'I want to talk about some details of the subject's history that have, until now, eluded me.' Dr Muku said this as soon as Senjin sat down.
It was unlike Dr Muku to seize the initiative in these psychoanalytic sessions. Senjin was like those strange and eerie fish that live near the bottom of the sea, that see without light and, often, without eyes. He knew without having been given any visible sign that Dr Muku was coming close to the truth.
Senjin was quite certain that the psychiatrist had begun
to suspect that there was no psychopathic 'subject' and, further, that this mythical 'subject' was, in fact, Senjin himself.
There were, of course, dangers inherent in his knowledge. But even had Senjin suddenly stood up and confessed everything, Dr Muku would be helpless to do anything about it. Certainly, he was constrained by the dictates of his profession from divulging anything they had discussed. Senjin had made it clear in their first session that whatever information exchanged hands was strictly confidential, and could not be repeated outside the confines of the room in which they met.
Dr Muku had readily - if, in retrospect, somewhat foolhardily - agreed, as Senjin suspected would be his wont. Now the relationship between them had taken on a new and, to Senjin's way of thinking, exciting dimension. There was a subtle struggle for control forming between the two of them, a kind of skirmish line as yet amorphous and, therefore, mutable.
It was akin to living on the edge, the length of cloth twisted around Senjin's neck, being pulled tighter by Dr Muku's pudgy hands as the two men drew closer in a deadly dance. Senjin felt himself growing hard. A pulse in the side of his forehead beat a hasty rhythm with the heating of his blood. This kind of lethal game was what he lived for.
'For instance,' Dr Muku was saying, 'what kind of upbringing did the subject receive? Was his family life normal?'
'What do you mean by normal?' Senjin could not keep the sneering tone out of his voice. 'Doesn't psychology shun the term "normal" as being false?'
'Psychology might,' Dr Muku said in an assuring tone, 'but psychotherapy may not. It all depends.' He provided Senjin with a smile so contrived that, as far as Senjin was concerned, he might just as well have said, You
should know. You're not normal, are you, Senjin-san? 'Of course,' Dr Muku went on amiably, 'you're right. In the abstract - that is, statistically - there is always a norm. However, the real world is quite different. Still, it is often the case that psychosis has its roots in early family life. And here, for the purposes of our discussion, we may use the word "normal", because I would be willing to bet that our subject did not have a normal upbringing.'
Senjin sat forward. 'In what way?'
Dr Muku shrugged. 'Perhaps his mother was a whore, or he believes that she abandoned him in some way. This would account for his obsession with Kiyohime and the demon woman.' Dr Muku shrugged. Because they were, sitting in the small, close room, facing one another, and because Dr Muku's back was to the window, his face was in half-shadow. In that soft light, Dr Muku's face seemed made of putty. 'Our subject could even have harboured incestuous feelings towards his mother. That kind of guilt would be too heavy a burden for a child's developing psyche to bear. It would be natural for him to "get rid" of those unwanted feelings by projecting them outwards, away from him, by turning them into something else - namely, the innate evil of the female. He would conveniently believe that his mother caused by action or word those taboo sexual feelings.' Dr Muku's eyes glittered behind his round glasses. 'Is any of this making sense? Does it have a familiar ring?'
'How would I know?' Senjin said blandly.
'Well, you are far more familiar with the subject than I am.'
'Am I?' Senjin raised his eyebrows. 'I'm beginning to wonder if either of us knows him sufficiently.'
Dr Muku shifted in his chair. 'What makes you say that, Senjin-san?'
'Well, for one thing, the mystery of sex. That is, the suspect hasn't, to my knowledge, raped any of his victims.'
'Yet they have all been women, his victims, yes?'
'Yes,' Senjin lied.
'All young. All beautiful.' Dr Muku was nodding at the appropriate visual prompts Senjin was giving him. 'Well, he must have come close. Very close. It is just a matter of time before he spills his seed over them.' Dr Muku pointed, as if Senjin were, indeed, the subject. 'You see, our friend must feel that the act of ejaculation is akin to pulling the trigger of a gun. He'll see his sperm as the bullets.'
Senjin sat very still. 'You're very sure of yourself, Doctor.'
Dr Muku shrugged again. 'Nothing is sure in my field, Senjin-san. One tries merely to make the proper educated guesses. Like a detective, I carefully walk amidst the rubble of a ruined psyche. I imagine that my modus operandi is quite similar to yours at a murder site. We are both looking for clues that will allow us to piece together the whos and whys that led to tragedy. And, in order to solve the mystery, don't you sometimes take a leap of faith or two?'
Senjin recognized the direction in which this was going. Not only had Dr Muku begun questioning him, instead of the other way around, but the psychiatrist was also bringing Senjin himself directly into the conversation. We are both . . . and don't you sometimes? . . . This methodology was part of the clever interrogator's procedure of involving his subject in the interrogation in order to elicit truthful answers to his questions.
Senjin said, 'I have found that the leaps of faith of the kind you describe are best left to films and novels where an author controls the destiny of all the characters.'
Dr Muku cocked his head, looking at Senjin quizzically. 'But is it not the same here in real life? Life controls our karma. Surely our destiny is not in our own hands.'
Senjin smiled. The balance of power had begun to
shift, if ever so subtly. The more Dr Muku continued in the interrogation, the more sure of himself he became, the more he revealed of his own strategy, and the less threatening he became, the less control he maintained over the situation.
It was time, Senjin thought, to further enlighten the doctor. 'Muku-san,' he said, 'have you ever heard of Kshira?'
'No. I don't believe I have.'
'Kshira is a form of physical and mental discipline,' Senjin said. 'But it is more encompassing than even a philosophy. It is its own reality. Kshira is the language of the sound-light continuum.'
Dr Muku blinked. 'The what?'
Senjin lit a cigarette, but he didn't seem to draw on it deeply or often. 'The sound-light continuum,' Senjin repeated. 'You have no doubt heard of ki, the underlying energy of all things - humans, animals, the sea, the forests, the earth itself. WeU, the Kshira sensei have made a remarkable discovery, and it is this: that there are different forms of ki. By recognizing them, and harnessing them in series, an engine of enormous psychic and physical energy is created.'
Senjin could see that Dr Muku was sceptical. That was hardly surprising. When it came to the human mind, Dr Muku was locked within the severely limited framework of modern analytical thought. He was, to Senjin's way of thinking, a pathetic cripple, unable to comprehend anything save what he had been taught at school.
'The thing about Kshira,' Senjin said, suddenly leaning forward, 'is that it is infinitely malleable.' He took a puff on his cigarette and it began to sizzle, bursting with an odd blue-white incendiary glow.
Senjin's left hand covered Dr Muku's face before the psychiatrist had a chance to react. Senjin's thumb lifted Dr Muku's glasses off the bridge of his nose. The metal
slid in the sweat-sheen breaking out on the psychiatrist's forehead.
Then Senjin jabbed the glowing end of his cigarette directly into Dr Muku's left eye. His left hand, fingers spread like a spider across the doctor's face, held Dr Muku implacably in place.
Dr Muku's arms flailed at Senjin as the phosphorus-impregnated cigarette burned ever more deeply into his eye socket. He began to wail, an eerie, stifled sound that was more a vibration emanating from his throat.
Watching him as if he were an electronic image on a TV screen, Senjin smiled. 'The "subject",' he said in Dr Muku's ear, 'has not killed only women. Young women, beautiful women.' He was throwing the psychiatrist's words back at him. 'You were wrong, Doctor. About me. About everything.'
There was a smell in the room, emanating from Dr Muku, and Senjin's tongue appeared between his parted lips, curling slightly, questing for more of the scent. It was the stench of death.
Senjin shifted his gaze, staring into Dr Muku's wildly rolling right eye. Tears were streaming from it and, with one finger, Senjin wiped them away. The pupil was dilated, as if the psychiatrist were an addict: Senjin wished that Dr Muku could tell him what the pain, the fear were like. Surely his analytical brain could make sense of the chaos, could separate the rage of sensation into easily recognizable components.
'Muku-san, what is it?' Senjin asked. 'What is happening to you?'
There was an entire world in that one teary eye, defined by agony, detailed with the increments of knowledge at the approach of death.
Then the eye fixed on something even Senjin could not see.
Dr Muku, burning still from the phosphorus embedded
in his skull, lay slumped against the back of his chair. He looked quite relaxed now, Senjin thought.
Senjin reached past the body, jerked open the drawer of the wooden side table. He grunted, extracting the mini-tape recorder. The reels were slowly churning, faithfully recording every word, every sound uttered in the room. Senjin had suspected that the doctor had begun taping their sessions as soon as Senjin had given him enough clues for him to form his opinion that Senjin and the 'subject' were one and the same.
Senjin depressed the 'Stop' button, pocketed the device. Then he looked at Dr Muku. 'You'll never know how wrong you really were,' he said.
With slitted eyes he looked into the blinding sun of his memory, remembering each aftermath of the Kabu-ki play, Musume Dojoji. How he would treat his dates to an expansive dinner, encourage them to dissect the psychological motivations of the two major characters. And how, sated on these odd appetizers, he would then proceed to the main course, the slow, aching, erotic discipline of murder.
Senjin pulled the curtains on that lambent sunlight, bent, heaved the corpse on to his shoulder. In a way, he thought, it was a pity that Dr Muku could no longer answer him. But, then again, Dr Muku still had another, more important, service to perform.
Clearly, Dr Hanami did not believe him. Nicholas had finished his account starting with his vague feelings of unease in the hospital after the operation, his trying and failing to stem the post-operative pain, to the events of the last twenty-four hours, which proved conclusively that he had lost the use of Getsumei no michi and every other aspect of the martial arts he had painstakingly learned over the years. Dr Hanami had sat back, steepled his fingers, and
said with absolute finality, 'But my dear Mr Linnear, what you are suggesting is patently impossible. You may well think that you have, as you say, lost these admittedly remarkable abilities, but let me assure you that you have not.'
He extracted a set of X-rays from Nicholas's file, turned and snapped them into place against a pair of light boxes mounted on the wall behind his desk. He switched the boxes on. 'See here' - he pointed to a shadow - 'is where the tumour lay, along the second temporal convolution, just above the hippocampal fissure. You can see its outline here.' He switched his attention to the second X-ray. 'Now here we are after the operation. As you can see, there is a perfect fitting of the folds. The surrounding area was left absolutely undisturbed. Of this there can be no question, Mr Linnear. None at all.'
'Then what happened to me, Doctor?'
Dr Hanami considered this for some time. Very deliberately, he switched off the light boxes, pulled the X-ray film down, slid them back into the folder. Then he closed the file, clasped his hands over the top. 'It's difficult in these cases to be certain, but it seems to me that we could begin by asking not what happened to you, but rather, what is happening to you.' Dr Hanami smiled encouragingly. 'After a major operation of this nature it is not at all abnormal for the patient to believe that some part of him has been excised along with the non-beneficial tissue.' He drew a small pad towards him, scribbled a name and a phone number. He ripped off the sheet, gave it to Nicholas.
'What is this?'
'Dr Muku is pre-eminent in the field of psychotherapy, Mr Linnear. His office is right across the - '
'That's what you think I need?' Nicholas said, incredulous. 'A psychiatrist?'
'Given your present emotional state, I think it would be highly bene - '
'You haven't got it yet, have you, Doctor?' Nicholas was livid. 'Someone - maybe it was you - did something to me while I was on the operating table. For Christ's sake, tell me what happened!'
'Linnear-san, you must calm yourself,' Dr Hanami said, resorting once again to age-old rituals in order to quell the modern demons that seemed to have invaded his office. 'These outbursts will do no one any good, least of all yourself. When you have returned to a state of serenity, you will be able to see everything in its proper light.'
'You're not going to tell me, are you?'
'Linnear-san, I assure you there is nothing more I can tell you.' He glanced again at Nicholas's file, as if to give added weight to his words. 'Your operation was successful in every way. As for your claim, I can find no medical reason to - '
Dr Hanami stopped. He looked up, realizing that his patient was already gone.
Nicholas had lost faith. He saw in a flash of terrible clarity that all his training had been in vain. He saw that without Getsumei no michi he was nothing. His spirit, diminished because he had been denied his ultimate place of refuge, of intimacy with the world around him, of strength, was withering. Cut off from the kind of communion with the universe that had sustained him through his most painful ordeals, which had nourished him during his brief stab as a family man and a businessman, he felt like the lone survivor of a shipwreck, cast upon a hostile and alien shore.
He thought of his mother, Cheong, and knew there was only one thing for him to do now. His mind flew back in time,to the dreadful autumn of 1963, when he had fallen hopelessly in love with Yukio and had, thus, incurred the wrath of his cousin, Saigo.
Nicholas, Cheong had said to him, your grandfather, So-Peng, was a very wise man. It was he who said one is never truly alone in Asia. Cheong had drawn out a box made of copper. Nicholas had seen it once before when his father had shown it to him, a legacy of his grandfather, So-Peng. On its enamelled and elaborately lacquered top was a fiery, scaled dragon entwined with a rampant tiger.
Carefully, almost reverently, Cheong had opened the box. Inside were four rows of glittering emeralds, fifteen in all.
You are free to use six of these emeralds, she had said. To convert them into money if your need is sufficient. Originally there were sixteen. One was used to buy this house. She had taken a deep breath. There must never be less than nine emeralds in here. Ever. No matter the reason, you must not use more than six.
As you know, Nicholas, my father, So-Peng, gave your father and me this box when we left Singapore. It is a mystical box. It has certain powers. She had paused, as if waiting. / see you're not smiling. Good. I believe in the power of this box, the nine emeralds, as did So-Peng. He was a great and wise man in all things, Nicholas. He was no fool. He knew well that there exist on the Asian continent many things which defy analysis; which, perhaps; have no place in the modern world. They relate to another set of laws; they are timeless. She had smiled gently. So I believe. If you believe then the power will be there for you when some day you need it.
Nicholas believed in the legacy of his grandfather, the power of the fifteen emeralds in the mystic box. He had put away the treasure, secreting it within his house when he and Justine had returned to Japan. For while he had no intention of ever using the emeralds, he wanted them near him, could feel their pulse in his heart as one feels sunlight warming one's flesh.
Cast adrift, Nicholas knew that he had to get home
as quickly as he could. Now he understood that the time had come to put the magic of the emeralds to work.
He had lost faith. Now he understood, and the terror flooded fully through him. It was not merely that he had lost his ability to find Getsumei no michi, not merely that he had lost his memory of his ninjutsu training. He had lost faith in everything he had believed in.
There could be only one explanation for that: Shiro Ninja.
It was clear that if he were indeed Shiro Ninja, Dr Hanami had not been responsible for his loss of memory; it was not a medical problem at all. He almost turned around then, so he could apologize to Dr Hanami, but he was too wrapped up in his own fear.
Somewhere in Tokyo he had an enemy, one of such power that it beggared the imagination. Who could it be? Why had he been rendered powerless through Shiro Ninja?
Nicholas, shivering, imagined himself amid the vapour of his recent nightmares, and shuddered. He imagined that the emeralds' magic could save him from drowning in that colourless vapour. Falling and drowning. Part of him, perhaps, even suspected that his grandfather, So-Peng, had known this day would come and had prepared him for it by ensuring that he would receive the box, just as once the Colonel and Cheong had received it.
So-Peng. Cheong had told him so much about her father, yet increasingly now, when Nicholas thought of him, he realized how little he knew of the man and his life. Much less than he did about the Colonel's English parents - his father, a middle-class London banker, levelheaded, honest, content; his mother, a wealthy Jewess who, despite her money, was never accepted in English society, dark-haired, green-eyed, tempestuous, curious and very smart. She had had two sons, one of whom, William, had died of smallpox. Three years later, in the
winter of 1915, she had given birth to Denis, Nicholas's father.
Nicholas was so wrapped up in his thoughts of the past that he failed to see the young woman heading into Dr Hanami's office as he left it. They hit head-on, even though she tried to step hurriedly back. Startled, Nicholas automatically apologized, began to move towards the lifts.
'Linnear-san!'
He turned, found the woman following him. 'You are Nicholas Linnear.'
There seemed to be no interrogative in her inflection, but he said yes, just the same.
'Hello. I'm Tomi Yazawa. Detective Sergeant with the Homicide division of the Tokyo Police.' She flashed him her credentials, which he studied with the kind of amused curiosity he normally reserved for outlandish headlines in tabloids.
'Good morning, Miss Yazawa,' he said. 'How is it you know who I am?'
'I'm looking for you, Mr Linnear.'
'Indeed. Well, perhaps some other time. This really isn't the best - '
The lift doors opened and Nicholas got in. Tomi followed.
'Ah, persistence,' Nicholas said. His mind was far. away from Tomi Yazawa and what she might want of him. Whatever it was, he decided, it could wait for a more propitious moment.
'Persistence is a required course at the academy,' Tomi said.
If Nicholas recognized this as a joke, he gave no sign of it. All he wanted to do was get down, and out of there.
'I appreciate that this may not be the best time for you,' Tomi said, 'but I must talk with you immediately.'
Nicholas discovered that he was gripping a piece of
paper in his left hand. He uncrumpled it, saw there in Dr Hanami's hurried scrawl the name and phone number of Dr Muku, the psychiatrist. He wondered briefly why the surgeon had not included an address. Then he saw the suite number and realized that Dr Muku must have his offices in this same mega-building. Cosy, he thought. How many patients did the two cross-pollinate? He imagined the two doctors as tennis players, sending their patients back and forth across the net, picking up finders' fees with every swing. With an angry growl, he mashed the paper into a ball, flung it against the brushed bronze of the lift wall.
'Mr Linnear -'
The doors opened on the enormous lobby dominated by a sculpture composed of black rock, waterfall and foliage, and Nicholas strode purposefully out.
Tomi bent, snatched up the crumpled slip of paper. She had just a moment to glance at what was written on it before she hurried out after him. She caught up with Nicholas near the automatic doors. They were glazed a soft bronze colour so that the sunlight coming through them was devoid of heat.
'Mr Linnear, please - '
'Some other time, Sergeant Yazawa.' Nicholas went through the doors.
Out on the street, Tomi said forcefully, 'I must speak with you on a matter of life or death, Mr Linnear. Your life. Your death.' This gave him pause, and she took advantage of it. 'I wanted to tell you in a more politic manner, but you leave me no choice. According to a communiqué we intercepted and decoded late yesterday, you have been marked for assassination by the Red Army one week from today. I have been - '
Tomi broke off as a scream reverberated against the mammoth facade of the skyrise. An instant later, the sun was momentarily blotted out as a shape hurtled to
the sidewalk not ten yards from where they were standing. 'Jesus!' Nicholas breathed. 'A jumper!'
Tomi had broken away from him, and was threading her way through the already gathering crowd. Nicholas went after her, saw her kneeling by the side of a male figure. He had landed on the small of his back, and his spine and legs were broken in so many places that his shape had already ceased to resemble anything human. Blood seeped along the sidewalk in a spiderweb pattern radiating out from the broken body. Bits of glass shimmered on the concrete, here and there pink and red and dark brown.
Gingerly, Tomi reached out, turned the head towards, them. The back was completely smashed in, but the face, though blood-streaked, was recognizable.
'God Almighty!' Nicholas said, and Tomi looked up.
'Do you know this man, Mr Linnear?'
Nicholas nodded. "That's Dr Hanami, the surgeon who operated on me.' He looked up, could see the darkness like an open mouth where the window to Dr Hanami's consulting office had been.
Tomi and Nicholas pushed their way through the gesticulating mob. Inside the building, Tomi showed her credentials to a uniformed attendant, told her what had happened, to call the police. Then they took the lift up.
'By all rights,' Tomi said, 'you shouldn't be coming with me. We have no idea what happened up there.'
Nicholas said nothing, looked at her.
'He could have jumped,' Tomi went on. 'Or he could have been pushed.'
'Why would someone want to murder a surgeon?' Nicholas asked.
'A grudge for malpractice?' Tomi shrugged. 'Why does the Red Army want you dead?'
Nicholas continued to look at her. 'You tell me. I haven't the faintest idea.'
'I'm allowing you to come with me,' Tomi said, continuing a previous thought, 'because I have been assigned as your bodyguard. I'm on the scene of a potential crime, so I've got to respond. You've got to accompany me.'
'Otherwise you would have stopped me?'
'Yes,' Tomi said. 'I would have stopped you.'
'How?' Nicholas leaned towards her. He was not in the mood for either idle bluffs or for tough talk from someone he didn't know.
The doors opened and they raced across the hall to Dr Hanami's office suite. They burst through the door to confront the white-faced receptionist who stared wide-eyed at them. She had her arms around a hunched woman, obviously a patient, who was sobbing in great, inconstant gasps.
'I've called the police,' the receptionist said to no one hi particular, but she nodded as Tomi identified herself. She pointed to a closed door to her right. 'In there. The doctor's inner office.'
'Who was the doctor's last patient?' Tomi asked.
'Well, he was,' the receptionist said, pointing to Nicholas.
'Was anyone with the doctor after Linnear-san left?'
'I don't know,' the receptionist said. "The doctor asked me to leave bun this hour free.'
'You saw no one go in there after Linnear-san left?'
'No.'
'Stay here,' Tomi said to Nicholas.
'Like hell,' he said but, seeing the gun in her hand, he kept well back.
Tomi turned the knob, threw the door wide open. Wind rattled the vertical metal blinds that had been ripped from their bottom moorings. To the left of the window was Dr Hanami's paper-strewn desk, his high-backed chair turned away from them as if he had leaped from it to the window. They saw that a side chair, leaning up against the sill, had
been used to break the glass of the sealed window.
'Well, one thing we know,' Nicholas said. 'It wasn't an accident.'
Tomi went across the small room to the door on the opposite side. 'What do we have here?'
She put her gun up, jerked the door open. 'This leads right out into the hallway,' she said, peering out. 'If Dr Hanami was murdered, this was how his murderer got in and out without being seen by the receptionist.'
Tomi closed the door, went over to the shattered window, looking for blood, a note or any other sign that might tell her whether Dr Hanami's death had been a suicide or a murder. She stared out of the ruptured window at the vaporous city below. 'God, it's a long way down.'
'Sergeant.'
Tomi started at Nicholas's voice which was not loud but nevertheless got her attention. She looked in the direction in which he was staring. From this angle, she could see Dr Hanami's high-backed chair in profile. There was a hand lying along the armrest.
Tomi took three quick steps, spun the chair around to face them. They saw a small, roly-poly man of middle-age in a grey pin-striped suit. His long, unruly hair stood up from his scalp as if he had been delivered an electric shock. Wire-rimmed glasses were perched on his pale forehead as if he were plunged deep in thought.
Tomi could not help but let out a gasp as the corpse's one blackened, ruined eye socket stared blankly at her.
'Jesus,' Nicholas said, 'who the hell is this?'
'What the hell happened to him?' Tomi was peering at the lethal wound. 'This is horrific.' Close to the corpse, there was an unmistakable smell of roasted flesh. 'He was burned with something small and very hot.'
'It must have had penetrating power,' Nicholas said.
Tomi moved back, took a pencil off the desk top, used it to lift up part of the corpse's unbuttoned jacket. Carefully, she extracted a wallet from the corpse's breast pocket. Dropping it on the desk, she opened it with the pencil point.
'Dr Jugo Muku,' she read from a driver's licence. She looked up. 'Wait a minute!' She took out the piece of paper Nicholas had thrown in the lift, and which she had picked up. Unfolding it again, she said, 'Linnear-san, you had Dr Muku's name when I first met you.' She looked at him.
'Dr Hanami gave it to me,' Nicholas said. He was staring at the mutilated face of Dr Muku. 'He was under the impression that I needed psychological help.'
'There's a phone number here,' Tomi said. 'And another number, but no address.'
'It's a suite number,' Nicholas said. 'Dr Muku's office is in this building.'
'I think we ought to take a look,' Tomi said. She went back past the window. As she did, she noticed something on one of the remaining shards of glass. She moved closer, stared hard at it.
'Linnear-san,' she said in a breathless voice, 'what colour was Dr Hanami's hair?' There had been too much blood and spattered brains to make such a determination from the corpse.
'Grey,' Nicholas said, coming closer. 'And he used some kind of hair cream.' He was looking at the spot that had caught Tomi's attention. Several strands of iron-grey hair, wet-looking, clung wretchedly to the sharp point of a glass shard. 'It looks like his.'
'Which could mean,' Tomi said, 'that he went through the window head-first. No one would do that, not even a suicide.'
'You mean he might have been thrown?'
Tomi was busily gathering the evidence into a glassine
envelope. 'It's looking more and more likely. Then there's Dr Muku's death to con - '
She looked up as a shadow registered on the extreme periphery of her vision. She stared, open-mouthed, as if she were in one of those dreams where unthinkable calamity is about to strike and, shouting a warning, one finds that one's voice is gone.
The black form had coalesced into a distinct shape: that of a human figure. It was clothed completely in matt black so that Tomi could not see even its face. It rose up from outside the bottom lip of the window. Her brain was frozen in shock. The figure was on the outside of the building.
Such a thing was impossible, Tomi knew that. And yet her brain was reacting to w.hat her eyes were showing it. The figure appeared in a split-instant. Tomi felt her heart give a painful lurch. She felt as if she were in a lift in free-fall. Her stomach dropped, her bowels turned to water.
Even so, as the figure was silently swinging in towards her, part of her mind had given instructions for her right hand to grab her pistol, bring it up.
Time ran abruptly out. The figure crashed into her with such force that it drove all breath from her lungs. She flew backwards with barely a sound, tumbling over Dr Hanami's cypress-wood coffee table, dislodging its heavy glass top.
The top of her spine slammed against the side wall, her head snapped back and blue lights flashed, a jolt of pain causing her to cry out at last. But that sound was drowned out by the shattering of the table top. Groggy and nauseous, Tomi tried to get up, fell heavily back. She was fighting just to breathe.
All this had taken no more than a second or two. Time enough for the old Nicholas to have turned, assessed the situation, and begun a tactical strategy against the unknown assailant.
But this was another Nicholas entirely. His mind, unfocused, without the ability to 'sink in', without his beloved Getsumei no michi, was unable to react in any meaningful or co-ordinated way to the attack on Tomi.
He understood that whoever had murdered Dr Muku had probably thrown Dr Hanami out of the window. He understood that this individual had been hanging outside the shattered window, clinging to the concrete and steel of the skyrise's skin like a fly. He suspected, further, that from the deliberateness of the attack on Tomi the murderer seemed to have been waiting coolly for them.
There was nothing wrong with Nicholas's capacity for reasoning. It was his ability to translate the reasoning into action that had been taken from him.
Now he confronted the black-garbed figure and knew that he faced a ninja. Only a ninja could have planned out and executed two such bizarre murders. Only a ninja could have clung to the sheer side of a building twenty storeys up, swung in through a shattered window, taken out a trained and armed police officer with such ease.
Nicholas felt a resurgence of the cold fear slithering in his gut. It could be no coincidence, he knew, that just when he had lost his powers, he was confronting another ninja.
It was true, then. He was Shiro Ninja. Defenceless and under attack. Which meant that this figure was more than a ninja. Far more and far less.
Nicholas said a silent prayer.
The figure, which had been momentarily still and silent, erupted into a fury of motion. Dimly Nicholas recognized that this was something he had once been able to do.
He tried to prepare himself for the coming attack as best he could, but the figure was upon him before he could get his mind to function properly.
Pain exploded along nerve meridians in chest, abdomen and pelvis and, like a line of dominoes beginning to fall,
Nicholas felt first one section then another paralysed by short, vicious blows to various nexus points. The pain was not localized to the target of each strike; because of the nature of the blows it ripped through the interconnecting nerve network within his body.
His muscles bunched and knotted, betraying him at every turn, spasming with the bursts of nerve-pain, overlapping so that they began to have a cumulative effect on him, magnifying exponentially their debilitating impact.
The assault was methodical, almost scientific, in the way it dissected his body into quadrants. Nicholas knew without being able to do anything about it that he was being put out an inch at a time. To achieve victory was one thing; this was quite another. It was a clinical demonstration of total domination. Nicholas's spirit withered in utter despair at both his helplessness and the hopelessness of his plight. Unable to turn his back on nihjutsu, how was he ever going to live Shiro Ninjal
The answer was, of course, obvious. He wasn't going to live. He was going to die.
This was the ultimate lesson of this unrelenting assault.
Tomi was against the side wall, the effects of the figure's initial attack wearing off. Gasping, trying to shake off the dizziness that had gripped her, she became aware that she no longer held her pistol.
She was aware of the figure's attack on Nicholas, and desperately she searched for her gun. She found it, lying on the floor several yards away from her outstretched right hand. With a pain-filled groan she pushed herself from the wall, began to crawl towards the gun. Her hand touched it, then closed around the grips. An instant later, she was pointing it at the back of the figure's head. She was about to pull the trigger when she realized with a sickening lurch that she was aiming at Nicholas.
'Shit,' she said under her breath and, trying a bluff, shouted, 'Get off him or I'll shoot!'
The figure turned so that Nicholas's head and upper torso were between him and Tomi. 'Go ahead.' It was a rasp of a voice, a chilling sound much like fingernails being scratched down a blackboard. 'Shoot me. Or will it be him?'
Tomi got a sudden intuition that made the short hairs at the back of her neck stand up. She knew the figure was laughing at her behind his mask.
Then she saw the glint of a tiny blade at Nicholas's throat. 'Put down the weapon,' the raspy voice said, 'or I'll kill him now.' As a demonstration of his determination he drew blood.
Tomi put down her gun.
'Kick it away from you,' the voice instructed.
She did as she was told, and was instantly sorry. She saw as if in slow motion the figure release Nicholas. It rose up eerily, spectrally, just as it had from beyond the window. Without appearing to have moved at all, its shape ballooned out.
Tomi realized that it crossed the space between them in some manner totally unknown to her. She felt herself drawn up by a power beyond her comprehension. Then the top of her head was jammed against the wall. Her cry of astonishment and pain was swiftly cut off as she lost consciousness.
The figure dropped her in a heap, and turned. Nicholas was crawling towards where Tomi had kicked her gun. It was a measure of his extreme despair that he had forsaken the arsenal of weapons within himself, in an effort to lunge at a mechanical one.
In one fluid motion, the figure lifted Nicholas as easily as an instant before it had lifted Tomi, and threw him headlong across the room. Nicholas crashed into the desk top, sliding across its surface, his near-paralysed body collapsing on to the floor between the desk and the ruined window.
The figure came around the desk, moving easily, deliberately, but without hurry. It picked Nicholas up and headed with him towards the window.
Nicholas divined his intent, and did the only thing he could. He spread-eagled his body in order to stop the figure from manoeuvring him through the opening of the window.
He could hear the figure laughing. It was an awful sound, like a mass of pinpricks on the skin. 'Do you think that will save you?'
Nicholas gave a low groan as a high-percussion blow landed on his right shoulder. His arm went numb, dropped to his side. With the next blow to his left shoulder, Nicholas bit his lower lip to stop himself from crying out with the pain. His right leg was next, then his left leg. He was going through the window.
Still, he struggled, as the organism must when it senses the end of its existence being thrust rudely upon it. Numbed as he was, Nicholas flailed and thrashed, struggling inch by inch to hold on to the window frame.
Using his shoulders and buttocks, he wedged himself in, defying the figure to push him through the last part of the opening. Heavy strikes landed on his upper arms, his thighs. He ignored them, set his mind on remaining immobile.
Then he was struck on the side of his head, close to the spot that was still healing. It was too much. His body, stretched beyond its tolerance, slumped in the aperture, and he was pushed all the way through.
The skyrises of Tokyo, smoky and somehow unreal, were tilting, coming up to meet him. Nicholas could feel his heart thumping heavily in his chest. The roar of his pulse was like the sighing of the wind in his ears.
For what seemed an endless moment he hung suspended twenty storeys above the street. He could imagine the next instant: the plunge through the air, tumbling slowly
head over heels, the pavement rushing up to meet him. He would be inside his recurring dream, falling through the vapour, endlessly falling. Only this time, he would not wake up.
Staring down into the heart of Shinjuku, Nicholas heard the last pitiful cry of his daughter. He prepared himself to die.
Then, almost before he knew it, he was pulled back inside the building. The figure's hooded face was very close to his. 'If you die now, if you die too easily,' the figure said, 'you will never understand. And with comprehension will come the certainty of despair. That will crush you far more thoroughly than defeat ever will.'
The figure delivered a blow, short, concise and accurate, to the side of Nicholas's neck.
Vapour curling like an adder's tongue, hiding in its midst secrets too horrifying to endure.
Blackness.
After a brief stay at the hospital, after giving as complete a statement to the police as he could muster, after Justine had arrived with Nangi, she white-faced but with her panic, thankfully, under control, after spending a restless, pain-laced night in the hospital, after deflecting for the moment Justine and Nangi's queries, Nicholas, came home.
He had seen Tomi in the hospital, discovered that she was just badly shaken up, that the cat scan had shown no sign of concussion in her as it had done in him.
Because of the mild concussion, the hospital had insisted that he stay a week to receive a battery of further tests and to be monitored. Nicholas insisted on leaving right away. They compromised with an overnight stay, during which he was given a second cat scan. Apparently, that had shown no further complications, because
Nicholas found himself home by noon the following day.
