The Nicholas Linnear Novels (195 page)

“Here I have anticipated you,” Nangi said. He produced from his jacket pocket a folded sheet of paper. He handed it to Ikusa. “I have taken the liberty of drawing up a short list of firms I thought would be appropriate.”

“I don’t think Nami would approve of your dictating the parameters of such a search,” Ikusa said.

Nangi shrugged. “I understand. Perhaps, though, you could look at the list and tell me where I have made a mistake in judgment.”

This appealed to Ikusa’s ego. He dropped his gaze to the list. He went through it three times before he said, with some apparent surprise, “As it happens, there is a firm here that Nami would find acceptable. Nakano Industries is on Nami’s own list of clean
keiretsu.
If you can convince the chairman of the merits of the merger, Nami would not oppose such a venture.”

Thinking, I’ve won, Nangi said, “Perhaps, Ikusa-san, it would not be inappropriate for you to have a word with Nakano Industries’ chairman.”

“As it happens, Ken Oroshi is an acquaintance of mine,” Ikusa said. “We play golf together several times a year.” He nodded thoughtfully. “I’ll see what I can do.”

They were approaching the far side of the park. Nangi could see a black Mercedes glistening in the west, waiting for Ikusa. The big man turned to Nangi, said, “I may have misjudged you, Nangi-san. Your proposal was well thought out. It pleases me. Nami approves of your actions. It is grateful for your loyalty.”

With that Ikusa moved swiftly away. It was not until he had climbed into the Mercedes and the car had disappeared into traffic that Nangi, breathing an inner sigh of relief, allowed himself to feel the elation of a difficult victory painstakingly won.

Justine lay on her back staring at the pattern the shadows of the trees made on the beamed ceiling. There seemed at this time of night, the first lonely beachhead of morning, an entire world alive in the hills and valleys above her head. In the old days of the Tokugawa shogunate, Nicholas had once told her, ninja hired by the shogun himself to enforce his will—even if it went counter to the tenets of
bushido,
the Way of the Samurai—hung in the rafters very much like these, waiting for their victims to fall asleep. Then, like silent bats, they would drop to the tatami mats, draw a silken cord around their victims’ necks, or, rendering them unconscious, would sling them across their backs, making off with them.

That was seventeenth century Japan. But some things, Justine was learning, did not change here. That was the essential difference between Japan and America. In America
everything
changed constantly.

Here ninja still existed. Justine ought to know. She was married to one.

Nicholas.

That name was enough to set her crying. Wiping the tears from her cheeks, she sat up and, pulling the covers around her chin, cursed herself for her essential weakness. Her father had wanted sons. Instead his wife had borne him two daughters. If I had been born male, Justine thought, perhaps I would not be so weak. But that in itself was a weak thought. Even Nangi—a Japanese—had told her as much.

She had come to cherish their twice-weekly lessons on the society of Japan. It was Nangi who described to her how Japanese women held the purse strings in the family, even to doling out weekly spending money for their husbands; how it was the mother-in-law who dominated family life, lording it over her son’s wife and children; how it was the geisha who afforded many of Japan’s most powerful and influential men their only opportunity to get drunk, turn maudlin and irrational, to weep upon a female breast as they once had when they were infants. It was the geisha, too, Nangi informed her, who listened with complete objectivity to knotty problems inherent in momentous state and industrial deals, and who offered clever advice to the same clients who cooed at their breasts.

Slowly she was coming to understand Japan and, with it, the people who inhabited the islands. She was both grateful to Nangi and amazed at his sensitivity to her insecurity. Even if he was playing Professor Higgins to her Pygmalion simply because she was Nicholas’s wife and he had a duty to make her comfortable, she knew that could not be all that motivated him. Seeing him praying in church, she had realized how she had underestimated Tanzan Nangi. He was filled with the kind of Christian charity that was all too rare even in America. To find it here in this alien landscape was a godsend.

She knew that Nangi and his cherished lessons were all that was keeping her here now. Nicholas was gone—God only knew where or for what reason. He had tried to explain it to her, but she could not understand what he was saying, as if she had lost the ability to decipher English. She knew only this: there had been an attack on him, and it would not be the last. But by whom?

