The Nicholas Linnear Novels (176 page)

Senjin lighted a cigarette. “How so?”

Dr. Muku shrugged. “Clearly, the subject has lost sight of reality. His senses tell him only what he wishes them to tell him. It is as if he has put a filter on them; as if real life is too frightening or complex for him to interface with without this filter of his own design.”

Senjin was inwardly amused by the frailty of Dr. Muku’s reasoning, built as it was, assumption upon assumption, on lies masking as truth and vice versa. “Tell me,” he said, “how do you come to this conclusion, Doctor?”

“It is simple, really,” Dr. Muku said. “To you and me, the concept of the demon woman of which Kiyohime is an excellent example is not so black and white.” Dr. Muku chuckled. “Or, in this case, entirely black.” He settled his hands across his pudgy stomach. “The truth of the demon-woman myth is this: man sees her as so frightening because when he first sees her, she has the aspect both of his mother and the mother of his children. It is only when he tugs upon her loving, maternal mask that he comes upon the face of the demon woman.” Dr. Muku lifted a finger. “However, the psychoanalyst knows that the aspect of the demon woman is, in its own way, also a mask. And the most interesting thing is that
this
particular mask is entirely the creation of the man himself. It is something that
he
desires; that, in fact, he cannot do without. It is, as Yukio Mishima has told us, a reflection of the male’s unceasing sexual passion.”

Senjin almost laughed in Dr. Muku’s face. Did he know how foolish he sounded? Senjin thought not. Dr. Muku was all too wrapped up in Dr. Muku as teacher, as healer.

In order to encourage the doctor, Senjin nodded his head, murmuring empty words of praise as he had once done to his Kshira
sensei.
After all, Dr. Muku thought of himself as a master of psychology, and, at least for the time being, it was to Senjin’s benefit to feed that perception.

On the other hand, Senjin did not want Dr. Muku to have an easy time of it. “Pardon me for interjecting this,” he said, “but the suspect has shown no signs of violent sexual behavior.”

“If he hasn’t as yet,” Dr. Muku said sagely, “it is only a matter of time before he does. A man so obsessed with the concept of a demon woman must of necessity harbor a deep and violent antipathy toward women. This would, from his point of view, be most satisfactorily transmitted in a sexual manner.”

“He wouldn’t just kill them?” Senjin inquired.

“No. Killing is too final, too abrupt to satisfy his rage. He would first need to mutilate his victims in some way—perhaps even in a variety of ways. I would be very much surprised if rape was not among them.”

Senjin kept nodding and smiling. But in the pit of his stomach something cold and hard was forming. Dr. Muku no doubt would have perceived this sensation as rage. But Senjin knew it was something altogether different. Something entirely outside Dr. Muku’s ken.

Branding lay upon the rumpled bed. His body felt heavy with lust, his head light with abandon. While his body was for the moment sated, he found that his mind was not. He watched through eyes slitted by dusty late-afternoon sunlight and lust as Shisei climbed naked off the bed.

For a moment she was silhouetted against the light, and he saw the kind of aura one looks for in eclipses. It was as if the very sun itself was her core, and for the first time he understood the true meaning of the word radiant. As she turned, the light slid across her like honey. Her luminous eyes, for the moment lighter than the black they had been, paler certainly than the surrounding shadows, reached him where he lay spread-eagle, and he felt paralyzed both by excitement and by fright.

Cotton Branding did not want to take his eyes off her. He had never felt such power being exerted by one person over another on such an intimate level. It was one thing to squeeze out one’s influence—either gently or crushingly, as the circumstances dictated—quite another to find oneself in the jaws of such a magnetic whirlpool.

And then—just like that—Shisei smiled, and all the shuddering intimations of power were whirled away on a froth of lightness, innocence, and healthy curiosity, so that Branding was left breathless, doubting anything dark and sinister had ever existed.

Shisei, in her open cover-up, sat in a straight-backed chair, her legs demurely crossed, just as if she were fully clothed and this were a business meeting. She sat with her forearms lying along the black wooden arms of the chair, and, even now, with the oblique sunlight spread along their slender lengths, he could discern no hair whatsoever, not even the pale down of youth.

