Linnear 02 - The Miko (26 page)

He took a long swallow and, staring at nothing in the mirror behind the bar, cleared his throat. “Linnear-san, you said there were a number of abnormalities.”

“Why don’t you wait for the police?”

A Westerner would have, of course, given an answer. Sato merely stared at Nicholas. And what his eyes said was, That is why you were allowed inside Sato Petrochemicals business, because we want no police intervention.

Nicholas had asked the question because he had to be certain of these people. Why they did not relish the thought of police involvement did not concern him; why they had involved him did.

“I fear Kagami-san was not killed quickly.”

“Pardon me, but what do you mean?” Ishii asked.

“He was struck many times,” Nicholas said, “by a sharp-bladed weapon.”

“Do you know what kind?” Sato asked.

“I’m not certain,” Nicholas said. “It could be any number of shuriken.”

Sato had gone through half his long whiskey. Otherwise there was no outward sign of his agitation. “Linnear-san,” he said, “when you first mentioned this Wu-Shing, you said it was a series of punishments. May we deduce that because it uses the character Wu, there are five of them?”

Nicholas looked uncomfortable. “Yes, that’s correct. Mo is the first and therefore the least of the punishments.”

“What can be more severe than death?” Nangi said somewhat angrily.

“I was referring to Mo itself.” Nicholas looked at him. “Strictly speaking, it should only have been that: tattooing of the face.”

Nangi’s cane click-clacking across the short expanse of bare wooden floor that separated Sato’s true office space from the informal conference area where the rest of them stood or sat announced his approach. “Then this murdering of the victim as well is unusual.” He had pounced on it immediately.

“Highly unusual,” Nicholas said. He sat quite still, his hard hands clasped between his knees. He forced an absolute calm onto his face, into every aspect of his physical being. The last thing he wanted was either of them to become aware of his inner feelings. His mind was still reeling from the thought that someone from his own ryu, someone steeped in the arcane ways of aka-i-ninjutsu, could perpetrate such an act. It was quite unthinkable. And yet it had happened. He had seen the grisly evidence and he knew there could be no doubt at all. Fervently he prayed that no one would ask him the one question that might detonate the whole situation.

“There’s something I don’t understand,” Tomkin said, and Nicholas prepared himself to answer the unanswerable. “This Wo-Ching or however it’s pronounced, is Chinese you said. What’s with this cross-referencing between Japanese and Chinese? I thought the two cultures were separate and distinct. I thought only igno-ramous Westerners say they can’t tell one from the other.”

The phone rang in the ensuing silence and Ishii launched himself away from the bar to pick it up. They waited while he spoke softly into the receiver. He had left instructions that they not be disturbed.

He punched a button, hung up. “It’s a call for you, Nangi-san,” he said. What dark emotion swam within his eyes? Nicholas wondered. “Apparently it cannot wait.”

Nangi nodded. “I’ll take it in the other room.” He went back across the office, through the open passageway to the tokonoma where Nicholas had first caught sight of him.

The tension in the room was thick and now Nicholas used his training to seek a way of dissipating that high level of energy, as well as diverting interest away from areas he was still reluctant to discuss here. “Why an ancient form of Chinese punishment should be taught in an essentially Japanese discipline is simple,” he began. “It is saidand not I think without a great deal of meritthat ninjutsu had its origins on the Asian continent somewhere, more specifically in northeastern China. Certainly it had existed long before Japan became civilized.

“But then so have many of the more ancient customs and traditions in Japan.” He got up and went across the room, his movements pantherlike. He moved like some dancers Tomkin had seen, with a very low center of gravity, as if the floor itself were springy as a mat of dried grass.

Resettling himself on the sofa across from Tomkin, with Sato and Ishii on his left side, he continued. “In fact, China and Japan are more closely bound than either country likes to admit, since the enmity between them is longstanding and quite bitter.

“Nevertheless, you only have to take such a basic of life as language to see what I mean. Chinese and Japanese are virtually interchangeable.”

