The Nicholas Linnear Novels (88 page)

“Nick, what the hell’s going on here?” Gray-faced, Tomkin hung onto the door frame leading from the bedroom of the suite to the large bath. “I come to Tokyo to negotiate a straight-ahead business merger and suddenly we’re involved with a weird cultlike murder. I could’ve gone to Southern California if I’d wanted that.”

Nicholas smiled thinly at the semblance of humor, sat down on the corner of the king-size bed. They were back at the Okura. It was late in the evening and neither had eaten since breakfast which, for Tomkin, had been nothing more than tea and toast, which he had immediately vomited up.

“Let’s eat first,” Nicholas said. “We’ll talk afterwards.”

“The hell we will,” Tomkin said as he came unsteadily into the bedroom. “You seem to know more about this—what did you call it?”

“Wu-Shing.”

“Yeah. You’re the expert. Give me an explanation.”

Nicholas ran his fingers through his hair. “Traditionally there are five punishments, each one a response to a more serious offense. Therefore each punishment is more severe than the last.”

“So what’s that got to do with Sato Petrochemicals?”

“I don’t know.”

For a moment Tomkin peered down at the younger man, then he went slowly to his dresser and pulled on a pair of faded jeans, a blue chambray workshirt. He slipped on a pair of shiny black handstitched moccasins. “I guess you’re as hungry as a bear.”

Nicholas looked up. “Aren’t you?”

“Frankly, the sight of food nauseates me. I’m running a low-grade fever so that doesn’t surprise me. I’ll let this thing run its course.” He paused. “And don’t look at me like that. You remind me of my mother when you do. I’m perfectly all right.”

The phone rang and Tomkin went to answer it. He spoke in low tones for some time, then cradled the receiver. “That was Greydon. He wanted permission to go up to Misawa to see his son. Apparently the boy’s stationed at the air base there. He’s a fighter pilot and is scheduled to go up on one of the first test runs of those new F-20s we’ve just imported. I think Greydon feels there’s some danger.”

“He’s quite right,” Nicholas said. “Stationed at Misawa puts those supersonic jets just 375 air miles from the Soviet Union’s Pacific coast and Vladivostok.”

Tomkin shrugged his shoulders. “So? What harm can they possibly do?”

“Those F-20s have nuclear capacity,” Nicholas said. “And the Russians’re worried as hell about them. Which is why we’ve seen an increased Soviet military buildup in the Kuriles over the past year of an alarming size.”

“The Kuriles?”

“The Kurile Islands. They’re the chain just to the north of Hokkaido, Japan’s most northerly island—the one where the winter Olympics were held in 1976. In effect, they connect the southeast of Russia to Japan in a series of stepping-stones.

“The Kuriles had been Japanese territory until they were seized—the Japanese say illegally—in 1945 at the close of the war. Quite naturally, they want them back.”

Nicholas got up from the bed. “Recent reports tell us that there are over forty thousand Russian troops currently stationed in the Kuriles. Quite recently they sent in a squadron of twelve supersonic MIG-21 fighter-bombers to replace the subsonic MIG-17s, which they obviously felt were overmatched by the F-20s. They’ve got an air base on Etorufu, or, as they call it, Iturup.”

“You sure seem to know a lot about this.”

“It concerns Japan, Tomkin,” Nicholas said evenly. “So it concerns me. The situation’s serious; Greydon’s got every right to be anxious. I hope you gave him the weekend off. We’ve only got the wedding tomorrow and negotiations won’t resume until Monday.”

“He’s booking his flight now,” Tomkin said archly. “That meet with your approval?”

“If Greydon’s son doesn’t make it back from that flight, you’ll be happy you let him see the kid.”

There was silence for a time. The phone rang again but neither of them made a move to answer it. In a moment it stopped, and the tiny red light on the base began to wink on and off.

“I told you before,” Tomkin said at last, “that my old man was a real sonuvabitch. I can’t tell you how much I hated him sometimes.” He put his palms together as if he were praying. “But I loved him, too, Nick. No matter what he did to me or my mother. He was my father….Do you understand?” It was a rhetorical question, and Nicholas remained silent.

