Linnear 02 - The Miko (79 page)

“Itami-san.” His voice was a reedy whisper. “Oba.”

“Sit, please, Nicholas-san.”

He did so, not wishing to analyze what was in her eyes; what was in her mind.

After tea and rice cakes had been served, after they were alone again, she said, “It is so good that you have returned. My heart is gladdened to see you again, watashi no musuko.” My son.

Something broke within him and he bent forward until his forehead touched the glossy wood with the ache inside him. He wept, no longer able to hold all his emotions within him, his Japanese side ashamed even as he did so; but his Western side needed this release and could no longer be denied by any discipline on earth.

“Watashi no musuko.” Her voice held such tenderness that she might, indeed, have been his mother. “I knew you would come back. I prayed you would have the courage.”

“I was afraid, Oba.” His voice, too, was tear streaked. “I was afraid because of what I had done. I did not want to face all the pain I have caused you.”

“You never caused me any pain at all, Nicholas,” she said softly. “You were always more a son to me than my own blood child ever was. His was a weak spirit, and he belonged body and soul to his father. Satsugai ruled him as the sun does the earth. It was Satsugai who determined Saigo’s life path; it was his paranoia which Saigo absorbed.”

Nicholas became aware that at no time had she referred to Saigo as “my son.” That was quite odd in a mother. His head came up and then-eyes met. He found no anger there nor even any sadness. Rather there was a mix of resignation and love… love for him.

“He was totally evil,” Itami said. “I never before believed such a thing possible in a human being. Complexity, after all, vitiates extremes, or at least one believes that it should.” She shook her head. “Not in Saigo’s case. There was an uncanny purity to him that might have been admirable if it had been channeled in a proper direction.

“That it was not was a burden I was obliged to live with. 1 should be shamed to say that I wished him dead, but I am not. How could I be? Everything he came in contact with withered and died. He was a spirit-destroyer.”

“Even so,” Nicholas said. “I am not proud that I destroyed him.”

“Of course not,” she said. “You acted with honor. You are your mother’s son.”

All at once he realized that she was smiling at him. Without thought he did the same, his heart lightening just as the clouds roll back after the thunder of a storm.

For a long time they did nothing but that, basking in the presence of each other’s spirit, becoming reacquainted, finding a new, and unexpected, level to their relationship that the heavy baggage of the past had denied to them before.

“I’m glad you came when you did,” she said the next day. “We’ve had one or two earth tremors, nothing major, but uncomfortable enough.”

Nicholas recalled the first satellite readout Protorov had shown him that indicated a crescendo of earthquake activity. He said nothing about it, however.

“I did not choose the time, Oba; it was chosen for me.”

She nodded, smiling slightly. “That is why we must all learn to Cross at a Ford, eh, Nicholas?”

He was slightly surprised. “I did not know that you had read Musashi.”

“Read and studied him.” Now she was laughing outright. “There are many things you do not know about me, though surely in all the world there is no other with whom I have shared so many secrets.

“It was I who guided certain businessmen to Saigo; people whom this Raphael Tomkin had offended; people who wanted him dead.”

Nicholas turned to look at her. “I don’t understand.”

“Do you think for a minute, watashi no musuko, that I lost track of you when you left your home? My love is as long as my protection. Whose daughter had you fallen in love with? How long would it take Saigo to find out the same piece of information? How long before the diamondlike precision of merging the two assignmentsone professional, the other personalwould dawn on him? Surely it would appeal to his delicate sense of logic; he could not resist it.”

Nicholas’ mind was reeling. “You… It was you who sent him after me?” He put his hand to his head; he could scarcely believe

what he was hearing.

“My dear,” she said softly, “he was like a cape buffalo or one of our giant wild boars who had been wounded. He was dangerous, and becoming more so each day that dawned. I could not in good conscience allow that to continue.”

She stopped them in their walk and for the first time touched him, a light but definite gesture, fullas was the case with all Japanese gestures no matter how smallof exquisite meaning.

“Did you think I would send him to harm you? I sent him to his death. Perhaps I murdered him, if one chooses to look at it in a certain light.”

“But other people died in the process, Oba. You must have thought of that.”

