The Nicholas Linnear Novels (93 page)

His eyes closed in easy meditation. His finger depressed one of a series of studs recessed into the left arm of his chair.

“Tanya,” he said softly into the void of the room, “two directives. One: get that Doctor Kidd—what’s his Christian name? Timothy?—on the phone. If he’s not at the Park Avenue office, try Mount Sinai Hospital. Get him out of rounds.”

“What pseudonym shall we use as imprimatur?” The voice that emerged from the hidden speaker system was husky, with just a trace of a foreign slur.

“Oh, let’s be ingenious today, shall we? Use the Department of International Export Tariffs.”

“Very good.”

“Second,” Minck said, “since our time seems to be rapidly running out, invade ARRTS and call up the file on Linnear NMN Nicholas.”

It was Justine’s first day on the job and she was uncomfortable as a cat on a hot tin roof. For more than three years she had been more or less happily ensconced in her own one-woman company, delivering free-lance advertising concepts to medium-range accounts. While she had not amassed a fortune, her talents were such that even in an uncertain economy she had managed to do quite well.

Of course from time to time she had received offers to join agencies, but the comfort of working for herself had always outweighed the increased security that working for someone else would give her.

But meeting Rick Millar had begun to change all that. Just over six weeks ago Mary Kate Sims had phoned Justine in frantic need of a project designer. Mary Kate worked for Millar, Soames & Robberts, one of the newer agencies with a high profile and even higher net yearly bookings. Two of their best designers were down with the flu and would Justine be a dear and fill in on the American Airlines project? It was a rush job, but Mary Kate said she could guarantee Justine a sizable bonus for on-time delivery.

Justine took the project, working on it eighteen hours a day for almost a week. But ten days later, into three or four of her own projects—one of which was giving her fits—she had forgotten all about Mary Kate and her American Airlines package.

Until the call from Rick Millar, the head of the agency. Apparently American had loved Justine’s idea so much they were turning what had been a New York regional into a national campaign. The firm of Millar, Soames & Robberts had received a sizable bonus and a long-term contract with American.

Rick said that he had loved Justine’s idea before the agency had submitted it to American. Justine did not know whether or not to believe him. He made a lunch date with her.

The following week they met at La Côte Basque, a superb French restaurant that Justine had read about several times in
Gourmet
but had never actually been to.

Yet the delicious food was the least memorable aspect of those several hours because, as it turned out, Millar had more on his mind than just wanting to meet her.

“Justine,” he said, over drinks, “I’m basically a people-oriented person in business as well as in my private life. I believe in creating an atmosphere that allows my employees to work at full throttle.

“But more than that, I allow certain individuals to cut across departmental boundaries when their talents warrant it.” He took a sip of his bourbon. “I think you’re such a person. A job with us wouldn’t be all that different for you than having your own business.” He grinned. “Except of course that you’d make a ton of money and build your rep among the high-level accounts that much quicker.”

Justine put her drink aside for the moment, her heart hammering. “Are you giving me a direct job offer?”

Millar nodded.

“Isn’t this supposed to come over the Grand Marnier soufflé or something?”

He laughed. “I’m a maverick in every way.”

She watched him for a time. He was fairly young, perhaps just forty. His hair was thick and long enough to reach his collar. Streaked blond, brushed straight back, it could just as easily belong to a surfer from Redondo Beach. He had a good hard face with the hint of crow’s feet at the corners of his intelligent, wide set blue-green eyes. He had the kind of nose that made you think of Mercedes, pink gins, and polo along the carefully manicured greensward of the Connecticut shore. He should have had a cable-knit sweater spread on his back. But his manner belied all that.

“I can see the wheels turning in there,” he said as they were served the first course of fresh bluepoint oysters. He grinned again, a sunny, somehow reassuring expression that showed good white teeth. “I wasn’t born into money. I worked hard to get where I am today.”

But she found that she had little appetite, because she knew that she was going to take him up on his offer. Dreams like this one rarely came along in life. Though the idea turned her edgy, she had learned early to grab them before they slipped irretrievably by.

