Angel Eyes (12 page)

He had come to Sengakuji to the; Honno was certain of it. This was the place one came to honor the memory of the forty-seven ronin who, in feudal times, had avenged themselves upon those who had wrongly put to death their lord. They had died in that pursuit, nobly, honorably, so that their deaths were as meaningful as their lives had been.

This, too, was Sakata's purpose. He could no longer live with what he knew or had done, yet he could not divulge these secrets. A betrayal of his lifelong friendship with Kunio Michita was unthinkable; the shame would be unbearable not only for him, but for the family he was leaving behind. Ritual suicide was the only honorable way out for him. Honno knew this and, therefore, did nothing to interfere. It would not have occurred to her to commit so dishonorable and disrespectful an act.

She had always revered this man who handled the fund-raising from Tokyo's complex bureaucratic and political arenas that backed Michita, but never more so than now.

On this very warm spring day the graves of the forty-seven ronin were covered in flowers. Incense rose in the still air. The combination of heady scents was almost overpowering, and for the rest of her life, Honno would equate this particular amalgam of odors-sweet and musky-with death.

What were the secrets Kakuei Sakata could no longer live with? As far as Honno knew, there was not even a breath of scandal. Connected as she was with Tokyo District's feared Tokuso-the Special Prosecutor's Office-surely she would have heard if an investigation file had been opened on Michita or Sakata.

It was a long road from Kasumigaseki, the district in central Tokyo where Sakata and Honno worked, to the ancient graves at Sengakuji. Sakata had chosen a time late in the day when the shrine was deserted.

He was dressed in white, the color of death. Honno saw him limned in the setting sun against the field of flowers covering the graves. A wind whipped his baggy cotton trousers about his legs. The contrast between the vivid color of the blossoms and the purity of the white material was striking, another memory that Honno would not forget.

She watched as Sakata knelt with his back to her. He withdrew from his waist a ceremonial knife. The blade, slightly curved, shot the sun's rays into Honno's eyes, so that for a moment she saw nothing. Then the glare was gone and Honno saw Sakata hunched over. She could see the acute angles his arms made, and knew that his hands, grasped around the knife's hilt, were already thrust against his lower abdomen.

All at once his head shot up. She could see his shoulders trembling as he sought to bring the blade, buried deep inside him, from left to right, in the ritual samurai's disemboweling cut.

Sakata's spirit was being purified, disentangled from the sins he had committed during the course of his duty. But even the strongest hand could falter. The mind's determination did not fail, but the body in trauma could betray the spirit, and this was what was happening now to Sakata.

Honno could see that, on the verge of death, his body lacked the strength to finish the cut. He tried again, but to no avail.

Honno could watch no longer. She stepped from behind the huge cryptomeria tree that had hidden her from Sakata and, hurriedly, she knelt by his side.

The lower half of his clothes were stained crimson. The veins at the sides of his neck were standing out like ropes, and his eyes seemed to be bugging out of his head with the massive effort.

Honno leaned over him and, placing her hands over his on the silk-wrapped hilt of his ceremonial knife, added her strength to his. She heard a terrible ripping sound like thunder as the blade crossed fully from left to right.

Sakata's red-rimmed eyes rolled toward her, locking on her. For one split instant his face registered gratitude. Then he toppled face first into the bed of fragrant flowers, placed there to honor the sacred memory of the dead.

Irina Viktorovna Ponomareva awoke not knowing where she was: Mars's large, dark apartment in Vosstaniya Square or Valeri's brighter but more spartan one in Kirov Street. She sat up in bed, looked out the window. There was narrow Telegraph Street behind the Ministry of Education, where she worked, and there was the Church of the Archangel Gabriel. Irina's coworkers referred to it as Menshikov Tower, but she could not, at least to herself.

But then again, Irina had nothing in common with anyone at the Ministry of Education. She had returned from an extended trip to the United States filled to overflowing with innovative ideas based on the American educational system.

