Linnear 03 - White Ninja (61 page)

'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 are 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 her dancing 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 the 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 the 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 had 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^le-lighted, 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 investigations I had ordered into Branding's Hive advanced-computer research people at the Johnson Institute.'

'Why the investigations?' asked Shisei. 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. Til 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 pre-emptive 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 learnt 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?

She had done more than well; she had caused Shisei to fall in love with her. This was another important lesson that Kiku taught Shisei: there is only one thing more important in life than artifice, and that is kokoro, the heart of things. To control artifice, to be the master of illusion is to control the thinking and the emotions of men. This, for a female, is the height of power, the ideal to which one must dedicate one's life. It was, in effect, the ultimate outward manifestation of seishinshugi, the triumph of the will...

With consummate iki, so that even one such as he could not possibly take offence, see through her artful facade, Shisei said, 'You don't want me, Howe. Not really.' She immediately turned and walked away to make them both drinks. She needed time away from his incessant kineticism to allow the stillness to coalesce again, to accumulate in the dark corners of her psyche, to infuse her with strength, a sense of what she needed, step by step, to do.

'What would you like?' she asked him. 'Scotch or vodka?'

'Clear liquor tonight,' Howe said, lurching after her. 'I can drink more vodka, and tonight, while Branding's locked away in a cell, we're gonna celebrate! We're gonna get stinking drunk because now all my problems are solved!'

... Shisei had realized that with her gift and with the doorway Kiku could provide for her, she could become the greatest geisha in Japan. But to what end? The power she could wield - considerable in those circles - was too limited. Her audiences would be too small to satisfy her thirst for adulation. Though she might entertain - and be able, ultimately, to influence - the rich and the powerful, these were, after all, only individuals. The stage of the geisha was already too small. Shisei needed to act out her life on a far wider-reaching scale.

And, of course, there was Senjin to think of. In retrospect, she saw that he would never have allowed her to devote her life to the willow world. He had a master plan, and she was an integral part of it.

How many times, years later, had he repeated to her, Shisei, I cannot do this without you, as if those words, whispered into the delicate whorl of her ear, could ameliorate the pain he was inflicting on her with the bundle of ink-dipped needles that pierced her skin over and over for hours, days, weeks, months on end... ?

Howe slopped half his drink over his shirt front in his excitement, and Shisei had to mix him another. In the meantime, he had ripped off his stained tie and shirt, and now, bare-chested, reached for his glass.

He was covered in curling black hair, even over his back and throat. Shisei, for whom smoothness of flesh was an ideal, was nauseated. She was reminded of the stoat whose neck sensei had cracked just before he had skinned it in thin delicate strips.

She had never before seen Howe naked, and she wondered why he should want to reveal himself to her, the mastiff, now. It could not be for any sexual purpose, for she knew that Douglas Howe was a man for whom sex's pleasure was defined strictly by the amount of power it gave him. Otherwise, he was content to satisfy himself; who knew better than he