“Shisei,” he said, and still smiling, she turned her head toward him. A thick shaft of the sunlight slipped around the curve of her high cheekbone as if she were being painted by an artist instead of being illuminated by the ending of the day.

Then, in a movement so innocent it startled him, she put her head back so that he was able to see as an unbroken line the soft underside of her jaw, the hollow of her throat, the abrupt thrust of her breasts. It was a gesture fraught with intimation, a gesture that was erotic and primitive, a kind of unmasking, revealing an intimacy that went beyond lovemaking, which as Branding well knew, could be as impersonal as getting a haircut. It was the kind of gesture that one jungle cat makes to another, an exposure of a vulnerable spot, an ultimate acquiesence that said on a subliminal level, Here, see how deeply I am in your power.

And in that breathless moment Branding knew that he wanted this woman more than he had ever wanted anything in his life.

He recalled, like the flash from a gemstone held to the light, a moment from his childhood that had been with him, moving beneath the ice of his memory, made shadowy by time. But the presence of Shisei negated both memory and time, and Branding saw in her eyes his past being resurrected like a ghost at a feast.

He had been raised on Beacon Hill in Boston, scion of his father’s vast banking fortune. His mother Bess was, in Branding’s memory, a somewhat intimidating figure. Because she could not completely control her husband, she controlled her sons with a severity none of them forgot.

The times and her husband’s will demanded that she could no longer be puritan in the strictest sense of her forebears, and she resented it. She was deeply, almost obsessively, Godfearing, and Branding remembered being dragged off to her Presbyterian church every Sunday to hear fire and brimstone sermons concerning man’s innate sins emanate from the mouths of bearded ministers of considerable ecclesiastical rank. She insisted that he read the Bible over and over until he could quote entire sections to her on demand.

One day, when he was thirteen, his mother handed him a book. Its title was
Wonders of the Invisible World,
and its author was Cotton Mather. Written in 1693, a year after the Salem witch trials, in which Mather was involved, it was an eerie tome discussing satanic possession.

When he had finished the book, his mother sent for him. Holding him by his arms, she had peered deeply into his eyes and had said, “The world is Satan’s playground, Cotton, never forget that.” She was the only one who called him Cotton, not Cook. After all, it was the name she had given him. “Work hard, never indulge to excess, above all, be disciplined. Stay on the narrow path that God has ordained for you, and you will be safe. Stray from the narrow path, and all the good that I see within you will wither and die.”

Now, staring into Shisei’s charcoal-gray eyes, with the heat of summer billowing into the bedroom, Cotton Branding thought again of his mother and of the narrow path. How lucky she would have considered herself to have died before he had chosen politics as his career. She had been so certain that he alone, the firstborn of all her sons, would fulfill her dreams and become a man of the cloth.

Well, Branding thought now, perhaps she wouldn’t mind his choice of careers, after all. He was railing against injustice in his own way. And, working in Sodom, he had resisted all temptation to wander from the narrow path.

Then he looked at Shisei and thought, How can I keep our relationship a secret?

Night had come at last.

St. Theresa’s, the only Roman Catholic church in Shinjuku, was situated four blocks west of the Meiji-dori, on a side street just off the Okubo-dori.

It was, Nangi thought, still an impressive sight amid the clean-lined sky-rises, the gigantic neon signs of modern Tokyo; perhaps even more impressive because of its location in the midst of a concrete and steel forest.

Inside, it was cool and dim and quiet. The light, falling through the arched, stained-glass windows, seemed to echo in the vastness. Somewhere above his head the choir was practicing, the young, sexless voices like a star shower against a night sky.

Day into night, Nangi thought.
Now I lay me down to sleep
…The outside world—and the inherent secrets it keeps—is, for the moment at least, at bay.
And pray the Lord my soul to keep.

He turned, dipped his fingers in the font, crossed himself. He knelt at a pew in back, staring at the space, hearing in the pauses between the sporadic choral singing, the muffled footfalls, a fragment of hushed conversation, all quickly snuffed out, the silence of God.

He discovered, to his dismay, that there was no solace for him here. He had sinned; he could not take communion. He was cut off from God and the peace of spirit His protection provided.

