The Nicholas Linnear Novels (94 page)

And always he found her looking at him. Those eyes he had known so well, had loved so desperately, so wildly, so utterly passionately in the dark days of his youth locked with his. He tried to read some kind of emotion there and, because he was a master of this as well as of many other things, he was dismayed to find that he drew a blank. Did he see mockery there or love, desire or betrayal? He found he had no way of knowing and this, too, was as frightening as this
kami
resurrected from his past.

All Nicholas could think of was getting a chance to talk to Akiko. But quickly he saw just how difficult it was going to be to get her alone. With the ceremony’s end, clusters of friends immediately gathered around the couple, wishing them well, offering their congratulations.

Others began to drift away down the narrow dirt path toward the edge of the lake below, where striped pavilions had been erected the night before.

There was no space for him. The best he could do was to offer his own congratulations to them both. Sato was smiling hugely, being very American about it, pumping hands just like a canny senator in his re-election bid.

Tomkin grunted at Nicholas’ elbow, said, “I’m about ready for him to pass out the cigars.” He turned his head away. “You go on to the reception. My gut still hurts; I’m going back to the hotel. I’ll send the car back for you.”

Alone, Nicholas began to walk down the path circling the cliffs. Ahead of him he could see Sato and Akiko, still surrounded by well-wishers. There was laughter and gaiety now that the stiff formality of the ceremony had been dispensed with.

He saw her descending through the darkness and light, the moving shadows of the pines painting abstract symbols upon the delicate curve of her back. A slight swaying of the shoulders and hips, appearing and disappearing as he descended behind her.

The wedding, the crowds, the swirling chattering talk faded so that he was alone with her and the elements. He was acutely aware of the sunlight, the shadows, the scents of pine and cedar, incense and wild lemon, but only as they pertained to her.

Her passage was like the return of the plovers after a long, sere winter when the ground was rimed with frost and only the glowing hearths emanated warmth.

Once Nicholas had likened Yukio to the fading pale petals that fall on the last of
hanami
’s three days. Although many said that at
hanami
’s peak, the second day, the cherry blossoms were most beautiful, still, to almost every Japanese the third-day petals were most affecting. For it was on that last day when one truly understood the ineffable nature of beauty’s transience.

But now what was he to think? His whole reality had been turned upside down.
Was
Akiko Yukio? How could she still be alive? Had Saigō pulled one last diabolical trick from beyond the grave? Had he kept Nicholas from her all this time when she was alive and…

He could not go on with that thought; the idea made him sick to his stomach with the intensity of longing and bitter frustration. Then he managed to get hold of himself. He knew where he was and what he would have to do in order to find the answers to all these questions. He would have to allow his Eastern side complete ascendancy. Time…and patience. He knew that he would have to employ them both if he was to successfully break this maddening riddle. Meanwhile he would just have to ignore his breaking heart.

He had been watching Alix Logan for over five months now. Through the sun-drenched streets of Key West, along the narrow, flat beaches, in and out of the small clothing and jewelry boutiques. He had even gone with her when she went to pick up her dog, a large brindled Doberman. He cringed when he saw the neat white and black sign hanging from a crosstree on the lawn: Gold Coast Obedience School, and in smaller letters beneath: Police and Attack Training Our Specialty. And the one thing he had learned from all that time on the job was that there was no conceivable way in to her.

Alix Logan was a looker. She had a slender model’s body, long thick hair the color of honey, streaked nicely now by the Florida sun. Her eyes were an intense green. He had seen them only through the compact Nikon 7 x 20 binoculars, flattened by the lens’ prisms into ovoid orbs as large as the sun.

For just over five months she had been his universe, this powerful man with the wide shoulders and the cowboy’s pushed-in face. He had dogged her for so long and so intensely that it was as if he were living with her. He knew what she ate, what her tastes in clothes and men were. What she liked, what she didn’t like.

