Floating City (26 page)

“Those years after the war were pure chaos. Everything and anything had to be considered in order to restore political order and economic balance to Japan. It was Occupation policy to use Yakuza on occasion. This was part of my father’s job.”

“Yes. He was a great man in the founding of the new postwar Japan. I doubt we would be where we are today without his help.”

But from his tone Nicholas was quite certain this was not at all what Tachi had meant to say.
Shicho,
the current of thought, played between them like heat lightning. And now Nicholas saw how their elemental affinity through Tau-tau could be a two-edged sword. While it could bring them together in spirit and purpose, like the carcasses of the leviathans arranged beneath the stars, it could also betray them, revealing more, perhaps, than either was consciously willing to divulge.

They both became aware of the figure at the same time. Slowly, almost hesitantly, it detached itself from the shadows of the temple columns, padding toward them. It was small, willowy, the narrow hips swaying in an age-old rhythm that seemed out of place, even grotesque.

It was a girl, not more than nine years old, too young even for her breasts to have begun to bud. Yet she swung her hips like any seasoned streetwalker the world over.

“Let me handle this,” Tachi said as the girl held one hand out to them. She was beautiful, if one could imagine her without the bruises on her face and bare shoulders.

She said something in Vietnamese that sounded to Nicholas like, “Want to fuck here? Do it now. Only five dollars American.” But he could not believe a child so young could sell herself this way.

Nevertheless, Tachi rose and, pressing several bills into her fist, bent to slip his jacket across her shoulders. He spoke to her quietly in the same dialect she had used. In time, the suspicion on her face dissolved enough so that she allowed herself to be led to where Nicholas was.

She sat between them, this filthy, wretched child, and ate in the large famished bites of a wild animal all the food they had left between them. She picked the sweet meat of the cheeks from the fish’s head, chewing slowly in a kind of euphoric daze. Then she slipped the head into her mouth, devouring it completely. Finally she took the bones and crunched on them contentedly.

Her eyes were dark and luminous, the deep color of her skin like burnished bronze where it was free of bruises. While her limbs were delicate, they were already developing out of the shapeless appendages of a little girl. Her youth made her bruises and scrapes seem all the more abominable.

Between swallows she answered Tachi’s gently probing questions. Nicholas found it fascinating to watch this Yakuza boss tenderly minister to this creature of the nighttime streets.

“She says that her father taught her how to give pleasure to men,” Tachi told Nicholas softly. “Her family is very poor, and without the money she is bringing in, they would have nowhere to live. Her baby brother is ill, and what her father earns goes to medicine and food.” He looked at Nicholas. “In her company it would be easy to hate such a father.” He reached out, wiped the child’s lips free of grease. He said something to her and received a lopsided grin in return. Then she scrambled up and, clutching his jacket tightly around her, scampered off seemingly as carefree as any child her age into the shadows of the temple and the whales.

“We’ve given her only a temporary respite from her life,” Tachi said sadly. “Tomorrow she’ll be back at it, turning tricks, lying about her virginity so foreign businessmen won’t worry about contracting AIDS. No one thinks about how soon it will be until the disease finds her.”

The night had become very still. The moon was turning fiery as it descended through the layers of exhausted air surrounding Vietnam’s new industrial future. Soon soot would cover this tiny garden, clinging like glue to stone and tree alike.

Shorn of his jacket, Tachi’s arms were bare. Nicholas could see a series of what appeared to be long concentric circles spiraling down his right arm. Tachi, who had little body hair, was devoid of it on this arm. Instead, the skin was pale and puckered, shiny as melted wax, though it was clear these scars had been inflicted long ago.

Tachi did not look at Nicholas, but continued to rummage in his satchel. “I imagine you’re curious. I know I would be in your situation.”

Nicholas said nothing. He thought of Croaker and his bio-mechanical left hand. Fabulous as it was, Nicholas wondered whether his friend ever missed having two flesh-and-blood hands. He missed Croaker. They had spoken by phone earlier via the prearranged schedule they had set up, bringing one another up-to-date on the progress of their parallel missions.

