Angel Eyes (11 page)

All the sushi she had ordered was food for which, after a long time, one might possibly acquire a taste. It was true that many Japanese themselves did not care for sea urchin. But to impress Westerners as well as to prove their superiority and separate-ness, they ate it anyway, pretending to savor its strong rancid taste.

To her dismay, Bernard tackled the sushi with a good deal of aplomb. He even asked for more marinated ginger and wasabi, the fiery green horseradish.

"I once read a report," he told her, "that said this ginger was a natural protection from any nasty microorganisms that might be in the raw fish. Had you heard that also?"

Tori said she hadn't.

The fugu came, and Tori told him what it was. Bernard looked at the fish, shrugged, ate it. When they were both finished with their food, and Tori ordered their sixth bottle of sake, Bernard said, "Tell me, young lady, how did I do?"

"Pardon me?"

"How did I do on the test you just gave me?" he said patiently. "Did I pass?"

Tori looked at him for a moment, then laughed until the tears came to her eyes. "Jesus Christ," she said, wiping at her eyes, ''you really are the limit."

"Funny," Bernard Godwin said with a serious face, "that was just what I was thinking about you."

Tori took him back to her apartment, a tiny place in an ugly, colorless building that looked like a cracker box stood on end. But inside it was comfortable, if cramped.

Bernard seemed content to settle in. He was an exceedingly magnetic man, for he carried with him a singular kind of power. He reminded her of images she had seen of Julius Caesar: the planular face, dominated by the long patrician nose, the prominent chin, the commander's eyes, so full of good humor as well as power. It was a good face, strong and at the same time gentle. It was a glyph which, if you read it correctly, seemed to say, If you are my friend, I will take care of you forever, but if you are my enemy, I will take you down in such a way that you will not even know it's happening. Much later she would come to see the guile, lurking like a pike in deep water, behind his bright blue eyes.

Tori got a couple of Kirin beers from the half refrigerator, opened them, handed him one. She liked that Bernard was comfortable drinking it from the bottle. He was dressed in a pair of dark blue trousers, a polo shirt of the same color, and a handsome jacket of soft chocolate-colored lambskin. He wore highly polished John Lobb stalking shoes that made no sound when he walked.

Tori liked the way he moved-not quickly, but lithely, with a sense of purpose always. His were not the mannerisms of a young man, but they certainly weren't the mannerisms of an old man, either. Far from it. Bernard Godwin had obviously put his years to good use, learning as he went, from many sources. Tori found this interesting. In fact, she found Bernard Godwin altogether fascinating, but after the incident in the fugu restaurant when he had so effortlessly seen through her, she was careful not to let him know this. He wanted something from her. She thought that the chances were good that he would get it, but it was she who wanted to set the price.

"You said something about a proposition," Tori said, flopping down beside Bernard Godwin on the rolled-up futon she slept on that doubled as a sofa.

"Yes, indeed." Bernard had stretched out his long legs, crossing them at the ankles. His eyes were hooded, as if the sake was finally catching up to him or he had passed his bedtime. "This is something I've no doubt will pique your interest."

"First I'd like to know how you heard about me."

Bernard took a sip of the Kirin. ''The Yakuza might call you the Wild Child, but there are others to whom you are known as the Female Ronin.'' He turned his head toward her. ''In certain circles you really are quite famous.''

"Like a celebrity." Tori got up, turned on the stereo. Jefferson Airplane. Stomping backbeat, swirling melody. Grace Slick singing ''White Rabbit.'' Yeah, Tori thought. You tell 'em, Gracie. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? When Tori came back to sit beside Bernard, she said, "What circles?"

"My kind of circle," he said in his sleepy voice. "Yours, too, I imagine.'' He sucked at his Kirin.

"Yeah? What makes you so sure?"

"You want it straight? Okay. You're an angry young woman looking for direction. Right now, you'd as soon throw yourself in the furnace as someone else. Right now, it doesn't matter all that much to you as long as someone burns. But I'm here to tell you that it does matter. It matters very much."

"Why?"