Justine said that Tomi had already been in to see him twice while he had been asleep. She had told Justine to call her when she got Nicholas home, and that she would come out to see him.
At home, he went straight into his workout room. With an effort that set his head pounding, he pushed aside the padded post. Beneath it, he took up a tatami mat, used his fingernails to remove a small door set flush with the underfloor boards.
Beneath was a small steel-reinforced chamber that Nicholas had built himself just after he and Justine had moved in. Now he lifted out a copper box. On it was lacquered the brothers dragon and tiger, the gift that his grandfather, So-Peng, had given to Colonel Denis Linnear and which now belonged to Nicholas.
With trembling fingers, Nicholas opened the box. Inside were sixteen indentations in the dark blue velvet, one for each mystic emerald. One emerald had been used by the Colonel to buy his house in Japan.
Remember, Nicholas, he heard his mother say to him, there must never be less than nine emeralds in here.
'Ahh . . .'
There was such relief in Nicholas's voice that Justine came running. 'Nick, what is it?' she asked. 'What's happened?'
'The fifteen emeralds are still here,' Nicholas breathed. Then he looked up at her, as he locked the box away. 'Justine, you must never tell anyone - not even Nangi
- what you have just seen. These emeralds are special
- mystical. They are a legacy from my grandfather, So-Peng, and must never be used or spoken of.' He pushed the tatami back into place, drew the post over them. 'Promise me, Justine!'
'I promise.'
Nicholas rose, a bit unsteadily, the words of his attacker
echoing inside him. If you die now, if you die too easily, you will never understand.
Why didn't he kill me when he had the chance? Nicholas asked himself. What fate has he saved me for?
SUMMER, 1889 Singapore/Peninsular Malaysia
So-Peng, Nicholas Linnear's grandfather, was born into a family of undistinguished Chinese merchants, hardworking men who nevertheless toiled their entire lives beneath the frustrating weight of ill fortune.
His mother was something else altogether.
So-Peng's family had been in Peninsular Malaysia, it was said, since the 1400s, trading variously in silk, tortoiseshell and ivory. Early in the 1800s, they had moved to Kuala Lumpur, on the peninsula's west coast, attracted by the breathtakingly quick fortunes to be made in the newly opened tin mines. The vast sums of money they made were soon gone, as they gambled, made incautious investments or were swindled outright.
Still, they persevered, a virtue that must have been in their genes because it was passed down to So-Peng.
So-Peng had spent the first ten years of his life near Pahang, on the east coast, where his father was then involved in importing silks and black teas from China. So-Peng, however, had little interest in being a merchant, and none at all hi being burdened by ill fortune. He was far more clever than his father and his uncles, almost as quick-witted at nineteen as his mother was at thirty-four.
So-Peng was so like his mother, Liang. She had been a child bride, had borne him when she was but fifteen. No one knew her origins - whether she was Hokkien like So-Peng's father, whether she was Chinese at all, fully Chinese, or, as was sometimes said, Sumatran. She never spoke of her origins and, out of respect, So-Peng
never asked her, though he often burned with curiosity.
So-Peng's mother was very smart. She knew everyone of importance everywhere the family lived for more than a few weeks and, what was more important, these people often owed her favours. So-Peng knew that she had saved his father from absolute insolvency more than once by her rather miraculous intervention. She managed to do so, moreover, without causing her husband any loss of face.
By 1889, when he was nineteen, So-Peng had accomplished many things. He was, for instance, proficient in an astonishing array of Asian and ancient Indo-European languages and dialects. Having spent his upper school years in Singapura, the Lion's City, as Singapore had been named in 1100 a.d. by lords of the Srivijayan empire, he had the advantage of not only the best teachers in Malaysia, but also the best opportunities that the labyrinth of backstreets overflowing with canny Chinese, Malays, Indians, and Sumatrans could offer.
He had worked on the city's docks, in its wholesale markets, its bars, restaurants and hotels; had even shipped out for six months on one of the new steamships that had more and more been replacing the merchant clipper ships ever since the Suez Canal had been opened in 1869, cutting down on the distance between Europe and Asia. He had immediately grasped what others would not for some time: that with the advent of the steamship, Singapore would burgeon in importance as a major port. Hitherto, the settlement had been wholly dependent on the winds for its naval trade. January and February brought the north-east monsoon winds which were favourable for the junks from Siam and China. Six months later, in the autumn, the winds shifted, bringing the boats from the subcontinental Malay Peninsula. Ships under their own power would free Singapore from the whims of the weather; trade could continue the year round.
So-Peng had, in other words, tried his hand at many jobs, and had become master of none. At nineteen, in fact, though his mind was full of knowledge, he had no profession and, what was worse, he was penniless.
His fondest memory of his childhood before he had moved with his family to Singapore was of warm May nights when he and his best friend, a Malay named Zhao Hsia, would sneak out of their houses and rendezvous to sit amid the foliage ringing the beach at Rantau Abang.
So-Peng could clearly see the host of stars, blue-white, blue-green and red, strung across the heavens. The two boys were enveloped by them as completely as they were by the croaking of the tree frogs, the cries of the night birds, the incessant clicking of the insects, the stirring of the palm fronds.
Before them, starlight and, if they were lucky, moonlight as well, illuminated the churning surf and, further out, on the South China Sea, they could see the winking lights of swift ships bound south-east for Borneo or northwest for Thailand.
But as much as they loved this spot in the night, So-Peng and Zhao Hsia had not come to the beach to stare at the stars or the passing boats. Neither had they come to swim.
Soon their gazes lowered from the star-strewn sky, moved closer than the silvered wavetops, the shadowed troughs of the South China Sea. They watched, instead, the progress of the surf as it rolled up on to the dark beach, retreating only to return again, 'an indomitable force - the creator - upon the sand.
And from the salt water they at last saw emerging the black humped shapes for which they had been waiting. The shapes were enormous as they detached themselves from the waves. The surf churned all around them, and they left this, too, in their wake. As So-Peng watched, he seemed thrown back a million years to another age,
another time. He whispered to them in Vedic, a language so ancient that he was certain they would understand it.
Within the sheltering sands, the shapes ceased to move. Soon, above the hiss and suck of the surf, beyond the insects' drone, the boys could hear the peculiar sound of sand being stirred and moved.
So-Peng and Zhao Hsia waited, learning patience. For this was the end of May, the beginning of giant tortoise season. The boys were here clandestinely. The tortoise of this region was much prized by the Malays and the Chinese for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that the animal's domed carapace was a lucrative source of revenue exported out of the peninsula. What the boys were here to do was strictly forbidden - haram, Zhao Hsia, who knew many Muslims, would say; although this was civil custom and not religious law. If they had been caught, they would have been thrown into prison, and So-Peng suspected that not even his mother would be able to intervene successfully on his behalf.
There were already tortoises on the beach. So-Peng and Zhao Hsia looked at one another. They were physically ill-suited as friends. So-Peng was already tall, towering over the chubby Malay with a sinewy grace that seemed all the more pronounced in Zhao Hsia's presence. But they shared a daring and an unquenchable curiosity that transcended dictates and custom. They were natural explorers, drawn together by their fascination for the different and the bizarre.
Slowly, the boys crawled out from the shelter of the foliage, snaking their way along the sand on then: bellies. When they came upon a tortoise, Zhao Hsia touched its horny carapace. So-Peng, fascinated, watched in the dim starlight as its head and legs withdrew into its shell, rendering the fiercely protective creatures harmless. Then they turned the tortoise over and took its eggs.
Back within the cluttering shadows of the ferns and
fronds, they carefully cracked open the eggs, drank the viscous insides. They smacked their lips, making contented noises as they gorged themselves on this forbidden delicacy.
When So-Peng was almost eleven he and his family had moved to Singapore. Afterwards, he often wondered what had happened to Zhao Hsia, and whether the two of them would ever lie again in the unquiet darkness of Rantau Abang, waiting for the forbidden to come their way.
In Singapore's wide-open atmosphere, it was perhaps surprising that So-Peng had never been involved in anything illegal. What was even more surprising, however, was that it took the murders to bring So-Peng to his true vocation.
Two shipping merchants were murdered within ten days of each other. It was during the height of the summer, the hottest in recent memory, when the sun, white and bloated, made even the normally cooler Singapore quayside simmer. The ocean lay flat and listless; not a breath of air stirred on its own, and the breezes created indoors by the ceiling fans moved like sludge against a pier piling.
The murders horrified a community normally inured to death. The British authorities said it was the work of smugglers, involved in their internecine warfare. Because the murders occurred on the fourth and the fourteenth of the month, and four was the number of death, the Chinese were certain that the murders were some form of retribution by relatives for the victims' past sins. Revenge was the motive given by the Malays as well, who pointed out that a pig's foot was found in the mouths of both Muslim victims - pork is strictly haram to Muslims. But they were just as certain that the murderers were Western because it was their opinion that no Muslim and certainly no Buddhist would so profane the strictures of religion.
Liang, So-Peng's mother, had another theory entirely. She had seen the curious eight-pointed metal stars that the police had extracted from the throats of the two corpses and, one night at the evening meal, she put a name to their murderer: tanjian.
Tanjian, she said, had no god, followed no religion and, thus, had no compunction about behaving blasphemously. Tanjian, she said, created their own laws, adhered to their own peculiar dictates which deviated radically from those of society. They were, she said, kingdoms unto their own selves, harnessers of the night and of every evil thing that made their home in the darkness.
All this talk was meant, of course, to frighten So-Peng's brothers and sisters. Liang possessed the very yang - that is, male - quality of using fear as a way to discipline her children. She was more involved in her children than she was in anything else which was, So-Peng supposed, a direct result of having married a man such as his father. He had no interest in his children save that they were the inevitable result of the sex act, in which he appeared to have a great deal of interest.
When So-Peng was alone with his mother, she said to him, 'Now nothing will keep them from their studies.'
'You mean all that about the tanjian was a lie?' So-Peng asked.
'It was not a lie,' she said. 'Neither was it the truth.'
So-Peng thought a moment. 'Is this a puzzle?'
She smiled at him, an expression filled with pride. 'You are so grown up,' she said.
She left him to go to her own chambers. Alone in the kitchen, So-Peng considered what she had said and, as he restlessly wandered the house, he considered the nature of the puzzle she had left for him. Their house was large, in a wealthy area of the city, for his father, at Liang's urging, had two years ago invested in a new firm that had begun to import rattan, black pepper and
giant nutmeg from Borneo. The venture had so far proven highly successful.
After a time the silence in the house proved oppressive. Outside, he heard young voices raised in anger and, passing through the garden, he went out into the street.
He saw two of his younger brothers and several of their friends facing off against one another like two armies on a field of battle. Between them, a small yellow dog stood, yelping, its bony hind quarters quivering, its tail tucked between its legs.
One of So-Peng's brothers had a firm grip on the ruff of the dog's neck, unmindful of its obvious terrpr. He kept pulling the unfortunate animal towards his side of the street while one or another of the other boys tried to drag the dog to their side.
"This is our dog!' So-Peng's brother said defiantly.
'No it's ours!' the most aggressive of the other boys cried. He had a flat face that reflected his anger like a mirror.
'We found him first,' another of So-Peng's brothers said hotly. 'He belongs to us.'
'You found him near our house!' the flat-faced boy shouted, growing ever more angry. "That makes him ours. And it makes you thieves!'
'You're the criminals!' So-Peng's brother said, heaving on the panting dog. He pointed to dark scars upon the creature's flanks where the fur had failed to grow back. 'Look how you have mistreated him! You are hateful!'
'We hate you more!' the other boys shouted.
Watching the intensifying fight, So-Peng felt himself grow unutterably sad. To others, perhaps, the incident might appear trivial, quickly forgotten. But So-Peng saw in this childhood acrimony the seeds of something far larger. He recognized the universal, inevitable conflict of man, the image of the eventual usurpation of the world by those not content with what they had, or those too poor
to have anything of their own. Hie need for conquest had risen full-blown out of innocence like a Hydra in a glade of dancing poppies. The long march into die night of the spirit had already begun.
So-Peng advanced upon the opposing would-be armies just as fists began to shake, stones were picked up from the gutter. In a moment the former friends would surely come to blows.
Reaching in between the boys, he seized the cringing, whimpering dog, the only truly innocent party in this dispute. He picked it up, cradling it as he stroked its quivering flanks. In a moment, its head turned and it began to lick his hand.
'This animal belongs to neither of you,' he said.
'But, brother -'
So-Peng's fierce stare cut off his brother's protest.
'We want him!' cried the flat-faced boy. 'He's ours!'
'And what would you do with him,' So-Peng said, turning on the lad, 'beat him some more?'
'I never beat him!' the boy said in that defiant way children have that makes it clear they are lying.
'But you kicked him,' So-Peng said, reaching briefly out to touch the boy with his spirit. 'You punished him just as your parents punish you. Is that not the truth?' He watched as, tongue-tied, the lad merely hung his head.
'You see?' So-Peng's brother said triumphantly. 'We were right!'
'And what would you do with the animal?' So-Peng asked his younger brother.
The boy shrugged. 'Keep him. Let him go. I don't know. What's the difference?'
So-Peng said, 'Did you think of how you would care for him?'
'Care for him?' So-Peng's brother wrinkled his nose in confusion. 'He's just a dog.'
'Look at him. He's frightened and in pain, just as
sometimes you are. How can I expect you to understand? You are all too selfish, thinking of yourselves and nothing else. None of you deserve his friendship or his love.' The contempt in So-Peng's voice was so evident it penetrated their childish shells.
'What will happen to him?' the flat-faced boy asked.
'I will take him away,' So-Peng said.
'But we're used to having him around,' the flat-faced boy said.
So-Peng said nothing, continued to stroke the dog's flanks. The animal put its head on his arm, sighed contentedly, closed its eyes.
'I don't want him to go,' the flat-faced boy said suddenly. 'I think - Hey, we can take care of him.'
'Yeah,' So-Peng's brother chimed in. 'We'd all take care of him, wouldn't we?'
'Yeah!' they all cried.
'Maybe we could train him or something,' another boy said.
'Like a watchdog!' another of So-Peng's brothers continued.
The boys were together now, milling in the street, excitedly discussing their plans for the dog. So-Peng put the animal down. It sat, staring at him, its tail wagging.
Suddenly, the boys turned to So-Peng. 'What do you think?' the flat-faced boy asked him.
'It isn't up to me,' So-Peng said. 'He isn't my dog.'
'Well, he isn't ours either,' So-Peng's brother said.
'Do you have to take him away?' the flat-faced boy said. With the anger dissolved, his face reflected only his tremendous need for love and attention.
So-Peng smiled. He patted the dog's head. 'Maybe I could leave him here, just for a while, to see how you do with him.'
The boys clustered around the dog, stroking its head and flanks. Its tail wagged faster and faster.
The flat-faced boy came up to So-Peng. 'We don't really hate each other, Elder Brother,' he said, using the Chinese honorific. 'That was just talk.'
So-Peng took the boy's fist, opened it up. The stone he had picked up when the threat of violence was in the air rolled into the street.
'Words,' So-Peng said, 'are often only the beginning.'
'I would not have thrown the stone, Elder Brother.'
So-Peng knelt down next to the flat-faced boy. 'I know that you would not have wanted to.'
After a time, the flat-faced boy said, 'I think I understand.'
So-Peng looked at the flat-faced boy. He did not need his power in order to know what the boy needed. It was so basic. 'When I was your age,' he said, 'I longed for an older brother to talk to. Alas, I had none.'
'Oh, I know what you mean!' the flat-faced boy cried. Then, as he was about to go on, he lapsed into silence.
So-Peng rose. 'Next week I'll need some help on a job I'm working on weekends. Think you'd be interested?'
The flat-faced boy nodded eagerly. Once more he was too overcome to speak.
'I'll come for you in the morning - early.'
'There'll be no need, Elder Brother,' the flat-faced boy said. Til be here at sunrise.'
So-Peng laughed. 'An hour after will suffice.'
So-Peng went back through the gate. The garden was empty and still. Wondering where his mother was, So-Peng reached out with his mind. When he found her, So-Peng gasped. He felt waves of what he could only suppose was panic emanating from her.
He went immediately into the house, to the bedroom she shared with her husband. She was packing her bags.
'Where are you going, Mother?'
She whirled around. There was colour in her cheeks,
and she brushed several stray strands of hair off her face. She was an extraordinarily handsome woman, powerful of visage, rather than merely beautiful. Her long, narrow head was faced with high cheekbones and oddly deep-set eyes. Her ears were small, and were a source of some pride to her, as were her feet and hands, which were delicate and tiny and very capable.
'A tortoiseshell was cracked in a fire, the pieces read by a fengshui man. It was foretold that you would come to me here,' she said, looking at him gravely. 'If you did not come, I would know that the fengshui man lied, that you were not the chosen.'
So-Peng looked at her quizzically. 'What do you mean?'
She gave him a sudden, dazzling smile. 'Let us go elsewhere to discuss this,' she said.
She led him outside to the garden which she knew would be deserted at this time of the evening. They entered Singapore's soft amethyst twilight. The rank scent of the mangrove swamps to the north mingled with the cloying attar of the flowers, hung in the heavy, breathless air. In the distance, dogs barked at the encroaching shadows. One by one, the streetlights were being lit by a dark-skinned Malay boy on a ladder, whose glossy head So-Peng could just see over the brick wall.
Liang and So-Peng sat across from one another on lacquered rattan chairs.
'When you were still inside me,' she said, 'I could feel you reaching out to me, not with your hands, but with your mind. I saw colours - your colours, the shadows of your still forming mind. After you were born, I experienced this phenomenon more strongly, and I knew that you had inherited my gift. Thereafter, I encouraged this gift inside you, exercising it, you might say, allowing it to grow as you grew.'
'I remember,' So-Peng said. 'It was a link between us that no one else could share. I could speak to you without
opening my mouth, and hear your response without using my ears.'
Liang sat in a very yang manner, in a way that So-Peng's father should have sat, and didn't. It was as if she owned the house and everything in it. So-Peng, observing this, realized that he would not be surprised to find that this was, indeed, the case.
'You are still young, So-Peng,' Liang said, 'but now circumstance has forced me to impart to you -1 pray not prematurely - the full truth behind your gift. You may think now that it is a blessing, but it can so easily turn into a curse. Used for the wrong reasons - greed, envy, lust - it can be a force for great evil. Allowed its freedom it can come to dominate your life. You must know that you cannot see into all other minds as you do into mine, or I into yours. The link is the key; two people, not one, are required. Do you understand me?' Liang waited for his affirmative nod. 'Your gift may be used on its own, as no doubt you have already discovered. But it can be a trap, leading to arrogance: once you come to rely too heavily on your gift, you will blind yourself to the instances when it gives you a false reading or no reading at all. You will begin to tell yourself what you want to hear, not what your gift allows you to see and hear.'
Outside in the street, beyond the garden's brick wall, So-Peng could hear the clip-clop of a horse-drawn carriage, the brief chatter of voices. This intrusion of the banal seemed to lend Liang's words even more weight, as a black velvet background will enhance the glitter of a diamond.
He rose, wandering close to the wall. He put his hands out, pressed them against brick and climbing vines. He began to understand now why as a child he had been reluctant to use his gift, why he- had always felt as if he carried a burden within himself that weighed upon his mind, a profound enigma.
Liang, aware that her son's spirit was too restless to be contained within the sanctuary of the garden, suggested that they take a walk. They went silently through the teeming streets until they came to Queen Elizabeth Walk and the harbour.
Liang watched her son for some time. At length, she responded to his silent question.
'I cannot tell you where I am going, So-Peng,' she said, 'only that I must go.'
He was thinking of the puzzle, that her leaving must be part of it. If he solved the puzzle, he thought, perhaps she would not have to go.
They stopped by an iron railing that protected strollers from a fall into the water from the high embankment. So-Peng leaned upon the black rail, staring out at the patterns the flames of the streetlights made upon the surface of the harbour.
'Who are the tanjian?' he asked.
Liang smiled. 'Why do you think I would know that?'
'Because I think you know what they are.'
The reflection of the flames on the water seemed like spirit lights, and in this close and magical atmosphere So-Peng could imagine emerging from the harbour the merlion, hah7 land beast, half sea creature that was said to be Singapore's protector.
'I imagine,' Liang said, 'that you have heard all the stories about my heritage. I am, or I am supposed to be, Malay, perhaps part-Malay, part-Chinese - Hakka, Teochew, even Sumatran. The truth is - ' she looked at her eldest son ' - that no one knows me.'
'Not even father?'
She laughed, good-naturedly. 'Especially not your father.'
Liang had three basic qualities from which all the ruffles and furrows of her personality stemmed. She was giving, she was sympathetic and she was self-controlled. Years
later, when his studies were more complete, So-Peng would discover that, as far as the Tao was concerned, these qualities could be reduced to a single syllable, Da. And Da was the voice of God.
'I never rail against the gods,' Liang said. 'Neither do I blame those around me if they have sinned or are evil. It is my children whom I care about, and it is you, So-Peng, whom I care about the most.'
A small boy emerged from the crowd along Queen Elizabeth Walk. He ran to the railing, stuck his head between the ironwork to stare down into the water.
'Do you know that you came to me full-grown in a dream on the day before you were born?' Liang said. 'I saw your face, I spoke to you, I knew your heart. That is how I know now what course your life will take, just as I know my part in it.'
The small boy climbed up the railing in order, So-Peng supposed, to get a better look at something he had seen in the harbour. So-Peng thought again of the legendary merlion of Singapore, and wondered if that was what the boy had seen.
He returned his attention to his mother, who said, 'Now is the time when you must put all your energies into learning so that by the time you are thirty you will be secure in your career. So that at forty you will have no more doubts about the world. So that at fifty you will know the will of heaven. So that at sixty you will be prepared to heed it. So that at seventy you will be able to follow the dictates of your heart by travelling the path of the righteous.'
He looked at Liang. 'How am I to accomplish all this, Mother?'
"That is entirely up to you,' she said. 'But I will tell you a story that may be of some help to you. In Zhuji, the village in north-east China where I was born and brought up, there was a temple inhabited by the
most peculiar monks. They claimed to be descendants of Chieh, the terminator - or so he was called by many; a monarch so degenerate that he single-handedly caused the destruction of his dynasty, the Hsia. This was a very long time ago, nearly two thousand years before Christ, as the Westerners reckon time. Chieh, it is generally thought, undid all the good accomplished by the Yellow Emperor, who ruled nine hundred years before him.
'The monks were unconcerned with how the world at large viewed their infamous forebear. They were practitioners of Tau-tau, a composite form of martial arts that they contended was created by the decadent king, Chieh. They were known as tanjian, the walkers in stealth.
"These tanjian monks worshipped no god, save if you believed that Chieh was a god. Some did; others still do.' Liang paused, as if she wanted to gauge the effect of her words on her son.
'How did you come to know so much about the tanjian monks?' So-Peng asked.
'I knew them well,' she said, 'because I lived with them.' She was watching her son's eyes, reading him. 'My father was a tanjian monk.'
They heard a tiny shout. The small boy, who had been attempting to walk atop the highest rail, had slipped, toppling into the harbour waters where the calm surface belied the strong, swirling currents.
People came running, but it was a long way down. They began to signal frantically to a lighter. But it was still quite a way off and it was clear from the boy's thrashing that he could not swim.
So-Peng climbed up on to the railing, preparatory to jumping in, but his mother put her hand on his arm, restraining him with her typically firm grip. 'It is too dangerous,' she said.
'But Mother - ' He saw the look in her eye, and fell
silent. He felt the whisper of a wind, cool and invisible as it rippled out from his mother's mind.
Liang was now concentrating fully upon the thrashing child. So-Peng thought for an instant that he saw her eyes glowing but perhaps it was merely the reflection of the streetlights.
In the harbour, the child who had been struggling unsuccessfully to keep his head above water, now burst upward as if held by an underwater hand. He looked about him, terrified and, at the same time, filled with a kind of wonder as he bobbed upon the surface, immune to the treacherous currents.
So-Peng was aware of a thin line of perspiration rolling down the side of Liang's face. His own mind was vibrating in the backwash of her powerful aura.
The lighter, close now, slowed, and one of the crew threw a line to the child. A moment later, the child had been pulled to safety. The crowd which had gathered on the quay broke into spontaneous applause.
Liang turned away, allowed whatever breeze there was to dry the sweat on her face. She seemed very calm, and So-Peng was aware of an unnatural stillness enfolding them as if in a healing blanket. They sat on a backless stone bench, and Liang closed her eyes.
He should have been stunned at what his mother had just done, but he wasn't. He remembered a time many years ago when one of his younger sisters had fallen gravely ill. The doctor had come, had done what he could, and had left shaking his head. So-Peng recalled him saying in a whisper at the door, 'She will surely die. Make her comfortable, and pray. That's all you can do now.'
Of course, thinking about it, there was no way that So-Peng could have overheard the doctor's words. What he had picked up were the reverberations of those words in his mother's mind.
Then he had watched as Liang had knelt beside the sick bed and, taking her daughter's tiny hand in hers, had grown absolutely still. There was a clock upon the mantel at Liang's shoulder, and So-Peng was sure that for the first and only time it had failed to sound the passing of the hour. He had felt the house bathed in concentric circles of warmth and light, and had felt his mother's spirit expanding.
Later, he had been sure that he had dreamt the episode, but the next morning, his sister had awakened from her high fever. Her eyes were clear, the marks upon her skin already fading. Liang, still clutching her daughter's hand, had slept through that entire day.
So-Peng took a deep breath, exhaled it slowly. He needed time to comprehend the merging of past and present, to let the scattered pieces fall gently into place.
'You recognized how the two merchants were killed,' So-Peng said after a time, 'because of your father.'
Liang opened her eyes. 'Your grandfather,' she said, and it was as if that were a veiled reminder. She nodded. Her eyes seemed luminous, reflecting not only the streetlights but the last of the pellucid light in the sky far above.
Tau-tau,' she said. "Those throwing stars are made only by tanjian. The other things, the days on which the merchants were killed, the pigs' feet in their mouths, were nothing more than ruses meant to confuse the authorities. Traditional tanjian tricks.'
'Is my gift -?' So-Peng paused because this was difficult to ask; an affirmative answer would hurt him deeply. He began again. 'Is my gift part of Tau-tau?'
'No,' Liang said at once. She felt the tension drain out of him. 'That was handed down from my mother, who was not tanjian-born.'
'What are tanjian doing here in Singapore?'
Tanjian are by nature wanderers,' his mother said.
'Many emigrated to Japan three hundred years ago. Tanjian are never satisfied, always hungry for new territory. Perhaps that is because they have 'nothing of their own.'
'What do you mean?'
Liang sighed. 'Tau-tau is in a way a nihilistic discipline. Tanjian are pitiless, incapable of feeling emotion as you or I know it. As a result, they have no possessions, and are envious of those who do. Also, they are infiltrators. They hire themselves out to do the dirty work others are too honourable or too cowardly to perform themselves. This Tau-tau teaches them.'
Perhaps So-Peng heard something in his mother's tone, or again in the cast of her features. In any event, he felt compelled to say, 'None of these are the reasons that the tanjian are in Singapore.' He knew that this was the truth as soon as he had said it.
Once again, he felt the expansion of her spirit, witness to its breathing, as enormous as if the earth itself were inhaling and exhaling.
'So-Peng,' Liang said at last, 'when you came to me in my dream before your birth, this was what you said to me, "None of these are the reasons that the tanjian are in Singapore." Your father and I were not in Singapore then. We were outside Kuala Lumpur, at the tin mines. I had had no thought of moving to Singapore and, after the dream, I had no intention of ever coming here.'
'What happened?'
She smiled. 'Life happened, So-Peng.' Her eyes seemed limpid, as if they had somehow taken on a quality of the water beside which she and So-Peng sat. 'And, in time, I realized that I was not to be merely a creator of life, but a transmitter of knowledge as well. I realized almost as soon as I got here that it had not been coincidence that I had been born into a tanjian family and that years later I would give birth to you. It became clear to me
that the two were connected. I feared that connection, dreading the moment when you would say those words to me, "None of these are the reasons that the tanjian are in Singapore." '
His mother put her head down. Years later, So-Peng would remember that the city seemed to have grown still all around them. As familiar as he was with Singapore, he found that an impossibility. Yet this is what his memory told him.
'No,' Liang said, 'none of those are the reasons the tanjian are in Singapore. The reason they are here, So-Peng, is to bring me back to my family in Zhuji.'
So-Peng was silent for a long time, and Liang said nothing in order that he might best absorb what she had told him. At last, So-Peng rallied his spirit from the shock it had received. He said, 'But why would the tanjian kill two merchants? You did not know them.'
'Don't make the same mistake that everyone else has made,' Liang said. 'It isn't who the tanjian have murdered, but how they have been killed. The method announces the tanjian presence here. It is a warning to me to obey or die.'
'You mean they took two lives merely to frighten you?'
'That is the tanjian way,' Liang said.
So-Peng was now so stunned that he opened his mouth, shut it without having said a word. His mother looked neither directly at him nor away from him. She seemed to be waiting for him, reluctant to continue until he had gathered himself.
From some hidden inside pocket, Liang produced a small, black velvet box. She held it in the palm of her hand as if it were a star from heaven.
'Open the box, my son.' She intoned this as if it were a religious act, part of an ancient rite that needed completion.
So-Peng, his heart hammering in his chest, did as she bade. Inside the box he saw rows of gems.
'Sixteen emeralds,' Liang intoned in the same peculiar, almost sing-song tone of voice, 'one for each principle of the Tau-tau, one for each founding member of the tanjian. It is said that their essences have been contained in these stones, sealed away at the moment of their deaths.'
So-Peng looked at the gems as if they were alive, as if at any moment they would bite his head off. He said, 'These are what the tanjian want.' It was not a question.
Liang nodded. "They want me back, they want the emeralds back. It is one and the same. The emeralds are mine; we cannot be separated. They are sacred. Their care is my sacred trust. They have power beyond mere monetary value. Here is the very essence, the heart and the spirit of Tau-tau. Here is Good and Evil, my son. Look upon the varied faces, learn to differentiate between the two. With these stones in your possession you cannot help but live the life of the righteous.'
'But what do the tanjian want with them, Mother?'
'As I said, both Good and Evil are contained here: the spirits of the original tanjian monks. Some were good, others evil. The current tanjian, corrupted by their poverty, warped by their own shifting sense of morality, seek to loose the Evil, use its ancient power for their own ends. In so doing, the Good would be destroyed forever.'
Liang's face had grown dark, disturbed as if by a flux only the two of them could detect. 'You see, there exists within these mystic sixteen gems a kind of equilibrium. Should their number be depleted, fall below nine, the equilibrium would begin to erode, and the Evil, no longer held in check, would begin its ascent to power.'
In the tiny flames from the streetlights, the stones looked dull and black, or devoid of any colour at all, so that there was about them an air of brooding menace.
At length, So-Peng tore his gaze from the emeralds.
Looking into his mother's face, he said, "The tanjian would actually kill you, one of their own?'
'I renounced their way of life when I ran off with your father,' she said. He listened for a hint of sadness in her voice, found none. 'He is still handsome, your father. In those days, how much more so he was! He was a high liver. He must have just made an important deal because he threw money around. I liked that, I suppose. But I liked the idea of getting out of the temple even more. I felt stifled there; I was never born to be a tanjian woman. And your father was completely unlike the tanjian men I had grown up around, whom I had grown to despise. He was so kind, so genuine - of course that's why he continually loses all the money he earns.'
Her smile was wistful, as if she looked upon her husband as an overgrown child, a delightful blessing who, like a tender flower, nevertheless required constant attention. 'But I was afraid of my father's wrath - and rightly so. He would not have allowed me to go had I asked him. So I didn't; I just left with your father, who knew nothing of this, of course. I have made certain that he still doesn't. Poor man! What would he make of it?'
Liang looked at her son, saw not herself but her beloved husband mirrored in those features, as the moon is reflected in the water. 'What I did was unheard of. How many laws of Tau-tau have I transgressed? In the back of my mind, I knew that I would have to pay for those sins. But another - stronger -- part of me hoped that that day would never come. Now it has.'
'Which is why you must go.'
'I cannot endanger my family,' she said simply.
So-Peng said, 'If you go there will be no family.'
She was silent for some time. 'But you see, my dearest, I have no other choice.'
So-Peng thought, She is right. But I do have a choice.
He was also dimly aware that she was withholding something vital from him. 'Tell me everything you can about the tanjian,' he said.
Liang gave him a small, sad smile. She shook her head. 'What I have already told you is far too much. The danger is too great.'
'What if you go and the danger is still present?' So-Peng said.
'Impossible,' -his mother said. 'As soon as I return to Zhuji, the danger will no longer exist.'
Then, with the direct prescience of youth, So-Peng said, 'What if you are not all the tanjian want?'
Liang had begun to tremble. 'We will not speak of this!' she said sharply. And then, in a softer tone of voice, 'Do not allow your imagination to get the better of you. If you rely overly on your gift now, it will surely fail you.'
So-Peng bowed in obedience. 'I am sorry, Mother,' he said. 'Nevertheless, I still believe that knowledge is strength.' He lifted his head at what he judged to be just the right moment. He had learned this trick from her, and it worked. Their eyes locked, but there was more that passed between them.
