Floating City (49 page)

The office was filled with pipe smoke and agitation. Okami had felt it the moment he had entered. The Colonel, who had been pacing the floor like a caged tiger, had whirled as the door opened and he saw Okami.

“Well,” he said in the kind of strangled voice he used when he was busy stepping on his rage. Okami was not looking forward to the interview.

“Sit down, Okami-san.”

The Colonel spent some time knocking the dottle from his pipe, reaming it out, and repacking it with tobacco. During this time he did not glance in Okami’s direction. When he had it going, he took several deep breaths.

“This is the way it is,” he began. “In three days’ time Donnough was to deliver to MacArthur a packet of information that would incriminate Major General Willoughby, the führer of the Gang of Fifteen, so completely that MacArthur would have had no recourse but to move against Willoughby, and he would do it willingly. He was beginning to see the mistake in hanging on to the Gang. Donnough and I were going to give him the ammunition to make Willoughby the scapegoat. Mac would have been out of it altogether, utterly blameless.”

“Can’t you still go through with your plan?” In retrospect, the question was so thoughtless it was the second most serious mistake Okami made with the Colonel.

“You idiot!” Colonel Linnear thundered. “This bombing has made Willoughby into something of a hero.” He towered over Okami like a god over a mortal. “Of course Mac is relieved the potential public-relations nightmare the Gang represented is a dead issue, but there’s the American servicemen to think of. Not to mention the fact that the Communists were so afraid of the Gang they decided to dispose of them. Don’t you see, the Gang’s violent death gives credence to Willoughby’s raging paranoia about the Communist threat in Japan. His conservative position with Mac is stronger than ever. The movement to rearm Japan has got a shot in the arm, and you can be sure it will make our work that much more difficult.”

“But surely MacArthur hasn’t bought into—”

“The fact is nobody knows how Mac feels about rearming Japan,” the Colonel said flatly. “Especially now.”

Okami’s heart was in his throat. Stupid, he thought. It had been just plain stupid to deal with the Communists himself. No. His stupidity was in losing faith with the Colonel. He vowed he would never do that again.

When he judged the dust had had time to settle, he said, “The Americans have arrested a Japanese national for the murders.”

The Colonel’s eyes blazed. “So?”

“He didn’t do it.”

“You mean he’s innocent?”

How did this man know the right questions to ask every time? Okami wondered in awe. “He’s a socialist. He works for the Communists, but believe me when I tell you he had nothing to do with the bombing.”

“Do you have proof I can bring to the provost marshal?”

“No, but...” Okami put his head down. “I have nothing.”

The row houses were dark in the moonless night. It looked like death here, where nothing grew and even the trains did not stop. A mangy dog ran at Okami’s heels as he stood, staring at the darkened windows of Iwanushi’s house. It was a new feeling for him to be so helpless. He listened to his heartbeat, the dog sniffing at his cuffs.

He crossed the street, knocked on the door, and a light came on almost immediately. He could imagine her, a tiny figure sitting in the dark, listening to the soft breathing of her children, wondering where her husband was.

The door was pulled open and she looked up at him with eyes wide with anxiety and terror. “You! Have you news of my husband? Is he unhurt?”

“I have no news of Iwanushi-san.”

“Oh.” Her face collapsed.

“I’ve come to help.” He took a step toward her. “I can—”

“Stay away! I want no part of you!” She spat at his feet. “You are like an evil
kami.
You are a criminal, poison. You come into my husband’s life and now the Americans have taken him. I warned him. I told him you would destroy us, but he said, ‘You are a woman, you know nothing of what I must do.’” She glared at Okami like a demon out of a No play. Then her voice cracked and tears rolled down her cheeks. “I know what I know. I will never see him again.” She slammed the door in Okami’s face.

He stood in the darkness. The one light went out, a train rocketed by, shaking the walls of the row houses. He knocked on the door, but no one answered. In the ensuing silence he was sure he heard Iwanushi’s wife sobbing. He looked around. Even the dog was gone.

After a very long time he turned and walked away.