Tomkin sighed. “I guess in some ways I turned out just like him. Years ago I could not have believed such a thing possible. But the passing time…” His voice fell off. “Time has a way of molding people to its own ends. You remember Chris—I know Justine must’ve told you about him. He was the last of her boyfriends before she met you. He was the biggest bastard of the lot. He was sexy as hell. He seduced her, made her move to San Francisco. She was using her real name, Tomkin, then. She got a monthly stipend from me. It was very generous and she took it all. It—” His eyes slid away for a moment, searching, perhaps, for a place to hide. He took a deep, shuddering breath. “It made me feel better that she took it all. It assuaged my guilt for all the years I’d accepted her presence, her demands on my time, only when it suited me.

“They were fucking like bunnies out there; the relationship was all sex. Or so I thought. Justine wanted more money, then more still. Finally, I hired a team of detectives to find out just what the hell was going on. Two weeks later I took the corporate jet and flew out. I presented my darling daughter with all the evidence. I packed her up and took her home that afternoon before Chris got back.”

Tomkin seemed to be having difficulty breathing as the emotions surged within him. “The shit was using my money—” He stopped abruptly, his eyes wide and feverish. “
Justine’s
money, to finance an ongoing cocaine deal. He was a user himself, and besides…He was unfaithful to her every day of their relationship.” He made a disgusted sound.

“She hates me for interfering, though. That’s a helluva laugh, isn’t it? He was slowly killing her with his infidelities and his craziness. He’d beat her and—” His throat seized up on him. He ran a hand through his damp hair. “But at least she has you now, Nicky. That’s the most important thing.”

For all this time Tomkin had not taken his eyes off Nicholas. He was a shrewd man with an acute, analytical mind. His intolerance of foreign custom and his lack of patience in no way negated that fact.

“Now it’s your turn. You’re dragging your feet about something.” His voice was quiet with more strength in it than had been apparent for several days. He sounded almost like a father. “I think you’d better tell me what it is because I have a funny feeling in my gut it has to do with that Wo Ching or whatever you call it.”

“Tomkin—”

“Nick, you’ve got a duty to me. You’ve gotta tell me what you know. All of it.”

Nicholas sighed. “I had hoped not to tell you.”

“Why, for Christ’s sake? I’ve got a right to know if I’m putting my neck on the chopping block.”

Nicholas nodded. “Yes. You do.” He looked directly at Tomkin. “But the simple truth is I’ve got nothing definite, no cold facts and figures like the Soviet buildup in the Kuriles. Here, as happens often in Japan, there is nothing but legend.”

“Legend?” Tomkin laughed uneasily. “What is this, the start of a vampire movie?” He cocked an ear. “Jesus, I hear the wolves howling, Nick. It must be a full moon tonight. We’d better stay indoors and hang up all the garlic.”

“Stop it,” Nicholas said shortly. “This is precisely why I’d hoped not to tell you.”

Tomkin proffered an upraised palm. “All right.” He crossed back to the bed, sat down. “I promise to be a good boy and listen.”

Nicholas stared at him for a moment before beginning. “At the Tenshin Shoden Katori
ryu
where I received my
ninjutsu
training, where the
Wu-Shing
was taught, this legend was told…and believed.

“In the old days when only the Ainu inhabited the Nippon Islands and true civilization had not yet spread southeast from China,
ninjutsu
was in its infancy on the Asian continent. It was still too early in the discipline’s life for there to have been
sensei
—true masters—or even, as there are now,
jonin
—
ryu
patriarchs—simply because the differentiated schools of
ninjutsu
were barely formed.

“There was much more ritual then, more superstition. The thinking among what
sennin
—adepts—existed was rigid and unyielding, principally because the forces they were working with were still so newly strange and deadly potent. Thus any deviation was summarily condemned wholesale.”

Nicholas paused here to pour himself a glass of water. He drank half of it and continued. “As the legend goes, there was one
sennin
more powerful than the rest. His name was Hsing, which has many meanings in
kanji.
His meant ‘shape.’

“It is said that Hsing walked only in the darkness, that it was his only lover. His devotion to his craft caused him to be celibate. And, also unlike his compatriots, he took only one pupil, a strange wild-haired boy from the steppes far to the north where the Mongols dominated.

“This student of Hsing’s, it was whispered, could not speak any civilized dialect, nor could he read Mandarin. Yet he conversed fluently with Hsing. No one knew how.

