The Nicholas Linnear Novels (201 page)

And then like a thief in the night the thought came: what have we done?

She broke away from him; it was as if they had been pressed together with glue. Tomi found that she was panting as she voiced her question to herself, “What have we done, Omukae-san?”

“Perhaps,” he said, “we have saved each other.”

In the intimate space, under the intimate circumstances, it was such a shocking reply that she blurted, “What do you mean?” even though a secret part of her knew very well that he might be right.

“It is no secret that you have been unhappy, Tomi,” he said gently.

“How did you…? But I have told no one!”

He ignored her outburst. “And I…” He gave a little laugh. “Of Omukae the stone there is little known,
neh
? That is because there is precious little to tell. My life is hollow, empty, meaningless save for my work.” He reached out to touch her, an electric contact, like a quick burst of lightning. “Now I feel as if the universe has caught up with me at last. The stars shine in my corner of the world. There is a moon…even, I think, a sun.” He sighed. “Tomi…”

“I— No!” She broke away from him and, with a little cry, thrust open the door, gasping in the cool air-conditioned air of the corridor as she ran out.

In the ladies’ room she washed up, splashed cold water on her face. She did not look in the mirror, as if she suspected that she might see his face instead of her own reflected there.

She was struck dumb by the thought of being involved with a man such as Senjin Omukae. While her attraction had been kept in the realm of fantasy she could ignore the implications of someone who lived by his own rules, who lived most uncomfortably within the rigid societal restraints of Japan.

It is no secret that you have been unhappy, Tomi.
She heard again his voice echoing in the darkness, coiling around her throat like a plait of her own hair. How had he known? It
was
a secret, or so she had thought.

The reality shook her. How easily he seduced me, she thought. How well he must understand the desires of my spirit. How easily I can be led astray by him. I have sinned once, but not again. Does he understand how he has humiliated me by making me feel pleasure in such a proscribed act?

Probably not, she decided. Senjin Omukae was a loner, at his core a kind of rebel who, if brought into the full spotlight of his peers, would never be tolerated. This was why he was feared rather than admired by those in power in the Metropolitan Police Force. They chose to look the other way at Senjin the man because Senjin the homicide-division commander was so useful to them. And what if one day that changed? Tomi thought with a shudder. He would have nothing; he would be nothing.

She closed her mind to her newfound terror, rushed out of the ladies’ room as hurriedly as she had entered it.

It happened that Kusunda Ikusa worked late every Thursday night. As such, that was the one night that the Pack Rat had not kept strict watch on him—there didn’t seem to be any point to it.

Now he saw the enormity of his mistake. It was past nine o’clock and Ikusa was still in his office. Everyone else had gone home but lights were still burning in Nami’s suite.

The Pack Rat was already inside, having entered the building during the afternoon as a civilian engineer, disappearing into the upper floors without a trace.

From his vantage point he saw Killan Oroshi coming before Kusunda Ikusa did, and he began to set up his electronic “ears.” Killan, wearing a suede skirt that came barely halfway down her thighs, a cream-colored silk blouse, patent leather boots, and a floor-length python-print coat of some shiny synthetic, pushed open the door of the suite Nami used in the Nippon Keio Building two blocks off the Meiji-dori, in Nishi-Shinjuku, and went directly into Ikusa’s office.

Outside, Tokyo shimmered like a jewel suspended in amber. Dusky lights glowered in the darkness like a beast’s lambent eyes. Microscopic particles of petrochemical detritus hung in the air, outlining Shinjuku’s massive office towers with Seurat’s impressionistic brushstrokes. It was art, after a fashion, if only a postmodern one that deserved the name industrial pointillism.

Kusunda Ikusa was not working; he was waiting for Killan. He put aside papers he had not really seen for hours.

“Why do you insist on being so foolishly indiscreet?” Ikusa asked as she came through the door.

“If my father knew about us he’d have a heart attack, for sure,” Killan said. A kind of beatific smile suffused her face. “That would be nice.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Kusunda Ikusa said. “It would be nothing of the sort.”

“You don’t have to live with him,” Killan retorted. “He hates me almost as much as he hates Mother.”

“You’re very precious to him.”

Killan gave Ikusa a twisted smile that somehow made the Pack Rat’s stomach contract. “You’d like to think so because that’s why you fuck me.”

