The Nicholas Linnear Novels (168 page)

Who could fail to fall in love with one such as she? Certainly not Cotton Branding.

“Is it possible we haven’t been introduced?” he said in his most affable tone of voice.

Shisei looked at him with the wide-apart eyes of a fawn. “Anything’s possible. But you look to me like an old friend.” She told him her name.

He laughed. “I believe I would have remembered that.”

She smiled, as if drawn in by his ironic amusement. “Then I must be mistaken,” she said. “Perhaps it’s because I have seen you on television. I feel as if I already know you, Senator Branding.” Her voice was light, musical, and it pleased him, despite an accent so heavy that he had at first thought she had said, I feel as if I already own you.

“Call me Cook,” he said. “All my friends do.”

She looked at him quizzically, and he laughed. “It’s a nickname,” he said. “I grew up in a large family. We all took turns with the chores, but I was the only child who enjoyed cooking or was any good at it. I kept that chore, and got the name.”

A band was playing, out on the brick deck, amid the Tuscan terra-cotta pots filled with Martha Washington geraniums and globular English yews, and they went out into the star-filled darkness. The night was typically wet but, because of a breeze, not uncomfortably so.

“Do you think,” Shisei asked as they danced, “that these are desperate times?”

The band was playing a tune Branding did not recognize, something with a sinuous beat. “Desperate in what way?”

She smiled sweetly, showing him just a bit of her tiny white teeth. “One need only look to the Middle East, to Nicaragua, to the Midwest here in the States, where it is said another dust bowl is forming, or to the oceans here and in Europe, where it is no longer safe for fish to live or for humans to swim. Already I have read a dozen reports about restrictions on consumption of seafood and fish.”

“You’re talking on the one hand about ideological antipathies, and on the other about ecological catastrophes,” Branding said. “The only thing the two have in common is that they’ve been part of our world virtually since the dawn of time.”

“But that is my meaning,” she said. “Desperation is only dangerous when it is looked upon as commonplace.”

“I think you’ve got that wrong,” Branding said. “It’s
evil
that is most dangerous when it becomes commonplace.”

“Are we speaking practically,” Shisei asked, “or morally?”

Her body had become entwined with his, and Branding felt her flesh through her thin clothes. He was especially aware of the muscles of her legs and the heated juncture of her thighs as she rubbed against him like a cat.

He looked down at her, was struck again by the innocence of her face. Its sunny, careless expression belied her body’s actions. It was as if he held two people in his arms, one who existed before the dawn of sexual desire, the other rapt in it.

“I suppose I was speaking theoretically,” Branding said a bit thickly. “Real life has proved that evil is always banal.”

Shisei put her head in the hollow of his shoulder, the way a child might when she is tired or in need of affection. But she was not a child. Branding felt with a start the hardness of her breasts. The erotic charge was like an electrical current running through him, and he missed a step, almost stumbling over her tiny feet.

She looked up into his face and smiled. Could she be laughing at him?

“As a child,” she said in time to the music, so that she might have been singing, “I was taught that banality was in itself evil, or in any event, not acceptable.” A light sheen lay along the skin of her arm, like the dew on the geranium petals. It seemed to Branding to highlight the tender firmness of her flesh. “There is a Japanese word—
kata.
It means rules, but also the proper form to maintain. Do you understand? Banality is outside
kata,
not of our world.”

“Your world?”

“In Japan, Senator, training is everything.
Kata
is all. Without them both, chaos would surely ensue, and man would be little better than the ape.”

Branding had heard many stories of Japanese prejudice but had never thought much of them. Now, hearing that bias firsthand, it rankled. He was a man who disliked prejudice in any form—it was one of the reasons he disliked this crowd, why he had had so many bitter fights with his father, the blue-blood Brahmin, and why, after college, he had never returned home. It was in his nature to struggle against such ignorance.

“Surely you mean laws,” he said, attempting to understand her. “Laws are what make mankind civilized.”

“Mankind,” she said, “enacts laws to suit individual purpose.
Kata
is equal among all Japanese.”

He smiled. “Among all Japanese, perhaps. But not among all people.” He realized too late that his tone as well as his smile was the kind he used when, years ago, his daughter said something amusing but essentially foolish.

Shisei’s eyes sparked, and she broke away from him. “As a senator I assumed you would be sufficiently intelligent to understand.”

