The Nicholas Linnear Novels (220 page)

It had already gone too far. She, too, close to
kokoro,
felt the reverberations as its energy was excited, bouncing off the membrane at the heart of things, creating the presence in the room that was power, that was much more than power, that made them what they were, more than the others all around them.

Gasping, Shisei slipped her bounds and, as if in a fever, extending across the bloody bed, her muscles flexed in spasm, reached out for Senjin.

They had crossed the boundary that separated those who were aware of
kokoro
and those who used it. Yet this was not Kshira; nor was it Tau-tau. It was something else, something new, something of their own creation.

On that day in 1980 a severe earthquake hit Japan. Tokyo was its epicenter. The violent paroxysm of the earth took seismologists completely by surprise.

Across the ocean in China the tanjian elders, locked away in their sanctum in Zhuji, felt the convulsion at
kokoro
and looked wordlessly at one another.

One, Mubao, especially was filled with dread. He was remembering the casting of the runes and what the fire-induced cracks on the etched tortoiseshell foretold:
A flood, a torrent, a rage of thunder, a detonation of energy. And after the deluge, death. Its tone permeates the silent echoes we hear and which guide us. Death and more death.

AKEGATA

The man who fears nothing

is as powerful as he who

is feared by everyone.

—Friedrich Von Schiller

W
HEN NICHOLAS RETURNED HOME
he found that it had been turned into a battlefield. The house and grounds were surrounded by concentric circles of officers from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Force. They did not recognize him, and so detained him at the outermost ring until someone in a position of authority could be contacted to tell them what to do.

His first thought was for Justine, and his heart froze in his chest. “Can anyone tell me what’s going on?” he asked, but they couldn’t, or wouldn’t. They just stared at him with stony, colorless eyes.

The longer they held him here at the perimeter, away from his house, away from knowing what had happened there, whether Justine was safe or…the more agitated he became.

Then he saw Tomi emerging out of the throng of police officers, and he called out to her. She was heading his way, saw him and hurried up.

“Linnear-san?”

“
Hai.
You look surprised to see me, Detective.”

“Not surprised; curious. You look different.”

He rubbed the back of his hand over his furry cheek. “It’s the beard or the windburn.”

“And something besides,” Tomi said, peering into his eyes. “This is a happy moment. Your coming now must surely be a sign from heaven. Your expertise is sorely needed.” She nodded to the men barring Nicholas’s way, and they stepped dutifully aside.

“What’s going on here?”

“I will take you to Nangi-san,” Tomi said. “He’s inside the house.”

“My wife,” Nicholas said breathlessly. “Is she all right? What’s happened?”

Tomi glanced at him. “Every bad thing. But do not fear, your wife is unharmed.”

“Then she’s inside with Nangi-san?”

But Tomi was busy threading their way through the phalanxes of policemen. They went up the steps of the
engawa,
through the door guarded by two officers wearing riot helmets and bulletproof vests and holding machine pistols.

“What is this?” Nicholas asked, indicating the guards.

“It’s war, Linnear-san,” Tomi said, taking off her shoes. “All-out war.”

Nicholas threw aside his muddy, scored mountain boots, shrugged out of his backpack, threw aside his parka, which he had taken off as soon as he had come down from the high altitudes.

“Justine?”

A rice-paper door slid aside and Nangi stepped through.

“Nicholas! Thank God! My prayers have been answered!”

“Nangi-san.” Nicholas bowed. The two men embraced one another with their eyes. Tomi had never seen Nangi’s face take on such a glow. Watching this extraordinary meeting, she began to understand the singular link between these two men: the closeness between a father and a son. “Where is Justine? Where is my wife?”

“Gone,” Nangi said. “She left eight hours ago for America.”

Nicholas, aware of the stricken look on his friend’s face, said with a sinking heart, “Why did she leave now? What’s happened here? Tomi said we’re in an all-out war.”

“And so we are,” Nangi said. He was leaning heavily on his dragon-headed cane, and Nicholas saw how lined and tired his face looked. Nangi gestured. “But come inside, Nicholas. Umi is here. There is tea and cakes. There is food. Come reclaim your house. We will eat, and I will tell you everything that's happened—at least, so far as I know, which, I readily admit, is not nearly far enough.”

