Angel Eyes (41 page)

"How?"

"He was murdered," Hitasura said. "Much more than that I do not know. It happened sometime shortly after midnight. His apartment was broken into. Some things, perhaps, were stolen, although we can rule out robbery as a motive. His money and valuables were not touched."

Tori said, "Have you any idea who's responsible?"

"Nothing conclusive," Hitasura said. The pain was apparent in his dark eyes, in the new lines in his face. The pressure of being an oyabun was massive. "But yesterday morning, early, a woman hurled my brother's mentor, a university professor named Giin, from the parapet of the Nihonbashi. Giin had been teaching my brother his method of deciphering codes."

"Who killed this man, Giin? Fukuda?"

"That would have been my guess, since Fukuda works for Big Ezoe, and he is my chief rival. But the odd thing is that Fukuda was busy elsewhere at the time of Gun's demise."

"Another female assassin?" Tori said doubtfully. "Who?"

"You've come back to me at a most propitious time, Tori-san." Hitasura's eyes were burning. "I have begun to mobilize all of Tokyo to find out.''

"We have a fix," Hitasura said with the receiver of the mobile phone to his ear.

"On who?" Tori said. "You have no description of the woman who killed Giin, and you can't even say whether it was she who murdered your brother."

"We know where Fukuda is," Hitasura said. "Fukuda knows. We must persuade Fukuda to tell us what she knows."

''Who is this Fukuda?'' Russell asked. ''Did I hear you right? She's some kind of female Yakuza assassin? "

"That's right," Tori said.

The anonymous moving van rumbled through the streets of Tokyo. Hitasura was on the mobile phone, getting the latest information on the citywide search for his brother's murderer.

"But I thought the Yakuza had no use for women," Russell said.

"Generally speaking, that's true," Tori said. "But Fukuda is an exception."

"In many ways," Hitasura added. He had cradled the phone receiver. "Fukuda has a-oh, shall we say, a history in Yakuza lore."

Tori grunted. "What Hitasura-san means is that she broke her way into Yakuza society. Forcibly. She made the Yakuza oyabun notice her, and accept her."

"Some," Hitasura corrected. "Others will never accept a woman doing a man's job.''

"Better than most men can do it," Tori said.

Hitasura glowered at her, then abruptly laughed. "Tori-san, too, is an exception. I do not hold her sex against her." He said this in a tone of voice that indicated he should be congratulated for his insight.

''If I read Hitasura-san's thinking right,'' Tori explained, ''he feels sure that if there is another female assassin working, she had to have been trained by Fukuda. Fukuda is the key.''

"Wait a minute." Russell looked from one to the other. "Even if you manage to capture her, what makes you think that this highly trained assassin is going to tell you anything?"

Hitasura glanced at Tori.

Russell said immediately, "What am I missing?" He looked at Hitasura, but the oyabun turned away. "Tori?"

Ton said nothing. Instead, she took his hand in hers, placed the flat of it over her left hip. It was an extraordinary gesture, full of echoes of the past: their meeting in the library in L.A. when he had come to re-recruit her, and had touched her there. How does it feel? But there were also intimations of the future, an intimacy about which neither of them was at the moment able to speak. It was in some sense a tribal gesture, a tremor of intent, primitive, powerful, a symbol full of meaning, in a land composed of meaningless symbols.

''Fukuda broke your hip?''

It was a whisper, but Tori winced, as if she were experiencing again the bright blue-white-green flash searing her eyes, singeing her brows and fuzz of hair on her arms, feeling anew the weird sense not of falling, but of floating in the subway tunnel far below the streets of Tokyo. Feeling nothing for an instant, and then as if the percussion is hitting her all over again, the agonizing, teeth-grinding pain as the shock dissipates. Then the extreme heaviness of her own body, as if it now weighs tons. Crashing to the tracks, the shining steel coated with a hot, sticky substance, dark, running out of her in a stream. And Fukuda pausing a moment in the semidarkness of the subway tunnel, her face alight with triumph. I told you not to get in my way, but you didn't listen. You took from me something that was very precious. Now that you'II pay with your life, perhaps you will understand just how precious. The gloating is cut with her rage and her hate. You backed the wrong horse. Sooner or later, we'II take Hitasura down, just as we've taken you down. No big thing. Easy does it. Then she had disappeared, and in her place was the rumbling of the oncoming train, sweeping around a curve, its startlingly brilliant headlight firing the steel tracks, the light racing toward Tori, who lay on the tracks, immobile . . .

