The Nicholas Linnear Novels (50 page)

“Christ, haven’t I had enough of you, already? You’ve hounded me about—”

“I’m only here to protect you,” Croaker pointed out, “and to nail the ninja before he gets you.”

Tomkin’s eyes narrowed. The peculiar monochromatic light had washed out all color from his eyes; they looked oddly pale. “Wouldn’t you just love to sit back and let him do your dirty work? Sure, sure. You could say, ‘Well, I’m sorry, Captain, but I did my best. I got beaten, is all. Can’t blame me for that.’”

“Listen, you bastard”—Croaker lunged forward, trying to get around Nicholas’ body—“I do my job better than anyone else in this creepy city and if that means making sure you don’t buy it, I’ll do it. When I nail you, buddy, it’s gonna be for all the right reasons—”

“What reasons?” Tomkin snarled. “You got nothing—”

“No, but I will have,” Croaker shouted. “And when I do, I’ll be coming for you with a warrant that’ll stand up to any of your high-priced attorneys!”

“You’ve got nothing,” Tomkin sneered, “and you’ll get nothing. I was nowhere near Angela Didion the night she was murdered. There’s nothing linking me to—”

They were pushing and shoving now. Nicholas heard swift reports on the asphalt as sharp as rifle shots as Tom headed their way. He shouldered the two roughly apart, said, “Knock it off, both of you.”

Then Tom had hold of his boss and was pulling at him. Tomkin allowed himself to be drawn away from the confrontation but lifted a finger, swung it in the air in Croaker’s direction. “I’m warning you,” he cried, “this is harassment. I don’t want you near me!” And then, lowering his voice, said to Nicholas, “He’s after me. I don’t know why. It’s a vendetta. I’ve done nothing, Nick. What’s he doing to me?” He turned away abruptly, walked silently back to the limo with Tom at his side casting a worried glance or two over his shoulder. The revolving red light played on their backs intermittently.

“Well, that was pretty stupid,” Nicholas said, turning around.

“Oh, who gives a fuck? What are you, my nanny? Jesus!” Croaker disappeared into the car.

Nicholas went slowly around to the passenger’s side. He took his time climbing in. Croaker stared fixedly out through the windshield.

“Sorry,” he said, after a time. And then, “That bastard really boils my blood.”

“The antagonism isn’t going to make anything easier.”

Croaker turned his head; looked at Nicholas for the first time since he got in the car. “You know, I worry about you, Nick, I really do.” Their reflections in the windshield like a neon sign, blinking on and off in the backwash of traffic headlights, a product advertisement. “You’re a man who never loses control. Don’t you ever get angry? Or sad?”

Nicholas thought about Justine. He wanted to see her now, to talk to her more than anything.

“Because I feel sorry for you if you don’t.”

“No cause to worry,” he said softly. “I’m as human as the next person. All too human.”

“Hey, you know I’d swear you’re making that sound like a liability. We’re all born into it, buddy.”

“But me,” he said. “I grew up thinking there was no room to make a mistake; that it was some kind of failure if I did.”

“But you made them—”

“Oh, yeah.” Nicholas laughed softly, without humor. “I made plenty of them, especially when it came to women. I trusted when I shouldn’t have; now I guess I’m afraid to try it again.”

“Justine?”

“Yeah. We had a heavy row. It’s mostly my fault, I see now.”

“You know what I think, buddy?” Croaker said, starting the engine.

“What?”

“I think the problem’s not with you and Justine but in the past. What’s so wrong in trusting someone? Like I said, we all do it. Sometimes it pays off and sometimes…” He shrugged. “But what the hell, right? It’s worse never to trust anyone.” He put the car in gear and they edged past Tomkin’s limo, pulling over to the left to make the U-turn downtown.

The flood was coming, Nicholas knew. His face was awash in yellow and red, blue in the shadows between light sweeps. The
tsunami
, his personal tidal wave, was roaring blackly just behind him, looming over the world. The past will never die, he thought. Pain surged inside him, threatening to engulf him. All the bitter days, hanging like frost on the ledges of his soul, were returning again despite his careful compartmentalizing; the agony returning like a dull river of lead, climbing through him once more. He lacked the strength to push the memories away anymore.

Come! He thought savagely. Here I am; let it happen.

But before the
tsunami
hit, he heard Croaker saying triumphantly, “But cheer up. We got a break. We may not know who this ninja is but I know where he’s gonna be at exactly 11
P.M.
tonight.

