The Nicholas Linnear Novels (165 page)

Passing around the southwestern curve of the Imperial moat, Senjin came upon the great avenue, the Uchibori-dori, at the spot which in the West would be called a square, but for which there was no corresponding word in Japanese. Past the Ministry of Transportation, Senjin went into the large building housing the Metropolitan Police Force. It was, as usual at this time of the night, very quiet.

Ten minutes later he was hard at work at his desk. The sign on the front of his cubicle read:
CAPTAIN SENJIN OMUKAE, DIVISION COMDR, METROPOLITAN HOMICIDE.

Under the knife, Nicholas Linnear swam in a sea of memory. The anesthetic of the operation, in removing him from reality, destroyed the barriers of time and space so that, like a god, Nicholas was everywhere and everywhen all at the same moment.

Memory of three years ago became a moment of today, a pearling drop of essence, distilled from the blurred seasons passing too swiftly.

Nicholas spreading his hands, palms up.
I look at these, Justine, and wonder what they’re for besides inflicting pain and death.

Justine slides one of her hands in his.
They’re also gentle hands, Nick. They caress me and I melt inside.

He shakes his head.
That’s not enough. I can’t help thinking what they’ve done. I don’t want to kill again.
Voice trembling.
I don’t believe that I ever could have.

You never sought out death, Nick. You’ve always killed in self-defense, when your insane cousin Saigo came after us both, then when his mistress, Akiko, tried to seduce and kill you.

Yet way before that, I sought out the training, first
bujutsu,
the way of the Samurai warrior, then
ninjutsu.
Why?

What answer do you think will satisfy you?
Justine says softly.

That’s just it,
Nicholas cries in anguish.
I don’t know!

I think that’s because there
is
no answer.

Swimming in the heavy sea of memory, he thinks, But there
must
be an answer. Why did I become what I have become?

A flash of spoken word, uttered long, long ago:
To be a true champion, Nicholas, one must explore the darkness, too.
Immediately, he rejects the remembered words.

He sees the stone basin in the shape of an old coin that lies within the grounds of his house. He recalls, in a starburst of memory, taking up the bamboo ladle in order to slake Justine’s summer thirst. For a moment the dark belly of the basin is less than full. Then he can see, carved into its bottom, the Japanese ideogram for
michi.
It symbolizes a path; also a journey.

His journey out of childhood and into the ranks of the ninja. How rash he had been to rush into that hideous darkness. How foolhardy to put himself into such moral peril. Did he think that he could learn such black, such formidable arts without consequence? A child, unthinking, unknowing, hurls a stone into the middle of a pristine, sylvan pond. And is astounded by the change in the pond’s appearance because of that one act. All at once the calm, mirrored skin of tree and sky is shattered as ripples advance outward from the trembling epicenter. Image of tree and sky waver, distorted out of reality, then disintegrate into chaos. And down below, the mysterious fish, hidden in veils of shadow, stir, squirming toward the surface.

Was it not the same with Nicholas’s decision to study
ninjutsu
?

He floats. Time, like sensation, is wholly absent, banished to another, weightier realm, but recalling
michi,
he thinks of the stone basin on the grounds of his house northwest of Tokyo. Before it was his, it had belonged to Itami, his aunt; Saigo’s mother. In his battle with Akiko, she had sheltered him, had aided him, and he had come to call her Haha-san, Mother.

Itami loved Nicholas, even though—perhaps partly because—he had killed Saigo, who had stalked Nicholas, murdering Nicholas’s friends as he had come ever closer to killing Nicholas.

Saigo was totally evil,
Itami says.
There was an uncanny purity to him that in other circumstances might have been admirable. I wished him dead. How could it be otherwise? Everything he came in contact with withered and died. He was a spirit-destroyer.

If it had been the same with Akiko, Saigo’s lover, she would surely have succeeded in destroying Nicholas. But her purity of purpose, her flame, had encountered Nicholas’s spirit, and had flickered in its power.