Branding, standing with her on the patio with couples in movement all around them, was all too conscious of the stares they were getting. He held out his hands. “Let’s dance.”

Shisei studied him, unmoving. Then she smiled, as if having taken in his embarrassment, she had been amply repaid for his unintentioned insult. She moved smoothly, effortlessly, into his arms. Again Branding felt the heat of her body insinuate itself erotically against him.

The band had switched to the kind of smoky ballads Frank Sinatra loved to sing.

“What kind of music do you like?” Shisei asked as they slowly circled the patio.

He shrugged. “Cole Porter, I suppose. George Gershwin. As a kid I used to love to hear Hoagy Carmichael play. Do you know ‘Sweet and Low Down’?”

“I love Bryan Ferry, David Bowie, Iggy Pop,” she said as if he had not answered her. “Am I going too fast?”

He knew what she meant. “I’ve heard of them,” he said, somewhat defensively.

“Energy,” Shisei said, “is the kick I need with my champagne.”

He studied her face and, feeling his heart beating fast, wondered that his adrenaline had started running. It was after midnight, a time by which he would have normally said his good-nights and been driving back to his wind- and salt-weathered house on Dune Road, bored and slightly depressed, as if contact with these people was somehow pernicious. He found much to his surprise that he had no inclination to leave.

He wanted to continue dancing, to keep her in his arms, but she said, “I’m hungry.”

The clams casino and the lobster had already come and gone. They picked over what was left: cold charcoal-broiled chicken, slightly limp salad, corn on which the butter had congealed.

Branding watched with fascination as Shisei ate like a little animal, hunched over her plate. Her long gold-lacquered fingernails speared into the flesh of chicken and corn. She ate quickly, economically and voraciously. She seemed to have forgotten his presence, or the presence of anyone else, for that matter.

When she was done she sucked the fat and juices off each slender finger in turn, her full lips distended outward. It seemed such a blatantly sexual gesture that Branding was taken aback, until the innocence and unselfconsciousness of her expression reassured him. Shisei wiped her mouth on a paper napkin, and her eyes met his.

Branding reacted as if he were a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Then he reminded himself that she could not read his thoughts. He smiled that thoroughly synthetic smile politicians perfect that means nothing to them.

“When you do that,” Shisei said, tossing the crumpled napkin aside, “you look as stupid as a puppet.”

For a moment Branding was so stunned he could think of nothing to say. Then, angry, he flushed. He set his plate aside and got up. “You’ll excuse me.”

She reached out, took his hand in hers. “Are you so easily driven away? I would have thought that a senator of the United States would be open to the truth.”

Gently but firmly he unwound her fingers from his. “Good night,” he said in his frostiest tone.

Now, the morning after, as he strolled down the beach, his feet already numbed by the Atlantic, Branding tried—and failed—to turn his thoughts away from Shisei. He wondered if he would ever see her again. He thought he recognized something dangerous, perhaps even destructive in her. But there was something delicious in that knowledge as well, like standing at the edge of an abyss or playing chicken in a souped-up hot rod. Coming closer than anyone else to disaster and dancing away unharmed was, after all, the object, the trophy of excitement he—and other teenagers like him—had tried to hold on to for as long as possible. Like Peter Pan desperately trying to hold on to his reckless youth.

Oh Christ, Branding thought. What in God’s name is happening to me?

But he already knew that it was nothing in God’s name.

Justine, coming out onto the
engawa,
said, “There’s a letter for you. It’s got a Marco Island, Florida, postmark. I think it’s from Lew Croaker.”

Nicholas looked up from the patch of ground where he had been watching the afternoon shadows creeping along the ground. He took the letter from her without any expression.

“Nick?” Justine sat beside him on the Japanese porch. She did not touch him. “What is it?” Her eyes changed color, from hazel to green, as they often did in times of emotional stress. The red motes in her left iris were fired by the sunlight. Her long legs were crossed at the knees, the dark mane of her hair swept back across her shoulders. Her skin was creamy, as lightly freckled as a teenager’s. Her nose, slightly too wide, gave her character, her plump lips adding a note of sensuality. The years had been kind to her; she looked very much as she had on the day Nicholas had met her ten years ago on the beach at West Bay Bridge on the East End of Long Island, when she had been a lost little girl. Now she was a woman, a wife; briefly, a mother.