“We’re gonna be there, buddy, waiting. You and me and two blue-and-white backup units. We’re gonna nail this bastard before he even gets a chance to get to Raphael Tomkin.”

A
T THIS TIME OF
the year the countryside was bleak and pale. The searingly spectacular deep reds and oranges of the autumnal foliage had already faded, dropped away to dull brown mulch under animals’ hooves, and the first snow had obstinately yet to fall to leave the sere land hidden beneath its ghostly luminescence.

Rolling by rail under a low sky full of incipient rain reminding him of a child’s face full of an emotion unacknowledged, it seemed sad to see the lines of bare trees like rough wire approximations of next year’s model in among the eternal dark green of the sentinel pines. So forlorn, almost as if God had, after much effort, at last given up on this part of the world.

Nicholas allowed his eyes to focus on the far horizon. The speed-blur of the landscape passing closer about on a fun-house ride. Yukio, leaning half across him to get a better glimpse, pressed the side of one hard breast against him. Fingers spread on his thigh to brace herself against the rocking. Nails digging in, giving her purchase. Warmth spread upward into his groin and he wondered, half-afraid, half-expectant, if her hand would move up with it to cup him.

Opposite, on a seat facing them, a Japanese businessman in a dark-colored pinstripe and a scrubbed face; calfskin attaché case placed carefully on the seat beside him as mute company, surmounted by a charcoal-gray cashmere overcoat folded meticulously and, atop that, like the miniature couple on a white wedding cake, a black bowler hat—in all, an arcane archaeological pyramid offering no ancestral clues—glanced up from reading the paper. His eyes were given the unnatural size and annularity by his thick round glasses. He blinked much as a fish might upon encountering an unexpected foreign object close to hand. Was he staring at the proximity of her fingertips to his crotch before he returned to his reading? The paper rustled slightly. It might have been a brick wall.

Nicholas could see the flash of reflected light from the curving edge of the thick gold ring. He imagined the man to be an important member of the
zaibatsu.
But which one, he wondered? Mitsubishi, perhaps? Or Sumitomo or Mitsui? Not one of the groups, surely, Fuyo, Sanwa, Dai-Ichi Kangyō. Of the seven lesser konzerns, he was obviously not from Nippon Steel, Toyota or Nissan. No, he had the look about him of the burgeoning electronics firms like Tōshiba-IHI, Matsushita, Hitachi—on second thought, scratch Hitachi—or Tōkyū. Did Tōkyū manufacture electronics, come to think of it? He wasn’t all that certain.

Perhaps this man’s family had started Mitsubishi—the families, he knew, were back running the
zaibatsu
as they had since the beginning. The American laws that had forced a hiatus had been stricken after only a brief term.

Nicholas stared at the paper barrier as if he had X-ray vision. He could see in his mind the round yellow face, slightly burnished with a light film of sweat, and, below it, the perfect collar white as snow, stiff and starched, the thin dark silk tie the color of the midnight sky. Here was a symbol of the new Japan: the painful climb out of the stone-age isolationism—oddly, still more pressing than the much more recent war—the human memory is so deliberately and de-pressingly selective. Adopting the Western mode of dress was just one manifestation of the Japanese cultural drive to catch up with the West. As monomaniacal as Tojo still. Or MacArthur. Our savior.

Parity was already a fact in Japan and the country was gearing itself up for overdrive, for the great push to surpass those countries from which it had learned. And there would come a day now, Nicholas was convinced, when the Japanese, having proved his economic strength, would shed his Western apurtenances, returning in rewon security to the traditional kimono, robes of state.

They were on the fast train—the express—from Tokyo to Osaka. Out the window on their right was all of the width of Honshu, the main island. On the other side they could see from time to time the glintings of the sea, throwing bright golden reflections in abstract patterns across the car’s ceiling. The vibration from the rails was minimal, as was the noise on this sleek blue and silver liner, quiet, spacious and serene.

Yukio sat back in the seat, linked her arm through his. “Why don’t we stay overnight in Osaka?” she suggested and then, as if in explanation, “I hate trains.”

Nicholas thought about that. Perhaps it wasn’t such a bad idea. The night life there was bright and glossy and he needed cheering up right now.

