Floating City (33 page)

Feeling fit and energized, Rock prepared to spend the rest of the nighttime hours prowling Saigon’s back streets for whatever human oddities he could unearth. The prospect was enough to make him whistle a jaunty tune.

That hair! It shone in the sun like spun gold, like caramel being pulled, like cream spilling from a glass pitcher. Croaker, skulking in the trees like some part-time poacher, followed Vesper as she drove the golf cart slowly along a rutted dirt service track.

Deeper and deeper they went into Dedalus’s estate. He noted that she gave a wide berth to the main house, looping around a pond and a conifer garden, over a ridge tawny with the roughage of dead summer grasses, down into a glen where a smaller house sat, made of fieldstone and logs. It looked like an elegant fishing cabin. Blue smoke curled from the stone chimney, and teak furniture in the traditional Adirondack style of the thirties and forties was ranged along a wraparound porch. The cabin overlooked a rough-seeded lawn that ran down to thick patches of underbrush and large zelkovas, whose upper reaches towered over even the old oaks that dominated much of the property. Beyond, Croaker could glimpse slivers of a rushing stream that, no doubt, Dedalus yearly stocked with trout.

Vesper ran the golf cart to a dirt area at the side of the house and stopped it beside her black Nissan 300ZX ragtop. She climbed out and, dusting off her overalls, went up onto the porch and into the cabin.

Croaker detached himself from the trees and, running in a semicrouch, made his way to the edge of the porch, where he carefully and silently climbed the wooden steps. He crept from window to window until he saw Vesper. She was standing beside an oversize stone hearth within which flames flickered. Someone was pouring her a glass of white wine. When the figure turned to put the bottle on a side table, he caught a glimpse of the face: it was Margarite.

Edging closer, he put his ear against the cold glass. In this manner he cauld hear what was going on inside.

“I don’t understand why you have to go to London,” Margarite said. “You’ve given me the latest intelligence from Nishiki.”

Vesper smiled at her. “I told you, this is different. I’m not merely a Nishiki courier. I have other duties. There seems to be a problem and I have to be briefed in person. Besides, that bit about Congressman Martin I just gave you is incomplete. I know he’s important to you because he’s drafted the new banking-regulation bill that could hurt your family’s interests. Before you move on it and put pressure on him to amend the bill, you’ve got to have
all
the dirt on him. So sit tight until I get back.”

“How much danger are you going to be in over there?”

Vesper put down her glass, went to where Margarite stood. “Why worry about it? This is what I was trained to do.” Her laugh was oddly carefree, making her seem nothing more than a happy schoolgirl. “Nothing is going to happen to me.”

“But the danger inherent in the Nishiki network—”

“You really must curb this morbid streak, darling.”

Margarite shuddered. “I was thinking of Lew. Everything is so much more dangerous since I met him.”

Vesper looked at her archly. “I don’t think
met
is the operative word.”

“Are you jealous?”

Vesper laughed. “Do I still make you uneasy?”

“When it comes to sex, you can be omnivorous, you’re not going to deny that.”

Vesper drew a lock of Margarite’s hair away from the side of her face. “I don’t have designs on you. You’d know if I did. As to sex, I admit to having a certain facility with it. Dedalus saw that right away. It’s at the heart of our relationship.” She kissed Margarite on the cheek. “Like your brother was, he’s tremendously intuitive. It was one of his great strengths.”

“God, I miss Dom. But sometimes I think I hate him for saddling me with his responsibilities.”

“You don’t hate him.” Vesper squeezed Margarite’s hand. “He’s given you a chance to be something more, something greater. He saw that spark in you and he nurtured it. Give him credit for seeing you as more than merely female.”

Margarite went across the room, stared into the fireplace. “I see something more, some special quality, in Lew, too.”

Vesper faced Margarite. “Let me remind you that because of your Lew we could all be killed. Caesare—”

Margarite’s eyes flashed in abrupt anger. “What are you doing? Are you trying to poison my emotions?”

Vesper shook her head. “I’m doing my best to protect you.”

“From Lew? Don’t be absurd. He’d never hurt me.”

