The Nicholas Linnear Novels (207 page)

Thinking Nangi was right, Nicholas said, “One thing is certain: my enemy is a
dorokusai
.”

“Oh, yes.” Kansatsu nodded. “All things are possible in this universe, Nicholas. Even the unthinkable: the existence of a
dorokusai,
the most feared of tanjian. As you must know, a
dorokusai
is a loner, a rebel who has deliberately turned away from the discipline of Tau-tau—from
all
discipline. He is the master of deceit and disguise. Often, he appears in a benign guise. Always, he is not what he seems.”

Here Kansatsu paused, and it seemed to Nicholas that he had at last answered his question.

“A
dorokusai
inhabits his own universe,” Kansatsu continued. “He has created his own laws—his own Way. Even the tanjian
sensei
fears the
dorokusai,
because he has such power that he cannot be killed—he must be destroyed.”

“What is the difference,” Nicholas asked, “between death and destruction?”

“That is one of the reasons you have come to me,” Kansatsu said. “It will be the last lesson I teach you, Nicholas. But know this: if you begin your lessons here, then you choose to place yourself squarely in the Path this
dorokusai
is bent on pursuing.”

Nicholas considered this. “I have already been placed in the
dorokusai
’s path,” he said at last. “My only choice is whether to fight or to die.”

“If you have found the conviction,” Kansatsu said, “then reach out. Find the Darkness again. It is your special friend.”

There was a silence of such duration that the light changed in the chamber before Nicholas gave a sharp cry. “I felt it,” he whispered. He was covered in sweat but was no longer trembling. “I felt it.”

“Hold out your hand,” Kansatsu said. When there was no response, he said again, “Nicholas, hold out your hand.”

Slowly, Nicholas extended his hand until it had crossed from the light into the shadows on Kansatsu’s side of the chamber.

Kansatsu touched the tip of his forefinger to Nicholas’s. “Here is your fear. Touch it, breathe it, own it. Understanding will come only in this way.”

After a time Nicholas said, “The fear comes from inside myself, not from the Darkness.” His voice was filled with a kind of wonder.

Kansatsu said, “Now your spirit hangs suspended over an abyss just as, before, your corpus was suspended over white snow, gray ice, and black rock.” He waited a moment, then said in an entirely different voice, “Tell me what you are thinking at this moment.”

“I don’t want to believe that I am tanjian,” Nicholas said. He took a deep breath. “I’m afraid that if I do, I’ll be no better than my cousin Saigo, whose spirit was warped and corrupted by the evil inside him.”

“Is that what you believe, that the Darkness is evil?”

“Isn’t it?”

“I admit that it has the potential for great evil,” Kansatsu said. “The
dorokusai
who pursues you is ample evidence of that. But that is not all the Darkness is. The universe, Nicholas, is neither good nor evil; rather, both moral extremes exist within it.” Kansatsu’s voice was soft, a tide calming the racing of Nicholas’s terror-driven heart. He kept the physical connection between them. “This was one of the first lessons I taught you, remember? It is the most essential of all the truths.

“The same is true of the Darkness. It, too, is a universe, but because it is one of almost limitless power, its potential is often abused, corrupted. That is the nature of power.

“All power is transitory. In its ephemeral nature lies its infinite malleability, and its potential to warp the spirit of human beings. If you touch it, you will not die. But you
will
change. In what ways even I cannot say.”

“I am afraid to change,” Nicholas confessed.

“If you do not change,” Kansatsu said simply, “I cannot help you. If you do not change, the
dorokusai
who pursues you has already won. You will never be able to use the emeralds your grandfather bequeathed you. You will remain
Shiro Ninja
forever.”

Nicholas was shaking as if with a fever. The minutes stretched on, building an agonized silence. At last, slowly, Nicholas bowed his head.

Kansatsu closed his eyes. He seemed to resume breathing after a very long time. “All right, then,” he said. “The first thing you must do is to learn to speak all over again. You must learn to think in a new language. It is called Akshara, the language of eternity.”

“It is part of Tau-tau?”

“It is the very essence of Tau-tau,” Kansatsu said. “Without Akshara nothing else is possible.” He looked at the whiteness of Nicholas’s face. “Tell me, Nicholas-san, are you afraid?”

“Yes,
sensei
.” It was a hoarse whisper. The fear was coming in a flood, but then Nicholas realized that Kansatsu had called him Nicholas-san, and he could breathe again.

