Floating City (46 page)

“So you see, Tachi had no real power base. His
oyabun
mentor was from a Yamauchi subfamily in Kumamoto, powerful there but without real consequence in Tokyo. I told you Tachi was ambitious, perhaps overly so. When an alliance with another, older
oyabun
was offered, he took it, no questions asked. He knew he might be signing away his clan’s autonomy, but with his hubris he hoped to rectify that before it got out of hand. But first he had to destroy you.”

Nicholas looked at her for a long time. She had emerged like a downy duck from an evilly spotted egg. The layers of personality were peeling off her like slices of an onion, but with every revelation there seemed more about her he did not understand. In a sense, he seemed to be looking back through time’s terrible telescope at his dead wife, Justine. They had fallen in love without ever coming to understand one another. He did not love Seiko in any traditional sense. But they had shared something so intimate and ephemeral that it eluded most lovers. He was determined not to make the same mistakes with this woman that he had made with Justine. Judging her too quickly or too narrowly was a start down a delusive and dangerous path he was not now willing to take.

“Assuming this is the truth,” he said slowly, “why are you telling me now—instead of when we first met in Saigon?”

“Because at long last self-interest has murdered morality. I told you I owed Tachi an enormous debt. He saved me from myself. I was in danger of imploding—of falling into myself, of being lost in someone else’s image of me.”

“Your father’s?”

“Or my mother’s or my boyfriends’...” Her gaze brushed his, bounced off as if burned. “But why make a litany of it? There were so many. Tachi was the last, and there was some good in him. I could... sense it. But it was so deeply buried, so twisted in the mire of self-interest, it was almost dead. I was good, then, at recognizing the almost dead.”

“So you were bound to Tachi.”

“Body and soul.” She was fighting not to cry. “But not heart. At great personal cost I kept that free.” She looked up at him. “For you.”

Her psychic aura, in the guise of heightened intuition, had made her vulnerable to suggestion and abuse. It had amplified her sense of her environment and those in it.
There was some good in him. I could sense it,
she had said of Tachi. It was what had compelled her to seek an extreme nontraditional path, what had brought her to Nicholas.

He moved toward her, wanting to take the crossbow from her. “Seiko—”

“Leave me alone!” she screamed, taking a stumbling step backward. “I know you too well. You cannot forgive me for saving you from Tachi. You think my jealousy blinded me; you think that the precious gift you two shared would have been enough to change him. You’re wrong. He was above all else a pragmatist. He was nothing without that deal. He would have found his chance and he would have murdered you.” She brandished the crossbow. “I hate you for your righteousness, for not understanding that there are so many shades of gray between black and white.”

Nicholas leapt upward, knocking the weapon aside. It flew out of her hand, striking the ground butt first, and with a thick
twang!
the bolt was loosed.

It pierced Seiko at almost point-blank range, the force of its entry lifting her off her feet, pinning her to an enormous cryptomeria. Her eyes opened wide in pain, and her hands held the end of the bolt where it protruded from her stomach.

Nicholas, gaining the high ground of the path, could see the situation at once. He could not loose the bolt without her bleeding to death within seconds.

“Seiko.”

She shook her head mutely. Tears stood out in the corners of her eyes. Her chest was heaving and her mouth was filling with blood. He could not bear to see her suffering. Grasping the haft of the bolt, he jerked it free of the tree and of her. With a gasp, she collapsed.

He held her, and she did not try to push him away. He pressed his hand over the wound, but with his
tanjian
eye he could feel the life leaving her. With her psychic sensitivity she knew it, too.

“Hold on. I’ll get you to a hospital.”

“No. Don’t lie to me. Not now. Not ever.”

“No lies.” He brushed a strand of hair from her damp cheek. Her eyes closed for a moment, and he bent down, kissed her gently on the lips. Her lids fluttered open.

She stared up at him, and at last, her eyes focused. What had she seen in that moment before she saw him?

“Nicholas,” she whispered. “Go see my father. He’ll tell you what you need to know.”

She was fighting to hold on. Her head lay on his shoulder as if they were simply lovers, sharing an intimate moment beneath the stars. Her eyes dulled over and she began to pant heavily. Her eyes closed and her lips parted.

