The Nicholas Linnear Novels (231 page)

“But what kind of operation is it?”

Nangi rested the point of his chin on his hands, which were cupped over the dragon head of his cane. “I’m still not quite sure of its ramifications,” he said slowly, “or even its full intent. It’s similar to this quite amazing mole virus. Like the Pack Rat’s computer-language whiz, Mickey: I can see the architecture, but I’m not yet certain of its purpose.”

He glanced at his watch, stood up. He pocketed the tape recorder, said, “Let’s go. It’s time we started seeing some fruits of our own operation.”

Masuto Ishii, his vice-president of operations, was waiting when he and Tomi arrived at his house. Umi had made tea and sweets for Ishii, making him comfortable in the nine-tatami room that served as one of the formal rooms.

One entire wall was open to a lacquered wooden
engawa
that led out onto an interior garden. Ishii, who was sipping his tea, staring out at the azaleas and the peonies, scrambled to his feet, bowed deeply, when Nangi entered the room. Nangi made the introductions, as Ishii and Tomi had never met.

Umi came and served them tea, then sat beside Nangi. Nangi said, “What news have you brought?”

Ishii smiled, withdrew a videocassette from a slim briefcase. “It is all here, Nangi-san,” he said, offering the cassette with a deep bow. “Just as you predicted.”

Nangi grunted, took the cassette, slipped it into a VCR sitting atop a sleek twenty-four-inch TV. The electronic gear came on, and using a remote, Nangi set the tape running as soon as he resumed his place beside Umi.

“Watch closely,” he said.

Color bars were replaced by image. Tomi could see immediately that this was no amateur job; it was professional surveillance work all the way.

The image resolved itself. They all recognized the setting as the Imperial Palace East Garden. Ishii came into the frame, and shortly thereafter, Kusunda Ikusa. As with all surveillance tape, this had the date and the running time digitalized in hours, minutes, seconds along the bottom of the frame, so there could be no doubt as to when this was being taped and no allegations of fraud or splicing.

With a sharp gesture, Ikusa thrust a thick envelope at Ishii, who took it. Ishii opened it up in the direction of the camera which, as if on a prearranged cue, zoomed in. Tomi could clearly see the stacks of yen.

The two men spoke for some time, walking around the garden. There was no sound track to the tape. At length Ishii and Ikusa parted. The tape followed Ishii as he got into his car. The car was followed to the other side of Tokyo. The tape stayed with Ishii all the way. He made no stops.

Ishii pulled over on a side street, waited. He looked at his watch. A man came into the frame, opened the back door of Ishii’s car, climbed in. The image showed him clearly. He was Catch Hagawa, a well-known bookie, gambling operator. Yakuza-connected.

Hagawa spoke briefly to Ishii. Ishii said nothing, handed over the envelope. It was the same envelope that Ikusa had given Ishii. Hagawa took it, counted the money twice. Then he nodded curtly, stuffed the yen back in the envelope, slipped the envelope inside his jacket. He got out of the car. Ishii drove out of the frame. End of surveillance.

“Good Christ,” Tomi breathed.

Nangi bowed to his vice-president of operations. “You did well, Ishii-san.”

The diminutive man bowed back, much more deeply. “Thank you, Nangi-san. The integrity of Sato International must be maintained at all costs. An attack against the corporate entity is a personal attack against every loyal employee. I was humbled by your faith in me. Whatever I accomplished is little compared with the tasks facing you.”

“Each individual is integral to the whole,” Nangi said, obviously pleased with Ishii’s reply. “Each contribution, if pure in heart, is equally important. This is the way of Sato International.”

Tomi said, “How in the world did you set that up, Nangi-san?”

Nangi turned to her, smiled. “It was Nicholas’s idea. Are you familiar with the philosophy behind aikido? Aikido is an art of concentric circles. It uses an aggressor’s own momentum against him, pulling him in toward you, instead of the more difficult direction, outward and away.

“We employed the same philosophy here. Instead of fighting Ikusa’s attack—pulling away from it to attack him ourselves, we drew him closer to us, we appealed to his essential lust for power, for seeing us utterly defeated. We presented him with a situation of distress.” He told her of Ishii’s initial contact with Ikusa. “Ishii’s history made such a story not only logical, but irresistible to Ikusa, because in Ishii’s supposed plight, he saw a way to use Ishii against us. As we suspected, Ikusa wished to use Ishii to tell him what our strategy was going to be.” Nangi smiled again. “Ishii obliged him. Now what we have on tape is visual evidence of Kusunda Ikusa, moral paragon of Nami, passing a great deal of money through an intermediary to Catch Hagawa, a known criminal.”

