The Nicholas Linnear Novels (175 page)

He took the microcassette from the interior of the cane, put it into the office stereo system. Soon the voice of Kusunda Ikusa came through the speakers, talking of Tenchi and Nangi’s duty to betray Nicholas Linnear.

Nangi sat back in his swivel chair, fought the urge to have a cigarette, and thought of his friend Seiichi Sato. Sato had been a fighter, a fiercely loyal friend and implacable enemy. For the first time it occurred to Nangi how alike in many ways were Seiichi and Nicholas.

Nangi knew that he could never have betrayed Seiichi.

He tapped his forefinger rhythmically against his lips as he listened again to everything Ikusa said, not merely the words, but the inflection, the intonation as well, in order to glean every drop of information from the meeting. Others, at one time or another, had tried to extort Nangi. All had failed. But Ikusa was another matter entirely. Ikusa was Nami, and Nami was, for better or for worse, Japan.

Nangi felt locked within a cage. In order to get out, he knew, he would have to use the one door. But to do that, he must betray Nicholas Linnear.

The taped conversation was over, and silence fell like an ominous shadow across the room. Nangi took the tape from the recorder, pocketed it. Then he rescrewed the head onto his cane and left the office.

In the street he found a public phone, dialed a number and deposited the correct change. After one ring a recorded message came on. Nangi let it run its course, waited for precisely three seconds, then said one word into the receiver mouthpiece. He hung up.

He waited five minutes, during which time two people wanted to use the phone. Nangi, his finger on the pips, pretended to speak into the dead receiver. The people went away.

He let go of the pips, dialed the same number. It rang three times, then a human voice answered. Nangi did not give his name, and he was not asked for it. He spoke an address into the receiver, hung up. Then he went back to his office.

Nangi spent much of the day with his technicians, sharing their frustration as they failed to gain any headway in deciphering the nature of the mysterious virus that had attacked Sato International’s computer banks. He wished vainly for Nicholas’s insightful advice, mourning the loss as if it were a death in the family.

Late in the afternoon, Nangi left the office, went crosstown. He remembered the Akihabara district of Tokyo with great fondness. In the ashen days following the end of the war in the Pacific, a raging black market had sprung up here, and people who were clever and audacious had made fortunes virtually overnight. This was where Nangi had started his new life, before he learned the discipline of
kanryodo,
the way of the Samurai bureaucrat.

Today, Akihabara was a living monument to Japan’s postindustrialist economy. Shops, jammed along both sides of the narrow, winding streets, bristled with electronic hardware of all shapes, sizes, and functions, most of them manufactured expressly for export.

Postpunk models with spiked hair and painted faces glowered and sneered out of massive posters that hawked the latest compact-disk player or stereo component. On massive TV screens American women rolled their eyes in ecstasy at the sound of the newest, lightest-weight headphones or portable cassette deck, caressing these electronic marvels as if they were lovers. A cacophony of disparate rock and pop songs emanating from open doorways and stalls fought with colored digital displays for attention along the jammed streets.

Akihabara was steaming with people. Which was, of course, why Nangi had chosen it. There was no chance of being overheard—either accidentally or deliberately—in this fantastic fever-pitched madhouse.

Nangi saw the Pack Rat lounging against a display-packed window. He was watching David Bowie pitching a soft drink on a large-screen TV. The scene changed to show the ecstatic face of a female talento, a perfect image, a new-wave silicon and gallium icon.

The Pack Rat felt Nangi’s approach without having to look. He was a tough-looking character, short, dark, with a pockmarked face and a heavy jaw. He was known as the Pack Rat because he accumulated contacts and intelligence like others acquired artifacts. He was a man Nangi had known for many years and trusted implicitly. The Pack Rat was unlike many of the others of his dubious profession: he was not a mercenary, hiring out to the highest bidder. One did not have to look over one’s shoulder when one hired him.

The Pack Rat liked Nangi. But even more, he admired him. Many years ago Nangi had saved the Pack Rat’s sister from a serious altercation with the head of a Yakuza clan. The Pack Rat owed Nangi
giri,
a debt he could never repay.

As Nangi came past him, the Pack Rat detached himself from the window. Soon, however, he had pushed ahead of Nangi, and taking his unspoken cue, Nangi followed the Pack Rat through a tortuous circuit of the district. Nangi lost count of how many times they doubled back on themselves, ducked in and out of shops.

