The Nicholas Linnear Novels (233 page)

“I—”

Tomi snatched up her bag, came around from behind her desk. “You’d better tell me right now, ace, because tomorrow may be too late.”

On the way downstairs she held out her hand. “Give it to me.”

And the Scoundrel obediently placed in her hand the audio microcassette he had found in the apartment next to his.

Wherever Kusunda Ikusa looked, he saw his own face replicated as if in a terrible mirror. On the television he saw himself handing Masuto Ishii an envelope stuffed with yen, then Ishii’s hand delivering that same envelope to Catch Hagawa. When he turned on the radio, station after station was serving up commentary on the scandal. If he opened a newspaper, he saw his face, along with appropriate photos, reproduced from the damning videotape.

Ikusa thought, I am some kind of animal, trapped in a cage where people come to stare at me, to frown and cluck their tongues in disapproval.

The telephone had begun to ring just after the first news reports were aired. Ikusa’s blood ran cold. He knew who was calling him. Nami. Nami would want to exact its own particular brand of retribution. He had had the effrontery to drag Nami into the midst of this scandal, and for that he could not be forgiven. The ties that bound him so tightly to Nami, that had once made him one of the most powerful men in Japan, were now about to strangle him.

Ikusa knew that he could not allow that to happen. He had his own path to take.

In the pouring rain Ikusa slipped out of his house via a side entrance. He was dressed in blue jeans, a UCLA sweatshirt, scuffed Reebok sneakers, and a long, hooded PVC raincoat whose deep pockets were filled with more than his fists. He went unnoticed.

Ikusa walked the few blocks to the subway, went underground. During his trip crosstown he had time to contemplate the fleeting nature of power. How long had he felt invulnerable? He did not know. Time ceased to exist when one was close to being a god. Curious, that. Time and power must be linked in some mysterious equation, he decided, that not even Albert Einstein could fathom.

But there was another, even more interesting element to be considered. Power was so real, so tangible when one had it, so unreal, so ephemeral when one didn’t. It occurred to Ikusa, dripping water on the two seats he occupied in the rocketing subway car, that power must then be an illusion. It must exist only in the minds of men if it could be so easily granted and denied.

As Kusunda Ikusa stood in line to get off at his stop, he came to the conclusion that the only real power a man had was to inflict death on his fellow man.

Above ground the sky was black. The rain beat against the sea of opened umbrellas, the shore of the pavement, with a kind of demonic glee.

This is a city of sheep, Ikusa thought, a country of sheep, all moving in one direction with one purpose. Although he walked among them, moved through their bustling midst, he no longer felt a part of them, no longer felt the pride in their oneness—in
his
oneness. Now he was cut adrift, a balloon without anchor or rope, drifting aloft, a child of the invisible winds.

Ikusa paused before a shrine, rang the bell. He invoked the intervention of the Shinto spirit-gods who, it was believed, dwelled everywhere. But he felt nothing; he was cut off from even these elementals, a dead man walking among the living.

That videotape, so villainously, treacherously procured, had stripped Ikusa of
tatemae,
his public image of honor and virtue. Without
tatemae,
which was so vital to him—and to Nami—he was without standing in the community, without face. The living dead.

As he shouldered smaller people aside, he remembered a song he had heard some time ago, part of one of actor Takakura Ken’s most popular Yakuza films, which seemed appropriate now to his own situation:
My body drifts and wanders/But in the dim lights of home/I can see mother, but then she fades away.

Ikusa wept, as one often does at cherry blossom time, when beauty and sadness are epitomized by the fragility of a translucent blossom, so quickly bursting with life, so soon falling from the tree. From home.

How swiftly time passes, Ikusa thought. How abruptly power diminishes. How soon life ends.

Passing his reflection, distorted in a rain-streaked window, Ikusa was appalled at his tears. He had not wept since he was a child, after his first defeat in martial arts competition. Certainly he had not thought of home for many years. He had lacked the time and also, he had to confess, the inclination. As the infusion of power increased, making of him a new man, it had caused him to dismiss his past as unimportant. It was funny now, that was all he could think of.