In a moment, Liang nodded. She began to speak, telling him every bit of lore and strategy she knew of the tanjian and Tau-tau. It was quite late when she finished.
As children, So-Peng's brothers and sisters always obeyed their mother. So-Peng did more: he listened to her. So it was that, when she revealed the background concerning her past and the philosophy of Tau-tau, So-Peng decided that in order to save both his mother and the family he needed first to explore the dark. Because there is where he would find the tanjian, the harnessers of the night and of every evil thing that made its home in the darkness.
The way into darkness, he quickly discovered, was twilight, and twilight was synonymous with deceit, within which were always elements of the truth. One could not be truthful and explore the dark, rotting corners of the world. Truth was not the currency of evil, which inhabited the darkness like a bed of thorns in a woodland glade. Neither were lies. In order to negotiate these treacherous byways one needed to speak neither one but, like an incantation, an arcane combination of the two.
So-Peng went to see his cousin, Wan, who cleaned the floors in the offices of the British chief of police. Wan, needless to say, knew everything that went on within the police precinct, which was quite a bit more than the chief of police knew.
Wan said, 'Why do you ask about these murders, cousin? They are very bad business. Even the British are reluctant to investigate. They would prefer to let the past be the past. The British are afraid. Now I am afraid.'
Nevertheless, Wan let So-Peng see everything the police had amassed concerning the incidents. So-Peng concentrated on his reading so as not to allow Wan's extreme anxiety to affect him.
'It mentions weapons called, for lack of a better term, throwing stars,' he said to Wan. 'Are the police holding them?'
Wan nodded, showed them to So-Peng, who gave them only a cursory look, though he was extremely curious about them. He returned to the report, asked Wan several meaningless, misleading questions, then gave him back the report. As Wan went to put it away, So-Peng palmed one of the throwing stars.
Now that he knew as much as the police did about the murders, So-Peng felt he was as prepared as he ever would be for Nightside.
Nightside was only an approximate translation of the patois word, part Malay, part Hokkien dialect. It was
an area of town shunned by the ruling British, rarely frequented by the Babas, as the Straits Chinese bora in the settlement of immigrant parents were called. The Babas, with an eye to the future; were far more respectable than were their forebears, who had endured unimaginable hardships, being brought to Singapore in the holds of clipper ships, being imprisoned there until the cost of their passage was paid for by those who promised to employ them. Subsequently, they toiled eighteen hours a day to pay off that heavy debt whose amount increased with each day's interest.
Nightside was the province of the samsengs, professional criminals breeding in the dark underbelly of Singapore. These unwholesome denizens were utterly contemptuous of Western law. They committed murder, extortion, robbery and burglary with such regularity that these crimes were to them the equivalent of a nine to five job.
Because So-Peng knew all this, he determined that Nightside would be the logical place to begin his search for the tanjian. Nightside was a place along the docks. It was filled with godowns - warehouses - bars, and clubs open until dawn. Here liquor and opium vied for prominence among a population that had little thought of tomorrow. They were a godless bunch, the Nightsiders, the concept of belief in anything excoriated by a life without either hope or purpose.
Into this pit of evil stepped So-Peng, weaponless save for his quick wits and the knowledge he had got from his mother, the facts he had gleaned from the police files.
At first, at bar after bar, he was left alone, as if he were some dim-witted Baba who had wandered into Nightside by mistake, and would soon disappear of his own accord.
When this did not occur he garnered somewhat more attention, and when he began asking questions concerning
the whereabouts of the men who had murdered the two merchants, he became the object of considerable curiosity and speculation.
A samseng named Tik Po Tak, the leader of one of the innumerable Chinese tongs, took particular interest in So-Peng. Tak was a thick-set man in his early thirties, a former sinkeh - an indentured immigrant - who had seen his two older brothers die of cholera in the hold of the Chinese junk that had brought them to Singapore on the wings of the monsoon winds.
Tak himself had emerged from that disease-ridden ship thin and tubercular. He had worked night and day to pay off the enormous debt he had incurred for not only his own passage but that of his dead brothers as well.
Within two years he had paid off the debt and, a free man, he had entered Nightside. There, he had bought a weapon with the remainder of his money, had returned to the pepper plantation on which he had toiled for twenty-four months, and had killed his former employer.
He was a famous figure around Nightside, and he was much feared. He also had amassed the most powerful tong in the Crown Colony, as the British called Singapore in those days. Rather than being intimidated by the local British police, Tak had made a deal with them - a kind of mutual non-aggression pact. The British did not hinder his affairs to any major degree. They did not dare.
When he had been a sinkeh, Tik Po Tak had been a brash young man, willing to take appalling risks for the sake of honour and freedom. In So-Peng he no doubt saw an image of his younger self and, therefore, his interest was piqued. On the other hand, he was wary. His truce with the British was at best brittle, and it would be correct to say that Tak was uneasy around them. In his opinion, any people who were more concerned with telling the
truth - and, thus, giving offence - than they were with saving face were simply not trustworthy.
Tik Po Tak sent One Eye Yan across the bar to speak to So-Peng. In that way he might observe the young man's actions, reactions and manner from a distance, the better to judge whether So-Peng was what he claimed he was or a spy sent into Nightside by the devious British.
One Eye Yan was a massive man with a notoriously incendiary temper who could intimidate the bravest British officer. But Yan had his orders, and Tak had no doubt that he would do what he, Tak, wanted him to do.
Yan said to So-Peng, 'Why are you here in a part of Singapore that does not belong to you?'
So-Peng looked at this giant of a man who was of approximately the same height as he but was perhaps twice again as heavy. 'I am looking for men who have committed murder,' he said.
Yan laughed. He brandished a long, dirty knife in So-Peng's face. 'Then you've come to the right place.' He watched So-Peng's face as he turned the blade of the knife this way and that. 'Which murders?'
"The Muslim merchants who were found with pigs' feet in their mouths,' So-Peng said at once.
One Eye Yan grunted. 'Why do you want to find these men?'
'I wish to talk with them,' So-Peng said.
Yan grinned as he put the filthy blade to So-Peng's neck. 'Your search has ended,' he said softly. 'I am one of them.' He leaned into So-Peng's face. 'Speak.'
So-Peng did not move. He knew that this giant was not a tanjian; he did not have the sense of menace about him that Liang had described. There was nothing mystical about this one-eyed man. His character was simple, straightforward. So-Peng knew that this did not make him any less dangerous.
With that in mind, So-Peng knew that the manner of his reaction now was extremely important. 'If you are who you say you are,' he told the giant, 'you will know my name.'
'Is that so?' Van said. 'Why should I know you? You're just a stripling.'
Using his gift, So-Peng reached out, touched Van's spirit with his own, enfolding it in a sense of truth. Straightforward adversaries demanded straightforward measures.
Yan grunted, took the blade from So-Peng's throat. 'Aren't you afraid that they will kill you as well?' he asked. 'Murderers are notoriously indifferent towards their victims.'
'Not these murderers,' So-Peng said with such absolute authority that for a moment Yan was taken aback.
He peered more closely at So-Peng. 'You know the identities of these men?'
So-Peng nodded. 'Yes.'
'Can you prove it?'
'Yes, lean.'
'Come with me,' Yan said. He led So-Peng to the back of the bar, where Tik Po Tak waited in the shadows. So-Peng stood until he was invited to sit down. He shared a drink with Tik Po Tak without knowing the man's name. That was all right, he decided. On that score, the two of them were even.
'I understand that you are looking for the men responsible for the two recent murders,' Tak said when they had both drained their glasses.
'That is correct.'
"There are elements within Singapore who believe that I murdered the two merchants.'
'Why would they think that?' So-Peng asked.
'Because I am Tik Po Tak, and I had business with those two merchants.'
'Opium business?'
Tak squinted at So-Peng. Beneath the table he had drawn a small-calibre pistol which he had aimed at So-Peng's stomach. 'What is your name?' he asked tightly.
So-Peng told him.
'My business is no concern of yours, So-Peng,' he said.
So-Peng shrugged, his nonchalant attitude belying the hammering of his heart. He could feel Tak's distrust; it was like rubbing up against a rusty scow. 'If it was opium trade, I could understand the British believing you had the two merchants killed.' He had read Tik Po Tak's name as a prime suspect in the material Wan had shown him at police headquarters. He fought down an urge to reassure Tak that he was who he said he was, knowing instinctively that that would only make the samseng more suspicious.
Tell me,' Tak said, hunching forward, his hands out of sight beneath the table, 'am I who you are looking for?'
'I am looking for Chinese known as tanjian,' So-Peng said. "They are monks of a sort, who possess remarkable skills. To them killing is a way of life; this is their Tao. The tanjian worship death.' His eyes met Tak's, and he put his spirit into his gaze, projecting it outward. 'They are the ones who murdered the merchants, not you. Will you help me find them?'
'Monks who kill?' Tak was still sceptical, though So-Peng could sense a growing interest. 'Who has heard of such a thing?'
'I have,' So-Peng said. He sensed that Tik Po Tak had reason of his own to find the murderers. 'I will know them when I see them,' he said. 'It seems to me that you have the physical means to find them.'
So-Peng was proposing a partnership and Tak knew it. On the surface it seemed ridiculous, a mere lad of unknown - and suspect - origins offering an alliance with Singapore's most powerful samseng. Still, Tak said, 'Tell me more about these - tanjian.'
So-Peng related more or less what his mother had told him. He did not, however, include his mother's - or his own - connection.
'Why do you want to find these tanjian - assuming,-of course, that they exist at all?'
Now So-Peng was faced with a fundamental dilemma. Truth or fiction, which should he choose? He decided to stick to the twilight, where he suspected Tak had also chosen to dwell. He began to speak but at the last instant stopped. Something in Tak's eyes hinted of discernment, and so So-Peng told the truth, recounting his mother's fear, his own desire to protect her. He withheld any mention of his own or his mother's gift.
Tak was silent for some time, digesting this. 'How will you recognize these tanjian?' he asked abruptly.
So-Peng did not know. He said, 'I have seen them before,' While projecting that same sense of truth he had directed at Yan.
Tik Po Tak had remained at the summit of Nightside's underworld through rock-hard determination, an iron fist, and the unbending rule of never entering into a partnership. Alliances inevitably led to a sharing - and therefore a diminution - of power. And power was something Tak had been born understanding.
And yet there was some quality in this lad that drew him. It was not merely that in order to maintain face in Nightside, Tak must avenge the death of his business associates; not merely that the lad had knowledge that Tak could exploit, although, surely, that must have been part of it. It was the sense that So-Peng possessed a talent that could prove enormously profitable. Tak saw that unless he took So-Peng under his wing, someone smart would, and that would be bad for Tik Po Tak.
'We want the same thing,' Tak said warily. 'Perhaps we can do business.' He was aware that So-Peng had not enquired as to why Tak wanted the murderers found.
This impressed Tak; it was his experience that partners were inordinately nosey. He was convinced the lad was far wiser than his years would indicate. 'Meet me here tomorrow at first light,' he said, terminating the meeting abruptly.
The next day, brutally steamy and uncomfortable even by Singapore standards, So-Peng travelled with Tak to Choa Chu Kang village, north of the Colony.
'Do you know how to handle a rifle?' Tak asked So-Peng.
Here there was no use lying.
'Well, no matter,' Tak said. 'I will teach you.' This, in fact, gave him pleasure. Tak, who had two wives and seven children, was nevertheless unused to quick wits and unlimited aptitude in the young. He found his children stupid, lazy and altogether a disappointment.
He liked teaching So-Peng to shoot, and was oddly proud of the lad's almost instinctive skill. On the other hand, he was suspicious of it.
It was a good thing that So-Peng learned to use the weapon quickly because by midday they were on a tiger hunt. The violent carnivorous cats were unhappy with the encroachment of civilization on their territory. Already this year almost 300 people had been killed in tiger attacks on the outskirts of Singapore.
Tak was affable, even loquacious. This was a side of the samseng that So-Peng had not seen before, and he was fascinated. Tak managed to introduce his young ward to everyone in the party. They were friendly, spending time talking to So-Peng, asking him questions, answering his in turn.
Tak introduced So-Peng to a Western man of pleasant mien named H. N. Ridley, who Tak said would stalk with them. The two men seemed to know each other weU. It seemed odd to So-Peng that Tak would befriend a
Westerner, and his consternation increased when, during a rest break, he discovered that Ridley was the director of the Singapore Botanical Gardens.
'I'm a Sower-fancier,' Tak said, laughing.
What could the two men have in common? So-Peng wondered. Immediately he corrected himself, and asked, What was it Ridley had that Tak could exploit?
He pondered this question while the party moved out, the Malay dog-handlers first, fanning through the jungle, the dogs straining at their leashes.
So-Peng had heard that the government had put a bounty on every tiger head brought back to Singapore, but he suspected that this group would have gone hunting merely for the excitement and the sport of it. The atmosphere among the party was nothing short of that of an exclusive men's club. Among the Chinese there was intense gambling not only on how many heads the party would bring back, but also what time the first tiger would be spotted, killed, as well as what time the party would bag its last animal.
So-Peng was very excited. While Tak and Ridley spoke idly of rumours making the rounds of the Colony, So-Peng was watching the dogs, or at least the one closest to them -a Saluki. This animal was far smaller than So-Peng would have imagined would be used to hunt such large beasts. It was brindled black and white with quick, inquisitive eyes and large triangular ears.
The tiger must have been downwind, because it came gliding through the thick underbrush on the Saluki's left without so much as a rustle. So-Peng had swung his rifle around and, as the tiger leapt for the dog, jerked the trigger hard. His rifle went off with a terrible roar. Unprepared for the recoil, he was thrown backwards, his rifle pointing skywards.
Tak whirled, squeezed off two accurate rounds. The result made it seem as if the dog, tiny by comparison
with the giant cat, had shrugged the larger beast off its back.
The dogs were howling. Everyone ran, converging on the spot where the tiger lay on its side, panting, eyes rolling. So-Peng arrived in time to see it lift its noble head and roar defiantly at those who had brought it down. Tak reloaded, put a bullet through its right eye.
The brindled Saluki sat, panting and bleeding, by the tiger's side. The poor wounded beast howled as best it could along with its brethren, and it resisted its handler as he dragged it away from the kill to minister to it.
Tak walked over to where So-Peng stood staring at the tiger. Its death seemed an ominous foreshadowing.
Watching So-Peng's reactions, Tak nodded to himself. He pointed to the Malay dog-handler, said, 'Desaru owes you much for saving his dog's life. Those animals are difficult to train, very hard to replace.' He went to where So-Peng had dropped his rifle, returned with it. 'You did a good job,' he said, handing over the weapon.
Two of the Malay boys stayed with the kill while the rest of the party prepared to move out.
As often happened after an early kill, for a long time nothing occurred. The day wore on, hot and intensely humid. A spattering of rain fell, and then was gone. So-Peng watched the sunlight evaporating the precipitation off the wide leaves and fronds.
For a while, Ridley walked side by side with So-Peng, speaking easily and light-heartedly. The answer to what Tak wanted from Ridley appeared gradually, and was simple enough. According to Ridley, a rather gentle man, astoundingly intelligent for a Westerner, Tak had been donating money to the botanical gardens, in return for which Ridley was experimenting with growing poppies.
So-Peng could see what Tak was up to. If he could get Ridley somehow to adapt the flower to this area, Tak could cultivate the opium crop himself, cutting
out all the middlemen who cut into his profit margin.
'It's a fool's dream, really,' Ridley confided in So-Peng during the long, tedious afternoon. 'The papaver somniferum, or Eurasian poppy, is a delicate creature. For one thing, it craves the coolness one finds in these parts only in elevations between 1,000 and 1,500 metres. It is impossible to get it growing here at sea level, and any attempt at hybridization mucks about with the end product - opium.'
'Have you told Tak this?' So-Peng asked.
'No,' Ridley said immediately. Then, appalled, he said, 'Good God, I hope you won't tell him. The fact is, the bulk of his donations have gone to a new project I've been interested in for a year now. I've imported seedlings of the Para tree from England. These were smuggled illegally out of the Amazon River basin - do you know where that is? I'm not surprised. South America. The other side of the world.
'In any event, unlike the Eurasian poppy, it appears as if this climate and soil are perfect for the Para tree. If this proves true, the effect on Singapore will be - well, I can't really imagine it. Quite remarkable, at the very least.
I've mentioned the Para to Mr Tak, but he seems to have other matters on his mind. Growing it would be easy for him; he's got acres and acres of land to the north of Singapore.'
'Why would he want to grow this tree?' So-Peng asked.
H. N. Ridley looked at him. 'Have you ever heard of rubber?'
'No,' So-Peng admitted. 'What is it?'
Ridley told him. To So-Peng, what he had to say was far more interesting than the brace of tigers the hunting party took.
The tiger hunt was a way for them to move northwards without causing any undue talk.
'If these tanjian were actually in Singapore,' Tak said to So-Peng, 'I would have known about it. That means they're out here in the jungle with the tigers.'
So-Peng nodded. 'From what I understand, that fits their elemental philosophy.' He had not said anything about his talk with Ridley, preferring to keep his information to himself until a propitious moment. In life, So-Peng knew, one not only had to cross bridges, but one had to cross them at the proper time.
'It also means they'll be far more dangerous,' Tak warned. 'In Singapore, I control virtually everyone or know someone who does. We would have a much easier time of it.'
To So-Peng's surprise, they did not head into the jungle when the hunt broke up. Instead, they trekked for just over an hour through mangrove and thick forest palms until they emerged on the bank of a wide, meandering, muddy river. A slim sampan was waiting for them. Surrounding it were three heavily armed men who bowed when they saw Tak approaching. He stepped aboard the boat, checking the provisions himself. Apparently satisfied, he waved So-Peng aboard and, casting off the lines, the three men leapt into the sampan as it nosed out from the shore. At the rear of the boat, one of the men had a coal fire going. An iron wok was beginning to sizzle.
'What river is this?' So-Peng asked.
Tak said, 'The orang asli have named it, but I don't know what it is.' He was speaking of the original people - the natives - of the peninsula. 'It doesn't matter. It will get us where we need to go.'
The man in the stern produced food: drunken chicken, strips of meat boiled in shoo shing, the yellow rice wine that was a Shanghainese favourite, served cold with
broad, pungent sprigs of fresh coriander. In a moment, the wok was emptied, filled again, and Tak and So-Peng were delivered of baby eels sauted in sesame oil; crisp baskets of deep-fried yam noodles.
Tak talked animatedly as they ate. As he spoke, it gradually dawned on So-Peng that he had passed some kind of test that Tak had devised for him. He thought back to the people he had been introduced to on the hunt. Each of them, though polite, had seemed eager to know about him, almost as if they were quizzing him. And, indeed, So-Peng now realized that that was precisely what they had been doing.
When he thought about it, it was not so surprising. People in Tak's position had a right if not a duty to be sceptical of everyone with whom they came in contact. Tak's only fear was from infiltration by the police or by a rival tong. Tak had in effect passed bun around to all those in the hunt party who could identify him as something other than what So-Peng had claimed to be.
'These two merchants,' Tak was saying now, 'were something special to me, and everyone knew it. They had the fastest fleets, the trained personnel, the desire to take risks that I required. It is clear to me that whoever murdered them - the tanjian, you say - did so at the behest of someone with whom I have done business. We had a disagreement about six months ago, and he vowed to get even. Now he has, and I cannot let his challenge go unavenged.'
Hearing this, So-Peng was about to say that this could not be so, since his mother was certain that the tanjian had murdered the two merchants as a warning for her to return to her family, but instead he bit his tongue. It was clear to him that Tik Po Tak was far from a fool. If he believed that the murders were meant to teach him a lesson, So-Peng could not discount that possibility. Then who was right about the motive for the murders, Tak or Liang?
'You were very quick with your reflexes,' Tak said, returning to the subject of the tiger hunt. 'Desaru owes you; he will not forget.'
'I had some practice,' So-Peng admitted. 'Some years ago, I made money by bagging those giant rats that were gobbling up the Colony's cats. Remember? The governor put a bounty on their heads. One week I brought in twenty. They made a good deal more noise than the tiger.'
'You heard him anyway,' Tak said, missing nothing, 'when Ridley and I did not.'
'Well, I have not lived in Singapore all my life,' So-Peng said, judging the time was right to divulge this information. 'My family moved around a lot and I spent time on both coasts of the peninsula.'
Tak laughed. 'So you know the jungle better than I.'
So-Peng told him the Malay name of the river they were on, then immediately regretted it; Tak might think him devious.
'Do you also know where we're going?' Tak asked seriously.
So-Peng shook his head. 'I'd need second-sight for that,' he said.
'I know someone who has second-sight,' Tak said. 'I consulted him before we set out.' He spat into the muddy water. 'He said I would not return from upriver.'
'Yet you chose to go anyway.'
'Chose?' Tak seemed surprised by the word. 'Fate dictated that I must go. These merchants were like part of my family. Also, I was waiting for a sign.' He pointed at So-Peng. 'You are the sign, lad. You know the murderers, these tanjian. I no longer feel like an eagle in the dark. You'll see them before they see us.'
So-Peng felt his bowels turn to water. He was angry at himself for inflating his value' to Tak. He had told the satnseng that he had seen the tanjian and could thus identify them. Now Tak was counting on him to provide
the edge in a showdown between two powerful enemies. So-Peng was in the middle of a war from which it was impossible to extricate himself.
Yet he knew that he could not confess his error in judgement - not now after he knew what was required of him. All of a sudden, he found that his cynical feelings about Tak had dissipated. Tak had revealed himself as a man who believed in his ideals, and was willing to die for them. So-Peng thought that no better definition of a hero existed.
It was, perhaps, not surprising that Tik Po Tak should have such a profound effect upon So-Peng. After all, the boy had grown up in a family where his father was all but completely absent. That So-Peng should wind up admiring this man with the iron will and compelling personality was, in retrospect, inevitable.
Children from a kampong they passed swam out into the river, laughing and splashing at the garfish which could swim atop, the water for minutes at a time. Two enterprising lads swam alongside the sampan until one of Tak's men shouted a warning in Bahasa, pointing to an oncoming crocodile. The kids shouted. So-Peng could see their eyes rolling in fear, and he was reminded of the mortally wounded tiger before Tak shot it through the eye. The children turned, trying to head for shore, but So-Peng, watching the crocodile overhauling them, did not believe they would make it to safety. The crocodile, close now, opened wide its greedy jaws.
One of Tak's men reached for a rifle, but So-Peng put his hand on the barrel, saying, 'The blood will only attract more animals.'
Leaning over the side of the boat, So-Peng ripped off a thick branch and, launching himself into the river between the terrified children and the crocodile, he jammed the branch into the mouth of the crocodile. Immediately, he swung aboard its back, riding it as it thrashed. Behind it,
the river was turned into a froth by its whipping tail. The children, seeing this display, began to laugh, swimming to shore, pulling themselves up the embankment, standing, dripping, pointing and laughing as they nonchalantly peeled giant leeches off their bodies.
Tak pulled So-Peng back aboard the sampan, and the boat moved on.
'Where did you learn that trick?' he asked.
So-Peng, thinking of Zhao Hsia, laughed. 'I'm glad it worked,' he said. 'When I was a boy my best friend used to do that with crocodiles larger than this one. He had a knack with animals. Not like second-sight, but similar, I suppose. They would not harm him.' He shrugged. 'Perhaps he hypnotized them.'
Tak was staring upriver, at the Gunung Muntahak mountain, rising in blue haze out of the emerald and khaki jungle. 'I could use your friend's powers on this journey,' he said. Then he turned, and smiled at So-Peng. 'It is good that you are here, lad. Not many Chinese are familiar with the Malay east coast. It is my great good fortune that you came to me at just this moment.'
Within a stand of huge Tualang trees they saw a brace of scaly pangolin, overseen by a family of raucous gibbons, swinging from branch to branch. Kingfishers, hornbills and sunbirds flitted and stalked along the river and its steep embankments. Sunset was approaching.
There were few cooking fires in the kampongs, for this was the beginning of Ramadan and, for the Muslim Malays, the next thirty days were reserved for fasting and for prayer.
'I chose this time well,' Tak said, as the sampan nosed into a natural cove on the right bank. 'In Ramadan the spirit may be strong, but the flesh is weak.'
They crept ashore, under cover of the swiftly encroaching night and the cluttering of the nocturnal insects. Fireflies glittered in the gathering dusk and, here and
there, birdwing butterflies as large across as So-Peng's head made their last foray of the day. They went as far as they could, then made camp without a fire, settled down for the night.
At first light, they set out. Tak led them down a jungle path, winding and circuitous. There were many breaks, and the path was overgrown with palm and fern so that intuition - or perhaps memory - played as great a role as jungle lore in divining the way.
However, it was So-Peng who pointed out that several of the clumps of fern were unattached. Rather they had been purposefully placed in order to obscure die path in as natural a manner as was possible.
'Is this your enemy's doing?' So-Peng asked.
'I don't think his people are that sophisticated,' Tak said, shaking his head.
They pressed on, strung out in single file: two of Tak's heavily-armed men, then Tak himself, So-Peng, and the last of the men, the one who cooked for them.
The foliage, thick, wide, beaded with moisture, held all manner of treasures: a multitude of insects, tiny jewelled snakes, green and blue tree frogs, small multi-coloured birds.
The days were always more quiet than the nights, but just as dangerous. Spitting cobras, krates and vipers whose bites were powerful enough to paralyse a man within seconds were much in evidence. Once, the lead man stopped, pointing at a great creature coiled around the bole of a tree by the side of the path. It was a reticulated python which looked to be longer than the height of five men.
Just before midday, Tak called a halt, and they hunkered down in place for a light meal. So-Peng, who was nearest the cook, helped pass the fruit down the line of men: rambutan, which were similar to lychee, and the sweet-sour mangosteen with its pure white flesh. It was
said that one told seasons in Singapore by what fruit was on sale there.
So-Peng was opening the last of his mangosteen when the white sections were suddenly, startlingly spattered with deep red. So-Peng smelt the sickly-sweet stench of fresh blood and, out of the corner of his eye, saw the cook crumple over as if he had fallen asleep.
Except that the middle of the cook's chest was rudely split by a gleaming steel object, eight-pointed, buried half-way into flesh. So-Peng recognized it immediately as a tanjian throwing star.
So-Peng grew very still. He felt his spirit contracting into an opaque ball, keeping to the low ground, staying invisible. The hairs at the back of his neck stirred; he was acutely aware of his vulnerability, his utter helplessness. He waited for the soft whirring of the throwing star, the sharp bite of steel blade burying itself in his back. He willed his mind to think of nothing. Afraid to move or to make any sound, So-Peng clandestinely watched the cook die.
All was quiet around them. The men ate, unsuspecting. So-Peng acted accordingly, so as not to differentiate himself from them.
He believed he knew what the tanjian were up to. His mother had emphasized their dependence on strategy, and he knew that he must bank on that dependence, turning it to his advantage, transmuting the tanjian strength into a weakness. He could not do that by offering himself up as a target. Sick at heart, trembling in fear, he obediently ate his last mangosteen, speckled with the cook's blood.
At length, So-Peng rose, went off the trail to urinate. Afterwards, instead of returning directly to the party, he struck out in a direction that ran roughly parallel to the jungle path they had been following.
He had been at this for perhaps ten minutes when he heard a voice calling softly, 'Don't move.'
So-Peng froze; he dared not even look around. Now he felt something on his back. As it began to undulate, silently tracking obliquely across one shoulder to his waist, he began to understand.
He waited patiently. In a moment, he sensed someone approaching him from the side. So-Peng relaxed his muscles. There was a quick movement, no more than a blur, then he felt the weight off his back, heard the swish of the knife through the air, turned and saw the viper's head severed from its writhing body. Black venom squirted on to the jungle floor, absorbed by the thick mulch.
So-Peng looked into Tik Po Tak's eyes. 'What do you think you're doing, lad?' the samseng said. 'You could've been killed.'
'I was looking for the tanjian in the trees,' So-Peng said, watching Tak wipe down his knife. 'The cook is dead.'
'I know. I got the men under cover, then I went looking for you. I thought you'd been killed as well.'
'The tanjian are here,' So-Peng said. When Tak said nothing, he went on. 'The cook was killed with the same weapon as the two merchants in Singapore - a throwing star.'
Tak was scowling. 'You knew this and you made no outcry?'
'If I had,' So-Peng said, 'I would have been the next to die. I did not know from which direction the star had come, but I knew I was being watched.'
As he moved through the jungle, he avoided a spot where the sun dropped almost straight through a small gap in the jungle canopy, golden instead of luminescent green.
'We are being stalked,' So-Peng said as they returned to the jungle path. He had made his circuit, had seen no one. Still, he fingered the throwing star hidden in his trousers, the one he had purloined from the police office
in Singapore. 'I believe the tanjian mean to kill us one by one until you are the last remaining member of this party.'
The silence stretched on so long that Tak was forced to say, 'And then?'
'I don't know,' So-Peng confessed. 'Perhaps they will seek to take you apart in front of your enemy.'
Tak looked at So-Peng. 'Second-sight says that I will not return from here,' he said. "That future, I believe, is but one of many. Now we must prove that it is the wrong one.'
'We cannot remain on the path,' So-Peng pointed out.
'No, we must head directly into the jungle.'
'How well do you know this area?'
Tak spat. 'Maybe better than the tanjian, though not as well as the man we have to get to.' He eyed So-Peng. 'Do you have an idea?'
'Maybe,' So-Peng said, 'but I need height for it to work.'
Tak smiled, pointing almost due north. 'There,' he said, 'not a mile away are the Kota Tinggi waterfalls. They are over 100 feet high.'
So-Peng nodded. 'They'll do.'
Tak and So-Peng returned to where the men squatted under cover, and headed out. Less than a mile, Tak had said. Still, So-Peng thought, considering the numerous skills of the tanjian, that could seem like a day's march.
The second man went down at precisely the moment when So-Peng heard the deep rumble of the falls. An outflung arm flared across So-Peng's vision like the wavering of a battle standard. Moving, he shouted in Malay patois, a dialect he and Tak had agreed upon for future communication, rather than a Chinese dialect which might be understood by the tanjian.
The three of them hurried onward towards the falls, zigzagging as best they could. The terrain began to change,
first subtly, then more obviously as they approached the lowest level of the falls.
In the first of the rocks surrounding the falls, the last of Tak's men went down with a throwing star in the back of his neck. As they had agreed, Tak ascended the wet rocks, heading directly up the left face of the cliff.
So-Peng hoped that the tanjian would be filled with their recent accomplishments and so could be taken off-guard. So far as they were concerned, their strategy had been wholly successful. This was what was crucial and, as he climbed above and to the left of Tak, So-Peng thought it a shame that two men had had to die in the furtherance of this fiction. He would have much preferred to go after the tanjian after the first attack, but that would have proved foolhardy and, no doubt, fatal. They had obviously held the high ground and, as his mother had explained to him, they were masters of their environment, learning to blend in to their surroundings. He would have had no chance at them back on the jungle floor.
Now he was taking the high ground. Now, like the field mouse fixed in the pupil of the eagle, he was about to fix the tanjian in his mind. Soon their image would appear in his eyes.
As he ascended, the water, white and fuming, bellowed in his ears. Birds flew at the level of his shoulder, then, moments later, soared below him. When he looked down, he could see now and again Tak's black hair bobbing in among the rocks and spume, a tiny boat trying to find safe harbour in a storm.
So-Peng paused and, setting his back firmly against the rocks, closed his eyes.
Was it the fear engendered by the tanjian or the arrogance inside himself that caused him to ignore his mother's warning not to rely upon his gift? At that moment, who could say? In any event, he sought to find that secret place in the centre of him from which point
his psychic link with his mother had been bom. Then, as he had seen her do, he expanded his spirit outwards, breathing in the sky.
It was a heady experience. He felt the wind against his mind and, rising, the salt spray of the South China Sea far away. He could see the stars burning in the heavens beyond the sunshine, could begin to feel the currents of unseen particles filling the vast trenches between the stars.
Below, he ranged across the tumbling arc of the waterfalls, fascinated by the continuous outpouring of kinetic energy, wondering like a child if he could find a way to tap into that elemental source.
It was then that he felt the wall. Featureless and grim, it rose up around him, blotting out first the stars, sun and sky, then the wildly rushing water, even the rock face upon which he now crouched, trembling and terrified, his arm over his eyes.
He had disobeyed his mother. He had chosen to abandon the low ground where he could use his gift in obscurity. In thoughtlessly expanding his spirit, he had announced himself as clearly as if he had shouted, 'Here I am!' at the top of his voice.
Because a link had been forged. Not with Liang - she was many miles away. But with another who possessed the gift!
In the moment when their spirits touched, So-Peng gave up his anonymity. But, in return, he learned a great deal. For one thing, he now knew that there was only one tanjian who had been stalking them. He knew where that tanjian was, and most terrible of all, he knew his identity.
Hearing his name being called, So-Peng took his arm away from his face, and rose in time to see the tanjian appearing through a narrow defile in the rocks not more than six feet away.
So-Peng looked into the face of Zhao Hsia, his childhood friend.
218
At that instant, Zhao Hsia laughed. 'Not merely your childhood friend,' he said in a voice, grown deep through the years. 'Your half-brother.'
