Floating City (15 page)

The girl with the almond-colored skin turned her dark eyes in Akira Chosa’s direction, and he saw the secrets floating there like islands in the stream.

Secrets were Chosa’s stock in trade, so he felt an immediate bond with the girl. She was spread upon a black lacquered table, her long hair, glossy as the lacquer itself, fanned out across her small breasts, slim belly, and firm thighs. The atmosphere at the intimate
akachochin
he habituated was thick with cigarette smoke and the musky intimation of sex. The girl, naked, streaked with indigo dye, watched him as she calmly opened her mouth in a perfect
O.

Secrets were what allowed Chosa, the
oyabun
of the Kokorogurushii clan of Yakuza, to remain out of jail. Too many high-rolling financial traders, high-ranking politicians, and senior bureaucrats were being investigated, hauled off to jail to face charges of embezzlement, tax evasion, and making illegal contributions to political war chests.

A thin strip of a shiny Mylar-like material was stretched decorously across the girl’s loins, but there was no mistaking the phallic shape of the large rubber device being lowered into her open mouth. This was the performance: while colored strobes probed her breasts and belly and thighs, only her lipstick-coated lips moved in a subtle dance. It was so still in the room that Chosa could hear the ragged breathing of the small audience of males who had come to this after-hours club from expensive and boozy business dinners, where the immense pressures of their daily work schedules could be obliterated for at least a few hedonistic hours.

Of all the secrets that Chosa possessed, the one he treasured most was the one about Nicholas Linnear. But, in truth, Linnear was only the central figure around which events whirled in their own peculiar rhythm.

Like the girl’s lips, which pulsed, expanding and contracting as they worked their way up and down the shaft of the rubber device. She knew her business, this girl, her eyes closing slowly, as if in ecstasy, as her tiny pink tongue swirled around the head.

Nicholas’s father, Col. Denis Linnear, had formed a kind of sub-rosa alliance with Mikio Okami, during the early years of the American occupation of Japan. On the surface, there was nothing extraordinary in that. In those days, it was common practice for the American military to enlist the help of Yakuza to quell the Communist-inspired worker riots that plagued the big cities. Better by far, the Americans felt, to have Japanese nationals cracking the heads of protesting Japanese workers than to have American military personnel do it. And the Yakuza were more than happy to help out; they feared the Communists as much as the Americans did.

But it seemed as if the relationship between Colonel Linnear and Mikio Okami ran deeper than a mere business quid pro quo. The two, it appeared, had been fast friends. Beyond this point, Chosa’s intelligence was rather sketchy. Just exactly what the two men were up to was still a mystery. But at least some inferences could be made. For instance, Chosa was alone among all the Yakuza
oyabun
who understood Tomoo Kozo’s motivation for trying to kill Nicholas Linnear this past New Year’s Day.

It was widely assumed that Kozo, who was then the
oyabun
of the Yamauchi clan, was terrified that Linnear would find out that it had been Kozo’s orders to follow Linnear’s wife, and that her fear of being followed had caused the accident in which she and her lover had been killed. Chosa had lied to Ushiba—Kozo had deliberately gone after Justine Linnear, he wanted her dead, just as he had wanted Nicholas dead. All because he believed that Colonel Linnear and Mikio Okami had killed his father Katsuodo in 1947 because Katsuodo had been against Okami’s policy of appeasement with the Americans. Katsuodo despised everything Western; he was never able to surmount his humiliation at his country’s defeat in the war of the Pacific. Consequently, he and Okami had constantly been at odds.

At the time an internal war had seemed inescapable even though all Yakuza
oyabun
knew this would deeply injure them all. Two weeks after Katsuodo spoke openly of going to war with Okami, his body was found floating in the Sumida River. There was not a mark on it, but a closely guarded secret was that the elder Kozo could not swim. The boy Tomoo Kozo theorized someone somehow learned that secret, and he had made it his life’s work to discover the perpetrators of his father’s death. His suspicions led him to concentrate his investigation on Okami and Colonel Linnear, but Chosa had never found out whether Kozo had gathered sufficient evidence—or any at all—on which to base his conclusions.

