Floating City (50 page)

Walking the densely packed streets of his city, brushing against the people who daily pounded the pavement, took public transportation, and struggled to pay their taxes, he became frightened. Not for them, but for himself and the other members of the Godaishu, because he sensed the answer to his question. Thinking of each individual in turn, he knew that no amount of money, influence, or power would be enough to satisfy them. Was he included in their ranks? Surely, up until this moment, he had been. What did that make him? He closed his eyes, abruptly dizzy. He shuddered, invaded by his own private winter.

His eyes snapped open and he found himself staring into the curious face of a young woman holding her daughter’s tiny hand.

“Are you ill, sir?”

“No. I’m entirely well, thank you.”

He left her behind, but he turned to watch her guide her daughter across the wide avenue. Her face was still in his mind. It was not an unusual face, but its very ordinariness moved him. He suddenly thought of Torch and of its implications. Torch would never have come to fruition without the Godaishu’s assistance. And now the full horror of what they were perpetrating fell squarely upon his shoulders so that his stomach heaved and threatened to send whatever acids it contained rocketing into his throat.

We’re mad,
he thought.
All of us are quite insane.

I’ve been foolish
, Croaker thought.
How out of shape can I get? That sonuvabitch Bad Clams
. But it was his own fault. Bad Clams had warned him.
I got my eye on you
, he had said.
Just ’cause you’re flying the pond don’t mean I won’t know where you go and what you do
.

Croaker had become aware of the man behind the newspaper just after Vesper and Mikio Okami had embraced. He would have spotted the tail sooner had he not been concentrating so on matching Okami with the images of the photos Nicholas had shown him before he had left Tokyo at the beginning of the year.

The tail had entered the Bird Lawn area from the direction of the Japanese garden, settling on a bench, opening a copy of the
London Times.
Croaker could have kicked himself. Once he had ID’d Okami, he knew he had the last piece of the puzzle: Torch was going to be detonated in the heart of London.

Now Croaker was faced with a classic dilemma. He had followed the Nishiki network back to its source; he had found Mikio Okami. But in the process he had led the opposition to its objective. His choice was to follow Okami back to his safe house and risk leading Bad Clams’s man there or dealing with the tail now at the expense of losing Okami. He had only one viable option.

As Okami and Vesper walked north out of Bird Lawn, Croaker strolled over to the bench where the man was sitting behind his newspaper.

“Howdy,” he said, sitting down next to the man.

The paper rustled, but there was no response. Croaker hooked a forefinger over the top of the paper, pulled it down. He found himself staring into the face of a sallow-skinned man with unnaturally black hair, thinning on top. He had quick, alert eyes that seemed to focus on nothing and everything all at once. He was wearing a cheap brown suit and had a mole on his chin. His nose had been broken several times and poorly set, and he was tough enough that the lines in his face might have been scars.

“I beg your pardon.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“Do I know you?”

“You do now,” Croaker said, slipping one hand into the man’s jacket, extracting the gun from the shoulder holster. “This is illegal here.”

“Not for me. I have a license.”

“We’ll see.”

“Put it back.” The mole man bared his teeth. “Or I’ll take you apart with my bare hands.”

Croaker unloaded the gun, shaking the bullets out onto the ground. Then he returned the weapon to its holster. As he did so, he extruded the stainless-steel nails from their sheaths in the tips of his biomechanical fingertips, hooked them over the collar of the mole man’s shirt. He jerked down, and the nails shredded shirt, tie, undershirt, flesh from neck to navel.

“Christ!”

Mole man tried to jerk away but Croaker held him fast with adamantine fingers. He exerted pressure on mole man’s naked chest, jamming him back against the slats of the bench back.

“Don’t threaten people you can’t kill in a tenth of a second.”

Mole man was covered in gooseflesh, but his eyes burned so brightly Croaker could tell he was still more frightened of Bad Clams than he was of Croaker.

“I want you to give your boss a message.”

“Fuck you. Who cares what you want?”

Croaker exerted more pressure. “You should.”

The mole man smirked. “What’re you gonna do? Kill me here among the birds and the kids in prams? Get real.”

Croaker hauled him to his feet. “I’ve had about enough of you. Let’s go over to New Scotland Yard. They have pits for people like you.”

The mole man began to struggle mightily. “You’ve got nothing on me. You can’t lock me up—” He broke free and, depressing the dial of his watch, opened his right hand as a small-caliber pistol appeared in it from a spring-loaded wrist-grip. He pulled the trigger just as Croaker lowered his shoulder and barreled into him.

Croaker closed his titanium and polycarbonate fingers over the weapon, wrenching its muzzle away from him. He took a pounding for it. The mole man was strong and he knew how to street-brawl. He got in two quick jabs to Croaker’s ribs before he went for the groin.

Pain flared in Croaker’s pelvis and he thought he heard the crack of a rib giving way. The mole man pressed his advantage, pummeling Croaker’s right side, but this gave Croaker the opportunity he needed, and he exerted full force into his biomechanical hand. The mole man’s wrist snapped back just as he landed a vicious blow into the flesh over Croaker’s kidney.

Croaker saw stars, almost passed out, but managed to swing his left hand away from the fractured wrist. The extended stainless-steel nails slashed in a horizontal plane, flailing the skin and flesh from the mole man’s cheek, the cartilage from the bottom of his nose. Croaker dug his nails in, catching them on bone and viscera, pulled down. The side of the mole man’s head slammed into the pavement with a sickening sound. Then Croaker let go of consciousness.

