The Nicholas Linnear Novels (120 page)

“Six months after Mariko’s death, when I could think clearly again, I founded
Keshohinkogai higaisha no kai
, the Organization of Cosmetic Victims, using profits from Ikiru.”

There was pain in Nicholas’ heart at the enormity of what Sato had to bear. Mariko had not been the sole victim of
kokuhisho.
Other victims’ suffering and death could be only slightly less painful to Sato. And atonement, as Nicholas knew well, was not the same as never having sinned at all.

Sato turned his cup over and placed his palm across it. “Tell me, Linnear-san, have you ever felt anything other than pleasure at being in love?” His damp head bobbed. “Ah, yes, Buddha knows there is pain and suffering sometimes when there are arguments, when animosity lingers, perhaps, for a day or so. But that is a temporary thing, surely. It fades like the snow each winter and when the sun shines, the blossoms open up again.

“I am speaking of something entirely different now.” His head was weaving, sunk down as it was onto his broad shoulders. “Experience means nothing in this realm. Have you ever felt imprisoned by your love, Linnear-san? As if you love despite yourself rather than because you wish to. No, no, you
must
, do you see?” His hand came away, and Nicholas could see that the tiny porcelain cup that had lain beneath was now gone. “As if some cruel heart had cast a spell over you?”

In the gloaming at the end of the day Lew Croaker sat slumped in the car that had taken them up the east coast of Florida. Traffic rushed by him, the procession of crimson taillights like searching eyes. Alix had just gone to the bathroom in one of the highway cafeterias. He felt the vibrations of the road as if they had become a part of him.

Just behind him was the Savannah River. Up ahead stretched Georgia, then South Carolina, North Carolina, and so on as I95 snaked its way northeast. They had not eaten since Jacksonville; there was no point in stopping in small towns along the way, leaving footprints for anyone to follow. Big cities had a habit of swallowing new arrivals and transients; no one paid attention.

Alix had wanted him to slow down as soon as they had crossed the Florida border, but Croaker had kept his foot on the accelerator. She thought he was being stubborn, but he didn’t want to tell her what he had found in the Red Monster’s Ford sedan. It was a Phoenix cipher transmitter / receiver that he had read about. The sight of it had sent chills down his spine. He did not think that anyone Raphael Tomkin would hire would know what to do with a Phoenix let alone have one in his car.

The Phoenix was a relatively new instrument that automatically turned the spoken word into a preset cipher. It was the code alone that was broadcast between units, so that rapid transmission was virtually indecipherable to an eavesdropper.

Now, alone in the gathering Georgia night with the endless miles of dazed flight still thrumming through him, Croaker wondered again where his obsession with Angela Didion’s murder was taking him. He had forsaken his job, his friends…and a woman he was just beginning to know and fall in love with. His entire existence had been turned inside out, upside down. And for what?

Vengeance against Raphael Tomkin. For despite the gathering evidence, Croaker was still convinced that the industrialist had murdered Angela Didion. How and why still had to be determined. But he had his key now. Alix Logan was the sole witness, and against all probabilities she was still alive. And again he asked himself, Why?

With a shiver, he went over it again. By all rights she should be deader than a doornail now. He saw her emerging from the lit doorway and gunned the engine. She was alive. And being kept that way by a brace of very deadly creatures. Why? And why in one place? Surely they could have moved her anywhere. Who were they protecting her from? Croaker? But “Croaker” was dead, drowned and crushed beyond recognition when his car went off the road in Key West. Who had instigated that? Tomkin?

With a start, Croaker remembered Matty the Mouth. He had been the fly on the wall who had delivered Alix Logan’s name and address to him. For a usurious price to be sure, but what the hell, he had come through, hadn’t he?

“Stay here,” Croaker said to Alix as he sprinted toward the cafeteria. Inside, he dug out some change and made a long-distance call. A woman answered. At first she professed to never having heard of Matty the Mouth. Croaker did some first-class persuasion. Matty was out, the voice didn’t know where, didn’t know when he’d be back. Since he got back from Aruba Matty’d gone low profile. Croaker said he understood, it was the same with him. He had no number to leave with her and under the circumstances wouldn’t’ve left one if he had. Said he’d call back.

