventional computers were, but rather on an interconnecting neural network of a complexity not unlike that in the brain of a bee - hence the project name.
This computer would, in effect, be able to think. Using radar, sonar and Loran, it and subsequent versions, so the Johnson Institute report showed, could distinguish between friend or foe; it could choose a weapon's path, and change it instantaneously to suit incoming intelligence from the field; it could recognize, and respond to, human speech. The applications seemed endless.
Douglas Howe, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was dead set against Branding's Ascra bill. His argument was that he did not want to foster another disaster on the order of the recent Artificial Intelligence Initiative. Four hundred million dollars had been allocated for a fever-pitch run at constructing a 'cognitive artificial brain'. So much money had been dropped in the
researchers' laps at once that they did not know what to do with it and, consequently, great chunks of the funding disappeared down an unknown drain. But Branding knew that Howe's reasoning was only skin deep.
The fight, which had long been simmering, now threatened to boil over into what many people on Capitol Hill saw as a personal vendetta, as Howe sought to destroy or, at the very least, cripple Branding's enormous influence in the Senate. This influence was now symbolized by the Ascra bill.
The increasingly bitter conflict had become something more than Democrat versus Republican or even liberal versus conservative. It had about it now something of a pitched battle, with the combatants dug in on both sides, armed to the teeth, and determined that only one would survive the final assault.
But Shisei had continued to surprise him, just as she had ever since they had met at Tippy North's masque. Rather than ask questions about his work, she spoke of those subjects about which she seemed the most passionate: ecology and sex. Branding, beginning to understand Shisei's personality, saw that she was obsessed with health: a healthy world, a healthy life. To her, a vigorous sex life was as integral to a healthy life as eating the right foods or daily exercise.
And again Branding was struck by the essentially childlike qualities lurking beneath the woman's glowing skin. She possessed a kind of naivety - a straightforwardness of purpose - that to Branding was as exciting as it was refreshing.
From inside the house, George Shearing interpreted 'Mood Indigo' in a typically lush arrangement. Branding's eyes closed dreamily. He half-heard Shisei say she was going to take a shower.
He felt her passing by him. Then he was alone on the porch with the night, the sea and the music. He inhaled
deeply of the heavy, salt air, luxuriating in its purity.
George Shearing disappeared in mid-note and, a moment later, Grace Jones's sinewy vocals were imprinting themselves on the even-tempoed surf. Branding was reminded of the long afternoon's session of ecstatic love-making. Surprisingly, he felt himself stirring, becoming aroused all over again. He imagined Shisei's body spread upon his bed, and he felt lust clotting his veins as if it were a drug.
He rose, aware that his loose white cotton trousers were already tented at the crotch. He pushed open the screen door, and Grace Jones's voice washed over him. Memories writhed in his head.
He went past the kitchen, through the living-room, down the hall. The music followed him, twisting along the corridor as if it were his companion. He could hear the sound of the water spray, and opened the door to the bathroom.
It was steamy and hot inside. Branding undid his trousers, stepped out of them. He stripped off his voile shirt. He could see Shisei's body, a dark shape moving behind the translucent shower curtain. Her back was to him, her arms upstretched into the curving spray, her hands encircling the shower head as, before, they had encircled him.
He was very hard. He could feel the throbbing between his legs, and sucked in his breath. He felt like a sex machine. He felt twenty-five again.
As he watched Shisei washing herself, Branding smiled, remembering that she had not wanted to turn her back to him, that now he could take her from behind, coupling as animals did, as Branding had never done with his wife or with any of the women he had been ultimate with before Mary.
He was trembling with desire, fired by the sight of her, hazy and indistinct behind the thin curtain, one filmy
layer, a storm of painted violets swaying, rivulets of water running through them . . .
Branding grasped the shower curtain and, in one quick gesture, drew it aside. And stood transfixed, staring at Shisei's back.
It was one of those moments in one's life that did not last more than a tenth of a second but which seemed to last a lifetime - image imprinted upon the retina, burned upon the brain for all time. It was akin to the moment when Branding had learned that his daughter was dyslexic; when it had become clear to him that Mary, the woman he loved, did not particularly enjoy sex. They were infinitesimal moments in one's life; yet charged with such power that they irrevocably changed one's life.
And like all such moments, this one was chaotic. Branding stared at Shisei's back, at, more properly, the perfectly hideous detailed tattoo there, of a spider. It was gigantic, covering the entire area of her back, the obscene cluster of eight red eyes atop its small head, the two pairs of spread appendages from which venom is secreted to paralyse and liquefy its prey, its eight hairy, articulated legs stretching from one shoulder-blade to the other, from the top of one buttock to the other.
And then Shisei reacted. Her head jerked around, looking back over her shoulder. Her torso moved and, with the play of her back muscles, the spider moved, dancing in nauseating cadence to the sinuous drift of Grace Jones's vocals.