“Not intentionally, perhaps. But how long do you think you can keep him balanced on the edge of the law that is so important to him? He can’t stay there forever, and when he goes off either side, darling, odds are he’ll take you down with him.”

“You are presuming on our relationship. And now I think you’re something of a hypocrite.”

“I made love to your brother because it pleased me to do so. I admit I formed a strong attachment to him, and he for me; because of that perhaps I became too involved in your struggle with the Leonfortes.” Vesper shook her head. “Still, with all that, he never would tell me the origin of the enmity between the two families.”

“Nor will I.” Margarite turned away.

“Really? That’s curious. I’m the one who delivers the Nishiki intelligence to you, and that intelligence is what allows you to maintain your advantage over Caesare Leonforte and all the other Family dons.”

“Family is family. You’ll miss your flight,” Margarite said with crisp finality.

After a moment, Vesper nodded and said, “You’re right. I’d better get changed.”

When she disappeared from view, Margarite sat on a sofa lost in thought for some time. Then she picked up the phone and called her daughter, Francine. Croaker felt a pang. His visit with her had been all too short, and her sadness at the continuing plight of her parents had been all too palpable. But he knew that pang was for Margarite as well. Hearing how her voice changed when she spoke with Francie reminded him of how desperately he missed her and of how much he despised himself for continuing to spy on her.

Margarite finished her call, rose, and brought out two small valises, lined them up beside the front door. For some time, she stood still and silent, staring down at them as if by a supreme act of will she could make them disappear, turn the present course of events on its ear, and perhaps change the future.

Then she turned, and Croaker knew that Vesper was coming. He stretched to get a better view, then froze. The figure who now approached was dressed in black jeans, a man-tailored white shirt open at the collar, an oversize Claude Montana leather jacket. A thick red jade choker was around her throat.

He stared in disbelief at her black, lustrous hair, close cut: a superb wig. Her large, brown, doe-soft eyes, altered with colored contact lenses, flashed with life and a highly developed sense of wit. Only the pouty mouth, devoid of lipstick, was the same.

I’d better get changed.

Now he understood the irony of her seemingly innocent statement. The chameleon had changed its appearance again. Just what kind of a creature was she? Croaker remembered the old ensigns of persona he had contemplated while waiting for her to appear at the Phillips gallery. And he recognized this was the moment when he had to tear them up and start all over again. His traditional notions of gender and motivation no longer applied to this world he was burrowing into. If he could not let go of his basic prejudices, he knew he would never solve the riddle of Vesper Arkham.

For me who go,
for you who stay—
two autumns.

—Buson

In 1962, Col. Denis Linnear made the mistake of introducing his son to Tsunetomo Akinaga. In the many melancholy autumns after the one in 1971, Nicholas had cause to wonder what his motives might have been. But, of course, by then it was far too late, for the Colonel had been killed in 1963.

In the summer of 1962, Tsunetomo Akinaga was a vital man, bursting with energy the way a peach is ripe with juice. He had been
oyabun
of the Shikei clan for many years.
Shikei
meant “capital punishment,” and in those days Nicholas often wondered why a family should bear such a designation. No one seemed prepared to tell him, least of all Tsunetomo, who had all the good humor of a professional comedian. The old man—for he was far older than he appeared—told strings of hilarious jokes that kept the boys howling with laughter.

The boys were Omi and Hachi, Tsunetomo’s middle and youngest sons, and Nicholas. Tetsuo, the eldest son and the one destined to supplant his father as
oyabun,
was already out of the house, cutting his teeth, as Tsunetomo said with a grin, running a Shikei subfamily in Kobe.

Whether Omi and Hachi liked Nicholas was debatable, but because of his aikido prowess they accepted him. As for Tsunetomo, he respected Nicholas, at first because he was Colonel Linnear’s son, and then because he recognized Nicholas’s innate intelligence.

“You are a half-breed,” Tsunetomo said to Nicholas one afternoon over tea and soybean sweets, “and so your life will not be an easy one.” They were alone, kneeling on tatami in a room that overlooked a small garden composed exclusively of azalea and rocks. The azalea were exquisitely sculpted into the shapes of rocks, so the garden itself became a complex meditation on the relationship between nature and artifice.