She said nothing, moving across the grass dappled in the shadow of a sculpted arbor of boxwood trees. “What would you have me say, watashi no musuko? Life is imperfect because we are humans and not gods. Gods by their very definition do not live but rather exist.”

They paused and she put her hand against the gnarled back of a tree trunk. “1 am sorry for death… any death. But often some good tissue must be excised in order to destroy a malignancy.

“It is not fair and it is certainly not to my liking. But it is a time that we must learn to Cross at a Ford. It is not what we choose but rather, as you have said, it chooses us.”

That was not precisely what he had said, but he suspected Itami knew that. What she had said was far more apt, in any case. He knew that what had happened between Saigo and himself was really not either of their doing. Rather it had been determined a generation before by the abiding enmity between their fathers. Filial piety bound them, causing them to end what had been begun so long ago.

He could not help but think of those who had perished because of an honor, a code that was not theirs: Eileen Okura, Terry Tanaka, Doc Deerforth, how many cops and others whose names he did not know? and, yes, even Lew Croaker. Nicholas understood the wisdom of his aunt’s words, even agreed with them. Yet something inside him recoiled, calling out as if from a distance, It’s too much; even the expunging of one life is too great a price to pay for the extirpation ofgiri.

After a time, Itami said, “I have been truthful with you, Nicholas. Now you must return the kindness. Tell me why you have come here. It was not just to see me again after all this time.”

“Part of it was that, yes.” But she was right again. All the way on the trip south his mind had been rolling the question around. As he had done so it began to increase in size until even in sleep he could not be rid of it.

Akiko.

She was not Yukio, yet she had Yukio’s face. Why? Surely she could not have been bom with features so precisely akin to his lost love’s. Nature simply did not repeat its handiwork in such a manner save perhaps between twins.

And if, as he believed now, her face was manmade, then he was led like a dog on a leash back to the one person who could wish him destroyed; one person who could conceive of such emotional torture.

Itami had been quite correct: he was totally evil. Saigo. So he had instinctively come here, to his cousin’s house, in search of answers to the unanswerable.

“But there is another reason, Oba; a more urgent one. I recently came across a woman with Yukio’s face. She wasn’t Yukio and she was. Her name is Akiko.”

Itami turned away, her face to the dying sun. “I knew a woman with such a name, once,” she said. “I loved her once; she revered me once. As was proper between mother and daughter-in-law.”

Nicholas felt his heart constrict. What Itami was suggesting felt monstrous to him, unclean if not unholy. “She was married to Saigo?” he managed to get out.

Itami nodded.

“Was she a student?”

Itami knew very well what kind of student he meant. To them there was only one kind. “Yes.” Her voice was a whisper. “They met in Kumamoto. She was there for two years, studying before she left.”

“Where did she go?”

“I do not want to talk of it.”

“Itami-san”

“It is a shameful thing.” Her voice was cold; old and sad for the first time. “Do not make me utter it.”

He moved around in front of her. “I must know. I must! She is your son’s”

“Do not call him that!”’

“She is Saigo’s last weapon against me, can’t you see that? If you do not help me, I am afraid she may succeed where he did not.”

Her eyes were clear. “Is this truly so?”

He nodded. “Hai, Oba.”

“In the alps somewhere to the north lives a sensei. His name is Kyoki.”

“That is no name,” Nicholas said, stunned. “That is a state of being: madness.”

“Nevertheless, that is where Akiko went; that is where she learned to mask her wa; where she learned jaho.”

Itami made a face and turned away. “There, I’ve said it all now, though it makes me ill.”

He waited a long time before he spoke again. There were many reasons for this. He wanted, first of all, to allow her to recover her composure. Too, he wanted to drink in this most serene surrounding that gentled his spirit like a mother’s caress. Lastly, he did not want this time between them to end.

But at last he was moved to speech. “I must go, Haha.”

“Yes.”

“Will you kiss me good-bye as my father taught Cheong to do?”

Itami turned. Her eyes were brimming and so huge they seemed to encompass the world. Gently her hands held him and, lifting herself lightly on tiptoe, she pressed her lips to his cheek just as she had done it thousands of times before.

“Happy birthday, Haha,” he whispered.