The girl’s muscular control interested Chosa, but of course she was just beginning. It was her gift. Not a muscle moved on her body, though her skin was now burnished with a fine layer of perspiration. A single bead, glittering in the lights like a diamond, clung to one erect nipple. There was something ineffable about that one bead of moisture, like a tear or a cherry blossom about to fall, that spoke of life transfigured, unaltered either by time or by emotion.

In one important sense, Chosa found himself admiring Nicholas Linnear because he was entrenched in a purely Japanese dilemma, worthy of its most famous heroes. Nicholas loved his father, but believed that his alliance with the Yakuza—with Mikio Okami in particular—was morally indefensible. Thus his abiding hatred of the Yakuza. And yet, in order to honor the memory of his father, he was forced into service to Okami because the Colonel had made him promise to help the old
oyabun
should he ever need it. Last year Okami, having gotten word that a contract had been put out on him, had gone to Nicholas. To Nicholas’s credit, he honored his
giri
to his father, though the cost to him, personally, must have been great.

A slender strand of saliva linked the tip of the girl’s tongue to the end of the rubber device as it was withdrawn from her mouth. She held it up in the air, twirled it, then slid it languorously down between her rising and falling breasts. She stirred its tip around first one nipple, then the other, until they quite clearly quivered in the spotlights.

Then she dragged the slickened head down over her flat stomach, through her navel, down down, until it nudged the top of the tight Mylar strip covering her loins. With a deft twist of her wrist, the head slipped beneath the shiny fabric, lifting it so that the men in the club rose as one off their seats.

In went the rubber device as her mouth opened in what might have been either a silent moan or a scream. Perhaps it was a bit of both. In and out went the rubber device, in and out, in rhythm to music that had started up. But her mouth remained open, scarlet lips stretched taut.

In a moment, there was a soft rustle as a man from the audience staggered forward, ten thousand Yen trembling in his outstretched hand. A figure from the shadows by the side of the stage took the notes as the man’s trousers puddled at his ankles. Breathing hard, he climbed upon the stage. In and out, went the sleek rubber device. In and out.

The man knelt astride the woman’s head, directed himself into her open mouth. Her lips closed upon tumid flesh and the man’s eyes closed. Everyone was standing now. Not a breath could be heard, even when the music ceased to be replaced by the soft grunts of the kneeling man. The insides of the woman’s thighs were humid with sweat, and flushed with blood. Her knees spread wider as the Mylar strip became more twisted, and now, for the briefest instant, one could see beneath it to...

She took her hands away from the implement raising them to slyly cup her breasts. And yet, astonishingly, the rubber device continued its motion in and out as if it were alive. The highly developed muscles in the woman’s groin rippled and undulated, the cords on the insides of her thighs like steel cables. Her jaw hinged fully open and she took all of the man into her mouth, holding him there as he began to shake. With a groan, his hips jerked forward and he almost fell off the stage. At the same time, the woman’s feet pressed hard against the surface of the stage and her own pelvis canted upward uncontrollably as her sex inhaled the rubber implement to its full depth.

There was a low collective groan from the men surrounding her. The smell of sweat was strong on the air. The man rose and, staggering drunkenly, lurched off into the audience.

Cigarettes were fired up. The show was over and the spell had been broken. Chosa signaled to one of his men to go backstage and wait for the girl while she showered and dressed. She would, he knew, be waiting for him in his bed when he returned later that night. But first he had an interview with perhaps the only person besides Mikio Okami who knew all the secrets of occupied Tokyo in the latter half of the 1940s.

Chosa climbed into the back of his armor-plated limousine and spoke softly to his driver. Beside the beefy man, Chosa’s bodyguard sat stoically and so still he might have been asleep. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Within twenty minutes they were rolling through a worn-out district that paralleled the Sumida River. Stray dogs skulked on the edges of the headlights, and fires burned in trash cans. The black facades of the warehouses seemed forbidding in the night. The limo stopped outside a private residence wedged between two such structures.

