The Nicholas Linnear Novels (167 page)

“Then, at this time, there is nothing more to say. Until five.” Ikusa broke the connection, and Nangi was left wondering whether his choice of rendezvous venues was deliberate. Shakushi meant a dipper or a ladle, a typical name for a bathhouse where one was soaped and rinsed with ladled water. But Shakushi had another meaning: to go strictly by the rules.

Cotton Branding, walking down the wide, scimitar-shaped beach, dug his toes into the wet sand each time the chill surf lapped over his ankles.

A salty wind was blowing. With a spiderlike hand he wiped an unruly lock of thin, sandy hair out of his eyes. Somewhere behind him he heard the
thwop-thwop-thwop
of the helicopter rotors, that most familiar harbinger of summer on the East End of Long Island.

Branding was a tall, stoop-shouldered man in his late fifties with pale blue eyes dominating a face whose obvious lineage more or less paralleled that of the Kennedys. He possessed the open, almost innocent look—much like an actor on a billboard in the heartland—of the American politician. He wore his authority openly, like a soldier’s medal, so that anyone seeing him pass would say: there goes a power broker, a deal maker.

He was perhaps less handsome than he was attractive. One could picture him commanding a fast sloop out of Newport, head into the rising wind, knowing eyes squinting against the sun. But he exuded a unique kind of scent, a precious attar, which was a product wholly of power. Lesser men wanted to be near him, if only to stand in his shadow, or, like Douglas Howe, to bring him down to their level. Women, on the other hand, wanted only to be a good deal nearer to Branding, snuggling into his warm skin, the better to inhale the intoxicating aroma of supremacy.

But as must be the case in the modern world, to a great degree Branding owed his power to his friends. While he had many acquaintances among his political brethren, his true friends resided in the media. Branding cultivated them with precisely the same fervor that they pursued him. He was, perhaps, aware of the symbiotic nature of the relationship, but he was a politician, after all, and had willingly dived into a sea of symbiosis when he had entered his first election campaign.

The media loved Branding. For one thing, he looked good on TV, for another, he was eminently quotable. And, best of all, he gave them the inside stories—their lifeblood—as they were breaking. Branding was savvy enough to make them look good with their producers or their editors, which in turn made the producers or the editors look good with the owners. In return, the media hounds gave Branding what he needed most: exposure. Everyone in the country knew Cotton Branding, making him much more than New York’s senior Republican senator, chairman of the Senate Fiscal Oversight Committee.

In one sense Branding was unaware of the breadth of his power. That is to say, he was unused to taking full advantage of it. His wife Mary, recently deceased, had been especially fond of pointing out his devastating effect on women when he walked into a crowded Washington room. Branding never believed her, or perhaps did not want to believe her.

He was a man who believed in the American system: executive, judicial, legislative, a careful counterbalance of powers safeguarding freedom. He understood that in becoming a senator he had put one foot into a kind of professional Sodom, where colleagues were regularly indicted for all manner of fraud. These people disgusted him and, as if he saw in their heinous behavior a personal affront to his unshakable faith in the system, he was quick to hold news conferences vilifying them. And here, too, his ties with the media gave him an enormous advantage.

Influence peddling, on which he was regularly quizzed, was another matter entirely. The very threads of the legislative fabric of the American government were woven into the pattern of barter: you vote for my bill and I’ll vote for yours. There was no other way to do business on Capitol Hill. It was not the way Branding himself would have chosen, but he was nothing if not adaptable. He believed in the innate good he was doing—not only for his own New York constituents, but for all Americans. And although he would never openly admit to thinking that the ends justified the means, that was, in effect, how he had chosen to live his professional life.

This strict, almost puritan morality was, after all, the genesis of Branding’s antipathy toward his fellow senator, Douglas Howe, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. It was Branding’s opinion that ever since Howe gained that lofty position, he had been throwing his weight around not only the halls of Congress, but the Pentagon as well. But this was apparently not enough for Howe. It was said that the senator had meticulously gathered sensitive intelligence on the private lives of a certain number of generals, and from time to time exercised this extortionate control over them. The abuse of power was, in Branding’s mind, the most heinous crime of all, and as was his wont, he had spoken out on more than one occasion against Howe’s misuse of the public trust.