Dreams and beasts are two
keys by which we find out
the keys to our own nature.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Morning mist clung to London’s curbsides like the fingers of a mendicant. Croaker was at the 315 rendezvous site early. Holland Park stood at the western end of the city, not far from the larger Kensington Gardens. It was a relatively small park, but a beautifully planted space for all that.

Croaker had taken the tube to the Holland Park station and, crossing Holland Park Avenue just west of Notting Hill Gate, had walked two short blocks, entering the park via the Rose Walk.

He spent some time in the Japanese garden, feeling nostalgic and wondering when he and Nicholas would meet up again. Four days until the ides; four days until Torch would be detonated. Not much time left. Nicholas had told him that he had corroboration that Torch was being manufactured in Floating City, that its target appeared to be Okami, and that he had been told by the dying Niigata that once it was in the target area, it would be impossible to trace. If Nicholas could not penetrate Floating City in time to prevent the delivery, a major disaster was imminent. It was imperative that they find out where Okami was and try to protect him; his enemies knew his approximate location, but Nicholas and Croaker did not.

From his present location Croaker could keep an eye on Bird Lawn where the rendezvous was to take place. It was now three minutes to noon.

Who had contacted Vesper?
He’s going to want the update on Sermon, and I’m not going to be able to give it to him,
she had told Celeste. It must be someone very high up in the Nishiki network, perhaps even someone who had direct access to Okami. Also, Vesper had not been expecting it, so it was likely an emergency procedure. Crises always brought the big guns out of the woodwork.
Perhaps,
Croaker thought,
luck is with me today. I’m close to the heart of Nishiki, I can sense it.

Nicholas was not the only person the Japanese garden reminded him of. He could not get Margarite out of his mind. Was everything he had believed about her false? He had known the dangers of falling for a woman who was, to all intents and purposes, on the other side of the law. But who could control love? Ever since he had followed her to Washington, Margarite had been set on a course for which he had been totally unprepared. How many lives did she lead? She was mother and wife in her family role with Tony D. and Francine; hidden within Tony D.’s shadow she was manipulating the reins of her late brother’s underworld empire; she was Croaker’s lover; and now she was involved with the Nishiki network, which had been compromised to its core by Vesper.

His mind filled with Margarite and Bad Clams’s threat against her life, he saw Vesper striding toward Bird Lawn from the direction of the orangery. She was cloaked in a long, swingy coat rimmed in fur with a huge stand-up collar. She had on her head a fashionable take on the old Russian hat, which was also fur-trimmed. She walked with purpose and grace, her posture as erect as that of any graduate of a top finishing school. In her gait it was clear she held both power and femininity in the palm of her hand.

Her piercing cornflower blue eyes quartered the area surrounding Bird Lawn with the precision of the seasoned professional, and this simple demonstration of tradecraft exposed a heretofore carefully hidden part of her: she was no amateur, no dilettante squandering her enormous intellect in playing vicious games to, say, subvert the traditional male-oriented playing field. She was deadly serious at everything to which she turned her hand, and he knew he must give careful consideration to her motives before he could devise a way of neutralizing her.

Then she turned her back to him, and he moved toward her, out of the Japanese garden, heading for Bird Lawn. Someone else was coming toward her, emerging from the direction of Holland House, just southeast of them.

Wrapped in a thick winter mackinaw, carrying an open umbrella, the figure was impossible to identify at this distance. He could see it was small—another woman, he surmised, until it came close enough for Vesper to break into a run, holding out her arms. She embraced the figure, wrapping her arms around it. The umbrella fell to the pavement, and Croaker, already very near Bird Lawn, could see the face.

He stood stock-still, but a shot of adrenaline provided a massive jolt to his system. His mind was buzzing with the kind of terrifying electricity one experiences in the instant before elation or utter tragedy because the person who had sent the unsigned message to Vesper, who was indeed high up in the Nishiki network, who was here now as undeniably alive as Croaker and Vesper, was the Kaisho, Mikio Okami.

“It’s something of a miracle,” Dr. Benwa said. “Your cancer is in remission.”