It was raining lightly, the drops fizzing against the harsh sodium lights of the street. Chosa emerged from the car, pulled the collar of his overcoat up around his cheeks. After the thick, steamy atmosphere of the club it was good to breathe open air. He could smell the Sumida, but the effluvia of burning ash collected in the back of his throat, and he hurried up the steep flight of stairs to the front door of the private dwelling.

It opened immediately at his knock as if the woman inside had been waiting for him. She was heavyset, a plain-looking woman in her late twenties with a thick mane of black hair, frizzy as the fibers in rice paper.

The interior of the house was Western and elegant, a small oval foyer flowering open to a grand central staircase. Sparkling light from a crystal chandelier burnished the warm tones of the rooms, and a marble console held a crystal bowl of flowers he knew were cut fresh every day.

He was led down a hall tastefully paneled in cherrywood and was shown into the library. A very old and expensive Persian carpet covered the floor on which stood a velvet-covered sofa and a pair of high-backed upholstered chairs. Books on every conceivable subject lined one wall. Opposite was a glass cabinet displaying a full set of samurai armor dating from the seventeenth century that surely belonged in a museum. Next to it was a burlwood French secretary at which sat a woman who turned and rose as he was ushered into the room.

This was her sanctuary, and Chosa was at all times respectful of it. The woman, who must have been in her seventies, looked perhaps two decades younger than that. She had the kind of patrician face that spoke of pure samurai blood. Her skin was the color and smoothness of porcelain, but in her fiery black eyes was contained an entire world of emotion and intellect. This was no woman to trifle with, Chosa knew. She was the sister of Mikio Okami, and that alone placed her on a different level, but the force of her personality almost made her family connection irrelevant. Chosa, who had learned from his steel-willed mother to respect the quiet strength of a female, would not make the fatal mistake of thinking this woman to be an inferior being.

“Good evening, Kisoko-san,” Chosa said deferentially. “I hope I haven’t disturbed you at this late hour.”

Kisoko regarded him levelly. “Time is irrelevant to me,” she replied in her well-modulated voice. “As is sleep.” It was an exceptional voice, one that could be used as a weapon as well as a promise. In other words, this was a woman well used to the company of men. “Would you care for a brandy?”

“A brandy would be perfect.”

Kisoko poured from a cut-crystal decanter. She wore a magnificent kimono of brocaded silk, black on indigo, in a water pattern. As tradition warranted, an underkimono of soft black silk peeked out at cuff and collar, but her hair and makeup were strictly Western and as voguish as any model’s.

She handed Chosa his drink and sat in her gilt Louis XV desk chair. Chosa went over to admire the suit of samurai armor.

“Magnificent,” he said. “I’m envious of you.”

“Oh, that isn’t mine. It belongs to my son, Ken. He’s fascinated by the weapons of Japan’s past.” Her eyes swept past Chosa to the armor. “His sense of honor is, how shall I put it, preternaturally heightened.” She gave a little laugh. “Perhaps he wishes he were back in the seventeenth century. At least then everything had its place. I sometimes suspect he’s completely baffled by the complexities and subtleties of the modern world.”

It was a brave thing to say of a child who was permanently crippled. Or perhaps, like all mothers of impaired children, she could not see her son’s disabilities for what they were. Even the most rational of people, Chosa knew, could be blinded by their love and desperate hope for their offspring.

She smiled benevolently. “But I must apologize. You did not come here to listen to me talk of my son.”

Chosa turned and took some brandy on his tongue. He had never developed a taste for the liquor, but he could appreciate its medicinal properties. It was often this way with the many things required of him during his days and nights of business.

“I’d like to speak to you of Colonel Linnear and your brother.”

Kisoko turned her head as will a bird at the sound of a potential threat. “Go on.”

“I do not wish to offend you.”

“Chosa-san, we go back a long way. I dandled you on my knee, took you for walks in Ueno Park, freed your kite from the branches of a cherry tree.”

“I remember, yes. It was a tiger.”

Kisoko nodded. “A very fierce creature, who nevertheless needed all your love to survive.”

“My brother tried to steal him and I beat him badly.”

“He went to hospital, I recall. A fractured collarbone.”

“To this day that side of his shoulder is lower than the other. But when he came home, he never tried to steal anything of mine again.”