She had spent the subsequent weeks painstakingly writing, revising, and annotating a lengthy treatise on how the Soviet educational process could be streamlined and improved. The paper had been duly passed around the ministry without so much as a ripple of comment.

At last Irina had sought an interview with the minister, who had spent twenty minutes circling around the fact that all the points she had made in her paper had been rejected. He had been so condescending that Irina had no difficulty in divining his message: stick to your computer models, to your statistical research. Use the American methodology to reform the ministry's medieval archival retrieval system-that was, after all, why she had been sent to the United States in the first place, the minister reminded her-but leave the important reform to the experts, the men.

Well, at least I don't have to worry about being stuck in that dead-end job anymore, Irina thought as she stared at the familiar landmark of the Church of the Archangel Gabriel. She knew where she was. She was in Kirov Street: Valeri's place.

Irina felt her pulse still racing. Thoughts of her job, the quotidian tasks of her life, had failed to calm her.

She had awakened from the same nightmare. In it, she is drowning at the dinner table. She jumps up, goes to the window, but there is blood on the streets, and when she looks up in horror, bars across the moon. She knows she must get out into the streets, something important is happening there, something that will otherwise leave her behind forever. But she cannot move and, looking down, she sees with a kind of sickening despair that she is shackled to the floor. . .

Irina closed her eyes for a moment, then stared again out the window, across the street to her church, beautiful, comforting, as if to assure herself that she was truly awake, that the nightmare was just a dream. Put it out of your mind, she reprimanded herself sharply.

Though it was in the Sadovaya, farther out on the periphery of Moscow-Mars insisted on living with the people-Irina actually preferred Mars's apartment. Or perhaps it was Mars himself that she preferred. That, indeed, would be ironic.

But this apartment had its charms. She loved to wake up in the morning to the sun shining on the remnants of the church spire, destroyed in a fierce electrical storm some years ago. It was a reminder of how even something so fragile as faith could survive in inhospitable soil. If the church could survive here, she had decided some time ago, so could she. It was a reminder that she did not have to end up like her parents.

Irina turned away from the window, and could hear Valeri bustling around the kitchen. What was he preparing? There was bread, but no butter or milk available in all of Moscow. It had been this way for months now, and Irina recalled her mother's harrowing stories of the war, when beets and turnips and perhaps a cabbage or two were all that were available to eat for months on end. My God, her mother had once said, what we would have done for a bite of fresh food! Killed each other, like as not. Although it was said-and Mars assured her-that great upheavals were occurring every day in the Soviet Union, Irina thought that some things never changed-and never would.

Despite perestroika, she found it just as difficult-and in some cases impossible-to obtain the essentials of day-to-day life: soap, bread, fresh vegetables, toilet paper-as she had in the years before the restructuring. The problem that no one seemed to want to face was that the old market centralism was so deeply entrenched that not even the president could dislodge it. Though it was clear to anyone that the produce grown by private enterprise was robust and healthy, whereas the vegetables from the old collectives looked soft and withered, even the president was reluctant to encourage the anathema of more private enterprise.

In Russia, after all, such structural transformations always were paid for by enormous political risks, so it was usually better not to act than to make a move at all. Instead, in typical Soviet doublethink, the decisions to enact new freedoms were quickly followed by decisions to severely limit those freedoms.

This would have been an utterly depressing scenario for an American-but not, it used to be said, for most Russians. Hardship, the long, bone-chilling winters, and the even colder heart of the state apparatus, inured the Soviet citizen to disappointment. When there is little hope, depression nourishes unwillingly. But flourish it does, in direct proportion to alcohol consumption, which warmed the body, numbed the mind, and destroyed the spirit.

Irina stretched, got out of bed, padded down the corridor to the bathroom. As usual, the hot water was not working, but she was used to showering in icy water. Nevertheless, her eyes opened wide under the spray, and she gave a little reflexive shout.

Toweled dry, she dressed in fresh clothes she kept in the bottom drawer of the magnificent mahogany chest Valeri had had imported from England.