At last the Pack Rat turned and grinned at Nangi. They slowed their pace. Together they strolled the streets.

“I’ve been here awhile,” the Pack Rat said, “seeing if the environment needed cleaning out.” He meant he had checked to see if Nangi was being followed. “It did.”

Nami.

“I know the source,” Nangi said.

The Pack Rat tensed. “Is there any immediate danger?” Which meant, Should I find the man who followed you and take him out?

“Not yet.”

The Pack Rat had stopped for a moment, as if he were interested in a shop-window display of portable computers. Nangi knew better. The Pack Rat knew that after the last fifteen-minute mad dash, Nangi needed a breather. The Pack Rat was courteous.

“How may I be of service, Nangi-san?”

Nangi waited until he was ready to move on. Considering Nami’s attempt at surveillance, he did not want to talk, even on these crowded streets, unless they were in motion.

When they had gone a couple of blocks, shouldering aside a host of Germans intent on buying everything in sight, Nangi said, “We had a serious incident this morning. Our computers were compromised by a virus.”

The Pack Rat was surprised. “I brought you your system of computer encryptions. I thought it was totally secure.”

“And it was,” Nangi said, moving nimbly through the throng. “Until today.” As they moved he handed the Pack Rat a 3½-inch floppy disk. “This is a record of the attack.”

The Pack Rat pocketed the disk with the ease of a maître d’ accepting a tip. “I’ll get right on it.”

“I know you will. Even though I have others working on this aspect, they do not have your wealth of resources.” Nangi’s cane tap-tap-tapped on the pavement. “There’s something else, even more urgent, that I want you to concentrate on. Kusunda Ikusa.”

The Pack Rat whistled a little tune. They paused at a stall and he pointed out some items that blinked and flashed, as if he and Nangi were prospective purchasers. After a moment they pressed on.

“First of all,” the Pack Rat said, “I want to make certain I heard you right.”

“If you’re thinking Nami,” Nangi said, “you did.”

They passed a flock of black-leather-jacketed kids in 1950s American hairstyles, complete with Brylcreem and duck tails, dripping metal chains and looking cocky. Clouds of cigarette smoke wreathed them. The two-way flow of pedestrian traffic parted on either side of them, making of their group a kind of island of curiosities.

The Pack Rat said something to them as they passed, and the rockers laughed, giving him thumbs-up signs.

The Pack Rat said to Nangi, “Do you want the target researched? Catalogued? Indexed?”

“No,” Nangi said. “I want him compromised.”

The Pack Rat evinced no surprise. “Do I have a time limit?”

“Yes,” Nangi said. “Yesterday.”

The Pack Rat grinned. “Now that’s a job to cherish.”

When Senjin Omukae moved, he moved like the sea. He had a way about him that was as sinuous as if his bones could bend instead of break. Women especially noted this, if not consciously, then with a part of their mind still attuned to atavistic behavior. Men only said that Senjin was dangerous, but women saw in that danger another dimension, one to which they were attracted, perhaps despite themselves. There was a kind of freedom in being so close to danger, as well as a heightened sense of awareness. They saw more, tasted more, felt more, and they fell in love with that supraclarity, mistaking it for a love of Senjin himself.

For his own part, Senjin did not mind. In fact, he did not make a distinction between the two kinds of love. Love was for him, in any case, a counterfeit emotion, fraught with self-deceit and laden with a treacherous passion that inevitably led to greed, jealousy, and envy.

Senjin laughed. Had he been a bit younger, he could imagine himself a talento, hawking Hitachi or Mitsubishi software, smiling vacuously out at the adoring population glued to their twenty-four-inch cathode-ray tubes, dancing when he was told to dance, singing meaningless pop songs in front of thousands of screaming adolescents, being interviewed by NHK-TV in a series of prime-time programs as eagerly anticipated as the latest soap opera.

He had the kind of face that ad agencies and conglomerate executives fell all over themselves to find, market, and exploit: handsome, lineless, with a hint of the feminine in its softness of angles in jaw and brow.

These qualities did not make him any less attractive to the opposite sex. Quite the contrary, Senjin possessed that confluence of features most admired in doomed Japanese heroes down through the ages.

His girlfriends had been many and varied, but they all shared one experience. They had been taken by Senjin to the Kabuki theater to see
Musume Dojoji.

