The Nicholas Linnear Novels (213 page)

The State dinner was one of those affairs where protocol and diplomacy were the only acceptable currency. Branding had both of these to spare, and he was soon one of the few around whom knots of people congregated to listen, laugh, and be seen.

He kept an eye on Shisei as she drifted through the gilt and cream ballroom, a glass of champagne in one hand, talking to one diplomat after another, who listened intently to what she was telling them. They would nod sagely, smile, and in the end give her their cards as if delivering an offering on the altar of a goddess.

An hour after they arrived, Branding drew her aside. He winked. “Having a good time?” he asked.

“Successful,” she said.

“I noticed.” It was for Branding, too. All the ranking Republicans were in attendance, and they were never far from him, engaging him in conversation, always bringing up the ASCRA bill, pledging their support.

The only sour note was delivered by Tricia Hamilton, the wife of Bud Hamilton, the senator from Maryland, a good friend and often an ally of Branding’s. Like a herald announcing the approach of a still distant army, Tricia arrived at Branding’s side with a flourish.

“You’re my escort into dinner,” she said.

She wore a formal silk and crinoline dress that must have cost a fortune but made her look ten years older than her fifty-three years.

Her eyes flashed, and he could see her eyeing Shisei with the kind of predatory avidity raised to a high art by Washington wives.

“What a perfectly lovely girl,” Tricia said in a tone that made it sound as if she had said, What a perfect little tart.

Branding laughed, in too good a mood to allow Tricia’s bitchiness to disturb him. “She’s smart, too,” he said.

“I’ll bet.” Tricia smiled sweetly at him as they headed for the dining room. “That’s an interesting suit she’s wearing. A Louis Feraud, isn’t it?”

“I have no idea,” Branding said. “But I like it.”

“Oh, so do I,” Tricia said acidly. “Funny thing, though. It looks terribly familiar, and I
know
there aren’t too many Louis Feraud suits around these parts. I mean, only Saks Jandel carries them hereabouts, and they only get in one in each size. I know because I was there just the other day trolling for a new outfit and, do you know, I believe I saw that very suit there.” She pulled herself closer to Branding, hugging herself against him. “Yes, it
was
that suit. I’m sure of it.” She looked into his face. “But, do you know, Cook, Senator Howe was buying it. Douglas didn’t see me, I’m happy to report, he was in too much of a hurry. A repugnant little man, isn’t he, Cook? The thought of him touching me sends shivers down my spine.”

Branding said, “Despite what you say about Saks Jandel, that can’t be the only Feraud suit in all of Washington. I don’t know what you’re getting at, Trish.”

“Me? I’m just making small talk, Cook.”

He tried not to let what Tricia Hamilton said bother him but, despite his best intentions, he found himself brooding over dinner. Afterward, he could not remember what he had eaten or what he had talked about with his dinner companions. The President made a speech, then the West German chancellor, but Branding paid them no attention.

In the car on the way home, he was so quiet that Shisei touched him, said, “Is anything the matter, Cook?”

He thought, then, about asking her where she had gotten the Louis Feraud suit. Had she bought it herself or had it been a gift? He almost did, but at the last instant bit back the words. The fact was that he did not want to hear her answer because the chances were it would be a lie.

“Nothing,” he said.

What Tricia Hamilton had told him—her “small talk”—had rocked him. Tricia was a gossip only in the sense that she liked to talk about other people because it furthered her belief that knowing as many intimate things about the power pols put her in the center of things. But she only passed on verified gossip. She wisely let other Washington wives indulge in innuendo and semitruths.

What bothered Branding was that if Tricia said she saw Douglas Howe picking up Shisei’s suit from Saks Jandel, that’s exactly what happened.

At first he tried to think of an innocent explanation, but soon abandoned the idea as improbable and foolish. Then he began to work out the strategy behind Howe and Shisei as a team, and got nowhere. For the life of him, he could not imagine Shisei’s personality meshing with Howe’s. Something didn’t feel right. Not unless Shisei was the greatest actress on earth.

He pulled up at her house but did not turn off the engine.

“Aren’t you coming in?” Shisei asked.

“I don’t think so. Not tonight.”

