The Nicholas Linnear Novels (179 page)

That was just like the Scoundrel, Tomi thought, making up the rules as he went along.

“Hey,” he said suddenly. “Remember when I was promoted out of my engineering department?”

“How could I forget?” Tomi said, laughing. “I threw you a party that lasted the entire weekend. Remember that woman from my office who told ghost stories all night?”

“Are you kidding? I’m lucky I remember my name after that blowout. We did in a case of Suntory scotch, didn’t we?”

Tomi nodded. “Among other cases.” She was smiling. “Those were the days.”

The Scoundrel, downing his Sapporo, watched the smile fade from her face like the color out of a cherry blossom. “I see you’ve got weight tonight.” To him, weight was synonymous with sadness, lightness with happiness. “If that’s the case, you’ve come to the right boy. What’s hung the stone around your neck?”

“Around my heart, more like it,” Tomi said.

“Ah!
L’affaire d’amour. Bien!
Please explicate your predicament,
madame.”

Tomi couldn’t help but smile. “Is everything a joke to you?”

“Sure. Life’s a joke, Tomi. Or have you been too busy to notice?”

“I guess lately I have.”

He winked. “We’ll soon put you right. Now give it to me straight. Don’t hold anything back. I can take it. I promise I won’t faint.”

This was just what Tomi had wanted. But now she hesitated, wondering whether it made sense to tell the Scoundrel about Senjin Omukae. After all, this was very serious business to her, while to the Scoundrel it was already
l’affaire d’amour,
a situation of which he was more than likely to make fun.

“All right,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest. “I can see those two vertical lines above the bridge of your nose. I know you well enough to know that they only come out when you’re really concerned. So no jokes.” He gestured. “Cross my heart.”

Tomi was immediately relieved, and she launched into her tale of attraction and uneasiness, of confused emotions, of the attendant submergence of her policewoman persona, and of her fear of the moral repercussions.

When she was finished, she watched the Scoundrel’s face for any sign of what he thought. But he had his face buried in his beer glass and she could tell nothing.

At last the Scoundrel said, “You obviously want my advice, so I’ll give it to you, though I don’t think you’ll like what I’m going to say.” He drained his glass. “It’s very simple. Forget this guy. From what you’ve told me, he’s not for you. But even if he were, he’s your commander. The situation’s so dangerous that the risk of going further’s not worth it.” He put aside his empty glass. “Now I’ll shut up, we’ll eat dinner, and you can digest what I’ve said along with the
unagi.”

As she ate, Tomi tried to sort out her feelings. She knew that she should have been relieved by what the Scoundrel had said. She recognized in his counsel an echo of what a part of her had suspected all along. The best course was for her to bury her feelings for Senjin Omukae, to continue with her life as if he were merely her commander.

But Tomi felt no sense of relief, only a growing despair. For now, as the Scoundrel had clarified the situation, she knew that she would not take the best course, that her path lay in another, darker, less understandable direction.

If she had been the kind of woman to bury emotions she felt deeply, to allow herself to live a life acceptable to those around her but not to herself, she never would have hung up the phone on her brother. The dutiful sister, she would have bowed to his wishes, returning home to marry the man he had chosen for her.

But she was not one to go blindly where an outdated notion of duty would heartlessly thrust her. At the terrifying moment of her break with her family, she had promised herself that from that moment on she would be true to herself and to her own wishes. That must become the meaning of her life, or else her grand gesture, rejecting the traditional life, would have no meaning.

“I wish I could take your advice,” Tomi said.

The Scoundrel shrugged. “Advice is cheap, even here where everything is expensive.”

“I know. But I value yours.”

He leaned forward. His face was unusually somber. “Then take my advice, Tomi. Go out. Have a fling. You deserve some fun.” That grin flashed again, lighting up his face. “You’re far too serious for your own good.”

She put her hand over his. “Thanks, Seji. You’re a good friend. Your heart is true.”

The Scoundrel, perhaps embarrassed by the compliment, slid his hand out from under hers. He studied her darkened face. “Come on,” he said, spilling yen onto the table, “I know a club in Roppongi where they don’t allow either day or night to intrude on the nonstop festivities. We’ll dance, get drunk, and say to hell with everyone!”