“Remember me, that’s all I ask.”

Man must sit in chair
with mouth open for
very long time
before roast duck fly in.

—Chinese proverb

“I think I’ve found our man,” Mikio Okami said.

“Really?” Col. Denis Linnear looked up from his mass of paperwork from which, it seemed, he was as loathe to part as Okami would be from a lover’s arms. The Colonel rarely slept these days and only occasionally returned to his bed, as if home had become a vacation spot to visit now and again.

“Yes.” Okami nodded. “He’s perfect.”

“No one’s perfect. Least of all a potential murderer.”

The Colonel sat back in his chair, loaded his pipe as he watched Okami move nervously around the small, stuffy room. It was early summer, but already stiflingly hot. If this heat kept up, he shuddered to think what Tokyo would be like in August.

“Let’s take a walk,” the Colonel said, firing up his pipe.

Outside, Tokyo was a morass of destruction. Entire sections of the city would have to be rebuilt from the foundation up, and some felt the past had been incinerated along with lives and property. The economy was shaky, inflation was running rampant, and the Communists were on the rise—all destabilizing elements that made the country ripe for lawlessness.

The Colonel knew he and Okami were running out of time. Maj. Gen. Charles Willoughby and his group were busy debriefing the cream of Japan’s military generals, men whom they had saved from the war crimes tribunals in order to “train” them as American spies and to head up a new rearmed Japanese army that would become America’s watchdog against the spread of Communism in the Pacific. The Colonel was absolutely certain that this fascistic plan would bring ruin on a Japan struggling for economic survival and redefinition in the postwar world, and diplomatic and public relations nightmares to a United States already under the gun for unleashing two atomic bombs on its former enemy. A country that could hardly put rice on the table could ill afford the onerous expenditures rearmament would incur.

“All right,” he said at length, “who’s our pigeon?”

“Tokino Kaeda. He’s a key man in the Yamauchi clan, an under
oyabun
whose ruthlessness and ambition has of late made him Katsuodo Kozo’s favorite.” Okami stopped, bought a bag of sweets from a street vendor. “His ambition makes him both approachable and reliable.” Okami shrugged. “Power over honor. This, I fear, is to be the nature of the new world you have brought us.”

“Yes, the world has changed irrevocably,” the Colonel said thoughtfully. “It’s too bad your lot came down on the wrong side of the war. Who is to blame for this wreckage?” They turned a corner, went down the street toward the Sumida River. “But now is not the time for bitterness or recriminations. We must look to the future in order to make the present secure. I am convinced that the future of the world’s commerce lies here in the Pacific. Between Japan and China, we have the collective will and the sheer population to create economic miracles. We’ve made it our mission, Okami-san, to ensure that Japan, at least, gets a chance. Life from the ashes of defeat, eh?”

They reached the bank of the river, which was slung like a boa around the shoulders of an insolent woman. Tokyo was that woman, maimed, violated, and starving. But at least she was still on her feet, and recovering from the worst of her wounds.

“Katsuodo is our first obstacle.” Okami leaned against the black iron railing, staring into the brown, sluggish water. “He’s dead set against any Yakuza involvement with the Americans. It’s his belief that the Occupation command is using us as a shield to do the dirty work the American military prefers not to do themselves.”

“He’s right, in a way. But it’s myopic thinking. The Yakuza have as much to fear from Communist incursions into Japan as the Americans do. Why shouldn’t they crack a few heads in public for the Americans? They’re being paid handsomely for what they do so well anyway.”

Okami grunted. “Dismiss what Katsuodo says. He’s
oyabun
of the Yamauchi clan and he fears my power. Don’t forget that I was the one who brought him to power. Now I see what a mistake that was. He’s using this issue as a dye marker to test the waters. Which
oyabun
will side with me, which with him? This is why he’s been so intractable in his position against us. And now, to further his cause of total isolationism, he’s instigated incidents of violence between the clans. We can’t afford this kind of divisive behavior. This is just the kind of situation Japan was in at the end of the sixteenth century when Iyeyasu Tokugawa came to power as shogun. If only we had a modern-day shogun to unite all the
oyabun
and keep them under control.”