"Tori! Tori!" Russell was shaking her. "Are you all right?"

White-faced, Tori turned her head toward him. "No," she said, her voice a hoarse whisper. Her eyes locked with his. They were dark, swirling with emotion. "I've come full circle, Russ. I beat death once. Now I see I've got to do it all over again.''

EIGHT

ARKHANGELSKOE/STAR TOWN/MOSCOW/TOKYO

"Comrade, have you heard the latest news? They've done it again."

"Who's done it again?" Valeri said.

"White Star," the young man with the strawberry birthmark said. "Their elite cadres are better armed, more well-trained. White Star is no longer merely a ragtag guerrilla organization made up of disparate dissident minorities. They are a full-fledged army now. And elements of this new army have attacked the Kyshtym Industrial Complex. It is entirely destroyed!"

Valeri Bondasenko was sitting on the bench overlooking the large birch tree, outpost of the forest on the other side of which were the grounds of Arkhangelskoe. On one side of him was the young man with the strawberry birthmark, on the other, his daughter, silent, imperturbable. At their backs, up the sloping incline, bulked the almost Victorian exterior of the insane asylum.

''Is that so?'' Valeri said. ''I had heard the story differently. I had heard that there was a low-level nuclear event at the complex, but that it was under control." Kyshtym, for almost fifty years, had been the site of the Soviet Union's main military atomic reactors. Three years ago, a massive overhaul of the aging units had begun. But only after a series of scrupulously unreported events-leaks, explosions, and the like-had killed one-third of the people who worked at Kyshtym, and who lived in a nearby city so secret it was without a name.

The young man laughed. "Where do you get your information, comrade? Tass?'' He chuckled, shook his head in disbelief. When he spoke he looked ahead, never at Valeri. "Really! The gullibility of some people."

He seemed to have drifted off, and was talking to himself, and Valeri began once again to consider the enormous miscalculation the president made when he began to replace the central Communist party with his own handpicked people. Cults were dangerous. If anything in Russia's recent history had been made manifest it was that.

The president had needed some form of stability to hold the center together while he gathered his cult around him, and he had most unwisely chosen the military to aid him. In return for their help, he had promised-and delivered-more and more money to the generals' annual budget. This had created a serious shortfall in the other national sectors in dire need of money.

Now the president was paying the fearful price of consolidating his power in the form of strikes, local uprisings, the disintegration of the economy, the appalling Western characteristic of the polarization of the classes, and the concomitant rise to power of White Star.

Valeri shivered, trying to free his mind from its turmoil. He slipped his hand into his daughter's, as if this could reassure her that he was here with her. He wanted so much to see even the slightest hint of a reaction, a sense that there was the spark of consciousness in her mind, that she might be thinking, I know you're with me, Daddy, and it makes me feel better.

But then the young man spoke directly to Valeri. "No, no, comrade. It was White Star. They blew apart the concrete lake prison labor helped pour. They exposed cracked reactor cores, defective rods that caused partial meltdowns, and enough carelessly dumped plutonium sludge to irradiate all of Siberia. I'm told the entire area has been evacuated. The officials won't get any more idiots from the city without a name to come in and clean up like they did after the disaster of 'fifty-seven. Within two years, over a thousand people had died of radiation poisoning. Within ten years, twenty-seven hundred more died of cancer, almost everyone who had been brought in the for the cleanup in exchange for promises of extended vacations." The young man laughed again, but this time there was a disturbing edge to it. "The workers got vacations, all right. Only they were a bit more extended than they had bargained for.''

Valeri gripped the white hand of his daughter all the tighter. The tracery of blue veins beneath the translucent surface of her skin reminded him of the skein of birch branches, bare, traced with snow, pale against the dark Ukrainian sky in winter.

"The stars," Valeri's father had said during the last nights of his life. "Perhaps our salvation lies in the stars. The stars look cruel, I know, but Valeri Denysovich, I know they are not. Here is where the cruelty reigns, in Kiev, in the captive Ukraine."

