The Kaisho (12 page)

Once the hotel had been an ornate summer palazzo for the ruling doge. Its spot overlooking the Grand Canal was impeccable: on the Rio de San Maurizio, a
canale
itself, of course, but as Nicholas was to learn in Venice, only the Grand Canal bore that designation. Also, the grand structures commonly called palazzi were, in fact,
casas.
During the age of the Serene Republic only the ducal residence could technically be called a palazzo.

The hotel had its own private dock, and its green-and-gold-uniformed porters were on hand to greet him, take his bags, and lead him past the tables of the hotel’s open-air restaurant being set for dinner.

Inside, the public rooms were sumptuously decorated in the florid style of old Venice with arching, beamed ceilings, sconced walls covered with opulent moiré silks, and lush color everywhere—the wholly Venetian shades of blue, green, yellow, and burnt orange. And always rococo gilt edging on furniture, picture frames, massive clocks, Murano candelabra, and chandeliers weeping pear-shaped tears of blown glass.

Nicholas was checked in with great formality, almost as if he were an old guest returning for a special occasion. An enormous mask hung above the burnished burlwood counter. It was painted a glossy white, with a protruding nose and a wide, aggressive upper lip. Nicholas, curious, asked the concierge the nature of the mask.

“Ah,
signore,
Venice is a city of masks—or at least it once was in centuries past. The name of this hotel—Le Palazzo di Maschere Veneziana—means the Palace of the Venetian Mask. The particular doge who built this palazzo and summered here was a rather mischievous fellow, prone to donning his Bauta to go among the common folk and perpetrate—well, all manner of, er, indelicate activity.” The concierge stroked his upper lip. “In this disguise I believe the doge fathered any number of illegitimate children and consummated many a nefarious political arrangement.” He pointed upward to the oversize mask. “This is the Bauta—the mask known as the great leveler because it was used by many a powerful doge, judge, or prince to conceal his identity. As the Common Man he roamed the
calli
and
rii
of the city in perfect secrecy.”

“And no one ever knew who he really was?”

“No one,
signore,”
the concierge assured him. “Venezia keeps its secrets.”

Nicholas’s second-floor room was huge. The porter put down his bags and, crossing the Persian carpet, flung open the twelve-foot wooden shutters to let in the sounds, smells, and, most significant of all, the light from the Grand Canal.

Bathed in the aqueous illumination of this city, marooned for all time in the geographical twilight between the shore and the sea, the ornately furnished room appeared just as it might have three hundred years ago when the doges ruled and the songs of the East perfumed their
campi
and gardens with enchantment.

Left alone, Nicholas went into the marbled bathroom to shower away the dry grit of travel. He shaved before a gilt mirror, watching the subtle transformation of his face as the stubble came off, and he was reminded again of Seiko’s words,
You will be different
—so different that no one will recognize you.

He splashed cold water on his face and, with a towel in his hands, returned to the room. He stood at the open window, watching night stretch its long fingers across the Grand Canal. To his left, the Santa Maria della Salute was powder white in the tungsten lights, and below and to his right, across the water farther down, four gondolas, painted blue, green, black, and red, bobbed at a deserted embarcadero. Their high, arching prows, six-pronged to represent the city’s
sestieri,
its districts, seemed to Nicholas in that velvet light to be musical instruments that gave off melody and harmonies as beautiful as they were ancient.

Wiping his face dry, he turned away from the scene to find a large cardboard box on the king-size bed. He went to it, certain that it hadn’t been there when the porter had shown him in. He called down to the front desk, was assured that no package for him had been delivered to the hotel.

He opened the box and, peering into it, stood as still as a statue. He felt, again, the small hairs stirring at the base of his neck, and a thin line of sweat snaked its way along his spine.

Reaching into the box, he drew out the long black cloak of his vision. Beneath it was a mask, handmade of papier-mâché. Like the Bauta over the concierge’s desk downstairs, it was painted a glossy white, had a prominent nose, and even more aggressive upper lip line that defined its lower edge, so that there was something vaguely apelike about its overall appearance. It was the mask that secured the identity of the highborn.