Branding screamed.
I must be going crazy, Tomi thought. With the night had come the rain, like a curtain coming down on the last tableau held by actors upon a stage. It was a red rain, or a blue rain depending on which glowing sign one was passing. Masses of umbrellas held at an acute angle to keep
the wind from inverting them clogged Tokyo, turning the streets into fields filled with disquieting black flowers, storm-tossed, beading moisture down the stretched nylon and rice-paper.
Headlights washed like klieg lights across these thick swathes of living matter, highlighting faces and hands as if they were segments of one vast millipede making its laborious way across the city.
Tomi, on her way home from work, ducked into a brilliantly lit pachinko parlour. Her feet and legs were wet, and she was tired of being herded into puddles by the twists and turns of the ceaselessly moving millipede on the streets.
She had tried to find Nicholas Linnear's whereabouts. She had first called his office at Sato International, but they had no idea where he might be. His home number went unanswered. She had dialled Sato International again, asked to speak to a vice-president. This time, she had learned the cause of Nicholas's absence and, on a hunch, asked for the name of his surgeon. Then she called the surgeon's office and had a bit more luck. They informed her that he had an appointment with Dr Hanami at ten the next morning. Tomi had decided to meet him there.
In truth, however, Nicholas Linnear was not uppermost in her mind. Senjin Omukae was. That individual was rapidly assuming dominance over the policewoman, and this fact in and of itself was disturbing to Tomi. If only that were the end of it, she felt perhaps she could, in time, handle what seemed to her a dereliction of her duty.
The fact that her individuality was asserting itself over the figure of Senjin had her really frightened. Senjin Omukae was not only her commander and, therefore, forbidden, he was Senjin the individualist, the Opaque Man. This was his nickname among those outside the Homicide
division. He was - other than heroic - an unknown quantity. He was feared; even, it was rumoured, by those who had elevated bun to division commander.
That she should be drawn to this man was a source of growing unease for Tomi. Which was why, on this rainy night, she decided to go to see the Scoundrel.
The Scoundrel, otherwise known as Seji Hikoko, was her best friend. They had met in school and it had been the Scoundrel who had supported her when she had made her traumatic break with her family, with her entire way of life. In this way, he was like Senjin. He saw and appreciated her for what she was, not merely a woman to be kept in her place. In response, it had been Tomi who had tutored the Scoundrel in his advanced level philosophy tutorials when he was in danger of failing those courses.
As a result, there was an intimate bond between the two that Tomi had never had with anyone else, even -especially! - a member of her own family.
The Scoundrel had a usagigoya - literally a rabbit hutch - what the Japanese called a modern Tokyo apartment: tiny, cramped, virtually airless. Still, it was a place to sleep.
The Scoundrel's usagigoya was in Asakusa, where he often rubbed elbows with Kabuki actors and sumo wrestlers. It was Tomi's favourite part of town, but it made her melancholy as well, for it reminded her of her lowly station in life. As a police sergeant she could not afford to live here, even in a place as minuscule as a rabbit hutch.
The Scoundrel was home. But then he was always home at this hour, tinkering with his portable computer terminal, which now ran two to three times faster than it had when, he had traded for it. The Scoundrel never bought anything when he could barter for it. In the privacy of his home he liked to improve upon what others did. In this way he could assert his genius without exerting ego.
It was a Zen exercise, Tomi knew, a way to achieve the same kind of mind/no mind she strove for in her martial arts training. Hers was the more physical discipline, she knew, but hardly the more demanding.
She heard the careening music of Billy Idol as she went down the hall. And when the Scoundrel opened the door, the blast of rock 'n' roll almost bowled her over.
'Good God, how can you think with all that sound and fury?' she yelled, putting aside her umbrella and her shoes.
'Because it signifies nothing.' The Scoundrel grinned, pulled her inside, shut the door behind her. 'I can concentrate with it on.'
The music boomed from a pair of three-thousand-dollar speakers the Scoundrel had souped up, and Tomi felt as if she had encountered a g-force lift-off. She had to brace herself against the kineticism. She felt trapped within a huge pachinko game.
The place was, as usual, a mess. Masses of computer hardware were strewn like corpses upon a battlefield in seemingly random piles across the floor, the chairs, the small sofa, the top of the VCR. The TV screen was filled up with the image of Harrison Ford prowling the futuristic Los Angeles cityscape, searching for murderous replicants in Blade Runner.
The stereo glowed with a profusion of red and green pinpoints, waxing and waning with the volume of Billy Idol's vocals And, like Billy Idol, the Scoundrel had dyed his hair platinum. It stood up from his scalp like a bristly forest, longer on top, shorter on the sides. He was, like Tomi, in his early thirties. But while she had matured from the wispy teenager she had once been, he had retained the reedy, almost unformed shape of youth. He was like an oversized exuberant puppy, sloppy in his habits but lovable for all that.