The Colonel sucked on his pipe. “An interesting idea, my friend. But, as yet, no one
oyabun
could command such allegiance.” He blew out a cloud of smoke, watched it dissipate along the riverbank. “But as for the future...” He seemed intrigued by this notion. After a time, he said, “You know, even the rumor of such a person would enhance the Yakuza status. That might be helpful to all of us.”

Once more Okami was dazzled by the Colonel’s ability to take a simple idea and spin it out to its ultimate potential. In this way, he was truly able to make wheat into gold.

The Colonel reversed his pipe, knocked the dottle out of the bowl. “Food for thought. But for now let’s return to the problem at hand.”

“Katsuodo must be dissuaded, permanently,” Okami said. “That’s where Tokino Kaeda comes in. He’s guaranteed me a foolproof method for Katsuodo’s demise. It seems the
oyabun
can’t swim. This is a closely guarded secret, but of course, as Katsuodo’s most trusted under
oyabun,
Kaeda is privy to the information. A week from now Katsuodo’s body will be found floating here in the Sumida, and we can get on with dealing with Willoughby and his cabal of war criminals.”

The Colonel nodded, reloading his pipe. Okami watched him from the corner of his eye, wondering what was flashing through that magnificent brain. He had to admit, much as he tried, he could never quite keep up with the Colonel’s mind. If he had chosen to play chess, Okami had no doubt he would have been champion grandmaster. His thoughts unspooled so many jumps ahead, they often made Okami dizzy. Okami had learned more from this one man than he had from all his teachers, tutors, and
sensei.
The Colonel had an organic grasp of life in all its infinite varieties that bordered on the simple, ultimate truths of Shinto.

The man was stark, sometimes almost dour. There were bouts of levity, to be sure, but to Okami they seemed as carefully measured as the rationed food of a prisoner. It was as if the Colonel felt the entire weight of the new world upon his shoulders, a new world, Okami knew, it was his one burning desire to create. For, above all else, Colonel Linnear was an architect of dreams. His vision of what Japan would someday become filled Okami’s mind like the patterns of a kaleidoscope, and in those shifting designs Okami could see his empire expanding outward like waves in the Pacific, farther and farther until they encompassed the entire ocean.

Okami dipped into his paper bag, shoved a handful of soybean sweets into his mouth, letting them dissolve slowly. Better the sugar hit than the overindulgence of alcohol, which, the Colonel had pointed out, was slowly killing him. “Shall I give Kaeda the word tonight?”

“Wait,” the Colonel said unexpectedly. “I want to have a word with Katsuodo Kozo first.”

“What for?”

“I want to be certain that Kozo needs us and not merely a new tailor, that termination is our only viable option.”

Okami shoved more sweets into his mouth. “Perhaps it’s just as well. Katsuodo despises all Westerners. He’ll be condemned by his own mouth.”

The Colonel presented himself at the home of Katsuodo Kozo the following afternoon. It was an impressive-looking walled compound on the outskirts of the city that sheltered four buildings, the main structure for Katsuodo and his family, the others for his bodyguards, advisers, and the families of his two sisters.

The
oyabun
kept the Colonel waiting alone and without food or drink in a stark anteroom for almost an hour, an unforgivable breach of propriety. Except that the Colonel wasn’t Japanese; as a barbarian he warranted none of the courtesies that were prerequisites for civilized men.

The Colonel did not mind; he was used to being treated this way by Japanese who did not know him or, perhaps, knew him too well. He used the time to peer out of the anteroom’s windows at the compound, taking the measure of it and, by extension, of Katsuodo and the Yamauchi clan he headed.

The Yamauchi had been a thorn in his side for some time. Like the industrial
zaibatsu
of Japan’s prewar society, the Yamauchi had been on an expansionist course for almost all their history. Their
oyabun
seemed spun from the same cloth. They were arrogant men, confident in their course, secure in their power, and greedy for more of everything. They encouraged in their clan an extreme isolation that engendered in the already disenfranchised Yakuza a feeling of seeming invulnerability. If one did not belong to society, then its laws had no dominion.