Akiko, as part of Saigo’s continuing revenge, had, through extensive plastic surgery, taken the face of Nicholas’s first love, Yukio. But against her will, Akiko had fallen in love with Nicholas. Because of her vow to Saigo, she was trapped into seeking Nicholas’s death, and in the end Nicholas knew he would have to kill her in order to save himself. But as he had confronted her, he had wondered whether he could bring himself to kill her, for she, too, had engendered strong, dangerous feelings in him.

Even now, suspended in nothingness, he is not certain of what he would have done had not the gods intervened. The earthquake that hit north of Tokyo opened up the ground on which Akiko stood. Nicholas tried to save her, but she slipped away, down into the darkness, down into the shifting shadows beneath the rippling crust of the earth.

I am not proud that I destroyed Saigo, your son,
Nicholas says.

Of course not,
Itami says.
You acted with honor. You are your mother’s son.

Itami is eighty when this exchange occurs, three years ago, an hour before the gods will take Akiko to their bosom in the center of the earth. Six months later Itami is dead, and Nicholas, weeping at her funeral, thinks of cherry blossoms at the height of their ethereal beauty, falling to the ground, where they are trampled under the feet of gaily scampering children.

Sadness, unlike sensation, remains with him, bending his inner gaze to the slowly beating heart of his tiny daughter, blue-skinned, as fragile and translucent as a Ming vase. Kept alive by tubes and pure oxygen for three cruel weeks while she struggles valiantly to cling to what fragment of life was willed her, she finally expires.

As if in a movie, Nicholas watches in mute despair Justine’s mourning. He had not thought it possible for a human being to shed so many tears. For months her anguish is absolute, blotting out the entire world around her.

And how does Nicholas mourn? Not with tears, not with the self-absorbedness of body and spirit that the mother—within whose body the new life grew, and who already shared with her that mysterious, intimate bond, soul abutting soul—must most wickedly shed like a serpent’s dead skin. He dreams.

He dreams of vapor curling. Lost, no direction home, he falls through vapor. Gravity drags at him with such an inexorable pull that he knows he will drop a great distance. He knows that he had just begun to fall. And, knowing that, with absolute certainty, he wants nothing more than to stop falling. And cannot. He falls. He screams.

And awakens, his body coiled and sweat-soaked, and cannot return to sleep. Night after night bolting awake, licking his salty lips, staring at the ceiling, at the vapor curling.

Nicholas had come to Japan with Justine’s father to merge their computer-chip manufacturing arm with that of Sato International. Now, in desperation, Nicholas throws himself into his new work, the reason he has stayed on in Japan after Akiko’s death. The hellishly complex merger has been consummated, and the business of the chip manufacturing has to be coordinated with Sato International. Nicholas and Tanzan Nangi, the vast conglomerate’s head, have become friends.

Together they are manufacturing a revolutionary computer chip, known as a Sphynx T-PRAM, a totally programmable random-access memory chip. The ramifications in the computer industry of such a discovery are staggering—and so have been the profits. IBM has tried to deal itself in, offering the services of its infinitely expandable research and development department in exchange for the chip’s secret; similarly, Motorola has offered them a lucrative partnership. But the chip’s design is strictly proprietary, and, to Nicholas’s and Nangi’s surprise, no one has come near to duplicating the amazing chip.

Nicholas and Nangi have decided to go it alone.

With Justine so withdrawn, Nicholas spends more and more time with Nangi, and he supposes it would have continued that way for a very long time had it not been for his headaches. Not the headaches, really, so much as their cause: the tumor.

It is benign, but because it is growing, it needs to be removed. This cause for alarm is what breaks their dead daughter’s spell over Justine. Finding she is still needed, Justine returns to life. Waiting for the results of the tests, the operation, the two of them find a new intimacy. But, Justine tells him, she is taking precautions. She is not yet ready to return to the psychic ordeal of pregnancy.

The anesthesia is like a carpet upon which Nicholas walks in slippered feet, in a direction unknown to him. In that sense it is like life, and unlike
michi,
the path, also the journey, which are known.

Nicholas, gazing upon the angelic face of his daughter, who lives again and forever in the theater of his mind, for the first time openly wishes to abandon
michi,
his path, his journey. He wishes to change his karma. In the past, he has bent his fate as if it were an alder staff. But now he wishes to break it in two, turning it into an instrument of his own will.

