The Nicholas Linnear Novels (126 page)

And the trembling came to her again, this time in great wracking pulses, shivering her hot sheath around him. It was the last straw and he felt himself melting, all his energy, all his reserves of strength flowing down the ribboning muscles of his thighs to his loins, pooling like quicksilver in his scrotum. As her cupping palm urged him onward, as her sheath fluttered around his expanding penis, he felt a great series of throbs, an unutterably delicious warmth overpowering him combined with an enormous desire to penetrate her farther than he had any other woman.

Then she was crying out as her hips blurred, as she worked herself on him, rubbing and stroking, her sweet breath with a hint of his own musk in his face, her damp unbound hair a tender veil across his eyes. A heavy undulation across her abdomen and belly, her muscles fluting in spasm, and he felt silken fingers grasping him, stroking him anew with such tenderness that, miraculously, he felt a return of his waning orgasm, gathering once again in him as if he were a female, regenerating another form of pleasure entirely, one of which he had been ignorant all his life.

Something inside her—that same thing that had reached out to him in slumber and caressed him—lifted him up with her so that they experienced her orgasm together, united in a kind of spirit dance Sun Hsiung had previously only experienced at the very height of the highest level of combat, when lives hung in the balance and death hung by his side.

Shaken like a leaf in a tempest, Sun Hsiung allowed the full force of her marvelous power to blast through him. He rose with her on wings of ecstasy and, his renewed erection quivering, shot again within her dripping sex all that he could muster.

Years later, the memory of that evening remained fresh inside him. And so it was that she came before him, now fully a woman, and said to him, bowing as she did so, “
Sensei,
I wish to learn one more thing.” Sun Hsiung’s belly contracted and his heart went cold, for he had known of this moment almost from the first. And dreading its coming, he had erased its specter from his mind. Until now. For now was the time.

“And what is that?” he inquired, his voice faint in the flickering lamplight which served to illuminate one small patch of the surrounding darkness.

Akiko’s forehead was against the
tatami.
Her shining black hair was pulled tightly back from her exquisite face, tied in a long ponytail—a Chinese fashion unknown to her but pleasing to Sun Hsiung—that lay curled across one shoulder and her upper back. She wore a kimono of crimsons, golds, and flame oranges, a match for the autumnal foliage beyond their front door.

“I wish to learn how to disguise my
wa.
” Her voice was calm and free of excess emotion. She had proved to be an enormously gifted pupil. “Ever since I discovered the talent in me, I have longed to know this.”

“Why is that, Kodomo-gunjin?”

“Because I feel somehow incomplete without it.”

Sun Hsiung nodded once. “I understand.” He thought about saying more.

“There is no need to warn me,
sensei
,” she said, catching the essence of his emanation.

“It is more dangerous than even you can suspect.” Their eyes locked, Akiko submitted entirely to his will now, her whole being attuned to his words, sensing their import beyond the fact that nothing could dissuade her from her
karma.

“I am not afraid of death or dying,” she said softly.

“Corporeal death is far from the worst eventuality.” Abruptly the room seemed webbed with bioluminescent strands, the building of their spirits, pulsing with vitality, making of this place a power spot. “These forces you seek are beyond even our understanding; they are so elemental that they may only be controlled partially. And in those other moments they may change you; they may corrupt all that you have learned here.”

Within the echoing silence that engulfed them both, Akiko bowed her head. “I understand. I will guard myself carefully against just such corruption.”

“Then this is where you must go,” Sun Hsiung said, sliding a folded slip of paper across the
tatami
to her.

The next morning, as she finished her packing, he took her painting pad and brush from her. “You cannot take these where you are going, Little Soldier.”

And for the first time Akiko had a sense of the depth of the darkness into which she was descending. “This saddens me,
sensei.
”

Those were the last words Sun Hsiung heard her utter. They drank one last cup of tea together. Moments later she hefted her bags and, bowing formally, left him.

It was the first time that she had performed
chano-yu
for him, the pupil serving the
sensei
as new
sensei.
For a long time after that Sun Hsiung sat before his tiny cold teacup, the dark green leaves clinging tenaciously to its bottom like a vine refusing to die.

Then, slowly and carefully, as if he were made of delicate crystal, he crawled across the
tatami
to where her painting pad with its black finger of the sable brush lay.

He reached out and picked up the pad, drawing it toward him as his eyes studied the calming confluence of forces within the bonsai garden. He heard the plaintive call of a plover through the partially open
fusuma
; he was quite unaware of the coolness in the room.

And with the pad pressed tightly against his chest, he began a slow rocking on his haunches.

At last one salty tear slid down his weathered cheek, to drop silently on the edge of the pad, immediately absorbed by the sheets of paper, gone forever.

[Release the trigger]

“I
AM AFRAID, MR.
Nangi, that the news is a good deal worse than either you or I first imagined.”

Tanzan Nangi sat sipping his pale gold jasmine tea, staring out the set of windows that faced the Botanical Gardens on Hong Kong Island’s Mid-Levels. Just beyond was Victoria Gap, high up on the Peak.

He was high up above the Central District in the All-Asia Bank’s executive offices, a glass and steel tower in the middle of Des Voeux Road Central.

“Go on,” Nangi said placidly as he tapped the ash from his cigarette into a crystal ashtray on the desk in front of him.

Allan Su glanced briefly down at the oversized buff folder he was clutching although it was apparent that he hardly needed to do that. He wiped at his upper lip, then ran his fingers through his hair. He was a small, compact Chinese of Shanghainese extraction who was normally calm and clear headed. Now his obvious anxiety filled the room like a strange perfume.