A tanjian.

The word sent shivers of dread down her spine. Nicholas and Nangi had said that Akiko had been a kind of tanjian, but that this one—this
dorokusai—
was far more powerful.

“Oh, Nicky,” she whispered, “how I pray that God will watch over you and keep you safe.”

She went to church now because suddenly even Nangi and his lessons were not enough to make her feel safe. Something had happened.

Often she would see Nangi there, for she had chosen to attend services at St. Theresa’s, though there were certainly other churches that were nearer. Mass was a kind of return for her to the days when as a small child her mother would take her. She had never felt anything then but a kind of protective warmth, and later she understood why. Her mother had taken her and her sister Gelda out of a sense of hollow duty, rite by rote, because this was how
her
mother had brought her up. Justine’s mother had felt nothing for the mass or for the presence of God, and her children had eventually followed in her footsteps.

Now, in this ultimate crisis, Justine had returned in order to find some solace in the rituals that God decreed His children should follow. But she had found none. Church was as closed, as cold and incomprehensible to her, as it had been when she was a child.

Often she found herself inattentive to the service; she wanted only to slip into the pew beside Nangi and whisper in his ear. She desperately needed to talk to someone, but she could not bring herself to talk to him.

Here in Japan, with the darkness holding the light at bay, with Nicholas in the gravest danger, alone with her private fears, Justine had nothing to hold on to.

Fear and her memories of Nicholas before he had gone off into the Alps. After Nicholas had described how he must find the
sensei
who had trained Akiko, who he now believed to be tanjian, after Nangi had gone, there were just the two of them alone in the old wooden house.

Nicholas and Justine. And the tension between them, rising like a phantom or an animus in the gathering dusk.

They had looked at each other.

“Are you hungry?” Justine asked.

He shook his head. “How do I look?”

“The truth?” When he nodded, she had sat on the edge of the bed. “You look like hell, but you also look beautiful.”

He had closed his eyes then, as if her words had a physical presence. “We have some unfinished business, don’t we?”

“I don’t think that’s important now. What you’ve just—”

“No.” It was his hand on her arm as much as his exclamation that stopped her. “It
is
important. Justine, ever since I suspected that something was the matter with me—that I might be
Shiro Ninja—
I’ve been so frightened, so obsessed by the fear, so terrified that by being close to me you would become in some way contaminated by it, that all I could think of was pushing you away, of keeping you clear of the disaster zone.”

“Oh, Nicky,” she had said, her heart breaking, “it was what you did—distancing yourself from me—that frightened me most. All this other stuff—the magic, the tanjian, the
Shiro Ninja
—I can take.” She had rushed on, not wanting to give herself time to consider whether or not she was telling the whole truth; because if, as she suspected, she was as terrified as he was over this attack, it would do him no good to know it, it would only reinforce his intuition to keep her apart. And that, she knew, she could not tolerate. “All that matters is the two of us. Whatever happens, we have each other. You’re enough for me, darling, you always have been, you always will be.”

He had kissed her then, and she had been so grateful to feel his arms once again around her that she had wept. They had not broken the kiss even when Nicholas had drawn her fully onto the bed, even when his nimble fingers had unbuttoned her blouse, unzipped her jeans.

She had spread her legs on either side of his hips and, feeling his hands come up to cup her breasts, had settled over him. He had groaned deep into her throat.

Their lovemaking was long, slow, ecstatic. Justine kept delaying her orgasm, not wanting the pleasure to end. Nicholas had ended it for her. His release had triggered her own, and she had gasped, her eyes squeezed shut, feeling only him inside her, around her, below her, knowing that for this moment all she wanted to feel was him, only him.

And how she missed him now. Justine, in their bed, rested her cheek on her upraised knees, rocking herself back and forth in that gray, vulnerable time of night when one is ultimately, inescapably alone.

But she wasn’t alone, and this frightened her. She was terrified of her fright and what it might portend.

