Floating City (25 page)

“Of course.”

There was a silence between them, and Ushiba was about to hang up when Tanaka Gin added, “The charges are likely to be quite severe. We’ve just uncovered more than one hundred million dollars in gold bars and diamonds in Yoshinori’s house.”

The two men rode in silence through the rain-slicked streets of Tokyo. Neon lights gathered in the gutters. Enormous billboards to the twin temples of industry and consumerism winked and rolled, devoid of meaning without the crowds to ingest their messages.

Ushiba sat huddled beside Tanaka Gin. He was cold and his stomach felt as if he had swallowed battery acid. He had taken two pills before he had left his apartment, but they had done nothing to ease the pain. Power is indeed fleeting, he thought as he watched Tanaka Gin’s dark profile. Once, men like Yoshinori would have brushed off this kind of police probe with a contemptuous wave of their hands. No more. Greed had made even the most influential people careless, and the ensuing scandals had made waves reaching out to the media and, worse, the public. Now there was an outcry from the populace against greed and the endemic corruption they did not understand. Now the police and the prosecutors had the weight of the people on their side, and the balance of power was tipping in their favor. Ushiba, so close to the personal hand of the law, knew his one duty: to keep safe the secrets of the Godaishu.

Tanaka Gin pulled into the driveway of his office building, sat with the engine idling for some time. There was not a soul about. The slap and thwack of the windshield wipers were the only indication of time passing.

Tanaka Gin cleared his throat. “I have decided to take a chance and ask of you the impossible.” His eyes met Ushiba’s. “I need your help in prosecuting Yoshinori. Will you give it to me?”

Ushiba said nothing, unable even to form a coherent thought.

“I know what matters to you.” Tanaka Gin’s slim, dark face was filled with crags. Reflection from the windshield filled his face with rain. “Light, form, poetry. Honor.” His voice was abruptly gentle. “There comes a time in every man’s life when certain priorities present themselves above all others.”

Ushiba’s heart skipped a beat. “That’s true. Old age becomes one’s bedmate without one’s quite knowing how it got into the house.”

“Old age and disease fell even the mightiest cryptomeria in the forest. But before they do, they transform one’s perceptions.” Tanaka Gin stirred. “You might ask yourself how one as young as I might know this. My father died of lung cancer. Perhaps it was from living on the outskirts of Nagasaki, perhaps from other environmental pollutants of our age. In any case, I spent some time with him toward the end and discovered that he had been transformed by his illness. His mind, freed of the bonds of time and death, was mere lucid, more structured in a way than it had ever been. He became, for me at least, an entirely different person.”

Ushiba could not still his heart. All this oblique talk of disease, transformation, and death had a purpose. Tanaka Gin knew that he did not have a bleeding ulcer but stomach cancer. Damn him, the prosecutor was too clever by half. Did he know as well the real relationship between Ushiba and Yoshinori? Ushiba shuddered inwardly.

Tanaka Gin’s gaze was implacable. “As I said, I know what is important to you.” His hands upon the steering wheel were strong, heavily veined and callused. They were beautiful instruments, like the hands of a great pianist or a surgeon. “Yoshinori has betrayed the trust of those who believed in him most. Will you help me prosecute him?”

Ushiba looked into Tanaka Gin’s eyes and saw a great deal that he had not been allowed to see before. He opened his mouth to speak, but what was the point? Both men knew the nature of the reply.

Inside the building, Tanaka Gin ushered him down a long, dimly lit hallway guarded by two men in suits who clearly knew Tanaka Gin but nevertheless asked to see his identification badge.

They took an elevator to the sixth floor, where Tanaka Gin was again obliged to show his ID. He did not give Ushiba’s name or title and no one asked. They went down another anonymous corridor, stopped before a wooden door painted an awful shade of green.

“I can give you forty-five minutes. No more.” Then Tanaka Gin walked quickly away, disappearing around a corner of the corridor.

Ushiba looked around as if he might be secretly observed. Then, taking a deep breath, he turned the doorknob, went in.

Yoshinori was seated at one end of a polished wooden table. He stood up when Ushiba entered, and a small smile broke out on his lined face.

“My friend.”