Ikusa said, “Your sense of humor sometimes fails you, Killan.”

The smile became more twisted, and now it was disturbingly knifelike. “But I wasn’t joking. Of course you knew that, Kusunda. You know everything.”

“What is it I see in you, Killan?”

The girl reached beneath his desk. “You know.” She looked like she was manipulating something. “You know.”

“Yes,” Ikusa said thickly after some time. “You are so very bad for me. How is it I know that much yet I can do nothing about it?”

“Do you really want an answer,” Killan Oroshi asked, “or is this another of your rhetorical questions?” When he made no response, she went on, “You love fucking me because you’re fucking my father at the same time. That’s it, isn’t it?” She shook her head, her expression perfectly sincere. “No, I’m wrong, or at least that’s not all of it.” Her features softened like wax, her lower lip jutted out; her tiny tongue appeared as if she were about to suck up a savory sweet. “The fact is, I’m the only one who can seduce you, Kusunda. You spend all your time lording it over others, and that’s a strain. Oh, I know it’s a strain you’d never admit to. But that’s one of the beauties of our relationship. You don’t have to admit anything to me. You don’t need a priest and I have no aspirations to play the role.”

The Pack Rat could see the fullness of knowledge throbbing behind her eyes, and he wondered whether Kusunda Ikusa yet knew what he had gotten himself into.

“You can seduce me because I allow you to.”

Killan laughed. “That’s not seduction,” she said. “You’re talking about a business deal.” She shrugged. “Forget it. I don’t care about your weaknesses, Kusunda, either real or imagined. You’re like a dream to me, or a vision I conjure up in a marijuana haze. I don’t care about you at all. I do what I do because of my father. I fuck you because it would literally kill him if he found out that I spread my legs for you. I scheme with you because the schemes appeal to my sense of disorder, because I am the outlaw my father is not and never could be. The Americans say I have balls, Kusunda. My Japanese revolutionary friends say that I have an overwhelming desire for change. What do
you
call it?”

It seemed as if Ikusa was faintly amused by Killan’s monologue. Certainly he was not bored by it, and now the Pack Rat was sure that he was underestimating her. Kusunda Ikusa’s black eyes gleamed with a kind of inner insight as she recounted the litany of her philosophy, as if her words had the power to illuminate a hidden part of himself.

Listening to Killan Oroshi, the Pack Rat was reminded of a line from the English poet, Algernon Swinburne, “Change lays her hand not upon the truth.” But he thought that these two would-be revolutionaries, oddly entwined, could hardly understand what Swinburne had in mind.

“I would call it
tatemae,”
Kusunda Ikusa said. “The facade that talentos use so artfully on television or on the stage. Ten thousand people become caught up in
tatemae
at once. We Japanese are, after all, fetishists, worshiping the facade, some symbol to which we may attach and defuse our fears, to which we may humbly dedicate our lives.”

“Like the Emperor.” Now Killan’s eyes were alight. She had a talent, the Pack Rat observed, for turning even the most clever response back upon itself so that it served her own purpose. But she also spoke as no other eighteen-year-old that the Pack Rat had known. But then, he reminded himself, she fancied herself a revolutionary, and a successful revolutionary’s sense of oration and theatrics was highly developed. “No one knows more about the Emperor than you do, Kusunda. When I am near you I feel so close to him.”

“Stop it!” Ikusa snapped. “You are making a mockery of the sacred.”

Clearly Killan had reached a nerve, and such was her personality that she pursued her advantage to the limit. “Who says that the Emperor is sacred? You? The other members of Nami?”

“The Emperor is descended from the son of heaven.”

Now that she had successfully drawn him into untenable philosophical waters, it was clear to the Pack Rat, if not to Ikusa, that Killan was determined to undermine his position. “Now who’s using
tatemae?
You are better than any talento at
tatemae.
The myth of the god-king is ancient, universally revered. It is also, as you well know, an empty talisman that you have seen fit to use to compromise the spirit of the people.”

Kusunda smiled. “Now you sound merely foolish. If this were true, what would you be doing with me?”

“You know, Kusunda. I am as apolitical as you are political. That is the only aspect of balance we have in our relationship.”

