The Kaisho (5 page)

“The Yakuza are gangsters,” Nicholas said flatly. “Of what use would understanding them be to me?”

“I cannot answer that. No one can, save yourself.”

“What I
can’t
fathom is your connection with them. Leave them to their own dirty business.”

“That is like saying, ‘Please don’t inhale nitrogen with your oxygen.’ It’s just not possible.”

“You mean it’s not practical.”

Nangi sighed, knowing he was not going to win this argument with his friend; he never did.

“Go see your Kaisho, then,” Nicholas said, “or whoever he is.”

Nangi shook his head. “The Kaisho is purported to be the
oyabun
of all
oyabun.
The boss of all the Yakuza family bosses. But let me assure you he does not exist. It is a term some clever Yakuza concocted to keep the police in their place.”
Kaisho
meant “the mysterious commander.” “As long as there is a sense among us outsiders that there is a quasi-mythical boss of all the
oyabun,
there’s a level of the Yakuza hierarchy no one can penetrate. It aids their mystique, enhances their face whenever the cops stage a gambling-parlor raid or two for the media.” He shifted in his seat. “All of my Yakuza contacts deny any knowledge of a Kaisho.”

Their conversation eventually turned to the Hive computer, Nicholas’s pet project, which was now on hold because Hyrotech-inc., the American firm designated by the U.S. government to design the computer for all its branches, had inexplicably reneged on the deal Nicholas had negotiated to manufacture it.

“The most worrisome aspect of this is that no one at Hyrotech will return Harley Gaunt’s calls,” Nicholas said. “I’ve told him to go ahead and institute a lawsuit claiming breach of contract. In addition, I instructed him to name the U.S. government as codefendant.”

“The government?” Nangi said, concerned.

“Yes. I think they’re behind the whole thing. Stonewalling is their forte, not Hyrotech’s.”

He brought Nangi up to date on the company’s progress on the Chi Project. Nicholas had chosen the name
Chi,
which meant “wisdom.” It had been his idea to turn one entire
kobun
—division—of the company to the Chi Project. The Chi was a new kind of computer that required no software: it was literally as flexible as its user. It needed no software because it was a neural-net machine. The Chi prototype contained over a thousand minuscule “cubes”—as opposed to chips—composed of sixty-four electronic neurons whose design was based on those in the human brain. This machine operated by example. A “correct” decision as determined by its user produced one kind of current through the neural net, a “wrong” decision another kind of current. In this way the computer actually learned the functions required of it and how to best perform them without having to be configured for different software interfaces.

“Though it looks as if Ricoh will be the first to market with a neural-net computer,” Nicholas said, “I’m convinced Chi will be far more advanced and will gain us market share very quickly after its introduction.”

The early-morning meeting ended. Nangi rose, took up his walking stick, and went down the hall to his office.

Nicholas spent the next hour and forty-five minutes calling his manufacturing managers in Bangkok, Singapore, Saigon, Kuala Lumpur, Indonesia, and Guangzhou, in southeastern China. It should have taken less than half the time, but the phone systems in such places were maddeningly inefficient, and he had to accustom himself to busy signals, being cut off in midsentence, and dialing one number and reaching an altogether different one. But these calls to what had once been remote, unvisited backwashes were becoming increasingly important.

At last the arduous task of dealing with third-world telephone communication was done. He glanced at the time, then set about making a pot of green tea.

He had just taken up the whisk when his private line rang. He put the heavy iron kettle down, stared at the phone. Too early in the morning for this line to be ringing, he thought. He picked up the receiver with a distinct sense of foreboding.

“Moshi-moshi.’’

“Mr. Linnear? Nicholas Linnear?” said an unfamiliar voice in his ear.

“Who is calling?”

“I represent Mikio Okami. Does the name mean anything to you?”

Nicholas could feel his heartbeat, strong and heavy, in his throat. He fought to control his breathing. “How did you get this number?”

“Mikio Okami extends his personal greetings,” the voice said. “Okami-san takes care of everything.” There was a brief pause, during which Nicholas was certain he could hear the other person breathing softly. “Okami-san wishes to—”

Nicholas said, “Here is a phone number.” He reeled off eight digits. “Use it in ten minutes.”

