The Nicholas Linnear Novels (208 page)

He pocketed the emeralds, put the workout room back in order. Then he took her out of there, out of the house entirely. On the
engawa
the night had settled in. The cicadas were buzzing and, here and there, fireflies danced among the cypresses and the cryptomeria.

“Talk to me,” Senjin said to Justine. “Tell me about yourself; tell me what you can’t tell anyone else. Above all, I want you to remember.”

Justine sat on a cedar lounger Nicholas had made just after they had moved in here. It was her favorite spot, looking out as it did on Nicholas’s garden.

“When I came here to Japan, I loved it,” she whispered. “Why not? It was exciting, exotic. I was filled up with the unfamiliar sights, smells, sounds of the country, and that was enough to sustain me. A year later I seemed to hit a wall. I had taken care of setting up a household in a foreign land, or so I thought. My husband hired a Japanese woman to help. I became pregnant. It all seemed to be on track. But it wasn’t. It was terribly, terribly wrong. I missed my family and my friends. There was no one here but my husband and
his
friends. They weren’t enough, and then my daughter was born and I lost her. I became negative about everything. Now I hated Japan; now all I could think about was going home to our house on the ocean in West Bay Bridge on Long Island. Oh, how I longed to be there! How I long to be there now!”

Justine was trembling with the force of the emotions these memories were exacting from her. She felt a need to catch her breath. But she suspected that if she stopped, she would not finish, and now she needed to do that more than anything else, because that was what Senjin was willing her to do. “Then old disturbances I thought I had successfully dealt with when I was younger began to resurface and I felt as if I were back where I had started so many years ago.”

She felt now as she had felt then, a resurgence of the past, the ripping asunder of the fabric between past and present, the rushing of something hidden overtaking her.

“When I was much younger,” she continued, “and also at a low point in my life, I turned in desperation to analysis. I hated my father for paying no attention to me, for despising my weak-willed mother. I needed someone to talk to, someone who could set me straight.” She looked at Senjin Omukae. “I suppose you wouldn’t understand.”

“There are many psychiatrists here in Japan,” Senjin said noncommittally.

Justine rolled her head away from the moonlight. “The doctor I saw was a woman. She looked like a dark-haired gypsy. I felt embarrassed coming to her, the rich lapsed Catholic, emotionally bankrupt, my pockets bulging with money. Funny. I remember what I was wearing on my first visit: a Mary Quant miniskirt and polka-dot blouse I had just brought back from a shopping spree in London. Afterward, looking at myself in a full-length mirror, I was so appalled, I showed up the next week in jeans and a work shirt, and never let Honi see me in anything else again.”

Justine paused. It was hard work dredging up the past, facing up to the unhappy, spoiled brat she had been. She had never even spoken of this to Nicholas. How was it, she asked herself, that she was able to confess her sins to this man? Then the question slipped, unanswered, from her drugged consciousness.

“Honi wore huge silver earrings from Mexico, multicolored peasant skirts woven in Guatemala. She was totally unconcerned with how she looked, and I learned by example. She taught me to look inward at those dark, dank places inside myself I would rather ignore. It was hard work—at times impossible, I thought. Many times I broke down and sobbed, unable to go on. But Honi was always there, and her strength eventually became my strength, as if she were an empath, able to draw the inner pain out of me and into herself.

“She had an infinite capacity to absorb pain, like an icon or a saint. Often, when I was with her, I thought of myself in church, my idealized church which accepted suffering rather than displaying it in numbing profusion. I thought of Honi as a nun in a holy order, myself as a novice who must pass test after test in order to prove herself worthy.

“That was my problem, you see—I could never think of myself as being worthy of a decent relationship. Loving someone else and being loved in return was simply out of the question. But gradually I came to see that Honi loved me. She saw all my flaws, digested all my sins as I disgorged them. And still she accepted me. Still she loved me.

“What a revelation that was! Of course, at first I couldn’t—or wouldn’t—believe it. But Honi wore me down. I came to her like a wild animal intent on gnawing itself to death. She taught me not to bite myself, then she healed my self-inflicted wounds.