Shisei had had only one friend in her life. Kiku was indeed as fragile as the cherry blossom for which she was named—or so it at first seemed to Shisei. Kiku was studying to be a geisha. Shisei had met her in dance class. This had been during the years that Senjin was away in Zhuji. Since dance was one of the fundamental
gei,
or arts, from which the term geisha derived its name, it was not surprising that Shisei should come across geisha students in class.

Kiku had about her a stillness—a sense of a flower preparing to open its petals to the sun, or a bird waiting to spread its wings into the wind—that Shisei admired. Kiku was the best student in dance class. This was, Shisei deduced, because dance was about stillness as much as it was about movement. Like the play of shadows ornamenting an otherwise austere room, stillness augmented the dance steps, set them off, showed them at their most electrifying.

Kiku was able to sit in the proper geisha position—legs folded directly beneath the hips—for many hours with only the slightest, barely discernible movements of her feet (a subtle shifting of her weight) to ease the awful tension that stillness built in muscles, tendons, and joints.

To the extent that Shisei became an acceptable dancer, it was due not to her dance instructor, but to Kiku. In revealing to Shisei the secret of stillness, Kiku taught her a valuable lesson that was to prove useful her entire life. To know when not to move was just as important as to know when to move. Later this ability impressed Shisei’s talento managers and, ultimately, her sponsors, the chairmen of Japan’s top business conglomerates.

Shisei was thinking of Kiku and stillness when Douglas Howe burst through her door, rupturing the aura of silence and contemplation she had carefully constructed around herself following the phone call from her twin brother, Senjin.

Their abbreviated conversation, like blood poured into shark-infested waters, had disturbed dangerous but up until now controlled elements in her life. The waters, which had been calm, therefore predictable, had abruptly become roiled, menacing, unsure.

Into this potentially treacherous emotional sea walked Douglas Howe. His face was suffused with triumph, his eyes so filled with his delicious victory that he failed to see the tears glistening in the corners of Shisei’s eyes.

“I came as soon as I heard! I couldn’t believe it!” He was shouting, and his face was florid with his excitement. “This is too good! Too perfect!” He swept her up in his arms, hugging her to him in a grip strong enough to be painful. “Involved in a murder! Oh, Shisei, it’s too good, better than I could have imagined! It more than makes up for the goddamned wild-goose chase I’ve been on tonight.” He swung her around and around. “This is what you had planned all the time, isn’t it? Jesus God, I swear my luckiest day was the one when you walked into my office!”

Shisei had always known Howe was a pig, but as with all negative facts presented to her, she had filed it away as something she could eventually use for her own purposes. It never occurred to her that Howe’s cruelty would affect her personally.

Here was Douglas Howe, gloating and grinning like a monkey over a tree full of bananas. It disgusted her even as it shamed her. There was nothing surprising in his reaction, yet it strengthened Shisei’s resolve to tread the treacherous path she had carved out for herself. And she used her anger as a shield against the abrupt turn her life had taken with just one phone call. Senjin was coming; he needed her. What did it mean? Did it put Shisei’s own plan into jeopardy? Better not to think along those lines, she knew, or her reserve of courage would dissipate like smoke in summer…

Summer. Shisei was once again swimming in the past, in her summer with Kiku, who had dedicated herself to making her life into a work of art. But it was not merely this that attracted her to Shisei. In so early expressing her desire to become a geisha, Kiku was not only embracing a kind of discipline and fealty to duty with which Shisei could identify, she was also exhibiting her own iron will in defying her parents and the collective dictates of a society that decreed that at
tekirei,
the appropriate age, females should find a suitable man to marry. The strength of this defiance was enormously charismatic to Shisei, who in all respects felt herself to be an outsider in a society with a decidedly inward bias.