Seeing the look on So-Peng's face, he smiled. 'It is clear that Liang never told you. She was married before she met your father, wed to the tanjian monk our grandfather chose for her.'
'Was it you who killed those two merchants in Singapore?' So-Peng asked. He was still half in shock at discovering the true identity of Zhao Hsia.
Zhao Hsia shook his head. 'Originally, I was with another tanjian. We were meant to scare the merchants so that they would work for Tik Po Tak's enemy, not with Tak himself. My friend does not have my temperament. When the merchants refused to leave Tak's employ - well, the persuasion got out of hand. I tried to stop him, but it was too late. The merchants were already dead. I regret that sincerely.'
So-Peng wanted to believe him.
Tell me,' Zhao Hsia said. 'I have not seen our mother in many years. How is she?'
'She has been well,' So-Peng said, still trying to discern truth from fiction. 'But the tanjian presence in Singapore - the murders - have upset her terribly.'
'Then I will have to speak with her,' Zhao Hsia said, 'to pacify her fears.' He took a step up the rocky slope. 'Tell me, have you seen the box?'
'What box?' The trip-hammer beating of So-Peng's heart almost made him trip over the words. As it was the lie felt squeezed out of him like a pip from a fruit.
'The one containing the emeralds.' Noting So-Peng's puzzled expression, Zhao Hsia went on. "The sixteen emeralds, you idiot. The energy of the tanjian. Our sacred history is engraved upon their facets, although no one but a tanjian monk can see the writing. The emeralds are encased in a small velvet box. Have you seen it?'
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'No.'
'I would know if you were lying,' Zhao Hsia said, and So-Peng felt again the cool, featureless wall enclosing him for an instant.
'Why would I lie?'
Zhao Hsia's expression was contemptuous. 'Because evidently you are our mother's son, devious, depraved. Just as I am my father's son, a true monk of Tau-tau, schooled in all its disciplines.'
So-Peng, his heart in his throat, thought it interesting that Zhao Hsia could not tell that he was lying. Was this, too, part of his gift? he wondered.
'You have the gift,' So-Peng pointed out. He thought he had discovered something, a glittering rent in the apparently seamless wall. He struck out at it to see if he could prise it open. "The gift comes from mother. Like it or not, we are both her sons.'
Abruptly, Zhao Hsia's demeanour shifted. His mask slipped off his face, and the hate appeared, as stark and powerful as theatrical make-up. 'Do not speak to me of Liang,' Zhao Hsia said tightly. 'She despised my father, she despised me, just as she despised the tanjian way of life. So she ran away. She broke the law of Tau-tau.'
"Then it's true,' So-Peng said, struggling not to be overwhelmed by the brilliant light flowing out from the wall's rent. 'You've come to take her back to Zhuji.'
Zhao Hsia threw back his head and laughed. 'Not her, my friend. I've come for you!'
So-Peng was so stunned that all lie could utter was, 'Me?'
'You have the gift, just as I do. That gift is revered by the tanjian; its uses are limitless when it is harnessed to the discipline of Tau-tau.'
'I have no wish to be harnessed by anyone or anything.'
So-Peng thought frantically, How could I have been so blind as not to see the connection between my gift
and Tau-tau? And he asked himself why his mother had lied to him about the connection. She had lied, too, about Zhao Hsia's mission. What else had she lied about? What if everything Zhao Hsia accused her of was true?
'Then you are a fool.' Zhao Hsia's face was like rubber, stretching into the aspect of utter dismay. He was an actor upon a sunlit stage. 'Don't you understand? Your potential, like mine, goes beyond anything yet imaginable. But you are undisciplined, untrained, unfocused. Tau-tau can change all that. It can give you the power of dreams!'
So-Peng now realized what his mother had been hiding from him. She had known all along what the tanjian wanted - of course she would know, he was her son! She had understood that it was So-Peng's and Zhao Hsia's karma to meet like this. She had done her best to prepare So-Peng, to have the meeting occur on neutral territory where So-Peng would have at least a semblance of a chance. She had known that his gift was raw, untrained, unfocused, as Zhao Hsia had said. Just as she knew that Zhao Hsia's gift was already in harness to Tau-tau.
'I will not return to Zhuji with you,' So-Peng said, sealing his karma, and Zhao Hsia's.
'Would you leave me no choice then?' Zhao Hsia asked. His voice was sincere, laced with regret. But beneath that glossy surface So-Peng felt the emanations of exultation, and his spirit recoiled in horror.
'Weakling!' Zhao Hsia cried. 'Remember how we stole the tortoise eggs. It was only after Tau-tau that I understood the magnitude of our sin. We stole the tortoise's future, So-Peng. Just like Liang did. She robbed me of my future, just as she robbed you of yours, when she stole away into the night. I needed her and she was not there. You needed the tanjian community and she withheld it from you. It is she who is the evil one! It is she who must be punished!'
Like a wave inundating the shoreline, reality wavered,
and So-Peng saw the world woven for him by the words of the tanjian. Zhao Hsia's hate became his hate; Zhao Hsia's sense of abandonment became his.
'She did not tell you about your heritage. It is your birthright, So-Peng! It was her duty to tell you. But she didn't, did she? Did she tell you that she stole the sacred emeralds from our grandfather? I imagine not. He wants them back, So-Peng. He needs them. They are the source of his power. It is said that these sixteen emeralds were the prize possession of Chieh, the terminator, from whom our grandfather is directly descended. It is said that their power kept Chieh alive for decades after his contemporaries had perished.'
So-Peng felt an urge to hurl epithets in Zhao Hsia's face, to tell him what a liar he was. But he said nothing, knowing that any such words would give him away. Zhao Hsia would know that Liang had the emeralds, and this, he knew, he must never reveal.
'It must be so,' Zhao Hsia was saying. 'Even now Grandfather grows ill and weak, the life draining out of him. Without the emeralds, Grandfather will perish.' He was inching closer, sidling up the rock face towards So-Peng. 'Liang knew that, yet she took them anyway. Now her punishment is at hand.'
For an instant, the two boys' personalities merged, and So-Peng caught a glimpse of the terrifying entity thus created. He felt a lurch, as if the earth itself were shuddering at such an abomination.
Then he saw Zhao Hsia, the surrounding rocks, heard the churning of the waterfall beside and below him, and he knew how completely he had been'deceived. He also had a firsthand glimpse of the awesome power of Tau-tau. Had it not been for his gift, he would have been hypnotized by the speech, would have been convinced that Liang was indeed evil incarnate.
With a crystal insight, he understood that he was the
only thing standing between his half-brother and Liang's death.
Palming the throwing star from his pocket, he threw it at Zhao Hsia's head. Zhao Hsia did not move his upper torso, but rather lifted his hand, catching the whirling weapon out of the air.
'You do not know how to use this, brother,' Zhao Hsia said. Like a conjuror, he twirled the deadly thing between his outstretched fingers. 'It cannot harm me. You cannot harm me.' He was grinning now. 'But thrown by a true tanjian it can kill you.' All at once the star was on his fingertips, poised, waiting. Sunlight glinted blindingly off its razor edges as if the weapon could gather in that solar power.
'As I told you, brother,' Zhao Hsia said, 'you leave me no choice.' He twisted the star. 'Here is your karma.'
At that moment, So-Peng felt a presence behind him. He willed himself not to turn around, not to move or to think about the presence. Tak had been quite clever. He had used the sound of the falls to mask his approach, coming upon Zhao Hsia from the only direction possible - by keeping So-Peng's body between him and the tanjian.
Now everything happened at once and, like a glass ball in which was embedded a tiny scene, the snow falling as it was shaken, the present became the future, and that future was changed forever.
Tak emerged from behind So-Peng's right shoulder and, in a blur, lunged for Zhao Hsia. So-Peng, too, was moving forward. He saw the glint of the knife-blade emerging out of Tak's extended right hand. At the same moment, he heard the whir, like a mosquito in his ear, and he caught Tak's ankle with his foot.
The star whirred past Tak's head. Tak, sprawled headlong across the rocks, swiped with his right arm. The knife-blade cut the skin of Zhao Hsia's calf just as So-Peng reached him.
The moment they came together, So-Peng knew that it was a mistake to grapple physically with his half-brother. While So-Peng was quite strong, he had not been trained in Tau-tau, and strength alone was not enough.
Caught unprepared for the nature of the assault, So-Peng felt himself bound to Zhao Hsia. He tried to strike out with his balled fists, his knees, toes and heels. All to no avail. Zhao Hsia either deflected the blow with his body or twisted so that So-Peng painfully struck rock rather than flesh.
Out of the corner of his eye, So-Peng could see Tak rising, pulling a pistol from his belt. But the two boys were so inextricably entwined that Tak could not venture a shot without the possibility of shooting So-Peng.
So-Peng tried now to pull himself away from his half-brother but, as if sensing the danger to himself, Zhao Hsia kept bun tight against himself. At the same time, he managed to enclose So-Peng's throat in his fingers. He began to squeeze.
So-Peng fought back as best he could, but he knew it was fruitless. Zhao Hsia would never release him, and would most certainly kill him.
So-Peng's mind was in panic, searching this way and that for a way to survive. There was none. He knew he was going to die.
And with that knowledge he let himself go, relaxing into the very core of himself, until he discovered that place his gift had given him and, allowing that place to speak in the rustling of a tongue more ancient than any other, he discovered what he must do.
Using the weight not only of his body but of his spirit as well, he offset their combined centre of gravity. He leaned into Zhao Hsia instead of pulling away from him. He pushed hard with his spirit.
He heard the call of a bird in flight. He heard
the rumble of the water, felt the first chill splash of the rushing water as it churned over the rocks.
Then they were spilling past the rocks, into the water itself. In that last moment of coherent thought, So-Peng was sure he heard Tak cry out.
Then the two struggling boys were cast into the falls. As So-Peng's gift had shown him, the churning water acted as his ally, breaking Zhao Hsia's desperate hold on him. So-Peng gasped, and water filled his mouth and throat. He began to choke.
Restless water, bellowing like thunder, overflowing with energy, carried them both down.
BOOK II
Midnight/Shin-ya

How often the fear of one evil leads us into a worse.
Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux
SUMMER, PRESENT
Asama Highlands/Washington/East Bay Bridge/Tokyo/The Hodaka
'Tanjian.'
They all froze at Tanzan Nangi's one spoken word.
"That doesn't sound like Japanese,' Justine said.
'It isn't,' Nicholas told her. 'It's Chinese, I believe.'
Tanzan Nangi nodded gravely. 'You're quite right.' He addressed Justine, but it was clear he was speaking for Nicholas's benefit as well. 'You asked me before about who could create Shiro Ninja. Now that it is clear that this is what has happened to Nicholas, I have no choice but to tell you.'
'No!' Nicholas fairly shouted this.
Nangi said, 'If there is love between you, surely she must be told.'
'It is because of that love that I want her kept out of this,' Nicholas said, blind to the pain he was causing Justine.
'Love is sustaining,' Nangi said simply. 'Cutting yourself off from it is but one manifestation of Shiro Ninja' He waited long enough for this to sink in, then said, 'The attack of Shiro Ninja is beyond a Black Ninja's skills. It is beyond even a ninja sensei's scope.' His good eye glittered. 'It is the domain solely of the tanjian.'
Tanzan Nangi, cognizant that Nicholas had just returned home from the hospital and would fatigue easily, wanted to get right to the point. 'There is no doubt that the creature you and the policewoman encountered at the
doctor's office was a ninja.' Nangi was watching Nicholas carefully. 'Are we agreed on this?'
Nicholas heard himself say as if from a great distance, 'Yes. A ninja.'
'Could you by any chance discern his ryuT Nangi meant his school. For a ninja of Nicholas's skill, it was not difficult to discover where another ninja had been trained by how he moved, which strategy he employed, even the weapons he chose to use.
'No,' Nicholas said, sick at heart.
Nangi nodded. 'This is yet another manifestation of Shiro Ninja'
When Nicholas said nothing, Nangi went on in a more urgent tone of voice. 'You must come to terms with the fact that you are Shiro Ninja, that you are under attack, and that your adversary is an adept in Tau-tau.'
There is no evidence,' Nicholas said carefully, 'that either Tau-tau or tanjian exists or ever existed.'
Nangi took out a cigarette, lit it.
'I can't abide cigarette smoke,' Nicholas said. 'You know that.' Even to his own ears, his voice sounded peevish.
'I know what I see,' Nangi said evenly, 'and so do you.' He took another puff, let out the smoke slowly through his nostrils. 'Will you stop me from smoking?' He grunted in disgust. 'Look at you. You can't even get out of bed. You are attacked by a ninja. Without Getsumei no michi you cannot discern his origin, let alone battle him one to one. Only by the grace of God are you alive now to tell us of the encounter.' He squinted through the smoke. 'How much more evidence do you require?'
'Get out of here!'
Justine cringed as Nicholas shouted at Nangi. Perhaps that was the trigger. This colossal breach of faith in his friend cleared Nicholas's head for a moment; he understood then what Nangi had done. What had it cost Nangi,
Nicholas thought guiltily, to smoke after three years of abstention? He had broken his vow for Nicholas, a vow that meant a great deal to Nangi. His anger Nangi had quite deliberately engendered in him had sprung the gate that Nicholas had been holding fast with all his spiritual might.
Because as long as he denied Shiro Ninja, he could deny that anything was wrong wjth him. To accept its existence was to admit that his life had been turned inside out. That, worse, he might never be the same man again.
But Shiro Ninja was real; all he had left were the emeralds. Nicholas knew that he must do everything in his power to keep So-Peng's precious magic - arcane and distant - out of the hands of his enemy.
It was odd, now that he thought about it, just how far removed his life had been from those invaluable gems. Only now that they were threatened could Nicholas recognize what they meant to him, although he still had no idea of their function.
And Nangi was right: Nicholas almost wept at how helpless and weak he felt. Another wave of despair swept over him. The certainty of despair will crush you far more thoroughly than defeat ever could.
'I am sorry, Nangi-san,' Nicholas said. 'Please forgive my bull-headedness.'
Nangi stubbed out his cigarette. "There are times when fear can devastate even the most stout-hearted.' He leaned upon his dragon-headed walking stick. 'Before you can learn to walk again,' he said, 'you must accept that you are a cripple. Shiro Ninja has done this to you. And behind Shiro Ninja is a clever, deadly, foe.'
'Tanjian,' Nicholas said.
Justine said, 'Just what is tanjian?'
Nangi waited for Nicholas to answer, but when it was clear that he was not going to speak, Nangi said, 'Quite
simply, some believe that tanjian were the precursors of ninja; that the arcane discipline of Tau-tau is the origin of ninjutsu. But Tau-tau is far more primitive, therefore more powerful in ways a refined discipline such as ninjutsu cannot be.'
'Tau-tau is heavily laced with magic,' Nicholas said.
'Magic?' Justine echoed.
'Like the kind Akiko possessed,' Nangi said carefully. 'Many sects of ninjutsu employ some forms of minor magic or quasi-magic, sleight of hand, hypnotism and the like, relics of Tau-tau adulterated by generations of verbal translation, by time itself and by Japanese culture. Tanjian are different. Their discipline has remained intact, pure and primitive as it once was. Their magic is quite real, quite potent. Akiko was a miko, a sorceress. It is clear that she was trained in elements of Tau-tau.'
'She was no tanjian,' Nicholas said.
'No,' Nangi agreed. 'But the ninja you encountered two days ago certainly is.'
'Whoever this tanjian is,' Justine said, 'he is after Nicholas. Does anyone know why?'
'The shadows inherent in ninjutsu,' Nangi said, 'create their own danger.'
Seeing Justine's lost look, Nicholas said, 'What Nangi means is, the attack might not be personal at all. Being Aka-i-ninjutsu makes me something of a target.' That made him think of something, and he said to Nangi, 'That detective-sergeant, Tomi Yazawa, told me of a supposed threat on my life from the Red Army.'
'What was this,' Nangi said, 'some kind of rumour?'
'She said that her department had intercepted and decoded a piece of hard intelligence.'
'You cannot fight the tanjian alone and unarmed as you are,' Nangi said.
'I know that,' Nicholas told him. 'In fact, I've known ever since I suspected the loss of Getsumei no michi what
I must do. It's just that - ' He turned to look through the window at the grounds he loved so much. He could feel his aunt Itami's spirit very close at hand, and took what courage he could from its aura. ' - I've put roadblocks up to deflect my every step.'
'Or someone else has done it for you,' Nangi observed. He stamped the end of his walking stick on the floor. 'This Red Army message is obviously part of the tanjian tactic of sowing confusion. The Red Army has no reason to harm you.'
'I know that,' Nicholas said.
Nangi's hard stare penetrated the haze of aftershock. 'Now tell me what strategy you have devised.'
A week later, as he ascended, the breath in his throat growing cold, Nicholas had cause to remember that conversation. It gave him some measure of spiritual comfort, something he was very short on. He blocked out the howling of the wind as he made his laborious way through calf-deep snow. This high up his breath condensed in front of his face, misting his vision. It was still summer, to be sure, but up here in the Asama kogen, the highlands of the northern Japanese Alps, it was always cold.
He adjusted the straps of his backpack and, despite his physical aches and pains, continued his ascent. It was his spiritual pain, far more severe than any his body felt, that drove him onwards.
Upon the spine of Asama-yama, a mile and a half high, he paused within the lee of a mighty outcropping of striated grey granite. He put his back against the rock, cheered by its eternal presence, its elemental strength. He squatted down, scooped a handful of snow into his mouth, let it melt slowly. He chewed on a strip of dried beef.
He was more tired than he could have believed. The trek up the face of the mountain had taken an inordinate physical effort. Normally, such a journey would be nothing more than moderate exercise for him.
But these were not normal times, and he was not the Nicholas Linnear of old. He understood that he would have to get used to that painful reality. Still, he was only human and, once, on the high ridge of Asama-yama's southern flank, he almost broke down, feeling an overwhelming urge to weep in fear and frustration. But that would have been self-indulgent, or worse, self-pitying. He had no room in his new life for such treacherous emotions; they could only undermine his resolve to enter into battle with the tanjian despite being Shiro Ninja.
Nicholas, coming off the spine of Asama-yama, began a long, loping descent into a bowl-shaped alpine valley studded with larch, snow-white birch. Here and there, he could see a peach tree, remarkable in such a climate.
He looked back down the path he had come. Far below, where the last of the roads ended, he could make out several villas, stone and wood structures fixed into the side of the mountain, where the rich of Tokyo made the 80-mile weekend journey north-east from the metropolis.
It was not a villa that he was looking for, but rather a castle. As he searched for it, he thought of Akiko, Saigo's lover, then his. The miko.
It was Akiko who had described the castle in Asama to Nicholas. She might have learned Kan-aku na ninjutsu with Nicholas's cousin Saigo, at the ryu in Kumamoto, but it was here in the Asama kogen that she had learned jaho, the magic of the miko.
Then, coming down off the ridge, Nicholas saw it: Yami Doki castle, the Kite in the Darkness, where dwelled Kyoki, the master of jaho. Kyoki, the only man who could save Nicholas from Shiro Ninja, because Kyoki was tanjian.
Akiko had told Nicholas about Kyoki during her last hours on earth. She had felt compelled to describe him in such detail that Nicholas was certain he would recognize
the tanjian on sight. Akiko had studied with Kyoki for seven years. That had been during the 1960s. He was then, according to her account, in his forties, relatively young to be the master of such powerful arcane disciplines.
Akiko had never used the word tanjian to describe Kyoki. Nicholas doubted whether he had told her what he was. But from what he had taught her, it seemed clear enough to Nicholas that Kyoki was tanjian. His physical description - a savage Mongol face, more Chinese than Japanese - gave added credence to this theory.
Nicholas had to believe now that Kyoki was tanjian: it was his only hope.
Catching sight of the castle, still standing, looking exactly the way Akiko had described it to him, he felt a surge of faith that here was where he would be healed. He was coming closer to discovering what arcane power So-Peng's emeralds represented. Here was where he would be restored to life; Shiro Ninja would be banished.
It had begun to rain. The fine needles of the alpine firs swayed in the swirling wind, and the larch leaves, showing their silver undersides, danced as if in response to a choreographer's tutelage. The sky was oyster-white, and the air was fecund with the scent of mulch. Great drifts of blue-grey fog billowed over the sloping volcanic shoulder of Asama-yama, obscuring for minutes at a time entire sections of the valley.
Pushed by the winds through the mountains, the rain was falling in an almost horizontal plane. Nicholas hunched his shoulders, pulling up the Gore-Tex collar of his alpine parka, fastening the snaps across his throat. He was cold and wet, in need of shelter and rest.
In this atmosphere, Kyoki's castle at times appeared to wink in and out of existence, at others to fade completely into the mist-shrouded landscape within which it was set. It had seemed close enough when Nicholas was picking his way down the rubble-strewn slope of Mount Asama.
But now in the valley itself, the perspective changed, and Nicholas could see that he had further to go than he had at first believed.
He thought about his encounter with the ninja -the tanjian - in Dr Hanami's office. Tomi Yazawa had thought this had been the assassination attempt ordered by the Red Army. Nicholas did not. As Nangi had said, it was likely that there would be no assassination attempt at all, that the Red Army had no interest whatsoever in Nicholas Linnear. He could not think of a single reason why they would want him dead. Yet there was a deeper mystery to be solved: why hadn't the tanjian killed him when he had had the chance?
// you die now, if you die too easily, you will never understand, the tanjian had whispered in Nicholas's ear.
Understand what?
Nicholas had no idea. He tried to put out of his mind the feeling of utter helplessness he had experienced in the tanjian's grip. It was as if his body, ready and able to respond to the challenge, had been waiting for the proper commands from his brain. They had never come. Why?
With an effort, Nicholas pulled himself back from the abyss of despair. He found that he was panting, the breath blowing through his nostrils as if he were a frightened animal. Appalled by this lack of control, he took slow, deep breaths, trying to centre himself. It was no good. Anxiety continued to swirl through his spirit as the mist advanced across the valley.
At last he came to the castle. Soon he would see Kyoki; soon Shim Ninja would be just a memory, a bad dream dissipated by Kyoki's jaho.
The castle was nestled behind a rise strewn with mountain laurel and oak. It dominated a glen, a private sector of the alpine valley, from which it overlooked Asama-yama, as well as much of the entire Hida Range.
The views from its upper-floor windows, Nicholas saw, would be spectacular.
The entire fence of vertical iron bars appeared to be something from medieval times. The high, carved wooden gate was unlocked, and Nicholas entered.
Inside the compound it was very still; the restless wind coming in off Asama-yama was nowhere in evidence.
The front door, which should have been locked, was
not. Nicholas pushed it open. On the threshold of Kyoki's
domain he paused, listening to silence inside the castle. He
could smell woodsmoke, aromatic with balsam, undercut
by the bitter scent of charcoal, residue of years of fires. As
he walked in, other smells that he could not immediately
identify swirled around him like the mist coming off the
shoulder of Mount Asama, like the fearful vapour through
which he kept falling, falling ...	.
At that moment, he thought of Justine, and the memory was like a knife in his heart. He missed her with an intensity that he found almost insupportable. Another wave of despair washed over him with the knowledge that he would never be able to return to his old relationship with her while he was Shiro Ninja. The thought gave added urgency to his mission: find Kyoki, convince him to use his tanjian magic to undo what tanjian magic had created.
Although it had been utterly still in the grounds outside the castle, inside a chill wind blew through the stone corridors, the oversized chambers. Someone had been cooking recently, and the remnants of a balsam log fire lay in the great-room hearth. Shadows lay everywhere, seeming to Nicholas like spectators at the theatre, eager for the denouement. Or perhaps, he thought, it is only I who am anxious to get this over with.
He went through chamber after chamber, found them empty though not unused. In the Room of All Shadows where once Akiko had knelt to meditate on her jaho
lessons, the flickering flames of slender white tapers cast shadows as sharp as knife-blades into every corner of the chamber.
Upstairs Nicholas entered a singular chamber whose ceiling was arched. Tatami mats covered the floor. It was divided by a traditional Chinese moon gate, and Nicholas nodded in recognition. Tanjian was, after all, originally a Chinese discipline.
The room had about it the air of great antiquity as if it had existed long before the rest of the castle, as if by his magic Kyoki had transported it here from another place, another time. Of course, nothing of the sort was possible, Nicholas told himself. There must be a limit even to Tau-tau.
The scent of lit joss sticks was so thick it was cloying, clinging to the back of his throat, choking him. Coils of the aromatic smoke lay on the air like sleeping serpents. Nicholas went across the chamber. The stone walls were unadorned, and there were few pieces of furniture. A dark wood tansu chest stood against one wall, stark and majestic, surrounded by space.
Just beneath the moon gate was the demarcation between two tatami, and Nicholas, about to go through the gate, paused. Still in the first half of the chamber, he knelt down, stared at the black borders of the two straw mats. Unlike the usual close abutment, he saw a space of perhaps a sixteenth of an inch between the mats beneath the moon gate. Immediately he looked up, located the hairline slit in the underside of the gate.
He looked around the part of the room he was in, took up a floor pillow, braced himself, thrust it through the moon gate.
With a faint hiss, a blade blurred down, bisecting the pillow. As the blade whirred back into its hidden niche, Nicholas somersaulted through the opening.
He was about to make a quick circuit of the chamber,
but instead stood as still as a statue. In a moment tiny, violent quiverings broke out just beneath his skin. He felt sick to his stomach.
He had found Kyoki, the tanjian.
Kyoki lay spreadeagled in a far corner of the chamber. There was so much blood that for a moment Nicholas could not understand how he had failed to smell the stench. Then he remembered the lit joss sticks.
Slowly, as if in a dream, he approached the corpse. He stared in horrified fascination. Kyoki's skin had been detached in precise strips, every inch of his body laid open. The skin, like ruddy streamers, lay in a pinwheel pattern, radiating out from the central core of the corpse.
The tanjian's face was unmarred. Nicholas had no trouble identifying Kyoki from Akiko's description - it was as if he had not aged at all from the time he had trained her.
This close, the stench of death was apparent. Nevertheless, Nicholas squatted by the corpse's side. A despair he had never known before overwhelmed him. Kyoki had been his only hope, and now that hope had been denied him. What was he to do now? Was it his karma to remain Shiro Ninja until his unknown adversary came to kill him?
No, no. It could not be. His hands at his sides curled into fists. He fought against the hopelessness of his situation. But then a new dread wormed its way into his psyche. Kyoki had been tanjian, a master of Tau-tau. And yet he had been skinned alive. By whom? Who could have such power?
We have no power if we cannot use our imagination, Kansatsu-san, Nicholas's first ninja sensei, had told him. Just as we know that the mind-body continuum maintains a balance inside the human shell, so we have learned that power and imagination provide the Way inside the human mind. Kansatsu-san, small and intense, tranquil as a stone amid a leaf storm. Black eyes shining in Nicholas's mind,
his words playing the chords of memory. Others teach that being excessive is the same as being inadequate. These sensei do not possess imagination, which is synonymous with excess. Yes, it is true that in the mind-body continuum excess is to be avoided. But the power-imagination continuum is different; it presents us not with a whole new set of laws - which would be impossible to absorb, since we obey the Way - but with no laws at all.
Now we can understand the origin of chaos because in the power-imagination continuum chaos can reign. This is the side of unbridled power. But imagination keeps chaos in check, knowing that power with too little imagination is disastrous not only for the perpetrator but for those around him as well.
Never forget, Nicholas, that ninjutsu is in the realm of the power-imagination continuum. Those who abuse its teachings are dorokusai, warped beyond redemption, and must be destroyed.
With a shiver of precognition, Nicholas knew that it was such a one - a dorokusai - he had encountered in Dr Hanami's office. If that were the case, even with So-Peng's emeralds, without Getsumei no michi Nicholas knew that he had no chance of surviving.
Douglas Howe, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, stood on crowded Wisconsin Avenue in Chevy Chase, just outside the Washington DC city limits. As he glanced around the posh neighbourhood, his car, a sleek, dark blue Lincoln Continental, slid to a stop in front of him and he climbed in. The Lincoln took off.
Howe slipped the gift-wrapped package on to the back seat, said one word, 'Nora's', to Michael, his chauffeur/bodyguard. As the big car slipped through the late morning Washington traffic, Howe settled back in the leather bench seat. A letter faxed from his office
was waiting for him, and he pulled it out of the portable machine's slot.
He turned on a light, slipped on a pair of half-lens glasses, and began to read. The words meant nothing to him. His mind was still on the size four Louis Feraud suit - mid-tone speckled grey wool with a fox-trimmed peplum, harbinger of the new autumn collection - that he had just picked up. He had picked it out last week and, in his absence, it had been put on the seamstress's torso he had had Saks Jandel make for him in lieu of tedious fittings. He had heard that Jack Kennedy had had one made to fit Marilyn Monroe's figure, using it to buy her occasional presents of a jacket, a dress or a suit.
With an effort, he concentrated on the memo. It concerned the number of new Navy transport carriers to be allotted in next year's military budget. Howe scribbled his comment in the margin, initialled it, sent it back by fax to his office, put the glasses away.
Truth to tell, it was not precisely the Louis Feraud suit that was on Howe's mind but, rather, what the suit represented: not so much a present but a bonus for a hazardous job well done. Not that he knew for certain yet what the final outcome would be, but it was as well to be prepared.
The Lincoln Continental pulled into the kerb on R Street. Douglas Howe fleetingly felt as he opened the door that in leaving the Louis Feraud suit on the seat, he was leaving a part of himself behind. Immediately he overcame this weakness, and emerged into the glorious Washington sunlight.
It was exceptionally hot and humid, nothing new for summer in the city on tile Potomac. But Howe was, as usual, crisply, sharply dressed in a single-vent charcoal pin-stripe suit of a superb tropical-weight worsted, brilliant white shirt hand-loomed for him from Egyptian
cotton, and a dark tie of rich silk in a thoroughly subdued pattern so as not to take anything away from the exemplary cut of the suit.
Howe was a slight man with fine sandy hair above the high, domed forehead of the deep thinker. His face was odd, compelling, with its pointed chin, sunken cheeks and round blue eyes that burned with a luminous intensity. He was not a handsome man, yet he was so totally at ease with people that no one had yet commented on how much his face resembled that of a weasel.
Howe was greeted by Nora's smiling maître d', shown to his usual table in the far corner where he commanded a full view of the room.
Within moments a Bloody Mary, made to his specifications, appeared. Howe took a long swallow, allowed himself the luxury of one long circuit looking around the restaurant. He nodded to several people he knew or who fancied they knew him. The room was already three-quarters full. Within ten minutes, he knew, there would not be a seat free.
He glanced at his Polo watch. Twelve twenty-eight. Brisling had precisely two minutes to walk through Nora's door and sit down at his table. Two minutes and counting.
Actually, Howe couldn't care less about Brisling or the news that he would bring. Brisling would no doubt be so anxious to relate it that he would not even wait a civilized amount of time until a drink was brought and consumed in quiet reflection.
All things considered, David Brisling was the perfect assistant. He was smart enough to accomplish most assignments on his own, but stupid enough for Howe to control him utterly. He was, Howe thought, like an idiot manqué, something Howe might have concocted in his laboratory had he been a genetic engineer in the twenty-first century.
Thirty seconds to go, and there was David Brisling, hurrying past the maître d'. In another life, Howe thought
as Brisling was shown to his table, his assistant might have been a CIA agent. He was thoroughly nondescript, a man of middle America, made of solid stock. Salt of the earth.
David Brisling sat and, without a greeting, said a bit breathlessly, 'I think I've got the answer.'
'Hello, David.' Manners were of the utmost importance to Douglas Howe. To him, they were synonymous with breeding and, since as a son of farmers he could never have the one, he was damned sure he would have the other.
Only rarely did it occur to him that part of his abiding enmity for Cotton Branding stemmed from the fact that the other man had everything that Howe coveted because he could never have it: Branding came from the right family, had graduated from the right school, had the right friends, the right contacts, and had entree into the right clubs, the inner circles of power open to only those elite few born to money and to old-line families. These people, like Branding, had everything laid out for them from the moment they were born, while poor slobs like Howe had to slog uphill for every crumb, to curry favour to get even a brief moment of recognition. But the doors - the important doors to power, to the inner circle - were always closed.
Brisling nodded to Howe, fluttered some papers. 'I think we've got what we wanted out of the Johnson Institute study.' He was speaking about the feasibility study that would give the go-ahead to the Hive Project: four billion dollars of the government's money down,the drain because of Cook Branding's damnable Advanced Computer Research Agency bill. Chasing after the Holy Grail of a thinking, interactive computer, no matter what its theoretical benefits, was all well and good for some privately funded organization. But to involve the government, to waste the taxpayer's money on what, in Howe's opinion, was nothing more than a pipe dream,
went beyond the ludicrous - it was unconscionable.
'Read these.'
Howe, reluctant to put on his half-glasses, said, 'Just give me the digest version.'
What Brisling had unearthed were several questionable affiliations among two members of the fifteen-man Johnson Institute research team, including the director, Dr Rudolph. This was just the kind of breakthrough Howe had been praying for: a way to derail the passage of the Ascra bill. He knew he needed more facts, that he should hire a team of investigators to get them. Two factors dissuaded him. The first was that he did not want to involve himself personally in this investigation, in case it somehow backfired. Plausible deniability was, since Irangate, the watchword in Washington. The other was that he was innately impatient.