Instead he found the grinning face of Kusunda Ikusa hovering in his mind, like a spectre or a projection. Those laser eyes seemed to have followed him all the way into the sanctity of St. Theresa’s.
Do your duty, Nangi-san. Nami—and your Emperor—command you.

That meant betraying Nicholas. But Nangi owed a debt to Nicholas that he could never adequately repay, not only for the suffering that Tenchi had caused him, but also for protecting Seiichi Sato from Akiko for so long. And yet, as Kusunda Ikusa pointed out, Nangi’s primary duty was to his Emperor, and by extension, his Emperor’s emissary, Nami.

It was at this moment, while Nangi was thus engaged in this moral tug-of-war, that Justine entered the church. She had considered how best to contact Nangi. Visiting him at the office, or even calling him, seemed too public to her, and to disturb him at home seemed to Justine beyond the bounds of their uneasy relationship.

She had known about this church, of course, from Nicholas, and it had been Nangi himself who had, in some nearly forgotten conversation, spoken of his ritual visits to St. Theresa’s.

Desperation, Justine thought as she glanced around the interior, gave one all sorts of previously unrevealed powers. Like dredging up the subject of that discussion. And desperation most closely defined her current state of mind.

Heartsick at being shut out of Nicholas’s life, she had at first retreated to the opposite end of the house. She wanted to stand up to Nicholas, to make him see how wrongly he was behaving. After all, she told herself, she had done so before. But that had been at home in America. Here, in Japan, she found that she had lost her equilibrium, that without Nicholas as her anchor, she lacked the strength to battle on alone.

In the middle of the night, with the rhythmic sounds of Nicholas working out wafting eerily through the house, Justine had considered leaving Japan in the morning.

The pain she felt now, cut off from everything she loved, everything familiar, was like no other she had known. She fought down like unpalatable medicine her anger at Nicholas, unable to come to terms with the helplessness she felt. Here in Japan all her inadequacies, imagined and real, were magnified. And she was in Japan because of Nicholas.

She knew that her love for him was unshakable, but she also realized that she could no longer endure her own torment and guilt concerning their daughter’s death while battling with Nicholas.

She felt beset by foes she could neither see nor understand, and the instinct to flee was enormous, but there was terror in that as well, because it meant running out on Nicholas, and she could not imagine trapping herself in such a betrayal. She felt ensnared in a situation that was rapidly spinning out of control.

Long into the waning night she had wept bitter tears, for herself, and for Nicholas.

When dawn had at last come, Justine knew that she was incapable of running away. Under the present conditions she was also incapable of sticking it out here alone. She needed advice, and she needed it from someone who knew Nicholas as well as she did, someone who could guide her through the deepening maze of Japan. There was only one person she could think of who fit those requirements: Tanzan Nangi.

Nangi became aware of someone slipping into the pew next to him. As a matter of course he turned to look at who it was. He was stunned to see Justine.

“Mrs. Linnear,” he said, his eyes quickly downcast so that she would not see his shock. “I did not know that you were Catholic.”

“I’m not,” Justine said, and then bit her tongue. Too late, she realized that Nangi had been giving her a face-saving way of explaining her presence here in church. Of course, he had recognized the real reason she had come, but in Japan one never spoke of real reasons. One was too busy saving face. “That is—” she began again, then faltered. “Well, the truth is—” She stopped again. One never spoke the truth in Japan. Or, if one did, it was cloaked in such a way that it could be interpreted six other ways.

“Please forgive me. I am just finishing my prayers, Mrs. Linnear,” Nangi said, bowing his head.

Justine, about to say “Oh, I’m sorry!” clamped her jaws shut. Nangi was giving her time to collect her thoughts, to reapproach him in the proper manner, to regain the face she had lost. Justine was grateful to him. She realized, perhaps belatedly, that her wanting to meet Nangi here was not merely a matter of convenience. She recalled how she had prayed for Nicholas at the moment when he had come out of the anesthetic. If she did not believe in God, how could she have prayed to him? And, further, how could she have derived any measure of solace from prayer? Justine was coming to suspect that she was not the agnostic that she had all along believed herself to be. Now, beside the silent, prayerful Nangi, she bowed her head, too, asking silently for help and for strength.