Valeri had stayed with his father, until his nights became hours, then minutes, and at last his eyes closed for the final time. A moment later the red sun rose over the snow-covered roofs to the east, bloodying their tops.

Valeri, sitting next to his only child in this pastoral, almost peaceful setting near Arkhangelskoe, could not remember his father without also conjuring up the dreaded specter of Solovki.

In the late 1920s and early thirties the Solovki Islands in the White Sea had been turned into one of the most infamous of the Russian death camps. Into the forbidding universe of Solovki had been thrown the so-called "anti-Soviet" elements, chief among them the rebel Ukrainian kulaks-the peasants.

Valeri's uncle had been a kulak, but after he had been shot by a Russian soldier in the streets of Kiev for daring to speak his native language, Valeri's father decided on another course of action. He joined the army. Not just any division, mind you, but the fiercely independent First Siberian Cavalry Corps.

He had seen that as his revenge against the Russians, but instead it proved his undoing. Six months after he joined, in the autumn of 1931, the corps was overrun by Russian "loyalists," who were sent by Moscow to punish the unit for spreading anti-Soviet propaganda. The truth was the First Siberian had gotten too powerful. It had made Moscow nervous in a nervous time, and Moscow had acted accordingly.

Valeri's father was imprisoned for a short time, then sent summarily to Solovki. There was no trial, no chance to refute the charges. In fact, charges were never read to him; he never knew what he had been accused of. That scarcely mattered to Valeri's father. He was Ukrainian; that alone was enough to mark him as a potentially dangerous criminal.

"That's just what the Russians had made me," he would tell Valeri many years later. "A dangerous criminal."

In Solovki, Valeri's father and his fellow inmates were fed-when they were fed at all-on nine ounces of moldy black bread and a bowl of something akin to hot water with a lump of frost-blackened turnip floating in it. Clothes were out of the question, as was any form of heat, save the occasional fire.

A week after his father arrived in Solovki, there were already so many inmates that the overcrowding became intolerable. As a consequence, inmates were herded out in order to be sent to another camp. Valeri's father watched with bleak eyes as his fellow criminals pushed, shoved, clawed, and fought each other to be chosen. Anyplace, the reasoning went, would be an improvement over Solovki.

His father was chosen in the last batch herded out, but in the turmoil he managed to slip away, secrete himself beside a mother and child, blue-skinned and stiff, dead for a day and a half. He had no desire to be trekked to another place he knew nothing about. Better the devil you know, he told himself, than stepping out blindfolded in the dark.

It was two months before he received word through the camp grapevine as to the fate of those who had left Solovki. They had been sent to Siberia. Marched up the narrow ice-clogged Vasyugan stream, they had been left on the ice fields and the barren bogs without food or clothes. All of them had died.

His father spent just over three years in Solovki. Though he lost two fingers and four toes to frostbite, though he lost sixty pounds, he was a survivor. He stole food from the dead, ate the flesh of the odd guard dog that died of exposure, and eventually learned how to snare fish from the icy waters.

He escaped, finally, one moonless winter's night, with the snow falling eerily on the water, the guard dogs barking frantically, the darkness aflame with automatic gunfire.

He was wounded but managed to escape. It took him six weeks to make his way back to Kiev, and by that time he had lost the feeling in both his legs.

In order to save his life, the legs had to be amputated. "Do it! Do it!" he had shouted at the surgeons, shaking with rage at the indignity of what was about to happen. "What's the difference? I only have six toes, anyway. That's not so much to miss!''

But Solovki had done more than take his legs, it had dehumanized him. Living with the dead, eating frozen dog meat, watching day by day as his fellow Ukrainians wasted away or were shot by guards bored, drunk, or both, had scarred his soul. He could never again think about his country in the same way. Just as the murder of his brother had caused a violent reaction in him, so had his time in Solovki. But instead of turning his burning rage outward, now his isolation had turned it inward.

It had been his son, Valeri, who had saved him from taking a pistol and putting it to his head. Valeri had said the only thing that would make his father want to keep living: ''I want to learn, Father. I want to know what it means to be a Ukrainian, and I can only do that from you.''