Patience was one of Cook Branding's virtues and, since Howe could not discover within himself that particular resource, he hated Branding all the more for possessing it. It was Branding's strategy to wait for his adversary -whoever that might be - to make a mistake, and then to pounce on it. It was a strategy that could only be successful if employed by a man who was both patient and faultless. For such a man, it proved a potent strategy indeed. But should that man with the spotless reputation ever stumble, and should that stumble be brought into the public eye, then that man's position would not only be jeopardized, but his entire career would come apart.
Such a man, in Douglas Howe's opinion, was Cook Branding. And Howe meant to ensure that Branding would stumble hard.
Howe tapped the Johnson Institute flimsies. He smiled, said, 'I've got to admit that you've done your job well, David.' Pitting Brisling against Branding was like letting loose a trained flea to bring down a raging bull. Which was perfectly acceptable, Howe thought, as long as the
flea did not become aware of its status. He handed the flimsies back to his assistant. 'Keep these,' he said. 'Add them to the Branding file we've been amassing. And make certain the file's in a safe place. It's now strictly Eyes Only.'
Brisling nodded, pocketed the flimsies.
'Now I want you to find a way to work with this information. Dig deeper into the private lives of these scientists, see which ones will be most vulnerable to coercion.' Seeing the look in Brisling's eyes, he added reassuringly, 'Don't worry, David. This is for a good cause. What we're doing here will be ultimately redeemed when the Ascra bill goes down to defeat.'
At that moment, the maître d' bustled up, plugged an extension phone into a nearby socket. 'Telephone call for you, Senator Howe,' he said, placing the phone on the table.
Howe put the receiver to his ear, said, 'Yes?' into the mouthpiece.
'Have you begun to eat yet?' Shisei said from the other end of- the line.
Howe smiled, just as if she could see his expression. 'No,' he said. 'In fact, I'm contemplating a fast.'
'Fasting is my favourite purgative,' Shisei said, but he already knew that.
'Where are you?'
'In a phone booth,' she said, meaning the line was secure.
'How is your particular meal coming?' Howe asked her.
'Splendidly,' Shisei said.
'Good. I want you back here in forty-eight hours.'
'But you told me - '
Howe replaced the receiver in its cradle. He called for the waiter and, without bothering to ask Brisling if he was ready, began to order lunch. He had forgotten all about his resolution to fast.
Tomi Yazawa got to headquarters late, as she had since being released from the hospital. Someone was sitting beside her desk when she approached it. One of the uniforms told her that the man, Tanzan Nangi, had been waiting for her for over an hour.
She stopped at the communal hot plate, brewed two cups of tea, brought them over to her desk. She bowed as she introduced herself, apologized for keeping Nangi waiting. He accepted her offer of the tea, and they both drank in silence. Nangi enquired as to her health. They drank amid more silence.
After the requisite time, Tomi said, 'How can I be of service, Mr Nangi? Your insistence on waiting makes me think your mission is urgent.'
'I believe it is,' Nangi said, 'but not in the way you mean. While Mr Linnear is recuperating, I would very much like to gain as much information as is possible about the man you encountered in Dr Hanami's office.'
Tomi frowned. 'But surely you've talked to Mr Linnear? He must have provided you with the facts.'
Nangi nodded deferentially. 'I have of course talked to Mr Linnear regarding the incident. However, he was still somewhat in shock. Besides, he is not an individual trained to respond to memory the way a police officer -a detective such as yourself - is.'
Tomi said nothing for some time. She watched Nangi for some sense of what he might be after. Failing to find any clue in his words or his expression, she said, 'May I ask to what use you will put this information?'
'I intend to discover the whereabouts of the individual.'
'Don't you think that is best left to the Metropolitan Police, Mr Nangi?'
'Not necessarily,' Nangi said. 'This individual is a ninja. Furthermore, I believe that he is tanjian. Are you familiar with the term, Detective Yazawa? It is said by
some that the tanjian were the precursors of ninja. They are adepts at arcane arts we cannot even imagine.'
'Come, come, Mr Nangi.'
'Think back to the attack on Mr Linnear and yourself, Detective Yazawa. Was there anything unusual about it? Were you overpowered with great difficulty or with relative ease? Think back to how the two doctors were murdered. Was there anything unusual about the methodology?'
'It was all unusual,' Tomi admitted. 'But that is nothing new to me. I think you would be surprised at the oddities that cross my desk every day. It's part of the job, Mr Nangi.' She picked up a folder, opened it for him. 'Look at this, for instance. A sad and bizarre chronicle of Mariko, a dancer at The Silk Road - you know, one of those tokudashi parlours. She was a young, beautiful girl - once. Now look at her.' She pointed to the forensic team's brightly-lit photos of Mariko's flayed corpse.
Perhaps because of her mood, or because she thought it preposterous that this lame, one-eyed gentleman should profess to want to track down her suspect, Tomi had picked up this dossier - which, despite Senjin's orders, she had been reluctant to file - in order to shock him.
To her surprise and subsequent chagrin, Nangi did not blink or flinch from the grisly photos. Instead, he pointed to a section of her initial report.
'What is this?' he asked.
'Oh, it's a transcription of a handwritten note we found stuffed into Mariko's mouth. It said, "This could be your wife". It was written in her blood.'
'May I see the original?'
Tomi shrugged, flipped to the end of the report where the meagre pieces of evidence were affixed in appendices. She handed him the sheet of paper, watched in mounting fascination as he turned the paper this way and that.
'There are holes in the sheet,' he said.
'I know that.'
'What I mean is, the paper was slit as the words were being written.' He pointed. 'You see here . . . and here, on the downstroke. Interesting. .One can see immediately that this was not written with a brush. Now it seems that a normal stylus was not used either.' He looked at her, his one-eyed gaze momentarily disconcerting her. 'I believe that the same instrument used to skin this girl Mariko was used to write these words.'
'Yes?' Tomi could not see where this was leading.
Nangi put the paper carefully on the desk. 'Don't you see?'
'See what?'
He was silent for a moment, then he said, 'Tell me, Detective Yazawa, what meaning does this sentence, "This could be your wife", have for you?'
'It is a message,' Tomi said. She had gone through this so many times she spoke almost by rote. 'Obviously for someone connected with Mariko.'
'Someone? Who?'
'We've . . . never been able to ascertain his identity. Clearly, though, it was someone Mariko was . . . seeing.'
'Ah,' Nangi said. 'Now I see it all.'
'See what?' Tomi continued to be bewildered.
'A moment ago you called this bloody scrawl a message.'
Tomi nodded with the certitude of her police training. 'And so it is.'
'No,' Nangi said. 'It is a warning. "This could be your wife" is written in blood, using a steel blade. What do you suppose is meant? The threat is there, and it is more than implied. I think - my apologies for saying this - that your focus has been wrong. The dancer, Mariko, is merely the victim in this crime, not the focus. Consider. Mariko was not killed in a fit of rage or jealousy. Her death was a calculated chess move, one part of a larger whole. This
warning, "This could be your wife", was meant for only one person. He should be the focus of your investigation, Miss Yazawa. Mariko was just a pawn used to put pressure on this individual. Why?'
Slowly Tomi placed the blood note back into the dossier, closed the file. She was angry. Not with Tanzan Nangi who had, after all, only pointed out the truth. She was angry with herself for not having seen what was, in retrospect, the obvious. She had been so wrapped up in the plight of poor, pitiable Mariko that she had failed to catch a glimpse of the larger picture. She had injected a piece of herself into the puzzle, turning the objective into the subjective.
In showing him the Mariko case, Tomi had planned to reveal to him his folly at trying to play detective. Instead, he had reversed her strategy, effectively convincing her of his intelligence and insight.
'As you wish,' Tomi said softly. Her aikido sensei had taught her to have respect for those who could beat her. She gave a little bow. 'What is it exactly that yoti wish to know?'
Nicholas had known about the tanjian since he was a young boy; he had merely repressed their existence out of a deeply-rooted sense of self-preservation.
Years ago, when he was young, Cheong had said to her son, 'Nicholas, my father, So-Peng, had many children. But, oddly, they were all male. I was three when he adopted me. I would have, in any case, felt special among all those males - there were seven brothers - but So-Peng made me feel special all by himself. He was a most unusual man.'
Nicholas listened with heightened attention. He knew by now that his mother was the master of the understatement. For her, 'most unusual' was the ultimate superlative.
'Your grandfather was educated in many different places. He had attended school in Singapore, in Tokyo, in Peking. He spoke with an astonishing fluency every language and dialect extant in Asia.
'By the time I came to him, he had been a copra merchant in the Maldives, where he made his first fortune, and spent most of it battling the rhinoceros hunters in Borneo and the pirates in the waters off the Celebes; he had drilled for oil in Kalimantan, where he had made his second fortune; he had mined coal and gold in Sumatra, and owned virtually all the rubber plantations there, as well as extensive forests of teak, sandalwood and ebony north of Singapore.
'But, above all, he had a capacity for understanding. This was what made him truly unique. He did not view women as slaves or as inferior beings. As I was growing up, I attributed this to his being so well travelled. But when I was an adult, I realized that his understanding had evolved from within. He would have had it had he stayed hi Singapore all his life.
'My education came mainly from him. The schools were inadequate where we lived and, in any case, So-Peng had his own curriculum to teach me. I could ask anything of him and he would gladly tell me. But one day I remember asking why all his children were males. He said nothing, but his face grew sad and lines I had never noticed before appeared.
'Many months later, he said to me, "We are in a battle, you and I. To you, Cheong, I give everything of true worth. Not my oilfields or my rubber plantations or my export business or even my real estate. These are of no lasting import and, therefore, can easily be managed by my sons who are all clever and good judges of character.
' "This battle we are engaged in will continue long after we are both dust. This is as it should be. It is, in
any case, karma. Once I had daughters and I thought that they would join me in this battle, but now sadly they are gone. But I have you. You are my joy, and my saviour. You will continue the battle, as will your child."
'I was a young girl. His words terrified me. "But, Father," I said, "I wish to have many children. I am sure - I can feel it - that whoever I marry will want many children as well."
'And So-Peng said, "You will fulfil your duty, Cheong. You will bear a child. You must content yourself with that, because he will be the one. The battle begun so long ago will end with him."
' "He will be victorious against the tanjian?" I asked him.
' "That I cannot say," So-Peng told me. "It is not for human beings to know such outcomes in advance, even human beings such as we." '
Her words had terrified Nicholas. 'Why are you telling me this, Mother?' he had cried.
Seeing the look of fright on his face, she had pulled him close to her breast, rocking him back and forth. He could hear the beating of her heart, feel her warmth seeping into him, dislodging terror's grip upon him. 'To prepare you, my darling,' Cheong had said, 'for the coming storm. I want you to have every advantage I can give you.'
All this Nicholas remembered as he stared at Kyoto's corpse. He could not pull himself away from the grisly sight. A bad sign, he knew, a further disintegration, slipping deeper into Shiro Ninja. Nicholas had had the crazy notion that if he stayed close to Kyoki, somehow, even in death, the tanjian could find a way to save him.
Madness.
Nicholas knew it was madness, yet he still clung to the insane hope of resurrection and salvation by proximity. Then, as if in a dream, he caught a glimpse of himself kneeling like a penitent beside the flayed corpse with its
fastidiously arranged, sickening banners of skin. It was such a demented tableau that he knew he was truly lost.
He bent over until his forehead touched his thighs. His mind could not encompass the wretchedness of his situation. Without Getsumei no michi to guide him, he was directionless. It brought up another memory inside him, of Kansatsu-san, his first ninjutsu sensei.
Nicholas had been pitted against his cousin Saigo in a match at the do jo, Kansatsu's ninja school. Hie first time they had met, Nicholas had defeated his cousin. Because Saigo had been at the dojo longer, was more advanced, that defeat had caused him to lose face not only with his fellow students, which was bad enough, but with Kansatsu as well.
This affront Saigo could never forgive. And, forever afterwards, he was scheming to humiliate Nicholas. Then Nicholas's father, Colonel Linnear, had murdered Saigo's father, and the generations of revenge had been sealed in blood. So much time spent towards one end.
Like the dark side of the Go Rin No Sho, the Book of Five Rings, Miyamoto Musashi's ancient guide to martial arts that Kansatsu had made Nicholas study when he had first come to the dojo. When Kansatsu had asked what he thought of the philosophy, Nicholas had said, 'There is a dichotomy. On the one hand, it is clear that its purity is its ultimate purpose and its ultimate strength. On the other hand, the philosophy has about it the air of a monomania. And there is something intrinsically dangerous in that.'
Nicholas did not know it then, but he could have been talking about Saigo.
Kansatsu-san, his short, bristly hair already white, though he could not have been more than forty, taught Nicholas haragei, the forerunner to Getsumei no michi.
There was a bond between them, but it was no doubt an odd one. Nicholas had been bested by Saigo in a demonstration of the lesson of Uteki, the Raindrop, a
particularly nasty method of disabling an opponent from a prone position in such small increments that he is not aware of its effects until its accumulation disables him.
Afterwards, the dojo otherwise empty, Nicholas had been summoned to Kansatsu's study. He had expected a sensei sympathetic to his feelings not only of loss but of humiliation at being defeated by his cousin, who openly mocked him.
Nicholas could still taste like ashes the bitterness he had felt when Kansatsu had exhibited no sign of being aware of Nicholas's bruised emotional state.
Instead, the sensei had embarked on a philosophical discourse that, at the time, Nicholas felt had no relation to what he had just gone through.
The darkness and the light, Kansatsu told him, are not, as everyone would have you believe, two sides of the same coin. The darkness and the light are two separate spheres. They are akin to parallel rungs of a pair of ladders that have come very close to one another. At a point in time it becomes extremely easy to move from one to the other. What makes the darkness and the light different is that they are governed by different laws. And it seems to be that only those who cling to the darkness, who have learned how to manipulate it - and are thus manipulated by it - understand that.
Kansatsu, in the darkness, like a kite in a field or a bat in the rafters. You see, Nicholas, those in the light are not without flaws. Many believe that their virtues hide their flaws. Others are prideful of their mastery of the light, absolutely certain of their place in the world above those in the dark. That is their sin. Pride is the downfall of all heroes, Nicholas. If you retain nothing else of what I teach you, make sure it is this.
Now Nicholas knew that much of his despair was rooted in his pride. Despite Kansatsu's lesson he had fallen into the trap of the prideful. Thinking himself a hero, he
had gradually become like an addict, dependent on that concept. Now that he had been stripped of his powers, he could no longer be a hero. With that crutch gone, he had been plunged into the abyss. Falling through the vapour. Falling, endlessly falling...
Nicholas raised his head and, with a concerted effort, moved away from the final remains of Kyoki, the tanjian. He turned his gaze away and began a thorough search of the rooms.
He had no idea what he was looking for. Perhaps he was, after all, still clinging to the absurd notion that Kyoki could be of help even in death. Whatever the motivation, he was determined not to leave the castle without having explored every avenue. Tanjian were said to be clannish in the extreme. If Kyoki had any friends - or family - surely they would be tanjian too. And possibly there would be some evidence of them in these, Kyoki's private chambers.
He went through Kyoki's desk, through another tansu in this part of the chamber. Above it was a hanging scroll of fine calligraphy that said, 'Thunder/On a clear day/Brings thoughts of home-coming'.
An eighteenth-century lacquer writing box lay on top of the tansu. Nicholas opened it, took it apart. He was not admiring the exquisite workmanship, but examining each component. A ceramic vase, devoid of Sowers, nothing inside when he turned it upside down save a tiny dried leaf. Still, he lit one of the candles he found inside the tansu so that he could examine the inside of the vase. It was innocent.
Nicholas placed the candle in a stone holder on top of the tansu, bent to examine the chest's interior for any sign of a false bottom or compartment wall. There was nothing.
With a deep sigh, he shifted his gaze. Above the tansu, the calligraphy scroll seemed to float on the stone wall. But now something had caught his eye. Was it a
discoloration in tbe scroll? But surely it had not been there moments before.
Nicholas studied it more carefully, bringing the candle closer to the paper. And, with mounting excitement, saw that the heat from the flame had caused a chemical reaction to occur. Lettering hitherto invisible was appearing, superimposed upon kisho, the ideogram for home-coming.
Nicholas read, 'Genshi, my brother. The Black Gendarme. The Hodaka.'
And he thought, Dear God, not the Gendarme. But, of course, it had to be. The Black Gendarme was where at the age of fourteen Nicholas Linnear had died.
'Before I allow you to interrogate me,' Tomi said to Nangi, 'I want you to understand that I don't believe a word you've told me regarding your interest in the murderer of Dr Hanami.' She raised her hands. "That's all right; I don't suppose I have to know. But I know enough about Nicholas Linnear to know that he has the kind of mind that would remember as much if not more than I do about the attack.'
Nangi nodded. 'I apologize for that, but what I said concerning Linnear-san's shock is the truth. I'm sure he remembers in detail his encounter with the tanjian. But he is currently in no shape to be of use to me.'
Recalling Senjin's order about finding out Linnear's whereabouts, Tomi said, 'Are you currently in contact with Mr Linnear?'
'No,' Nangi said.
'Do you know where he is?'
'No.'
Tomi looked sceptical. 'Nangi-san, I must tell you that there is still a good deal of concern for him inside the department because of this Red Army threat.'
'Forget the Red Army threat,' Nangi said. 'That was
just a ruse used by the tanjian to direct our attention away from the true threat.'
'My boss did not think it a ruse. The threat came directly from an intercepted, decoded Red Army communiqué.'
'I have no doubt that it appeared genuine,' Nangi said. 'Nevertheless, I believe that your superior - what is his name . . . ?'
'Captain Senjin Omukae, Commander, Homicide Division.'
'Well, I believe that in this case Captain Omukae has been misled. There is no reason for the Red Army to want to assassinate Nicholas Linnear.'
Tomi thought a moment. 'Tell me, Nangi-san, assuming you know where Nicholas Linnear is now, would you tell me?'
'My dear Detective Yazawa,' Nangi said, 'I thought you had agreed to tell me what you can about the tanjian.'
Tomi shook her head. 'I would very much like to come to some kind of accommodation.' She smiled sadly. 'You must understand that I am running an investigation. If you have any information pertinent to this investigation and I think you're withholding it, I can cite you, designate you a material witness, even declare you a suspect. In which case, I guarantee that you would be spending a good deal more time answering questions in this building than you would care to do.'
'Besides anything else,' Nangi said, unperturbed, 'I am in negotiations with Kusunda Ikusa. I don't think Nami would care for my incarceration, your investigation notwithstanding.'
They stared frostily at one another for some moments. At length, Tomi said, 'OK, we've crossed our swords and where has it got us? Obviously, we each have something that the other wants.'
Nangi nodded. 'That is clear enough.' This was a difficult moment for him. It would be a mistake, he
knew, to let her know just how crucial it was for him to gather information on the tanjian. On the other hand, he suspected that he would lose her, and whatever knowledge she could provide him with, unless he made it clear to her that he was not going to withhold information.
'What I know is this,' Nangi said. "The tanjian may have some connection to Nicholas Linnear who, as I am certain your computers have told you, is a ninja. The tanjian are ninja of a sort - a very specialized and dangerous sort. Their arts are at once more primitive and more powerful even than a ninja's. A tanjian is a more dangerous foe than one can imagine.'
Nangi paused to allow Tomi to come to terms with the reality he was presenting before turning that reality subjective. He said, 'I suspect, but do not know for certain, that this tanjian is someone from Linnear-san's past. If this is so, you can see the urgency in my discovering his identity. Revenge is not so easily accomplished. The death of Linnear-san is obviously not the tanjian's immediate objective, though I believe it to be his ultimate goal. If I can learn his identity, I have a chance to work out what his strategy is and how best to counter it.'
Tomi digested all this. 'If I had not encountered this tanjian myself,' she said, 'if I had not heard what he said to Mr Linnear, I would find your story too fantastic to be credible.' She watched Nangi as she would a rival in a sharpshooting contest. 'All right, I think we have a treaty of sorts,' she said. 'And I'll take what you've told me about the tanjian's ruse under advisement. I already have too many dead ends on ray calendar to add another one, especially one that concerns the Red Army. That's really Commander Omukae's speciality.' She settled herself more comfortably behind her desk. 'More tea? No? Then, what can I tell you about the attack that Mr Linnear hasn't already told you?'
'Did you see the tanjian's face?' Nangi said.
'No.'
'Was he a man or a woman?'
'Man.'
'Is that a guess, an impression or a fact?'
Tomi thought a moment. 'I first became aware of him as a shadow. He came through the window as if he were shot from a bow. He must have been hanging on just outside, and the way he levered himself up and in - that kind of power - he was a man, no doubt about it.'
'What happened then?'
'I pulled my gun, or tried to. He slammed into me so fast, so incredibly fast! I hit the wall, I was groggy, but I saw that it wasn't me he was after, it was Mr Linnear.'
'Is it your impression that he could have killed Linnear-san?' Nangi asked.
'Yes.'
'But he didn't.'
'No.'
'Have you any idea why?'
'He seemed, I don't know, not to want to is the best way to put it, as if it were too easy, as if he didn't want it to be over so quickly.'
'Again, is that an impression or did something specific happen?'
'Well, I was unconscious for a time. But I remember opening my eyes for a moment, seeing him drag Mr Linnear back from the open window. He said, "If you die now, if you die too easily, you will never understand." '
Nangi sat completely still. 'Are you certain of what you heard?' he said at last.
Tomi nodded. 'I remember because there was more he said, but that's an impression. I was trying to get at my gun and I think I was slipping back under. I could hear a sound, like a buzzing or muffled laughter. By then I was putting all my energy into trying to get the gun. But the
pain came back and then I don't remember anything else until I woke up in the hospital emergency room.' She was trying to read Nangi's face. 'Do you know what the tanjian meant?'
Nangi did not, at least not in any specific way. But the evidence was mounting. The possibility that the tanjian had a long-range strategy was now a probability. And the strategy made chilling sense.
How Nangi missed Nicholas's expertise in strategy. Without Nicholas, the threat to the Sphynx computer chip kobun became far more acute. The fate of the entire Sato International organization was in jeopardy. Nangi needed Nicholas's agile mind hi this crisis. But Nicholas had been neatly put out of the way. He wasn't dead; but he was worse than dead: he was alive but powerless and unreachable. It could not be coincidence, surely.
Nangi knew that neither he nor Nicholas could successfully fight the tanjian alone. They needed each other, but the tanjian's strategy, Shiro Ninja, had torn them apart: Nicholas was useless to Nangi in his current state. And, with each passing hour, the threat to Sphynx was growing.
At that moment, Tomi looked up, startled. 'Commander Omukae!'
Senjin, who had come to drop off several files with her on his way out of the office, bowed stiffly, almost formally. He repeated the process when Tomi introduced him to Nangi.
'These dossiers require your immediate attention,' Senjin said to Tomi. 'Please have your comments ready by the morning's meeting.'
Nangi, watching the two of them, saw in their interaction layers like nacre on the inside of a pearl's shell. He saw in Senjin Omukae a diffidence he found odd in a Metropolitan Police division commander. Too, there was a disturbing lack of hara, of intrinsic energy within the man. It seemed to Nangi almost as if Omukae were
deliberately masking some essential part of himself.
But for the moment, Nangi was more concerned with Tomi. There was no doubt that the abrupt, chaotic splintering of her own spirit was caused by Omukae's presence. It occurred to Nangi then that the two were hiding something - perhaps a romantic entanglement. This forbidden possibility would explain both of their extreme subsurface reactions.
Senjin politely said goodbye. When he had left, Tomi said, 'What are you thinking?'
It took a moment for Nangi to get back on the track they had been pursuing. Interesting, he thought. Obviously Omukae has had an effect on me as well.
With an effort, he redirected his mind back to Nicholas and the tanjian. 'The murders of the doctors have more questions hanging over them than there are answers,' he said. 'For instance, it seems clear that Dr Hanami was killed in order to get Nicholas back to that office. But why was Dr Muku murdered? Where does he fit in?'
'Perhaps he overheard the first murder being committed or-'
'Did the two doctors know one another, or have any patients in common?'
'Several,' Tomi said. 'Apparently, Hanami referred a number of his patients to Muku for psychological counselling before and after surgery. But there's nothing there. I checked them all out myself.'
'Then it would be safe to assume that the tanjian is the link between them. He knew them both.'
'Or,' Tomi said, 'the tanjian knew only Dr Muku. After all, if he was after Mr Linnear, he would have little difficulty in finding out that Dr Hanami was Mr Linnear's surgeon.'
Too much talk,' Nangi said, rising. 'Too much speculation. Right now there's nothing solid to go on. Therefore, we've got to find something solid.'
'If this tanjian is only half as clever as you claim,' Tomi said, 'he'll already have erased every traee of himself.'
'Perhaps,' Nangi said. 'But I think it's time we discovered just how clever he's been.'
Shisei did not want to leave Cotton Branding, but she was used to being in chains, and, dutifully, she obeyed. It would have been unthinkable not to comply. Suffering was nothing new to her. On the contrary, suffering had been her constant companion ever since she could remember, as basic a part of her life as breathing or eating.
She contrived a story concerning her work. She did not want to suggest that he accompany her back to Washington. It would be far better for their relationship, she knew, if he came upon that idea on his own.
So it was that when she returned to their table at the Lobster Roll, the open-air restaurant in Napeague where they were having lunch, and sat down opposite Branding, her features had taken on the aspect of worry coupled with a new-found concentration.
Her frown was enough to compel him to say, 'Is something the matter?'
'My office wants me back in Washington.'
'When?'
She was careful not to look at him. 'Tomorrow, at the latest.'
She allowed the silence to spread like a stain upon the afternoon. She picked at her fried clams. In truth, she had little appetite. But she was also glad of it, because she knew that Branding would see. He noticed everything about her. He followed her moods as others studied the phases of the moon, with a rapt concentration she sometimes found frightening.
Her fright stemmed not - as it would in others in her position - from the degree of attention he accorded her. She was accustomed, one could even accurately say
most comfortable, with radical extremes both in emotional make-up and in psychological need. The basis of her fright was the degree to which she had come to rely on his involvement in her. She could not quite believe in its reality, therefore her addiction to it was altogether dangerous. Hung up on an illusion, Shisei felt weak, vulnerable. This was what she had for so many years been trained to do to others. Tables turning. The sensation of inhabiting an inside-out world was eerie, disturbing. Branding finished off his beer, said, 'Aren't you hun-
gry?'
She smiled, pushed her plate across the table. 'Here. You eat them.'
Her eyes followed the orbits of his hands, watching his fingers move as he picked up one curlicue of fried clam after another. Shisei propped her head up on her fists. 'I love to watch you eat,' she said.
'You do?' He seemed surprised, as if no one had ever said such a thing to him before. 'Why?'
'Eating is primitive,' she said. 'Like fucking. Do you know how much you can tell about a person by the way they eat? It's like seeing a film of their childhood, how they were brought up.'
'Oh, yeah?' He was clearly sceptical. 'And how was I brought up?'
'You loved your mother,' she said. 'I imagine that she ate just the way you do, with precise, pleasurable bites. Your father was either indifferent about .food or liked drink 'more.'
Branding felt a tiny ball of ice congeal in his lower belly. Immediately he stopped eating, and Shisei laughed. 'You look like you're being scrutinized by a psychiatrist,' she said.
'Anything more?' he said tightly.
'Mmm, yes.' Shisei went on as if she weren't aware of his tension. 'You have at least two brothers or sisters.
I know that not only because you like to share but also because of the manner in which you share. You must have been the oldest child.'
'I was,' he said, staring at her. 'And everything else you said is more or less true.'
She smiled.'I never fail.'
'You're not psychic?'
She heard the faint interrogative inflection. 'No,' she said, because that was what he wanted to hear. 'Just a keen observer of the human condition.'
'Well.' He wiped his lips with a paper napkin to give himself time to recover. 'Now you know a good deal more about me than I do about you.'
She shook her head. 'That's not true. I don't know one secret of yours, but you know my only secret.' He knew that she was speaking of the gigantic spider spread upon her back. It was hard, seeing her in clothes, to believe that the tattoo was actually there, pigmenting her skin in many hues.
'But I know nothing about it, or how you got it.'
'It's time to leave,' she said quickly, slipping her gaze away from his.
'Shisei.' He put his hand over hers, staying her. 'I'm sorry if I've upset you.'
'Cook.' She turned her hand over, pressed her palm into his. 'Nothing you could do could upset me.' She looked into his eyes, as if studying something there only she could see. 'If you want, I'll tell you all about it,' she said. 'When I return from Washington.'
Branding did not want to wait an indefinite amount of time. In fact, he found that he did not want to wait at all. 'When wiU that be?'
Her silence gave him the answer he had been dreading. 'I have an idea,' he said. 'Why don't I cut my vacation short? I'm getting restless. Besides, it would do me good to get back. The people at the Johnson Institute have been
clamouring for me to see their new advances on the Hive Project. There are some bills that need my attention. And there's a State dinner for the West German chancellor at the end of the month. It's one of the most important of the endless political affairs that keep Washington spinning on its axis of power.'
'But what about Senator Howe? You said that he might somehow use our relationship against you.'
Branding, leaning across the table, put a forefinger against her lips. 'Leave Senator Howe to me,' he said.
Shisei, relaxing inwardly as well as outwardly, smiled.
Tanzan Nangi had listened to the recording he had clandestinely made of his conversation with Kusunda Ikusa at the Shakushi furo so many times he knew every word, every subtle intonation by heart. As he stood in the rain, at the edge of Ueno Park, waiting for Ikusa to arrive, he played it yet again in his mind.
He had come to the park several minutes early in order to reacquaint himself with the curving paths, the bowing cherry trees, the ordered rows of azaleas and dwarf rhododendrons so that he could sink in, feel that this was familiar territory. Often, such attention to detail was all the edge he required in an adversarial situation.
He tried to blot out the fact that Kusunda Ikusa was unlike any adversary 'he had ever faced, and to concentrate on what lay before him. In the intervening days between meetings, Nangi thought he had found a way out of his dilemma. But he also knew that he would have to be clever indeed in order to give himself that slim chance for success.
He saw the bulky figure of Ikusa gliding along the slick pavement as effortlessly as if he were a slim man. Nangi spent thirty seconds working on slowing his heartbeat and increasing the depth of his breathing. It was crucial now to have his mind absolutely clear.
The two men bowed, exchanged the ritual greeting that with this man so set Nangi's teeth on edge. Ikusa had had no real reason to go through this formality a second time except, Nangi thought, if he were using it as another deliberate provocation.
Their umbrellas bobbed in unison as they moved off through the park.
'We can change venues,' Ikusa said amiably, 'if you would prefer.'
Nangi did not care for the veiled reference to his disability. He said, 'I enjoy the rain. It renews flowers that summer's heat has beaten down.'
Ikusa nodded as if acknowledging a well-placed return of service on the tennis court.
'I wanted to speak with you about ^a situation that has arisen since our last discussion,' Nangi said.
'Does it concern the iteki Nicholas Linnear?'
Now, as he was about to take his first step upon this dangerous path, Nangi felt his heart skip a beat despite his careful preparations. 'Only indirectly,' be said. 'Once I have severed our ties with Tomkin Industries, I am going to need help in running the Sphynx computer chip kobun.'
'If you're asking for my advice,' Ikusa said, 'close it down.'
'Oh, I would,' Nangi said. If he had been walking through a mine field he could not have been more cautious. 'In fact, that was what I had in mind. I felt you had given me no choice.'
'You are quite right in that assessment.'
'Towards that end,' Nangi went on, 'I had a final audit begun on the kobun's books. I discovered that this year's projected revenues are astronomical.'
At this crucial junction, Nangi fell silent. A pair of businessmen, as identical as ravens, hurried by, perhaps ruing their decision to take a short-cut through the park.
'What kind of numbers are we talking about?' Kusunda
Ikusa asked, a sleek-skinned shark, rising out of the depths to take the bait.
Rain poured off the perimeter of their umbrellas, bouncing against the hard concrete of the path they had chosen. Nangi gave him the number upon which he had previously decided.
Ikusa blew air out of his thick pursed lips. 'It would be against sound business principles to close down such a profitable enterprise.'
'That thought occurred to me,' Nangi said humbly. 'But what am I to do? Nicholas Linnear's people have all the expertise. You tell me that I must do without them.' He shrugged. 'I have my duty to perform, no matter how odious I might find it.'
Ikusa's mouth curled into a sneer. 'Your confusions of feeling are of no concern to me. But profits are. It would be foolish to terminate the Sphynx koban.'
'How then am I to proceed?' Nangi asked.
The big man considered the problem for a moment. Nangi could feel the rumbling of his spirit as it sought a solution. He remained quiet, seeking the low ground where he waited as still and patient as a fox who has sighted its prey.
'This is what I propose,' Kusunda Ikusa said. 'Wait until you have hired Tomkin Industries' key people away from Linnear, then sever the merger. That way you will be able to continue to manufacture this extraordinary chip on your own.'