In the almost silence of the engine purring there was a gulf between them that had not existed when the night began. The street was quite deserted. Arching streetlights cast pools of diffuse illumination at regular intervals. Shadows from the leaves on the elm trees fell across the long hood of the Jaguar.

Shisei put a hand on Branding’s arm. “Cook, what is it? Your entire mood changed during dinner.”

He closed his eyes for a moment. “I’m tired. I want to go home.”

“Please, Cook,” she said. “Come inside, if only for a moment. I can’t bear the thought of the night ending here.”

Branding waited a moment before turning off the ignition. Inside, Shisei went through the first floor turning on all the lights as a child will ask to be done when awakened by a nightmare. Branding watched her at this ritual with opaque eyes.

“Drink?”

“I’d rather not,” Branding said. He had not sat down, was standing in the center of the living room.

“For God’s sake, Cook, won’t you tell me what you’re thinking?”

“I don’t know what I'm thinking,” he said. “Not yet.”

“You want to go,” she said. “I can see it in your face. You can’t wait to get out of here.”

“It isn’t like that at all.”

“Don’t lie to me,” Shisei said.

Branding choked on his words. He was furious at
her
accusing
him
of lying. Especially because it was true. “How dare you say that to me, you lying bitch!” he shouted wildly at her. “Where did you get that new suit?” He strode into the hallway.

Shisei’s heart thudded heavily. Had he found out that the Feraud suit had been a present from Howe? How could he have?

Branding heard her calling his name, then the phone started ringing. He went out the door. His legs felt oddly stiff, the muscles jumping beneath his skin.

Shisei picked up the phone, shouted “What?” into it, and her breath caught in her throat because she heard her brother’s voice.

“Senjin,” she whispered, “I thought we had agreed—”

“Our agreement is at an end,” Senjin said.

“But you’ll put into jeopardy everything we—”

“Quiet!”

“What is it?” Shisei said. “What’s happened?”

“Life’s happened.” Senjin’s voice was like an engine about to explode. “The unimaginable has happened. I realize that I need you.”

“What do you m—”

“I’m coming,” he said. “To Long Island, West Bay Bridge.” He gave her an address. “Meet me there.”

Shisei was about to reply, but the line had already gone dead. She put down the receiver and shivered. Unconsciously she fingered her emerald ring.

Outside, Branding had gotten into the Jaguar, fired it up. As he nosed out into the quiet street he noticed that his hands were shaking. His heart was beating fast and an anguish he could identify almost as pain racked him. He longed for his wife’s counsel; she would know what was right and what was wrong; who was, figuratively speaking, in bed with whom. She always had.

The thought that Shisei had been sent by Douglas Howe to somehow undermine him in order to send the ASCRA bill down to defeat was almost too much to bear. It wasn’t until this moment that Branding could admit to himself that he loved Shisei. Almost immediately he realized just how much he loved her. She had penetrated deep inside his defenses, touched the core of him as no one else—not even Mary—had. To find out that it was all a lie was beyond comprehension.

He felt as if his world had been turned inside out, as if the neatly identifiable labels he had prepared for people were useless—worse than useless: false. It was as if he were a child who had been transferred to a new school, only to find that all the lessons he had so painstakingly learned in his former school were incorrect. He felt stupid, naive, betrayed by the very city of power that had pretended to nurture him.

He knew that it was his Puritan blood that made him all too ready to condemn her, to refuse to hear her answers to his questions, knowing that his love for her would make it all but impossible for him to differentiate the truth from the lies.

He could hear his mother’s words as clearly as if she were sitting beside him in the Jaguar, one of many physical manifestations of his work in Sodom:
The world is Satan’s playground, Cotton. Stay on the narrow path that God has ordained for you, and you will be safe.

Revolving red and blue lights in his rearview mirror made him start. A touch of a siren and he pulled over. His mind was still full of heavy black thoughts. A Metropolitan Police patrol car, white with the familiar horizontal blue stripe, nosed in behind him. Between flashes Branding could see two shadowed figures in the car behind him.

For a long time nothing happened. Then the driver’s door opened and a uniformed cop stepped out. His partner remained in the car.