Tomi, laughing again, let him lead her out into the rain- and color-swept night. For the moment, at least, she could allow her anxieties to wait in abeyance while she floated in the Scoundrel’s never-never land.

Cotton Branding sat naked and shivering on the edge of the porcelain tub, his head in his hands. Shisei stood in front of him, dripping water onto his bare legs. Behind him the shower rattled the plastic curtain with its painted violets so that they appeared to dance as if in a wind.

“So,” Shisei said, “now that you have seen all of me, you are like the rest. Your desire has turned to disgust.”

“That’s not true.”

“If you could only see yourself. You can’t even look at me.”

It was the contempt in her voice that broke the spell of horror that had enveloped him. He raised his head, stared at her. “Nothing has changed, Shisei.”

“Oh, please. Spare me your politician’s easy lies. I see your face. Everything has changed.”

“Not everything,” he said. He rubbed his hands one against the other, as if needing to warm them before a fire. “Give me a moment. Please.” He stood up. “We’ve startled—maybe even frightened—each other. The least we can do is retire to neutral corners before we come out for the next round.” He gave her a wan smile. “And perhaps there won’t be a next round.”

Shisei gave a little shiver, and he reached past her, handed her a towel. “Thank you,” she said. She wrapped it around herself, letting the moisture soak into the absorbent cloth.

Branding turned off the shower. He said, “I think I’ve had all the shocks I care to have in one night.”

“The shock,” she said sadly, “is what most people feel. But it isn’t all. The tattoo revolts them.”

Branding registered surprise. “If you care what other people think, then why did you have it done?”

She looked at him for a moment. “I’m cold,” she said. “I want to put some clothes on.”

He handed Shisei her cover-up, but she said, “No. I want something of yours.”

He went and got one of his pajama tops, gave it to her. That was all she needed; it came midway down her thighs. She buttoned it, her gold nails shining. The shoulders hung off her in an endearing fashion.

As if the enormous house had suddenly become too small, or still retained the detritus of the recent emotional conflagration, they went outside.

They stared out into the night. The Atlantic crashed all around them, and periodically the doleful foghorn from the nearby lighthouse intruded on the pull and suck of the surf. For once, the gulls were quiet, walking stiffly along the beach, peering here and there for the last morsels of food of the day.

Above their heads the sky was perfectly clear, strewn with glittering stars, hard, bright, piercing the canvas of the heavens with their blue, yellow, and white light.

But off to the south the horizon was cluttered with a long cloudbank, which Branding estimated must stretch for several hundred miles.

Now, as they watched, lightning began to flicker and spark within the clouds. Seen sometimes as fiery, jagged flashes, sometimes as great flowering bursts illuminating sections of the cloudbank, the heat lightning played out its stunning silent concerto across a keyboard too vast to comprehend.

This exhibition of nature’s handiwork was humbling, indeed. For Branding it served to put into perspective human concerns and anxieties, which seemed in comparison both fleeting and inconsequential.

After a time the cloudbank relapsed into darkness; the show was over. They went back inside.

They sat on the down-filled sofa, low lamplight spilling warmly across them. The eerie revelation of a while ago seemed not to have happened, or to have been something they had imagined.

The shock was gone. And in its place, what? Branding knew he very much wanted to find out.

He had poured out snifters of brandy for them both, and they sipped slowly, deliberately, silently understanding that they needed to rescue their equilibrium.

Shisei’s hair, shining and still damp, reminded him of a mink’s pelt, close and soft and precious. The fringe of blond color above her eyes made her seem at this moment somehow more vulnerable. Then, like a shock of cold water, he remembered the spider etched across her back, and he thought, “This is a different kind of mink.”

“Shisei,” Branding said, before she had a chance to speak, “I don’t want to be like all the others.”

For a long moment she said nothing. Her eyes, dark as night, held steady on his. “Is that the politician or the man talking?” she said finally.

“The man, I hope. I want it to be the man,” Branding said truthfully.