The little bit of clandestine cloak and dagger that Yukio and he had concocted regarding Saigō—he had quite conveniently forgotten whose suggestion it had been—had proved unnecessary. Astoundingly, before she had even had a chance to leave for the dinner at Satsugai’s house, where she was to take a peek at Saigō’s ticket destination, a note had been delivered to Nicholas. It was in Saigō’s hand and it invited him to come to a town called Kumamoto in Kyūshū for a visit during the next few weeks. No reason was given for the invitation. Like everything in Saigō’s life, this, too, was meant to be secretive.

Nicholas had read the note with a mounting sense of deflation. Irrationally, he felt as if Saigō had somehow read his mind and he could not throw off the anticipatory overtones the words set off in him, like a far-off bell tolling from some fog-shrouded hillside. “This will all be unexplored territory,” Kansatsu had said to him, “if you decide it’s what you want. It is totally your decision to make, Nicholas. I cannot guide you. Only say that here you can go no further. For that you must look to the darkness—and the light.” Squelched, his plan had been cruelly revealed as just so much juvenile fantasy and, instead of thinking about why he had been asked south, he made himself busy feeling unhappy, defeated. And to make matters worse, Yukio went to dinner at Satsugai’s anyway.

Mountains reared silently through the perspex window, blue-gray, ragged with streaks of snow running down from their summits like spilt cream. One of the three ranges of Alps—the most southerly, headed by Mount Shirane—passed like a cincture about Honshu’s waist. Where was he headed now, he wondered. Into the light or the darkness? Did it matter?

“Especially this one,” Yukio said as if there had been no space of silence between. “I hate this one. All the wide seats, the chrome trim, the bigger windows don’t mean a thing to me. It’s worse on this one. Because of the silence. The silence makes me restless.” She made a face. “My foot’s asleep.” She shifted, stretching out legs on which she had been sitting. The businessman across the way rattled his paper, peals of warning.

“All right,” Nicholas said. “Yes.” There seemed no good reason to rush headlong into Kumamoto. Anyway, he’d only been to Osaka once when he was much younger and he was curious to see how much it had changed. Would he recognize it? He thought not.

He felt Yukio’s presence close and warm beside him and he wondered if it had been intelligent to take her. In truth it had not been his idea. But after making his decision to accept Saigō’s summons, it had proved quite impossible to deflect her. “It was you, after all,” she had said in her most persuasively accusatory tone, “who got me involved in this in the first place.” He could not recall whether or not that was so. “It’s only fair you take me along now.” She had flung her head back defiantly, sensually—but then, even in anger, she was superbly sensual. “Besides, if you don’t, I’ll only come with you on my own. Do you think you could hide from me?” He thought not. Decidedly un-Japanese, he had said to himself while acquiescing. Did the Colonel give in to Cheong in this way?

He often trembled when she was so close to him, his muscles jumping and twitching quite beyond his control. He sometimes clandestinely watched this phenomenon as if he were an outsider. This helped stymie the feelings of terror that rose, fluttering like leathery bats, from the pit of his stomach, rising toward his head. This he knew he must not allow to happen, otherwise he felt he might go mad. She passed a hand across his flesh and thus stirred that hidden pool at the core of his being which he had, for a time, thought closed even to himself. It remained inaccessible to him.

Mr. Mitsubishi, face glossy as a horse’s hide after a canter, had put his paper down, folding it lengthwise. He proceeded to destroy the pyramid beside him, opening his attaché case, closing it again. On its spotless top he unfolded waxed paper in which was a chicken sandwich. Light lanced from his round glasses as he ate, turning him blind for moments at a time. Perhaps somewhere, Nicholas thought, he had a small bag of potato chips or a bar of chocolate.

Behind him, a group of Japanese businessmen, in all respects identical to Mr. Mitsubishi, rustled inside their dark three-piece suits like chrysaline insects, black bowlers on their laps, chattering animatedly about the two Jacks, Ruby and Kennedy.

One did not travel to Osaka for culture—one went to Kyoto, the country’s original capital, for that. It was commonly said—mostly by the inhabitants of Tokyo—that Osakans were money-mad businessmen, greeting each other on crowded street corners with the all-too-familiar phrase “
Mo kari makka
?” Making any money?

Nicholas had little first-hand knowledge of such affairs yet it was true that secreted along the city’s riotous streets, like tiny pockets of the past encysted within the neon age, were numerous shrines to Fudōmiyō, the deity overseeing such matters that concerned the dedicated businessman. These shrines never seemed to lack for attention.