In fact, she had been so keyed up about the job that she had asked Rick if she could start on the following day. Friday, instead of waiting through the weekend. With Nicholas just gone she had had no plans, and three idle days, waiting, was too much for her patience. So it was that she had shown up just past eight—a full hour before she had to—at Madison Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street. The offices of Millar, Soames & Robberts were three guttering twenty-first-century floors of the sleekest furnishings money could buy, with floor-to-ceiling windows in every executive office, and mechanical and production departments that would surely make her work a snap—she had been so used to doing everything herself. Now, as Rick had said to her over lunch, she could concentrate on ideas, allowing others to complete her sketches.

Rick himself introduced Justine to Min, her secretary. She was no more than twenty and, with the patch of green in her dark hair, seemed to be the agency’s concession to the post-punk era. But Justine soon found out that beneath the wild hair was a sharp brain that understood all the convoluted workings of the organization.

Justine’s office was a floor below Mary Kate’s and, because Mary Kate was a vice president, it was somewhat smaller than her friend’s. But it was light and airy. A fresh-looking coleus with a pink satin
GOOD LUCK
ribbon tacked to it sat on a desk otherwise empty save for a phone. The office was sparsely furnished with, it seemed, an agglomeration of cast-offs.

Rick apologized for the state of the office, saying that the company was in the midst of reorganizing departments and that Min would bring her a stack of furnishing and accessory catalogs “so that things can get straightened out in a couple of weeks.”

She thanked Rick for the plant and, putting it beside the window, sat behind her new desk. Her first call was to Nicholas, in her excitement forgetting that it was the middle of the night in Tokyo. The hotel balked at putting the call through, the officious operator asking if it was an emergency. When she explained to her what the local time was, Justine settled for leaving a message, not knowing of course that he was out wandering through Jan Jan.

But as she cradled the receiver, she experienced a sharp pang of sadness. She had never felt more acutely Nicholas’ absence or her desire for him to return. She had fought with desperation the fear and anxiety welling up inside her when he had told her he was going to work for her father. Were her feelings irrational or real? When it came to her father, she knew that she felt trapped by her emotions. The shape of her life had been dictated by Raphael Tomkin. As a woman in her twenties, she had had love affairs abruptly severed without her knowing; as a teenager, she had seen the devastation his harshness and self-involvement had wreaked on her mother; as a child, she had been rendered fatherless by his business affairs.

Even though Nicholas’ new job was temporary, she had been terrified that it would turn out to be a permanent position. She knew only too well how persuasive her father could be when he set his mind to it. She had been terrified too of his going away. So soon after the terrible nightmare with Saigō, who through Justine herself had almost succeeded in killing Nicholas, she felt that being alone was a kind of exquisite agony.

She knew that whatever it was Saigō had done to her had scarred her for life, despite all Nicholas’ efforts to exorcise that particular devil from her. True, she was free from Saigō’s arcane grip over her, but she could never be free of the memories.

In the deepest shoals of night, when Nicholas lay peacefully sleeping beside her, she would awake with a shivery start, into a nightmare.

I almost murdered him, she found herself repeating to herself as if there were a stranger alive inside her body to whom she must make sense of this. How could I? Another repeating riff, an agonizing counterpoint. I’m not even capable of killing a fish, let alone another human being, my own love.

That, of course, might have been her salvation: the conviction that
she could not kill
and therefore was not responsible. But the nightmare continued to stalk her. Had not Nicholas stopped her, she would most assuredly have killed him. Just as Saigō had programmed her to. She was not concerned with responsibility. Only with a guilt greater than any she had ever known.

But, oh, she ached for him even as she feared for him every moment he was in Japan, every moment he was with her father. For she knew intimately all the myriad ways Raphael Tomkin had of getting what he wanted. He could be bullheaded or subtle, as the occasion warranted. He could get you even when you were certain he wouldn’t.

She shuddered now within the confines of her new office. Oh, Nicholas, she thought. If only I had been able to make you see what he’s like. I don’t want him to steal you away from me.

