The Miko - 02 (14 page)

“Hai.”
Sato’s head nodded. Yes. “But it is no more than any business associate would ask of another. This is family now, you understand.”

“Hai.”
Nicholas’ head bobbed as Sato’s had a moment before. “My pledge stands. It includes everyone.”

“Well,” Tomkin began, “I want no part of this. Nick, if you think—” He froze as Nicholas looked up at him, the force of will behind those dark eyes so powerful he sat back down without a word.

When he had done so, Nicholas turned his head back to Sato. “That goes for Tomkin-san as well.”

Sato bowed. “Good.” He stood up. “Please follow me.”

They were met at the elevator by Ishii and another Japanese. This second man was enormous. He was dressed in
montsuki
and
hakama
; his blue-black hair was intricately coiffed in
ichomage
, marking him as
yokozuna
—a
sumō
grand champion. Sato introduced him as Koten. There was no doubt that he was a bodyguard.

Nicholas stopped them in the corridor before the steam room. The steam had been turned off in the room but still Sato suggested they take off their jackets before entering. Miss Yoshida draped each one, carefully folded, over her left arm. She remained outside the door, an odd, glazed-eye guard. No one else was around.

“Jesus Christ,” Tomkin said when he saw the body half sprawled across the tile bench.

“Please be careful of the blood,” Sato said, and they all stayed on the perimeter of the room. “Kagami-san was found just moments before Miss Yoshida interrupted our meeting.”

Nangi, standing, swaying slightly on his walking stick, said nothing.

“Do you see his cheek?” Sato asked. “The left one.”

Tomkin looked at Sato; he’d had enough of staring at the mess lying across the room. “You sure don’t seem broken up.”

Sato turned to him. “He is dead, Tomkin-san.
Karma.
There is nothing I can do that will bring him back. But he was with us for many years and I will miss him. The privacy of grief is something that is understood here.”

Tomkin turned his head away, put his hands in his pockets.

Sato watched for a time, then slowly redirected his gaze. “Linnear-san?” His voice was quiet.

Nicholas had not moved from the time he had entered the steam room and caught sight of the corpse. His gaze had been immediately drawn to the man’s left cheek.

“It looks to me like a character.
Kanji.
” Sato’s voice floated in the room.

“All I see is blood,” Nangi said curtly. “He was cut at least a dozen times.”

Without a word, Nicholas went carefully across the wet tile floor. Pink, stringy puddles were everywhere but he moved with such care and grace that they were left undisturbed. Tomkin had seen Nicholas move in such a way before, the night in his office building when Saigō had come to kill him.

With an abrupt movement like the skim of an insect across a still lake, Nicholas removed a handkerchief and carefully wiped away the trickles of semicoagulated blood from Kagami’s left cheek.

The breath whistled through Nangi’s half open lips. “It
is
a character: Ink.”

“What’s it mean?” Tomkin asked.

“Wu-Shing,”
Nicholas said. He could not believe what he was seeing. The blood pounded in his temples like a hammer on an anvil. He felt lightheaded, as if reality were slipping away from him.

“That’s Chinese, I know,” Sato said. “And old Chinese at that. But without seeing the character I don’t know what it means.”

Nicholas turned around, his face pale. It had been a decided effort to break away from the sight of this bloody crimson character, glowing with evil intent. He looked at all of them.
“Wu-Shing,”
he said slowly, “are a series of ritual punishments of Chinese criminal law.”

There was silence for a time. Sato looked from Nicholas to the pathetic drained corpse of his employee and friend. When he looked back again, he said, “There’s more, isn’t there?”

Nicholas nodded. His eyes were sad. He had never thought to say this in his life. He turned back and again gazed at the glyph, etched into human flesh, terrible and mocking. “This is
Mo
,” he said. “It means tattooing of the face. And it is the first of the mutilating punishments taught at the Tenshin Shoden Katori.” His heart was breaking as he turned back to them; he could look at the glowing character no more. “That is the ninja
ryu
from which I came.”

Nicholas was on his way to Tomkin’s room when the call came through, that fragile line connecting them so tenuously. Justine’s voice, thin and stretched out by the electronics of the medium, made it seem as if he had been away from her for weeks. “I miss you so, Nick. West Bay Bridge isn’t the same without you. I’d love to be in a foreign place with you.”

