The Kaisho (9 page)

“Mr. Minton,” he said now, wrapping a smile around his lips, “won’t you sit down. What can I do for you?”

Minton, who had brought with him his own gust of ill-scented air, settled himself in a leather-and-chromium chair on the other side of Gaunt’s old, scarred mahogany desk.

“Quite a crowd you’ve collected downstairs,” Minton said with the brittle tone of a scolding mother.

“These things have a way of blowing over,” Gaunt countered. “By tomorrow afternoon the war in Yugoslavia will be back on the front page.”

“Perhaps not this time.” As Minton spoke, he fondled his Phi Beta Kappa in that conspicuous way certain men will a magnificent woman whose services they have bought for the evening. “These are hard times in America and the populace is aroused.” His lenses flashed with light as he turned his head slightly. By the practiced way he did it, Gaunt could tell he was well schooled in the tactics of intimidation. “I believe that we are seeing a locomotive of incalculable energy stoking up steam.” Fondle, fondle, Phi Beta Kappa. Gaunt was willing to bet this bastard knew he had never even finished college. “When it gets under way, Mr. Gaunt, I pity the person—or company—that stands astride its tracks.”

Gaunt cleared his throat but said nothing. He felt a bit like Marie Antoinette. It was always like this, he thought, when you waited for the guillotine to fall.

“We on Capitol Hill have taken the pulse of the growing unrest in America, and we’re determined to respond with alacrity and force to what the people want.”

“What
you
want, more like it,” Gaunt said under his breath.

“What?” Minton leaned forward, suddenly alert as a terrier scenting its prey. “What did you say?”

“I merely cleared my throat.”

A certain rigidity had come into Minton’s spine. “What the people of the United States want is for Japan Inc. to get out of their face. And that, Mr. Gaunt, is precisely what the Congress of the United States proposes to give them.”

He slapped a folded sheet of paper onto the desk. “I am a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney General’s office on assignment to the Senate. I am here to inform you that you, Harley Gaunt, as managing director of Tomkin-Sato Industries, and one Nicholas Linnear, chairman and chief operating officer of Tomkin-Sato Industries, are hereby subpoenaed by the Senate of the United States of America. I am also to inform you that you are the subject of an investigation of the Senate Strategic Economic Oversight Committee, by order of Sen. Rance Bane. You are hereby ordered to appear before the Committee one week from this Thursday promptly at ten o’clock in the morning.”

Sen. Rance Bane, Gaunt repeated to himself. Somehow, after that name had been uttered he had ceased to listen to the remainder of Minton’s governmentese spiel.

Bane was a Democrat from Texas who had his sights trained firmly on the White House, where it seemed—whether Democrat or Republican sat in the hot seat—the mountain of debt incurred for decades wasn’t getting any smaller.

Rance Bane was an opportunist. He had come out of the heartland of America’s Southwest, from a state perhaps battered by economic woes, but still fabled as the birthplace of America’s movers and shakers, from cowboys to Texas Rangers to gung ho senators. Which was surely what Rance Bane was: the president’s fiercest foe, purporting to be the staunchest ally of America and Americans, “first, foremost, and only,” as he would say. But in the end Bane was a telegenic good old boy who understood modern-day power politics, and who knew how to best utilize its acolytes: advertising and the media. His state, among others in the South and the rust belt, had become staunchly protectionist. Losing jobs to the Japanese was no fun, and Bane, ever the canny psychologist, had picked up on this economic fear and had fanned it into a bonfire of paranoia. The most alarming thing was he wasn’t alone.

Bane’s uncommon brain trust drew from such divergent American loci as Hollywood, Detroit, and New York. Not surprisingly, the men Bane chose to present him to the public all melded into a synergistic whole. Gaunt was certain this was because they had one thing in common: they lived and died in the marketplace. They knew how to sell, whether it be on the silver screen, on the roads of America, or on Wall Street and Madison Avenue.

And sell him they did. Until he became what he was today: politics’ great, shining hope for resurgence after years of declining interest and then outright animosity on the part of the American populace.

