Rules of the Hunt (65 page)

After some minutes, he took her hands in his and kissed them one by one,
running his tongue across the palm of each hand.
 
She was wearing only a thin silk
yukata
, and through the thin material he
could feel her breasts where they rested against the back of his head and her
nipples hard and firm.

"Come with me," she said into his ear, her tongue licking
it.
 
Naked, he rose from the hot water
into the cool night air and stepped from the tub onto the tile surround.
 
His penis was erect and hard.
 
The faintest lightening of the sky indicated
the promise of dawn.

She draped his shoulders in a thick towel to dry him and to shield him
from the night air, and took another towel and knelt down to dry his lower
body.
 
Again, she touched him without
restraint, as if they had been lovers without secrets for some time.

Her beautiful hair, thick and glossy and normally worn up on a chignon or
some other restrained style, now cascaded around her shoulders.
 
He let the sensations wash over him until he
could scarcely bear it, and then he bent over and lifted
he
up and took her in his arms.

She smelled of an exotic perfume he could not identify, but which was
intensely stimulating.
 
It was a subtle,
sexual fragrance, and it blended with the clean, musky odor of
her own
arousal.
 
Her
arms around his neck, lips gently stroking, tongues intermingling, he carried
her from the courtyard through the open
shoji
screens to where he cold see the golden flickering light of a dozen candles.

The floor was of fresh
tatami
,
but instead of the futon he had expected there was a low-slung, king-size
bed.
 
He lowered her feet to the floor
and, still kissing her, stripped the gossamer-thin
yukata
from her body and placed her on the bed.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

It was dark when Fitzduane awoke, and then he realized that he must have
slept right through.

It was not surprising.
 
The Namaka
Steel business had been exhausting enough, but Chifune had been a marathon of
exquisitely sensual endurance.

He fumbled for his watch and then tried opening his eyes.
 
It mad the process a whole lot easier.
 
He noticed the candles were fresh and Chifune
was leaning over him.
 
She bent down and
kissed him.
 
Her hair was still damp from
the shower, and she was wearing a toweling robe.

"Fourteen hours," she said.
 
"More or less."

"So much for the sex," he said sleepily.
 
"How long did we rest for?"

Chifune laughed.
 
"There is a
razor in the bathroom," she said.
 
"I'll have some food ready in fifteen minutes.
 
Are you hungry?"

Fitzduane undid her robe.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

"Pillow
speak
," she said.

She was naked and lying with her back to him, staring unfocused at the
candles, enjoying the constant pattern as the flames flickered in the night
breeze off the sea.

Fitzduane smiled, but did not correct her.
 
Chifune had excellent English, but just
occasionally would make a slip.
 
He drank
some more champagne.
 
He was not quite
sure whether it was breakfast, lunch, or dinner, but it tasted good anyway.

He felt recharged after the long sleep and the lovemaking and a shower
and a shave and food and more lovemaking, and now that he thought of it, there
were few things more pleasant in the world than lying in bed in a postcoital
glow talking to a beautiful woman — unless it was doing exactly that with a
bottle of decent wine to hand.
 
Fitzduane
liked the company of women.
 
Women had
good minds; a much-neglected resource in his opinion.
 
And based on what he had seen and heard, a
particularly neglected resource in
Japan
.

Chifune turned to look at him.
 
"Pillow
speak
?" she said.
 
"I could hear you smiling,
gaijin
."

Fitzduane laughed.
 
"Pillow
talk," he said.

Chifune pulled back the covers and kissed his dormant penis quickly and
then covered him up again.
 
"Thank
you," she said.
 
"English is
such a quirky language."

Fitzduane did not want to spoil the mood, but there were matters he was
curious about and Chifune seemed to want to speak.
 
"What about this pillow business?"
he said quietly.

Chifune smiled without looking at him.
 
‘To pillow’
was
 
a
euphemism for lovemaking in Japanese.

"You don't say anything explicitly, Hugo," she said, "but
you're a man who invites confidences, an easy person to talk to.
 
I think it is because you have values and you
care.
 
So many people go through the
motions, but they don't really care and in their hearts there is nothing.
 
They take up space but they do not
contribute.
 
To contribute, you have to
care.
 
And caring is about risk.
 
You have something to lose.
 
It exposes you.
 
It makes you vulnerable.
 
It is dangerous."

Fitzduane put down his wineglass and turned toward her.
 
Her back was still to him, but he put his
left arm around her and drew her to him.
 
She snuggled up to him and pressed his hand against her breasts.

"Don't speak, Chifune," he said, "unless you must.
 
It is not necessary."

"‘Don't say anything you'll regret afterwards,’" she
quoted.
 
"Relax, Hugo.
 
I know the disciplines, the way it should be
done in Koancho.
 
I've been well-trained
for this game, and I live it.
 
But
sometimes I need to breathe, to talk freely, as if I were not part of a world
of paranoia, corruption, and deception.
 
Security may be necessary, but it's stifling.
 