This is what he longs for as, with an open heart, he tries to capture the spirit of his dead daughter, to observe her in the same manner in which he monitored her slowly beating heart. To gather to him like tender blossoms the pitifully few days of her life in order to know what made her strong, what made her cry, what caused her to laugh.

But it is impossible. Even floating godlike in othertime, otherplace, the essence of her passes through his trembling fingers like grains of sand disappearing into the heart of the desert. And here, in front of only one witness—himself—he does what he could not do for three years.

He weeps bitter tears for her…

He awoke to a whiteness so pure that for a moment his blood seemed to congeal, thinking of vapor curling, falling without end, dropping like a stone down a well.

His scream brought the nurses running, their rubber-soled shoes squeaking on the polished linoleum floor. It brought Justine awake with a start, her heart lurching because she had not even been aware that she had fallen asleep at his side, holding his hand. She had done that unconsciously, the pad of her thumb against the branched blue vein on the back of his hand, feeling the slow pulse of blood there as, three years before, she had listened for the slow pulse of her doomed daughter’s heartbeat.

The nurses brushed Justine away, not with any animosity, but with the cool indifference born of efficiency which was so much more difficult to bear, since they were making it perfectly clear to her how useless she was now.

Nicholas, in the frantic thrashing of new consciousness, had torn out both the IV drip and the catheter. The nurses clucked over him, whispering to him in Japanese, which, in three years, Justine had only managed to learn on a rudimentary level. She found herself resenting the added intimacy of these young Japanese women who bathed him, shaved him, and took care of his bowel movements.

She stood in a corner, a larger figure than any of the nurses, trying to peer over their shoulders, terrified that something untoward had happened to Nicholas, angry that she was reduced to standing helplessly aside.

What if he should die? She clutched at her throat as her heart turned to ice. It was winter; there was snow on the ground. She had not taken off her coat, even though it was warm in the room. Justine was always chilled now.

Dear God, save him, she prayed. She was not religious, did not even now know whether she actually believed in God. But for now she could do nothing more than pray, which at least held a measure of solace because it was something only she could do for Nicholas, and she held that knowledge close to her as a child does her teddy bear when night brings moving shadows close to her bed.

“Is my husband all right?” she asked in halting Japanese.

“There is no cause for alarm,” the woman Justine identified as the head nurse said.

Hospitalese was the same the world over, Justine thought. No one offered an opinion on anything, ever.

As she watched the nurses go about their arcane ministrations, she wondered what she was doing in Japan anyway. In the beginning she had readily agreed to staying on here. It was, after all, what Nick really wanted, and in any event, her boss, Rick Millar, had wanted to open a Tokyo branch of his advertising agency. It seemed perfect, like the happy ending of a novel.

Reality had turned out to be something quite different. For one thing, she was a foreigner, and opening a business—any business—that was not wholly Japanese-owned was a formidable task. In fact, looking back on it, Justine recognized that she would not have been able to open the agency in the first place had it not been for the influence of Tanzan Nangi and Nick.

She was amazed at how much power Nick had here. After all, he was a foreigner as well. Except that the Japanese she had met treated him with the deference they reserved only for their own kind. It was partly Nick himself, of course, but the respect also came because he was the Colonel’s son.

Colonel Denis Linnear had commanded a section of the British forces in Singapore during World War II. It was there that he had met Nicholas’s mother, Cheong. After the war he was assigned to General MacArthur’s SCAP occupation headquarters staff in Tokyo because of his expertise in understanding the Japanese mind.

The Colonel had been an extraordinary man, and the Japanese had recognized this quality in him. Their ministers had gravitated to him as moons will to a planet. When he died, his funeral was as well-attended as that of a Japanese emperor.

For another thing, she was a female, and no matter how much was written concerning the strides women were making in Japan, they were still treated as second-class citizens. They were tolerated in the workplace, but advancement was all but unheard of. The fact that she, a woman, was heading up a company made hiring all but impossible. No Japanese man of any talent would apply for a job, because he couldn’t take the venture seriously, and she quickly found out that when she hired all women, she got no clients. No one would take the agency’s products seriously. Within eighteen months she was out of business.