Linnear 03 - White Ninja (5 page)

Always, Mary would laugh in that way she had, defusing his righteous anger, making him laugh along with her. But, during his infrequent black moods, when he was off brooding on his own, when he had to resist following

his father's besotted fate, he longed to have that righteous anger back, and was secretly and ashamedly angry at her for having robbed him of it.

The masque at which he met Shisei - or, more precisely, when he became aware of her - was a morbid affair attended by people compelled to talk at length about their memories of Truman Capote in commemoration of his death. Listening to their anecdotes, meant to be funny but which, in fact, were merely sad, Branding felt relieved that he had never met the author.

Still, for Branding, the time had not been ill-spent. He had invited two of his best media friends: Tim Brooking, New York's best investigative reporter; and one of the on-air personalities of the TV networks' most popular investigative news show, and the three of them had talked on and off about the state of electronic journalism.

These were evil times for television news divisions, brought on by the demise of the television networks, sold to non-media conglomerates eager to increase profit margins whatever the cost. The networks had only themselves to blame, the on-air personality lamented. With cable and VCR use eroding their Nielsen numbers, they had turned more and more to independent producers to supply programmes. More and more the local stations controlled what went on the air. Quiz and infotainment shows such as Entertainment Tonight were far more lucrative than network news shows during the hour before prime time. Further, satellite feeds picked up by local news and the increasing prominence of Ted Turner's CNN all-news cable network were making the three network news shows redundant. As of now, they all knew, not one network maintained an investigative news team for its nightly broadcasts, and foreign bureaux, once the pride of American TV, were being closed as fast as was practical.

As they spoke informally, it occurred to Branding that they were looking at him in a certain way. With a start, he realized that there was about their manner to him the same deference he reserved for the President of the United States.

Branding felt wanned, honoured. He was well aware that one basis of his friendship with these men was their mutual usefulness. On the other hand, he was not so naive that he couldn't tell the difference between these serious newsmen, and the majority of their brethren, who were too lazy, bored or stupid to know what journalism was all about.

Branding's mother had once said to him: 'Choose your friends with care. These are the people who will talk about you most.' Branding had never forgotten those words.

At last, the topic reached the real reason for their meeting: the continuing 'field research' into Howe's professional conduct. Branding knew that he was on thin ice, that he was using up hard-won favours in order to keep the informal investigation going. There was, as yet, no hard evidence, and the on-air personality, the more impatient of the two, wondered aloud whether there ever would be.

Branding, who had just flown in from Washington after addressing the National Press Club, assured them that there would be. He also spoke to them about his favourite topic - the one he had spoken of in his address - the Hive Project.

At Washington's Johnson Institute, a team was putting the finishing brushstrokes on Hive, the advanced strategic computer that Branding's Ascra bill would fund over the next five years. The Hive Project was a revolutionary kind of computer that could reason, could create strategies. Branding hoped to install the Hive in every government agency: National Security Council, CIA, FBI, Pentagon, and so forth. The advantages of using such a system,

which was far beyond anything any other nation had achieved, would be immediate and staggering, not to mention the ramifications for national defence as well as for a comprehensive anti-terrorist response and controlled tactical forays into the Middle East or elsewhere if the need arose.

Now, Branding's people had given him some information. Someone had been nosing around the Johnson Institute team members, appropriating without permission computer records of their private lives - bank accounts, loans, that sort of thing. To Branding, this smacked of Douglas Howe. He told the newsmen that if he could link the unauthorized computer snooping to Howe they would have a basis to go forward. The two men concurred. Branding could see the greed filling them; they could already see the scoop playing out in their minds.

The masque wound down, and so did the men's discussion. It wasn't until much later in the evening, after the three had split up, that Branding caught sight of Shisei.

She was standing against the marble fireplace in the living room, and Branding remembered thinking how like marble her skin was. She wore a clingy, black sleeveless blouse and silk trousers of the same colour. Her startlingly narrow waist was cinched by a wide crocodile-skin belt with an enormous matt red-gold buckle sculpted into what appeared to be a free-form design. Her tiny feet were enclosed by high-heel crocodile shoes. It was not a typical East End summer outfit, and therefore Branding liked it and her. He remembered thinking: this woman's got guts. Not only for her sense of clothes style, either. She wore her glossy black hair long on top, in an ultramodern sculptured manner. A short fringe across her wide forehead was dyed a shocking blond.

When he was closer to her, he saw that she wore no jewellery - not even earrings - save for a square-cut

emerald ring on the middle finger of her right hand. Either she wore no make-up or it had been applied so skilfully that it was invisible.

For a long time, Branding studied her face. He fancied himself a student of the human condition, therefore faces were important to him. He saw in Shisei something remarkable. Though her body was that of a mature adult, her face, a perfect oval, had an odd purity, bordering on innocence. Branding was at a loss to understand why until, with an unsettling lurch, it occurred to him that she had the kind of androgynous perfection of beauty only a child could possess.

Watching her, he was reminded of a night when his mother had taken him to see Peter Pan on Broadway. How enthralled he had been with the young, dewy perfection of Mary Martin, how secretly ashamed he had been of that feeling because she had been playing the part of a male

- albeit a magical one.

Now, in this restored Revolutionary farmhouse in East Bay Bridge, he felt anew that odd, almost compulsive quickening of his blood that was so disturbing, and all the more intense for that forbidden component.

It was not merely the youth - Branding was as sexually unmoved by young girls as he was by homosexuals - but rather what that dewy freshness represented, a kind of ultimate, malleable state. Though he did not yet know it

- and perhaps never would - Shisei's face, in the flicker of a heartbeat, by turns encompassed all that the female represented to the male: slut, virgin, mother, goddess.