“Yet the other
sennin
began to suspect that Hsing was slowly expanding his scope of
ninjutsu
knowledge, experimenting in the darker unknown aspects which the others shunned. His power grew even greater and at last in fear—or perhaps simple envy—the other
sennin
massed against him and destroyed him.”

Nicholas’ eyes were alight and although it was now deepest night outside and though the lamps in the suite were turned low still Tomkin saw him clearly, every detail etched against the light glow. For a moment the bustling modern world had faded and the mist-shrouded Asian past was being recreated before him, plunging him into a world of arcane laws.

“The murderous
sennin
,” Nicholas continued, “were content with driving off the wild-haired student, shouting derisively to him that he should return to the northern steppes from whence he had come.

“But they had not reckoned with Hsing’s power. Apparently his death had come too late, for he had already created from his pupil
akuma,
what the Japanese call an evil spirit, a demon with
jit suryoku
—superhuman powers.”

“Oh, please, Nick, This’s—”

“You asked to hear this, Tomkin. Kindly have the courtesy to hear the legend through.”

“But this is the stuff of fairy tales.”

“Hsing had taught the pupil all he knew about
jaho
,” Nicholas said, ignoring him. “A kind of magic. Oh, there’s nothing supernatural about this. I’m not speaking now of spells and incantations, demons out of some fictitious hell dreamed up by the mind of man.

“Saigō had studied the
Kōbudera
—that is,
jahō.
He practiced
saiminjutsu
on your daughter; that, too, is a form of
jahō.
”

Tomkin nodded. “Okay, I can accept that. But what’s all this got to do with the murder?”

Nicholas took a deep breath. “The only recorded instance of death in conjunction with the first four
Wu-Shing
—the fifth ritual punishment
is
death—concerns Hsing’s pupil, who began a series of just such murders in Kaifeng. Bloody, horrific, terrifying, they enacted a perverse poetic justice on those who had destroyed his
sennin.

“He had become
mahō-zukai.
A sorceror.”

Akiko Ofuda wore a snow-white kimono, heavy with hand-stitched brocade. Over it she wore a light silk dress the precise shade of the last of the cherry blossoms bobbing in the breeze above her head.

Her hair was hidden beneath the ornate tresses of a gleaming wig. These swirls and complex loops were surmounted by a
Tsu-nokakushi
—the hornhider—a ceremonial white hat with wide brim said to be worn to hide whatever bad parts of a woman existed.

Her eyes were large and clear through the delicate makeup. Her face was very white, her lips a startling splash of crimson. She wore no earrings or other jewelry. In her right hand was clutched a closed fan.

Saturday had dawned bright and clear with just a hint of the crispness of March, the preceding month.

The enormous crimson camphorwood
torii,
symbol of the Shinto shrine, rose over the heads of the still assembling guests who, according to the final count of RSVPs, were going to number over five hundred.

Morning mist still clung to the steep hillsides, feathering the boles of the cedars and fir, obscuring the sapphire glint of the lake far below. At the guests’ backs huddled the dense and hazy superstructure of the northwestern edge of Tokyo.

The four buildings of the temple spread out in a rough horseshoe, their cedar-beamed, canted roofs with the raised ribs striping the sunlight into shadow and gloss.

The guests milled about, chattering among themselves, commenting on the fine weather, gossiping about late arrivals or even, in one or two instances, forging the underpinnings of an important deal. A great majority of the country’s foremost business and bureaucratic leaders were in attendance.

Seiichi Sato looked from the beautiful face of his bride to the milling throng of guests. As he recognized a face from business he recited to himself the man’s name and position, then filled in the appropriate slot on an imaginary pyramid in his mind. The structure he was forming was important to him. The face he gained at this marriage would go a long way toward furthering the prestige of the
keiretsu.
While Akiko’s parents were dead, the name Ofuda still ranked as most prestigious, tracing its origins all the way back to the time of Ieyasu Tokugawa.

That first Ofuda—Tatsunosuke was his name—was a great
daimyō,
an ingenious tactical commander whose genius for victory on the field of battle was called on many times by Ieyasu.

It pained him to know that Akiko had never known her parents, that she had no relatives, in fact, save the gravely ill aunt whom she visited so frequently in Kyushu. Sato had a brief somber flash of Gōtarō’s broad, smiling face. Sato knew well the grief at a family cut off at the waist.