He took the first sixty seconds after replacing the phone to regain complete control of his breathing. Then he did five minutes of
zazen.
But even the meditation could not stop his mind from racing backward in time.

Before Nicholas’s father had died, he told him that Mikio Okami was a friend of his—a very special friend. The Colonel had told Nicholas that he owed Okami his life, that if Okami should contact Nicholas, the situation would be such that Okami had no other recourse but to ask for Nicholas’s help.

Now, after all these years, the call had come.

Nicholas went out of his office, down the still-deserted corridor to the bank of elevators. The chairman’s elevator was waiting for him, patient as a loyal servant, but he wondered as he pressed the button for the mezzanine level where it was taking him this time.

Nicholas and Nangi had decided to buy the mezzanine space in the Shinjuku Suiryu Building late last year, after an unconscionably overpriced French restaurant went bust. Since then, they had gutted the vast three-story space, installed their own interior walls, and begun work on an opulent nightclub called Indigo.

The smells of lath and plaster, varnish, paint, and heated flex greeted Nicholas as he stepped off the elevator. The foreman recognized him at once, bowed, and handed him a hard hat, which Nicholas wordlessly put on. He went straight to a wall phone. He had only thirty seconds to wait before it rang.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Linnear.”

“Speaking.”

“Ah.” There was a great deal of emotion in that one brief exclamation. “I understand it is safe now to speak. I am gratified that we have connected so quickly.”

Nicholas was gazing into a space composed of a series of curled-edged platforms large enough to hold three or four small tables, each with a semicircular banquette, that the architect had designed to appear as if they were floating like magic carpets above a cuneiform dance floor, laser-etched to resemble a Persian rug.

“Who is this?” Nicholas asked. “You obviously know me, but—”

“I am employed by Mikio Okami. My name is therefore of no matter.” The voice waited a beat. “Do you remember your promise?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Okami-san is in need of your most immediate help.”

“I understand.”

“He requires you to go to Venice, Italy. A first-class ticket in your name is waiting for you at the Air France counter at Narita. Please be prompt and pick it up at least two hours before flight time, nine-forty
P
.
M
.”

“This
evening? I can’t just drop every—” Nicholas stopped, realizing he was speaking to dead air; the voice had already hung up.

Nicholas replaced the receiver. Plaster dust hung in the air made sharp and glittery by the many workers’ tungsten clamp-lights, which were strong enough to define every edge and sweeping curve, reveal even the most minute flaw in the skin of sand-dusted stucco being applied to the major vertical surfaces.

He thought about what little his father had told him about the mysterious Mikio Okami.
There are times, Nicholas, when one exhausts every ordinary means to accomplishing one’s goal,
Denis Linnear had told him when Nicholas was no more than thirteen.
Still, that goal
must
be achieved
—at any cost. You are young now, but believe it or not there
are
such times when the end is so vital that the means to that end must be overlooked. It may be unfortunate, but one cannot live one’s life as a saint; one must oftentimes make compromises, painful and questionable though they may be. So there are times when one is grateful one knows a man such as Mikio Okami.

Suddenly, in the wake of the call, the Colonel’s words had taken on a very sinister cast, indeed. Nicholas had surmised even then, so long ago, that Mikio Okami had to be Yakuza. In fact, given the difficult and demanding nature of his father’s work in the muddy postwar flux of Japanese political circles, it seemed natural that he would have come into contact with this potent and rather ubiquitous element of Japanese society. Nicholas remembered hearing persistent rumors of factions of Yakuza being hired by the American Occupation Hierarchy to quell certain labor strikes in 1947–48, said to be coordinated and funded by the Communists. The fierce and intimidating Yakuza were the logical foot soldiers in such an internecine war, since they were the quintessential capitalist loyalists, ready and willing to die for the freedom of their country, virulently opposed to any leftist tilt.

