The Nicholas Linnear Novels (102 page)

Something was happening within the
dōjō
that Tengu did not understand, some unconscious whirlwind, some spiritual flashpoint of which he was not part. He tried—and pretended to be a part to those around him—but he knew inwardly that it was useless. He was lost here and he could not say why. Had he been able to step outside of himself and observe the totality of the circumstances within which he found himself, he would have seen that he simply lacked the dedication, the intense concentration of energies that would have allowed him to become a part of the mourning, the renewed dedication of spirit that came with Kusunoki’s passing.

Tengu developed many fears during these volatile days when he was obliged to expend tremendous amounts of psychic energy in concealing his true mission at the Tenshin Shoden Katori from those about him. But none was as acute or as draining as the fear he developed of Phoenix.

Next to Kusunoki himself, Phoenix was the most powerful of the
jonin.
In fact, to Tengu’s way of thinking, Phoenix was more of a threat than Kusunoki ever had been. For one thing, he was younger, his vitality at the peak. For another, he was an explorer of pathways it seemed to Tengu that Kusunoki had long ago turned away from. Foolishly.

Too, Phoenix had always spent more time with the lowly
genin
than Kusunoki ever had, at least during Tengu’s tenure at the
dōjō.
The old
sensei
had increasingly seemed to devote himself to quiet contemplation and the instruction of certain favored pupils, among them the lone female, Suijin.

So it was that just before dawn Tengu would slip silently back into his cubicle, exhausted and utterly drained after a night spent alternately hiding and searching, his heart pounding heavily every time he sensed the approach of another.

Terror stalked him. He lived in fear that Phoenix would become aware of his clandestine activities. The thought of coming under the scrutiny of that glowering countenance was too much for him to contemplate for long. Better by far to die by his own hand than to be delivered up to the vengeance of such a one.

To Tengu, who had been brought up with all the superstition and ritualism of country folk, it was like trying to battle a
kami.

Phoenix was a shade, something that Tengu could not understand. Seeing him, seeing the fiercely visaged tattooed tiger rampant across his shoulder and back, Tengu was gripped by a primal paralysis that he could not break. Therefore, despite what Protorov had advised, he kept his boldness in check, masking himself against discovery while he continued his recreancy.

When Nangi returned to the larger office suite his face was entirely composed. He had done all he could for the moment. It was now up to Allan Su and his staff to go through Anthony Chin’s books and ferret out just what had been done to All-Asia, to see if it was still a viable entity. Su had advised that they close their doors until the matter was determined but Nangi, knowing how rumors flew in the Colony, had decided to keep the bank open and to issue an immediate story about Anthony Chin’s dismissal for fiduciary improprieties to both the Chinese- and English-language newspapers. He had no compunction about ruining the career of the man who had brought his bank to the brink of financial destruction.

The waters in Hong Kong must be muddied, Nangi had told Su. “We must do whatever we can to buy time,” he had said. “I do not want to transfer in capital from here to cover a run in an already skittish atmosphere. I will not throw good money after bad. Remember that, Mr. Su. Your job and those of all the others under you is in your hands. Please don’t fail.”

Running over it all again, he was certain that he had covered everything. Now it was in the hands of God. Let Him decide the fate of All-Asia. Of course he had not told Su that the
keiretsu
could not afford a major transfer of funds. But if the bank could not provide it, capital would have to come from somewhere.

Satisfied for the moment, he turned his full attention to matters within Sato’s office. He remembered what he was going to ask Linnear when the phone call had deflected him. He stopped behind the back of the sofa on which Nicholas, Sato, and Ishii were sitting. Tomkin was now sprawled in an oversized chair, facing them.

“Linnear-san,” he said, extracting another cigarette and producing his lighter, “before I was inopportunely called away, you said that it was highly unusual for death itself to be associated with this
Mo
.”

Nicholas, his face pale, said nothing, and Nangi, staring hard as he lit up, wondered whether he had hit a nerve that would somehow serve him in his quest for dominance of the
gaijin.

“I wonder,” Nangi continued, pouring blue smoke from his half-open mouth, “whether you would be kind enough to tell me the
Wu-Shing
’s purpose.”