“But that’s not what happened,” Tomi pointed out. “And Ikusa will be quick to point that out.”

“But he won’t be quick enough,” Nangi said. “You see, on the high moral perch Ikusa has placed himself, there is no room for error. Besides, what will Ikusa say to explain the video away? Whatever lie he uses will be perceived as a cover-up.

“In this case—as it is often—the reality is irrelevant. It is, rather, people’s perception of what transpired that counts. The evidence of wrongdoing is before us. That it is an illusion has no meaning. Believe me, the scandal will be real enough, as far as Kusunda Ikusa is concerned.”

Shisei took Branding home to her house, because his was sure to be staked out by reporters.

“I want you with me now,” he said solemnly. “After what’s just happened, I don’t want any more surprises.”

“Cook,” she said, “do you know there’s a school in Japan that teaches you to lie with your eyes?”

He looked at her as he began to strip. “I’m going to take a shower,” he said. “I feel like I’ve just jetted in from Hong Kong. I want you in the bathroom with me.”

“I won’t walk out on you, Cook.”

Branding was naked now. He rolled his soiled clothes into a ball. “I don’t know where to put these things.”

Shisei held out her arms. “Give them to me. I’ll have them cleaned.”

Branding threw them on the bed.

“You’re not going to listen to anything I have to say, are you?”

There was nothing in her voice, no pain, certainly no self-pity, and this is what got to Branding. “You were telling me about this Japanese school,” he said, padding into the bathroom.

“Can I join you?” Shisei asked.

He watched her as she took off her clothes. Who teaches women how to do that? Branding wondered. Certainly not their mothers.

“I thought you might be afraid of me,” she said.

Branding turned on the water, and soon the bathroom filled with steam. It became uncomfortably warm. He stepped into the shower, kept the door open. Shisei followed him in, shut the door behind her.

“About this school,” Branding said. The hot water felt good on his body, sluicing away the dirt, the sweat of fear. God, but he had been frightened when he had seen David Brisling’s corpse in the trunk of his car. But not as frightened as when the police had booked him. I couldn’t be a criminal, he thought. I haven’t the stomach for it.

“The school was in the country,” Shisei said. She picked up a bar of soap, began to lather his body. “All its buildings were in the style of a Swiss chalet. I don’t know why, except the entire place had the air of fantasy about it. It was called Kinsei no Kumo, Golden Cloud. All collaborative enterprises in Japan need a slogan to be often recited by those involved. Golden Cloud’s was,
‘Kiyoku Utsukushiku Kanzen,’
Pure Beautiful Perfect.

“There were only female students at Golden Cloud, but all the instructors were male. I suppose you could say we were taught acting, although it was nothing like the acting you might think of. Do you remember
kata,
the rules? Well, everything we did at Golden Cloud was according to
kata.
This meant not merely our acting, but our eating, sleeping, bathing. Everything.

“We played only male parts. There were many reasons for this. We were, for instance, made to memorize the life of the great actor, Yoshisawa Ayame, whose concept of acting was to express an ideal. Women actors, he said, could not express the ultimate feminine ideal on stage, because they would automatically rely on their external feminine charms: their lips, their hips, their breasts. This would destroy the ideal. Only a man could create the ideal woman on stage.”

“But that’s crazy,” Branding said.

“Do you think so?” Shisei’s soapy hands circled lower and lower on his back. “Why? Don’t you realize that an ideal expression is impossible unless it is wholly artificial? The ideal is but an illusion, skillfully sculpted by the artist.”

Branding turned around. “Then the same is true for women? Only they can express the male ideal?”

“Yes.”

“But you’re a female playing a female role.”

“I am a graduate,” Shisei said. “Not a student. Besides, most of my classmates at Golden Cloud were there because playing male roles allowed them to lose their own femaleness, to become, in a sense, sexless. They knew only too well the servile place waiting for them as women in Japanese society. Golden Cloud allowed them to escape that fate, at least for a time.”