Tomi stood making puddles on the floor, but the Scoundrel did not seem to care. There were times when Tomi needed to escape from the real world, filled with male pressure, constant fear of censure and loss of face. Here she could hide out amid the clutter and the chaos and the Scoundrel's eternal high spirits. She would help him with whatever projects he was working on, and feel useful and appreciated. But tonight she needed to think, so she prevailed on him to take a break, and come out with her for dinner.
They went where they always ended up, Koyanagi, their favourite shitamachi, an old-style businessman's restaurant, where they invariably ordered unagi, the broiled eel, which was the house speciality.
'What were you working on at the apartment?' Tomi asked when they had settled in, and had their first gulps of Sapporo beer.
'Oh, you know me.' The Scoundrel flashed his boyish grin. 'Always fooling around. I'm working on a borer, a computer software program that penetrates into other programs encoded for security.'
'Don't they already have things like that?'
'Hackers, yeah. There are some nasty ones around. And if the government finds who's using them, they throw 'em into jail until the next world war.' He grinned again. 'But the one I'm working on is different. I've named it mantis, which stands for Manmade Nondiscriminatory Tactical Integrated-circuit Smasher.'
The Scoundrel's grin widened at the blank look on her face. "The essence of the long name is that mantis is adaptable, meaning it can, in its own way, think. Every locked program has its own individual defence, so normally if you wanted to break in, you'd have to contour a specialized program.. My borer is set up to attack any defence, and get through.'
Tomi laughed. His genius often stunned her. 'You'd
better not let the government know what you're up to/
'Nan. There's zip chance of that,' he said around a gulp of beer.
'I don't get it,' Tomi said, intrigued. 'You work for Nakano Industries, one of the largest electronics designing and manufacturing keiretsu in the country. The government must oversee Nakano the way they do all the major corporations.'
'Oh, they do. The MITI people are always over for meetings.' The Scoundrel paused as he craned his neck, peering around the restaurant. The gesture was such an outlandish parody of a spy at work that she giggled. 'The fact is,' he said, returning his gaze to her,, 'that my boss is head of the advanced research and development department at Nakano. The stuff we're doing is so theoretical, he tells me that the MITI people leave him alone.'
The Scoundrel finished his beer, ordered refills for them both. 'My boss is a vice-president at Nakano. I've been working for this guy for a year and a hah7 now. He reviewed my file, picked me out of the engineering section, interviewed me over the course of a week. I must have passed some kind of test he was putting me through. Anyway, six months ago, he agreed to let me work on this borer project I dreamed up, which is anything but theoretical. In fact, it's just about ready to roll now.' He grinned. 'I'm not really supposed to tell anyone anything about it, but I don't think that includes you.'
That was just like the Scoundrel, Tomi thought, making up the rules as he went along.
'Hey,' he said suddenly. 'Remember when I was promoted out of my engineering department?'
'How could I forget?' Tomi said, laughing. 'I threw you a party that lasted the entire weekend. Remember that woman from my office who told ghost stories all night?'
'Are you kidding? I'm lucky I remember my name
after that blow-out. We did in a case of Suntory Scotch, didn't we?'
Tomi nodded. 'Among other cases.' She was smiling. 'Those were the days.'
The Scoundrel, downing his Sapporo, watched the smile fade from her face like the colour out of a cherry blossom. 'I see you've got weight tonight.' To him, weight was synonymous with sadness, lightness with happiness. 'If that's the case, you've come to the right boy. What's hung the stone around your neck?'
'Around my heart, more like it,' Tomi said.
'Ah! L'affaire d'amour. Bien! Please explicate your predicament, madame.'
Tomi couldn't help but smile. 'Is everything a joke to you?'
'Sure. Life's a joke, Tomi. Or have you been too busy to notice?'
'I guess lately I have.'
He winked. 'We'll soon put you right. Now give it to me straight. Don't hold anything back. I can take it. I promise I won't faint.'
This was just what Tomi had wanted. But now she hesitated, wondering whether it made sense to tell the Scoundrel about Senjin Omukae. After all, this was very serious business to her, while to the Scoundrel it was already I'affaire d'amour, a situation of which he was more than likely to make fun.
'All right,' he said, crossing his arms over his chest. 'I can see those two vertical lines above the bridge of your nose. I know you well enough to know that they only come out when you're really concerned. So no jokes.' He gestured. 'Cross my heart.'
Tomi was immediately relieved, and she launched into her tale of attraction and uneasiness, of confused emotions, of the attendant submergence of her policewoman persona, and of her fear of the moral repercussions.
When she was finished, she watched the Scoundrel's face for any sign of what he thought. But he had his face buried in his beer glass, and she could tell nothing.