That Kiku should choose the far more difficult path of dedicating herself to art, so that each movement, mode of dress, gesture, and syllable of speech was painstakingly polished like a facet of a stunning and perfect jewel, meant as much to Shisei as that she was choosing independence over submission. It was further proof to her of the validity of
seishinshugi,
the triumph of the will over the physical, a philosophy she had embraced since her frightening encounters with Haha-san’s emotional violence…

“I merely did what you hired me to do,” Shisei said with becoming modesty. “What you yourself would have done had you been in the position to do it.”

“But you did it so cleverly!” Howe exulted.

“I took my cues from you,” Shisei said truthfully. “You gave me everything I needed to do the job well.”

…The two youths, Shisei and Kiku, regularly spoke for hours of many deeply felt matters. For Shisei these talks, inasmuch as they were able, took the place of her mergings with Senjin.

Nothing lasts in this sad world,
Kiku once told Shisei.
The world of flowers and willows that I have chosen is built of illusion, so it makes sense that what matters most to me are taste and style.
So she taught Shisei to revere
iki,
that wholly Japanese form of chic best exemplified by the finest geisha, artful and understated. Again, the stillness amid the movement, the silence amid the noise, the shadow amid the light: all transmogrified their opposites, not only setting them off, but creating something more, a greater whole, an art form that might take a lifetime to achieve.

On the other hand, Kiku, disciplined as she was, was always lonely. She craved a man’s company the way most people needed food in order to live. It was Shisei, with her gift, who exposed to her friend the astonishing array of subterfuges young men would use in order to worm their way between a young girl’s thighs. Kiku could not, of course, sleep around; even though she was merely a geisha trainee, she was obliged to keep her reputation spotless.

At some point it became clear to both girls that love—the romantic love about which stories were written, songs composed, dramas created—could play no part in their lives if they were to adhere to
seishinshugi
and art, the principles that fired them. Not, they realized one breathless summer afternoon, that these two principles were so fundamentally different…

“I’m glad you’re so pleased,” Shisei said to Howe.

“Pleased?” Howe shouted. “My God, woman, I’m delighted, ecstatic! You’ve solved all my problems at once! Brisling was expendable. He was never content with what I gave him, he always wanted more. I was setting him up as a buffer. I didn’t want to be traced to the investigation I had ordered into Branding’s Hive advanced-computer research people at the Johnson Institute.”

“Why the investigations?” Shisei asked. Stillness at
kokoro,
the heart of her. A sheet of iron forming, bitter, reflective, the gleaming carapace of a wholly alien creature. The world—her world—turning on the axis of this moment.

“Isn’t it clear to you yet?” Howe replied. “I’ll do whatever I have to in order to destroy him utterly. This isn’t a game I’m playing with Branding. I think you understand.

“I’ve distanced myself from the operation. It’s strictly Brisling’s baby. I’ve got plausible deniability. But that didn’t work out. You were right about that, I never should have tried it. Branding got wind of it. This is better—much better! Branding
and
Brisling dealt with in one preemptive strike!

“Forget the environmentalists you work for, Shisei. That mind of yours is wasted there. When the vote for the ASCRA bill is over—and I know it’s as dead as Branding’s political career—I want you to sign on with me.” How easy it was when it suited him to elevate her above the status of slave, Shisei thought. “I could use your talent on a permanent basis. You’ll insulate me from any danger; you’ll guard my domain like a well-trained mastiff. You’ll scare the shit out of anyone who tries to cross me.”

And Shisei thought, How dangerous it is to make assumptions. Perhaps I am lucky to have already learned that lesson…

There was something else about Kiku that drew Shisei like a magnet. She was aware of it even before the night of the moon-viewing festival when she came upon a delicate-boned young Samurai warrior kneeling on the tatami of the living room of Kiku’s house. Her heart seemed to cease to beat, to turn to liquid, to be drained entirely out of her body by the aching beauty of that warrior. That warrior who was Kiku.

Kiku smiled deeply when she saw the look on her friend’s face.
This also is a
gei,
an art of the geisha,
she told Shisei. She turned her head this way and that so that the light played across her heavily made-up features.
Do you like it? They say that only women can successfully portray men on the stage because only women have the purity and the perfection required of a hero. Have I done well?