Sometimes I wish I could live a normal life
and have children and become an education mother and
be
married to a
sarariman
.
 
And then complain because he is
never
 
at
home —
always out working or drinking with his colleagues or stuck on some commuter
train."

"Who are you, Chifune?" said Fitzduane.
 
"What's your background?
 
How did you get into this business?"

Chifune was silent, and at first Fitzduane thought she was not going to
answer, but then she spoke.
 
"My
father was a politician and the son of a politician.
 
This makes a joke of democracy, but it is not
so unusual.
 
More and more political
posts are handed down father to son, like some aristocratic birthright, and
that happened in this case even though my father was estranged from my
grandfather.
 
Some alliances endure
regardless.
 
Like my grandfather, my
father was a member of the Hodama faction, but something of a maverick
nonetheless.
 
He had been brought up in a
world of money politics and at first regarded this as normal, but then started
to think for himself.
 
He had ideas,
there were policies he wanted to pursue, but everywhere he turned he was
frustrated by the system.
 
Special
interests ruled the day, and the amount of money going through the political
system was such that they were not going to allow anyone to stand in their way.
 
I'm talking about billions of yen here,
millions of dollars.
 
The bribe paid to
one provincial governor, for example, to win construction contracts came to
nearly twenty million dollars."

"Just one bribe?" said Fitzduane.

"Just one single backhander," said Chifune.
 
"Politicians, certain
senior civil servants, key businessmen, and the
yakuza
— the four pillars of power and corruption in
Japan
.
 
Not everyone is corrupt, by any stretch of
the imagination, but enough at the center of power is rotten for the tentacles
of corruption to stretch far and wide."

"So what happened?" said Fitzduane.

"My father tried to change things.
 
He and some younger faction members got together and set up a study
group, and for a while they made some progress, but then the group started to
fall apart.
 
Some were simply bought,
others were arrested on trumped-up corruption charges, and a few were simply
scared away.
 
It was an orchestrated
campaign of intimidation conducted with ruthless brilliance, and the man behind
it was my grandfather.
 
He had power and
he was not going to relinquish it to anyone — even his own blood — except on
his own terms and in his own good time.
 
And that was not yet, if ever.
 
He
was a
kuromaku
of genius and an evil
corrupt old man, but no one was better at the power game than he, and no one
was going to oust him."

Fitzduane gave a start as the full significance of her words hit
home.
 
"Hodama?" he said.
 
"Your grandfather was Hodama?"

Chifune turned toward him.
 
"There are other
kuromakus
,"
she said.
 
She was leaning on one arm
facing him, only inches from him.
 
He
could feel her breath as she spoke.
 
The
candles were behind her, so her face was in shadow.
 
He could see her breasts and the dark outline
of her nipples and the taut flesh of her stomach and the curve of her hip.
 
He had to remind himself that this was a
woman who was trained to kill and who could put that training into action with
ease.
 
This was a woman who had risked
her life for him and whose body he had shared.
 
This was a woman with blood on her hands.
 
As he had.
 
Theirs was a shared world.

"You're Hodama's granddaughter," said Fitzduane, ignoring her
denial.
 
"My God, who else knows
this?
 
What are you doing on this case?
 
Doesn't conflict of interest mean anything
around here, or is that just another difference between
Japan
and us
gaijins
."

Chifune leaned across and kissed him hard on the lips
.
"That
evil old man killed his own son," she said.
 
"He killed my father to preserve his
rotten regime.
 
When almost all his group
had been destroyed or dispersed, my father was found in his office with his
throat cut and a razor in his hand.
 
Money and other incriminating material
was
subsequently found in his safe.
 
The
suicide verdict was automatic.
 
A
disgraced politician kills himself.
 
It's
not so uncommon."

"How do you know it wasn't suicide?" said Fitzduane.
 
"How do you know all this?"

Chifune smiled sadly.
 
"Believe me, I know," she said.
 
"My father and I were very close.
 
I did secretarial work for his group and
worked with him on the reforms they planned.
 
I kept his records and knew what was in his safe and what was in his
mind on the day he died.
 
It was a setup
and it was murder.
 
Of that, I have no
doubt.
 
I confronted my grandfather with
this and he virtually admitted it, and then he laughed at me.
 
He despised women.
 
We were instruments in his eyes, not
people.
 
We were there to serve and to be
used."

"And so you worked the system," said Fitzduane.
 
"You used your connections to get into
Koancho and worked there under a false name.
 
The security service was the best place to get to know the dirt on the
people you hated.
 
And sooner or later an
opportunity would come up for you to strike back."

Chifune nodded.
 
"My father
had made the initial contact with Koancho.
 
They were the people who fully understood the extent of the corruption,
and the Director-General was a friend of his.
 
If he had lived, the security service was to supply the information
which would enable my father to push through his reforms."

"Your father was a clever man," said Fitzduane, "and
dangerous.
 
I can see why he had to be
stopped.
 
His plan might have
worked."