Linnear 03 - White Ninja (52 page)

'She was dried up, desiccated, devoid of zest. She had bequeathed that to us, had used up her quota of youth and gusto in becoming a mother. She was old before her time, lined, forever tired, forever plagued by vague maladies - headaches, backaches, cramps -that often prevented her from participating in even the simplest family requirements. More often than not she had her meals hi her room, which by then was separate from where my father slept: she claimed the weight of his body on the mattress caused her calves to spasm in the middle of the night.

'She rarely attended parties or family gatherings, never made it to our graduations from high school and college, but sent two trusted servants in her stead, as if believing that quantity would make up for her absence. Funerals were, of course, out of the question - they were too emotionally taxing - and she never went near a hospital until the day she died.

'It was as if, along with her drying up, her giving

us her life fluids, her capacity to take on obligation had dissolved.

This, to me, was adulthood; all I could expect in the coming years. Can you imagine how I felt when I thought about having a baby of my own? All I could see in my mind's eye was the image of my mother, grey-faced, bed-ridden, racked by the kinds of aches and pains only women twice her age start to experience.

' "You're not your mother," Honi assured me. It wasn't enough. I worked hard to want to be an adult, a mother, but it wasn't easy. My God, I tortured myself over it for years. I shed so many tears, you wouldn't believe how many. Finally, I thought I had it down. I thought I knew that I wouldn't turn into my mother. But then I came here to Japan.with my husband. I got pregnant and my little daughter died. I got through the hurt and the guilt just like an adult, I was proud of myself. I stood by my husband when he was in difficulty.

"Then I got pregnant again and everything burst apart. My whole life seemed turned upside down. It was as if I was back in Honi's office, terrified of becoming a mother. I don't know whether I want this baby. I don't know whether I can handle the responsibility. I feel as if I am turning into my mother, that I'm simply incapable of doing it - being a mother - and I'm so ashamed and disgusted with myself I can't stand it. And yet I don't want to be like my mother. I don't!'

Senjin, holding her, feeling her racked with sobs, was mute. I hated my mother, too, he thought. Only my sister knew that, and she didn't understand until I explained it to her, not with words but with actions. My sister is a stubborn, strong-willed woman. So much so that she became used to getting what she wanted. Except from me. I tried to cure her of her excesses. Perhaps I was at least partially successful. But I had to stop correcting her. I saw that if I went too far she would break, rather

than bend. I would not change her spirit, though that

spirit is imperfect, dangerous even. She is my sister, not

my mother. I would have changed my mother, if I had

been given a chance. My mother, like this woman, was

weak, deficient. A cure, no matter how radical, would

have been good for her in the end; anyone who knew

her could see that. .

I think my whole life has been an effort to be strong in everything I do or say or think. I cannot allow myself even a momentary weakness, it's too much to bear, the thought that I'm carrying some of her inside me. Can weakness be inherited in the genes or passed like poison through the umbilical cord?

With Justine's lips against his neck, her breasts hard against his muscled chest, her thighs against his leg, Senjin thought he felt nothing, just as he felt nothing when he stared down at the nude body of Mariko, the dancer at The Silk Road; just as he felt nothing when he had sucked the innocence out of Tomi, using Tau-tau to seduce her in the office; just as he felt nothing when he had entered the myriad women who had populated his past like signposts in a distant terrain. Without thinking of Haha-san he had never felt even a fleeting atom of carnal desire at the touch of female flesh.

He had intellectually savoured each coupling with the avidity of a cryptographer tackling a new code. For the rest, the wolf in heat throwing his shaggy head back and howling at the night, there was nothing.

Then he heard, with a start, Justine whispering in his ear, 'Save me. Oh, save me,' and he began to tremble with despicable desire just as if she had said, Take me.

Because he thought of someone else: his sister, with whom he shared everything of importance: strength, sin, punishment, the terror of weakness, destiny. And a longing that was pain swept over him.

Justine was lying so close to him that he could feel the

press of her heavy breasts, feel the accelerated beating of her heart. Her face was upraised to his. Starlight picked out highlights in her hair, the waning moonlight coated the soft flesh of her neck.

That was when, with eyes of copper, Senjin again wrapped the silken cord around Justine's neck, jerking her against him. He captured her hips with his powerful thighs. She tried to cry out, but could not. He saw her teeth, white in the moonlight. He imagined blood on them, an animal's mouth thrown back and howling at the soft moon, and knew that he wanted to - needed to - make her as much like him as possible, to merge her being into his as he had pathetically tried to do and failed with Mariko when he devoured her susurrus at the moment of her death, as he had tried to do with the other women he had been with. To possess them in as full a meaning of the word as was imaginable.

Because he could no longer possess his sister in that unique way that, for him, filled the dread place inside him where even he would never venture, where pleasure was pain.

'Pleasure and pain, yin and yang, the light and the dark,' Senjin whispered hoarsely. "This is the world view, the false reality. Kshira showed me the truth: that pain and pleasure can be one, the width of a circle and, when they are, the result is otherworldly, leading to a state beyond even ecstasy.' His breath hard and hot on her cheek. 'I promised you an example. I want you to understand. Now...'

Senjin pulled up her skirt, roughly ripped her underclothes. The terror emanated from Justine's wide-open eyes, filled her face like a river swollen to a torrent from spring fains. Her terror exuded from her pores like sweat, its peculiar scent making his nostrils twitch, his mouth water.

Senjin was so hard that he could barely feel his member.

It was stiff, it was numb; he thought of Haha-san. Now not only Justine. But his sister as well.

His sister and possession.

The cord around Justine's neck was making the white flesh turn red and raw. Her neck began to swell as it bruised, as the blood filled it, as he pulled the cord tighter, as it was further abused. The sight made Senjin dizzy with desire and he almost collapsed into her.