The minister’s sword looked every day of his seventy-eight years. His face was ashen, his clothes were in disarray, as if he had been forced to dress in a hurry. The room stank of smoke, and Ushiba saw a large brass ashtray full of ground butts next to a pack of cigarettes and a thick gold lighter.

The room looked more like a boardroom than a detention cell, and perhaps that was what it was. Twelve matching chairs ranged around the table. A pair of credenzas stood against two walls, on which were trays with tea and ice water, cups and glasses. The room was windowless and chilly.

“I was told you wished to see me.”

“The worst has happened, Ushiba-san.”

Yoshinori collapsed into a chair. He took out a cigarette and lit up. The ambient smoke was already irritating Ushiba, and he went to one of the credenzas, poured himself some water.

“I have pulled all the strings I have left,” Yoshinori said, “but times have changed. The LDP is no longer what it once was—a bastion of sanity against the Communists and Socialists. It seems our entire raison d’être no longer exists. Once the LDP was the only choice for voters wanting a free-market economy. We were installed thirty-nine years ago as a bulwark for the people, to ensure their freedom and prosperity—for the good of Japan! Now, there are splinter parties to the right and left. There are many choices for voters, but is that good? I doubt it. Politically, Japan now may well go the way of Italy: a revolving door of weak parties trying to muster alliances that will allow them majority rule.”

He shook his gray head like a wounded animal. “There is bitterness all around me. And, of course, that great beast envy. I do not think I will escape Tanaka Gin this time.”

“Do not give up hope that easily.”

Yoshinori gave him a wry smile. “If I am to fall upon the sword, I wish to do so with a pure heart.”

Ushiba took his glass and sat down near Yoshinori. The watery eyes could still blaze with the old energy when needed, and as Yoshinori pushed fingers through his tousled hair, a semblance of the man he used to be even a decade ago began to break through the bleak visage of the tiger in winter.

“People are expecting a political revolution here now that the LDP has lost its majority, but I know the truth,” Yoshinori said. “These reformers have come from our ranks; they have suckled at the breast of ‘money politics,’ they have participated in government by bribe. It is all they know. I am not naive enough to believe people—especially politicians—can change in the blink of an eye.”

Yoshinori turned away for some time in silence. At length, he took a deep breath. “I, too, have done questionable things,” he said in a reedy voice just above a whisper, “and committed what some might think unpardonable sins. My break with you, for instance.” He pulled on his cigarette thoughtfully, let out the smoke in a hiss. “Sitting here alone at the end of a long and eventful life sets one to contemplation. For instance, let us take love. Such a complex emotion, so riddled with, at times, affection, guilt, and unbridled lust. But what is love’s other, darker side? What happens when love is poisoned, affronted? It seems to me now that the deeper one loves, the greater is one’s potential to hate. Now isn’t this what happened with us?”

Yoshinori took another drag on his cigarette, and for a moment the glowing end of it was the brightest light in the room. When it had waned to gray ash, he continued, “It isn’t whether we hated one another, is it, Ushiba-san, but how
deeply
we came to hate one another.” He stubbed out the butt, lit another. “A sad ending for an uncle and his nephew, don’t you agree? I never forgave you for not backing me, not donating your share to my coffers... and you?” He shrugged his thin shoulders. “I can only speculate, but knowing you as I do, you disapproved of how I did business. You no doubt called it corruption, just as Tanaka Gin does.” He smiled, not unkindly. “In many ways, the two of you are similar. It’s quite extraordinary, really. Being taken into custody by him, I thought of you and I knew what I had to do.”

He smoked for some time in silence, apparently gathering his thoughts. Ushiba rose, poured himself more water. While his back was to Yoshinori, the old man said, “Of all the questionable acts or supposed sins I have committed, I regret only one. It was something I did only days ago, and I did it against my better judgment simply because of my hatred for you.”

Ushiba put down his glass and turned around.

“As I said, I want the end to come with my heart pure. I have to exorcise the poison of my hate. Tonight, I have forgiven myself for hating you, but I know more is required of me. I must confess this one act to you.”

“So that I will forgive you?”