In the Asakusa district, he came at last to the ferroconcrete building housing an anonymous cheap hotel. Upstairs, he went straight down the featureless hall to the room he wanted and broke down the door. It was not a difficult task for a man of his size and strength.

Inside the room there was no place to hide.

“I had you and that traitor Kikoko followed,” Ikusa said to the figure standing in the semidarkness. “But in the end it didn’t really matter. I knew you would be hiding like an animal in the dark.”

“I thought I’d be safe here,” Killan Oroshi said.

“You’re not safe with me around,” Ikusa said, advancing on her. “You should know by now that you never were.”

“But I don’t have the tape,” Killan said. “I gave it to Seji, and he’s taken it to the police.”

“I don’t care,” Ikusa said. “This has gone beyond all that.” He came on, big as a tree in the confined space of the tiny hotel room.

Killan moved, her silhouette changing as her arm came up. “Stop right there! I’ve got a gun!”

“A gun won’t stop me, Killan. Nothing you can do can possibly stop me from what I’ve come here to do.” His voice was almost gentle, but it possessed a surety, a finality, that caused her to bite her lip.

Her arms were extended, the elbows locked. Ikusa caught a glimpse of metal gleaming dully in the werelight. “I mean it!”

“So do I,” he said.

The rain scratched like a live thing, desperately seeking entrance. The aluminum blinds rattled against the windows, allowing tiny sparks of light into the hotel room, miniature flashes of lightning.

“Stop!” Killan cried. “You’re pushing me to the edge!” The hammer of the gun clicked back, a stark, echoey sound. “I know you murdered that man who was spying on us. You bashed him to bits, but I won’t let you do that to me. You’re not going to get that close.”

“You shouldn’t have tried to blackmail me, Killan. That was your mistake. I was willing to put up with your tiresome revolutionary cant because I thought I could harness your extraordinary mind. I thought I could channel it into conventional paths. That was my mistake.”

“Your mistake was in trying to use me.” Killan’s voice was filled with contempt. “That’s all you know how to do. Use people. Well, how does it feel to be used yourself? You used my father, took his company out from under him, the company he helped my grandfather build from nothing. You destroyed his life, trampled him into the mud, all the while smiling like an innocent baby.”

Ikusa frowned. “I thought you hated your father. Was that a lie, too?”

“You were too dense, too full of your own worth to see that I hated you more than I ever could have hated my father.” Killan laughed. “You know, you actually did me a favor, you fucker. You made me see my father in a whole new light. With you, I saw his accomplishments, I saw what his company meant to him. In his defeat, his sorrow, I at last came to love him.”

“A poor consolation for your death,” Ikusa said.

“It’s not me who’s going to die.”

Ikusa lunged for her men. Killan pulled the trigger, and he staggered back a half step. Then he came on. She fired a second time, and something in Ikusa’s left hand struck her shoulder.

Killan cried out as she felt the hot pain run down her arm. Blood erupted through her clothes.

Ikusa, too, was bleeding. He had taken one bullet in the chest, another in his hip. But he ignored the pain, his feet set firmly on the path ordained for him from the moment the first news of the scandal broke.

Killan had brought him to this sorry abyss. Stripped of his power, his face, his
tatemae,
he had understood that his sole transgression had been his relationship with her. His hubris had manifested itself in her mocking smile, her passionate embrace, her brilliant, deceiving hand. He had thought, in his arrogance, that he could—as she had said—ride the back of the dragon. But he knew now what he should have understood then: the dragon is too dangerous to be ridden at all.

And this is what he realized at the moment the scandal broke: if he could not ride the dragon, at least he could destroy it. That much power, at least, was left him.

He put his hands around her neck as she struck him across the face with the gun barrel. Blood flowed, blinding him. But he did not need his eyes to accomplish what he had come here to do.

Ikusa squeezed. Killan’s scream of anguish was choked off, along with the air. Ikusa saw her jumping like a rag doll. Her muscles spasmed as if with a will of their own. She opened her mouth then snapped it shut, her teeth clashing together.

