Floating City (30 page)

“In what way?”

“She was so
smart.”
He shook his head. “Actually, the word
smart
doesn’t even come close to defining what she is. There were times when I was convinced she knew me so well she was right inside my head. And then, there were other times when it seemed as if”—he shrugged, in its resignation a peculiarly anguished gesture—“she wasn’t aware I existed.” He glanced at his watch. “I gotta get back to work.”

Croaker let him get a few steps away before he said, “There’s more, isn’t there?”

The big man turned toward him. “There’s no more.”

“Mr. Arkham, it’s likely that Vesper is in serious trouble.”

“How serious?”

“Quite frankly, it could be terminal.” Croaker felt a twinge of remorse trapping Arkham this way. But he had no choice; most often he didn’t. People were not in the habit of spilling their guts to investigators, so you needed to find their vulnerable spot and press as hard as you could. Without knowing it, Arkham had revealed his soft spot: it was Vesper. Despite whatever had happened between them, he was still very much in love with her.

Arkham came back to where Croaker stood. “Look, what if there
is
more? How will it help her now?”

“I need to understand her, Mr. Arkham. She’s still innocent until proven guilty. The better I know her, the better my chances of saving her in the end. You’d want her to have that chance, wouldn’t you?”

The mist filtered down on them, the filthy water ran in the alley, and far away now, the drill continued to bore through the concrete subfloor. Croaker was aware of all these things, but they had been shifted into the background, as if they were no more than hiss on a bad cassette tape one needed to ignore in order to enjoy the music that had been recorded.

Arkham put his big hands in his pockets, nodded at Croaker’s biomechanical hand. “That’s some piece of work. It do well for you?”

Croaker looked around, pulled up an old rusty crowbar from the rubble close to the building. He wedged it between two exposed girders and, gripping one end with his biomechanical hand, exerted pressure. The bar bent, then wrapped itself around the girders in a U shape.

“Nifty. But I’ll bet you’d still rather have the real one.”

It was clear from the way Arkham spoke that he felt he had lost something fully as valuable as a hand.
Maybe that is to the good,
Croaker thought.
It’ll make it easier if he thinks we have something in common.

Arkham took a look around, as if he were worried they would be overheard. “Shit,” he said softly. Then he raised his head, looked Croaker in the eyes, and began. “One time when she disappeared, I was so frantic I tried to find her. I went to her parents’ house.”

“The Harcasters.”

Arkham nodded. Beads of moisture were building on his hard hat, slipping like tears off the metal surface. “I didn’t know what to expect because, well, Vesper hardly spoke of them. There had never been any talk of being with them on, you know, Easter or Christmas or Thanksgiving. We always spent holidays with my family, and she seemed happy to be there.

“Still, I was unprepared for the reception I got from her parents. It was openly hostile. I told them I was Vesper’s husband, and for a moment I thought her father was going to get his shotgun off the wall. Then his wife put a hand on his arm. His face was white. She asked me what I wanted and I told her that I was looking for Vesper. Do you know what her father said, Mr. Croaker? He said, ‘Why have you come here?’ Can you imagine a parent saying that about his child?”

Arkham had a stunned look on his face, as if he were living the terrible incident all over again. “‘Our child doesn’t live here anymore,’ Vesper’s mother said. ‘It’s been many, many years.’ Neither of them would use her name. They had kicked her out, disowned her. They wanted no part of her. I could see her mother’s heart was still breaking, but her father’s was stone cold.”

“What happened?”

“For one thing, she was adopted... and she was gay, or at least bisexual.” The sentence had been squeezed out of him, and Croaker was aware of how much the admission had taken out of him. “When the Harcasters found out, they freaked out.”

“When did that happen?”

“According to Mrs. Harcaster, when Vesper was a senior in high school.”

A warning bell went off in Croaker’s head. “I’m curious about something. Vesper is exceedingly well educated—Yale, Columbia, postdoctoral work. All of that schooling takes a whole lot of money. Obviously, she didn’t get it from mommy and daddy. Where
did
it come from?”

“She went to New York, scammed her way into a job working for the Democratic mayoral candidate. You know Vesper, once she was inside an organization, she would find a way to make it open up like a flower.”