Now Nicholas had a choice of losing face or possibly causing a panic among the Japanese and thus endangering the negotiations Tomkin had made eminently clear must be completed this week. He had told Tomkin part of it back in the hotel room on Friday, and now he had told them all a little more. But only he, Nicholas, knew it all, and the ramifications were so terrifying that, at least for the moment, he preferred not to think about them. Yet tenacious Nangi, intelligent Nangi was about to force his hand and in so doing wreck how many years of Tomkin’s planning?

His mind was racing, working on the problem, when his head turned as if of its own volition.
Haragei
—his peculiar sixth sense—was warning him…of what? Tomkin! What was wrong? Nicholas began to move even before fully coherent conclusions had been made.

Raphael Tomkin’s brown eyes, usually so full of cunning and impenetrable guile, were now liquid and runny, as if all the color of the irises were drooling out across his lower lids. His pupils were dilated and he seemed to be having trouble focusing.

Nicholas touched him, felt the minute vibration in his torso, arhythmic, fluttery, abnormal.

“Quickly,” Nicholas said, “call for a doctor.”

“There’s one in the building,” Sato said, motioning to Ishii, who was already halfway to the door. “He’s ours and he’s very good.”

Tomkin tried to open his mouth and could not speak. His hands grasped at Nicholas’ jacket, crumpling the fabric in thick swatches beneath his clawed fingers. Within his eyes jumped the red spark of fear and terror.

“It’s all right,” Nicholas said, his tone soothing, “there’s a doctor on his way.” Something was trying to surface within his mind, a half-remembered memory, tiny, fleeting, seemingly insignificant at the time. What was it?

Tomkin’s face was mottled and so close to him Nicholas could feel the beat of his pulse like an engine gone wild. He put his forefinger against the underside of the other man’s trembling wrist. After a moment, he moved his finger, then again. His mind was numb with disbelief. He could not find a pulse!

Tomkin’s mouth was working and he pulled Nicholas toward him wanting, needing perhaps, to whisper. Nicholas put his ear against Tomkin’s lips and listened hard. Hard breath like a bellows working overtime and the sickly sweet stench of decay. It brought up the buried memory, but just as he reached for it, he heard Tomkin’s voice, sere, fibrous, unearthly.

“Greydon,” Nicholas heard between pants. “For. Christ’s. Sake. Get. Grey. Don.
Now.
”

Pink light reflecting off the
kanzashi
in Miss Yoshida’s hair turned the water-soaked stones glistening at the bottom of a pool into gems. She knelt just inside the open
fusuma
on the fiftieth floor of the Shinjuku Suiryū Building, home of Sato Petrochemicals. It had been given over to a master interior architect and then a
sensei
of gardening in order to create a sanctuary of peaceful contemplation in the smoky madhouse of downtown Tokyo.

A whisper of wind came from somewhere in the pearly atmosphere above Miss Yoshida’s bowed head. Off to the right rose a stand of willowy green bamboo, tall, youthful, filled with eternal suppleness, that ineffable quality the Japanese so treasure, whose aura can renew the tired spirit.

Miss Yoshida, dressed in a fashionable dark red suit, knelt by the side of the pool. Though she was Sato’s administrative assistant, the simple fact was that tradition dictated that she be known as an Office Lady. It was a tag she had been fighting for years without any sign of success. And indeed under other circumstances she would not have been here but would have fulfilled her traditional female duties of being a wife and mother, of keeping her home in perfect order.

But six years ago her husband had been struck by a careening truck as he stepped off a sidewalk jammed with the crush of midday pedestrian traffic. His skull had been crushed instantly. His death had left Miss Yoshida all alone to care for their one son, Kozo, who was then beginning high school, the one linked with prestigious Tōdai. Miss Yoshida and her husband had labored long and hard—she had even appealed to Sato to use his influence in this matter—to get Kozo in. And they had been dismayed at the boy’s appalling display of ungratefulness; he seemed totally oblivious to the great step upward to a successful future his parents had wrangled for him.