“I’ve been trying to make contact for two days,” Croaker had said, “signaling, then waiting for your return call. Nothing. What the hell happened? Are you okay?”

“Just barely. Remember Timothy Delacroix?”

“The arms dealer, yeah, sure.”

“He’s in Saigon and I tried to set up a meet with him. The bastard tried to blow me off the street.”

“Christ! You sure you’re okay? You want me to come out there?”

“I appreciate the thought,” Nicholas said, “but I’m all right. Besides, it sounds to me you’re needed right where you are.”

“I’m not so sure.” Croaker told him about the break-in at Moniker’s and the Morgana ledger. “I found out the truth about Torch, and it’s worse than we thought. It is some form of new weapon—and it’s of a sizable scale. It’s scheduled to be detonated on March 15, but I have no idea where. What I do know is the site was chosen for—and I quote—’proximity of target and density of population.’”

“That means a major urban center,” Nicholas said, his heart filled with dread.

“Right. But where? It could be any large city in the world.”

“We’ll have to put the pressure on: we only have three weeks left. But from what you’ve told me, I think our best bet is for you to pursue your end.”

When Croaker had told him about Domino, Nicholas had said, “I think you’d be well advised to learn more about her as quickly as you can.”

“I agree,” Croaker had said. “What was a supposed Looking-Glass clerk like Domino doing with all the information she gave me?”

“Exactly. And if Vesper Arkham is part of Okami’s Nishiki network, I find it highly alarming that she also worked for Looking-Glass’s late boss, Leon Waxman.”

“Of course. Waxman was Johnny Leonforte, Bad Clams’s father,” Croaker said.

“The implications are more and more ominous as far as Vesper is concerned,” Nicholas had said. “What if she’s the Godaishu’s mole inside the Nishiki network?”

“I had been thinking along the same lines. Nishiki is Okami’s method of keeping the Goldonis—Dominic and now Margarite—up-to-date on the peccadilloes of Washington’s power elite. If Vesper is already inside Nishiki, she could travel without too much difficulty back along the network to Okami.”

The possibility that Okami’s enemies possessed a means of finding him even while he was in hiding chilled both men.

“This makes your mission even more urgent,” Nicholas had told Croaker. “You’ve got to find Okami before Vesper does.”

“Soon,” Nicholas said now, bringing himself fully into the present with Tachi, “she’ll be an outcast in her own land.” He watched the shadows into which the girl had disappeared.

“An outcast, yes.” Tachi raised his right arm until the moonlight flooded the skin in a pearlescent glow. The glossy ridges of his ropy skin stood out whitely like embroidery upon a dark quilt.

“Linnear-san, you better than anyone else I know understand the meaning of the word
ijime.
Being half-Caucasian you must have encountered some form of it growing up in Japan.”

“Bullying by other children because I didn’t fit into the group, because I was different.”

Tachi nodded. “Precisely so.” Showing off his right arm as if it were a trophy, he said, “This is from
ijime.
Outside Kumamoto, where I was raised, my family was different from most others. For one thing, my father had a lot of money. He owned fabric-dyeing mills in the area. We had moved there when I was six because it was a depressed area and my father determined he could make a greater profit by lowering his overhead.

“Whereas all my classmates lived in small, ugly ferroconcrete houses, we lived in a sprawling two-story wood-frame house. It was beautiful, really. My mother was an artist, a fabricator of the most fantastic art. I wanted desperately to follow in her footsteps but, sadly, I had no aptitude for art. Form and perspective were as alien to me as quantum physics was to my mother.

“Also, my skin was light, another strike against me. My earliest memories are of my mother bathing. Her skin was as white as milk, or so it seemed to me, and so translucent I often believed I could see through it. When I was older, I read magic tales and myths of the snow fox that lives high in the Japanese alps, who on the last day of the year comes down to the levels where mankind lives and, transforming itself into a maiden of milky skin, plays tricks on farmers and townsfolk alike.

“From that moment on, part of me believed that my mother was a magical creature. The worse for me, since this only served to further my sense of specialness and isolation from those around me.