At the bottom of the box was a sea green envelope bordered in gilt. He opened this, slid out a single sheet of stiff paper. On it was beautifully written one sentence in large, back-sloping script:

Your presence is requested, cloaked and masked, at thirty minutes past ten o’clock
P
.
M
. at Campiello di San Belisario.

Nicholas looked at his watch. It was fifteen minutes to seven, not yet time for dinner. He dropped his bizarre costume, dressed, and opened up the briefcase Seiko had handed him at the airport. He had deliberately ignored it during his flight; he had not been in any mood then to look at work.

He settled himself into an overstuffed chair and, with the hydrous light from outside mixing with the room’s lamplight, began to read the latest coded report from Vinnie Tinh. Tinh had been born and raised in Vietnam, though he had emigrated to Australia for his college and postgraduate years. He was an expert in international business law and had even spent a year in the trading pits of Wall Street, researching his thesis.

Nicholas had spent a good deal of time with Tinh both in Tokyo and Saigon and had found him to be bright and clever, two assets not often found in the same person. There was also a devious streak to him. Though Nicholas had come to understand that this somewhat dubious talent was necessary in order to be successful in Southeast Asia, he was nevertheless convinced that Tinh bore watching. In fact, this was one of his reasons for scheduling the now postponed trip to Saigon.

Nicholas skimmed over the summary of Sato International’s projected grosses and nets for the coming quarter, the rising success rate of the ongoing training program for potential employees, and the continuing problems in getting enough petroleum products at a reasonable cost. The Japanese were buying almost 90 percent of Vietnam’s crude oil, so it seemed ludicrous that it should be so difficult to obtain petroleum products within the country. He scrutinized Tinh’s assessment of the political regime and the current business climate. Most importantly, he read Tinh’s updates on his political and business contacts. Among the wealth of fascinating information, one bit of unfocused data stood out. According to Tinh, there were a spate of recent rumors—none of which he could confirm—of the establishment of a kind of shadow government, wholly independent from the Vietnamese government. What this shadow network meant or what it proposed to do, Tinh could not say, only that it was said that its power and influence was growing every day. Tinh proposed finding out more about it before any of their competition could possibly exploit it.

Nicholas made a mental note to fax Tinh not to waste his time. It was preposterous, he thought. Saigon was filled to overflowing with rumors of this sort. Anyway, who would support such a regime? How could it come into being and how could it possibly be maintained? If it was becoming more and more powerful, who was funding it?

These were questions that would have troubled Nicholas had he believed in Tinh’s smoke. If Vietnam was to abruptly destabilize again, the hundreds of millions of dollars that Sato International had invested in the country would be in dire jeopardy. In any event, it appeared as if Tinh had been out on the edge of the jungle too long and was in urgent need of direction from civilization. Making notes in the margins of the report, Nicholas resolved to get to Saigon as soon as he was able.

By the time he went down to the hotel restaurant for dinner he was hungry. He sat inside the deep blue room, staring out the window at the
vaporetti
putt-putting past, their running lights winking and darting like fantastic fireflies. Gondolas glided by, carrying Japanese and German tourists festooned with cameras and colored souvenirs from Murano.

He dined on
spaghetti con vongole,
a magnificent pasta dish with tiny, delicate clams whose briny essence exploded in his mouth like caviar, and
seppia in tecca,
squid steamed in its own ink. He let the captain suggest the wine, a Prosecca, but was loath to drink more than a glass and a half. He declined the dessert tray, settling for a double espresso, instead. By the time he signed the check it was almost ten, and remembering the address on the note, he asked the concierge for directions to his rendezvous.

He was given a small, folding map of the city on which the concierge circled with a pen the location of the hotel and traced several alternative routes to the Campiello di San Belisario.

“The best way is, of course, to walk,” the concierge said in the best Venetian tradition. “It is not the quickest way but certainly the most beautiful. Have you the time for a twenty-minute stroll?”