For some time Bernard Godwin was quiet. Then he leaned forward, put the Kirin bottle on the free-form glass and iron coffee table. He put his elbows on his knees. "There was a guy I know," he said at last. "This was a long time ago. This guy was about your age, perhaps a couple of years younger. His mother had just died, and all through the funeral he was hoping his father would walk into the funeral parlor-just for a minute, even-to pay his respects.

"This guy's father had run out on his wife when his son was five years old. He found another woman, maybe, or maybe he liked to go from woman to woman, who knows? Anyway, the guy hadn't seen his father in all those years. He hadn't thought that he really wanted to-harboring in his heart this hatred for his old man-but now at the moment when the minister was speaking of the fulfilled life of the dearly departed, he saw the eulogy for a lie, and this guy knew that he had to see his father again.

"Soon after his mother was buried, the guy traveled west to Chicago, where his father had taken up residence. He ate lunch at a great rib soul shack on the South Side, where he was served by a black woman who had hickory ash in her hair, then he walked to the building where his father worked.

''His father was a reporter for a Chicago paper, and when his son asked to see him, the guy was told that his father was out running down a story. No one knew where he was or when he would be back.

"This guy said he was the reporter's son, that he hadn't seen his father in years, and that he'd wait. No one said a thing.

"He was shown to his father's desk, and he sat down in an old scarred swivel chair that squeaked when he moved it back and forth.

"He saw the clutter on his father's desk and thought of the clutter of his mother's life. He saw the old IBM typewriter on his father's desk and thought of how often his mother longed to hear from his father, walking to the mailbox with an expression of hope, returning with the weight of a secret defeat. Only it hadn't been a secret from her son, who saw everything, and hurt when she hurt.

''This guy opened the drawers of his father's desk one by one as if he hoped to reveal the ghosts of the past he could not remember, the specters of a past that might have been. In the lower right-hand drawer, underneath a half-empty box of Kleen??, he pulled out a framed picture of his mother and himself as a small boy. He could not remember the picture having been taken. He put the photograph away, as if he were not really certain that little boy was him.

"Time passed, day into night. The son fell asleep, his head on his folded arms, his arms on his father's desk. When he awoke, he saw his father standing in front of the desk, peering down at him.

'' ' Son,' his father said, 'what the hell are you doing here?' ''

There was silence for some time. Even Grace Slick had the sense to keep quiet. Tori did not stir, though she felt the need to cut the silence with music.

At last Bernard Godwin got up, fetched two more Kirins for them from the refrigerator. Tori heard the tops popping, and it was a kind of music. She took the bottle Bernard offered her, but she didn't drink it right away.

Bernard said, "I guess in my case the truth was simple: my father was a dyed-in-the-wool sonuvabitch. People who knew him better than either I or my mother did said he had to be like that to be such a good reporter, but I didn't give a damn what they said. As far as I could see, he was an abject failure. But there you are, everyone has to have his own opinion."

"Maybe we're not so different," Tori said at last.

Bernard Godwin took a thoughtful swig of his beer. "Well, if life has taught me anything, it's this: truth is a complex ani-mal. Every time you think you've caught it by the tail, it turns around and bites you on the ass."

Tori laughed, but she knew he was serious.

As the gray end of the night became the pearl-blue beginning of a new day, Tori and Bernard Godwin strolled through a Tokyo filled with the last rumblings of delivery trucks. The bridges were filled with them. From the Sumida River horns sounded as fishing boats neared the Taikiji wholesale fish market.

Tori found herself recalling how Bernard had done nothing, not even twitch, when Godzilla had lifted him off the floor. Now she wondered what would have happened if she had not intervened. She was not at all certain that she would have put money on Godzilla. She thought she would give anything to see Bernard Godwin at work.

"I guess now's as good a time as any to present your proposition," Tori said. The sky above Tokyo looked clean this early in the morning, and the city seemed immense, a world unto itself.

"I want you to work for me," Bernard Godwin said.

"Is the work legal?"

''I take it as a good sign that you asked.'' Bernard took a last swallow of beer, gave a little belch. "Pardon me."