Flash of a magnetic face seen almost daily on TV and in the papers: curling reddish hair, wide forehead, quick eyes, ready smile, hearty handshake. A rawboned, rangy man not unlike a youngish LBJ but without the blubbery lips. A man associated not only with oil but with cattle as well, the farmers and oilmen combined into a formidable special-interest base that drew not only from a traditional Democratic sector but poached on Republican territory as well.

And a new brand of McCarthyism—this time safeguarding the country against the infiltration of the Japanese—was raising its head, this time in the guise of liberalism and a return to good old-fashioned American values.

“What the hell is the Strategic Economic Oversight Committee, anyway?” Gaunt asked, although he suspected he already knew.

“The Committee is the brainchild of Senator Bane,” Minton said, toady like. His blatantly righteous admiration for Bane was nauseating. “It has been convened to review all companies whose business with the Japanese consists of more than fifty percent of their gross annual earnings, or who have entered into partnerships of any kind with Japanese-owned corporations.”

“Why?” It was perhaps an unnecessary question, except that Gaunt wanted this paranoia spelled out for him from beginning to end.

“Certain information has come into Senator Bane’s possession that some of these transactions may involve transgressions of national security.”

“National security?” Gaunt almost laughed in Minton’s face. “You’ve got to be kidding.” But he could see by the attorney’s expression that neither he nor his newly anointed champion, Rance Bane, were kidding. “What information?”

“At this time I’m not at liberty to say.” Minton rose abruptly, as if he were concerned that a prolonged stay here would expose him to some form of insidious contamination.

“You have been served, Mr. Gaunt.” Minton continued to fondle his Phi Beta Kappa, flaunt and taunt to the end. “The Committee expects to see you at the appointed time.”

“What about Nicholas Linnear? He’s currently out of the country.”

“A formal request for his appearance has been duly filed with your Tokyo office.” Minton showed the yellowed teeth of a hound. “We got you; we’ll get him.”

With a curt nod, Edward Minton was gone, taking with him the faintly rank smell, an unappetizing confluence of Egg McMuffins and week-old socks, but leaving behind a residue like rime: the ramifications of inexorable power.

Wallowing in the wake of this rather godlike visitation, Gaunt had not the slightest interest in laughing in anyone’s face. Rather, he was experiencing the queasy sensation of being caught in the jaws of a gargantuan machine that had no other interest than to chew him up and spit him out. Or an even worse nightmare, engulfing and devouring him, so that months from now he might become the first of the American
disappeared,
a direct translation from Argentine Spanish, a New World fascist fad, spreading like an unwitting virus northward along the continental drift.

Seiko met Nicholas at Narita. He saw her walking serenely through the chattering throngs that filled the airport terminal. She smiled, bowing as she came up. She handed him a slim briefcase. He had been standing at the Air France first-class check-in desk, and he moved them away from the line.

“I brought some documents for you to look at on the flight over,” she said. “Included in there is a coded fax from Vincent Tinh.”

Saigon again, Nicholas thought. Tinh, Sato’s director in Vietnam, had big plans for the company there, but he sometimes had a tendency to get ahead of himself and the physical resources allotted him. It was he who had been urging Nicholas to allocate more capital to their start-up operations there. “Thank you, Seiko-san.”

She recognized the sorrow in his eyes, but true to her nature she made no overt comment on it. Instead, she said, “Did you remember your passport?”

“Hai.”
Yes.

“There is some time before your flight.”

Nicholas knew a cue when he heard one. “Why don’t we go into that shop and have some tea.”

Seiko nodded her head, and they made their way across the crowded concourse, to stand at a curving counter while green tea was served them in paper cups.

The smell of fish was very strong, and looking down into his tea, Nicholas was reminded of Justine’s disgust for the national drink, which, she said, tasted of fish.

“This trip,” Seiko began in a halting fashion, “it is very important to you.”

“Yes.”

“To honor your father in such a fashion is very… Japanese.”

“Thank you.” Usually serene even in a crisis, Seiko seemed filled with a curious energy. “Seiko-san, what is it?”

“I had—” She paused to lick her lips. “I had a premonition. It was—do you remember I knew everything about Vincent Tinh? That was partly a premonition, as well. We met him and he was everything I told you he’d be—and more, given the cost figures beginning to come out of Saigon.”