He pulled on the cord, cutting off more oxygen, and her head went back, lolling as her eyes rolled up. Drool spilled from the corner of her mouth, her hips lurched inwards against him, against the quivering tip of him.

Senjin was overcome by desire. Never before in his life had its advance been so swift, so overpowering. He was delirious with sensation, about to thrust himself into her when, unbidden, he remembered that he needed her in another way, just as he had once needed Haha-san, and his hot, desperate seed spilled out of him in a paroxysm of need.

Senjin grunted like an animal. His head fell forwards on to her shoulder. With a sob, he released the cord from around Justine's neck, seeing not her but his sister, Haha-san, his sister, they were all fused in his mind because he needed all three, hated himself for that need.

Then the three images became unstuck, drifted apart. Senjin tenderly kissed the already blackening welt, licking it with his tongue, tasting the salt on her skin, already associating it with her wound, the pain he had inflicted on her.

He held her head as she had before, to take away the pain. 'You must tell me,' he whispered hoarsely, 'I must know what the ninja did with the emeralds he took out of the box.' But he could tell that Justine had not heard him, and he put his lips against her ear, said into it, 'Think of the ninja, think pf your husband in his workout room, with the box in his hands. Now he has the emeralds, you

can see them sparkling in the light. What do you see him doing next? Tell me.'

Justine, her eyes only half-open, her mind benumbed with Tau-tau, said, 'I remember... something

'What? Wkat!' But Seojin could see it was no good, she would not be able to dredge it up just yet. Not yet.

Staring at her white, sweat-slicked face in the moonlight.

But soon.

Leaving her there, untied in the moonlight, freed, but only for a time.

Shisei, dressed ever so fashionably in the Louis Feraud suit that Douglas Howe had bought her at Saks Jandel, locked the door to her borrowed brownstone just off Foxhall Road in Georgetown, skipped down the steps to the waiting black Jaguar sedan.

Branding himself was behind the wheel. Although he employed a driver to get him across town in rush hour traffic or out to the Pentagon while he did some work in the back seat, he preferred at other times to drive himself, taking pleasure in the purr and power of his own automobile.

'You look tremendous!' he said as she slid into the leather seat beside him. 'I'll be proud of you.'

'What have you planned for Howe?' Shisei asked nervously. 'Or for us?'

Branding laughed, swinging out into the Washington twilight. 'You must know General Dickerson, Howe's pet dog inside the Pentagon? Woof! Woof! Anyway, just about, oh, twenty minutes ago, while Howe was dressing for tonight's dinner, the general called him at home. But, you know, the funny thing is that there's a guy on my staff who does an amazingly accurate imitation of Dickerson's voice. In any case, whoever it was who called, swore that there's a security leak at the Johnson Institute. This

information surely set Howe drooling with anticipation. Greedy people are predictable people.

"The general, or whoever it was, insisted that Howe meet him in the wilds of Maryland where - so Howe's been told - the information is being leaked.'

Branding laughed again. 'It'll take Howe about an hour and a half to get where he's been told to go -longer, even, since this is his chauffeur's night off and he has to drive himself. He'll wait there, oh, I'd say an hour or so, just to make sure he got the time right, that the general hasn't been detained somewhere. Then another ninety minutes back. By then, the State dinner will be over.'

It was almost eight o'clock, the worst of the rush hour had dissipated, and the monuments were just being illuminated. It was a magical time of day, Branding thought. If you were in New York, you'd be on your way to a Broadway show; in Paris, strolling down the Boulevard Haussmann to the Opera; in Tokyo, in Roppongi, taking in the fashion show on the street while on the way to a glittering dining spot.

Here in Washington they were heading for the seat of power: the White House. The thought never failed to set Branding's heart pounding. He wondered whether one day he would sit in the Oval Office after having been elected to the nation's highest office. As he often reminded himself, that was one of the reasons he had got into politics in the first place.

He knew that with the success of the Ascra bill, with the formidable array of strength he had been able to muster, he now had a shot at the next nomination, less than two years away.

'Cook,' Les Miller, the chairman of the Republican Party, had told him last night, 'I've never seen any one man make an impact on the party the way you have. This bill is just the final touch. Even our most

conservative sunsabitches are mighty impressed with you. They've told me privately that they've been aware of you for some years. By God, you've got their full attention now. We're all tired of the man in the White House. This party wasn't founded to be led by a man who's turned out to be more Democratic than most Democrats.

'I can tell you your last speech on the Senate floor had them spellbound. They saw in it, as I did, the new platform fundamentals to return us to being the party of hard, no-nonsense principle. It's not too early to begin thinking about running for the nomination. Right now organization is half the battle. The sooner you give us the go-ahead, the sooner I can throw the full weight of the party machine behind you and get the process going. That's how sure we are of you, Cook.'

'Oh, God,' Shisei said, 'I've forgotten my bag. I always do that. I think it's deliberate. I hate evening bags.'

'No problem,' Branding said, making a U-turn. 'Anyway, if we're late, it will create a bigger splash.'

Shisei turned to look at him. 'I thought that's exactly what you wanted to avoid.'

'Look at yourself, darling,' he said. 'In that outfit, even a blind man would notice you.' He shook his head as he putted up to the kerb in front of her house. 'Strategy is useless unless it can be changed. And I've changed mine.' He saw her puzzled look, kissed her hard on the mouth. 'Go on, get your bag. Otherwise you'll never get to see how this evening ends.'

Shisei went up her steps, dug in her pocket for her key. She opened her front door, and disappeared inside.

In the foyer, she put the key in her pocket and removed her high heel shoes. Then, on stockinged feet, she crept up the stairs to her bedroom.