Because the thought of Nicholas permanently wedded to Tomkin Industries was more than she could bear. She wanted her father out of her life, had struggled all through her formative years for just such an objective, even going so far as to change her last name to Tobin. And she knew that if there was a chance that he would come back into her life she would move heaven and earth to prevent it.

Angry now as well as lonely, she dialed Mary Kate’s extension. If Nicholas had phoned at this moment, she would have spat at him for putting her in such an impossible position, for making her fear for him and them both.

Justine was told that her friend was in a meeting, so again she left a message, hoping they could have lunch and celebrate. Then she asked Min to come in. Together they began working out logistics, departmental and otherwise, so that Justine could get on with her first projects for Millar, Soames & Robberts.

It took all of Nicholas’ training to cover his true feelings. The shock had been so great, so totally unexpected that he had taken that one lurching step backward, losing for an instant his centrism, exhibiting a certain paleness of complexion, a momentary flaring of the nostrils as animal instinct threatened ascendancy; he was certain no one had noticed. His face closed down like a steel trap as the soft mix of voices from all around him faded….

And he was back in New York, his long
dai-katana
drawn, its gleaming blade arching away toward Saigō. He took a step forward and his cousin said, “You believe that Yukio is alive, somewhere, and thinking every so often of the old days with you. But, oh no, this is not so!” He laughed as they continued to circle each other with murderous intent. He looked into Nicholas’ eyes as he said, “She lies at the bottom of the Straits of Shimonoseki, cousin, precisely where I dumped her.

“She loved you, you know. With every breath she breathed, with every word she spoke. And at last it drove me out of my mind. She was the only woman for me…without her there were only men.” His eyes blazed like coals, red-rimmed and mad. He was bleeding heavily.

“You made me kill her, Nicholas!” he blurted out in sudden accusation.

For months Nicholas had lived with that pain, a black cyst of torment he rarely let out into the light of day. And now to see…It was not as if Akiko Ofuda looked like Yukio: a family resemblance, a sister even. Her face
was
Yukio’s. And as for her figure, well, certainly there were differences. But Nicholas had last seen Yukio in the winter of 1963 on that long, terrible journey south to Kumamoto and Saigō. And when he had returned at last to Tokyo, alone and confused, everything had changed. Satsugai, Saigō’s father, had been murdered. Then the Colonel, Nicholas’ father, died. Shortly thereafter, Cheong, his mother, had committed
seppuku
with her sister-in-law, Itami, as second.

Now, staring hard at Akiko Ofuda, Nicholas wondered wildly whether Saigō had lied that one last time. Was it possible? He was a master of twisted truths. He had been dying when he told Nicholas. What would that have made him do? Lie or tell the truth at last? Whatever would hurt Nicholas the most. Truth or fiction? Nicholas could not tell.

Yet how Akiko had stared at him from the moment he was close enough for her to see him. Though there were more than a hundred people at the affair, her eyes had locked on his. She had created the aura of mystery, hiding her face until he was quite close. She had used her fan deliberately. Why? If she were not Yukio, why would she have any interest in him? And yet to turn up here as Sato’s soon-to-be-wife…The wild coincidence did not escape him. Nicholas, quite rightly, did not trust in coincidences as a force of nature.

All through the ceremony, as the traditional sakē cup was being passed from Sato to Akiko, Nicholas’ mind was preoccupied by the bizarre puzzle. But the more he thought, the more he seemed to become entangled in a mare’s nest of questions without answers. It was clear to him that he would get nowhere until he could speak to Akiko herself. And yet his mind would not stop turning over the possibilities: was she, wasn’t she? His eyes stared at her bleakly. That face, her face. It was as if he had suddenly stepped into a haunted house and now, confused, could not find his way out again. It felt precisely as if all solid ground had fled.

Was the ceremony long or short? He could not tell. He was suspended in an agony of not knowing. Hope, fear, anger, and cynicism all mixed inside him. His own thoughts and memories took precedence over outside events. His body went through the proper motions like an automaton.