Miss Yoshida sighed now, her shoulders hunched as if beneath a great weight as she recalled these events.

At first she had tried accepting the invitation to come and live with her mother-in-law. But that had lasted only a few months for Miss Yoshida found that she had merely exchanged one form of hell for another. By living in her mother-in-law’s house she put herself under the direct control of the older woman. She was a
hera-mochi
of ferocious intensity, insisting on taking over the guidance of the money in her son’s life insurance and multiple bank accounts. And the servitude under which Miss Yoshida was forced to abide became too much for her.

She took Kozo and fled the baleful eye of the
hera-mochi,
returning to the same section of the city she had loved as a child, renting a small apartment there.

And because there was only Kozo left in her life now she became a
Kyoiku mama,
an education mother, constantly working with her son to improve his grades so that he could get into the elite
juku
, the private study groups that gathered on Sundays and on national holidays over and above the 240 days regular classes were in session. Miss Yoshida wanted Kozo to enroll in a
juku
because she knew the level of teaching in the classroom at his school. Because students were not allowed to repeat or skip grades, the level of teaching was geared to the slightly slower students in each class and these, Miss Yoshida had judged, were on a level far below her own son’s.

And through her own diligence and Kozo’s innate intelligence, he was soon asked to join a particularly prestigious
juku
which rented a classroom at Tōdai.

Miss Yoshida was particularly pleased because she remembered her own schooling. In junior college, where all of her classmates were women, Miss Yoshida was taught how to behave in society, how to treat her prospective mother-in-law, how to raise children, and how to prepare herself for all the myriad vicissitudes of married life. It was no more than a finishing-school education. She had been bitter about that and had vowed that when she had a female baby, that child would have an entirely different form of education.

But her
karma
had lain in another direction, and when her physician had told her that the one child was all she could ever have, she resigned herself to seeing that her son received the finest in Japanese education so that all the great doors to the business world would be open to him. For everyone knew that without an education at only a handful of universities a young man would be cast adrift on a lonely and unproductive sea.

Thus she ignored Kozo’s complaints that his teachers at school resented his enrollment in the
juku.
They felt, he told her, that the
juku
undermined their own teaching and they were jealous at the loss of control and thus made life more difficult for him in class.

“Nonsense,” Miss Yoshida told him. “That’s merely an excuse to shirk your studies. Do you have any idea how much the
juku
costs me each month?” Of course she would not tell him, but privately she was glad that her husband had been such a hoarder; he was a good provider even in death.

Two years ago—has it already been so long? she asked herself—Kozo was ready to graduate high school. All semester long, he had dedicated himself along with his class to studying for the Tōdai entrance examinations. White faced and tense he would leave the apartment every morning, not returning from the library until late in the evening.

Then, in the three weeks after New Year’s, with all regular classes dissolved for the year, Kozo began the rigorous around-the-clock cramming that was known as
shaken jigoku,
examination hell. Miss Yoshida shuddered now when she thought of those words.

She arranged for Kozo to have one entire section of the apartment for his intensive studies. And then one morning…

Miss Yoshida’s shoulders shook as she sobbed out loud at the verge of the exquisite garden, the rustling of the leaves, the musical notes of the tiny waterfall which flowed over the smooth ochre stones lost on her.
No!
a voice within her cried.
Why torture yourself again? Why make yourself remember?

But all the while she knew why. Penance. Silent tears streamed down her rounded cheeks, staining her silk blouse, beading on her linen suit jacket.

Ah, Buddha! How can I ever forget the moment when I entered his rooms that morning and found him hanging, twisted in his bedsheet, the small stool kicked over on its side. Swinging back and forth like a monstrous metronome and, oh, when he was a child and sleeping peacefully, that small secret smile on his lips, he would twist his sheet around his legs—his legs, not his neck.

Oh, my poor Kozo!

Three months after she had buried him in a plot next to his father’s, she had read a newspaper article by Professor Soichi Watanabe of Tokyo’s Sophia University. In part, he lamented “the bitterness of educational servitude” young boys were forced to undergo, “a sentence from which no child can escape.” And she had wept all over again, appalled at her own lack of understanding or compassion.