At last, the Scoundrel said, 'You obviously want my advice, so I'll give it to you, though I don't think you'll like what I'm going to say.' He drained his glass. 'It's very simple. Forget this guy. From what you've told me, he's not for you. But even if he were, he's your commander. The situation's so dangerous that the risk of going further's not worth it.' He put aside his empty glass. 'Now I'll shut up, we'll eat dinner, and you can digest what I've said along with the unagi.'
As she ate, Tomi tried to sort out her feelings. She knew that she should have been relieved by what the Scoundrel had said. She recognized in his counsel an echo of what a part of her had suspected all along. The best course was for her to bury her feelings for S,enjin Omukae, to continue with her life as if he were merely her commander.
But Tomi felt no sense of relief, only a growing despair. For now, as the Scoundrel had clarified the situation, she knew that she would not take the best course, that her path lay in another, darker, less understandable direction.
If she had been the kind of woman to bury emotions she felt deeply, to allow herself to live a life acceptable to those around her but not to herself, she never would have hung up the phone ob her brother. The dutiful sister, she would have bowed to his wishes, returning home to marry the man he had chosen for her.
But she was not one to go blindly where an outdated notion of duty would heartlessly thrust her. At the terrifying moment of her break with her family, she had promised herself that from that moment on she would be true to herself, and to her own wishes. That must become the meaning of her life, or else her grand gesture, rejecting the traditional life, would have no meaning.
'I wish I could take your advice,' Tomi said.
The Scoundrel shrugged. 'Advice is cheap, even here where everything is expensive.'
'I know. But I value yours.'
He leaned forward. His face was unusually sombre. 'Then take my advice, Tomi. Go out. Have a fling. You deserve some fun.' That grin flashed again, lighting up his face. 'You're far too serious for your own good.'
She put her hand over his. 'Thanks, Seji. You're a good friend. Your heart is true.'
The Scoundrel, perhaps embarrassed by the compliment, slid his hand out from under hers. He studied her darkened face. 'Come on,' he said, spilling yen on to the table, 'I know a club in Roppongi where they don't allow either day or night to intrude on the non-stop festivities. We'll dance, get drunk, and say, To hell with everyone!'
Tomi, laughing again, let him lead her out into the rain- and colour-swept night. For the moment, at least, she could allow her anxieties to wait in abeyance while she floated in the Scoundrel's never-never land.
Cotton Branding sat naked and shivering on the edge of the porcelain tub, his head in his hands. Shisei stood in front of him, dripping water on to his bare legs. Behind him, the shower rattled the plastic curtain with its painted violets so that they appeared to dance as if in a wind.
'So,' Shisei said, 'now that you have seen all of me, you are like the rest. Your desire has turned to disgust.'
'That's not true.'
'If you could only see yourself. You can't even look at me.'
It was the contempt in her voice that broke the spell of horror that had enveloped him. He raised his head, stared at her. 'Nothing has changed, Shisei.'
'Oh, please. Spare me your politician's easy lies. I see your face. Everything has changed.'
'Not everything,' he said. He rubbed his hands one against the other, as if needing to warm them before a fire. 'Give me a moment. Please.' He stood up. 'We've startled - maybe even frightened - each other. The least we can do is retire to neutral comers before we come out for the next round.' He gave her a wan smile. 'And perhaps there won't be a next round.'
Shisei gave a little shiver, and he reached past her, handed her a towel. "Thank you,' she said. She wrapped it around herself, letting the moisture soak into the absorbent cloth.
Branding turned off the shower. He said, 'I think I've had all the shocks I care to have in one night.'
'The shock,' she said sadly, 'is what most people feel. But it isn't all. The tattoo revolts them.'
Branding registered surprise. 'If you care what other people think, then why did you have it done?'
She looked at him for a moment. 'I'm cold,' she said. 'I want to put some clothes on.'
He handed Shisei her cover-up, but she said, 'No. I want something of yours.'
He went and got one of his pyjama tops, gave it to her. That was all she needed; it came midway down her thighs. She buttoned it, her gold nails shining. The shoulders hung off her in an endearing fashion.
As if the enormous house had suddenly become too small, or still retained the detritus of the recent emotional conflagration, they went outside.
They stared out into the night. The Atlantic crashed all around them, and periodically the doleful foghorn from the nearby lighthouse intruded on the pull and suck of the surf. For once, the gulls were quiet, walking stiffly along the beach, peering here and there for the last morsels of food of the day.
Above their heads, the sky was perfectly clear, strewn with glittering stars, hard, bright, piercing the canvas of
the heavens with their blue, yellow and white light.
But off to the south, the horizon was cluttered with a long cloudbank, which Branding estimated must stretch for several hundred miles.
Now, as they watched, lightning began to flicker and spark within the clouds. Seen sometimes as fiery, jagged flashes, sometimes as great flowering bursts illuminating sections of the cloudbank, the heat lightning played out its stunning silent concerto across a keyboard too vast to comprehend.
