The Miko - 02 (27 page)

“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 introduced—
katakana
—to 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 high-rise 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 Shōgunate 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 shore—and if they could make it completely believable—then 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 future—date unspecified, of course—they 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 Seng—the Colony’s stock market—index 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…”

He would have to take one of them out. Red or Blue, which would it be? Riding the waves, cerulean and a green the shade of translucent jade, Bristol thought it would be Blue.

He sat in a sway-backed canvas director’s chair that had seen better days, paying out his line, waiting for something to strike the bait twisting fifteen feet below. Not more than a hundred yards to port, the long sleek twinscrew pleasure boat carrying Alix Logan, a half-dozen of her friends, and the Red Monster, who was doing his level best not to stick out like a sore thumb, sat in the water.

He had gone so far as to take off his shirt, which, Bristol thought, was a mistake because it only emphasized the paleness of the flesh on his chest, back, and upper arms. There was plenty of muscle, though, and Bristol took careful note. He wondered how Alix had introduced him to her friends.

The line went taut and the ratcheting of the set reel began. Bristol watched the end of the rod bending and quivering, and he began the reel-in. If it had been a toss-up he probably would have chosen the Red Monster to take out because he was even bigger than Bristol was, and after all this time Bristol was itching for a fight.

But as it was, there was no contest. In the months of his surveillance, he had come to hate the Blue Monster. For one thing, he had a way of looking at Alix that went beyond a strictly business interest. Somehow, over time, Blue had developed a proprietary absorption.

To the Red Monster she was just another piece of meat, an assignment like many others he had had before and would have again. Isolate and protect; he stuck to the letter of the command he had been given—they had a Laundry List, an accounting of people in her life who had been checked out and were okay for her to associate with.

Blue, the night man, loved to look at her. He was allowed inside her apartment. Not for the entire night, of course, but just long enough when she returned home to check the place out thoroughly. Then the door would slam and he’d saunter down the concrete steps, a wooden toothpick twirling from one corner of his mouth to the other.

He’d cross the street, heading for the chrome and glass box of the fried chicken franchise less than a block away. He’d buy a pail of extra crispy that would feed a family of four and hunker down in an orange plastic seat. His lips full of grease, his cheeks flecked with bits of chicken skin, he’d stare at the lighted window square behind which Alix Logan was undressing for bed and lick his lips. Bristol did not think it had anything at all to do with the food.

A force jolted him, all the way down at the base of the rod, and things began to hot up. He pushed the soles of his worn topsiders against the aft coaming and hauled back mightily on the rod. The force of God was down there, and the answering twist almost pulled him out of his chair. What in Christ’s name had he lit onto? His back muscles tensed as he brought all his brawn to bear against the sea creature at the other end of his line.

A hundred yards away, across the diamondlike sparkle of the rolling sea, Alix and her friends were in their suits, their coppery skin shining with suntan oil, faces held up to the streaming sunlight, hair floating in the wind. Tops popped off iced cans of Bud, handed around. Laughter floated across the water.

Bristol fought the fish, even as his eyes were on the activity aboard the pleasure boat, even as his mind still turned over his feelings for the Blue Monster.

His great muscles corded and he felt the adrenaline pumping through him, exulting him. Damn, but it was good to be alive. The terror of the grave Tomkin wanted him in was an inconstant specter inside him. That night, the tumbling car, the uncontrollable motion, the soaring, stomach-wrenching free fall, the ground coming up, the overpowering darkness, the vertigo, the get-out, and the searing fireball of his coffin, the triumphant shout of the flames licking near his cheek, and rolling, rolling, looking again and again with each rapid revolution into the face of death.

With a fierce grin, Bristol reeled in the line, feeling with every sense he possessed the skein of life flowing all around him. He felt the rhythmic rocking of the boat as it negotiated the deep sea swells, he breathed deeply of the clean salt air laced with the pungency of marine fuel, felt the hot bite of the sunlight on his arms and shoulders. The colors of the water flashed before him, now deep blue, then aquamarine, turquoise, even, far out, a thin feathery line of pale green.

But mostly, he felt the life at the other end of the line, the fight, the strategy of working the big fish closer, ever closer to the boat’s side and the ultimate landing. During New York’s long, frigid winters he had dreamed of such moments, and now he was living them.