“Live long, Nicholas,” Itami breathed. But she was already alone in the bower, the birds trilling sweetly overhead with the first onrush of twilight.

To Justine, Tokyo was as bewildering as New York City would be to a teenager from Nebraska. It was not what she had expected it to be nor what she had wanted it to be.

It throbbed all around her like a neon hive, its atmosphere as chokingly heavy as that of a coal mine. She entered into it with increasing trepidation and by the time she had been conveyed to the portals of the Okura was prepared to turn right around and go home. The only thing that prevented her was Nicholas or, more accurately, the thought of him.

Craig Allonge was staying at the Okura. She knew him slightly and in desperation she scribbled a note for him and asked the concierge to see that he got it the moment he returned to the hotel.

Then she went up to her room and collapsed on the bed. Her skin felt as if it had been coated with oil and her hair was greasy from the long flight. Groaning, she got up and drew a bath, using water as hot as she could tolerate. She felt she would need that to peel all the layers of grime off her.

She had soaped up and was soaking, her knotted muscles slowly unwinding, when the phone rang. There was an extension within reach and she used it. It was Allonge. He had been set up with a temporary office at Sato Petrochemicals and had returned to the hotel to change for lunch. He was a shirtsleeves man and no one had told him how formal the Japanese could be.

When Justine asked about Nicholas, Allonge did not know what to tell her. He heard the agitation in her voice and did not want to alarm her unduly by telling her he had no idea where his boss might be. Instead he said he would find out and would call her right back. He disconnected and called Sato’s office. No, there was no word as yet from Mr. Linnear. Did Allonge-san wish to speak with Nangi-san?

Tanzan Nangi’s return from Hong Kong was news to Allonge and he said, “Yes, put me through, please.” When the connection was made he told Nangi about Justine.

“Bring her back with you,” Nangi said. “I’ll talk to the young lady.”

Nangi put down the receiver and swung away from his desk. Having just an hour ago deplaned at Narita, his thoughts were still partially back in Hong Kong. He thought of Fortuitous Chiu and his Dragon father. But even more his thoughts were concentrated on the Green Pang Triad. Sometime within the month they would raid the Sun Wa Trading Company on Tai Ping Shan Street. There would be violence, people killed. One of those people would be Mr. Liu; perhaps another would be a young woman by the name of Succulent Pien.

Whatever the outcome, it would have nothing to do with Nangi; it was, rather, Triad warfare; a territorial dispute. Or at least that would be how all the newspapers would write it up; how the populace would see it. That was the accepted way of life in the Crown Colony. Lo Whan would have to accept it as well. Karma. Perhaps he should have consulted afeng shui man before entering into the agreement with Nangi.

In fact, the raid had been agreed upon by Nangi and Fortuitous Chiu before the meeting with Lo Whan at Ocean Park took place. That had been the reason for all the h’eung yau spread around, the partriotic angle that Nangi had asked Fortuitous Chiu to bring up to Third Cousin Tok. Nangi had not abrogated his agreement with Lo Whan; and the disinformation connection with Redman would cease to exist within three weeks time.

But his satisfaction was to be shortlived because in a moment a discreet knock was heard at his door and Nangi swiveled around. He saw Kei Hagura, one of Seiichi’s senior vice presidents.

“Enter, Hagura-san.” The man looked decidedly unwell, Nangi thought. Perhaps he needs some time off with his wife and children. There is nothing like being with one’s family to restore the spirit.

“Pardon me for intruding, Nangi-san.” Hagura was bowing profusely. His face was white and pinched and over his shoulder Nangi became aware of a stir within the hive of offices on the fifty-second floor.

“Come, come, Hagura-san.” Nangi’s voice was slightly irritated. “What can I do for you?”

Hagura’s head was down; his eyes would not meet Nangi’s own. “A report has just come over the wire from our Hokkaido office. There has been some kind of… well… an accident, perhaps. No one is quite certain as yet.”

Nangi sat forward, his pulse accelerated.

“What sort of accident, Hagura-san? How bad was it? Who was involved?”

“I am afraid that it concerns Sato-san.” Hagura’s voice was faltering just as if he had contracted laryngitis. “There has been some form of automotive accident.”