He paused a moment to see if the Japanese were going to protest. “Until the fifth century there was no written Japanese language at all. Rather, they relied on kataribe, people trained from birth to be professional memorizers, building up a finely detailed oral history of early Japan. But that, as we know today, is a mark of a primitive civilization. Chinese characters were introduced into Japan in the fifth century, but the practice of using kataribe was so firmly entrenched in a culture always reluctant to change that it persisted for at least another three hundred years.”

“But there are differences in the two languages,” Sato offered. He seemed grayed and defeated. Ishii appeared to be doing nothing at all but breathing.

“Oh, yes,” Nicholas said. “Of course there would have to be. Even so far in the past the Japanese were true to their own nature. Never very good at innovation, they nevertheless excel at improving on someone else’s basic design.

“The problem with Chinese is its awesome cumbersomeness. It contains many thousands of characters, and since it was used largely for the recordings at the Imperial court and official proceedings, the language was not well suited for everyday use.

“The Japanese therefore began to work on a phonetic syllabary now known as hiragana to make the Chinese kanji more adaptable as well as to express those matters uniquely Japanese for which there were no Chinese characters at all. And by the middle of the ninth century this had been done. It was, coincidentally, just about the time that the Eastern European countries were developing the Cyrillic alphabet.

“Sometime later, another new syllabary was introducedka-takanato be used for colloquialisms and foreign words being introduced into Japan as an augmentation for the forty-eight-syllable hiragana.

“But a curious holdover from Chinese custom was already in effect in Japan. No Chinese woman ever used kanji and therefore here too it was. considered, well, ungraceful for a Japanese woman to use the language. So they took to hiragana and katakana and, in the process, created the country’s first true written literature, The Pillow Book of Seishonagon and the classic Genji Monogatari, both dating from the beginning of the eleventh century.”

Just a wall away, Nangi was sitting at a desk clear of all papers and folders. The cedar gleamed, its high polish giving it an almost mirrorlike surface within which he could see part of his own face.

“Yes?” he said down the open line.

“Nangi-san”the voice sounded thin and strange, as if the electronic medium had somehow inverted it, pulling out its soul in the process”this is Anthony Chin.”

Chin was the director of the All-Asia Bank of Hong Kong that Nangi had bought into almost seven years ago when, through a combination of fiscal mismanagement and a series of unfortunate market fluctuations within the Crown Colony, it had been on the verge of going under.

Nangi had flown into Hong Kong and had worked out a bailout scheme within ten days that left his keiretsu with a maximum of cash flow after twenty months while providing it with a minimum of risk after the initial year and three quarters. However, beginning in the spring of 1977, a land boom had commenced within the tiny, teeming colony of unheralded proportions.

Anthony Chin had been at the forefront of the boom and with Nangi’s consent had invested much of All-Asia’s primary capital in real estate. And both he and the keiretsu had prospered tremendously as property values rose sharply, until by the end of 1980 they had quadrupled.

But for almost a year before that Chin had counseled expansion. “It’s got to just keep going,” he had told Nangi in late 1979, “there’s just no alternative. There’s no room at all left on the Island or across the harbor. There’s plans afoot to make Sha Tin in the New Territories the Hong Kong for the new middle class. I’ve seen plans for sixteen different highrise complexes all within a mile or two of the race track. If we get in now, we’ll double our capital within two years.”

But Nangi had opted for caution. After all, he told himself rationally, Britain’s ninety-nine-year lease on the New Territories was coming due. Of course, every citizen of the Colony discounted Communist China, reasoning that since Hong Kong and Macao were its only real windows on the west and provided such a lucrative flow of money into Red China, it would be against their own best interests to abrogate the lease or not to renew it at the very least.

But Nangi had had plenty of dealings with the Communist Chinese and he knew how their minds worked. And he thought, near the beginning of 1980, that there might be something else they would be needing more than mere money.

He had successfully predicted the downfall of Mao and, thence, the Gang of Four. This was easy for him since he recognized in modern China precisely the same circumstances that created the overthrow of the three-hundred-year Tokugawa Shogunate in his own country and had established the Meiji Restoration: in order to survive in modern times, the Chinese leadership had come at last to the painful conclusion that they must open themselves up to the West. They had to pull themselves out of the self-imposed isolationism that Mao had thrust them into, a veritable dark ages since industry atrophied along with culture, commerce, and artistic expression, all for the sake of the Five-Year Plans and intense repression.