Mary, of course, had counseled a more diplomatic course. That was her way. Branding had his. When they had quarreled, it had been around their differing approaches to life.

Still, Cotton Branding had always strived to keep the professional and the personal separate. Now Douglas Howe had closed that division, threatening to lead Branding down a treacherous and potentially disastrous road.

Howe was using his own public forum to denounce Branding and the work Branding was doing with the Advanced Strategic Computer Research Agency. Lately the verbal fight had turned dirty. Allegations of cover-ups, misuse of the public’s money, fraud, and boondoggling were becoming the norm; the two were rending each other limb from limb, and privately Branding had begun to wonder whether either of them would survive.

Within the past two weeks he had come to the conclusion that in this instance Mary had been correct. Accordingly, he had cut back on the public speechifying, concentrating his efforts on another front. He and his media cronies had gotten together in private in an effort to amass a case against Douglas Howe’s misuse of the public trust.

Howe and Mary: they were the only two people Cotton Branding had thought about for months.

Until Shisei.

He had met her—could it be only last night? he asked himself incredulously—at one of those innumerable social gatherings that for many formed the structure of summer on the East End. Inevitably, Branding found these fetes to be boring. But in his line of work they were strictly de rigueur, and it was at these times that he missed Mary’s presence most keenly. It was only now, in her absence, that he recognized how palatable she made these masques.

“Masque” was Branding’s private, ironic name for these summer parties. They were affectation personified; evenings where appearance was all, and content virtually nil. If one looked smashing, if one was seen talking to the right people when the photographers came, that was all that mattered, save if one boorishly abrogated social custom, say by bringing an undesirable such as a commercial literary figure or a Jew.

These Draconian requirements left a bitter taste in Branding’s mouth, and often when he would get fed up or one too many drinks would loosen his iron-bound superego, he would confess to Mary that he would dearly love to hold one of his famous press conferences in order to expose what he called “this medieval infrastructure.”

Always, Mary would laugh in that way she had, defusing his righteous anger, making him laugh along with her. But during his infrequent black moods, when he was off brooding on his own, when he had to resist following his father’s besotted fate, he longed to have that righteous anger back and was secretly and ashamedly angry at her for having robbed him of it.

The masque at which he met Shisei—or, more precisely, when he became aware of her—was a morbid affair attended by people compelled to talk at length about their memories of Truman Capote in commemoration of his death. Listening to their anecdotes—meant to be funny, but which in fact were merely sad—Branding felt relieved that he had never met the author.

Still, for Branding the time had not been ill-spent. He had invited two of his best media friends—Tim Brooking, New York’s best investigative reporter; and one of the on-air personalities of the TV networks’ most popular investigative news show—and the three of them had talked on and off about the state of electronic journalism.

These were evil times for television news divisions, brought on by the demise of the television networks, sold to nonmedia conglomerates eager to increase profit margins whatever the cost. The networks had only themselves to blame, the on-air personality lamented. With cable and VCR use eroding their Nielsen numbers, they had turned more and more to independent producers to supply programs. More and more, the local stations controlled what went on the air. Quiz and info-tainment shows such as
Entertainment Tonight
were far more lucrative than network news shows during the hour before prime time. Further, satellite feeds picked up by local news, and the increasing prominence of Ted Turner’s CNN all-news cable network, were making the three network news shows redundant. As of now, they all knew, not one network maintained an investigative news team for its nightly broadcasts, and foreign bureaus, once the pride of American TV, were being closed as fast as was practical.

As they spoke informally, it occurred to Branding that they were looking at him in a certain way. With a start, he realized that there was about their manner to him the same deference he reserved for the President of the United States.