Her favorite item was a hot fudge sundae with coffee ice cream and two cherries. What she disliked most were the pair of monsters who shadowed her constantly. At least that was how she thought of them. He had heard her call one just that, “Monster!” as she accosted him on the pier one bright cloudless afternoon, rushing into the shadows to deliver her impassioned message to him directly, using her small fists on his burly chest for emphasis.

The monster stared at her impassively from out of his close-set brown eyes.

“I’m fed up!” she screamed at him. “I can’t take it anymore. I thought it’d be all right down here. But it’s not. I can’t work, I can’t sleep, I can’t even make love without you monsters breathing fire on my back.” Her honey hair whipped in the salt wind. “Please, please, please, just leave me alone!”

The monster turned his face away from her and, crossing his massive arms across his chest, began to whistle something from a Walt Disney movie.

The man with the cowboy’s lined face witnessed all this from the small boat he sat in, gently rocking at pierside while he worked on his fishing tackle, a stained canvas hat scrunched down low over his forehead, putting his face in black shadow. They knew him here as Bristol and that was how he liked it. He also responded to “Tex,” a rather unimaginative nickname Tony, the dockmaster, had given him, owing to his face.

“Tex” Bristol. If you thought about it for more than a moment, it was idiotic. But then, he thought, this whole scene was something for the books.

He finished his work on his rod and prepared to shove off. On the pier, Alix Logan, tears trembling like diamonds in the corners of her eyes, was stalking stiff-legged away from the monster, toward the gangplank of a pleasure boat.

He cast off, heard the twin screws of the engines thrumming liquidly behind him. He picked up speed, the thought of martin in his head.

Far from shore, he had to laugh. For someone dead and buried, he was leading a remarkably action-filled life.

Akiko Ofuda Sato felt the press of her husband’s hand in the limo on the way home from the reception. Felt the heat emanating from his body, the pressure of his lustful spirit so close beside her. He made no overt move, but in all other aspects she felt the electricity crackling through him as they drew closer and closer to home.

Multiple images, thronging her mind in such profusion they tumbled end over end over each other, of her voyeuristic nights in the house, of the bodies of all the gifts she had presented him with over the long months, made her gasp inwardly with a manufactured excitement. She squeezed Sato’s hand, the edges of her lacquered nails scratching gently along the warm flesh of his palm.

Once inside, she went immediately to the bathroom and, doffing her kimono, removed all her undergarments. Naked, she carefully wrapped her kimono around herself, tying the
obi,
checking her makeup in the mirror. She reapplied eye shadow and lipstick.

The master bedroom was in the
omoya,
far from the six-
tatami
room where he had received his gifts. Those women had never been allowed into this section of the house. They were outsiders, after all, not family.

On a pedestal not far from the generous
futon
bed was a sculpture of Ankoku Doji, scowling fiercely, one leg up in the classic sitting position. He was an aide to the kings of hell and, putting brush to a paper-covered plank, it was his responsibility to annotate the sins of each penitent who entered that unholy court to be tried for his misdeeds on earth.

This particular Ankoku Doji was carved from camphorwood, dated to the thirteenth century.

Akiko hated him. His sculpted eyes seemed to follow her, seemed to know what she planned to do to his owner. As soon as she was well ensconced here she was determined to move him to another place, preferably one she did not visit often.

Sato welcomed her to his
futon.
They drank hot sakē and he made several jokes. She made sure she laughed although she barely heard them.

Was she terrified or revolted at the prospect of being penetrated by her sworn enemy? She used all her prodigious skills to push down the black tide that threatened to engulf her mind. She did not want to think about what Sun Hsiung had said to her, but she had no choice.

Sato touched her and she jumped. Her eyes flew open and she realized they had been squeezed shut as if that physical act could blot out the reverberations filling her mind.

“You are an empty vessel which I will now proceed to fill,” Sun Hsiung had said to her. “You came to me of your own volition. You must remember that in the days and weeks and months to come. Your time will be long here. It is not inconceivable that you will feel a desire to leave. I will tell you now that you cannot. That if you harbor any suspicion that you cannot tolerate hardship, pain, arduous labor, then you must leave immediately. Now is the time, the only time. Do I make myself clear?”