This exhibition of Nature's handiwork was humbling, indeed. For Branding, it served to put into perspective human concerns and anxieties, which seemed, in comparison, both fleeting and inconsequential.
After a time, the cloudbank relapsed into darkness; the show was over. They went back inside.
They sat on the down-filled sofa, low lamplight spilling warmly across them. The eerie revelation of a while ago seemed not to have happened, or to have been something they had imagined.
The shock was gone. And, in its place, what? Branding knew he very much wanted to find out.
He had poured out snifters of brandy for them both, and they sipped slowly, deliberately, silently understanding that they needed to rescue their equilibrium.
Shisei's hair, shining and still damp, reminded him of a mink's pelt, close and soft and precious. The fringe of blond colour above her eyes made her seem at this moment somehow more vulnerable. Then, like a shock of cold water, he remembered the spider etched across her back, and he thought, This is a different kind of mink.
'Shisei,' Branding said, before she had a chance to speak, 'I don't want to be like all the others.'
For a long moment, she said nothing. Her eyes, dark as night, held steady on his. 'Is that the politician or the man talking?' she said finally.
'The man, I hope. I want it to be the man,' Branding said truthfully.
Shisei briefly closed her eyes. 'And I want to believe you.' She put her snifter down. 'You scared me, Cook, when you came in on me like that. I wasn't prepared. The truth is, I hadn't yet thought of a way to tell you - or to show you all of me.'
'Is all of you so terrible?'
Shisei snatched up her brandy, and Branding caught a hint of the vulnerable woman she was so afraid of revealing. 'You tell me,' she said.
'The image is a terrifying one.' He caught the momentary flash of anger in her eyes as she glanced at him, then away. He was reminded of his daughter when she was a child. She had often looked at him that way when he had said no to her. But it passed, and her love for him would always prevail.
'I don't care for spiders,' Branding went on. 'I don't know anyone who does.' He slowed his pace, understanding that he needed to feel his way in the face of this unknown, for his sake as well as for hers. 'But, on the other hand, it's a tattoo, a work of art.' He saw her shudder. 'And, because it's on your body, I admit I'm intrigued. Will you tell me how it came to be done? It must have been a project, tattooed over a period of time.'
Two years,' Shisei said, as if this were a fact to be proud of, as if this were the only aspect of the existence of the spider to which she could point with pride.
'A long time.'
He had meant it as an assurance. But, hearing his words, she put the snifter to her lips, drained all the brandy at once. She swallowed convulsively, almost choking on the fiery liquor. Her eyes watered, and she wiped them with the heel of her hand. 'Oh, God, Cook, you don't know how long.'
'Was it painful?'
'My soul hurt, for years afterwards,' Shisei said. "The other pain was nothing. It disappeared like mist in sunlight.'
'I want to know what happened,' Branding said.
'We have already established that many topics are taboo.' Shisei poured herself more brandy, drank more slowly this time. Then she said, 'Cook, what did you do after your wife died, when you hurt so much you thought you'd never recover? Didn't the emptiness make the days endless? Didn't you wait in the night for death to come; didn't you hear it breathing close beside you, see its red eyes like lamps hanging in the blackness? And didn't, oh, once, twice, didn't you long to tumble into the oblivion death held in its hand like a prize?'
Branding was taken aback by the extremes of her emotions. He knew that she was describing herself, not him. He had never felt such utter despair as she described, even after the initial shock of Mary's death had worn off. And now he supposed that, at least in part, this is what had triggered his guilt. But he knew that how he answered Shisei was very important. She appeared on the verge of opening up, and he knew that he possessed the power to push her one way or the other.
'The human condition is such that life goes on, no matter the depths of despair into which one is plunged,' Branding said. 'I did ... To be perfectly frank, I'm not sure what I saw or heard after Mary died. I only know that I see the car, upside down and still smouldering; I see her body on a stretcher, a blanket over her head. I hear a TV commentator speaking about her death in the same clipped, detached phrases he spoke of Vietnam casualties and the death of American Marines hi Beirut. I keep thinking that death should not be degraded by being made impersonal or reduced to its lowest common denominator.'
Shisei sighed, and it was as if the last hour had not
occurred. 'You will not forsake me, Cook, the way the others have,' she said. 'I know that now.' She put her head against the sofa back, and she seemed once more so much the little girl that Branding felt his heart pounding. He wanted to take her in his arms, to protect her, to tell her everything would be all right.
But he knew that he would do nothing of the kind.
He could sense that the two of them had reached a kind
of shared nadir and, tike two motes suspended in fluid,
the next moment would tell in which direction they would
spin.
'You can't know what that means to me, Cook.' Her fingers were lost in her hair, pulling it hard, as if the pain were also part of her penance. 'I have been . . . treated poorly; I have been abused. I have loved, and have been punished for that love.'