Shisei briefly closed her eyes. “And I want to believe you.” She put her snifter down. “You scared me, Cook, when you came in on me like that. I wasn’t prepared. The truth is, I hadn’t yet thought of a way to tell you—or to show you all of me.”

“Is all of you so terrible?”

Shisei snatched up her brandy, and Branding caught a hint of the vulnerable woman she was so afraid of revealing. “You tell me,” she said.

“The
image
is a terrifying one.” He caught the momentary flash of anger in her eyes as she glanced at him, then away. He was reminded of his daughter when she was a child. She had often looked at him that way when he had said no to her. But it passed, and her love for him would always prevail.

“I don’t care for spiders,” Branding went on. “I don’t know anyone who does.” He slowed his pace, understanding that he needed to feel his way in the face of this unknown, for his sake as well as for hers. “But on the other hand, it’s a tattoo, a work of art.” He saw her shudder. “And because it’s on your body, I admit I’m intrigued. Will you tell me how it came to be done? It must have been a project, tattooed over a period of time.”

“Two years,” Shisei said, as if this were a fact to be proud of, as if this were the only aspect of the existence of the spider to which she could point with pride.

“A long time.”

He had meant it as an assurance. But hearing his words, she put the snifter to her lips, drained all the brandy at once. She swallowed convulsively, almost choking on the fiery liquor. Her eyes watered and she wiped them with the heel of her hand. “Oh, God, Cook, you don’t know how long.”

“Was it painful?”

“My soul hurt for years afterward,” Shisei said. “The other pain was nothing. It disappeared like mist in sunlight.”

“I want to know what happened,” Branding said.

“We have already established that many topics are taboo.” Shisei poured herself more brandy, drank more slowly this time. Then she said, “Cook, what did you do after your wife died, when you hurt so much you thought you’d never recover? Didn’t the emptiness make the days endless? Didn’t you wait in the night for death to come, didn’t you hear it breathing close beside you, see its red eyes like lamps hanging in the blackness? And didn’t, oh, once, twice, didn’t you long to tumble into the oblivion death held in its hand like a prize?”

Branding was taken aback by the extremes of her emotions. He knew that she was describing herself, not him. He had never felt such utter despair as she described, even after the initial shock of Mary’s death had worn off. And now he supposed that, at least in part, this is what had triggered his guilt. But he knew that how he answered Shisei was very important. She appeared on the verge of opening up, and he knew that he possessed the power to push her one way or the other.

“The human condition is such that life goes on, no matter the depths of despair into which one is plunged,” Branding said. “I did…To be perfectly frank, I’m not sure what I saw or heard after Mary died. I only know that I see the car, upside down and still smoldering, I see her body on a stretcher, a blanket over her head. I hear a TV commentator speaking about her death in the same clipped, detached phrases he spoke of Vietnam casualties and the death of American Marines in Beirut. I keep thinking that death should not be degraded by being made impersonal or reduced to its lowest common denominator.”

Shisei sighed, and it was as if the last hour had not occurred. “You will not forsake me, Cook, the way the others have,” she said. “I know that now.” She put her head against the sofa back, and she seemed once more so much the little girl that Branding felt his heart pounding. He wanted to take her in his arms, to protect her, to tell her everything would be all right.

But he knew that he would do nothing of the kind. He could sense that the two of them had reached a kind of shared nadir, and like two motes suspended in fluid, the next moment would tell in which direction they would spin.

“You can’t know what that means to me, Cook.” Her fingers were lost in her hair, pulling it hard, as if the pain were also part of her penance. “I have been…treated poorly; I have been abused. I have loved, and have been punished for that love.”

Branding stared at her as if seeing her for the first time. She was like an iceberg. He was wondering just how much of her was hidden below the surface of a dark and stormy sea.

“You’ve survived, Shisei,” he said. “In the end, isn’t that what’s important?”

“Have you ever been imprisoned?” Shisei said, as if to tell him that he knew nothing about the condition of her life. “I have.” She lifted her arm over her head, pointing to the creature that had become a part of her. “This spider is my penance—and my reward.”

Branding was once more trying to fathom the nuances, the facets of her personality he could from time to time glimpse like the heat lightning they had seen tonight. “Shisei,” he said, “I don’t understand.”