Nicholas said he thought he did, an answer that pleased the concierge.
“Bene.
Each hour of the day or night brings its own particular eminence to La Serenissima,
signore,”
he said with a wide smile.

Upstairs in his room, Nicholas tried calling Justine again, but there was no answer. Where could she be? It was two in the morning in Tokyo. He cradled the receiver, pulled on a thick sweater, then, feeling vaguely foolish, wrapped the long dark cloak across his shoulders. The mask he took up in his hands and, tucking it beneath one arm, went out the door.

The unique intonation of the city swept over him, a kind of language composed of small sounds—really a peculiar combination of noise and echoes thrown back by the narrow streets and the houses built up against the
rii.
The sounds of footsteps, for instance, took on otherworldly tones; the vigorous slap-slap of leather striking stone and paving hovered in the cool night air like ghosts.

He would pass a late-night bar and hear a quick burst of laughter, a snatch of conversation that would follow him down an alley or across one of the innumerable, tiny bridges. And always there arose like a dream the faint susurrus of the water lapping against the wooden pilings of a
traghetto,
where, invariably, a gondola was moored; or against the moss-covered stone foundations of the houses themselves.

Once, he turned a corner and came upon a
rio
filled with gondolas. An old man in a black suit, who stood at the rear of one of the fleet, had commenced a song, his pure tenor voice ringing off the stones’ facades as his gondola passed beneath the bridge where Nicholas stood, entranced.

He passed a small palazzo within which was a postage-stamp-sized
corte
where bougainvillea bloomed in long, opulent crescents and a fig tree rose, gnarled and twisted, the last of its lush foliage bronzed by the street and
rio
lights. He could see a wrought-iron bench, patinated with age, and could imagine Casanova on one knee, seducing the young woman who sat upon it, staring up at the night sky.

Nicholas, trained to
sink in,
to feel the crosscurrents of places and of people, was beginning to find his way toward the metaphysical enigma of Venice as he made his way to his rendezvous with Mikio Okami. This, then, was the secret of Venice: its unique locus in the world, situated neither on land nor on the sea, had imbued it not only with otherworldly sounds and light, but with the ability to immunize itself against the ravages of time. No cars, buses, trains or subways had insinuated themselves into this magical place. People traveled within its breast now as they had done for centuries. Buildings were restored in the traditional Venetian style using the same techniques craftsmen had employed for centuries. Nicholas walked down
calli, callesse,
over
ponti
of stone, black metal, and wood, along
fondamenti
that fronted
rii
that had remained constant for hundreds of years. If he had been alive in the 1600s, his views would have been fundamentally the same.

And as he walked, Venice took him up in its arms, enfolded him lovingly, bound him to it as it had done to so many travelers in their time. He lost himself not so much in its maze of streets,
rii,
bridges, and quays, but in its sorcerous heart, feeling time slip away like an old, withered skin, experiencing the bracing and ultimately exhilarating gift that the city brings to those willing to accept it: a renewal to the bone weary, a reaffirmation of life to the sick at heart.

And so his frustration and anxiety over his relationship with Justine dissipated; he saw his displaced anger at her for losing two of their children for what it was; he forgot about his last vertiginous encounter with Seiko. Miraculously, he even found himself calmer about his imminent meeting with Mikio Okami.

This enchanted mood stayed with him as he entered the Campiello di San Belisario. It was a small square, cobbled and clean, but with no adornments whatsoever: no trees, fountains, benches, or the like. Just, as in most Venetian
campielli,
the earth-colored buildings stood on three sides and, on the fourth, rose the imposing white facade of a church. This one, Nicholas saw as he approached it, bore the same name as that of the small square. He had never heard of Saint Belisario, but, it seemed, the Italians and especially the Venetians venerated a plethora of otherwise unknown holy men and women.

The
campiello
was deserted. He strained his ears and heard the echoes of footfalls, fading. Pigeons rattled briefly in the eaves of a building, settling themselves for the night, and far away, he heard the drone of a
motoscafo
plying the water of some unseen but not unheard
rio.
Mist crept along the cobbles, hanging at the foundations of buildings like a mendicant.