The Nicholas Linnear Novels (100 page)

When they were all seated comfortably—save for Ishii, who stood against the wall like a guard—Sato began. “Before we resume our negotiations, I would like to explain why I asked our respective counsels if they would step away for a moment. No disrespect to Greydon-san was intended, but Nangi-san and I both thought it prudent to keep this part of our meeting just between us.”

He cleared his throat while Nangi lit a cigarette with careful deliberation. “Tomorrow afternoon’s meetings will have to be rescheduled, I am afraid, because we must attend the funeral of our loyal friend, Kagami-san.” He paused for a moment as if unsure how to proceed. “It may seem a crass request to make at this time, but we quite naturally feel that some answers must be reached.” He leaned slightly forward so that he approached the area where Nicholas and Tomkin were seated side by side on the sofa.

“Linnear-san, I must tell you that we are absolutely mystified by the manner of Kagami-san’s death. We know nothing of this
Wu-Shing
that you mentioned on Friday, nor can we think of a reason for murder being committed here.

“In light of all this I trust that you now, having had some small time to marshal your thoughts and surmises, may give us some insight into what happened to our poor colleague and friend.”

It was an elegant speech and Nicholas admired it. But he could not rightly say that his mind was fully focused on the murder of Kagami. Truth to tell, since he had seen Akiko at the wedding his mind had been filled with nothing but the burning image of her face and the maddening thought, Is she Yukio?

He felt slightly ashamed now to have been so slavishly self-involved all weekend. It was utterly unlike him and that, above all, worried him.

Now, as he hurriedly recalled the catalog of his observations in and around the blood-splattered steam room, he muscled his own doubts and fears aside.

He laced his fingers together, tapped the thumbs. “Over and above the bizarre appearance of the
Wu-Shing
tattoo on Kagami-san’s cheek, there were a number of abnormalities that would, I think, preclude a simple explanation such as assault by a madman, that sort of thing.”

“It was premeditated,” Ishii broke in. “Is that what you’re saying?”

“I am,” Nicholas said. “For one thing, the murderer left no discernable footprints outside the door, even though that area’s constantly saturated with moisture.”

Sato groaned heavily and glanced at Nangi. When the other did not return his gaze, Sato stood up and walked to the bar. Though it was only a little past ten he fixed himself a drink, and it was a measure of his agitation that he forgot his manners completely and failed to offer anyone else a refreshment.

He took a long swallow and, staring at nothing in the mirror behind the bar, cleared his throat. “Linnear-san, you said there were a
number
of abnormalities.”

“Why don’t you wait for the police?”

A Westerner would have, of course, given an answer. Sato merely stared at Nicholas. And what his eyes said was, That is why you were allowed inside Sato Petrochemicals business, because we want no police intervention.

Nicholas had asked the question because he had to be certain of these people. Why they did not relish the thought of police involvement did not concern him; why they had involved him did.

“I fear Kagami-san was not killed quickly.”

“Pardon me, but what do you mean?” Ishii asked.

“He was struck many times,” Nicholas said, “by a sharp-bladed weapon.”

“Do you know what kind?” Sato asked.

“I’m not certain,” Nicholas said. “It could be any number of
shuriken.
”

Sato had gone through half his long whiskey. Otherwise there was no outward sign of his agitation. “Linnear-san,” he said, “when you first mentioned this
Wu-Shing,
you said it was a series of punishments. May we deduce that because it uses the character
Wu
, there are five of them?”

Nicholas looked uncomfortable. “Yes, that’s correct.
Mo
is the first and therefore the least of the punishments.”

“What can be more severe than death?” Nangi said somewhat angrily.

“I was referring to
Mo
itself.” Nicholas looked at him. “Strictly speaking, it should only have been that: tattooing of the face.”

Nangi’s cane click-clacking across the short expanse of bare wooden floor that separated Sato’s true office space from the informal conference area where the rest of them stood or sat announced his approach. “Then this murdering of the victim as well is unusual.” He had pounced on it immediately.

“Highly unusual,” Nicholas said. He sat quite still, his hard hands clasped between his knees. He forced an absolute calm onto his face, into every aspect of his physical being. The last thing he wanted was either of them to become aware of his inner feelings. His mind was still reeling from the thought that someone from his own
ryu
, someone steeped in the arcane ways of
aka-i-ninjutsu
, could perpetrate such an act. It was quite unthinkable. And yet it had happened. He had seen the grisly evidence and he knew there could be no doubt at all. Fervently he prayed that no one would ask him the one question that might detonate the whole situation.

“There’s something I don’t understand,” Tomkin said, and Nicholas prepared himself to answer the unanswerable. “This Wo-Ching or however it’s pronounced, is Chinese you said. What’s with this cross-referencing between Japanese and Chinese? I thought the two cultures were separate and distinct. I thought only ignoramus Westerners say they can’t tell one from the other.”

The phone rang in the ensuing silence and Ishii launched himself away from the bar to pick it up. They waited while he spoke softly into the receiver. He had left instructions that they not be disturbed.

He punched a button, hung up. “It’s a call for you, Nangi-san,” he said. What dark emotion swam within his eyes? Nicholas wondered. “Apparently it cannot wait.”

Nangi nodded. “I’ll take it in the other room.” He went back across the office, through the open passageway to the
tokonoma
where Nicholas had first caught sight of him.

The tension in the room was thick and now Nicholas used his training to seek a way of dissipating that high level of energy, as well as diverting interest away from areas he was still reluctant to discuss here. “Why an ancient form of
Chinese
punishment should be taught in an essentially Japanese discipline is simple,” he began. “It is said—and not I think without a great deal of merit—that
ninjutsu
had its origins on the Asian continent somewhere, more specifically in northeastern China. Certainly it had existed long before Japan became civilized.

“But then so have many of the more ancient customs and traditions in Japan.” He got up and went across the room, his movements pantherlike. He moved like some dancers Tomkin had seen, with a very low center of gravity, as if the floor itself were springy as a mat of dried grass.

Resettling himself on the sofa across from Tomkin, with Sato and Ishii on his left side, he continued. “In fact, China and Japan are more closely bound than either country likes to admit, since the enmity between them is longstanding and quite bitter.

“Nevertheless, you only have to take such a basic of life as language to see what I mean. Chinese and Japanese are virtually interchangeable.”

He paused a moment to see if the Japanese were going to protest. “Until the fifth century there was no written Japanese language at all. Rather, they relied on
kataribe
, people trained from birth to be professional memorizers, building up a finely detailed oral history of early Japan. But that, as we know today, is a mark of a primitive civilization. Chinese characters were introduced into Japan in the fifth century, but the practice of using
kataribe
was so firmly entrenched in a culture always reluctant to change that it persisted for at least another three hundred years.”

“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.”