Branding stared at her as if seeing her for the first time. She was like an iceberg. He was wondering just how much of her was hidden below the surface of a dark and stormy sea.
'You've survived, Shisei,' he said. 'In the end, isn't that what's important?'
'Have you ever been imprisoned?' Shisei said, as if to tell him that he knew nothing about the condition of her life. 'I have.' She lifted her arm over her head, pointing to the creature that had become a part of her. "This spider is my penance - and my reward.'
Branding was once more trying to fathom the nuances, the facets of her personality he could from time to time glimpse tike the heat lightning they had seen tonight. 'Shisei,' he said, 'I don't understand.'
But she was already bent over, weeping into her hands. And when at last he heard her voice, it caused a shiver to run down his spine.
'Cook,'she whispered,'I pray to God that you neverwill.'
Tanzan Nangi lived in an uncommonly spacious wooden house that dated back to the turn of the century. It had been built for the most famous Kabuki actor of his time, and only because the actor's son had fallen into disrepute had it come into Nangj's hands.
His impressive, wide-eaved structure sat amidst an extravagant garden of ornamental cherry, dwarf maple and cryptomeria trees. Flat stones, some great, some small, were set into the earth between fern, sheared azalea and purple gem rhododendrons, creating a serene environment. Inside, the main passageways between rooms were glassed-in so that one could feel even in the most inclement weather that one was in the midst of the garden.
Nangi sat alone, staring through the glass at a gibbous moon that plunged in and out of indigo clouds.
Hie house was silent all around him; it smelled of cedar and lemon oil. Nangi, sipping green tea that he had brewed himself, was sunk deep in thought. He was rerunning his extremely disturbing conversation with Justine Linnear. He had to admit that he was grateful to her. In brashly coming to see him, she had forced him to face what he was coming to conclude was a baffling and thoroughly terrifying situation.
If Nicholas was, indeed, Shiro Ninja, it meant that he was under attack. By whom, and for what reason? Nangi had told Justine that even a Black Ninja sensei lacked the ability to create Shiro Ninja in an adept such as Nicholas. Now Nangi shuddered at the thought of what concentrated evil might be out there in the night, crouching, readying itself for the kill. If, as he was beginning to suspect, that kind of elemental power were arrayed against them, then only Nicholas could save them. Yet, according to Justine, Nicholas was without his powers.
Instinct told Nangi to retreat. A general who finds himself facing an army of superior strength retires from
the field of battle because the safety of his forces is paramount. He must either retreat or discover another, unconventional path to victory because a frontal assault will clearly end in disaster.
Nangi heard a small sound behind him, but he did not turn around. The faint scent of night-blooming jasmine infused the room, and he filled another celadon cup with tea.
With a rustle of silk, Umi crossed the tatami mats. Now, without a sound, she knelt beside him, accepting the offering of the green tea. Nangi was aware of her huge dark eyes watching him even as she sipped.
Umi said, 'It was cold in bed without you beside me. I dreamt that the house was inhabited by a storm, and I opened my eyes to find that I was alone.'
In the almost-dark, Nangi smiled. He was used to the poetic way in which Umi spoke. She was a dancer, and whichever medium she chose to express herself was bound to be rife with layers of meaning.
'I had not meant to wake you,' he said. He understood by her use of the word 'storm' that she had felt the agitation of his spirit.
She put her hand on him. Umi, whose name meant the sea, thus calmed him, bringing him back to that low place inhabited by water, where one can think, one can gain power in the shadows and the silence.
Nangi said, 'Music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all, but you are the music while the music lasts.'
Umi, very close to him, said, 'When I was fifteen you gave me a book by T. S. Eliot. I had never before encountered a Western mind that intrigued me or was filled with such light. I remember that quote from the book you gave me.'
That was typical of Umi. She learned everything; she forgot nothing. Though she was only twenty-four, she was far wiser than women three times her age. She was
a student who, without being aware of it, had become a master. That was also typical of Umi. She was egoless, could therefore absorb philosophy on the deepest level, incorporating it into her spirit, widening the breadth of her power: the width of a circle. Umi was a sensei of myth, the mystical and the Tao. The life-force of the universe was in her heart.
Umi took his hands in her own, placing them palms down. Nangi felt the warmth seeping out of her like the crack of light from a window in a solitary house encountered by a winter wayfarer when night comes down.
She was so beautiful - not only her face, but her body as well: slender, graceful, sinuous and strong like a young tree that had survived winds, rain and snow.
'There is darkness here,' Umi said, 'beyond the night.' Gripping each of his fingers in turn, she said, 'Emptiness and chaos. The stability of the world is threatened. The Spider Woman calls, and the axis wobbles. Ice comes.'
Nangi knew that she was speaking of part of the Amerindian Hopi myth of creation: the death of the Second World, before the creation of this one, doomed to an eternal ice age by the Spider Woman, who sings the Song of Creation, because of the unremitting evil of its inhabitants.