He began to pace back and forth over the antique Bhokara. “To give you an example, we have three-quarters interest in the Wan Fa housing project in the New Territories in Tai Po Kau. The first mortgage has already been refinanced once and is on the verge of being so again. That would necessitate a second mortgage, which we cannot afford.

“We need an occupancy rate of seventy-six percent to break even at this point. The units should be renting for sixteen thousand Hong Kong dollars a month; we’re lucky if we get five thousand now. Since the announcement by the Communists no one wants to live in such an ‘unstable’ area that ‘could be overrun at any moment.’”

Allan Su stopped his pacing long enough to slam the folder down on the polished teak desktop on a pile of other such folders. “The list is almost endless.” There was true disgust in his voice. “Anthony Chin could not have done us more damage were he secretly working for one of our competitors.”

“Was he?” Nangi inquired.

“In this city, who knows?” Su’s shoulders lifted and fell. “But I doubt it. Several of the other banks were caught the same as us, though none to such a degree.” He shook his head. “No, I think Mr. Chin was merely greedy, and greed, Mr. Nangi, is the worst enemy of good judgment.”

Nangi bent forward and poured more tea. Then he settled himself more comfortably in Allan Su’s high-backed leather chair and contemplated the terraced network of white and pale ochre high rises that sprouted from the slopes of Victoria Peak, a forest of concrete.

“Tell me, Mr. Su, when was your last severe earthquake?”

Momentarily nonplussed by the question, Allan Su blinked his eyes behind his wire-rimmed spectacles. “Why, it’s been almost two years now, I believe.”

“Uhm.” Nangi’s attention was still firmly on the thicket of skyscrapers. “A bad one, inopportunely placed, would do many of those in, don’t you agree? They’d all fall apart like a jumble of children’s building blocks. Many lives would be lost, many family lines would abruptly come to a halt, many fortunes would be destroyed.”

He turned his head to face Allan Su fully. “And who else do
you
work for, Mr. Su?”

“I…Pardon me, Mr. Nangi, but I do not understand what you are talking about.”

“Oh, come, come,” Nangi said, thinking that all Chinese were alike, “there’s no room here for coyness.
Everyone
in Hong Kong holds down more than one job; it’s far more profitable.”

He paused to pour tea into a second cup. “Now take Anthony Chin, for instance. He was not only the president of the All-Asia Bank of Hong Kong but he was also a lieutenant in the Red Chinese Army.” He pushed the cup across the desk.

“Impossible!” Allan Su had ceased his pacing. “I’ve known him for years. Our wives shopped together once a week.”

“Then you must have known of all this fiscal impropriety,” Nangi said blandly, indicating the pile of folders filled with their damning evidence. The investigation team he had hired had done their work well.

“I knew nothing of the sort!” Su proclaimed hotly.

Nangi nodded his head. “Just as you knew nothing of his true affiliation.”

Allan Su stared at Nangi for a moment, trying to force down his instinctive hatred of the Japanese and see this man for what he really was. He knew that that clarity was all that could save him now. “Then it follows that you also suspect me of being a Communist.”

“Oh, you may rest easy on that score,” Nangi said. He smiled. “Come, Mr. Su, will you drink with me?”

His heart hammering in his throat, Allan Su did as he was bade. “I should no longer be surprised at the outcome of events here.” He gulped at his tea, which had already grown cold, then used the cup to gesture out the expanse of sparkling glass toward the slender fingers of the Mid-Levels. “Take those high rises, for instance. It would take far less than a major earthquake to send them tumbling. More than likely they’ve been built with a gross insufficiency of supporting iron rods in the concrete. The favorite trick is to set a half dozen in the poured cement—which, by the way will have twice as much sand in it as it should—while the building inspector watches. Then, as he moves on, those same six rods will be removed from the setting cement and used in the next section the inspector is looking at. After he’s gone, they’ll be removed once more and used at the next building site.

“It’s a game, really, because the inspector has already been paid off by the builders not to search through the site too thoroughly.”

Nangi frowned. “That’s nothing to play a game over: lives. And millions of dollars.”

Su shrugged. “If I can buy a twelve-year-old virgin down in Wan Chai, why then should I not be able to buy a building inspector as well?”

“The difference there,” Nangi said dryly, “is that the twelve-year-old virgin you’ve paid your hard-earned dollars for could probably screw rings around your wife.”

“Then my lust—and that’s a form of greed—has blinded my good judgment.”

Nangi stood up abruptly. “How much is the Royal Albert Bank paying you a month, Mr. Su?”

Allan Su almost dropped his porcelain cup. But not quite. He heard the yammering of his pulse in his ears like the screaming of all his ancestors and he thought, Great Buddha, what will happen to my family now? No work and ruined in the midst of the Colony’s worst recession in three decades.

Nangi was seeming to slip in and out of focus, and with the exaggerated slowness and care of a habitual drunk he placed the empty cup on the desk top next to the pile of buff folders.

“Come, come,” Nangi said. “It’s a simple enough question.”

“But the answer’s a difficult one. I beg to—”

“I do not,” Nangi interrupted him, leaning forward with his rigid arms on the teak, “wish to hear explanations, Mr. Su. I require someone here whom I can trust completely. Either you can do it or you can’t.”

Nangi held his eyes. “You know what will happen to you, Mr. Su, if you can’t do it.”

Allan Su shuddered, saying nothing.

He stood very straight though his knees felt weak. Of course he could walk out of here now, tendering his resignation. But where would that get him? Had he any assurance that the Royal Albert would hire him? The job market had narrowed considerably in many fields—banking high among them—since the damnable Communists made their accursed announcement. He thought about his wife, his six children, aunt, and two uncles, one widowed—and how many cousins on his wife’s side—whose welfare he was responsible for.