Increasingly, Nangi had seen that more than profits, China would need two elements to set her on her lumbering feet, and both inspired within him awe and terror: heavy industry and nuclear capability. China was in need of wholesale transplants and there just was not enough money to pay for them. There was only one other path for them to take: barter. And the only commodity they possessed with which to play for such astronomical stakes was Hong Kong. If they could threaten England with expulsion, a complete breakdown of all that Great Britain had labored so hard and so long for on the tip of the Asian shoreand if they could make it completely believablethen they could extort almost anything they wished from that country. Certainly England possessed all the modern technology China could hope for.

Toward this end, Nangi felt, China would soon be making her first move. That would, no doubt, involve some kind of public statement indicating that the original lease was a document which, for them, had no validity. Then would come their inevitable announcement that at some time in the futuredate unspecified, of coursethey would begin a reinstitution of Chinese control over the Colony.

Revelations like that, Nangi knew full well, would burst the current real estate boom in a flash. What foreign investor would want to sink his money into that kind of political quicksand? The inevitable result would be that both the Hong Kong real estate and stock markets would take a nose dive. Nangi did not want to be caught in that. So he vetoed all of Anthony Chin’s requests for expansion. “Let the others do that,” he had said. “We’ll sit on our profits.”

And events had borne out his worst fears. The Chinese announcements had come late in 1982, bringing Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth running at full tilt. Her people had set up an extensive round of talks with the Communists, hoping to get the main issues resolved immediately and thus head off the expected downturn in the Colony’s economy.

Nangi had had to smile at that, just as he had had to smile at his own perspicacity and caution. The Chinese, now that they had the upper hand, were going to string this out as long as possible, enjoying their dominant position. It was essential to make Britain suffer as long as possible in order to bring home to the dense Westerners the dire straits in which they found themselves.

The talks had broken off inconclusively. And the crash had come to Hong Kong. From a high of 1730 in June of 1981, the Hang Sengthe Colony’s stock marketindex plummeted to the 740s in December of 1982. In early 1983 some of the smaller property companies began to fail, followed in the third quarter of the year by two or three of the larger ones.

“But,” John Bremidge, Hong Kong’s Financial Secretary, said, “the real thing to worry about is the financial and banking sector. They’re scared at present.”

Now, as he took Anthony Chin’s call, Nangi again thanked God for his wise course of conservative action. “How are things in the garden spot of China?” It was their own private capitalistic joke, but this time Chin did not respond.

“I’m afraid I have some bad news, Nangi-san.”

“If it’s another run on the banks, don’t concern yourself,” Nangi said. “We can weather it. You know how much capital we have.”

“That’s just it,” Chin said. “It’s much less than you think. We won’t be able to hold against even a minor run.”

Nangi consciously slowed his heartbeat, which, for just an instant, had leaped. He fought for calm and, reaching into the nonspace that was the home of the Holy Trinity, he found it. His mind teemed with a thousand questions but before he opened his mouth, he arranged them in order of importance. First things first.

“Where is the money?”

“In six of the Sha Tin developments,” Anthony Chin said miserably. “I know what your orders were, but you were not here. I was on top of the situation, day to day. I saw just how much money we stood to make. Now we can’t get tenants to move in. Not with the unsettled climate, the fears about the Communists. Everyone is shaken here, all the tai-pans. Even”

“You’re fired,” Nangi said curtly. “You have ten minutes to be out of the building. After that the security people will have orders to arrest you. They will do the same if you touch or alter any files.”

He hung up and quickly redialed the bank, asking for Allan Su, All-Asia’s statistical vice president. “Mr. Su, this is Tanzan Nangi. Please do not ask any questions. As of this moment, you are president of All-Asia. Anthony Chin no longer works for me. Please give your security people orders to evict him as of now. Have them make certain he takes nothing of the bank’s with him. Now, to business…”