“Japan’s not foreign,” he said without thinking. “It’s too much like home.”

“Even now? After all this time?”

Belatedly, he heard the terror in her voice, but he could do nothing about it. “My soul is Japanese,” he said. “I told you that when we first met. Outwardly, perhaps, I am my father’s son. But inside…the
kami
of my mother resides. I can no more do anything about it than I can pull the clouds down from the sky. I wouldn’t want to.”

There was silence for a time, the gentle wheezing of the unquiet wire unable to hide from him the soughing of her breath

“You won’t want to stay, will you?” Her voice as tiny as a child’s.

He laughed. “Permanently? Good God, no. Whatever gave you that idea?”

“Please let me come, Nick. I can be on a plane tonight. I promise I won’t be in the way. I just want to be near you. To hold you again.”

“Justine,” he said as gently as he could, “it’s just not possible. There’s too much to do here. We’d have no time together.”

“Not even at night?”

“This isn’t a nine-to-five business.”

“I think I liked you better when you were doing nothing.”

“I’m happier now, Justine.”

“Nick, please let me come. I won’t be—”

“It’s out of the question. I’ll be home soon enough.”

That singing down the wire, as if
kami
, hovering, were growing restless.

“The truth is, I’m frightened, Nick. I’ve been having a recurring dream; a kind of…premonition. I’m scared something awful is going to happen to you. And I’ll be left here—” Her voice choked off abruptly. “Then there’ll be no one.”

“Justine,” he said quietly, “everything’s fine and it’s going to stay that way. As soon as I get back, we’ll get married. Nothing’s going to prevent that.” Silence. He pushed the thought of the murder out of his mind. “Justine?”

“I heard you.” Her voice was so still, he had to strain to hear her.

“I love you,” he said, hanging up the phone.

Was there something more he could have said? he wondered. Sometimes her irrationality was impossible to control. Fears in the night. Phobias. The terror of darkness. These were all alien to him and he had difficulty understanding the fixity of their power over others not like him.

“Nick, what the hell’s going on here?” Gray-faced, Tomkin hung onto the door frame leading from the bedroom of the suite to the large bath. “I come to Tokyo to negotiate a straight-ahead business merger and suddenly we’re involved with a weird cultlike murder. I could’ve gone to Southern California if I’d wanted that.”

Nicholas smiled thinly at the semblance of humor, sat down on the corner of the king-size bed. They were back at the Okura. It was late in the evening and neither had eaten since breakfast which, for Tomkin, had been nothing more than tea and toast, which he had immediately vomited up.

“Let’s eat first,” Nicholas said. “We’ll talk afterwards.”

“The hell we will,” Tomkin said as he came unsteadily into the bedroom. “You seem to know more about this—what did you call it?”

“Wu-Shing.”

“Yeah. You’re the expert. Give me an explanation.”

Nicholas ran his fingers through his hair. “Traditionally there are five punishments, each one a response to a more serious offense. Therefore each punishment is more severe than the last.”

“So what’s that got to do with Sato Petrochemicals?”

“I don’t know.”

For a moment Tomkin peered down at the younger man, then he went slowly to his dresser and pulled on a pair of faded jeans, a blue chambray workshirt. He slipped on a pair of shiny black handstitched moccasins. “I guess you’re as hungry as a bear.”

Nicholas looked up. “Aren’t you?”

“Frankly, the sight of food nauseates me. I’m running a low-grade fever so that doesn’t surprise me. I’ll let this thing run its course.” He paused. “And don’t look at me like that. You remind me of my mother when you do. I’m perfectly all right.”

The phone rang and Tomkin went to answer it. He spoke in low tones for some time, then cradled the receiver. “That was Greydon. He wanted permission to go up to Misawa to see his son. Apparently the boy’s stationed at the air base there. He’s a fighter pilot and is scheduled to go up on one of the first test runs of those new F-20s we’ve just imported. I think Greydon feels there’s some danger.”

“He’s quite right,” Nicholas said. “Stationed at Misawa puts those supersonic jets just 375 air miles from the Soviet Union’s Pacific coast and Vladivostok.”

Tomkin shrugged his shoulders. “So? What harm can they possibly do?”

“Those F-20s have nuclear capacity,” Nicholas said. “And the Russians’re worried as hell about them. Which is why we’ve seen an increased Soviet military buildup in the Kuriles over the past year of an alarming size.”