“Let’s go,” he said as he slid behind the wheel and nosed the car out into traffic.

“I’m tired,” Alix said, golden girl beside him. She curled into a ball.

It was like having a dream come to life, sitting at his elbow. Lithe, blond, beautiful. Croaker had only seen women like this from afar. This close, he had expected her to turn to garbage at any minute. When she hadn’t, he was startled. It wasn’t that he lusted after her precisely as the Blue Monster had, although he had to admit there was an element of sexuality about how he felt.

Rather there was this protectiveness thing. Having her safe and with him made him feel warm and somehow more alive. He did not want to take her to bed, but as a father will with his daughter when she comes of age he longed to see her nakedness, to caress her with his eyes. It was as if the presence of her nude in front of him, that acquiescence of vulnerability, would increase his feelings, fulfill them, even.

But this night his thoughts were not of the golden girl lying like a cat curled on the seat against his hip. Rather his thoughts retraced the moment when he had first seen the Phoenix and had broken out into a cold sweat.

The ultimate purpose of a Japanese drunk such as this one was reciprocity. While it was true that the freedom the Japanese found in drunkenness allowed them to unburden their spirit, that could not be accomplished alone. A mutual unburdening, a clasping of warm hands, was what really mattered.

Nicholas knew that Sato was waiting. This was a crucial moment between them; much would depend on what Nicholas next said. If he lied now—for whatever reason, not trusting Sato being just one of them—there could never be anything between them. Despite what Sato said before about their being friends. Those were just words and the Japanese did not take much stock in words. What mattered to them most, what they truly revered above all else, was action. Because actions never lied.

For better or for worse, Nicholas suspected, he and Sato had to trust each other now. They were in deep water with nothing but an abyss below them. If there was no trust between them, then their enemies had already won.

“I think, Sato-san, that in some ways we are the same. Perhaps that is the reason why Nangi-san dislikes me. Perhaps he has already sensed this bond.

“When I was a young man…young and foolish”—the two men grinned hugely at each other—“I met a woman. She was old beyond her years; certainly beyond
my
years. But then my, er, studies precluded my early initiation into certain basic worldly matters.”

Sato, both fists against his rather flushed cheeks, was rapt; he was obviously enjoying himself immensely.

“She possessed a power I could not explain—I still can’t, though I think I understand it better. But it was as you have so eloquently said. It was as if some cruel heart had cast a spell over me. I was powerless before her.

“She was a purely sexual animal, Sato-san. I still cannot fully believe that such a creature could exist. And yet I must confess that it was precisely this quality which drew me to her. You can see that she could not possibly be a happy person. How could she? If she were not making love there was a nothingness for her. Oh, not the Void. You and I know that there is power in the Void, and an essential kind of peace that causes a completeness of the spirit.

“But Yukio’s was diminished when we were not at sexual play. I did not think on this part of her at all until one day in April we were walking through Jindaiji. I favored that place above all others in Tokyo because my father had always taken me there rather than Ueno. I suppose he liked it better because it was a botanical park.

“The
bonbori
were hung on the trees though the time of the
someiyoshino
had already passed. It was late into
hanami
, the third of the traditional days when the cherry blossoms fall. We had meant to go the day before when the petals were at their height but Yukio had felt ill and we had stayed in, watching old movies on TV.

“We walked through the winding pathways of Jindaiji on that third day, and it felt to me as if we were high on the slopes of Mount Yoshino with one hundred thousand cherry trees whispering in the wind about us.

“I had never before wept at
hanami
, though certainly my mother had many times and, once, I had seen tears in my father’s eyes. That time, as well, it had been on the third day, and I had wondered why he might be so moved since it was obvious to me that the blossoms had been more beautiful the day before.