Branding rolled down his window, heard the cop’s footsteps crunching over the asphalt of the street. The cop, all six-foot-three of him, stopped in front of the open window, peered at Branding through mirrored sunglasses. Branding wondered how he could see anything at night.

“May I see your license and registration, please?”

“I’m sure I wasn’t speeding, Officer,” Branding said.

The cop made no reply, and Branding handed the documents over. He noticed that the cop accepted them with his left hand; his right was on the walnut grips of his holstered service revolver.

The cop signaled to his partner, then said, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to open your trunk, Senator.”

Branding said, “What?”

The cop backed up a step, said, “Please step out of the car, Senator.”

Branding got out of the car, walked toward the rear of the Jaguar. The cop was behind him. Ahead he could see the second cop climb out of the patrol car; he held a 12-gauge shotgun loosely in one hand.

Branding said, “Can I at least ask what’s going on?”

The cop behind him said, “If you would be kind enough to open your trunk, Senator.”

Branding did as he was asked. He opened the trunk, then stepped back. The first cop shone a flashlight into the trunk’s interior. An odd, unpleasant sickly-sweet smell erupted into the night.

The cop said, “Jesus.”

Branding heard the twin hammers of the second cop’s shotgun being cocked as he stared into his trunk and saw the body lying curled in the darkness. Sudden nausea gripped him. The flashlight’s beam illuminated the patches of dried blood, the crushed skull, just as it illuminated the corpse’s bloodless face.

Branding’s mother saying,
Stray from the narrow path, and all the good that I see within you will wither and die.

God in heaven, he thought, frozen in shock, I know this man. It’s David Brisling, Douglas Howe’s personal assistant.

Nicholas, high up in the Hodaka, his bearded face rimed with ice, out of time, assaulted the Black Gendarme. He was living his dream in which he was searching among the bulrushes, for what he did not know. He had found footprints in the black, marshy earth: in reality, clues seeded in his memory, recorded, embedded there by his senses. The voice he had heard speaking to him was that of his memory. But with his spirit entangled he had not been able to hear the voice clearly enough to understand what it was telling him.

As Kansatsu had said, it was not
Shiro Ninja
that was entangling his spirit—that was merely a symptom of the disease. In fact Nicholas was already ill, entangled when the tanjian attacked him; he was already susceptible, made vulnerable to
Shiro Ninja.

Nicholas, with the elementals of Akshara already absorbed, was still
Shiro Ninja.
That was another thing he had been taught. Neither Kansatsu nor anyone else could “cure” him of
Shiro Ninja.

In fact, there was no cure.
Shiro Ninja
was a delusion that must be healed from inside himself. And yet, his memory of his martial arts training was little improved.

“Shiro Ninja
is one thing,” Kansatsu had said, one evening after lessons were finished for the day. He was examining the scar on the side of Nicholas’s head. “This state you find yourself in is quite another.”

“But why?” Nicholas had asked. “The main symptom of
Shiro Ninja
is loss of memory.”

“That is just it,” Kansatsu had pointed out. “Your problem is not
loss
of memory but, rather, an
inability
to get at it. Akshara has begun to disentangle your spirit, yet your memories of
ninjutsu
and
Getsumei no michi
are still unavailable to you. Therefore, I believe now that the cause has an organic component.”

“Do you mean my inability to remember is physical?”

“Yes. Precisely. It is my belief that something was done to you during the operation.”

A chill went down Nicholas’s spine. “You mean the surgeon severed something he wasn’t supposed to cut?” The thought of some part of his brain irrevocably maimed was too frightening to contemplate.

“No,” Kansatsu had said immediately, as if he had an intimation of the dread creeping through Nicholas. “That would be random, and the chance of him damaging the precise part of your brain dealing with memory retention is so infinitesimal it is not worth talking about.” Kansatsu had sat very still. His eyes were black specks, a pair of ravens seen from afar over an autumn wheat field. There was both melancholy and power in such an image. “I am speaking now of something deliberate, Nicholas.”

In the stunned silence Nicholas had heard his heart beating, the blood pounding in his ears, a deafening symphony of terror. “But the surgeon—”