“The Kuriles?”

“The Kurile Islands. They’re the chain just to the north of Hokkaido, Japan’s most northerly island—the one where the winter Olympics were held in 1976. In effect, they connect the southeast of Russia to Japan in a series of stepping-stones.

“The Kuriles had been Japanese territory until they were seized—the Japanese say illegally—in 1945 at the close of the war. Quite naturally, they want them back.”

Nicholas got up from the bed. “Recent reports tell us that there are over forty thousand Russian troops currently stationed in the Kuriles. Quite recently they sent in a squadron of twelve supersonic MIG-21 fighter-bombers to replace the subsonic MIG-17s, which they obviously felt were overmatched by the F-20s. They’ve got an air base on Etorufu, or, as they call it, Iturup.”

“You sure seem to know a lot about this.”

“It concerns Japan, Tomkin,” Nicholas said evenly. “So it concerns me. The situation’s serious; Greydon’s got every right to be anxious. I hope you gave him the weekend off. We’ve only got the wedding tomorrow and negotiations won’t resume until Monday.”

“He’s booking his flight now,” Tomkin said archly. “That meet with your approval?”

“If Greydon’s son doesn’t make it back from that flight, you’ll be happy you let him see the kid.”

There was silence for a time. The phone rang again but neither of them made a move to answer it. In a moment it stopped, and the tiny red light on the base began to wink on and off.

“I told you before,” Tomkin said at last, “that my old man was a real sonuvabitch. I can’t tell you how much I hated him sometimes.” He put his palms together as if he were praying. “But I loved him, too, Nick. No matter what he did to me or my mother. He was my father….Do you understand?” It was a rhetorical question, and Nicholas remained silent.

Tomkin sighed. “I guess in some ways I turned out just like him. Years ago I could not have believed such a thing possible. But the passing time…” His voice fell off. “Time has a way of molding people to its own ends. You remember Chris—I know Justine must’ve told you about him. He was the last of her boyfriends before she met you. He was the biggest bastard of the lot. He was sexy as hell. He seduced her, made her move to San Francisco. She was using her real name, Tomkin, then. She got a monthly stipend from me. It was very generous and she took it all. It—” His eyes slid away for a moment, searching, perhaps, for a place to hide. He took a deep, shuddering breath. “It made me feel better that she took it all. It assuaged my guilt for all the years I’d accepted her presence, her demands on my time, only when it suited me.

“They were fucking like bunnies out there; the relationship was all sex. Or so I thought. Justine wanted more money, then more still. Finally, I hired a team of detectives to find out just what the hell was going on. Two weeks later I took the corporate jet and flew out. I presented my darling daughter with all the evidence. I packed her up and took her home that afternoon before Chris got back.”

Tomkin seemed to be having difficulty breathing as the emotions surged within him. “The shit was using my money—” He stopped abruptly, his eyes wide and feverish. “
Justine’s
money, to finance an ongoing cocaine deal. He was a user himself, and besides…He was unfaithful to her every day of their relationship.” He made a disgusted sound.

“She hates me for interfering, though. That’s a helluva laugh, isn’t it? He was slowly killing her with his infidelities and his craziness. He’d beat her and—” His throat seized up on him. He ran a hand through his damp hair. “But at least she has you now, Nicky. That’s the most important thing.”

For all this time Tomkin had not taken his eyes off Nicholas. He was a shrewd man with an acute, analytical mind. His intolerance of foreign custom and his lack of patience in no way negated that fact.

“Now it’s your turn. You’re dragging your feet about something.” His voice was quiet with more strength in it than had been apparent for several days. He sounded almost like a father. “I think you’d better tell me what it is because I have a funny feeling in my gut it has to do with that Wo Ching or whatever you call it.”

“Tomkin—”

“Nick, you’ve got a duty to me. You’ve gotta tell me what you know. All of it.”

Nicholas sighed. “I had hoped not to tell you.”

“Why, for Christ’s sake? I’ve got a right to know if I’m putting my neck on the chopping block.”

Nicholas nodded. “Yes. You do.” He looked directly at Tomkin. “But the simple truth is I’ve got nothing definite, no cold facts and figures like the Soviet buildup in the Kuriles. Here, as happens often in Japan, there is nothing but legend.”