But if Mikio Okami had been a Yakuza
oyabun,
family boss, just after the war, and assuming—generously, Nicholas thought—that he was thirty at the time, he would be in his late seventies now—possibly over eighty. Too old to continue the never-ending orchestration required to maintain the Yakuza’s unique symbiosis with the police, government, and bureaucracies? Or old enough to be in need of reinforcements against the encroachment of the other Yakuza families on the rise in power and influence? Either way, Nicholas did not like the possibilities.

Back in his office, he hastily dictated two memos to Seiko Ito, his assistant: the first, to tell her of his trip and to confirm his reservations; the second, regarding the eight most vital matters that required follow-ups, letters, calls, faxes. He faxed Vinnie Tinh in the Saigon office that he would be postponing his planned trip for at least a week, then made a raft of calls that he had been planning to put off until after the Saigon trip.

That done, he thought about Justine. She would be livid, of course. Bad enough he had refused to take her back to the States; now he was leaving her alone in Japan. How was it, he thought, that she had come to despise this place? Was it her refusal to learn Japanese, her eternal homesickness, or just her intolerance of the Japanese themselves? Perhaps it was a combination of all three. Other than her friendship with Nangi, she had made precious few connections in Tokyo and thus found herself isolated, enisled on an Elba of her own making. Or was it of her own making? Nicholas wondered if he was being unfair to her—or whether he was simply fed up with her complaining.

Of course, there were pressures peculiar to their circumstance. Justine had been pregnant twice. The first time, she had given birth to a girl, who had quickly died. The second time, less than a year ago, she had miscarried in her sixth month. Now there seemed to be no solace for her agony.

Nicholas put his head in his hands, his mind haunted still by the face of his three-week-old daughter, her blue-white face distorted by the oxygen tent. His dreams echoed with the feeble sound of her small cries like the febrile panting of a wolf snapping at his heels.

He heard sounds from the corridors as the offices began to fill up. He had no interest in facing anyone at the moment, so he slipped out the side door to his office, took the spiral staircase down one flight to the fully equipped gymnasium. There, stripped to shorts, T-shirt, and sneakers, he spent the next three hours working first on aerobics, then abdominals, weight-circuit training, and finally, his beloved martial arts: aikido, kendo, as well as the various subdisciplines of Akshara, which were so ancient that they had no names in the Japanese language. In this manner he cleansed first his body, then his mind, and finally, his spirit of the various negative toxins that the postmodern world invariably built up.

Nicholas was long-muscled and wide-shouldered. It was obvious that he was an athlete of some kind, but it was his presence, what the Japanese called
Kara,
that made him such an extraordinarily intimidating figure. He moved from the waist down, as if his feet were a part of the floor or the earth he walked upon. Seeing him for the first time, one had the distinct feeling that he could not be moved from the spot on which he stood even with extreme measures. He had the unusually upswept eyes that were a legacy of his mother, along with the angular, rugged cheeks, nose, and chin of his father. He was handsome in a charismatic rather than a poster-boy manner, with dark, curling hair flecked here and there with silver.

He himself did not see it, but those old enough to have known Col. Denis Linnear saw the striking resemblance between father and son in the overall shape of Nicholas’s face, the line of his nose, lips, and jaw. The father, who counted among his ancestors calculating Romans and wild Celts, rather than barbarous Saxons, had had that extraordinary gift of being both warrior and statesman. It was said by those who knew them both that the son possessed the same quality.

Nicholas’s mother, Cheong, was oriental, and it was only recently that he had been able to unravel the puzzle of her origins. She had been secretly
tanjian,
like Nicholas’s Chinese grandfather, So-Peng, who had adopted her. So was Nicholas.

Trained in the arcane mysteries of Tau-tau, the
tanjian,
whose origins harked back to myth-shrouded ancient China, were ancient mage-warriors who wielded a knowledge so potent, so elemental, that most humans had been cut off from it for centuries.

The basis of Tau-tau was
kokoro,
the heart of the cosmos.
Kokoro
was the membrane of life. Just as in physics the excitation of the atom caused the most extraordinary reactions of energy—light, heat, and percussion—so, too, did the excitation of the cosmic membrane manifest its own ethereal energy.