In the Age of Love and Chocolate (14 page)

The car door swung open, and a man in a dark suit leaned out. “A ride, Anya?” Yuji Ono asked. His tone was familiar, as if it had been days and not years since I had last seen him.

I hesitated. I slowly (and I hoped subtly) reached for my machete.

Yuji Ono laughed. When he spoke, his voice was scratchier than I remembered. “Do you think I have come to kill you? I have brought no weapon aside from Kazuo, who is sleeping back at the hotel and who is, in truth, a pacifist. Besides, had I wanted you dead, I would not have come to see you in person. I would have sent someone to do the job. You’d think even a nascent head of a crime family would understand how these acts are accomplished.”

“What do you want from me?”

“A conversation. I think you owe me as much. You refused me once and therefore you are still in my debt.”

Despite Yuji’s association with Sophia Bitter, at this point I had no particular reason to think he wished me dead. I had indeed declined his marriage (business?) proposal three winters ago and though I hadn’t entirely understood his conduct in the years since, I could not say for certain that he was my enemy. Besides, I was curious. “Come into my office,” I said, pointing toward the club.

He leaned farther out of the car into the light, and I noticed that dark circles masked his eyes and that he seemed slimmer than the last time I’d seen him. Was it my imagination or did he seem to be considering the four flights of stairs that led to the entrance of my club? “I would very much like to see the Dark Room, but I have been traveling,” he said after a pause. “I am tired. Might we see the club tomorrow after our conversation? Assuming you survive it, that is.” He smiled a bit wickedly at me.

The truth was, if Yuji had wanted me dead, I would have been dead long ago. Besides, I had had so much good fortune in the past two years that I had truly begun to believe I was charmed and that nothing would ever go wrong for me again.
(NB: Famous last words.)

And so I got into the car.

*   *   *

I instructed the driver to take us to my building. When we arrived, Yuji struggled to get out of the car and the walk from the street to the lobby seemed to fatigue him. Though he tried to conceal it from me, his breathing was shallow and labored.

I took a better look at him under the lights of the elevator. He was still handsome, but his body, which had always been thin, was skeletal. The skin of his face was nearly transparent, and I could make out disturbing patches of blue veins below the surface. His eyes were bright, though perhaps too bright.

The last I had heard from Yuji had been a letter that had accompanied ashes that had turned out
not to be
my brother’s. In the letter, he had mentioned that he was in poor health, but that was years ago. Still, this did not look like a healthy man to me, or merely a sick one either. I had watched my nana die, and I knew what dying looked like.

“Yuji, you’re dying,” I said tactlessly.

“I thought I was hiding it rather well,” he said with a laugh. “You’re still blunt. I’m glad of that. I had worried that now that you were grown, your rough edges would have been sanded away. But yes, it is true. The elephant in the elevator is that I am dying. As are we all, though I am sure that is a cliché.”

“How? Why?”

“Everything will be revealed. Let’s sit down first. Now that my secret is out, I don’t have to pretend that I do not fatigue easily these days, my old friend.”

I was not sure that we were friends.

I deposited him on my living room sofa, and then went to the kitchen to get him a glass of water.

“How long do you have left?”

“The doctors say a couple of months, perhaps a year. I could linger. I would rather not linger though.”

“No.” My grandmother had lingered.

“Come closer to me.”

I did. He took my hand. His fingers were long and bony and cold. He had lost a finger years ago, but he no longer bothered with the prosthetic. I was not sure why this disturbed me, but it did.

I had so many questions to ask him. Why was he dying? Why had he claimed those ashes were my brother’s? What was his relationship to Sophia Bitter? Why was he here now? But it didn’t seem like the right time. It was a great shock to see Yuji Ono in such a state of physical collapse. Once upon a time, I had thought of him as almost superhuman.

“Anya, I want to begin by telling you that I have watched your career with great interest. In opening the Dark Room and its sister locations, you have done everything I hoped you would do and more than I ever dreamed. I do not take credit for you, but I am gratified by the small ways in which I may have set you on the road to this success.”