Slowly, like a balloon—the balloon Ikusa had been—she was deflating, the air seeping out of her. Ikusa felt as heavy as lead. There was a roaring in his ears. His blood had turned to sludge, his pulse drumming in his ears in slow rhythm.

He saw her hands trembling, her face white and staring, and he wanted her to die more than he ever wanted anything else. He saw the gun barrel, but did not believe she had strength enough to pull the trigger. He laughed in her face.

Killan snarled, adrenaline pouring into her system. She could hardly see or move. But that face—his face—laughing, deriding her, mocking her, filled her mind as a harvest moon fills the night sky. She would not give him the satisfaction. She would not be defeated.

Her hands shook so much she did not think she could aim properly. So she did the only thing she could do. She squeezed the trigger.

The explosion was very loud. The gun the Scoundrel had given her for protection bucked in her hands and she was thrown violently backward. She tried to scream but, as in a nightmare, was unable to utter a sound.

She was on her knees. Her right side was completely numb and she felt wet, as if she had soiled herself. Blood was everywhere, a great tree stump in front of her, staring sightlessly at the ceiling with black, button eyes.

Then Killan became aware of a keening in the room, as if a great knife blade had been given the power of speech. Then there were people in the doorway. Familiar faces: the Scoundrel and Tomi Yazawa.

In a moment Killan, so full of pain and dismay, became aware that the keening was coming from herself. She tried to stop it, but she had lost control. She stared upward at them helplessly.

She felt herself being lifted, people speaking to her, but she could not understand what they were saying, did not want to understand. She wanted only to scream and scream and scream. So she did that.

The fire existed still in Senjin’s mind: the dark, crackling flames, cleansing the foul air of calumny. They burned longer in his imagination, but did they burn brighter? He thought not.

It was Senjin’s birthday. He was twenty-nine, but there was only one other to mark that date: Shisei. He had called her, left a message on her answering machine without giving his name. She was already late. He had expected her to be waiting for him in West Bay Bridge. Why hadn’t she been there? He had been so certain that he would see her face, grip her flesh, peer from mind to mind, merge as they had merged for so many years long ago.

He longed to gaze at the canvas he had made of her back while he lay with her, minds entwined, sharing as only they could share. A birthday present.

Senjin had never had his birthday celebrated; there had been no special family dinner, no gathering of friends, no present or even a card to set that day apart from all others of the year. When Senjin had first come upon the practice of gift-giving for a birthday, he was already grown up. He was astounded by the custom, and quickly came to hate it because it made him feel melancholy; instinctively he knew that this must be a weakness thrust upon him by Haha-san which he must fight.

But today Senjin thought that at last he might give himself a birthday present.

Now was the beginning of the end, the last few steps on the road he had been born to tread.
Sensei
had trained him for this moment, though he never could have suspected it. His mind lacked the breadth, the scope of Senjin’s own.
Sensei
might be tanjian, he might have the gift, but he was not a
dorokusai,
could not have even an idea what that might mean.

On the other hand, Senjin suspected that Haha-san would. He remembered a day when she took him into town with her. It was a tortuous journey, long and, to his mind, boring. He would have preferred to have been with
sensei.
But
sensei
was off on one of the mysterious journeys he undertook periodically, and Shisei was out running an errand for Haha-san.

In the village, Haha-san went to the bank. There, they were seated before a man with a stiff bearing and an even stiffer collar to his black suit. He asked Haha-san some questions about herself, writing down her answers on a square card. Then he gave her a long form to fill out. Senjin watched. When she went to fill in the section marked date of birth, she wrote Senjin and Shisei’s instead of her own.

Afterward, out on the village street, Senjin asked her about this.

“Did I?” Haha-san said almost dreamily. She smiled. “Well, it was a natural mistake. Your birthdate was the most vivid day in my life.”

It was only years later that Senjin realized what she meant. She had been so wrapped up in her children’s rearing—in their lives—that they became her
ikigai,
the meaning of her own life. But as that happened, she invested them with distant, sharp-edged shards of her own personality, fragments of fear, rage, loneliness, and agony: the weaknesses that had already overrun her life.