Nicholas passed the letter back to her, said “Read it” with such a total lack of inflection that another flood of anxiety washed over her. Ever since he had come home from the operation at the hospital—nearly eight months now—he seemed a different person. He did not like the meals she prepared for him with what she knew were his favorite foods; his sleep patterns had changed. Always a sound sleeper, except after the baby had died, she often heard him up and pacing the floor at three in the morning. Worst of all, he had not worked out, even minimally, since recovering from the operation. Instead he came out on the
engawa
each day and sat, staring into the dust, or he drifted through the gardens with a blank expression on his face.

At one point she was so concerned that she phoned his surgeon, Dr. Hanami. Nicholas saw the doctor, who had removed the tumor, once every two weeks, and he assured her that there was nothing organically wrong. “Your husband has sustained a major trauma, Mrs. Linnear,” Dr. Hanami had said with the surety of God. “Nothing permanent, I assure you. It is not caused by his anti-seizure medication. Whatever your husband is going through is temporary and purely psychological. His powers of recuperation are quite remarkable. Whatever this minor problem is will pass in a matter of time.”

But Justine knew better. She knew how much psychological stress Nicholas could take, since she had been with him through the time Saigo had stalked them both. She knew how well-prepared Nicholas had been for that stalking and assault, and how cleverly he had managed to outmaneuver Akiko, Saigo’s former lover. An operation was hardly enough to cause this reaction in him.

Justine slit open the envelope, unfolded the typewritten letter. It was from Croaker, Nicholas’s best friend. Lew Croaker had been a detective lieutenant in the NYPD when Justine met him. He had been assigned to the mysterious murders that Saigo had been committing. A year after Nicholas had killed Saigo, Croaker had come to Japan to help his best friend Nicholas in apprehending a Soviet agent who was after Tenchi, Tanzan Nangi’s ultrasecret oil-drilling project with the Japanese government. In fierce combat with a particularly powerful agent, Croaker’s left hand had been severed. Since that time, Nicholas had been racked by guilt, feeling that Croaker would never have been there except for him. Justine knew better, just as she knew that Croaker did not blame Nicholas for what had happened. Nicholas, so Eastern in so many ways, was in this instance terribly Western.

“‘Dear Nick and Justine,’” she read. “‘Greetings from Marco Island. I suppose you’re wondering why we’re not still in Key West. Well, the simple truth is that I got bored at the End of the Line. That’s what the natives call Key West. It’s a strange place, even for Florida, which is a goddamn weird state any way you slice it. You’ve got to be a serious drunkard or a real dropout to stay there. So, we left.

“‘Here on Marco Island the fishing’s fine and Alix is becoming an expert with marlin. I’ve bought a little boat, and we’ve been chartering it out. Making a living at it, too, though I doubt I’ll ever get rich. On the other hand, I’ve busted so many boats out here trying to smuggle coke into the country, the Coast Guard’s given me honorary commander status. Once a cop, always a cop, I guess.

“‘I keep waiting for Alix to tell me she misses New York and the modeling scene, but she hasn’t—at least up till now.

“‘Nick, my new hand works! That doctor you set me up with at Todai Med Center in Tokyo was a whiz. I don’t really know what it is on the end of my left wrist, but it’s amazing! It works so well, in fact, that Alix has taken to calling me Captain Sumo.

“‘The strength in this new hand is awesome! It took me nearly two months before I could control the power in it. Another four months and I got dexterity. It seems to be made of a composite of titanium, graphite, and some kind of polycarbonate, all wrapped up in an airtight sheath. I’m only sorry you and Justine were away when I was in Tokyo getting it put on.’”

Justine paused here, risking a glance at Nicholas. When they had gotten back from their trip to Bangkok, where several of the Sphynx components were being manufactured by a Sato International subsidiary, she was furious that they had missed Croaker’s visit. Hadn’t Nicholas known, she wondered, when his friend would arrive? After all, Nicholas had been the one to set Croaker up with the surgeon at Todai. Then she had wondered whether Nicholas had purposely taken them on the Bangkok trip at just that time. She had begun to suspect that he did not want to see his friend—and certainly had no desire to look at some prosthetic that would remind him of his guilt.