“I would have thought apolitical was the wrong term for you,” Ikusa said. “You are a nihilist. A black-draped sibyl,
afuturi-suto
.”

“Oh, if only you’d call me that while we’re fucking!” Killan said.

The Pack Rat could see that Ikusa’s tack with her expletives was to ignore them. He pulled her against him. She seemed lost against his massive bulk. The Pack Rat averted his gaze but did not stop the recorder as they made love.

“
Futurisuto
instead of angel,” Kusunda Ikusa said afterward. “I will never call you angel again.”

Killan Oroshi laughed as she dressed. “That will suit me just fine,” she said. She put on her coat. Ikusa did not move or make a sound.

When Killan left, the Pack Rat decided to follow her. She took him crosstown, into the Asakusa district. Into an anonymous postwar building made of ferroconcrete, made up of
usagigoya,
tiny rabbit-hutch apartments.

The Pack Rat watched as a thin young man with hair the color of platinum opened the door to her repeated knocking.

“Killan!” he cried, clearly delighted.

“Hello, Scoundrel,” Killan said, closing the door behind them, shutting the Pack Rat out.

When Tomi went to interview Dr. Hanami’s widow, she asked Nangi to come along, and was pleased when he accepted her invitation. Tomi found his comments and opinions insightful rather than intrusive. More and more she was coming to see that he was a natural detective: his intense curiosity combined with his sense of detail and the analytical bent of his mind. And he had become her only ally in the murder of the dancer, Mariko. He seemed as fascinated by the case as Tomi herself was. Besides all that, Tomi liked him.

Haniko Hanami was a tall, slender woman of imperious mien. She came, so she told them with no humility, from one of the oldest Samurai families in the north of Honshu. She wore a magnificent silk kimono which, by its workmanship, appeared to be at least fifty years old. A scattering of flowers crisscrossed its deep blue background. Golden threads winked and shone as she moved.

She had entered into marriage with Dr. Hanami and, according to her, had an ideal marriage until his untimely death. This was all she would say, no matter what questions Tomi tried. Clearly, she did not like anyone prying into what she considered her private life, and she resented the intrusion even from such a commonly acknowledged authority as the police. Almost everyone in Japan cooperated with the police. Why wouldn’t she?

“If you don’t mind, Mrs. Hanami,” Nangi said when the silence had taken on the aspect of a stalemate, “might I have a chair? Often my legs do not allow me to sit in the traditional fashion.”

“Of course. This way, please.” Haniko Hanami led them into a room furnished in the Western manner. She studied Tomi as Nangi sat down, careful not to cause him any embarrassment should his legs inadvertently give out.

When he was comfortably seated, she said, “Is the pain bad?”

“Bad enough, sometimes.”

She nodded, kneaded her hands. “I suffer from arthritis,” she said mournfully. “Now it is not so bad, save in the morning when I wake up. But in winter…” She clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth.

“Winter is the worst,” Nangi agreed.

Tomi watched the growing rapport between them with something akin to awe. The angry, sullen Haniko Hanami who had met them at the door had disappeared. In her place stood this suffering old woman.

“Is your pain bad now?” Mrs. Hanami inquired.

“I have perhaps overwalked today,” Nangi admitted.

“Then I have just the thing to help you.” She rushed out of the room, returning within moments with a jar, which she held out almost shyly to him. “This is what I use on my hands. It works very well. My husband made it.”

Nangi took the jar and, much to Tomi’s astonishment, rolled up his trouser legs and began to apply the ointment. “This way?” he said.

“No,” Mrs. Hanami said, “this way.” And kneeling beside him, she dipped her fingertips into the ointment, began to massage it into his calfs precisely as if she were his mother. “There,” she murmured. “There, there.”

When she was finished, Nangi thanked her, helping her to her feet. She was blushing.

“I am old and childless,” she said wistfully. “This is all I am good for now.” She brightened somewhat. “Still, it is good to be useful in any way one can,
neh
?”

“Indeed,” Nangi said. “Since my retirement some years ago, I, too, seek to be of help to others. Which is why I am here today.” He leaned on his cane. “Mrs. Hanami, it is important that we ask you some questions. Whoever killed your husband has killed before. Without doubt he will kill again. Do you see how vital it is that we find this person?”