“But the pay wouldn’t have been enough to put her through a community college, let alone Yale and Columbia.”

Arkham nodded. “She once told me that she had been very lucky. The candidate got elected. He was so impressed with her he recommended her to a foundation that helped deserving students in financial need.

“Has she been scamming again? She can’t help it, you know.” The man’s pain was palpable, and Croaker felt sorry for him. He’d never stop bleeding for his ex-wife.

“I can’t say yet. Tell me, do you know the name of the foundation?”

Arkham’s face was lined in thought. “Acton? Andover? I remember it started with an
A
just like my name.” He snapped his fingers. “Avalon! That’s it! As in King Arthur.”

Croaker stood stunned for a moment. Avalon Ltd. was the name of an international arms merchant concern. It was also the name of a foundation that had put Vesper through years of higher education. Coincidence? In Croaker’s world, coincidence did not exist. Was Dedalus stealing from his own organization, DARPA, and getting rich selling the booty through Avalon Ltd.?

“Mr. Croaker, she’s not a bad person,” Arkham said desperately. “Bad things have happened to her. That’s not the same thing, is it?”

“No, it’s not.”

Croaker watched the big man melt into the shadows of the building that would soon come crashing down upon itself in much the same manner as Arkham’s world had come down on him.

Ushiba went to see Tetsuo Akinaga, the
oyabun
of the Shikei clan. Given the Daijin’s clandestine relationship with Akira Chosa, this was a most difficult decision to make. But Yoshinori’s revelation that Chosa had enlisted Tachi Shidare, the new
oyabun
of the Yamauchi clan, to destroy Nicholas Linnear had given Ushiba no choice.

The truth was that Ushiba did not trust anyone—least of all a revenge-minded Chosa—to have success against a man such as Nicholas Linnear. The truth was that Ushiba did not believe any of Chosa’s well-reasoned arguments for Linnear’s demise. Not that they didn’t have validity—far from it. But Ushiba knew Chosa well enough to understand that, like the doomed, mad Tomoo Kozo, who had tried to kill Linnear on New Year’s Day, he had his own personal reasons to see Linnear destroyed. And the ultimate truth was that Ushiba did not believe in personal revenge. It went against every tenet of
kanryodo,
the creed of the samurai-bureaucrat, by which he lived his life. It also went against everything he had observed in life. How many men had he seen consumed by their need for personal revenge? More than one was often too painful to remember.

In his lifelong battle against the Americans, Ushiba had tried with varying success to remember the painful penalties of obsession. Surely those who chose to define morality to suit their own vision were doomed. Tomoo Kozo and Chosa came immediately to mind. There had to be an absolute morality, Ushiba believed, like the tenets of
kanryodo
or Buddhism, upon which the world worked and the human heart flourished, or else it would merely survive like an organ preserved in formaldehyde.

After the debacle with Kozo, Ushiba thought that Chosa had learned his lesson. But Chosa was hardheaded; more, he still had the arrogance of youth, whose chief illusion was that mortality and disaster could be kept at arm’s length merely by force of will. Ushiba could detect nothing but danger in such a cavalier attitude, and he had no desire to be pulled into the vortex that must surely ensue from Chosa’s irresponsible actions.

Ushiba stared out the tinted window of his car, but he saw nothing of the passing panoply of Omotesando, one of Tokyo’s beautiful wide avenues. Instead, he continued to gaze inward, thinking of Chosa and Akinaga, and how much the inner council had changed since the attempt on the Kaisho’s life had forced Okami into exile.

Tetsuo Akinaga ran many large and complex businesses in Tokyo, but his favorites were his smaller boutique companies. These he took a direct hand in starting up and multiplying like crickets all over town. His current interest was Big White Men.

Ushiba’s car had come to a stop without his knowing it. He got out when the driver opened the rear door for him. He suppressed a wince as his stomach regurgitated pain like rotten food.

This particular Big White Men was in Harajuku, near the Meiji Shrine. Ushiba went across the busy sidewalk, into the store. Of course, Big White Men wasn’t really a store. It was a discreet laundry service specializing in men’s underwear. For a monthly fee, the patron received the key to an anonymous-looking box, approximately the size and shape of a mailbox in the post office. The patron paid one hundred yen per item, then deposited the soiled garments in the box and, forty-eight hours later, returned to find them laundered and neatly pressed. Business, Akinaga said, was booming, particularly since underwear was being stolen off clotheslines in apartment blocks. “Who would have thought it,” Akinaga said jocularly. “I’m getting rich protecting people from fetishists.”

