The Nicholas Linnear Novels (154 page)

The house was built by an architect who had been elderly when Itami and her husband, Satsugai, had commissioned him. He revered the old styles of the seventeenth century, which, he had said, were still the best. Time was their proof, had been their victory.

He had designed this house after one in Kyoto called Katsura Rikyu, an imperial villa from four hundred years ago which was still the finest example of the blending of the manmade with the natural to be found in all of Japan.

“What I try to do,” the old man had said, “is to impose my spirit upon nature so that it appears to remain natural.”

That the result of his handiwork was exquisite in the Japanese sense of the word was without question. Perhaps too many of these details had been too subtle for Nicholas’ mind when he was younger for he had not loved the house as a whole but only one room: the one in which the
chano-yu
was performed.

And it was to this room that he was conducted after he had been met at the door by servants, Itami informed of his arrival, bathed, and his hurts attended to by a bent old man who spoke to himself in a constant singsong but who nevertheless knew what he was doing.

Feeling better than he had in many days, Nicholas knelt alone in the room, turned toward the garden outside. The opening was all the length of the room and perhaps six feet high. However, the top half was covered by a rice-paper latticework screen, so that only the bottom part of the garden could be viewed while being immersed in the tea ceremony. It was a peculiarly Zen concept: to have as part of your surroundings the wonders of nature, yet only so much. Beyond that invisible boundary, it was felt, one would have been overwhelmed by the bittersweet delicacy of the cherry blossoms or the flamboyant fan of autumnal foliage and thus the concentration one needed for
chano-yu
—the harmony of this place—would have been broken.

Sunlight, splintered by the trees, splattered against the lattice, turning it the color of newly churned butter, warming the room in tone and temperature. A lone bird strode through the pebbles of the garden, pecking here and there.

A breeze sprang up and rustled the tops of the cryptomeria, making soft shadows move behind the screen, on the polished wood floor. Nicholas shuddered inwardly, remembering the trembling flight on the
hito washi
, the ruffling of his tattered clothes like pinfeathers, the rush of the night against his face, the fear that the inconstant wind might die in midgust, sending him diving hard against stands of bamboo.

Exhilaration and terror mingled within him like liquor, tingling his blood.

He was exhausted again. Physically the drugs had been dissipated, eliminated from his system. Yet their accumulated effect on muscles, tissue, and brain still lingered. Exercise was the only remedy for that.

She came into his sight with a stiff rustle of silk. He rose and bowed, his heart in his throat. He was overcome by the awesome majesty of her beauty. It was not as if time had not touched her, merely that she had somehow made it her friend rather than her enemy. Time followed her about like a tamed animal, present but quite irrelevant.

“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 Saigō’s life path; it was his paranoia which Saigō absorbed.”

Nicholas became aware that at no time had she referred to Saigō as “my son.” That was quite odd in a mother. His head came up and their 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 Saigō’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. I 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 Saigō; 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 Saigō to find out the same piece of information? How long before the diamondlike precision of merging the two assignments—one professional, the other personal—would 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, full—as was the case with all Japanese gestures no matter how small—of 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. “I 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 Saigō 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 of
giri.

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 born 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. Saigō. 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 Saigō?” 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 Saigō’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 Kyōki.”

“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.