Branding felt wanned, honored. He was well aware that one basis of his friendship with these men was their mutual usefulness. On the other hand, he was not so naive that he couldn’t tell the difference between these serious newsmen and the majority of their brethren, who were too lazy, bored, or stupid to know what journalism was all about.

Branding’s mother had once said to him,
Choose your friends with care. These are the people who will talk about you most.
Branding had never forgotten those words.

At last the topic reached the real reason for their meeting: the continuing “field research” into Howe’s professional conduct. Branding knew that he was on thin ice, that he was using up hard-won favors in order to keep the informal investigation going. There was, as yet, no hard evidence, and the on-air personality—the more impatient of the two—wondered aloud whether there ever would be.

Branding, who had just flown in from Washington after addressing the National Press Club, assured them that there would be. He also spoke to them about his favorite topic—the one he had spoken of in his address—the Hive Project.

At Washington’s Johnson Institute a team was putting the finishing brushstrokes on Hive, the advanced strategic computer that Branding’s ASCRA bill would fund over the next five years. The Hive Project was a revolutionary kind of computer that could reason, could create strategies. Branding hoped to install the Hive in every government agency: National Security Council, CIA, FBI, Pentagon, and so forth. The advantages of using such a system, which was far beyond anything any other nation had achieved, would be immediate and staggering, not to mention the ramifications for national defense, as well as for a comprehensive antiterrorist response and controlled tactical forays into the Middle East or elsewhere, if the need arose.

Now, Branding’s people had given him some information. Someone had been nosing around the Johnson Institute team members, appropriating without permission computer records of their private lives—bank accounts, loans, that sort of thing. To Branding this smacked of Douglas Howe. He told the newsmen that if he could link the unauthorized computer snooping to Howe, they would have a basis to go forward. The two men concurred. Branding could see the greed filling them; they could already see the scoop playing out in their minds.

The masque wound down, and so did the men’s discussion. It wasn’t until much later in the evening, after the three had split up, that Branding caught sight of Shisei.

She was standing against the marble fireplace in the living room, and Branding remembered thinking how like marble her skin was. She wore a clingy, black sleeveless blouse, and silk trousers of the same color. Her startlingly narrow waist was cinched by a wide crocodile-skin belt with an enormous matte red-gold buckle sculpted into what appeared to be a free-form design. Her tiny feet were enclosed by high-heel crocodile shoes. It was not a typical East End summer outfit, and therefore Branding liked it and her. He remembered thinking: this woman’s got guts. Not only for her sense of clothes style, either. She wore her glossy black hair long on top, in an ultramodern sculptured manner. A short fringe across her wide forehead was dyed a shocking blond.

When he was closer to her, he saw that she wore no jewelry—not even earrings—save for a square-cut emerald ring on the middle finger of her right hand. Either she wore no makeup or it had been applied so skillfully that it was invisible.

For a long time Branding studied her face. He fancied himself a student of the human condition, therefore faces were important to him. He saw in Shisei something remarkable. Though her body was that of a mature adult, her face, a perfect oval, had an odd purity, bordering on innocence. Branding was at a loss to understand why until, with an unsettling lurch, it occurred to him that she had the kind of androgynous perfection of beauty only a child could possess.

Watching her, he was reminded of a night when his mother had taken him to see
Peter Pan
on Broadway. How enthralled he had been with the young, dewy perfection of Mary Martin, how secretly ashamed he had been of that feeling because she had been playing the part of a male, albeit a magical one.

Now, in this restored Revolutionary farmhouse in East Bay Bridge, he felt anew that odd, almost compulsive quickening of his blood that was so disturbing, and all the more intense for that forbidden component.

It was not merely the youth—Branding was as sexually unmoved by young girls as he was by homosexuals—but rather what that dewy freshness represented, a kind of ultimate, malleable state. Though he did not yet know it—and perhaps never would—Shisei’s face, in the flicker of a heartbeat, by turns encompassed all that the female represented to the male: slut, virgin, mother, goddess.