The Nicholas Linnear Novels (180 page)

But she was already bent over, weeping into her hands. And when at last he heard her voice, it caused a shiver to run down his spine.

“Cook,” she whispered, “I pray to God that you never will.”

Tanzan Nangi lived in an uncommonly spacious wooden house that dated back to the turn of the century. It had been built for the most famous Kabuki actor of his time, and only because the actor’s son had fallen into disrepute had it come into Nangi’s hands.

The impressive, wide-eaved structure sat amidst an extravagant garden of ornamental cherry, dwarf maple, and cryptomeria trees. Flat stones, some great, some small, were set into the earth between fern, sheared azalea, and purple gem rhododendron, creating a serene environment. Inside, the main passageways between rooms were glassed in so that one could feel, even in the most inclement weather, in the midst of the garden.

Nangi sat alone, staring through the glass at a gibbous moon that plunged in and out of indigo clouds.

The house was silent all around him; it smelled of cedar and lemon oil. Nangi, sipping green tea that he had brewed himself, was sunk deep in thought. He was rerunning his extremely disturbing conversation with Justine Linnear. He had to admit that he was grateful to her. In brashly coming to see him, she had forced him to face what he was coming to conclude was a baffling and thoroughly terrifying situation.

If Nicholas was, indeed,
Shiro Ninja,
it meant that he was under attack. By whom, and for what reason? Nangi had told Justine that even a Black Ninja
sensei
lacked the ability to create
Shiro Ninja
in an adept such as Nicholas. Now Nangi shuddered at the thought of what concentrated evil might be out there in the night, crouching, readying itself for the kill. If, as he was beginning to suspect, that kind of elemental power were arrayed against them, then only Nicholas could save them. Yet according to Justine, Nicholas was without his powers.

Instinct told Nangi to retreat. A general who finds himself facing an army of superior strength retires from the field of battle because the safety of his forces is paramount. He must either retreat or discover another, unconventional path to victory because a frontal assault will clearly end in disaster.

Nangi heard a small sound behind him, but he did not turn around. The faint scent of night-blooming jasmine infused the room, and he filled another celadon cup with tea.

With a rustle of silk, Umi crossed the tatami mats. Now, without a sound, she knelt beside him, accepting the offering of the green tea. Nangi was aware of her huge dark eyes watching him even as she sipped.

Umi said, “It was cold in bed without you beside me. I dreamt that the house was inhabited by a storm, and I opened my eyes to find that I was alone.”

In the almost-dark, Nangi smiled. He was used to the poetic way in which Umi spoke. She was a dancer, and whichever medium she chose to express herself was bound to be rife with layers of meaning.

“I had not meant to wake you,” he said. He understood by her use of the word “storm” that she had felt the agitation of his spirit.

She put her hand on him. Umi, whose name meant the sea, thus calmed him, bringing him back to that low place inhabited by water, where one can think, one can gain power in the shadows and the silence.

Nangi said, “Music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all, but you are the music while the music lasts.”

Umi, very close to him, said, “When I was fifteen you gave me a book by T. S. Eliot. I had never before encountered a Western mind that intrigued me or was filled with such light. I remember that quote from the book you gave me.”

That was typical of Umi. She learned everything; she forgot nothing. Though she was only twenty-four, she was far wiser than women three times her age. She was a student who, without being aware of it, had become a master. That was also typical of Umi. She was egoless, could therefore absorb philosophy on the deepest level, incorporating it into her spirit, widening the breadth of her power: the width of a circle. Umi was a
sensei
of myth, the mystical and the Tao. The life-force of the universe was in her heart.

Umi took his hands in her own, placing them palms down. Nangi felt the warmth seeping out of her like the crack of light from a window in a solitary house encountered by a winter wayfarer when night comes down.

She was so beautiful—not only her face, but her body as well, slender, graceful, sinuous and strong like a young tree that had survived winds, rain, and snow.

“There is darkness here,” Umi said, “beyond the night.” Gripping each of his fingers in turn, she said, “Emptiness and chaos. The stability of the world is threatened. The Spider Woman calls, and the axis wobbles. Ice comes.”

Nangi knew that she was speaking of part of the Amerindian Hopi myth of creation—the death of the Second World, before the creation of this one, doomed to an eternal ice age by the Spider Woman, who sings the Song of Creation, because of the unremitting evil of its inhabitants.