“And why were you there?”

“By that time I knew I wanted to become a talento, a celebrity,” she said. “I remember watching the marriage of the top two talentos. The media coverage was unprecedented in Japan. Not even the prime minister received that kind of air time. They were treated as if they were royalty. The public adulation was like a wonderful surge of electricity, and I remember thinking that these two perfect people must have entered heaven. They had everything. Everything I wanted.”

Shisei’s long lashes were heavy with moisture. “The truth is, I went to Golden Cloud to gain a measure of control over others,” she said, “because I knew that as a female, I would otherwise have none.”

Branding watched the water cascading over Shisei’s firm-muscled body. In the small folds and hollows, beads of moisture clung to her flesh. “So this was where you were taught to lie with your eyes,” he said. “Did your instructors also teach you to deceive your heart?”

Her head was lifted to his. “Cook—”

He touched her. “If only you wouldn’t lie to me.”

“Why is the truth so important to you?” Shisei asked.

“The truth is what I have dedicated my life to.”

“But all of life is a lie.”

“Ah, Shisei, you can’t believe that.”

“But I do, Cook. I really do. You would, too, if you knew what I knew.”

Branding suddenly gripped her shoulders, drew her against him until their lips were almost touching. He looked deep into her eyes, the eyes that had been taught to lie, and said, “Who are you, Shisei? Are you the self-confident lobbyist, slipping artfully through Washington society, playing the game better than almost anyone else? Or are you the concerned environmentalist, wonderfully pure of heart? Or the tormented human painting, kept like an animal at the sufferance of a mad artist? Or the hard-edged little girl sent to Golden Cloud to learn how to submerge her sexuality in order to attain some insane ideal?

“Do you know which one of those people you are, Shisei?” He shook his head. “I don’t think so. I don’t believe you’re any one—or any combination—of those identities.

“I don’t think you know who you are. Because somewhere along the way you lost the sense of your own self. You were taught to deceive, of that I have no doubt. The only trouble is, in the end you’ve deceived only yourself.”

Shisei gave a little cry and, twisting from his grasp, collapsed at his feet. Her head hung, the water smashing her hair flat, bringing it like a curtain down around her face.

“Oh, Shisei, don’t do that.” Branding knelt down beside her, lifted her up.

“Cook,” she breathed, “life for me is a lie because the truth is impossible to face.”

“Only for right now,” Branding assured her. “But you’ve got to take the first step toward accepting the truth about yourself.”

“I cannot.”

“If you could tell me the truth about yourself,” Branding said, “if you could see that I can accept it, that would be a start.”

“No!” She clung to him. “Cook, no. Don’t make me!”

“Shisei,” he said, hugging her to him, “I can’t make you do anything. Although I daresay the opposite has not been true.”

Shisei closed her eyes, her heart hammering. “I’m tired, Cook.”

Branding turned off the water.

She toweled him off before she began to dry herself. “I think you left some clothes in my closet,” she said.

Branding padded into the bedroom, opened the closet door. Inside he found his robe, a fresh pair of underclothes. Shirt and slacks of his were also neatly hung on hangers.

He drew on the robe, tied it. As he did so, he found himself looking at the edge of the closet door. There was a dark patch at head height. It had been wiped clean, but the abrasion of the wood was obviously fresh. He stared at the naked slivers of unpainted wood as if they were an accusing chorus. In his mind he saw again David Brisling’s corpse curled in his car trunk, the lethal wound in the back of his head. It had a vee shape, Albemarle had said to him over and over during the interrogation at the police precinct. And tiny pieces of wood were found in the mashed flesh.
Do you know what could have caused that type of wound, Senator? A two-by-four? What’s your best guess?
Branding hadn’t any. He wondered if he had one now.

His face was still thoughtful as Shisei emerged from the bathroom. She was winding her hair into a thick braid, hesitated when she saw his face.

“Shisei,” Branding said quietly, “do you know who murdered David Brisling?”

“Douglas Howe.”

“That’s what the police think,” Branding said.

There was a swath of lamplight on Shisei’s face, but Branding could not tell what it revealed. “What’s the point of asking? You know I’ll only lie to you.”

Branding said, “I’m asking you not to. If you feel anything genuine for me in that secret, tortured heart of yours, you’ll tell me the truth.”