I knew Yuji didn’t give such praise lightly. “Thank you. I have never entirely understood what happened between us. But I do know that you saved my brother’s life, possibly twice. And you saved my life once. And you sent me to the cacao farm. If I hadn’t gone there, I might never have started the business. And you were always so tough on me. You were the first person who insisted I had a responsibility to learn the business. I didn’t see it at the time, but you were a true mentor to me.

“And I have often been sorry about the way we parted in Chiapas,” I said. “You were—I believe now—trying to protect me and my siblings when you proposed marriage.”

“You get ahead in the story, Anya. It starts a long time before that.”

“Tell me, then.”

“I will. But know that I did not come here only for storytelling. My tale will end with a request. Though you did once make a promise to me, you are a free person, and it is up to you whether you will honor my request. You have paid me back with what you have accomplished. If you refuse me, you needn’t fear for your life. I will leave New York, and I can assure you that you will never see me again.”

YUJI’S STORY

Where does a story ever begin, Anya? If you are a self-centered person, I suppose it begins with your birth. If you are other-directed, maybe it begins with your first love.

I have always tried to present a strong face to you. You may not recognize the boy I am about to describe.

When I was twelve, my father sent me to an international school in Belgium.

School life was miserable for me. I was too timid and—dare I say?—too Japanese for my classmates. I didn’t understand how to respond to teasing and so I didn’t. This made the situation worse. My grasp of the language was poor, and I began to stutter out of nerves. This also made the situation worse. I was frustrated by my inability to get my classmates to like me. I had been well liked at my school in Japan. If you are a person who has always been liked, it is hard to understand why you have, without changing a thing about yourself, suddenly become unlikable. It is equally difficult to turn the tide in your favor when those around you find you to be deficient.

I ate alone in the dining hall or in the library. One day—I had been there about two months—a girl sat down across from me and started talking.

“You are not bad looking,” she said in a flat, light German accent. “You should use that. You are tall. I bet you could join a sport if you like. Join a sport and then they will leave you alone. You’ll have a team behind you.”

“G-g-go away,” I said.

She did not move. “I am only trying to help you. Your English is bad, but it won’t be so forever. You need to talk to people. You could talk to me. There are many reasons that I think we should be friends. I’m Sophia, by the way.” She looked at me. “Here is where you introduce yourself. Sophia Bitter. Yuji Ono.” She held out her large, sweaty hand. The nails were bitten down to the quick.

I looked up at her. At that age, she was a tall, gangly, hairy creature. All eyebrows, limbs, nose, pimples, and greasy hair. Her best feature was her large, brown, intelligent eyes.

“How did you lose your finger, by the way?” I wore leather gloves to cover my prosthetic and I didn’t think anyone knew. She tapped on my metal finger with her hand.

“How do you know about that?” I asked.

She raised one of her caterpillar-like eyebrows. “I read your school file.”

“That is private.”

She shrugged. Sophia cared nothing about privacy.

I told her the story. Perhaps you know it, perhaps you don’t. I had been kidnapped when I was a boy. They had sent my father my right pinkie finger as proof of life.

“The gloves are a mistake,” Sophia said. “They make you seem affected. No one would make fun of a prosthetic, trust me. These people are as phony as they come.”

“If you know so much, why don’t you have any friends?” I knew Sophia Bitter to be as much an outcast as I.

“My problem is I’m ugly,” she said. “But you can probably see that for yourself. Also, I’m rude, and smarter than everyone here. People like you if you’re smart, but not too smart. My family comes from chocolate, too. I’d guess we’ve both been sent to this school to try to throw some lacquer on the dirt.”

I had never met anyone like her. She was sarcastic and daring. She didn’t care what people thought. She could be mean, but I didn’t mind that very much at first. I had been raised around people who were polite even as they stabbed you in the back. She became my closest and indeed my only friend. There was nothing in my life that I did not wish to discuss with her.