Tori smiled.

''What I do-and what you will do should you decide to join me-is legal in the broadest sense of the word.''

"Meaning?"

"Meaning that no matter what we become involved in, we would never be brought before a court of law.''

"But. . . ?"

"What we do is, in another sense, amoral. We are beyond the laws man constructs. This does not mean that we are lawless. Far from it. Much like the Japanese, whom you obviously love and admire so much, we create and define our own set of laws." Bernard's eyes seemed to have closed, as if he were on the verge of sleep. "Interested?"

Tori almost said, God, yes, how soon can I start? Instead she drank half her Kirin, looked up at the forest of monstrous towers through which they were walking, and said, "I'll give it some thought."

Three days later Tori gave Bernard Godwin the answer she knew she would give him from the first. The trouble was, she did not want to go home. He understood this, just as he seemed to understand the rest of her character, carefully hidden from all others like an enigma in the center of a stone pyramid.

"I want you here in Japan," Bernard told her. "We have no one with your expertise in this quarter of the globe. We've found it impossible to infiltrate anyone of substance into the Japanese underworld. But you're already in it. You're already respected, and more importantly, feared.''

Tori said, "I think you've got that the wrong way around."

"We'll see," Bernard said ...

We'II see.

"Oh, God," Tori moaned softly. "Oh, God." And with Bernard Godwin's voice still echoing in her mind, she stumbled to the phone, dialed a number she had long ago committed to memory.

There was a great deal of waiting while the switching was accomplished. But when at last she heard Russell Slade's voice, crackly with mobile phone interference, she said, "A bientot. You were right. I'm coming."

TWO

TOKYO/MOSCOW

No one knew in advance that Kunio Michita's nakodo-his go-between-was going to commit ritual suicide, save Honno Kansei. Honno worked for Kunio Michita. As personal secretary to Tokyo's most prominent businessman, Honno was privy to many secrets: impending deals, mergers, acquisitions. She could easily have put this knowledge to work on the Tokyo stock market, but she didn't. Honno was adept at keeping secrets. She had made herself that way out of necessity. She carried a secret buried deep inside her: the horrific knowledge that she had been born during the year of hinoeuma. It had been a mistake, of course. Her father had never forgiven her mother, believing, of course, that the pregnancy was her fault. If he had come to love Honno, he had never showed it. He always made her feel soto, an outsider in her own family.

Why? According to the ancient Chinese zodiac, hinoeuma was a year of the horse that appeared every sixty years. Legend had it that women born in hinoeuma became husband killers. Consequently, there were far fewer births in Japan in the year of hinoeuma than during any other year.

Because of her keen intuition and empathetic powers, Honno was almost destroyed by superstition. Leaving her family had both strengthened and weakened her. The constant proximity to their fear and anguish had been like a knife cutting through her belly, and she had believed her sensitivity to be a curse. But years later it had also inadvertently exposed her to many more deeply buried secrets.

Such as the impending death of Kakuei Sakata, Kunio Michita's go-between.

Sakata, too, had been privy to many secrets. He had borne this burden, if not easily, then well, for the past four years. What had changed now to cause him to snap? If he had been a member of a different, more Western culture, Sakata would simply have resigned his position in the face of a scandal cracked open. He would have turned state's evidence against his boss, acquiring immunity, as well as vast wealth from the best-selling book he would then write about the affair. A film or television miniseries would merely be the icing on the cake.

But Sakata was Japanese, living in Japan, where the worth of a personal relationship created one's definition of what it meant to be a human being. His death, like Yukio Mishima's years before, was a means of communication, a statement, a symbol even of his own personal beliefs which would now be stamped for all time upon the collective consciousness of the nation.

All these ramifications, like ripples upon a pond, were on Honno's mind when she heard Sakata tell his assistant, "Your time has come. I wish you luck, though I doubt that in the coming maelstrom it will matter."

What maelstrom?

As she looked upon Sakata's calm face, Honno wondered what must be in his mind. What were the secrets that would unleash the maelstrom? Had he just unearthed them or had they at last become too difficult to bear?