The
oyabun,
who led a hectic life, liked to spend an hour with one of his boys late in the afternoon after school and martial-arts lessons were over. He said it had the same effect as meditation, which he claimed he was incapable of ever since his father had been murdered in a territorial war a decade before.

“But I will waste no sympathy on you, young man,” he said as he crunched down on a sweet, “because you need none. You will overcome your burden. In fact, it will teach you much about the people you meet, and you will be a shrewder person for that knowledge.” Then he told a joke about a farmer and an itinerant priest that made Nicholas burst into laughter.

Tsunetomo smiled. “Laughter is good for my azalea. They drink it up as they do water and sunlight. When there is a wilt in my garden, I know it is because they lack the sound of laughter.”

“Is that why you tell jokes?”

Tsunetomo nodded. “Partly.” He gestured to Nicholas to pour more tea. “My father was a great prankster. Did I ever tell you about how he snuck into the inn where my wife and I were honeymooning and set off a string of firecrackers under our window? Ha, ha! Yes, he was a master, and it was a tragedy for many people when he was killed. My jokes are a way of keeping him alive, you see. In your laughter and the laughter of others here he returns again and again to light firecrackers beneath my window.”

This conversation was made all the more poignant in Nicholas’s memory because it occurred in the spring following the Colonel’s death. For months, Tsunetomo had not called Nicholas, and though Nicholas regularly saw Omi and Hachi at the dojo, they never invited him home with them. For much of that time, Nicholas was too busy to think much about it, but there were days when he missed those afternoon encounters with the
oyabun
with a sensation as acute as pain. And it was only then that he understood how much they had come to mean to him.

He had loved and revered his father, but the Colonel was, after all, a Westerner, and this fact separated him from his son, no matter how attuned the Colonel was to the oriental mind. Tsunetomo provided what, in the end, Colonel Linnear could not: a wholly Eastern sensibility, and perhaps this was why the Colonel had introduced the two.

In the spring of 1964, Tsunetomo appeared at Nicholas’s dojo. He spent an hour and a half watching only Nicholas, as the aikido
sensei
put him through his paces. By this time, Nicholas was well advanced and had, at another dojo entirely, commenced his training in
ninjutsu.
Some of this ancient secretive discipline could be seen in his unorthodox and often astonishing solutions to the aikido attacks the
sensei
had devised for him.

The
oyabun
waited patiently for Nicholas while his phalanx of bodyguards remained out of sight so as not to disturb the harmony the
sensei
had diligently labored to produce in his class. Nicholas, overjoyed to see Tsunetomo, was only too happy to receive an invitation to share tea and soybean sweets.

Later, after Tsunetomo’s words reverberated in his mind, Nicholas understood how deeply the
oyabun
had been hurt by the Colonel’s death. Perhaps it reminded him too keenly of his own father’s brutal murder. Both he and Nicholas needed to heal from the wound before they recommenced their meetings. A strict sense of respect was also involved. Tsunetomo did not want to give Nicholas the idea that he was in any way aiming to supplant the Colonel in Nicholas’s affections.

“I am Tsunetomo,” he said that afternoon, staring at the tender azalea buds on the verge of opening. “And your father was the Colonel. I am
oyabun,
but he was far more than that. Your father was an architect of dreams. I do not expect you to understand this now, but one day you will.”

Tea was an endless ritual with Tsunetomo. It was sacred time; as long as he was at tea, his men and advisers knew that he could not be disturbed. In this way did Tsunetomo draw the demarcation between commerce and what he referred to as the business of life.

“As you can see,” he said, “this garden is enclosed by four walls. Three are fusuma doors into the house; the fourth is the inner wall of this estate. Everything is low in the garden; this is deliberate. Not even the wind can disturb the components. I have caught sunlight and shadow like ships in a bottle. To sit here in the morning or the afternoon and watch how the shapes are transformed with the light is to understand the nature of life and time, for in the end, nothing is ever transformed here. At the end of each night the garden starts afresh at the beginning of its cycle.”