Now Yoshinori did smile. “That is not required of you, nephew. I only want you to listen. Several days ago, Akira Chosa came to me. We have done business together for many years. You never suspected, did you, Daijin? Well, no matter. Chosa and I are partners in gambling parlors, insurance and construction companies. We’ve made fortunes together, so when he wanted a favor from me, I was inclined to grant it. He of course knew of the enmity between us and used that. He said he wanted this favor to use a certain man as a weapon to get to an enemy’s Achilles’ heel. Does this sound familiar?”

“Yes,” Ushiba said, thinking of Chosa’s vow to find a way to destroy Nicholas Linnear.

“He said you were against his plan. Is this true?”

“It is.”

Yoshinori’s eyes had begun to tear, perhaps because of the acrid smoke. “Because of that I granted him that favor. I allowed him to use my influence to convince the newly appointed
oyabun
of the Yamauchi clan, Tachi Shidare, to become this weapon.”

The skeleton was enormous, over thirteen feet long, Nicholas estimated. Firelight flickered off the glass case in which it was housed, causing odd shadows and distended fingers of light to play over the rib bones.

“This one was caught in 1868,” Tachi said. “All the whales here at Lang Ca Ong have a special significance.” Lang Ca Ong, the Temple of the Whales, was built in 1911 and had about it a distinctly non-Buddhist air, with its cases of cetaceous skeletons. The whale cult, to which Lang Ca Ong was consecrated, was appropriated by the Vietnamese from the Champa, one of the indigenous peoples they had defeated in founding their nation.

“Whales have for centuries played the part of savior in local folklore.” Tachi put the flat of his hand against the glass case. “Not surprising in a nation of fishermen.”

The sky was bright with stars, and a moon the color of bananas floated in the sky like a ship one could imagine setting sail against the shadows cast by the ghostly skeletons of these enormous beasts.

“What time did Van Kiet say he’d meet us?”

Tachi looked at Nicholas. “Have patience. We are here early for several reasons. I wanted you to see this place because it is unique in Vietnam. I also wanted us to catch a scent of the meeting ground. It’s not that I don’t trust the chief inspector; I don’t trust any Vietnamese. I think they’ve learned to lie to everyone—including themselves.”

They walked through the temple grounds. Surrounded by the massive forms of the whales, Nicholas felt the spatial harmony of life. The great sea mammals provided a kind of context that made the stars seem less remote, the moon appear closer.

“From what I know of the Yakuza it’s unusual for someone so young to be made
oyabun
of a full clan.”

Tachi smiled. “Yes, well, you know far more about the Yakuza than any of my fellow
oyabun
would believe.”

Nicholas paused in the shadow of the beast; his face was striped by the strips of darkness thrown from curving bones, bleached by time and the elements. He refused to be drawn out in this manner. “I know that you are now one of the Kaisho’s inner council.”

“That’s right. And you have sworn yourself to protect Mikio Okami. But Okami may already be dead. Some of his inner council would undoubtedly rejoice at the news, since one of them ordered his assassination. At the very least the former Kaisho is in hiding.”

“Has he already been stripped of his title?”

“So it would seem from my limited knowledge of the current workings of the inner council.”

This response intrigued Nicholas. “You don’t sound as if you’re really part of them.”

“Why would I be? Just because I’ve inherited Tomoo Kozo’s position? I don’t yet have his influence, though I’m working on it.” Tachi glanced upward to the stars. “I have a theory: I believe I was chosen to succeed Kozo precisely because I am young and do not yet have the influence of either Akira Chosa or Tetsuo Akinaga. What could be better for them? I need help and they are only too eager to provide favors, knowing that once I am in their debt, I will be tied to them forever. The power of the Yamauchi has been effectively stifled, so they believe.”

“You have other plans, I take it.”

“I do.”

They went on through the temple, and on the edge of a small stone garden, they sat, their legs dangling over the side of the veranda like boys at ease. Tachi broke open a satchel, pulling out cold grilled meat, rice, and a whole baked fish. They ate by the light of the stars and the moon, the hulking masses of the whales at their backs.

When they were finished and had packed the remains away, Tachi said, “My plans include you, assuming I could discover a way to interest you.”

“The Yakuza hold little interest for me.”

“I know otherwise,” Tachi said, rising. “Your father’s best friend was Mikio Okami. Through Okami he used the Yakuza to achieve certain goals.”