“Now I wept, understanding what it was my father had seen that as a child I had not. Though, indeed, the
sakura
were past their peak, as they fell this day one knew that there was no tomorrow, that this was the last leavetaking, and their beauty seemed enhanced, deepened, even, by this knowledge. The ineffable sadness inherent in the moment was palpable. And for the first time I found myself understanding in a purely visceral way the mystique known as the nobility of failure which we, as Japanese, revere so highly. For I saw that the sorrow of the moment caused the
effort
to be truly heroic.”

Nicholas paused for a moment. He had become as rapt as Sato at the return of those long-ago memories. He was transported by the opportunity to unburden himself.

“Then something odd happened. I turned and looked at Yukio. Her beautiful head was raised toward the pink-white cloud of the descending blossoms. I could clearly see the line of her long neck, the hollow between the collarbones. Two pale
sakura
clung to her silk blouse as if they belonged to her.

“And I saw that somehow they were the same, these last, most precious of the cherry petals and Yukio. That she possessed that same quality that made them so special. It was not a nothingness that possessed her when she was not making love but rather a terrible, aching, unassuageable sadness that went beyond anything I had encountered.

“And all these years later I find myself wondering whether that was why I loved her, cherished her above all others. Because somehow I knew that, given time, I was the only one who could remove that sadness from her.”

“You speak of her in the past only, my friend.”

“She died in the winter of 1963. Drowned in the Straits of Shimonoseki.”

“Ah,” Sato murmured. “So young. How sad. But she is with the Heike. The
kami
of that doomed clan will care for her.” He turned his gaze downward, wiped at the remnants of spilled sakē on the lacquer with the hem of his kimono sleeve.

Sato’s large frame seemed as hulking and hunched as a brown Hokkaido bear’s. There was an unbreachable gulf between them but at the same time they were closer now than many men ever got in their lives. For they were bound by a common sadness that drew them together like blood brothers. Twined as much by what had been left unspoken as by what had been said.

“Linnear-san.” When he spoke again, his voice was soft. A hint of the paternal tinged it. “Did it ever occur to you that perhaps you would no longer have loved her had she lost that ineffable sadness? That, indeed, she herself might not have survived in this world without it? Perhaps it will help when next you think of her.”

But Nicholas was not thinking of that. He knew that the next logical step in this unburdening process was to tell Sato of Akiko’s uncanny twinness to Yukio. Indeed, he tried several times to get out the words. But nothing came. It was as if his throat had become paralyzed.

A shadow passed across the open doorway to the room and Nicholas saw Koten’s bulk for a moment. Just checking up on his boss, Nicholas thought. See that I haven’t strangled him yet, carved an ancient Chinese character into his cheek. He shuddered inwardly, returning fully to the present. For a blessed time they had both dwelled in a world free of revenge and bizarre murder.

Across from him Sato lurched to his feet. “Come, my friend.” He beckoned with a hand and, stumbling across the
tatami
, fumbled open a
fusuma
at the far end of the room.

The night breeze stole in. Following him, Nicholas found himself a step down, on a smooth pebble path that seemed luminous in the moonlight. Around him shivered dark peonies, releasing the scent of roses, clumps of iris and hollyhock. Farther away he made out the shape of chrysanthemums beside the bole of the boxwood tree.

Sato stood in the center of his garden, his chest expanding as he breathed in the fresh air. The storm had scoured away the last of the pollution, at least for the several hours left before dawn. Low in the distance, beyond the boxwood, the sky was pink and yellow, tattooed with the pigment of Shinjuku’s neon.

“Life is good, Linnear-san.” Sato’s eyes glowed, reflected in a combination of cool moonlight and the warmer light streaming out to them through the open
fusuma.
“It is a rich and varied tapestry. And I do not want to prematurely leave it.” His eyes blinked heavily in the manner of the drunk. “You are a magician, Linnear-san. You have come into our lives most fortuitously. One learns one cannot turn away from
karma
, eh?”

He hugged himself. “Tell me, Linnear-san, are you a student of history?”

“My father, the Colonel, was,” Nicholas replied, “and he taught me to be as well.”

“Then surely you remember the Emperor Go-Daigo who in the early fourteenth century sought to break away from the Hōjō regime. Soon it became clear to him that the only way to do this was to utterly destroy the ‘eastern savages,’ as he called them.