If the Spider Woman called it was because of the existence of inordinate evil. This was what Umi meant. Nangi's skin began to crawl. It was true, then, an enemy of extraordinary malevolence had targeted Nicholas. Fear burst full blown like a bomb blast upon his consciousness. He wanted to pray to God, but he could not. He was cut off by his own sins, incapable of finding exculpation. He realized, with a start, that he had been rendered as powerless as Nicholas. The loss of his faith was a devastating blow that he had pushed into the background because of the current crisis. But now he realized that it was part of the crisis.
Dear God, he thought, we are lost.
And, as if hearing his silent voice, Umi said, 'Though the Way is known, the many sin, living as though they had a different wisdom of their own.'
The Way meaning the Tao. Hearing echoes of Heraclitus in Umi's words calmed Nangi, reminding him that the knowledge of the ancients was available to him. Thinking of Heraclitus, he thought too of Sun Tzu, The Art of War; Yagyu Munenori, the synthesis of the sword and the mind, ichiri, the One Principle, the mind-set one must use when one cannot retreat in the face of an attack; the synthesis of the universe: the Tao.
In this manner, he conquered the chaos in his mind that the fear had engendered, brought himself back into focus. It was not only Shiro Ninja with which he had to contend, Nangi thought. His entire business partnership with Nicholas was threatened by Kusunda Ikusa and Nami. Now he wondered whether the two attacks were separate and distinct or whether they were a clever, concerted assault from two different directions.
Paranoia or truth? Nangi, spangled in silver moonlight, sitting close to the sea, knew that he would have to find out.
The next day, Nicholas went to see his surgeon. He took the train south-east into Tokyo, because he did not trust himself to drive, and he certainly did not want Justine to drive him, although part of him, perhaps, longed for just that.
He had spoken briefly to Nangi, explaining that he had made an appointment with the surgeon for later that morning and, depending on how he felt afterwards, he would either come into the office or not. Nangi's extreme solicitousness had set Nicholas's teeth on edge, another bad sign of his deteriorating emotional state.
The early morning mist rolled in heavy, oily undulations, inundating the green mountain-sides. The landscape was, otherwise, a blur, the result of the train's speed and Nicholas's fatigue.
The gentle vibrations lulled him, the far-off train whistle a melancholy reminder of his youth in a Japan struggling to overcome its shame at having lost the war, and in being remade in the image of the United States.
The soft song of the rails reminded him of the lullabies his mother used to sing him when she took him on trips by rail to visit his aunt Itami. Cheong considered Itami her sister, even though Itami was, in fact, the sister of Cheong's first husband, a Japanese officer killed in Singapore during the war. That was how Cheong and Colonel Denis Linnear had met: during the war • in Singapore. The Colonel had saved Cheong's life, and had fallen in love with her.
A time of danger, long ago and far away. But Nicholas held that spoken-of time close to him as if it were a magical talisman with which he could ward off the despair rising inside him.
But it was no use. His anger and his anxiety overflowed the inadequate vessel into which he placed it. He had misjudged its size as well as its strength. He wanted to be calm for this interview, to use patience, his mother's gift to him, in order to learn what he could about his loss of memory. He did not want to jump to conclusions but, sitting in the chill, air-conditioned train, shivering with the onset of anger adrenalin, he was afraid that he already had.
Tokyo was silver and grey. Fog enshrouded the vast neon corporate logos and advertisements in Shinjuku until their man-made reds, greens and blues were the colour of ash. The skyrises seemed cut off at the knees, as stubby and discoloured as an old man's decaying teeth.
Dr Hanami's office was on the twentieth floor of an
enormous skyrise complex complete with Plexiglas walkways and indoor gardens. Opposite his brushed bronze door, in fact, three black and white rocks rose from the sea of a small pebble garden.
Nicholas waited thirty minutes in a room lacquered to a glossy grey. He sat upon a grey tweed couch at right angles to six matching grey tweed chairs and across from the receptionist's grey metal desk. On the walls were two contemporary lithographs clumsily playing upon the delicacy of traditional ukiyo-e woodblock prints, combining them with images of the West: the Statue of Liberty, the front end of a vintage Corvette, a hamburger dripping ketchup. Nicholas hated them.
He got up, strode nervously to the window. Shards of the city could be seen through vertical grey metal blinds. He could not see the streets. The fog had left a film on the glass that turned a lurid rainbow hue in the dull shadowless light. He stared out across the plunging vertical canyon between the buildings. The fluorescent lights in the windows of a nearby skyrise burned through the haze with the lambent glow of an acetylene torch.
Nicholas heard the receptionist call his name.
Dr Hanami was a small, dapper man in his early fifties. He sported an immaculately-groomed moustache, and his iron-grey hair was shiny with cream. He wore a white medical smock, open over a grey pinstripe suit. His office was thick with cigarette smoke.