Nangi arranged his expression to indicate that he was giving this ludicrous idea serious thought. He would no more entertain the idea of betraying his friend than he would of foisting on him the termination of their merger.
'There is merit in what you have suggested,' Nangi said, 'but with your permission, I would like to provide an alternative.' He took the other man's silence as an affirmative. He said, 'Leave Linnear and his people in
place - for the time being. This alleviates the possibility of bad blood and reprisals in the courts which could tie up profits from the Sphynx kobun for many years.' He let Ikusa digest that before continuing. 'Instead, I propose another merger: Sphynx with a kobun outside my own keiretsu, a company that has the management expertise in chip manufacture. That way their trained personnel can gradually learn the ropes of the t-pram process without arousing suspicion.'
'What about Linnear? He can't possibly let this go by without comment or some kind of protest.'
'When he questions the merger I will simply tell him that with the increased revenue and demand, we've got to expand immediately. As long as I assure him that his profit percentage won't be diluted, he won't care.'
'I don't like the idea of Linnear staying on.' Ikusa's tone was so firm, so belligerent that, for a moment, Nangi suspected he had failed. Then Ikusa said, 'In order for your proposal to be acceptable, Nami would have to pick the electronics firm. That way. we could be certain of the loyalty of those being introduced to its design and manufacture.'
'Here I have anticipated you,' Nangi said. He produced from his jacket pocket a folded sheet of paper. He handed it to Ikusa. 'I have taken the liberty of drawing up a short list of firms I thought would be appropriate.'
'I don't think Nami would approve of your dictating the parameters of such a search,' Ikusa said.
Nangi shrugged. 'I understand. Perhaps, though, you could look at the list and tell me where I have made a mistake in judgement.'
This appealed to Ikusa's ego. He dropped his gaze to the list. He went through it three times before he said, with some apparent surprise, 'As it happens, there is a firm here that Nami would find acceptable. Nakano Industries is on Nami's own list of clean keiretsu. If you
can convince the chairman of the merits of the merger, Nami would not oppose such a venture.'
Thinking, I'vejvon, Nangi said, 'Perhaps, Ikusa-san, it would not be inappropriate for you to have a word with Nakano Industries' chairman.'
'As it happens, Ken Oroshi is an acquaintance of mine,' Ikusa said. 'We play golf together several times a year.' He nodded thoughtfully. 'I'll see what I can do.'
They were approaching'the far side of the park. Nangi could see a black Mercedes glistening in the wet, waiting for Ikusa. The big man turned to Nangi, said, 'I may have misjudged you, Nangi-san. Your proposal was well thought out. It pleases me. Nami approves of your actions. It is grateful for your loyalty.'
With that Ikusa moved swiftly away. It was not until he had climbed into the Mercedes, and the car had disappeared into traffic that Nangi, breathing an inner sigh of relief, allowed himself to feel the elation of a difficult victory painstakingly won.
Justine lay on her back staring at the pattern the shadows of the trees made on the beamed ceiling. There seemed at this time of night, the first lonely beachhead of morning, an entire world alive in the hills and valleys above her head. In the old days of the Tokugawa shogunate, Nicholas had once told her, ninja, hired by the shogun himself to enforce his will - even if it went counter to the tenets of bushido, the Way of the samurai - hung in the rafters very much like these, waiting for their victims to fall asleep. Then, like silent bats, they would drop to the tatami mats, draw a silken cord around their victims' necks or, rendering them unconscious, would sling them across their backs, making off with them.
That was seventeenth-century Japan. But some things, Justine was learning, did not change here. That was
the essential difference between Japan and America. In America everything changed constantly.
Here ninja still existed. Justine ought to know. She was married to one.
Nicholas.
That name was enough to set her crying. Wiping the tears from her cheeks, she sat up and, pulling the covers around her chin, cursed herself for her essential weakness. Her father had wanted sons. Instead his wife had borne him two daughters. If I had been born male, Justine thought, perhaps I would not be so weak. But that, in itself, was a weak thought. Even Nangi, a Japanese, had told her as much.
She had come to cherish their twice-weekly lessons on the society of Japan. It was Nangi who described to her how Japanese women held the purse strings in the family, even doling out weekly spending money for their husbands; how it was the mother-in-law who dominated family life, lording it over her husband's wife and children; how it was the geisha who afforded many of Japan's most powerful and influential men their only opportunity to get drunk, turn maudlin and irrational, to weep upon a female breast as they once had when they were infants. It was the geisha, too, Nangi informed her, who listened with complete objectivity to knotty problems inherent in momentous state and industrial deals, and who offered clever advice to the same clients who cooed at their breasts.
Slowly, she was coming to understand Japan and, with it, the people who inhabited the islands. She was both grateful to Nangi and amazed at his sensitivity to her insecurity. Even if he was playing Professor Higgins to her Pygmalion simply because she was Nicholas's wife and he had a duty to make her comfortable, she knew that could not be all that motivated him. Seeing him praying in church, she had realized how she had underestimated
Tanzan Nangi. He was- filled with the kind of Christian charity that was all too rare even in America. To find it here in this alien landscape was a godsend.
She knew that Nangi and his cherished lessons were all that was keeping her here now. Nicholas was gone -God only knew where or for what reason. He had tried to explain it to her, but she could not understand what he was saying, as if she had lost the ability to decipher English. She knew only this: there had been an attack on him, and it would not be the last - but by whom?
A tanjian.
The word sent slivers of dread down her spine. Nicholas and Nangi had said that Akiko had been a kind of tanjian, but that this one, this dorokusai, was far more powerful.
'Oh, Nicky,' she whispered, 'how I pray that God will watch over you and keep you safe.'
She went to church now because suddenly even Nangi and his lessons were not enough to make her feel safe. Something had happened.
Often she would see Nangi there, for she had chosen to attend services at St-Theresa's, though there were certainly other churches that were nearer. Mass was a kind of return for her to the days when, as a small child, her mother would take her. She had never felt anything then but a kind of protective warmth, and later she understood why. Her mother had taken her and her sister Gelda out of a sense of hollow duty, rite by rote, because this was how her mother had brought her up. Justine's mother had felt nothing for the Mass or for the presence of God, and her children had eventually followed in her footsteps.
Now, in this ultimate crisis, Justine had returned in order to find some solace in the rituals that God decreed His children should follow. But she had found none. Church was as closed, as cold and incomprehensible to her as it had been when she was a child.
Often she found herself inattentive to the service; she
wanted only to slip into the pew beside Nangi and whisper in his ear. She desperately needed to talk to someone, but she could not bring herself to talk to him.
Here in Japan, with the darkness holding the light at bay, with Nicholas in the gravest danger, alone with her private fears, Justine had nothing to hold on to.
Fear and her memories Of Nicholas before he had gone off into the Alps. After Nicholas had described how he must find the sensei who had trained Akiko, whom he now believed to be tanjian, after Nangi had gone, there were just the two of them alone in the old wooden house.
Nicholas and Justine. And the tension between them, rising like a phantom or an animus in the gathering dusk.
They had looked at each other.
'Are you hungry?' Justine asked.
He shook his head. 'How do I look?'
'The truth?' When he nodded she had sat on the edge of the bed. 'You look like hell, but you also look beautiful.'
He had closed his eyes then, as if her words had a physical presence. 'We have some unfinished business, don't we?'
'I don't think that's important now. What you've just - '
'No.' It was his hand on her arm as much as his exclamation that stopped her. 'It is important. Justine, ever since I suspected that something was the matter with me - that I might be Shiro Ninja - I've been so frightened, so obsessed by the fear, so terrified that by being close to me you would become in some way contaminated by it, that all I could think of was pushing you away, of keeping you clear of the disaster zone.'
'Oh, Nicky,' she had said, her heart breaking, 'it was what you did, distancing yourself from me, that frightened me most. All this other stuff - the magic, the tanjian, the Shiro Ninja - I can take.' She had
rushed on, not wanting to give herself time to consider whether or not she was telling the whole truth because if, as she suspected, she was as terrified as he was over this attack, it would do him no good to know it, it would only reinforce his intuition to keep her apart. Arid that, she knew, she could not tolerate. 'All that matters is the two of us. Whatever happens, we have each other. You're enough for me, darling, you always have been, you always will be.'
He had kissed her then, and she had been so grateful to feel his arms once again around her that she had wept. They had not broken the kiss even when Nicholas had drawn her fully on to the bed, even when his nimble fingers had unbuttoned her blouse, unzipped her jeans.
She had spread her legs on either side of his hips and, feeling his hands come up to cup her breasts, had settled over him. He had groaned deep into her throat.
Their lovemaking was long, slow, ecstatic. Justine kept delaying her orgasm, not wanting the pleasure to end. Nicholas had ended it for her. His release had triggered her own, and she had gasped, her eyes squeezed shut, feeling only him inside her, around her, below her, knowing that for this moment all she wanted to feel was him, only him.
And how she missed him now. Justine, in'their bed, rested her cheek on her upraised knees, rocking herself back and forth, in that grey, vulnerable time of night when one is ultimately, inescapably alon&.
But she wasn't alone, and this frightened her. She was terrified of her fright and what it might portend.
She could feel the seed stirring inside her, or imagined that she did. Dutifully, stoically, she got up, administered the self-pregnancy test she had given herself several days before. Five minutes later, she had the results, the same as the first test she had given herself when she had returned from her doctor's visit and he had told her the news.
She stared sightlessly at the slip of paper: positive. She was pregnant. When in God's name had it happened? Of course she knew. She and Nicholas had made love so infrequently since his operation she could count the number of times. Her doctor, an-American, part of her ever-so-tenuous lifeline in Japan, had laughed at her shock. 'It only takes one time, Justine,' he had said jocularly. 'I thought you learned that long ago.'
If only Nick were here now, Justine thought in anguish. I could talk to him, explain my terror away. She shivered as if freezing, because she knew that part of her almost desperate longing for him now was the fear that Nicholas would not return from the Alps, that this tiny life would be all she would have of him. And the terror came again, almost overwhelming her this time.
How unfair of him to leave her this way, disappear into the night. Hadn't she always been there for him, right by his side when he was most vulnerable? But men expected that from their women; did that mean women had no right to expect the same consideration from their men? Were the roles of the two sexes so immutably different?
She hated Nicholas now for abandoning her when she needed him the most. She could not help it, just as she could not stop the tears from forming, from flowing down her cheeks. I can't make it alone, she thought. My world is breaking apart, spinning out of control.
Her mind was filled with funeral orations, the cloying scent of chequerboard bouquets of flowers, the smell of rain in the air, and newly-turned earth, gleaming caskets being lowered into the ground, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, the muffled sobs of the mourners, death hanging in the air like a suffocating shroud.
She tried to turn her mind away from death and could not; could not stop the prayer from forming on her lips.
'Dear God,' she whispered, 'save me from myself.'
Douglas Howe had a residence on Seventeenth Street in theheart of the north-west district of Washington. It was a Federal style building of four storeys. The first floor served as offices, the second as quarters, when needed, for visiting notables. The third and fourth floors were devoted exclusively to Douglas Howe.
The residence, which was now worth a small fortune, was just down the block from the Corcoran Gallery of Art, whose glorious facade was eternally guarded by its brace of sleeping stone lions. The Corcoran was once described by Frank Lloyd Wright as 'the best designed building in Washington'. As such, Howe had decided that it was a fitting place to be near, both chic and immune to the incomprehensible whims of Washington fashion.
Shisei approached Howe's residence with a good deal of trepidation. Her time with Cotton Branding had made her feel a good deal less sanguine about what she had been hired to do. Only once before had she been affected by a man in the way Cook Branding affected her - and that time clearly did not count.
Shisei had been trained to emit emotion much as a television set emits images: in order to attract the attention of others. To accomplish such a feat with any degree of success, one had, of course, to train oneself to feel nothing. Objectivity rather than subjectivity was the rule, the law.
With Branding, Shisei had crossed the line, broken the law. Unwittingly at first, to be sure, but cross the line she had. Now she was entangled in her own emotions, and that was dangerous, especially with Douglas Howe, to whom emotions were like poker chips to be hoarded and used at the proper moments.
An aide opened the door to her knock and, recognizing her, ushered her into the library which abutted Howe's office suite.
'The senator will be with you shortly,' the aide said, before leaving her alone with the great minds of man's history. She idly let her fingers play along the expanse of leather-bound spines. She took out a volume of Nietzsche, read passages at random, thinking of the apologists for Nazism plundering poor Nietzsche, a man who denounced as pernicious the state, especially the German state, warping his concept of the moral superman into their physical one.
Shisei knew that she had picked up the book in order not to think of Cook Branding. It was Branding, she thought, who should have a taste for Nietzsche because the two were such pure moralists. But Cook was horrified by the German philosopher's search for moral perfection, believing that such perfection belonged solely to God. In this way - as in a surprisingly large number of others -Cook was quite Eastern. The Japanese, too, knew that perfection was beyond the human condition, preferring the myriad pleasures afforded by the journey to the anticipation of the journey's end.
Then she came across a sentence that startled her. 'All idealism is falsehood,' Nietzsche wrote, 'in the face of necessity.' This was quintessential Douglas Howe. It reminded her of a quote from the French philosopher of materialism, Denis Diderot, that was one of Howe's favourites: 'There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.'
She put the book back, searched in vain for the Tao. In truth, she had not expected to find it. She had too firm a grip on Howe's psyche to expect that he would be open to the mystical Tao. Yes, Nietzsche and Diderot were more his meat: solid, definite, Western; most of all, rational and pragmatic.
She turned at the sound of a door opening, and saw David Brisling, Howe's assistant. "The senator will see you now.' Brisling's voice was cold, aloof.
Shisei smiled her actor's smile. Everything, she thought, was simple when I felt nothing. Amid the brambles of her newly-exposed emotions, possibilities multiplied like reflections in facing mirrors.
She was wearing a short white silk skirt, a sleeveless black crepe de Chine blouse with a high mandarin collar. Around her waist was a wide velvet belt with an oversized red-gold buckle in an abstract shape. Brisling looked right through her.
Howe was waiting for her in his office. It was teak-panelled, with brass lamps, a large, overly-masculine leather club sofa against one wall, an overly-large carved English walnut desk behind which stood a matching cre-denza. A pair of black antique English chairs lurked like guardian Sphinxes. An excellent Robert Motherwell painting hung on the wall above the sofa.
Shisei duplicated Howe's dazzling hollow smile, reflecting it back at him, just like a television image. And like a television image she came across the room, kilowatts in her eyes.
She made certain the door into the outer office where Brisling had retreated in glowering silence was left ajar. She sat in one of the black English chairs, sorting out in her mind what it was he needed to hear, what she wanted to reveal, most importantly, how much she needed to tell him in order for him to be satisfied.
'You're late,' Howe said without consulting his watch. 'I expected you sooner than this.'
Shisei shrugged. 'When one is involved, one's time is not one's own.'
'Save the act for someone who'll appreciate it. How deeply is Branding involved?' Douglas Howe said in the same tone of voice he used to order one of his staff to get a Joint Chief on the phone.
'He's in love with me,' Shisei said truthfully. 'He is fascinated by me, consumed by me.' Her eyes glowed
until they were almost the colour of prehistoric amber.
'But does he trust you?' Howe asked.
He knows how to get at the heart of the matter, Shisei thought. She said, 'Trust does not come easily to a politician, especially one who is locked in a life-and-death battle with his worst enemy.'
Howe scowled. 'Does he suspect that I hired you?'
'He does not suspect me, no,' Shisei said, again truthfully. 'But the possibility has crossed his mind.'
Howe's scowl deepened. 'How do you know that?'
'He told me.'
'He told you?' Howe was incredulous. 'Then he's an idiot!'
Shisei said nothing.
Howe tapped a pen meditatively against his lips. 'In which quarter does he plan to attack me?'
'I don't know.'
'What have you been up to, then?'
"The creation of an obsession,' Shisei said, 'is accomplished only with patience and determination. No one responds to haste; they mistake it for insincerity.'
"That's unhelpful,' Howe said sharply. Time is the one commodity I have very tittle of,' he said, busy chewing on his pen. 'I hired you to burrow inside Branding, to get me information. I don't give a shit whether he loves you or just has the hots for you, as long as you get me information I can use against him.
'You say Branding is consumed by you. Let me clue you in. While you've been playing Mata Hari, Branding has been a busy little boy.' He made her aware that he was throwing her own words back in her face. 'He's been burning up the phone lines, calling in markers, political favours; he's made deals all over Capitol Hill. He's blocked me at every turn. He's going to get that fucking Ascra bill passed, despite my contacts. The Hive Project is very much alive and well and threatening to eat
our Federal Budget whole. Unless you can bring Cotton Branding down by the end of the month, when his bill gets on to the Senate floor, the Advanced Computer Research Agency will have the Federal Government by the balls, and Cotton Branding will have enough power to run for the President of the United States in two years and win.'
Howe was baleful when he was in this sort of mood. He could work himself up into a kind of trembling rage that often required a full-scale explosion to dissipate it.
'Do you know what that would mean?' Only too well, Shisei thought, but, dutifully, she said nothing. 'I know how far the Hive Project has come. They've already perfected the goddamned computer. Branding would have the entire government switch over to the Hive computer. I mean everyone: the NSC, the CIA, every fucking secret this country possesses will be in the Hive memory banks.
'Poor blind Branding has become dangerous to the security of this country. He doesn't see the risk inherent in the system and neither do very many other people. Everything we know, every secret thing we've amassed on foreign powers, on what we're secretly working on, would be fed into the Hive. Of course. It could solve our problems of defence, create initiatives one thousand times faster than any of our current inefficient think tanks or bureaucracies. But the Hive Project has enormous drawbacks. No one knows whether it can be penetrated. Its technology is so new, so revolutionary, that everyone assumes its so-called invulnerable defences will be impenetrable. Branding is so sure of the technology he's championing. But think of what could happen to the United States if a program run by an unfriendly power could worm its way inside the Hive computer. It would be a disaster of unimaginable proportions. It would undermine the very foundations of this country, putting everyone and everything we stand for in jeopardy.'
Howe's eyes were blazing. 'Goddamnit, we have to stop
Branding!' His shoulders assumed the powerful, compact hunch of the street fighter. 'God, I hate that moneyed, privileged bastard! Look what his family has given him. He's an insider here because he's a Branding, because of his old-boy contacts. And what am I? The perennial outsider, the poor boy, the hick fanner's son,'the nobody, clawing and scratching for every contact I make.' All of a sudden, he realized how worked up he had become. He snapped his jaw shut, whirled, poured himself a shot of Bourbon. When he turned back to Shisei, he was calm again.
'If only Branding's wife had not died in that senseless accident,' he said. 'We would have caught him up in a sex scandal that would have finished him right now.'
Shisei studied him for some time. At length, she said, "There's something I need to know. Where is the boundary? How far are you willing to take this in order to bring Branding down?'
Howe was again shaking with rage. 'Isn't it clear to you yet?' he said. Til do whatever I have to in order to destroy him utterly. This isn't a game I'm playing with Branding. I think you understand.'
'Of course.'
'Then tell me what it is you understand. Tell me what I want to know.' He leaned towards her. 'Enlighten me as to why I should continue to employ you when I have Brisling running an operation to discredit the people at the Johnson Institute involved in the Hive Project?'
Shisei laughed. "That's a dead end. Those people are clean. And if you manufacture a scandal, Branding will make it backfire on you.'
'Not me,' Howe said. 'I've distanced myself from the operation. It's strictly Brisling's baby. I've got plausible deniability.'
'Still, you're wasting your time with it.'
'I'm not paying you to be a critic,' Howe said acidly. 'So kindly tell me how I won't waste my time.'
Shisei felt nothing. She was comforted by the fact that she had so effortlessly slipped back into her methodology. She no longer felt confused, vulnerable, entangled. Everything was again clear, the normality of the Void encircled her like the arm of a loving parent.
'Well, we agree about one thing,' she said. 'Brisling's expendable. You know, of course, about the dinner at the end of the month?' She was referring to the State dinner for the West German chancellor that Branding mentioned to her over lunch. 'I will make sure Branding takes me.' She looked at Howe. 'You must do one thing. Convince Brisling that he has to act against me. It won't be difficult; I'll give him an incentive. Do whatever you have to, but make sure he breaks into my house the night of the dinner. I want him in the house just after I leave.'
Howe stared at her for a long time. 'You'll find the way, won't you? You understand that I must destroy Cotton Branding, Shisei, or the Hive Project will go through.' He shook his head. 'Christ, but you're cutting it close. The dinner is only a few days away from when Branding's Ascra bill makes it on to the Senate floor.' His low voice was full of menace. 'It's my last chance to destroy him.'
Howe did not show it, but he was pleased. As usual, he had found that his bullying tactics worked. People did their jobs more effectively, he had found, when they were firmly shown their place. Everyone wanted recognition more than anything else. But if you gave them too much, they became lazy, complacent. You had to keep employees on their toes, keep them in obedience school in order to keep them performing at peak efficiency.
In that light, Howe decided that Shisei had earned her reward. He gestured, and she saw the Louis Feraud suit
draped elegantly over the back of a chair. She stared at it, entranced.
'It's yours,' he said. 'I reward employees who perform for me.'
Shisei touched the suit. For a moment, she luxuriated in the feel of the superior wool. Then her fingers encountered the fox trim, and she experienced a wave of revulsion so powerful that she felt her gorge rise. How typical of this man to buy her so expensive a present because it was what he admired, what he thought she should wear. He had, as usual, been oblivious to her own preferences, ignoring her distaste for the killing of animals for such a reason.
She excused herself, went to the bathroom. She looked at herself in the mirror, tried to see herself as Douglas Howe saw her. She thought he might be dangerous if he ever started thinking for himself.
She cursed the day she had come to Washington, ingratiating herself slowly into Howe's confidence. Necessity and obligation, giri, these were always uppermost in her mind. But too often Douglas Howe had a way of making painful the performance of one's duty.
Unlike Cook Branding.        .
She had wanted to take this time to work out why her mind was again filled with Cook Branding. She had returned to that disturbing state of entanglement, her objective edge blunted by emotion. At the sink she stared at herself in the mirror. What is wrong with me? she asked herself.
She pushed the troubling questions aside for the moment, concentrating on how happy she was at what she was about to do. She was committed now; her feet were firmly set upon the path. There was no turning back.
Kusunda Ikusa had a vaguely humiliating weakness for Chinese food; he also had an affinity for a certain restaurant in Shinjuku.
Both facts were in the Pack Rat's computer. When he entered the Toh-Li restaurant at the top of the fifty-storey Nomura Securities Building, he was unrecognizable as the man who had met Nangi in Akihabara. The Pack Rat looked every inch the paradigm of ministerial Japan. His dark suit was impeccably cut, his shirt a blinding white, his brogues polished to a mirror shine.
It happened that the maître d' was a friend of a friend, and the Pack Rat was seated at a table just behind the one which Kusunda Ikusa had reserved.
Ikusa was not yet at the restaurant, but a small, powerful-looking man had already made himself at home. He was sipping a martini while reading today's copy of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.
The Pack Rat did not recognize him. It did not matter. The Pack Rat was in seventh heaven. He lived for danger; it was his way of ridding himself of the rigid hierarchical strata of responsibilities that made up life in Japan.
When Tanzan Nangi had given him the directive to compromise Kusunda Ikusa somehow, the Pack Rat had been unfazed. Rather, he relished such an assignment which carried with it the heavy burden of danger. The Pack Rat was like Atlas: the more weight he was asked to bear, the better he liked it.
When he and Nangi had parted company hi the Akihabara, he had spent the next forty-five minutes checking and rechecking the vicinity in ever-expanding squares that eventually took in the entire district. When he was certain that the environment was clean, he had gone to find Han Kawado.
Han Kawado was one of the Pack Rat's most reliable 'team members', as he liked to think of them. But the Pack Rat also loved the young man. He had picked Kawado to keep track, as Tanzan Nangi also wanted, of Justine Linnear's movements.
The Pack Rat had found Han Kawado making out the last of his report on the Kawabana affair at the back of the zinc-topped bar in Mania's.
'I'm looking for the key to this guy,' the Pack Rat had said to Han Kawado, as he slid on to a stool beside him. He was referring to Kusunda Ikusa. 'Unfortunately, what I need isn't a key, but a crowbar. Ikusa-san's gate is not to be delicately opened but prised off its hinges. Only then will one find his weakness.'
'Prying is a dangerous activity,' Han Kawado had observed. 'It's said that Ikusa-san does not even trust his own mother! Can you imagine such a thing!' Han Kawado shook his head.
The Pack Rat was looking at the calligraphy on a scroll hanging behind the bar. The clouds/With no mortal weight/Disappear like man/Thought remains.
Han Kawado had rubbed his face. 'What do you know of Kusunda Ikusa's psyche?'
'My computer bank holds facts, not psychology,' the Pack Rat had said. 'All it tells me is that he's so goddamned virtuous, he's invulnerable to coercion. But I don't need a computer to tell me what I already know of Kusunda Ikusa. He's a young man, an arrogant man, engorged with the aphrodisiac of power. Therefore, he's vulnerable.'
Now, a week after that conversation, a week of frustrating surveillance, the Pack Rat found himself here at this Chinese restaurant.
At the moment Kusunda walked through the door, the man drinking the martini folded the paper, put it away in a slim alligator document case. He rose.
The two men greeted each other warmly, and the Pack Rat was indirectly introduced to Ken Oroshi, Chairman of Nakano Industries.
'Oroshi-san,' Ikusa said, settling in, 'how are your wife and children?'
'All are fine, Ikusa-san,' Oroshi said. 'They send their greetings, and their blessings.'
It had been Oroshi, the Pack Rat observed, whose bow had been the deeper. For all of Nami's power, that was unusual in someone of Ken Oroshi's position, who was at least twenty years older than Ikusa. Custom - not to mention etiquette - demanded that Ikusa, as the junior man, bow that much deeper than Oroshi, to show his respect. Instead, the opposite had happened.
The two men began to talk about golf - the Japanese businessman's mania. It had cost Ken Oroshi more than four million dollars to join Koganei Country Club, the most prestigious in the country, where green fees were three thousand dollars-a-month, and then it was only because Ikusa sat on the club's owners' committee that Oroshi jumped the one-hundred-plus names on the waiting list.
The conversation drifted on with nothing out of the ordinary coming up. The Pack Rat allowed his attention to wander around the room, which was filled, for the most part, with serious faced businessmen along with a spattering of tourists: thick-necked Americans and beefy, red-faced Germans.
The Pack Rat's gaze fell upon a young woman, perhaps no more than a girl, really. Though she was dressed in the height of sophisticated, moneyed fashion, her utterly unlined face indicated that she was still in her teens.
She was, like the Pack Rat, sitting near Ikusa's table. Ken Oroshi's back was to her, and once, startlingly, the Pack Rat saw her eyes lock with Ikusa's. Something akin to amusement played like a melody across the girl's face, and she seemed abruptly more grown-up than the Pack Rat had given her credit for. Ikusa's face showed nothing but polite attention directed at Ken Oroshi, but the flicker of his eyes in the girl's direction caught the Pack Rat's attention, and he began to study the girl in earnest.
She wore a dramatic black and white pony pattern bolero jacket over a black rayon blouse. She wore a leather skirt of the same colour with a wide gold belt. Gold sandals were on her feet.
Her thick, shimmering hair was stiff with gel, her lips were small, bow-shaped, glossed a bright crimson. She had the kind of face, the Pack Rat decided, that devoid of its artful make-up would be, at best, plain. In any event, the eyes were filled with life and intelligence, and the Pack Rat noted this because it was more significant than, how she dressed or was made-up:
Over steaming platters of gingered fish and abalone in black bean sauce, Ikusa steered the conversation away from golf. 'I think I may have the answer to your fiscal problems.'
'As long as it will not expose our plight to the public,' Ken Oroshi said. 'We have gone to great lengths to conceal our difficulties.'
'There is cause on both sides for- secrecy,' Ikusa said, fastidiously extruding a translucent fish bone from between his lips. 'This plan will also bring you the most important new technology in computer chips.'
'What is it,' Ken Oroshi said, laughing, 'the Sphynx t-pram?'
'Yes,' Kusunda Ikusa said. 'Precisely that.'
Ken Oroshi put his chopsticks down. 'Do you mean to tell me that Kami has wrested control of that proprietary technology from Sphynx?'
'Not quite,' Ikusa said. 'Not yet.' He cut himself another thick slab of fish, dexterously manoeuvred it on to his plate. Tanzan Nangi is under some immediate pressure. He must merge Sato International's Sphynx computer chip manufacturing kobun. In the course of these discussions, your name came up as a possible partner. I indicated Nami's acceptance.' ^
'But Nangi-san is not in Sphynx alone. The t-pram
technology isn't even his. It comes from Tomkin Industries, which is owned by Nicholas Linnear. What about him? I doubt that he will approve the merger.'
'Linnear is not a factor in any of this,' Ikusa said, shoving the crisp fish tail in his mouth. 'Your deal is with Tanzan Nangi.'
The conversation then turned to appointments with lawyers, points to keep in mind when drawing up the merger papers, and so on. The Pack Rat's attention drifted back to the girl who was sipping tea with the avidity of a lioness hunkering down to her fresh-killed meal.
This struck him as odd until he realized that her full concentration was on the exchange between the two men. Even when the terminology became excessively technical and esoteric her interest never flagged. On the contrary, her face became suffused with the kind of glow normally only stage lights can provide.
Lunch was over, the tea had been drunk, the last pieces of business discussed. The men rose, bowing, but only Ken Oroshi left, hurrying out of the restaurant, his chic document case swinging at his side.
Kusunda Ikusa heaved himself back into his chair, sipped meditatively at his tea. The Pack Rat paid his bill and, as he did so, he noticed the girl from the next table get up, start towards the door. Ikusa looked up sharply, a dark look on his face. His eyes flashed as they locked with the girl's.
Was it the Pack Rat's imagination or did the girl hesitate as she passed his table before heading for the door? ,
Five minutes later, Ikusa paid the bill and left. The Pack Rat followed.
He momentarily lost Ikusa in the lobby, then found him just outside. He was with the girl from the next table. She was smiling at him as she strode beside him.
The Pack Rat got out the miniaturized shotgun mike he had made himself, got his tape recorder going. Ikusa gave the girl a feral grin, a baring of the teeth typical of a jungle predator.
'I wish you wouldn't persist in doing this kind of thing,' he said.
'It's not prudent,' the girl said, in a passable imitation of his voice. She swung her head around. 'I'm not prudent. I have you for that. Yin andyang, Kusunda. We must have a balance.'
One thing struck the Pack Rat immediately: how shockingly the girl used Ikusa's first name.
'As far as I can see, there is nothing balanced about this relationship,' Kusunda Ikusa said. 'It is based on mutual need, and need is never balanced.'
'Like riding the back of a dragon.'
'You thrive on danger, Killan. Sometimes I think that what you really want when you make these forays is for your father to turn around and recognize you.'
The Pack Rat's heart was racing. He could scarcely believe what he was hearing. Ken Oroshi had three children - two boys, aged twenty and a girl, aged eighteen. The girl, according to the Pack Rat's computers, was named Killan. Now here she was in the flesh, entangled in some bizarre, clandestine way with Kusunda Ikusa. What was going on?
At that moment, Ikusa broke away and, without a further word to Killan Oroshi, disappeared into the throng.
Black igneous rock, thrusting skyward in jagged, clawed might. How many aeons ago had the earth thundered, spitting in fire and gas? From that raging inferno the Hodaka had emerged to be weathered by wind and snow and ice. The massif of the Hodaka was perhaps the most
perilous area ia all of Japan. From Nisfai in the west to Oku in the north-east, the Hodaka was a series of razor-thin, serpentine ridges between deep, black ravines crusted with ice and hoar-frost over lime-impregnated granite. Fissures created in groaning slippage through the severe winter months crisscrossed the succession of ridges like wounds in the corded arm of a veteran warrior.
The fissured wall known as Takidanr, the Valley of. the Waterfalls, had developed another name over the years, one which all climbers knew and used in memory of the number of their brethren who had perished in failed assaults: the Devil's Graveyard.
Just beyond Takidani, rising like a brooding giant, remorseless and fearsome, was the Black Gendarme, a veil of absolutely perpendicular igneous rock, veined with black ice. Threatening, intimidating, the Cassandra of the Japanese Alps, it seemed to have been thrust in one culminating upheaval from the centre of the earth's core.
It was here that Nicholas had been brought as a teenager by Kansatsu-san to complete his training, to prove in Nicholas's mind, at least, that he was better than Saigo.
And, perhaps, this was why he had died upon the Devil's Graveyard, with the Black Gendarme mocking him from its lofty eminence.
He had not learned his lessons well; his arrogance had misled him into believing his mastery of ninjutsu was far more advanced than it actually was. His heart had not been pure. Instead of concentrating on reaching the state of mind/no mind that was the Void, the path to understanding, he had been intent upon besting Saigo again.
In a way, he saw now, he and Saigo had been alike in that. Their rivalry had become, for them, a monomania
- as the Book of Five Rings had been for Miyamoto Musashi - infusing their study of the martial arts with a very personal motivation. Their hearts had been tainted, then warped by the same sin: hate.