Musume Dojoji
was Senjin’s favorite play, one which he watched with a mixture of fascination and terror, precisely the kind of attraction-repulsion one feels upon seeing a particularly bloody accident. Wishing to avert one’s head, one stares instead, mesmerized, even while one’s stomach turns queasy.

Musume Dojoji
spins the legend of Kiyohime, a bewitching demon woman, who falls in love with a young Buddhist monk. He is torn by his attraction for her and his vows of celibacy. He deflects her attempts at seduction, first in subtle ways, then, as her pursuit becomes ever more determined, in more overt ways.

Finally he flees his town altogether. But Kiyohime will not be denied, and she pursues him, using various magical means to keep him in sight. At last, she turns into an enormous serpent.

The priest, now filled with fear at this supernatural adversary/lover, takes refuge beneath a gigantic bell under which he believes he will be safe.

Instead, the serpent Kiyohime slowly encircles the bell with her oily coils. Enraged that she cannot get to the priest, she rears up and, spitting demonic flames that eat metal, sets fire to the bell, incinerating the would-be lover who had so ill-advisedly spurned her.

Senjin would sit through each performance of this Kabuki play as if for the first time, gripped in the maw of a sickening exhilaration/horror as the hideous denouement approached.

Afterward he would take the woman he was with out to a lavish dinner of
fagu
or Kobe steak, during the course of which he would explore with her the psychological aspects of the play.

It was
Musume Dojoji
’s psychological undertones—or, rather, Senjin’s interpretations of them—that most fascinated the doctor. He was, Senjin thought, in many ways like Senjin’s endless parade of girlfriends—becoming increasingly fascinated by Senjin’s obsession with Kiyohime.

“The demon woman,” Dr. Muku said, “is a familiar figure both in our mythology and in our psyches. It should not be surprising that your, er, subject is fixated on such a creature.”

Of course, Dr. Muku did not know that Kiyohime was Senjin’s own obsession. Senjin had come to Dr. Muku in his official capacity in an attempt to, as he told the psychiatrist, “obtain a clear psychological profile on a suspect in a multiple-murder case.” He had given Dr. Muku a fictitious name for his “suspect.” He needn’t have bothered. Dr. Muku was not interested in identities; he was interested in, as he put it succinctly, “the pathology of crime.”

But, of course, Senjin was acutely aware of identity. His initial contact with the psychiatrist had been via the phone. That had been several years ago, when Senjin had been working a difficult serial murder case. Always, his meetings with Dr. Muku were, at the psychiatrist’s behest, utterly private.

“I hope you won’t take offense, Commander, but I would rather you not enter and exit this office through the waiting room,” Dr. Muku had said during that initial phone conversation. “Some of my patients are unnaturally sensitive. Your police aura might disturb not only them, but unnerve my staff as well. Far better that you use the back door to my consultation room which lets out directly onto the outer corridor. That way, we will be assured that no one will see you and, perhaps, mistake your presence.”

Now Senjin took full advantage of his previous relationship with Dr. Muku, day after day spending an hour with Dr. Muku—much as a patient would—spinning, as if he were a Kabuki playwright, concentric circles composed of lies and the truth, or subtle combinations of the two, until even Senjin himself often could not distinguish between the two.

This subconscious and unwitting playacting, of course, suited Senjin’s lifestyle. He had built his existence using subterfuge upon subterfuge, manufacturing flecks of artifice as if they were bricks, glazing them with the colors of his imagination, firing them in the kiln of Kshira.

What better—and dangerous—way to recreate the skein of his life, a movie filmed for an audience of two, than to speak of it in the darkness and the light of this psychiatrist’s office?

“The demon woman,” Dr. Muku was saying now, “is, in a very important sense, a figure of innocence.”

“Innocence?” Senjin echoed, despite himself. He laughed. “I don’t see how my suspect would see her as ‘innocent.’”

“Well, of course
he
wouldn’t see her as innocent,” Dr. Muku said. He was a small man, as compact as a rubber ball, and seemingly as malleable. He had the wide, open face of a child. His salt-and-pepper hair was long and rather wild, as if, as part of his morning ablutions, he spent five minutes in a wind tunnel. He wore old-fashioned, round wire-rimmed glasses that magnified raisin-colored eyes. “He would see her as wholly evil. But, you see, that is part of his problem.”