Ushiba sat on the examining table, staring at the gaunt man with a white face and waxy skin in a green physician’s smock. Dr. Benwa represented something of a miracle himself. His withered right arm hung lifeless at his side. Benwa and his parents had been outside Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped. They had died and Benwa had been treated for radiation burns. The prognosis had been negative, but against all odds he had survived. It was as if his right arm had sacrificed itself so that the rest of the organism could live. Somehow, even as the radiation sickness had taken the flesh off his arm, he had walled it off from the rest of him. No doctor had an adequate theory as to how Benwa had survived, but here he was practicing oncological medicine.

“While this is undoubtedly good news, I don’t want to give you false hope,” Dr. Benwa said gravely. “The human body is the world’s greatest miracle. It is capable of surprising feats of heroism. But the fact is your condition could resume at any, time. As I have told you, there has already been a great deal of organ damage that cannot be repaired. The malignant cells are still there, they haven’t disappeared; right now, for reasons we can’t begin to understand, they’re sleeping.”

As he dressed, Ushiba wondered whether the remission could in some way be related to his confession to Tanaka Gin. Had his vomiting up the litany of Akira Chosa’s connections with Yoshinori provided a kind of catharsis that had flowed from his mind into his body? Ushiba was not a religious man, but he knew this was certainly possible. He had experienced the intimate mind-body alliance time and again through tai chi and meditation.

He went back in to see Dr. Benwa before he left the doctor’s office. Benwa put aside a file in which he had been writing when Ushiba came in. He gestured.

“Sit down, Daijin.” He sat back, contemplating a spot on the wall over Ushiba’s left shoulder. “Tell me, how is it with you?”

Ushiba said nothing, waiting for the doctor to get to the point.

“As you know, we are doing everything medically possible.” He shrugged. “But often that is not enough.” His eyes swung to Ushiba’s face. “Are you still alone, Ushiba-san? I am concerned, you see. There have been innumerable studies that prove that in serious illness as in old age, loneliness can accelerate a terminal decline.”

“But I am in remission.”

“Yes. I am only offering you everything I can. I am incapable of doing less.”

“I can give no criticism of the care I have been receiving.”

Dr. Benwa nodded his head. “You are a great asset to this country, Daijin. Your death will make it the poorer. I have no wish—”

“Doctor...”

“Yes, yes, I know. I go beyond normal propriety.” He held up his withered arm. “This, you see, has given me certain privilege. You cannot take offense; it would shame you.” He looked down at his cluttered desktop for a moment. “Daijin, you are being treated by the most modern methods available. Forgive me, but what you need most now is love.”

“Well, Doctor, since we are being brutally frank with one another, I will confess that I am not sure that I would recognize it even if it was proposed.” Ushiba stood up. “But to set your mind at ease I can report that I have been offered kindness. Much to my surprise I have accepted it.” He smiled thinly. “Perhaps my disease is not such a terrible thing after all.”

It was twilight by the time he emerged from Dr. Benwa’s cavelike offices. The city rolled on around him, oblivious to his condition. He was all too aware of his increasing sense of isolation; the indifference of the world could be terrifying if he allowed himself to dwell upon it. In this sense, he knew the wisdom of Benwa’s theory—his psychological state was important for his physical health.

Instead of climbing immediately into his car, he told his driver that he would walk for some time. He felt the need to be immersed in the river of humankind, to feel it press against his skin, to reduce the volume of empty space around him. It seemed to him as if he had been operating in a vacuum for months on end. His lofty position as chief minister of MITI was not the only factor in his daily isolation from life in the city; his position in the Godaishu removed him even further from society than did his official capacity.

This brief respite from having death’s knife at his belly was proving surprising indeed. The clarity with which he saw his present position astonished him. He found himself wondering whether he and the rest of the Godaishu had any inkling of the world they so desperately wanted to control. What would they do once they achieved their goal of controlling international economic commerce? Would they gather in more money? More influence? More power? If so, what would it get them? How much money, influence, and power was enough?