“Good,” Kansatsu said. “You should be frightened now. Your spirit is through being suspended. The time has come to plunge yourself into the abyss.”

Nangi and Tomi arrived at The Silk Road after midnight. The
tokudashi
parlor was packed with sweating businessmen, a colony of milling ants, dressed alike, wreathed in acrid cigarette smoke.

Tomi paused for a moment, fascinated by the expression on the men’s faces, replicated over and over. She knew what they were watching, knew what was in their minds, and she marveled at the power behind that one image. She wondered whether women could become so obsessed over one portion of the male anatomy. She did not think so. Women were not so much involved with the physical as they were with the emotional. Not that they couldn’t be sex-driven, but certainly not in the way men often were.

Mega-amplified music almost blasted them back to the entryway; the strobes came on, momentarily blinding them. Tomi blinked, flashed her credentials at the bouncer. She had to shout to be heard over the music.

She led Nangi around the perimeter of the main club room, past a stained and greasy cardboard sign marked
NO ADMITTANCE.

The warren of corridors was like a catacomb carved from the earth. Nangi followed Tomi as she wended her way past identical-looking doors. The corridors were shabby, the walls filthy, paint peeling, air vents clogged with soot and grime fluttering feebly. Bare light bulbs hung on twisted lengths of flex from the exposed sockets in the blackened ceiling.

Tomi paused at a door. She had to pound on it in order to be heard over the rock music. She heard a response and opened the door. Inside was a tiny room furnished with a slab dressing table, a mirror surrounded by several lights, one cane-backed chair, a rusty sink. A young woman in a thin, ratty robe stood staring at them.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said in a dull voice, and turned away from them to apply makeup. She watched their reflections warily in the mirror.

“Atoko,” Tomi said, “this is Mr. Nangi. He’s a friend of mine.” She turned to Nangi. “Atoko shared Mariko’s dressing room with her. She found the body.” Then turned back. “We’d like to ask you some questions.”

“About what?”

Tomi slipped a photo of Dr. Hanami out of her pocketbook, placed it on the dressing table in front of the girl.

Atoko glanced down at it, said, “Who’s this?”

“I thought you could tell us,” Tomi said.

Atoko shrugged, went back to applying her makeup.

Nangi, with his limp exaggerated, walked over beside the girl. He reached up, plucked a photo stuck between the mirror and its frame.

Atoko said, “Hey!”

Nangi allowed her to take the photo from him. “Your brother or a boyfriend?”

Atoko pushed her lower lip out sullenly, stuck the photo back in its niche.

“You know,” Nangi said, “I had a sister once. She had a lot of boyfriends when she was young. Just about your age, I should think. How she loved the boys to come around! How she encouraged them! Not, I think, with any evil intent. She was a good girl. She just enjoyed their company so.” He took several limping steps away. “Sometimes, though, she would get into trouble.”

Atoko cocked her head in his direction. “What kind of trouble?”

Nangi looked at her, as if startled that she had actually been listening to him. He waved his hand. “Oh, well, sometimes another girl’s boyfriend would be sweet on my sister. Not that my sister did anything to encourage them. Oh, my, no. It just happened.” Nangi gingerly took another step. “But her girlfriends never understood. They blamed her, of course, because they could not bear to blame their own boyfriends.”

“But that’s exactly what happened!” Atoko exclaimed. She put down her eyeliner, stared at Nangi. “Mariko and I were such good friends until…” Her eyes lowered and she pointed to the photo of Dr. Hanami. “Until him.”

“He preferred you to Mariko?” Nangi asked.

Atoko nodded. “For a time. Then he switched back and forth, without us at first knowing. In the end I think he believed he was in love with Mariko, but by then it was too late. Mariko wanted nothing more to do with me.” There were tears in Atoko’s eyes; she would not look at herself in the mirror. “Poor Mariko, she was a good girl. She didn’t deserve…Oh, damn!”

Nangi and Tomi exchanged glances, and Tomi went to hold Atoko while the tears streamed down her face.

“I’m all right,” Atoko said at last. She took a handful of tissues, dabbed at her face. “Oh, shit, I can’t go on stage like this.” She began to cry again. “I thought I was finished grieving for her.”

Nangi waited a moment, then said, “Can you tell us anything about the man in the photo Detective Yazawa showed you?”