Who could fail to fall in love with one such as she? Certainly not Cotton Branding.

'Is it possible we haven't been introduced?' he said in his most affable tone of voice.

Shisei looked af him with the wide apart eyes of a fawn. 'Anything's possible. But you look to me like an old friend.' She told him her name.

He laughed. 'I believe I would have remembered that.'

She smiled, as if drawn in by his ironic amusement. 'Then I must be mistaken,' she said. 'Perhaps it's because I have seen you on television. I feel as if I already know you, Senator Branding.' Her voice was light, musical, and it pleased him, despite an accent so heavy that he had at first thought she had said, I feel as if I already own you.

'Call me Cook,' he said. 'All my friends do.'

She looked at him quizzically, and he laughed. 'It's a nickname,' he said. 'I grew up in a large family. We all took turns with the chores, but I was the only child who enjoyed cooking or was any good at it. I kept that chore, and got the name.'

A band was playing, out on the brick deck, amid the Tuscan terracotta pots filled with Martha Washington geraniums and globular English yews, and they went out into the star-filled darkness. The night was typically wet but, because of a breeze, not uncomfortably so.

'Do you think,' Shisei asked as they danced, 'that these are desperate times?'

The band was playing a tune Branding did not recognize, something with a sinuous beat. 'Desperate in what way?'

She smiled sweetly, showing him just a bit of her tiny white teeth. 'One need only look to the Middle East, to Nicaragua, to the Midwest here in the States where it is said another dust bowl is forming or to the oceans here and in Europe where it is no longer safe for fish to live or for humans to swim. Already I have read a dozen reports about restrictions on consumption of seafood and fish.'

'You're talking on the one hand about ideological antipathies and on the other about ecological catastrophes,' Branding said. "The only thing the two have in common is that they've been part of our world virtually since the dawn of time.'

'But that is my meaning,' she said. 'Desperation is

only dangerous when it is looked upon as commonplace.'

'I think you've got that wrong/ Branding said. 'It's evil that is most dangerous when it becomes commonplace.'

'Are we speaking practically,' Shisei asked, 'or morally?'

Her body had become entwined with his, and Branding felt her flesh through her thin clothes. He was especially aware of the muscles of her legs, and the heated juncture of her thighs as she rubbed against him like a cat.

He looked down at her, was struck again by the innocence of her face. Its sunny, careless expression belied her body's actions. It was as if he held two people in his arms, one who existed before the dawn of sexual desire, the other rapt in it.

'I suppose I was speaking theoretically,' Branding said a bit thickly. 'Real life has proved that evil is always banal.'

Shisei put her head in the hollow of his shoulder, the way a child might when she is tired or in need of affection. But she was not a child. Branding felt with a start the hardness of her breasts. The erotic charge was like an electrical current running through him, and he missed a step, almost stumbling over her tiny feet.

She looked up into his face and smiled. Could she be laughing at him?

'As a child,' she said in time to the music so that she might have been singing, 'I was taught that banality was in itself evil or - in any event - not acceptable.' A light sheen lay along the skin of her arm, like the dew on the geranium petals. It seemed to Branding to highlight the tender firmness of her flesh. "There is a Japanese word -kata. It means rules, but also the proper form to maintain. Do you understand? Banality is outside kata, not of our world.'

'Your world?'

'In Japan, Senator, training is everything. Kata is all.

Without them both, chaos would surely ensue, and man would be little better than the ape.'

Branding had heard many stories of Japanese prejudice, but had never thought much of them. Now, hearing that bias firsthand, it rankled. He was a man who disliked prejudice in any form - it was one of the reasons he disliked this crowd; why he had had so many bitter fights with his father, the blue-blood Brahmin; and why, after college, he had never returned home. It was in his nature to struggle against such ignorance.

'Surely you mean laws,' he said, attempting to understand her. 'Laws are what make mankind civilized.'

'Mankind,' she said, 'enacts laws to suit individual purpose. Kata is equal among all Japanese.'

He smiled. 'Among all Japanese, perhaps. But not among all people.' He realized too late that his tone as well as his smile was the kind he used when, years ago, his daughter said something amusing but essentially foolish.

Shisei's eyes sparked, and she broke away from.him. 'As a senator I assumed you would be sufficiently intelligent to understand.'

Branding, standing with her on the patio with couples in movement aft around them, was all too conscious of the stares they were getting. He held out his hands. 'Let's dance.'

Shisei studied him, unmoving. Then she smiled, as if having taken in his embarrassment, she had been amply repaid for his unintentioned insult. She moved smoothly, effortlessly into his arms. Again, Branding felt the heat of her body insinuate itself erotically against him.

The band had switched to the kind of smoky ballads Frank Sinatra loved to sing.

'What kind of music do you like?' Shisei asked as they slowly circled the patio.

He shrugged. 'Cole Porter, I suppose. George

Gershwin. As a kid, I used to love to hear Hoagy Carmichael play. Do you know "Sweet and Low Down"?'

'I love Bryan Ferry, David Bowie, Iggy Pop,' she said as if he had not answered her. 'Am I going too fast?'

He knew what she meant. 'I've heard of them,' he said, somewhat defensively.

'Energy,' Shisei said, 'is the kick I need with my champagne.'

He studied her face and, feeling his heart beating fast, wondered that his adrenalin had started running. It was after midnight, a time by which he would normally have said his goodnights, and been driving back to his wind-and salt-weathered house on Dune Road, bored and slightly depressed, as if contact with these people was somehow pernicious. He found much to his surprise that he had no inclination to leave.