She could feel the seed stirring inside her, or imagined that she did. Dutifully, stoically, she got up, administered the self-pregnancy test she had given herself several days before. Five minutes later she had the results, the same as the first test she had given herself when she had returned from her doctor’s visit and he had told her the news.

She stared sightlessly at the slip of paper: positive. She was pregnant. When in God’s name had it happened? Of course she knew. She and Nicholas had made love so infrequently since his operation, she could count the number of times. Her doctor, an American, part of her ever so tenuous lifeline in Japan, had laughed at her shock. “It only takes one time, Justine,” he had said jocularly. “I thought you learned that long ago.”

If only Nick were here now, Justine thought in anguish. I could talk to him, explain my terror away. She shivered as if freezing, because she knew that part of her almost desperate longing for him now was the fear that Nicholas would not return from the Alps, that this tiny life would be all she would have of him. And the terror came again, almost overwhelming her this time.

How unfair of him to leave her this way, disappear into the night. Hadn’t she always been there for him, right by his side when he was most vulnerable? But men expected that from their women; did that mean women had no right to expect the same consideration from their men? Were the roles of the two sexes so immutably different?

She hated Nicholas now for abandoning her when she needed him the most. She could not help it, just as she could not stop the tears from forming, from flowing down her cheeks. I can’t make it alone, she thought. My world is breaking apart, spinning out of control.

Her mind was filled with funeral orations, the cloying scent of checkerboard bouquets of flowers, the smell of rain in the air, and newly-turned earth, gleaming caskets being lowered into the ground,
ashes to ashes, dust to dust,
the muffled sobs of the mourners, death hanging in the air like a suffocating shroud.

She tried to turn her mind away from death and could not; could not stop the prayer from forming on her lips.

“Dear God,” she whispered, “save me from myself.”

Douglas Howe had a residence on Seventeenth Street in the heart of the northwest district of Washington. It was a Federal-style building of four stories. The first floor served as offices, the second as quarters, when needed, for visiting notables. The third and fourth floors were devoted exclusively to Douglas Howe.

The residence, which was now worth a small fortune, was just down the block from the Corcoran Gallery of Art, whose glorious facade was eternally guarded by its brace of sleeping stone lions. The Corcoran was once described by Frank Lloyd Wright as “the best-designed building in Washington.” As such, Howe had decided that it was a fitting place to be near, both chic and immune to the incomprehensible whims of Washingtonian fashion.

Shisei approached Howe’s residence with a good deal of trepidation. Her time with Cotton Branding had made her feel a good deal less sanguine about what she had been hired to do. Only once before had she been affected by a man in the way Cook Branding affected her—and that time clearly did not count.

Shisei had been trained to emit emotion much as a television set emits images: in order to attract the attention of others. To accomplish such a feat with any degree of success, one had, of course, to train oneself to feel nothing. Objectivity rather than subjectivity was the rule—the law.

With Branding, Shisei had crossed the line, broken the law. Unwittingly at first, to be sure, but cross the line she had. Now she was entangled in her own emotions, and that was dangerous—especially with Douglas Howe, to whom emotions were like poker chips to be hoarded and used at the proper moments.

An aide opened the door to her knock and, recognizing her, ushered her into the library which abutted Howe’s office suite.

“The senator will be with you shortly,” the aide said, before leaving her alone with the great minds of man’s history. She idly let her fingers play along the expanse of leather-bound spines. She took out a volume of Nietzsche, read passages at random, thinking of the apologists for Nazism plundering poor Nietzsche, a man who denounced as pernicious the state—especially the German state—warping his concept of the moral superman into their physical one.

Shisei knew that she had picked up the book in order not to think of Cook Branding. It was Branding, she thought, who should have a taste for Nietzsche, because the two were such pure moralists. But Cook was horrified by the German philosopher’s search for moral perfection, believing that such perfection belonged solely to God. In this way, as in a surprisingly large number of others, Cook was quite Eastern. The Japanese, too, knew that perfection was beyond the human condition, preferring the myriad pleasures afforded by the journey to the anticipation of the journey’s end.