Atoko shrugged. “What’s there to tell? He was a rich guy who loved to cheat on his wife. I got the impression that he liked being around us because we were young. He soon grew tired of me. But in a way it was different, I think, with Mariko.”

“Different in what way?” Tomi prompted.

“Like I said, he thought he was in love with her.”

“Do you think hey do anything for her?” Nangi asked suddenly.

Atoko paused in reapplying her makeup. She stared into the mirror at nothing, at the past. Then her eyes cleared. “You know, the funny thing is, when he was with me, practically all he talked about was his wife. I think he would have done anything for
her
.”

“Was he here the night of Mariko’s murder?” Tomi asked.

Atoko would not meet her gaze. She nodded at last. “I lied about that. I…was ashamed of how my friendship with Mariko had ended. I…didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want anyone to know.” She took a deep breath. “But, yes, he was here that night. He had a date with Mariko. I saw him, his face white as milk as he rushed out of her dressing room. I heard him vomiting in the alleyway outside. That’s when I went into Mariko’s dressing room and…found her.” She bit her lip, looked away from them. “I’m sorry. I should have told the truth from the beginning.” Her eyes met Tomi’s in the mirror. “I’m a good girl.”

Justine was staring into Senjin’s lambent eyes. It was like staring into the night sky, strewn with mysterious stars, filled with shadows whose shapes so familiar in daylight had taken on hidden meanings, extracted from the depths of her own imagination.

Tau-tau, and more than Tau-tau, the forbidden magic of the
dorokusai,
was at work here. She could not know, and if she had known, she would not understand.

Senjin, the vampire, continuing what Haha-san had begun, was doing to Justine what he did to all his women—what he had done even with Dr. Muku before he had plunged the phosphorus-laced cigarette into his eye socket, into his brain—he was sucking out of them their life, seeking as he did so the key to them (the key, had he but known it, to himself): their secret fears, their humiliating weaknesses.

Justine, taken out of time by Senjin’s conjuring, looked down upon her life, observing, much as Nicholas had many months before while undergoing his operation.

Now she did Senjin’s bidding, as Nicholas had while Dr. Hanami’s scalpel had probed his brain for the tumor.

“Where does your husband keep the box, Justine?” Voice like a silken whip, urging her to speak. “Where has he hidden the emeralds?”

Justine knew—or, in any event, she remembered Nicholas frantically rushing into the house, digging beneath the floorboards, seizing the box. His sigh of relief when he opened it. How could she forget? But there was something she was forgetting. What was it?

“I’ll take you,” Justine heard herself saying. “Come with me.” Taking his hand, her body filled with an energy that made her teeth chatter.

She showed him the spot in Nicholas’s workout room, showed him how to push aside the post, how to unearth the box. Just as Nicholas had…what was she forgetting?

Senjin brought up the box into the light. He realized that his hands were trembling. At last, he told himself, the emeralds! The last link with Eternity, for which he had been searching, it seemed, all his life. Ever since, at least, he had been told of the mystic emeralds’ power and what it could unleash.

He opened the box and gasped. Six emeralds, only six. Where were the other nine? He needed nine. His hands scrabbled over the dark blue velvet, tearing it into shreds. Six were not enough; in fact, as he knew, the number could be quite deadly. But not for him.

He scooped up the emeralds, put the empty box back in its cache.

Senjin turned to Justine. He could see the Tau-tau imprisoning her, coloring her eyes, making her do what he ordered. “Where are the other emeralds?” he said sharply. “There are only six here.”

“I don’t know.”

Senjin studied her bewildered face. “Are you certain? Think hard.” But she must know. Some part of her perhaps had seen or heard something, a tiny incident that she could not connect with the disappearance of the remaining gems. He would have to find out, look into her mind, dig deep, as a surgeon might, for what he was looking for.

“I am,” Justine said. “I don’t know. I thought they were in the box. I saw them in the box when Nicholas—” She stopped abruptly.

“What is it?” Senjin asked. “Go on.”

“I—I…” She grimaced suddenly, put her hands to her temples. “Oh, my head hurts!”

Senjin knew immediately what was happening. Some deeply buried part of her was fighting him, resisting this direct approach. Perhaps Linnear had told her directly that she must never reveal the emeralds’ hiding place. That would be enough to set up the moral conflict. He decided to try another approach. After all, he had the time. And, in any case, it might prove interesting on other levels.