If the Spider Woman called, it was because of the existence of inordinate evil. This was what Umi meant. Nangi’s skin began to crawl. It was true, then, an enemy of extraordinary malevolence had targeted Nicholas. Fear burst full-blown like a bomb blast upon his consciousness. He wanted to pray to God, but he could not. He was cut off by his own sins, incapable of finding exculpation. He realized, with a start, that he had been rendered as powerless as Nicholas. The loss of his faith was a devastating blow that he had pushed into the background because of the current crisis. But now he realized that it was part of the crisis.

Dear God, he thought, we are lost.

And as if hearing his silent voice, Umi said, “Though the Way is known, the many sin, living as though they had a different wisdom of their own.”

The Way meaning the Tao. Hearing echoes of Heraclitus in Umi’s words calmed Nangi, reminding him that the knowledge of the ancients was available to him. Thinking of Heraclitus, he thought, too, of Sun Tzu,
The Art of War,
Yagyu Munenori, the synthesis of the sword and the mind,
ichiri,
the One Principle, the mind-set one must use when one cannot retreat in the face of an attack; the synthesis of the universe: the Tao.

In this manner he conquered the chaos in his mind that the fear had engendered, brought himself back into focus. It was not only
Shiro Ninja
with which he had to contend, Nangi thought. His entire business partnership with Nicholas was threatened by Kusunda Ikusa and Nami. Now he wondered whether the two attacks were separate and distinct or whether they were a clever, concerted assault from two different directions.

Paranoia or truth? Nangi, spangled in silver moonlight, sitting close to the sea, knew that he would have to find out.

The next day Nicholas went to see his surgeon. He took the train southeast into Tokyo, because he did not trust himself to drive, and he certainly did not want Justine to drive him, although part of him, perhaps, longed for just that.

He had spoken briefly to Nangi, explaining that he had made an appointment with the surgeon for later that morning and, depending on how he felt afterward, he would either come into the office or not. Nangi’s extreme solicitousness had set Nicholas’s teeth on edge, another bad sign of his deteriorating emotional state.

The early morning mist rolled in heavy, oily undulations, inundating the green mountainsides. The landscape was, otherwise, a blur, the result of the train’s speed and Nicholas’s fatigue.

The gentle vibrations lulled him, the far-off train whistle a melancholy reminder of his youth in a Japan struggling to overcome its shame at having lost the war and in being remade in the image of the United States.

The soft song of the rails reminded him of the lullabies his mother used to sing him when she took him on trips by rail to visit his aunt Itami. Cheong considered Itami her sister, even though Itami was, in fact, the sister of Cheong’s first husband, a Japanese officer killed in Singapore during the war. That was how Cheong and Colonel Denis Linnear had met: during the war in Singapore. The Colonel had saved Cheong’s life, and had fallen in love with her.

A time of danger, long ago and far away. But Nicholas held that spoken-of time close to him, as if it were a magical talisman with which he could ward off the despair rising inside him.

But it was no use. His anger and his anxiety overflowed the inadequate vessel into which he placed it. He had misjudged its size as well as its strength. He wanted to be calm for this interview, to use patience, his mother’s gift to him, in order to learn what he could about his loss of memory. He did not want to jump to conclusions, but sitting in the chill air-conditioned train, shivering with the onset of anger adrenaline, he was afraid that he already had.

Tokyo was silver and gray. Fog enshrouded the vast neon corporate logos and advertisements in Shinjuku until their man-made reds, greens, and blues were the color of ash. The sky-rises seemed cut off at the knees, as stubby and discolored as an old man’s decaying teeth.

Dr. Hanami’s office was on the twentieth floor of an enormous sky-rise complex complete with Plexiglas walkways and indoor gardens. Opposite his brushed bronze door, in fact, three black and white rocks rose from the sea of a small pebble garden.

Nicholas waited thirty minutes in a room lacquered a glossy gray. He sat upon a gray tweed couch at right angles to six matching gray tweed chairs and across from the receptionist’s gray metal desk. On the walls were two contemporary lithographs clumsily playing upon the delicacy of traditional
ukiyo-e
woodblock prints, combining them with images of the West: the Statue of Liberty, the front end of a vintage Corvette, a hamburger dripping ketchup. Nicholas hated them.