The revelation shook him to the core, making him unsure whether he wanted to see this arduous journey through. In truth he had no idea how long ago the secret message had been written on Kyoki's scroll, or even what it portended. Even if Genshi, the tanjian's brother, had indeed lived within sight of the Black Gendarme, he might well be dead by now.
But Nicholas knew that if he did not go on, he would never know. There would certainly be no salvation for him, and he would lose everything - Justine, his family, Tomkin Industries - because he could detect like a menacing iceberg sliding through the water the slow disintegration of his own sense of himself.
With comprehension will come the certainty of despair.
Shiro Ninja.
The path from Nishi peak to the Devil's Graveyard was so arduous and hazardous that it had attracted far fewer climbers in recent years, after the disasters of 1981 and 1982 when ten people were lost there. And yet, within the community of professional mountaineers, there continued to be a fascination with the Hodaka and, in particular, with the Devil's Graveyard.
In retrospect, it seemed clear that Kansatsu, in selecting the Hodaka as the site of Nicholas's graduation from the ryu, had meant to drive out of the boy all thought, conscious and unconscious, of his obsessive rivalry with Saigo. Nicholas could not imagine what other reason Kansatsu-san might have had for choosing it.
The Black Gendarme was a locus of death; it had no place in a teenage boy's life.
It had been December and, even in ultra-efficient
Tokyo, great drifts of snow, charcoaled from soot, rain-bow-hued from car oil, lay against the pavements.
It had been the coldest winter in twenty years when Kansatsu took Nicholas north-east into the Hodaka. Snow lay hip-deep like sand; the mountain had been transformed by nature into a desert of ice. Snow eaves sixteen feet wide overhung the passes and shoulders which they traversed, their breaths coming hard, the hot exhalations crystallizing instantly in the thin, frigid air. The sky, an almost painfully brilliant shade of blue-purple, seemed brittle, little more than an eggshell.
Nicholas had been barefoot because Kansatsu had said, Ice and the fear of death are one and the same. Once you learn not to feel the one, you will not fear the other.
Nicholas remembered vividly how clear it had been on their ascent of the Hodaka. To this day he could not fathom where the storm had come from. But the range had mighty canyons, vast peaks like flying buttresses which acted like tunnels, directing the elements, magnifying their force, their virulence. Up here, when the sun shone, its rays could burn the skin off your face and hands; the same was true of an ice storm.
Nicholas had been in sight of the Black Gendarme when the storm hit. He had been perhaps half-way through the programme of tests Kansatsu-san had devised for him. Perhaps - this was forever an enigma in Nicholas's mind - the storm itself had been part of the examination.
In any event, a snow eave, perhaps twenty feet in length, was broken off by the rising wind whipping through the canyons between the peaks. Nicholas, who had been fighting just to breathe the thin air that the wind swept away from him, should have felt the solid arc of snow and ice dropping towards him, should have heard the echo of the crack as it was dislodged, even though the wind sucked the sound away into the storm.
The truth was that Nicholas was fighting haragei, the sixth sense Kansatsu had taught him to find within himself. Haragei, the precursor to Getsumei no michi, could be terrifying to the inexperienced. Controlling it was far more arduous than finding it. Nicholas did not fully know himself. Therefore, he was having difficulty manipulating haragei; it was, in part, controlling him.
Ice and snow dropping out of the sky crushed him beneath its weight. The storm was upon him, darkness and cold enveloping him all at once. The first thing he did was panic. He tried to breathe and, when he found that he could not, his mind dissolved into chaos.
Like a flash of lightning the panic quickly passed. Silence rang in his ears. He could hear the beating of his heart, the blood rushing through his veins, amplified in the dimensions of his tomb. Curiously, this revived him. I am alive, he thought.
Something - an ancient instinct, he believed - came to the iore, told him to centre himself. And with centring came haragei. He reached out with his mind, and rediscovered the world outside. Immediately, he became aware of Kansatsu's presence and was comforted.
He began to dig. He used his skills. He could 'see' Kansatsu pointing, showing him in which direction to dig, just as Nicholas imagined that Kansatsu himself was digging.
There was a finite amount of oxygen in the tomb, and it was fast giving out. Carbon dioxide burned his lungs. His body was on fire. Still he concentrated on the task before him, refusing to be distracted by fear. He did not feel the cold; he was not afraid to die.
The storm hit him square in the face when he emerged like an infant from the egg, the chrysalis, the womb. He gasped, taking in long shuddering breaths as Kansatsu, pulling him free from the pile of ice and snow, wrapped
him in his powerful arms, and sought shelter beneath a ledge of twisted black rock ...
Nicholas, upon the Hodaka again, stared at his nemesis, the Black Gendarme. It was the present, the past merely a vapour drifting above his head, a ragged war banner shredded by the sharp mountain peaks. Part of him could not believe that he was actually here. He had been certain that he would never again set foot otpon the Hodaka.
But he was Shiro Ninja, and everything had changed.
The sky was an opalescent white, giving the impression that he was inside a mass of cartilage, cut off from the rest of the world or in another world altogether. A distant howling told him that a wind had sprung up; the first drops of ram, fat and heavy, roughly brushed his cheeks like a dissatisfied lover.
Nicholas stiffened. As it had done so many years ago, a storm was approaching. It was at his back, moving swiftly north. There was a crack of thunder, and the shell of the sky was split open by a tongue of iridescent lightning.
In a moment, the rain came, part ice, part hail, beating down upon him. He took shelter beneath a ledge of twisted black rock. It occurred to him that this might be the spot where Kansatsu had held him safe and warm so many years ago.
Nicholas shivered. He was unutterably tired. His body ached in so many places he could no longer distinguish individual pain. His head throbbed where the incision had been made, and he unconsciously touched the spot beneath his knit cap. Despite the Gor-Tex parka, his layers of thermal clothing, he was cold. His teeth began to chatter.
He could see nothing beyond his shallow lair. He clung to the side of the Hodaka, at the foot of the malevolent wall of the Black Gendarme, as insignificant as an insect upon an elephant's back. In the face of the soaring majesty of this mountain range, the elemental
fury of this storm, he was nothing, less than a speck lost in time, soon forgotten.
He closed his eyes, rocking himself. It would be so easy to sleep now, encysted in the bosom of the storm, curled upon the Hodaka, ancient of the earth, to sleep the eternal sleep, and in such sleep an end to fear, to struggle, to Shiro Ninja.
He heard the siren call and part of him responded, edging closer and closer to a surcease for which he surely longed. Death came again to him, as soft and seductive as his first lover, at once a melancholy and exhilarating reunion ...
He awoke with a start. His throat was dry and raw, as if he had been breathing sulphur instead of oxygen. He blinked heavily. He could still see nothing beyond the hollow in which he crouched. He could no longer feel his feet. He squeezed his calves, pounded his fists weakly against his thighs. Numb. Totally numb.
Nicholas knew that he was dying. Even if he wanted to get up to run - did he want to? where would he run to? - he could not. The storm raged; night came down like a heavy cloak, the darkness of a moonless midnight.
Nicholas knew that if he fell asleep he would never awake. He exercised his mind, dredging up memory after memory, parading them across the theatre of his mind, immersing himself in the detail of recall. But he was so tired. His bones ached. He was cold. His eyelids drooped, and once or twice his head jerked up, his heart thumping wildly with the knowledge that against his will he had begun to drift off.
He was terrified, not only because he was losing con
scious control over his body, not only because he was
helpless, but because he knew that part of him welcomed
death. He fought against that part of him as, years ago,
he had fought against haragei.
He thought of Nangi, his friend. He thought of Lew
Croaker, the friend he had pushed away because of his own guilt. He thought of his tiny dead daughter, white-faced beneath the plastic tent that had not been able to keep her alive. He thought of Justine, of how much he loved her.
His heart broke then, and he wept bitter, crystalline tears. They froze on his eyelids, his cheeks, his lips. And still they came in such profusion that he might have been made of tears.
At last it was over. A calm after the emotional storm.
Emptiness.
Nothingness.
With his tears still frozen on his face, Nicholas drifted away into sleep. Through vapour he was falling, endlessly falling . . .
Until at last Death came to claim him.
'If virtue were its own reward,' Tanzan Nangi said to the Pack Rat, 'it would not be a human trait. It would belong solely to the gods.'
The noise emanating from the rows of pachinko machines was deafening. All the better for them; the Pack Rat knew it was safe hi here.
'I was speaking just now of Kusunda Ikusa.'
Nangi nodded. 'And so was I. If Ikusa seems virtuous, it is because it will prove useful to him.'
'Not to Nami itself?' the Pack Rat asked.
'We must examine most carefully the motives of those near a nexus of power who profess too easily to pure altruism. One suspects anything in a pure form, but most of all virtue, which is not natural to man, and which does not come to him without a struggle.'
Outside, in the dazzling Ginza, it was raining. Here, in the Twenty-Four-Hour pachinko parlour, all was the same as it always was, day or night: bright with garish neon colours, humid, dense with the sweat of human
emotion. The place never closed, which was why, the Pack Rat had said, he liked it. He came here often, Nangi knew, playing pachinko while he worked put problems in penetration, surveillance, and so forth. The nuances of his trade-craft.
'I have passed on your computer record of the virus attack to an associate,' the Pack Rat said.
'It is most frustrating. My people have got nowhere,' Nangi said.
The Pack Rat nodded. 'Then identifying the source of the virus has become my sole responsibility. But I must tell you, Nangi-san, it is proving to be a difficult problem to solve. Its architecture is wholly alien.'
Although there were a number of pachinko machines free, the Pack Rat was waiting for a specific one. Pachinko, something of a national craze in Japan, was similar to American pinball, but played on a vertical field. It was a decades-old game but, as with almost everything, the Japanese liked it best in its current high-tech form. Some of the newest machines were equipped with tiny televisions so the player could keep up with his favourite shows while scoring.
'I always play that one,' the Pack Rat told Nangi, pointing to the sixth machine in the seventh line. An old lady was on her last game; she must have been there for hours, moving from machine to machine.
'Is Justine Linnear being guarded?' Nangi asked as he watched the Pack Rat prepare to play. Curiously, the Pack Rat had bought only one token from the cashier at the front of the parlour. Nangi wondered whether the Pack Rat was that good. Winning would give him free tokens from the machine itself.
The Pack Rat put his hands on the machine, nodded. 'As you requested. I've put my best man, Han Kawado, on it. Please don't worry about her.'
'It is a precaution only,' Nangi said. 'I have no idea
yet what this dorokusai is after, but one cannot be too careful. I want full security maintained.' The Pack Rat nodded. He began to play. He won the first game, but not by much. His score only netted him a single token. He began a second game. 'Getting back to Ikusa,' he said. 'Seeing him and Killan Oroshi together, I can tell you first-hand there is nothing virtuous about their relationship.'
Nangi grunted. 'So much for protestations of the absolute.'
'And there's something about Ikusa's relationship with Ken Oroshi. Oroshi, the elder by twenty years, genuflected in front of Ikusa.'
'Oroshi's company, Nakano Industries, is in desperate financial straits,' Nangi said.
'Yeah. I'd heard that.'
'You're among the few who have,' Nangi said. 'Oroshi's moved heaven and earth to keep it secret. Frankly, I don't know how he's kept the company going this long. All he's got there now is a superior research and development department. I would give my left arm for some of his resident geniuses. That's what gave me the idea when Ikusa started to squeeze me. That's primarily why Nakano was the one firm on my list I was hoping Ikusa would pick. After we merge, I'm going to exercise my right of stock option immediately. Then I'll own Nakano. I'll have expanded, acquired key personnel, got 3,000 square feet of prime laboratory space, something the Sphynx kobun desperately needs. And the best part is that I'll have done it for virtually no money.'
The Pack Rat said, 'Excuse me, but what do you need me for?'
'Insurance,' Nangi said. 'I am not about to underestimate Ikusa-san. I want no interference from him or from Nami once I begin.'
The Pack Rat lost the second game. Nangi saw his expression, said, 'What's troubling you?'
'Killan Oroshi's not what I had expected. She's not a pawn, more of a wild card. I can't tell whether her actions are unpredictable or premeditated.'
'Why should this concern me?'
'I'm not sure,' the Pack Rat admitted. 'Perhaps it's as you suspect, nothing but an indiscretion on Ikusa's part. He thinks she's having the affair with him to spite her father whom she clearly despises. But I wonder. I wonder whether it's she who's playing the great Kusunda Ikusa for a fool.'
'That would, indeed, be interesting,' Nangi mused. 'But for this kind of investigation one needs time, and I have very little of that before I sign the merger papers with Nakano. Ikusa has worked moresquickly than I had imagined. Already the contracts are with my lawyers. Continue the Ikusa surveillance. This titbit about Ken Oroshi's daughter is interesting, but that is all. I need something with which to destroy Ikusa's reputation, not his friendship with Ken Oroshi.'
'Ikusa doesn't gamble,' the Pack Rat said. 'He owes no debts, he takes no bribes, he gives his advice freely. He's unmarried. He's a prudent man.'
Nangi shook his head. 'Do not make the mistake of confusing tatemae - the facade - with prudence,' he said. 'Kusunda Ikusa is clever; he covers himself in virtue as a squid ejects ink into the water. But for whatever reason, he has formed this liaison with Ken Oroshi's daughter. This is not the act of a prudent man, but a man so in love with power that it has warped his judgement.'
The Pack Rat reached around to the side of the machine, did something Nangi could not see. A small door opened, and the Pack Rat extracted a couple of tokens. So that's his secret, Nangi thought. He cheats. 'Still,' the Pack Rat said, closing the door, beginning his
third game. I've got a feeling we're missing something important, or looking at the situation from the wrong end.'
'With the recent death of the Emperor, Nami's power has grown ten thousand-fold. It has become a danger to Japan. This coercion they have me under is proof of that. It is Nami, ultimately, that I must discredit,' Nangi said. 'If we bring Ikusa down, Nami will follow.'
'Are we doing the right thing?' the Pack Rat said.
'As far as Nami goes,' Nangi said soberly, 'it exists neither for Japan nor for the Emperor. It was created in the minds of men and there is where its true power resides. It has no real function other than to raise its members to power. It is the guardian of this power and nothing more. But time passes and it seems to me that that empty power, that talismanic facade, needs to be fed. The warp of the flame is never so extreme as when it exists for itself and not to light the way for others.'
'Yet the topmost ministers, the business world's most influential chairmen acquiesce to its wishes.'
Nangi grunted. 'Such is the hypocrisy of the modern-day society in which we live. Men fear the unknown, and Japan without the old Emperor is a question mark. Nami seeks now to capitalize on the insecurity of the nation. Its members are predators who know well the stench of the rotting flesh upon which they feed.'
The Pack Rat watched the tiny steel ball-bearing rocket around the vertical pachinko field. 'Perhaps you're right, and Nami is our ultimate target,' he said. 'But right now I feel as if I can't get to that until I've unravelled the mystery of Kusunda Ikusa and Killan Oroshi.'
'I won't tell you how to do your job,' Nangi said, 'but have a care, Pack Rat. Nami is extremely dangerous. It is a law unto itself. Remember, I need you beside me, not dead in some alleyway.'
The Pack Rat won big. He was on a roll.
* * *
David Brisling watched Douglas Howe on the phone in his office, and felt a sharp stab of jealousy. That damned Japanese bitch, he thought. Nothing has been the same around here since she squirmed her way into Howe's inner circle. He tried to stem the wild burst of envy he felt, but blurted at Shisei when she emerged, 'Why wasn't I at that meeting? As operations deputy, I should have been involved.'
'Why don't you ask your boss?' Shisei said tartly. She turned her kilowatt smile on Brisling, held up the Louis Feraud suit. 'Did you see what Dougie bought me? It must have set him back a fortune.' She laughed to see Brisling's face flush. 'The problem with you,' she said, 'is that you're a wuss. I can't imagine what your function is.' She stuck her face in his. 'Why does Dougie keep you around? For laughs?' Her smile deepened, changed subtly. 'Or maybe it's just to bring his suits to the cleaners. Face it. You're a little boy in a man's world and you always will be.' She laughed as she left him standing there, white and trembling.
Howe, who was on the phone with General Dickerson, his stooge at the Pentagon, beckoned for Brisling to come in. He cupped his hand over the speaker. 'I need you to do something for me.'
'What is it?' Brisling snapped. 'You need me to go to the cleaners?'
'What?' Howe's head came up. 'General,' he said into the phone, 'I'll get back to you.' He cradled the receiver, said to Brisling, 'What the fuck're you talking about?'
'Nothing,' Brisling said sullenly. 'Just something the Jap bitch said.' He watched Howe emerge from behind his desk, reach for his jacket. Phones were ringing in the ready room, fielded by Brisling's cadre of assistant secretaries.
'Come on,' Howe said. 'I've got to get to SI to see Stedman.' He was talking about John Stedman, currently
the most senior senator on the Hill. S1 was Stedman's hideaway office in the Capitol Building. Ever since the dawn of the Republic, the seventy-five hideaways were the most precious perks in Washington. 'Life begins at S40,' Howe often said, because he didn't have one. But Cotton Branding did, because of his prestige, his contacts. Another unhealed wound in Howe's flesh, another inequity for which he despised Branding.
'Forget Shisei;' Howe said in the car as Michael, his driver, pulled out into traffic. 'She's not your concern.'
'That's what you always say. You know she calls you "Dougie"?'
'Does she?' Howe stared at his assistant. 'It's a joke, David. She's pulling your goddamned chain.' He shook his head. 'Jesus, sometimes I can't believe you.'
'Still. I want to know what her status is around here.' Brisling's jaw was firmly set and a vein pulsed in his temple. He could not believe how deeply Shisei had got under his skin. He had resented her from the moment Howe had started using her, and that resentment had steadily percolated. But the way she had talked to him just now had been the last straw. It was inexcusable.
'Shisei's a servant, David' - Howe shrugged - 'just like all the other dedicated, patriotic servants I employ to help me navigate the perilous waters of Washington.' There was a smirk on his face; privately he was amused by Brisling's obvious jealousy.
'Leave that bullshit for the press,' Brisling said hotly. 'She's nothing like the rest of us, and you know it.'
'Yeah,' Howe said, with a peculiar combination of satisfaction and malice, 'her pussy's prettier than all of you put together.' He was fed up with Brisling's whining. In fact, the only thing that was keeping him from firing Brisling was plausible deniability. Brisling was a born pawn. When his usefulness is at an end, Howe decided, he's out.
Howe picked up his mobile phone, spoke to General Dickerson for several minutes. Then, because he was in the mood to have some malicious fun, he leaned over, said in a conspiratorial whisper, Til tell you a secret, David, sometimes her pussy is smarter than the whole bunch of you.' He laughed so hard he had to wipe tears out of his eyes.
'Your jokes aside,' Brisling said somewhat stiffly, 'I don't trust her. For the life of me, I can't understand why you do. I've seen her twist you around her finger when you thought the opposite was happening. You set out to use her, which is OK, but this has turned into something else. She's got under your skin, into your blood. I see the presents you give her whenever she does a job for you. I think you want her and that's all that's on your mind when you're with her. That's power. That's control.'
'Are you finished?' Howe said. He was angry now. Who was this little pissant to tell him what was what? Shisei was right about Brisling, he was eminently expendable. He reined in his emotions with a great force of will. 'I just sent the bitch off to make sure Branding takes her to the gala State dinner for the German chancellor at the end of the month. There I will ruin him forever. So forget your little operation at the Johnson Institute. I have something else for you.
'You hate Shisei's guts, you think she's affecting my judgement. Maybe you're right. I think it's time we found out the truth about her.' He smiled warmly, settled his features into a mask of confidentiality. 'I'm giving you that job, David, because I know I can trust you. I happen to know that Shisei keeps her intelligence notes at home, in her bedroom. Wait until the night of the dinner, when we know she'll be out with Branding. Just after she^eaves, find a way to get those notes.'
'But - ' Brisling's face showed his concern. 'You want me to break into her house?'
Howe raised his eyebrows. 'David, I don't know what you mean. Use your own initiative, that's the way to get ahead in this city.' He stared out of the window at the passing parade of Washington's monuments. They all seemed to be saluting him. 'It seems to me I'm giving you what you want most: a chance to prove to me what you're really worth.'
He swung around, cultivating his avuncular look. 'You've always found my advice helpful to you in the past, haven't you? I took you out of the Senate cloakroom, made something out of the young drone you once were. That's because I saw the potential in you.' The benevolent smile broadened as he slipped an arm around Brisling's shoulders. 'Listen to me, David. You're going places. Today, my director of operations. Tomorrow -well, who knows?'
And Death had a name.
Nicholas opened his eyes, staring up into a face he had been certain he would never see again.
'Kansatsu-san?' His voice was a .dry, reedy rasp. 'Is it really you? Am I dreaming? Am I dead?'
'You are not dead,' Nicholas's first ninjutsu sensei said. 'Neither are you alive. Yet.'
His face - which was all of him Nicholas could see -was exactly the same as the last time Nicholas had seen it, in the winter of 1963. Impossible, Nicholas thought. But his thoughts were hazy, half-formed, still partially encased in ice.
'Where are we?'
'In Limbo,' Kansatsu-san said. 'My home upon the Black Gendarme.'
'A house? Up here?' How odd my voice sounds! Nicholas thought. How hollow, how timbreless.
"Though Limbo is my home,' Kansatsu said, 'it is a retreat. Think of it as a monastery, a holy place of
serenity and of strength.' He peered down at Nicholas. 'Isn't that what you need most now?'
Nicholas tried to nod his assent, fell asleep instead. He dreamed of the Black Gendarme, rising from the centre of his soul.
Two weeks after they returned to Washington, Cotton Branding took Shisei with him to the Johnson Institute. It was the first time since he had been back that he had been able to break away from his duties on the Senate floor.
The Institute, the ne plus ultra destination of the best minds graduating from MIT and Stanford, owned a large red-brick building constructed at the turn of the century in the Georgian style. It was essentially a country house that now sat in the centre of Washington, on Devonshire Place, just a block from the Connecticut Avenue Bridge with its gigantic Art Moderne urns.
That a structure originally built for displaying works of art was now used for highly advanced and elaborate laboratory facilities perhaps said more about the capital than a year's worth of speeches in the Senate.
Though the mansion was still beautiful on the outside, all its interior charm had been lost in the renovation. Still, as far as Cotton Branding was concerned, the Johnson Institute was the centre of the world, as beautiful as any museum he had been in or contributed to.
He was here to see the latest demonstration of how far the Hive Project had actually come. It was meant only for him, since this phase was still in its embryonic experimental stage. Yet Shisei was with him. He was proud of the work being done here, saw it, perhaps, as a reflection of his own efforts, the fruit of his hard work.
They entered the long, echoey marble foyer where a formidable state-of-the-art security network had been installed. Shisei gave the attendant her vital statistics,
full name, date and place of birth, place of employment, watched in fascination as the young woman typed the information on to a computer screen. There was only a fractional hesitation, then the printer began spewing out hard copy, including a facsimile photo of Shisei. The computer operator handed the hard copy to a uniformed officer, who scanned it, then scrutinized them. He nodded, indicated that they should step through a metal detector. They were asked to empty their pockets. Shisei's handbag and the contents of their pockets were X-rayed. In addition, Shisei was made to hand over her jewellery to be analysed by a spectrometer.
They were fingerprinted, then directed to look into the eyepiece of a great, arching machine so their retina patterns could be photographed and, in Branding's case, compared with those on file. Then they spoke in turn into a grille so that a sophisticated computer could record and store their voiceprints.
At length, they were given laser-etched tags to wear, each imprinted with an invisible one-time-only code.
'Is that all?' she asked ironically as they passed through into the Institute proper.
Branding smiled thinly. 'If you come back next month, they'll take blood as well,' he said. 'I understand they're about to perfect instant DNA identification.'
Dr Rudolph, a tall, whip-thin man with a pencil moustache and high, arched eyebrows, was waiting for them just past the next computer-operated check-point. His bald,skull gleamed in the overhead illumination. A brim of salt-and-pepper hair hung down over his ears and the nape of his neck. Shisei thought that he had the air of a man who bred dogs or roses in his spare time: meticulous, patient, gentle. He peered at them as if they were laboratory subjects, quickly shook their hands with a dry, firm grip. He nodded absently as Branding introduced Shisei.
'Do you smoke?' Dr Rudolph asked. 'No? Good. No smoking of any kind is allowed here.'
He turned and led them down a quiet corridor. Shisei thought the subdued light and acoustically muffling carpet were more appropriate to an executive suite.
Dr Rudolph opened a door, ushered them into what looked like a boardroom. The space was dominated by an oval mahogany table, around which high-backed chain were arranged. On the table, in front of each chair, were a glass ashtray, a copper-coloured water carafe, two glasses, pad and pencil. In the centre of the table, where a floral arrangement would otherwise be, sat a sleek black oblong box made of ABS plastic. On its face were three rows of colour-coded buttons and toggle-switches.
'Sit,' Dr Rudolph said laconically.
Shisei looked around. She saw that one wall of the room was entirely composed of a clear plastic sheet on which had been etched a detailed Mercator projection map of the earth. In all other respects, the room was nondescript. She had expected a laboratory, and was slightly disappointed.
'As you know,' Dr Rudolph began, 'the Hive Project is involved in constructing an altogether new form of artificial intelligence. There have been attempts before this. Indeed, other projects are going on even as we speak. But, sadly, all are doomed to failure. All except the Hive. This is because true artificial intelligence is impossible utilizing conventional computers. While these clumsy machines may be programmed to aid in disease diagnosis or the like, outside the laboratory they cannot reliably perform even routine tasks involving movement and recognition. Simply put, computer processors, even a series of linked processors, executing one pre-programmed task at a time, cannot achieve a useful kind of artificial intelligence.
'For that, one needs a brain, and what is a brain but billions of neurons, the human equivalent of processors,
running a multiplicity of tasks simultaneously. This has been our goal here, to accumulate and store information7 much as humans do, as a pattern of interconnections that can be accessed all at once. Hence the name Hive Project, because our "brain" has the approximate complexity of a bee.'
Dr Rudolph rubbed his hands together. 'Enough talk. I brought you here, Cook, for a demonstration.' He nodded at the plastic object in the centre of the table. 'Would you take the remote?'
Branding did so, then passed it to Shisei. 'I think I'd prefer my friend to participate in the demonstration,' he said.
Dr Rudolph nodded. 'As you wish.' He, pressed a stud, and the lights went down. Simultaneously, as if it were a Broadway stage, the map of the world began to glow. Then several spots began to pulse. 'We are in the war room below the White House,' he intoned. 'Our DEW line defence has automatically come up in response to the firing of several ICBMs' - red circles blinked, moving towards the United States - 'from three different locations.' Yellow lights flashed to indicate the launch sites. They were in Siberia, the USSR's south-west coast, Shisei saw.
'You want me to figure out a defence or offence with the help of the Hive computer?' Shisei asked, looking over the array of buttons and switches on the black box.
'No,' Dr Rudolph said, 'you have in your hands the Russian initiative. Of course, you will be aided by conventional computers. You will even get their advice on the box's print-out screen. But you will decide how and when to launch the second and, if you survive, the third launch waves.'
'If I survive?'
"The defence of the United States is now in the
hands of the Hive computer,' Dr Rudolph said. 'World War Three has begun.'
The red dots indicating the Russian missiles were more than half-way to their targets. Now she could see, arcing to meet them, green blips. Soon there was a series of yellow explosions as the first wave of missile strikes was detonated in the atmosphere.
Shisei asked for computer advice, even as she launched a second wave of missiles, double the number of the first launch. She glanced at the wall map in time to see clusters of green dots moving towards the Soviet Union: American missiles; the Hive computer had successfully defended America, and was now retaliating.
She punched the button for missile identification, got it, asked her computer to match a defence. She waited impatiently as the green dots streaked ever closer to impact. She sent bombers aloft, dividing them into four sectors, separating them. But already she could see the orange lights of American fighters launched off aircraft carriers, rushing to intercept her bombers. The Hive computer was doing all this, thwarting her at every turn? Impossible!
Again, she asked her computer for advice, then, desperately, deployed her fleet of atomic submarines, punched up the Soviet automatic defence-net against the American missiles. Identifications were flooding in, too many for the computer to handle, too many for her to defend all at once. Her computer managed to detonate some in the atmosphere but, one by one, she saw her launch sites impacted, destroyed or crippled beyond use. Before she knew it, American stealth bombers had decimated her subs. Then Moscow was wiped out and she had only a minimum number of bombers left. She was sweating. What was there to do?
'Had enough?' Dr Rudolph's voice echoed hollowly in the room.
'Yes.' Shisei's voice was hoarse. She thrust the black box from her. 'But how convincing can this be? I know next to nothing about missiles and defence systems. The Hive knows everything there is to know.'
'The Hive computer knows as much as the computer at your disposal,' Dr Rudolph said. 'Which, I might add, is an accurate simulacrum of the Kremlin's supercomputer.'
'But the difference is - astounding,' Shisei said.
'Like pitting modern-day man against a dinosaur in a game of intelligence.' Dr Rudolph nodded. 'I couldn't agree more.' He rubbed his hands together again. 'Was the demonstration a success, Cook?'
Branding was beside himself with delight. He had it all in the palm of his hand now. The Hive computer on which he had staked his career was a reality. Rudolph and his staff of geniuses had taken it out of the realm of theory, taken it further even than the first primordial jury-rigged experiments. Branding had been in on the Hive's first bleating squalls; encouraging, to be sure, but this was a fully-fledged success. It had spoken in sentences, paragraphs, volumes. The Hive brain was here, now, and it was his. 'You tell us, Shisei,' Branding said, too overcome to say more.
'I'd - ' Shisei seemed a little stunned. 'Would it be possible to actually see the Hive?'
Dr Rudolph looked at Branding. 'Cook, it's up to you. She's your guest.'
'All right.'
The Hive computer itself was housed three floors down, beneath even the old mansion's sub-basement. Rock had been blasted away to make room for the shielded laboratories. But when Shisei saw it, she could not believe her eyes.
'Why, it's no larger than my pocketbook,' she said. 'This can't be it.'
'But it is!' Dr Rudolph was beaming. He pointed to
a copper-beryllium object that was a three-dimensional octagon. 'This is the Hive computer. Your adversary during our simulation of World War Three. You see, the Hive is well named. It's really a multi-brain, a new form of intelligence. It's not compartmentalized as we humans like to think of everything being, but rather is made up of many inputs working at once, in conceit. We've mastered a revolutionary technology to make it so. These resonant tunnelling computer chips are constructed not of silicone, not even of the newest hyperfast conductive alloys, indium phosphide and aluminium gallium arsenide. We're beyond even that technology. The Hive runs on multi-laser computer chips. You see, what we've accomplished is to find a way to send coded light signals through chips at a rate of ten billion times a second. There they are converted to electronic signals via a monocrystalline diamond layer. The result is a chip that not only processes data at mind-boggling speed, but also insulates the data from the massive heat build-up such high-speed work would otherwise generate. In short, the speed of this Hive brain makes that of even the fastest of the conventional supercomputers seem annoyingly slow.'
'So I had no chance against it,' Shisei said.
'Not even George Patton at the helm would have a chance,' Dr Rudolph said.
'But if it's so good, so fast, and can reason, plan strategies and such, why isn't it being used now?' Shisei asked.
"This demonstration was just that,' Dr Rudolph said. 'It was in a controlled environment over a short space of time. There are still problems, applications we have to work on. And, of course, in some areas the Hive is still incomplete.'
'Aren't you afraid that someone will tap into the Hive brain?' Shisei asked.
Dr Rudolph beamed at her. 'Ah, no. Besides the
security network you yourself have experienced - which, I might add, is only a traction of the external shell security, as we refer to it - the Hive brain has been programmed with its own internal policing system designed to eradicate any form of intrusive or destructive virus program, as well as to deny any attempt at unauthorized usage. I assure you that Cook Branding's baby is quite safe.'
'The Hive computer is your baby,' Branding said to Dr Rudolph. 'I'm only godfather to its birth and development.'
'Thank you, Cook,' Dr Rudolph said. 'Come. I have some coffee brewing in my office. I'd appreciate a moment of your time to go over the revised estimates for next year's budget requirements.'
'Shisei?'
'Coming, Cook.' She was still staring at the amazing computer that thought like a brain. She took a step to follow the two men and her right heel gave way. She stumbled, went down on one knee. 'No, no.' She waved away their help. 'I'm OK. I'll just have to go barefoot.'
She slipped off both shoes, turned away from them a moment and, as she did, palmed a tiny cylindrical object she slipped from the centre of the broken heel. For just an instant her hand slid beneath the table upon which the Hive computer rested. Her heart .beating fast, she felt the coated plastic cylinder adhere to the underside of the table just beneath the octagon of the Hive. Then she was turning back to them, saying, 'Oh, coffee. How wonderful. I'm dying for a cup.'
Late in the afternoon, Tomi Yazawa returned to police headquarters. She had spent the entire day interviewing Dr Hanami's and Dr Muku's assistants, lab and X-ray personnel, anyone with frequent contact with either the offices or the doctors themselves. She also went over the appointment books for the previous six weeks. She was
searching for some clue to the identity of the man who had murdered Hanami and Muku.