Standing in front of the mirror, she carefully applied the American makeup she had bought in the local Beryozka store, where privileged citizens like herself could buy a limited selection of imported goods. She was a small-boned woman, with fine, high breasts, a tiny waist, and narrow hips. Her legs were shapely (the right genes), and had remained well-muscled (she still worked out at the ballet barre three times a week, though she could no longer harbor dreams of becoming a ballerina, her mother's wish for her). She had a peculiarly feline face, triangular, with large tawny eyes, a small nose, full, sensual lips, ears set close to her skull. She wore her shining black hair almost shockingly short. Altogether, she was happier with her looks than most women she knew.

In the kitchen, Valeri Denysovich Bondasenko was hunched over the illegal Toshiba 5200 lap-top computer he had smuggled into the country. The amazing Japanese technology had done away with the bulky CRT monitor. In its place was a flat gas-plasma screen. The battery pack-essential in a land where power outages were a fact of everyday life-bulged from the Toshiba's plastic side.

Irina peered over his shoulder, saw the food recipe up on the multicolored screen, kissed him on the tip of his ear.

''Almost ready,'' he said distractedly. He was a frighteningly large man, with a wrestler's meaty shoulders and the powerful forearms of a laborer. Irina had been terrified the first time she had gone to bed with him. His face and voice were as intimidating as his body. When he was angry, she could feel the tension in the same way she could just before a powerful storm.

She had not wanted to go to bed with him that first time, but she could not imagine what he would do to her if she did not acquiesce. They had met at a typical state function. She had gone because it was her duty to go, but all the time she had been thinking of renewing her nagging spirit on her knees at the font of the Church of the Archangel Gabriel.

Then Valeri Bondasenko had spotted her. He had herded her out of the throng as American cowboys did with cattle to the slaughter. She had read this in a paperback copy of Lonesome Dove that she had smuggled back into the country, and which she now kept with her wherever she went.

Valeri had been charming, gracious even. But beneath that veneer, Irina had been aware of another Bondasenko-the feared political tactician. It was he who had masterminded the brutal crackdown against the national separatists in his own native Ukraine. It was he who had counseled forging the still controversial compromise with the leaders of the Soviet Union's Baltic states that made the subsequent crackdown in the Ukraine possible. It was said that every move Bondasenko made was part of a sound strategy. Irina was intelligent enough to wonder what it was he wanted from her.

She had known full well that she was being seduced, but that knowledge did not stop the process from continuing. Whatever Valeri wanted, Valeri got, that was what everyone said. And it was clear that he wanted her. Irina did not have the political strength to resist him. No one did. Still, it had been a sad moment in her life, to be brought home to her in such concrete fashion that she was so helpless to determine her own fate. Sitting naked for the first time on the edge of his bed, she had prayed for guidance and for the moral strength to resist his corruption. Then, wiping a single tear from her cheek, she had climbed in beside him. He exuded the heat of a furnace.

She thought she might be crushed beneath his muscular bulk, but he turned out to be a surprisingly gentle and compassionate lover, as if the Valeri Bondasenko she met between the sheets was a different man altogether from the one who stalked through the halls of the Kremlin, consigning to purgatory-figurative and literal-those foolish enough to oppose his rise to power.

This gave Irina some semblance of hope. She had not hated him when he had taken her, had, almost despite herself, been swept up in the vortex of his lust. Soon she had found her own, and knew that she could come to find enjoyment on her own terms in this liaison, despite the fact that with him, as with all of her lovers, the moment of his physical parting from her brought a sense of emptiness and of sadness.

One night, in this apartment, with the sleet battering heavily against the outside walls, rattling the ancient windowpanes, Irina discovered another layer to their relationship. He had still been inside her, thick and hot. She was still pulsing to then-accelerated heartbeats.

"Can I confess something?" she whispered. "I have never felt like this with any other man." She pushed the hair back from his forehead. "You frighten people, perhaps you don't know how much you frighten them. When you approached me that first night, I felt paralyzed. I couldn't say no to you. I was terrified if I said no to you I would come to work the next morning to find my job was no longer there."