And with terror filling her heart like a rush of water, she had nodded, said, “I do,” just as if these were marriage vows she was taking.

And, oh, they were, she thought now. They were.

The silk of her kimono was sliding with a whisper across the pale expanse of her shoulder, guided by his deft hand. This close to him, surrounded only by the silence of the empty house—for all servants had been dismissed for the night, to stay free of charge at the city’s most plush hotel, Sato’s wedding present to them—she felt his male presence much the way a female fox is aware of her mate. There was no more than the acknowledgement of lust, of one brief moment stolen out of the net of time.

What she was about to begin had no more to do with love than a pair of microorganisms coming together. What true feelings she had for him she could not express until the moment of her vengeance was at hand. Her nostrils dilated sharply, scenting his odor.

Her kimono had slipped off both her shoulders and now she pressed her hands across herself as a schoolgirl might, embarrassed by her newly budding breasts.

Sato leaned forward and brushed his lips against her throat. Akiko closed off that private part of her which was most dear to her, accepting what might come.

She felt his hands sliding over her shoulders, and she willed herself out of her stupor, parting his own kimono, the bright red angular pattern breaking up into shards as the folds began to appear.

He was naked long before she was, his flesh warm beneath her probing fingers. He was virtually hairless, his skin smooth and unblemished. She put her cheek against his belly, felt the pulse of his life beating in her ear like the surf along the far shore. This meant nothing to her. It was as if she had put her ear to the bole of a tree.

He lifted her upward and now they lay, body against body. Her legs were closed, his were spread apart. There seemed a second heart down there, pulsing in a rhythm all its own. She felt its insistent push as it grew, insinuating itself between her thighs, another kind of serpent.

She reached her hand down and cupped his scrotum. He groaned and she thought it gave an answering throb. She touched the base of his shaft.

Gently, he began to roll over, to move her onto her back. She had never been so aware of one part of her anatomy before. The insides of her thighs burned as if she had pressed herself against an oven and her flesh there rippled as if in terror.

If he saw too soon, if his love was not enough to dissuade him, he would surely reject her. She saw him throwing her out into the street, saw herself banished from the city as it had been done centuries before when the Shōgun held sway and her kind would not be permitted into the bed of a
samurai,
let alone be his bride.

She understood that at this moment there was absolutely no difference between her and her mother. This terrified her beyond all measure, and she commenced to shake like a leaf. Her husband mistook her fear for passion, and groaned aloud.

He had placed her on her back. She could feel the soft silk of her open kimono on her flesh like a sensuous caress. Sato loomed over her, his muscular body throwing her breasts and belly into shadow.

She raised her arms, her fingers and palms tracing the ridges and bulges of his muscles. She used the pads of her thumbs to press inward.

“You like my arms?” he whispered.

Her eyes, black jade, stared up at him, unblinking, delivering the answer he wished for.

“Ah, yes,” he breathed. “Ah, yes.”

His head came down and his open lips encompassed a nipple. He moved from one breast to another, nuzzling and licking. Akiko felt nothing. His fingertips rolled one nipple while he sucked on another and now she gasped at the contrast between the warm softness of his mouth and the rough-calloused rubbing of his fingers. She did not know whether to scream or to cry. She did neither, merely bit her lower lip, exhaling sharply. She put her fingers in her mouth, transferred saliva to the spot between her thighs.

Then she felt herself being turned on her side, Sato’s heated body behind her. His hand gently lifted her upper leg and centered in on the core of her. She gasped as she felt him between her thighs in the tangled forest of her pubic hair.

His fingers pressed open her lips, and she thought briefly again of all his gifts, the movements of his lovemaking. Then she was opening herself to him, feeling the thick hotness of him like a bar of iron between her legs.

She began to weep. His breath hissed in her ear and she could feel the tightening of his powerful arms about her. Her buttocks were hard against him as he moved around and around at the entrance to her vagina until he could stand it no longer.