I took her advice in most areas, and my school life did improve. I took up football, made other friends, stopped wearing the gloves. My English improved. By the time I entered the upper school, other girls began to take notice. I was asked to a dance by a girl named Phillippa Rose. Phil was very popular, very pretty. I was excited and I said yes without talking to Sophia first.

I informed Sophia that night when we were studying. She grew very quiet. “What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Phillippa Rose is a dirty
Schlampe
.” Her words were venom.

“What does that mean?”

“It means what you think it means.”

I said meekly that Phil seemed very nice to me. “Do you have a reason for saying this about her?”

Sophia snorted as if it should be obvious. You must understand that Sophia thought everyone was against her.

“Sophia, I did not ask her. She asked me.” I looked at my hands. “Did you want me to ask you?”

“No. Why would I want that? I’m disappointed that you would choose to socialize with such a fake person. I thought you were better.” She stood up and left.

The next time I saw her, she did not mention Phil, and I thought the matter had been forgotten.

The day before the dance, Sophia was not in classes. I went to the dormitory to find her. The girl who lived across the hall from her told me she had gone to the infirmary with a case of food poisoning.

I went to the infirmary to see her, but she wasn’t there either. The poisoning was so severe she had been moved to a hospital.

As the hospital was off campus, the school would not let me visit her until the next evening. When I got there, she was hooked up to an IV. She had been vomiting the entire night. She looked very pale, very weak, but her eyes were sharp. “Sophia,” I said, “I was worried about you.”

“Good,” she said. “That was the point.”

“There is no one in the world more important to me than you, except for my family,” I said. You must remember, I was a boy far from home, and when we are far from home, friendly intimacies seem even greater.

She smirked at me. “Silly boy,” she said. “Your dance is tonight, is it not? You’re missing it.”

“I don’t care,” I said.

Her father was a lesser chocolate manufacturer in Germany—you know this, I imagine. But the way he got into the business was as a chemicals manufacturer. From the time she was a little girl, Sophia Bitter knew a lot about poison.

Yuji began to cough. His face was turning blue. “Should I call a doctor?”

He shook his head. In a minute or two, though it felt much longer, he was fine.

“What exactly is wrong with you?” I asked.

“We will come to that part of the story soon.”

“Did Sophia poison herself so you wouldn’t go to the dance with that other girl?”

“Very good, and yes.”

“Were you angry?” I asked.

“I wasn’t. I understood her. I was young, and at the time, I took it as a sign of the great love she had for me. I felt—and still feel to an extent—that that kind of loyalty should be prized.”

I cannot say that I was swept-off-my-feet in love with Sophia. Perhaps I am incapable of that kind of love. But I know that we would have done anything for each other and that she knew my secrets and fears, and I, hers. We were intimate in every way two people can be intimate.

We graduated from school. My father had died and I went to take over the Ono Sweets Company. She left to make a name for herself at the Bitter factory. The reason the Bitters had always struggled is because their chocolate tasted rotten. An education in chemicals is not necessarily the optimal background for making quality chocolate. She hatched a plan to distinguish the Bitters by making inroads into the American territory. Since the death of Leonyd Balanchine it was known that the American chocolate business was weak, and Ivan Balanchiadze, who is a loathsome man, had all but washed his hands of the American operation. Your father and my father had been friends, so Sophia asked my counsel. I suggested that she arrange a meeting with Mickey Balanchine, who had been a handful of years ahead of us at school. It seems they hit it off, and the next time she called me, she told me they were engaged.

It was, I believe, a political marriage on both sides. Your cousin probably believed he was strengthening his position in your family with a strategic alliance.

“I have a thought, Yuji,” she said to me one night when I was in Germany. “What if I create a small incident in America?”

“An incident?”

“Timed with my arrival, there could be a problem with the American Balanchine supply. I sweep in as Mickey’s fiancée and suggest replacing the Balanchine supply with Bitter chocolate.”

“What kind of problem?” I asked.

“The kind I’m good at making.”

“Innocent people could die,” I said.

“No one will die. We’ll tip everyone off before it comes to that.”