He took a last drag, stubbed out his busily burning butt in an overflowing ashtray, and waved Nicholas to a seat. He was punctilious about conforming to Nicholas's wish that he should not smoke in Nicholas's presence, but he seemed unaware that they often spoke through a noxious pall. After his visits to Dr Hanami, Nicholas invariably threw his clothes in the linen basket as soon as he got home.
'So,' Dr Hanami said, 'how's it going?' He said this
in English. Dr Hanami, who most often lunched on Bigu Makus from the local McDonald's, fancied himself a student of Americanisms.
Nicholas, slumped in a chrome and grey rubber chair, stared at him.
Dr Hanami played with his pewter lighter, turning it around and around between forefinger and thumb. 'I notice,' he said, 'that this isn't one of your regular visits.' He opened Nicholas's chart, scanned the pages. 'Everything looks just great here. The X-rays, the lab tests. Couldn't be better.' He looked up. 'Is there a problem?'
'Yes,' Nicholas said, resisting the urge to leap out of his seat. 'You could say that.'
'Um. And what form, may I ask, is this problem taking?' Around and around went the lighter, its dark pewter face catching the light of the overheads.
Nicholas, unable to bear sitting for a moment longer, sprang up. With a great clatter that startled Dr Hanami, Nicholas pulled aside the metal blinds, pressed his face against the window glass. It was still as foul as a petrochemical furnace out there; he could not get the burned smell out of his nostrils.
'Tell me, Doctor,' Nicholas said without turning around, 'have you ever been to Nara Prefecture?'
After a moment's silence, Dr Hanami said, 'Yes. Four years ago, I took my wife for a week's vacation to a spa in Nara. Hot mineral baths.'
'Then you know how beautiful it is there.'
'Yes, indeed. I often find myself thinking that we ought to go back. But, of course, there's never any time.'
Nicholas turned around; there was no point staring into that soup any longer, prolonging the agony. 'Doctor, have you ever wondered what life would be like if you suddenly could no longer perform an operation?'
Dr Hanami looked puzzled. 'Well, naturally, when I retire, I'll have to give this up - '
'No,' Nicholas said, his impatience betraying him, 'I mean now. At once. One moment to the next.' He snapped his fingers. 'Bang!'
'I can't say that I - '
'Well, the beauty of Nara, Doctor, where I studied martial arts for so long, is what I cannot live without. Not the beauty you and your wife see when you go to take your waters. Not that that beauty is inconsiderable. No, I'm talking about the beauty I've learned to see through Getsumei no michi. Do you know it? Hie Moonlit Path.'
Dr Hanami nodded. 'I've heard of it, of course. But I didn't know - ' Something either in Nicholas's face or his bearing caused the surgeon to pause. 'You're very different today,' he said. 'What has happened?'
Nicholas, feeling the pounding of his heart, sat back down facing Dr Hanami, but this time he was perched on the edge of the seat, leaning forward so that his head and upper torso crossed the intervening space between them. He was aware that his body was very tense. He rubbed his palms together, appalled that they were sweating.
'You asked what the problem is, and I'll tell you,' he said into Dr Hanami's face, the emotion bubbling up now so that he knew he could no longer control it. He pointed to the side of his head still healing from the operation. 'I can't fucking remember any of my martial arts training. It's gone, vanished, just as if it had never been there. I was up all night thinking about how this . . . impossibility . . . could have happened. And again and again I came back to the same answer, Doctor. The only answer that makes sense.' He was up on his feet now, his corded arms gripping the edge of Dr Hanami's desk. 'You and your trusty little scalpel did it to me. You took too big a slice out of me or maybe you nicked some adjacent tissue, I don't know which. But what I do know
is that my memory is gone, and you're to blame.'
Into the ringing silence, Dr Hanami said in Japanese, 'Perhaps some tea is called for.'
When faced with a crisis, Nicholas thought, fall back on the old traditions. The rage was so strong inside him, that he was trembling. He watched Dr Hanami ring through on his intercom, order the tea. When it came, on a black lacquer tray, the surgeon dismissed his receptionist, set about brewing the tea himself; taking pinches of the cut green leaves, dropping them into the boiling water, using the reed whisk at just the right speed to stir up the froth, turning the tiny porcelain cup around and around to ensure an even distribution.
There was something soothing, even comforting about the process. Its orderliness, its lack of spontaneity, its formality, even its stylized movements served to bring a sense of normalcy, of the patient procession of past to present to future firmly into focus.
Nicholas felt himself relaxing, the enormous tension that had built up overnight dissipating like air leaking from a punctured tyre. He sank back by degrees into the chair.
At that moment, Dr Hanami served him the tea. When they had both drained their cups, the surgeon said, 'Now, from the beginning, tell me everything.'