It was clear to her by the manner of the doctors' deaths that their murderer had been known to them. This was, perhaps, more apparent in the case of Dr Muku, because he had been killed at close range without a struggle. Tomi could not imagine anyone, even the frightening figure that had attacked her and Nicholas Linnear in Dr Hanami's office, breaking into Dr Muku's office and shoving a phosphorus cigarette into his face. Phosphorus was what the Medical Examiner's lab report had found traces of in Dr Muku's eye socket. The intense flash of heat had, hi the ME's words, 'burned through the orb, the external and internal recti, the optic nerve, the lesser wing, the sphenoid'. In other words, it had penetrated all the way into the brain, causing death by flash-searing the organ.
In the assistant ME's estimation - and in Tomi's as well - one not only had to be very close to the victim in order to inflict death in this bizarre manner, but also to take the victim completely by surprise. Dr Muku's clothes were not torn or even wrinkled, his office was in immaculate condition. There was, in sum, no evidence of a struggle. Ergo: Muku knew his murderer. Assumption: Hanami knew him as well.
Tomi spent the remainder of the afternoon in tedious phone work, trying to get a line on Hanami's friends and associates, trying to match them up with Muku's to see if there might be an overlap, a common ground from which to proceed. She had also asked for reports on the two men's families, not that she thought she might find something, but because she was well trained and was meticulous in her investigations.
All she knew so far was that Muku had been a widower, and that Hanami was survived by his wife. According to Hanami's widow they had been happily married. Neither doctor had progeny.
When Tomi's call list gave out (she was unable to reach more than a third of the people on it) she went to see Senjin. She needed advice on how to proceed. Besides, records showed that he had consulted Dr Muku several times concerning suspects since he had been in the Homicide division.
It was early evening. Most of the day watch had already gone, and the building was palpably quieter. Senjin, however, was in his office.
' "Psychopathy is not the face of evil", Dr Muku once told me,' Senjin said in response to her first question. ' "It is, rather, the beam emitted from a long forgotten lighthouse. Loneliness is the only companion a psychopath is able to tolerate." ' Senjin nodded. 'Yes, I remember Muku-san well. It is more than a pity that he is dead, it is a tragedy for the department. Because of his insights into the criminal mind I was able to identify, isolate and track down Kuramata, Shigeyuki and Toshiroh, three of our most wanted terrorists.'
'What was he like?' Tomi asked.
'Muku-san?' Senjin's forehead creased in concentration. 'Well, it is hard to say. He was brilliant, of course, but also, I would say, introspective. He did not actively seek the limelight; he was not, I would judge, a good public speaker. But, of course, he was by nature essentially a thinker.'
'From what I've been able to gather, he didn't seem to have many friends.'
'Frankly, I'd be surprised if he had any,' Senjin said. 'Muku-san, though brilliant, was opinionated, often quite stubborn. I doubt very much whether he'd have made an acceptable friend.'
'Is there anything else you can tell me?'
Senjin had come out from behind his desk. 'On a related matter, Nicholas Linnear has not returned to Tokyo?'
'Not to my knowledge,' Tomi said. 'In a way, I'm relieved. No one knows where he is. Surely he's safe from whatever attack the Red Army had planned for him?'
'Let us hope so,' Senjin said. 'Though I am not as comfortable as you are with him being outside the scope of our watchful eye, and I would think it rather important that you locate him as soon as possible.'
He was standing so close to her, she could feel him against her breasts. Tomi began to burn. She took a shuddering breath, taking his scent into her lungs, enjoying it as if it were nicotine-laden smoke. But she was ashamed, not because of her erotic thoughts, but because she had not immediately stepped away from him; this was not seemly behaviour in public. She did not move.
'How are you feeling, Tomi-san? You took quite a beating.'
She felt a little thrill pass down her spine as he used her first name. This, too, was unseemly behaviour, impolite in the intimacy it implied. Tomi found that she was not offended.
'I am feeling fit enough,' she said, aware of the slight tremolo in her voice. 'Except for some aches here and there.' She was having trouble catching her breath. Tve had several nightmares.' Her heart was hammering in her throat. 'Nothing hard work won't cure.'
'I see that I've been correctly worried about you.' Senjin put one finger beneath her chin, lifted her head up so that he could stare into her eyes. 'You are such a dedicated officer.'
When he touched her, Tomi felt her knees go weak. She prayed that she would not collapse. Had the office got abruptly hot? Then she ceased to breathe at all as his head came down and his lips grazed the side of her neck. Tomi's lips parted and her eyelids fluttered. She
heard him whisper her name as if from a great distance.
Then she heard him.say, 'Come with me.' Automatically, she obeyed, allowing him to steer her out of his office, down the half-deserted corridor and into a utility closet.
He shut the door behind them. Dim aqueous light filtered through a tiny window of translucent glass high up in one wall. Tomi felt shelving behind her back, pressing into her calves. Senjin was tight against her. With the two of them in there, the space was so tiny there was scarcely room to move, and none to turn around.
'Wh-what's happening?' Tomi asked, though her body knew, just as it had known of this inevitable end from the moment Senjin had come around from behind his desk.
She felt his lips on hers, felt her own mouth opening, almost dying of pleasure when their tongues met, searched, entangled. My God, she thought. It's happening and, oh, oh, I want it to happen.
Slowly she felt her skirt being lifted, felt his hands upon her thighs. Then he had sunk down on his knees. Tomi was so stunned that she could not utter a sound, not even the sob she felt welling up around her heart as his mouth sought out the spot between her thighs that most yearned to have him.
Tomi felt as if she were slowly slipping into a bath, her skin frictioned by heat, her muscles relaxed by heat, her bones melted by heat. Her mind was awash as if with a drug. Dimly, she remembered how often she had dreamed of this moment, never truly believing that it would ever be made real. And those dreams, like images perceived in dusty light, in a mirror cracked and peeling, added an almost insupportable'weight and urgency to the moment as reality merged with fantasy. How many nights had she lain sleepless, sightless, touching herself in a sad mockery of how Senjin was touching her now, imagining that he was beside her, above her, in her? Those imaginings were
all here with her now, a surrealistic pillow on which to rest her slowly working hips.
She felt a lightness of spirit in the tiny stifling closet. The smell of sweat - her sweat; the smell of arousal -her arousal; the smell of sex - her sex, was like the most delicate of perfumes, a mingling of scents that created a whole she breathed in with each shuddering breath, expelled with each muffled moan, each tiny cry of delight.
Until, her hips working faster and faster, the entire universe seemed to implode inwards. She gripped Senjin's sweat-soaked head, pushing him against her with great force, floating down from the heights slowly, slowly. And when she thought it was over, she was wrong because he was fully against her, his heat overwhelming, and then he was in her, and the sensation made what had come before as nothing.
Tomi needed more of his flesh. She tore frantically at his tie, unbuttoned his shirt all the way down to his navel. She licked his neck. She felt abraded skin as if from a wound, kissed it tenderly. Sweat ran into her eyes.
She wept into his chest as he thrust into her, thrusting back at him, biting his salty flesh as she encircled his hips with her legs, and in the claustrophobic space there were only the two of them, and then just one, aflame, melting, fused.
When it was over Tomi tasted his blood on her lips. She lay against him, encircled by his arms, encircling him with her legs, content just to listen to their two disparate heartbeats thumping in the darkness and the heat. She could not breathe, but she liked that, too. It was as if the engine they had created had sucked all the oxygen from the environment. She felt a pulse beating madly in the side of her head, and knew that whatever else might happen, a part of him was now hers, an emotion, a sensation, perhaps something altogether more ephemeral than that, who knew? This was not a time for definitions or even
for absolutes. It was a time of mystery and an acceptance of the unknown, acknowledging not only its existence but the idea that it existed wholly without answers.
And then like a thief in the night the thought came: what have we done?
She broke away from him; it was as if they had been pressed together with glue. Tomi found that she was panting as she voiced her question to herself, 'What have we done, Omukae-san?'
'Perhaps,' he said, 'we have saved each other.'
In the intimate space, under the intimate circumstances, it was such a shocking reply that she blurted, 'What do you mean?' even though a secret part of her knew very well that he might be right.
'It is no secret that you have been unhappy, Tomi,' he said gently.
'How did you - ? But I have told no one!'
He ignored her outburst. 'And I - ' He gave a little laugh. 'Of Omukae the stone there is little known, neh? That is because there is precious little to tell. My life is hollow, empty, meaningless save for my work.' He reached out to touch her, an electric contact, like a quick burst of lightning. 'Now I feel as if the universe has caught up with me at last. The stars shine in my corner of the world. There is a moon, even, I think, a sun.' He sighed. 'Tomi...'
'I - No!' She broke away from him and, with a little cry, thrust open the door, gasping in the cool air-conditioned air of the corridor as she ran out.
In the ladies' room she washed, splashed cold water on her face. She did not look in the mirror, as if she suspected that she might see his face instead of her own reflected there.
She was struck dumb by the thought of being involved with a man such as Senjin Omukae. While her attraction had been kept in the realm of fantasy she could ignore
the implications of someone who lived by his own rules, who lived most, uncomfortably within the rigid societal restraints of Japan.
It is no secret that you have been unhappy, Tomi. She heard again his voice echoing in the darkness, coiling around her throat like a plait of her own hair. How had he known? It was a secret, or so she had thought.
The reality shook her. How easily he seduced me, she thought. How well he must understand the desires of my spirit. How easily I can be led astray by him. I have sinned once, but not again. Does he understand how he has humiliated me by making me feel pleasure in such a proscribed act?
Probably not, she decided. Senjin Omukae was a loner, at his core a kind of rebel who, if brought into the full spotlight of his peers, would never be tolerated. This was why he was feared rather than admired by those in power in the Metropolitan Police Force. They chose to look the other way at Senjin the man because Senjin the Homicide division commander was so useful to them. And what if one day that changed? Tomi thought with a shudder. He would have nothing; he would be nothing.
She closed her mind to her new-found terror, rushed out of the ladies' room as hurriedly as she had entered it.
It happened that Kusunda Ikusa worked late every Thursday night. As such, that was the one night that the Pack Rat had not kept strict watch on him - there didn't seem to be any point to it.
Now he saw the enormity of his mistake. It was past nine o'clock and Ikusa was still in his office. Everyone else had gone home but lights were still burning in Nami's suite.
The Pack Rat was already inside, having entered the building during the afternoon as a civilian engineer, disappearing into the upper floors without a trace.
From his vantage point he saw Killan Oroshi coming
before Kusunda Ikusa did, and he began to set up his electronic 'ears'. Killan, wearing a suede skirt that came barely half-way down her thighs, a cream-coloured silk blouse, patent leather boots, and a floor-length python-print coat of some shiny synthetic, pushed open the door of the suite Nami used in the Nippon Keio Building two blocks off the Meiji-dori, in Nishi-Shinjuku, and went directly into Ikusa's office.
Outside, Tokyo shimmered like a jewel suspended in amber. Dusky lights glowered in the darkness like a beast's lambent eyes. Microscopic particles of petrochemical detritus hung in the air, outlining Shinjuku's massive office towers with Seurat's Impressionistic brushstrokes. It was art, after a fashion, if only a post-modern one that deserved the name industrial pointillism.
Kusunda Ikusa was not working; he was waiting for Killan. He put aside papers he had not really seen for hours.
'Why do you insist on being so foolishly indiscreet?' Ikusa asked, as she came through the door.
'If my father knew about us he'd have a heart attack, for sure,' Killan said. A kind of beatific smile suffused her face. 'That would be nice.'
'Don't be ridiculous,' Kusunda Ikusa said. 'It would be nothing of the sort.'
'You don't have to live with him,' Killan retorted. 'He hates me almost as much as he hates Mother.'
'You're very precious to him.'
Killan gave Ikusa a twisted smile that somehow made the Pack Rat's stomach contract. 'You'd like to think so because that's why you fuck me.'
Ikusa said, 'Your sense of humour sometimes fails you, Killan.'
The smile became more twisted, and now it was disturbingly knife-like. 'But I wasn't joking. Of course you knew that, Kusunda. You know everything.'
'What is it I see in you, Killan?'
The girl reached beneath his desk. 'You know.' She looked like she was manipulating something. 'You know.'
'Yes,' Ikusa said thickly after some time. 'You are so very bad for me. How is it I know that much, yet I can do nothing about it?'
'Do you really want an answer,' Killan Oroshi asked, 'or is this another of your rhetorical questions?' When he made no response, she went on, 'You love fucking me because you're fucking my father at the same time. That's it, isn't it?' She shook her head, her expression perfectly sincere. 'No, I'm wrong, or at least that's not all of it.' Her features softened like wax, her lower lip jutted out; her tiny tongue appeared as if she were about to suck up a savoury sweet. 'The fact is, I'm the only one who can seduce you, Kusunda. You spend all your time lording it over others, and that's a strain. Oh, I know it's a strain you'd never admit to. But that's one of the beauties of our relationship. You don't have to admit anything to me. You don't need a priest and I have no aspirations to play the role.'
The Pack Rat could see the fullness of knowledge throbbing behind her eyes, and he wondered whether Kusunda Ikusa yet knew what he had got himself into.
'You can seduce me because I allow you to.'
Killan laughed. 'That's not seduction,' she said. 'You're talking about a business deal.' She shrugged. 'Forget it. I don't care about your weaknesses, Kusunda, either real or imagined. You're like a dream to me, or a vision 1 conjure up in a marijuana haze. I don't care about you at all. I do what I do because of my father. I fuck you because it would literally kill him if he found out that I spread my legs for you. I scheme with you because the schemes appeal to my sense of disorder, because I am the outlaw my father is not and never could be. The Americans say I have balls, Kusunda. My Japanese revolutionary friends
say that I have an overwhelming desire for change. What
do you call it?'	,
It seemed as if Ikusa was faintly amused by Killan's monologue. Certainly he was not bored by it, and now the Pack Rat was sure that he was underestimating her. Kusunda Ikusa's black eyes gleamed with a kind of inner insight as she recounted the litany of her philosophy, as if her words had the power to illuminate a hidden part of himself.
Listening to Killan Oroshi, the Pack Rat was reminded of a line from the English poet, Algernon Swinburne, 'Change lays her hand not upon the truth'. But he thought that these two would-be revolutionaries, oddly entwined, could hardly understand what Swinburne had in mind.
'I would call it tatemae,' Kusunda Ikusa said. 'The fagade that talentos use so artfully on television or on the stage. Ten thousand people become caught up in tatemae at once. We Japanese are, after all, fetishists, worshipping the façade, some symbol to which we may attach and defuse our fears, to which we may humbly dedicate our lives.'
'Like the Emperor.' Now Killan's eyes were alight. She had a talent, the Pack Rat observed, for turning even the most clever response back upon itself so that it served her own purpose. But she also spoke as no other eighteen-year-old that the Pack Rat had known. But then, he reminded himself, she fancied herself a revolutionary, and a successful revolutionary's sense of oration and theatrics was highly developed. 'No one knows more about the Emperor than you do, Kusunda. When I am near you I feel so close to him.'
'Stop it!' Ikusa snapped. 'You are making a mockery of the sacred.'
Clearly Killan had reached a nerve, and such was her personality that she pursued her advantage to the limit.
'Who says that the Emperor is sacred? You? The other members of Nami?'
"The Emperor is descended from the son of Heaven.'
Now that she had successfully drawn him into untenable philosophical waters, it was clear to the Pack Rat, if not to Ikusa, that Killan was determined to undermine his position. 'Now who's using tatemae! You are better than any talento at tatemae. The myth of the god-king is ancient, universally revered. It is also, as you well know, an empty talisman that you have seen fit to use to compromise the spirit of the people.'
Kusunda smiled. 'Now you sound merely foolish. If this were true what would you be doing with me?'
'You know, Kusunda. I am as apolitical as you are political. That is the only aspect of balance we have in our relationship.'
'I would have thought apolitical was the wrong term for you,' Ikusa said. 'You are a nihilist. A black-draped sibyl, a futurisuto.'
'Oh, if only you'd call me that while we're fucking!' Killan said.
The Pack Rat could see that Ikusa's tack with her expletives was to ignore them. He pulled her against him. She seemed lost against his massive bulk. The Pack Rat averted his gaze but did not stop the recorder as they made love.
'Futurisuto instead of angel,' Kusunda Ikusa said, afterwards. 'I will never call you angel again.'
Killan Oroshi laughed as she dressed. 'That will suit me just fine,' she said. She put on her coat. Ikusa did not move or make a sound.
When Killan left, the Pack Rat decided to follow her. She took him across town, into the Asakusa district. Into an anonymous post-war building made of ferro-concrete, made up of usagigoya, tiny rabbit-hutch apartments.
The Pack Rat watched as a thin young man with hair
the colour of platinum opened the door to her repeated knocking.
'Kalian!' he cried, clearly delighted.
'Hello, Scoundrel,' Killan said, closing the door behind them, shutting the Pack Rat out.
When Tomi went to interview Dr Hanami's widow, she asked Nangi to come along, and was pleased when he accepted her invitation. Tomi found his comments and opinions insightful rather than intrusive. More and more she was coming to see that he was a natural detective: his intense curiosity combined with his sense of detail and the analytical bent of his mind. And he had become her only ally in the murder of the dancer, Mariko. He seemed as fascinated by the case as Tomi herself was. Besides all that, Tomi liked him.
Haniko Hanami was a tall, slender woman of imperious mien. She came, so she told them with no humility, from one of the oldest samurai families in the north of Honshu. She wore a magnificent silk kimono which, by its workmanship, appeared to be at least fifty years old. A scattering of flowers crisscrossed its deep blue background. Golden threads winked and shone as she moved.
She had entered into marriage with Dr Hanami and, according to her, had an ideal marriage until his untimely death. This was all she would say, no matter what questions Tomi tried? Clearly, she did not like anyone prying into what she considered her private life, and she resented the intrusion even from such a commonly acknowledged authority as the police. Almost everyone in Japan co-operated with the police. Why wouldn't she?
'If you don't mind, Mrs Hanami,' Nangi said when the silence had taken on the aspect of a stalemate, 'might I have a chair? Often my legs do not allow me to sit in the traditional fashion.'
'Of course. This way, please.' Haniko Hanami led
them into a room furnished in the Western manner. She studied Tomi as Nangi sat down, careful not to cause him any embarrassment should his legs inadvertently give out.
When he was comfortably seated, she said, 'Is the pain bad?'
'Bad enough, sometimes.'
She nodded, kneaded her hands. 'I suffer from arthritis,' she said mournfully. 'Now it is not so bad, save in the morning when I wake up. But in winter . . .' She clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth.
'Winter is the worst,' Nangi agreed.
Tomi watched the growing rapport between them with something akin to awe. The angry, sullen Haniko Hanami who had met them at the door, had disappeared. In her place stood this suffering old woman.
'Is your pain bad now?' Mrs Hanami enquired.
'I have perhaps overwalked today,' Nangi admitted.
'Then I have just the thing to help you.' She rushed out of the room, returning within moments with a jar, which she held out almost shyly to him. 'This is what I use on my hands. It works very well. My husband made it.'
Nangi took the jar and, much to Tomi's astonishment, rolled up his trouser legs and began to apply the ointment. 'This way?' he said.
'No,' Mrs Hanami said, 'this way.' And, kneeling beside him, she dipped her fingertips into the ointment, began to massage it into his calves precisely as if she were his mother. "There," she murmured. 'There, there.'
When she was finished, Nangi thanked her, helping her to her feet. She was blushing.
'I am old and childless,' she said wistfully. This is all I am good for now.' She brightened somewhat. 'Still, it is good to be useful in any way one can, neh?
'Indeed,' Nangi said. 'Since my retirement some years
ago, I too seek to be of help to others. Which is why I am here today.' He leaned on his cane. 'Mrs Hanami, it is important that we ask you some questions. Whoever killed your husband has killed before. Without doubt, he will kill again. Do you see how vital it is that we find this person?'
This was more or less what Tomi had said to Mrs Hanami at the beginning of the interview. But that had been before Nangi had adroitly found the key to her spirit. Tomi continued to marvel at the man.
'I understand,' Mrs Hanami said as she rose. 'Shall we go outside? There is so little sunshine these days, only industrial haze, one must take every advantage of it.' She led them out on to a stone porch that overlooked a jewel of a garden. She led them down a path of flat blue-grey river rocks artfully laid to seem naturally scattered.
'My husband, as you no doubt already know, was a perfectly brilliant surgeon. His hands were like those of a master sculptor, and he obsessed over them. He used more hand cream than I did.'
She confessed this as they sat in a tea room across the lush but tiny garden from the main house. It was redolent of dried grass, spice and woodsmoke.
'He never used soap on his hands at home. Indeed, I often thought he had a phobia against it. Of course, that could not be so, since he obviously used soap when he scrubbed up for an operation. Still, he was nervous if he caught even a hint of chapped skin on the backs of his hands. He had the hands of a teenager, of a girl, really.'
Initially, Tomi was surprised, not to say shocked, by these revelations unseemly told of the dead, and she found herself feeling a growing antipathy towards the woman. But slie soon came to realize that Haniko Hanami needed to unburden herself of secrets she had too long carried unaided in her breast, and Tomi's heart softened in acknowledgement of her plight.
Whatever faults Haniko Hanami might have, making tea wasn't one of them. Tomi watched, entranced, -as the older woman deftly turned the ash whisk to create a froth the palest shade of green imaginable.
'Well, he was a wonderful surgeon,' Mrs Hanami said, 'but as a husband he was something less than that.' She paused for a moment to take more tea and, seeing her thin face above her lifted hands, the tiny cup, Tomi was given a startling glimpse of the coquette she once must have been. 'I had wanted so much from this marriage," she said. 'I had such high hopes. Well, perhaps that was a mistake. But I didn't know my husband very well at the time we were married. Apparently I never did.'
'Why do you say that, Mrs Hanami?' Nangi asked.
Haniko Hanami sighed. 'My husband grew tired of me over the years. When he was younger, he liked an assortment of women. Later on, there was only one.' She looked at them in turn. 'Lack of stamina or perhaps a sense of - what shall I call it? - stability.' She sipped tea. 'You may think that an odd word for an adulterous liaison, but in my husband's case it was accurate, I assure you.'
'Do you know what it was your husband wanted?' Nangi asked gently.
'Wanted?' Mrs Hanami blinked. 'Why, yes. I'd have thought it obvious enough. He did not want to die. Or, I suppose more accurately, to get old. The parade of women assured him of new faces - and bodies - that, for him, never aged. His women were like a mirror into which he could look, seeing with absolute assurance the man he had once been.'
'But somewhere that changed,' Nangi said.
'What?' She appeared startled, as if he had interrupted a private meditation.
'He went from many to one, you said.'
'Oh, that.' She nodded. 'I believe this one was very
young, her flesh very firm. Lately, my husband had begun to long for more. Perhaps he had come to see the parade for the charade it really was, Perhaps he needed to hold youth in his hand in what would have been for him a permanent way.'
Nangi said, 'Was there ever any talk of divorce?'
Mrs Hanami gave a startled little laugh. 'Oh, my goodness no. It is clear that you never knew my husband. There was never a hint of that, and there never would be. My husband had no idea that I knew of his liaisons. He would have been mortified had I been cruel enough to tell him that I knew.'
'Why didn't you tell him?' Tomi asked in the same gentle tone of voice Nangi was using.
Mrs Hanami's eyes opened wide. 'But why would I? We loved each other.'
Into the silence that had wrapped itself around them, Nangi said, 'About this last girl your husband was seeing. How do you know she was very young and very firm-fleshed?'
'Well, she was a dancer, wasn't she?' Mrs Hanami said.
'You knew who your husband was seeing?' Tomi said.
'Not who, dear,' Mrs Hanami said. 'What.' She was perfectly composed now, the mask she had presented to them on their arrival firmly back in place. It was forged of pride, Tomi saw, a family pride of samurai forebears, a procession of centuries. Nowadays, Tomi thought, that iron-bound tradition must be difficult to shoulder.
Haniko Hanami rose and, with the grace and bearing befitting her station in life, crossed to a dark wood tatami chest. She opened a top drawer, took out something, came back to where they were sitting. She held out her hand, opened it up like a chrysanthemum budding.
'I found this in one of my husband's suits when he came home very late one night,' she said. 'I went through it while he slept. I felt I deserved that much.'
Tomi and Nangi looked at what she displayed. It was a tiny plastic flashlight. Along its side was emblazoned the name of the tokudashi club that Tomi had come to know so well, The Silk Road.
Kansatsu said, 'I have been sought, I have been defeated, I am now forgotten.' He was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the great room of the stone structure he had created hi the shadow of the Black Gendarme. 'You asked, Nicholas, why I am here in the Hodaka, and this is my answer. Now tell me why you are here.'
Tell me first if I am dead,' Nicholas said. 'I have no idea if this is some afterlife.'
Kansatsu cocked his head. 'Do you believe in an afterlife, Nicholas?'
'Yes. I suppose I do.'
'Then this is an afterlife.' Kansatsu waited a moment. 'This is what you make of it, Nicholas. After a time, you will give it your own definition.'
'But am I dead? Did I freeze to death on the Black Gendarme?'
'That question has no relevance here,' Kansatsu said sternly. 'As I said, it is you who must make the determination. Is this life or death?' The ageless sensei shrugged. 'I no longer seek to differentiate between the two states.'
'But surely you can tell me if I still live? Is this a dream?'
'When you understand how useless these questions are, Nicholas, you will have the answers you seek.'
Nicholas quieted his racing heart. He no longer felt
chilled or numb, but his body still ached and, touching
the side of his head, the scar of the incision was as evident
as ever. I must be alive, he reasoned. But reason seemed
a stranger in this land.	_
'You did not seem surprised to see me,' Nicholas said.
'Why should I be?' Kansatsu said. 'You have come here to me many times.'
'What? I haven't seen you since the winter of 1963, and I'm certain that I've never been here in this house before.'
Kansatsu looked pointedly at the plate in front of Nicholas. 'You haven't finished your meal,' he said. 'I suggest you do so. You will need all your strength soon.'
'I know,' Nicholas said. 'If I remember correctly, the descent of the Hodaka is every bit as exhausting as the ascent.'
'I was hot speaking of the physical,' Kansatsu said.
Nicholas looked from his enigmatic face to the bits of food on his plate. He ate. He slept. And dreamt again of the dominance of the Black Gendarme . . .
. . . This recurring image so disturbed him that when he awoke he described it to Kansatsu.
The sensei was silent for some time. At last he stirred himself. But his voice was slow, surreal, as if he had been roused from a dream. 'Why does this image disturb you so?'
'I don't quite know,' Nicholas admitted. 'Perhaps it has to do with the emeralds, my grandfather's legacy.'
'Is that so?' Kansatsu's eyebrows lifted. 'Explain.'
Nicholas did, telling him about the box with the fifteen emeralds, about how his mother, Cheong, explained to him that he could use the gems in whatever way he saw fit, with only one caveat: he must never allow the number of stones to drop below nine.
'Did your mother tell you what would happen if this occurred?'
'No,' Nicholas said. 'Do you know what these emeralds are?'
'Perhaps I have heard something of their existence,' Kansatsu said. 'But I had no idea that you possessed them.'
"They are very powerful.'
'Yes. Extremely.'
'But in what way?' Nicholas asked.
'In the Way of Tau-tau,' Kansatsu said.
'But what have I to do with Tau-tau?' Nicholas asked.
Instead of answering him, Kansatsu said, "The doro-kusai will want the emeralds. Where are they?'
'Safe enough,' Nicholas said.
'Are they with you?'
'No. I didn't think that being Shiro Ninja I could adequately safeguard them.'
Kansatsu nodded, was quiet for some time after that. At length, he said, 'You have been here some time now. I expect you are strong enough for us to begin.' He was dressed in a black cotton gi, the costume of the martial arts dojo. 'When I sent you to Kumamoto those many years ago,' Kansatsu said, 'you believed that it was to confront your cousin, Saigo. I imagine you have believed that self-deception until this moment. Well, you were young then. And just because you are supremely talented does not mean that you are capable of fully comprehending that talent.
'Of course, I know this because I have had this conversation with you many times.'
'Why do you keep referring to how often this has happened before?' Nicholas asked. 'It's happening now, for the first time.'
'Time,' Kansatsu observed, 'is somewhat akin to the ocean. There are tides, currents, eddies which at certain nexus points overlap, creating a kind of whirlpool of events that repeat like ripples until, having spread sufficiently outward, are spent upon a rocky shore.'
'You have a strange concept of time.'
'On the contrary,' Kansatsu said, 'it is you whose concept of time is strange. But then that is to be expected of someone who still sees a difference between life and death. Coming to grips with this illusion is the same as recognizing the Ten Oxen, the stages of Zen enlighten-
ment. Do you remember, Nicholas?'
'Of course. One begins by searching high and low for the ox, one finds it, ensnares it, tames it, rides it back into town only to find that the ox never existed, that it was a part of oneself, a part cut off, lost, confused.'
'Does that remind you of something?' Kansatsu asked.
'Nothing that I can think of,' Nicholas replied.
Kansatsu turned, took an iron pot off the hibachi stove sunk into the floor. He poured them both tea. It was the bitter, dark red tea of northern China known as Iron Dragon. 'Listen to me, Nicholas,' he said. 'I sent you to Kumamoto in the winter of 1963 to find the ox.'
'But I confronted Saigo and he defeated me.'
Kansatsu nodded. 'And in so doing he defeated me as well. That was meant to be. One month later I left Tokyo for good, and came here to fulfil the last of my three stages: to be forgotten.'
'I never forgot you, sensei.'
'No. You were never meant to. And that is why you have come.'
'As I have said, sensei, I am Shiro Ninja,' Nicholas said. 'I came to the Black Gendarme seeking a path to salvation. I thought Akiko's sensei, Kyoki, would help me because I suspected that he was tanjian, but I discovered him dead, flayed alive in his castle in the Asama highlands. Then I discovered that he had a brother. His name is Genshi.'
'I know,' Kansatsu said. 'I am Genshi, Kyoki's brother. I am also Kansatsu. I have many names.'
'You . . .' Nicholas almost choked on his words. 'You are tanjian?'
'Before I answer you, you must understand that your spirit is entangled. You are driven by fear. An exhaustion of the soul has made it impossible for you to distinguish between good and evil.'
'Yes,' Nicholas said. 'I understand. Shiro Ninja has
ensnared me.'
'Shiro Ninja,' Kansatsu said, 'was only able to work on you because you have hidden your true nature from yourself. You are still searching for the ox, Nicholas, unaware that the search is counterproductive because the ox does not exist.'
'What are you saying?'
'Remember the winter of 1963, Nicholas,' Kansatsu said. 'In Kumamoto when you believed your cousin Saigo defeated you, took Yukio, the girl you loved, away from you.'
'I believed it happened only because it happened,' Nicholas said.
'Again, you are thinking of the ox when the ox doesn't exist,' Kansatsu said patiently.
Nicholas looked at him. 'I don't understand.'
'No,' Kansatsu said. 'You are not yet strong enough. Sleep now.'
... 'I am lost, sensei,' Nicholas said when he awoke.
'Outside,' Kansatsu said, 'you will gain strength.'
'I am glad you are here to guide me,' Nicholas said, pulling on his waterproof hiking boots, bundling himself, in his Gore-Tex parka.
'Your spirit is still entangled,' Kansatsu said, leading the way out on to the Black Gendarme. 'No one can guide you.'
'It is night.' Nicholas was surprised. - "This time, you slept all night and all day. Did you dream of the Black Gendarme?'
'No.' But Nicholas had the sense that Kansatsu already knew that. 'I dreamt of bullrushes. I was searching for something. I can't remember what it was. Then I found footprints in the black marshy earth. When I knelt down to examine them more closely, they spoke to me. The voice was like the trilling of a night bird, almost a song. And then the bullrushes and the marsh were gone. I was
back in Kyoki's castle, passing through the moon gate in his study.'
'What did the voice say?'
'I can't remember,' Nicholas said.
'Was the voice my brother's voice?'
'Not his,' Nicholas said, 'but the source was close.' He was moving with some difficulty and great effort across the blistered rock wall. 'Perhaps,' he added hopefully, 'I have succeeded in banishing the image of the Black Gendarme from my dreams.'
'Would that be a good thing?'
'Of course it would!'
'Have you so quickly forgotten that your spirit is entangled, that you cannot distinguish good from evil?'
It was then that Nicholas noticed that Kansatsu was wearing nothing more than his tight cotton gi. 'Aren't you cold, sensei?'
'Is it cold out?' Kansatsu said unconcernedly. He gestured to indicate that Nicholas should take the lead. 'I hadn't noticed.'
The icy wind whipped through the canyons, ravines, the sheer, glassy walls of the Black Gendarme. Drifts of dry snow crunched beneath their feet as they followed a narrow winding path up the nearly sheer rock face. Now there was nothing at all but the rock face: vertical, glass-like, supremely forbidding. Nicholas began to climb, digging his fingertips into barely seen fissures, hauling himself up. He grunted with the effort, his breath coming in animal pants.
'When I dream of the Black Gendarme rising like a spectre from the centre of my spirit,' Nicholas said, resting for a moment as he clung precariously to the rock face, 'I awake full of anxiety and fear.'
Kansatsu did not answer, and Nicholas turned his head to find that he was alone on the Black Gendarme.
* * *