“It goes without saying that I was despised at school, not only by my classmates because I was foreign, rich, and light skinned, but also I believe by the teachers and the principal, who found my presence alien and disruptive. In fact, there’s evidence that these officials felt I bore the brunt of the responsibility for my troubles. The fact was my family
was
wealthy, we
did
live in a grand house by the standards of the area, I looked different from the stunted, dark-skinned trolls of the town, and I had never bothered to master their dialect. In short, I did not conform to the strict tyranny of the group. I was as different as if I were half-Western.”

Nicholas thought of the difficulties he had had in school, and then in the martial arts dojo until he had proved himself more than capable of defending himself. In fact, for the first time he wondered whether his batterings in school had led him into martial arts. The fact that he had chosen aikido as his first discipline of study was telling, because its governing theories were essentially defensive.

“I was bullied constantly,” Tachi said, “in the classroom and on the sports field. I was by turns kicked, beaten, insulted, and snubbed. How many times my poor mother was dragged away from one creation or another to sew my upper lip or the inside of my cheek. She did take me to the doctor once, but since two of his sons were often the instigators of my injuries, he refused to acknowledge that I needed medical assistance. My mother’s hands, so adept at wielding a horsehair brush or a sculpting knife, were equally as confident with surgical needle and thread.

“When my father went to school to plead my case, the principal greeted him coldly. After all, my father had been educated in Tokyo. He made in one week what the principal earned in a year. The principal told my father that instead of complaining about his son he should have compassion for the boys who were, he said, only acting out of a well-developed instinct for the survival of the group. When my father threatened to take my story to the local paper, the principal pointed out that both the editor and publisher had children at the school, that they would understand even if my father didn’t that the rights of the other children needed to be protected. Nothing could be allowed to interfere with their futures.”

Tachi sat very still. It was clearly not easy for him to allow the past its due. It seemed to sit on his shoulder like a demon, huge eyes gleaming like kaleidoscopes.

“I did try one act of defiance. I set my right arm on fire as I sat in the auditorium with the entire school listening to what amounted to a tiresome sermon from the sanctimonious principal. I suppose it was brave of me, but it did no good. Predictably, the school officials closed ranks, terming the incident an accident. They wanted nothing more than to end a thoroughly unpleasant incident.

“So I did the only thing that would save me, the only thing I seemed suited for: I joined the Yakuza. I went to Kumamoto, and with the brashness of youth—and I suppose the urgency of desperation—I sought out the local
oyabun.
When I told him the story of my arm, he understood immediately. He had no son of his own, only daughters. That was my lucky break, and I used it.”

Tachi now brought his left hand into the light. The end of his little finger was missing. He looked at it with such compassion that the demon on his shoulder vanished. “I made one mistake with this man. I thought it was the end for me. He assigned me to protect his eldest daughter on the day of her wedding to the son of the
oyabun
of a neighboring town. There were those against such a wedding because they saw a future where both clans would be joined into a single, far more powerful entity, and this they could not abide.

“There was an attack, and in the melee the bride was struck by a stray bullet. Even though I knew there had been nothing more I could have done to protect her, I had failed. Six hours later, she died on the operating table and I went before my
oyabun,
certain of my fate.

“Instead, he spoke to me of happenstance and loyalty; he spoke to me as if I were his own child. In the end, I gave him this part of me and he forgave me, not only in word but with his heart. That is a lesson I have never forgotten. In the real world—the world of my youth—there was no honor, but among the ranks of the Yakuza I found what I was looking for. I discovered what was important in life.”

The first thing Croaker did when he woke up was check to see if Margarite was in the hotel. He was told she wasn’t. Once again, he used his Looking-Glass ID to log on to the number given him by his former boss, William Justice Lillehammer. A man answered with the light, chirpy voice of youth. When the voice acknowledged the ID, Croaker asked to speak to Domino.

“I’m sorry,” the voice replied. “There’s no one here by that name.”

“But there must be. I spoke with her last night,” Croaker said, but his mind was already running several steps ahead, and he could see his folly.