Ushiba and Akinaga spoke in one of the back rooms of Big White Men. The smell of detergent and bleach permeated the air, and the low thumping din of the machines was felt as tremors through the floor.

Akinaga, looking particularly gaunt, poured tea for them both. They were sitting on low chairs, a stubby-legged table between them. These sparse furnishings were of modern Japanese design and manufacture, and as was typical, they displayed a bizarre hybridization of traditional Japanese sensibilities and European flair.

On the table was a phone and a small plate with sweet pastilles to counteract the extreme bitterness of the
macha
green tea. The two men drank in silence, each immersed in the ritual, savoring the confluence of two extreme tastes in their mouths. When they were finished, the young woman who had brought the tea cleared the low table.

When they were alone, Ushiba said, “I have a matter of the utmost urgency to discuss with you.”

Akinaga inclined his head slightly, the only indication he would give of his surprise. “I am honored that it is to me you have come, Daijin,” he said with great deference.

“I have most recently received word that Chosa has taken a most incautious path.”

“Chosa is often rash and hardheaded about personal matters.” Akinaga’s perpetual frown lifted slightly, as if he were talking of a wayward child. “What has he done now?” As if he were going to be asked to provide the cloth to wipe this baby’s behind after an unfortunate accident.

“It seems that he has somehow enlisted the aid of the new
oyabun,
Tachi Shidare, to carry out his desire to destroy Nicholas Linnear.”

If Akinaga had been capable of dropping his jaw in astonishment, he would have done so now. Instead, his frown deepened so that two vertical lines appeared between his eyes. “Yes. That was a most foolhardy decision to make. I cautioned him against any such act after you and I had our last talk. But it seems as if Chosa is not a reasonable man when it comes to the subject of Nicholas Linnear.”

“Apparently not,” Ushiba said, disheartened. “Is Shidare so vulnerable to such pressure?”

Akinaga shrugged. “Undoubtedly. He is quick-witted, ambitious, but young. His mentor was an
oyabun
from Kumamoto. The sticks. He cannot possess the power that Kozo had before him, and it will take him some time to consolidate his own. Easier if he were to agree to align his clan with Chosa’s at council. He’d have instant access to Chosa’s contacts and influence. At least, I imagine that is what Chosa offered him.” Akinaga’s bony hands turned over on the table. “It will take him a while to understand how he has been lied to. But by then it will be too late. He will have ceded too much control of the Yamauchi to Chosa, and Chosa will own him.”

The pain in Ushiba’s stomach flared so badly he was obliged to press his hand against it beneath the table. “Mikio Okami set up the inner council just so this kind of power grabbing could not happen,” he said. “The position of Kaisho was established to bring an end to the perpetual territorial wars between the major
oyabun.
Now, it seems, without Okami to keep you in line, there will be war again.”

“Not if I have anything to say about it. We have to deal with Shidare and Chosa, but in separate ways.”

Ushiba nodded, bowing to the inevitable. “I have come to the same conclusion.”

“Now I am doubly glad you came to me with this matter,” Akinaga said warmly. “It is urgent, indeed.” He thought a moment. “Here is what I propose. Let me deal with the youngster Shidare. I’m afraid if I start meddling with Chosa at this delicate stage, he could easily become hostile. If he’s in the midst of grabbing power, he’ll be paranoid about any inquiries of any of the other
oyabun
of the inner council.”

Ushiba was not happy, but he said nothing. It was not his place. While he was a respected senior member of the Godaishu, he was merely an adviser and ad hoc peacemaker to the inner council. He had hoped to have Akinaga deal with Chosa because he did not care for the idea of doing it himself. On the other hand, his anger at Chosa for continuing on a path that could wreck the entire Godaishu was intense. How could Chosa have betrayed a trust that Ushiba considered sacred? At the very least, he should have consulted Ushiba before he put his plan into play. It made no difference that Chosa must have known what the Daijin’s response would be. He clearly did not want to be tempered.