“‘I will bear the weight of your sins when you cannot,’ she told me. ‘Justine, it’s important for you to realize that you’re not alone anymore.’ And, of course, I thought, where’s the catch? What does she want from me?

“Honi was the only person in my life who wanted
nothing
from me. She loved me so that I could learn to love myself.” She turned her head back. “Do you love yourself, Senjin? It seems to me that you don’t. It seems to me that you’re too involved with the mechanics of keeping your environment in check. Nicholas is the same way. He melts into the darkness, he treads silently, at times I am certain that he has stopped his breathing. He has mastered all these things, yet he is not the master of himself. I sense the same thing in you, Senjin, am I wrong?”

Senjin said nothing.

“Being with you is like being with my husband. Can you tell me how that is possible?”

Senjin knew but he would never tell her. Instead he reached out for her. He had known that this evening would turn interesting.

Justine felt suspended above an abyss, entangled in her own roiling emotions. She felt Senjin’s touch like an electric current surging through her, and she thought in disbelief, This is not happening, I cannot feel what I am feeling, my body is betraying me, just as I am betraying Nick. She felt as if she had a fever, her legs weak, her lungs raw, coherent thought as distant and unreachable as a star.

Moonlight drifted like lace through the trees. I should be alone, waiting for Nick to return, she thought, but I’m not. I’m with this strange Japanese man and I want him against me, on me, in me.

Justine wept into the soft, fragrant hollow of Senjin’s neck as she clung to him, as he lay her on the porch, bound her wrists and her ankles. Her mind was on fire, but it could not match the heat of her body.

Senjin felt the heat as if it were emanating from a forge. This moment was very sweet for him. He had dreamed of just this triumphant moment, a transcendent experience, surely.

“I promised you an example,” he said, “of the mingling of pleasure and pain. The oneness.”

At that moment a twig snapped. They both heard it and, startled, Justine’s eyes sparked. Her chest was heaving, and he could see the fear-lust like a drug dilating her irises. He wondered what his own eyes looked like, and was glad he had no mirror in which to look.

He put one finger across his mouth to stop her from talking. He signed to her to stay silent, then went without a sound off the
engawa
into the swath of pebbles, the border of the front garden.

Anyone else would have made noise, weight crunching down on the pebbles, but Senjin seemed to have no weight. Justine watched him gliding across the garden and saw in him once again an aspect of Nicholas that made her desperately uneasy.

She was shaking from the cool night air and the release from forces so unknown and intense that they seemed to stop the normal functioning of her mind. She felt them even now, though they were less intense, like the tendrils of a dream that entangles you in its mood throughout the day.

If she had expected to be free from them the moment Senjin left her, she was wrong. There was about her the sense of lying in a hammock, swaying rhythmically in erotic indolence. She lay as if entranced, glutted with the throbbing of her body, rolled on her side, staring at the spot where Senjin had blended into the darkness, waiting for him to return as if he, not Nicholas, were her husband.

Han Kawado cursed himself. Crouching in the bushes beside the Linnear house, he drew a long, thin-bladed knife. He had done some work on the hilt so that it was covered with a dark abrasive material that would not slip or twist at a crucial moment even in the sweat of fear or the flow of blood.

Fear was what Han Kawado felt now. His mind, numbed by the long hours of surveillance, had begun to slip into a twilight fugue. Memory had merged with the present, and his wife, dead now six months, had been reborn in his mind. She had died suddenly while Han was off on a job for the Pack Rat. The doctors who attended her last hours had assured Han that had he been with her when she was stricken, he could have done little to prolong her life. A massive heart attack was like an earthquake, they told him, one had but to assess the damage in retrospect.
Karma.

So they said. But Han could not help but blame himself. Because of the nature of his work, he was hardly home, and then it was apt to be for odd hours, the sporadic day or so. In retrospect, he realized that he loved his work more than he had ever loved his wife. That was
his karma,
knowledge that he could not allow himself to forget, a kind of legacy from his wife, a justification, however tenuous, for her death.