Her small hand clasped the paper cup so tightly, the green tea slopped over the side. “I was right then and I—this trip will be very dangerous. I beg you to be careful.” She was speaking very quickly now, the words tumbling one over the other as if she knew she must spill out her secret knowledge before she had a chance to bite it back. “I may never see you again. I have this feeling that even if I do, everything will be changed. I will not be the same and certainly you will be different—so different that no one will recognize you.”

Despite his Western impulse to laugh at her melodramatic words, Nicholas felt an unpleasant chill race down his spine as he recalled his own sense of foreboding earlier when the call summoning him to Mikio Okami’s side had come in.

“Even if what you say is true, I must go. There is an old debt which my father incurred that I must pay.”

Seiko took a quick gulp of her tea, almost choked on it.

Nicholas placed his hand on the center of her back, massaging the spasmed muscles as she coughed. She turned to stare at him, her face reddened not only by the paroxysm but by something else.

It was not proper for him to be touching her in public, even in such an innocent manner. “Pardon me,” he said as he hastily took his hand away.

Her head swung back to her contemplation of her tea. Nicholas became aware of the intense anxiety radiating from her.

“Seiko-san, what is it?”

Her hands were clasped tightly together on the countertop, as if she were terrified she could no longer keep them under control. “I am an evil, selfish woman.”

“Seiko-san—”

“Let me finish. Please.” She took a breath. “Ever since Nangi-san assigned me to work for you I have known that I have a—special feeling toward you.”

Nicholas’s mind was now caught in a minefield that was part electrifying present, part recent past in which he heard over and over again Justine’s accusations.

She looked at him, finally, with a directness he could not dismiss. “I fell in love with you against my will. I knew you were married; knew that I could never have you. But none of that mattered. In affairs of the heart, I am afraid logic and common sense have no place.”

There was a silence between them. Now that the appalling truth was out, Seiko slumped over as if exhausted. “I never would have told you—never, never, never. But then this premonition—if it was true that I would never see you again, I knew I could not keep this secret inside me. I am not strong enough, you see.” She bit her lip. “I apologize, though any apology I make is inadequate. I am weak and self-indulgent. My love should have remained my own private anguish.” She put her head down. “You see how kindness is repaid. But I am helpless. I love you, Nicholas.”

Nothing she had said before could have prepared him for the effect of her use of his first name. He felt as if he had abruptly walked off solid land into a patch of quicksand from which he could not recover.

My God, he thought, Justine must have known—must have seen this awful secret in Seiko’s face. No wonder she had confronted him. Part of him wanted to rush home to Justine’s arms, to tell her that he loved her, that he would never leave her again. But here he sat rooted to the spot, in a neon-lit tea shop in a crowded concourse of Narita airport with a beautiful young woman who said she loved him. And for the first time, he acknowledged what he had unconsciously known from the moment he heard Mikio Okami’s name invoked: that he was on a collision course with a future from which he would not emerge unscathed.

You will be different
—
so different that no one will recognize you,
she had told him, and he shivered now because he began to suspect the truth of those words even while he had no idea what they could mean.

“Please don’t say anything,” Seiko murmured. “It doesn’t matter if you don’t love me as I love you. What good would it do anyway? You are married and in love with your wife. I have been betrayed by my heart, and now I do not expect you to keep me on as your assistant.”

“If you suppose I’ll send you away like a disobedient child, you’re wrong.” Nicholas hardly knew how to respond to everything she said, but he did know that he did not want to lose the best assistant who had ever worked for him. “Whatever you’re feeling toward me is irrelevant. You are so quick to learn, so good at everything I’ve given you to do, that I expect you’ll outgrow your job within a year. At that point, we’ll have to talk about a promotion and a raise.” He shook his head. “Whether or not you can recognize it, Seiko, you’re on a fast track at Sato International. You’re far too valuable to me to risk losing you now. You work for me and that’s the way it’s going to be, period.”

Seiko gave a little bow. “I thank you again for your unending kindness, Linnear-san. I cannot imagine what my life would be like without you.” She glanced at her watch, slipped off her stool. “It is time for you to go through immigration control. Your plane will be boarding in five minutes.”