He got up, strode nervously to the window. Shards of the city could be seen through vertical gray metal blinds. He could not see the streets. The fog had left a film on the glass, which turned a lurid rainbow hue in the dull, shadowless light. He stared out across the plunging vertical canyon between the buildings. The fluorescent lights in the windows of a nearby sky-rise burned through the haze with the lambent glow of an acetylene torch.

Nicholas heard the receptionist call his name.

Dr. Hanami was a small, dapper man in his early fifties. He sported an immaculately groomed mustache, and his iron-gray hair was shiny with cream. He wore a white medical smock, open over a gray pinstripe suit. His office was thick with cigarette smoke.

He took a last drag, stubbed out his busily burning butt in an overflowing ashtray, and waved Nicholas to a seat. He was punctilious about conforming to Nicholas’s wish that he not smoke in Nicholas’s presence, but he seemed unaware that they often spoke through a noxious pall. After his visits to Dr. Hanami, Nicholas invariably threw his clothes in the hamper as soon as he got home.

“So,” Dr. Hanami said, “how’s it going?” He said this in English. Dr. Hanami, who most often lunched on Bigu Makus from the local McDonald’s, fancied himself a student of Americanisms.

Nicholas, slumped in a chrome and gray rubber chair, stared at him.

Dr. Hanami played with his pewter lighter, turning it around and around between forefinger and thumb. “I notice,” he said, “that this isn’t one of your regular visits.” He opened Nicholas’s chart, scanned the pages. “Everything looks just great here. The X rays, the lab tests. Couldn’t be better.” He looked up. “Is there a problem?”

“Yes,” Nicholas said, resisting the urge to leap out of his seat. “You could say that.”

“Um. And what form, may I ask, is this problem taking?” Around and around went the lighter, its dark pewter face catching the light of the overheads.

Nicholas, unable to bear sitting for a moment longer, sprang up. With a great clatter that startled Dr. Hanami, Nicholas pulled aside the metal blinds, pressed his face against the window glass. It was still as foul as a petrochemical furnace out there; he could not get the burned smell out of his nostrils.

“Tell me, Doctor,” Nicholas said without turning around, “have you ever been to Nara Prefecture?”

After a moment’s silence Dr. Hanami said, “Yes. Four years ago, I took my wife for a week’s vacation to a spa in Nara. Hot mineral baths.”

“Then you know how beautiful it is there.”

“Yes, indeed. I often find myself thinking that we ought to go back. But, of course, there’s never any time.”

Nicholas turned around; there was no point staring into that soup any longer, prolonging the agony. “Doctor, have you ever wondered what life would be like if you suddenly could no longer perform an operation?”

Dr. Hanami looked puzzled. “Well, naturally, when I retire, I’ll have to give this up—”

“No,” Nicholas said, his impatience betraying him, “I mean now. At once. One moment to the next.” He snapped his fingers. “Bang!”

“I can’t say that I—”

“Well, the beauty of Nara, Doctor, where I studied martial arts for so long, is what I cannot live without. Not the beauty you and your wife see when you go to take your waters. Not that that beauty is inconsiderable. No, I’m talking about the beauty I’ve learned to see through
Getsumei no michi.
Do you know it? The Moonlit Path.”

Dr. Hanami nodded. “I’ve heard of it, of course. But I didn’t know…” Something either in Nicholas’s face or his bearing caused the surgeon to pause. “You’re very different today,” he said. “What has happened?”

Nicholas, feeling the pounding of his heart, sat back down facing Dr. Hanami, but this time he was perched on the edge of the seat, leaning forward so that his head and upper torso crossed the intervening space between them. He was aware that his body was very tense. He rubbed his palms together, appalled that they were sweating.

“You asked what the problem is, and I’ll tell you,” he said into Dr. Hanami’s face, the emotion bubbling up now, so that he knew he could no longer control it. He pointed to the side of his head, still healing from the operation. “I can’t fucking remember any of my martial arts training. It’s gone, vanished, just as if it had never been there. I was up all night thinking about how this…impossibility could have happened. And again and again I came back to the same answer, Doctor. The only answer that makes sense.” He was up on his feet now, his corded arms gripping the edge of Dr. Hanami’s desk. “You and your trusty little scalpel did it to me. You took too big a slice out of me, or maybe you nicked some adjacent tissue, I don’t know which. But what I
do
know is that my memory is gone, and you’re to blame.”