And ever since, he was conscious of how alone he was. Previously, he had chosen to live his life in this manner, a shadow man, lurking in the night, inhabiting a nether world forever apart from the bulk of mankind. He wore his solitary life like a badge of courage, certain of his heroism. Now his aloneness preyed upon him, withering his spirit as time lined his skin. At times he felt older than his own father, survivor of Bataan and of Hiroshima.

Still, surveillance work was the only thing he knew; and he was good at it. He had taken the Linnear job when the Pack Rat had offered it. But the hours were long. They weighed upon him mercilessly. His legs were stiff, the joints painful from holding one position for so long.

Han had been witness to everything: the almost collision, the talk over tea, the enigmatic seduction on the
engawa.
Tiredness and his guilty thoughts had conspired to make him careless. He had moved to get a better view of Senjin tying up Justine, had not looked where he was putting his feet, and
snap
! A dry, dead branch had cracked beneath his weight.

It was impossible to judge just how loud the sound had been to others or to know how disastrous his misstep had been. He had no clear idea who the Japanese cyclist was or what his interest in Justine Linnear might be. His job was to report to the Pack Rat any suspicious contact Justine had with anyone outside a circle of people he had been briefed on.

Perhaps, he thought now, as he crouched in the thick darkness, I should have reported this contact immediately. But he dared not leave Justine alone with this unknown man until his identity could be cross-checked. Now Han braced himself for the worst. If no one came looking for him, so much the better. But his instincts were too sharp to rely on a chance. He had to assume that his misstep had been heard. If the man named Senjin Omukae had any designs on Justine Linnear, he was sure to be suspicious and would want to check out the sound.

Well, Han thought, let him come. He strained for any hint of approaching noise, hefted the knife. I’m ready for anything. Then something as hard as steel was across his windpipe and he could no longer catch his breath.

Senjin had ceased to breathe in the normal sense. Instead he inhaled and exhaled tidally so that there was no rushing in his ears, no discernible throb of his pulse. In this way he heard far more than any other human, more even than most animals.

He found the man hidden within the underbrush. This proved no great difficulty for him, though by the manner in which he had secreted himself, Senjin could tell that the man was a seasoned professional in matters of surveillance. Any normal man—or even a team of men—would have overlooked him.

But Senjin was not a normal man. Senjin scented him first, the sharp man-odor wafting his way mixed with the soft-edged scents of camellia, jasmine, and pine, and knew that he was being spied upon.

Senjin heard the spy’s breathing within the gentle sigh of the wind, between the infrequent hoot of an owl. Senjin stood still as a rustling overhead in the branches of a cryptomeria momentarily disturbed his concentration. Then, glancing upward, he saw the owl’s great wings, black sails in the moonlight, dipping down, impaling a trembling vole in its talons, settling back in the cryptomeria to begin its nocturnal feast.

Senjin felt a special kinship with the owl, as he did with the cryptomeria. Both were sentinels as well as symbols of the solitary existence of the warrior, the last bastion against decay.

Scenting blood and then the sharp man-odor, so out of place in this environment, reminded Senjin of what he must do. He moved on.

He stole up behind where the man crouched in the underbrush, hidden, so he thought, in dense shadow. Senjin slipped one arm around the man’s throat.

“Who sent you?” Whispered into the spy’s ear. “Why are you here? Who are you working for?”

The man said nothing, and Senjin repeated his questions, inflicting a great deal of pain as his free hand hit a series of pressure points on the spy’s body.

Senjin had very little time—something the spy knew—and so was at a disadvantage. He needed answers to his questions, but unable to get them, he progressed to the next logical step.

His eyes closed to slits. Only their whites showed. A beat became palpable, a dimple in the fabric of the night. He plunged the stiffened fingers of his free hand through the man’s eyes. The spy’s body gave a powerful galvanic leap like that of a bucking bronco. Bunched muscles spasmed, then all at once let go. There was an abrupt stench, and Senjin stepped quickly away, letting the corpse fall into the bushes. He went hurriedly through the man’s pockets, taking anything he thought might give him some clue as to the man’s identity, what he was doing here, or who sent him.