He was roused by an urgent voice. He opened his eyes and found himself staring up into a bobby’s face. He was young, almost boyish, and he appeared very frightened. Croaker was aware of a crowd and thought,
Christ, what cock-up, as Major would say.

“Don’t move.” The bobby swallowed hard. “You’ve been hurt and there’s a lot of blood. A police ambulance is on its way.”

Then, despite the bobby’s warnings, he turned painfully over, saw the open eyes of the mole man staring blankly into his. He could hear the two-tone rise and fall of a siren, coming closer, but his ears were filled with Bad Clams’s voice:

Don’t try to cross me in London or wherever the fuck you wind up with this thing, because I’ll come down on you with both my hobnailed boots strapped on and it won’t be a pretty picture.

“Tachi’s dead.”

Chief Inspector Van Kiet looked up at Nicholas. “Shit. What happened?”

“Seiko happened. She put a crossbow bolt through his heart.”

Van Kiet slammed his palms down on his desk as he jumped up. “That bitch! I told Tachi not to trust her. Where is she? I want to interrogate her.”

“She’s dead, too. Karma.” His words were far colder than he felt, but Van Kiet had held no love for Seiko, and Nicholas saw no point in expressing his feelings. Grieving had always been best left as a private affair, as far as he was concerned.

“One thing about this job,” Van Kiet said, apparently not hearing him, “it’s filled with roads not taken.”

“That’s not a very oriental attitude. Don’t you believe in karma?”

“Not anymore,” Van Kiet said wearily. “I’ve been hanging out with too many Americans.” He looked at Nicholas. “But Tachi must have proved his innocence. He knew the Yakuza who claimed Vincent Tinh’s body.” Carefully monitoring the expression on Nicholas’s face, he said, “He did show you the copies of the photos I gave him.”

“He didn’t,” Nicholas said with a feeling of cold dread.

Van Kiet’s office was so cramped he would not have been able to close his door had he wanted to. Dossiers, leaflets, post-ups, wanted flyers, interoffice and interdepartmental memos, floated everywhere like polka dots in a spotlight. The place smelled of stale food and staler sweat. A meat locker would have been preferable.

He rummaged around in a pile so high it seemed to be intact through sheer willpower. With all the élan of a magician he extracted a manila folder from the center without disturbing any of the other files, folders, and circulars above and below it. He opened the folder, shoved three black-and-white surveillance shots into Nicholas’s hands.

They showed a Yakuza in his midtwenties. In one, he was seen entering a massage parlor. In the second, he was stripped to the waist. In the third, he was lying prone on a mat while a naked young woman with long hair bent over him.

“We’re not as backward here as some might believe,” Van Kiet said dryly.

Staring hard at the Yakuza’s
irizumi
—his tattoos—Nicholas said, “This man belongs to Tachi’s clan, the Yamauchi.” He pointed. “The subject matter of Yakuza tattoos are as identifiable as signatures.”

Van Kiet seemed to brighten. “But this happened last winter, before Tachi became
oyabun
of the Yamauchi.”

“True, but according to Seiko, Tachi was already in Tokyo and had gained Tomoo Kozo’s trust. By then, he was handling the Yamauchi’s interests in Southeast Asia.”

“He could have been sent by Tachi, in other words.” Van Kiet seemed very sad indeed.

Nicholas nodded. “At the very least it’s likely that Tachi knew about him,” he said as he put the photos back into their folder. This was evidence that Seiko had been telling the truth about Tachi. On the other hand, Nicholas still felt the Tau-tau pull of the Shuken. He suspected that given time, Tachi would have confessed his involvement in the scheme to kill Nicholas. Nicholas preferred to believe that their friendship would have defeated Tachi’s pragmatism. But perhaps that was just wishful thinking, and in any event, time had run out for both of them.

Nicholas looked at Van Kiet. “Are you prepared to tell me now who murdered Vincent Tinh?”

Van Kiet nodded. “Sure. What do I have to lose now? I trust you not to open your mouth about it. It was Rock. Tinh thought he could weasel his way into Floating City, become a partner. Rock made an example of him; he needed to show very clearly what happened to people whose ambition gets out of control.”

Outside, downtown Saigon sizzled with the inexpert giddiness only a massive infusion of capitalism and money could perpetrate. Music and horns blared in concert, and the sound of raised voices was, like diesel exhaust, always in the air.

“It’s the same,” Nicholas said. “Day or night, nothing’s changed.”

“No,” Van Kiet said, “it changes minute by minute. Every day there are more Japanese, Americans, Koreans, and Thai. The entrepreneurs and their representatives—factors, agents, and lawyers—flood Saigon, falling over themselves to set up shop.”

“You sound bitter.”

“Do I?” Van Kiet peered through the flyblown window glass, then turned back. “I can’t imagine why. In addition to having to struggle with encephalitis, yellow fever, and meningitis, we now have AIDS and hepatitis epidemics on our hands. Little of our own culture has survived the wars and the superpowers, and our home is again invaded by those who swear they know what’s best for us. The Party, who have led us, is dissolute, and the capitalists, who will lead us, are corrupt. There’s not much to differentiate the two these days. But I apologize if I have offended you with my tone.”

“Come on. It’s almost dinnertime. Let’s go out and get drunk.”

Van Kiet took him to My Canh, one of several floating restaurants on the Saigon River. It was an unfortunate choice; Nicholas was reminded of his boat ride with Bay, leading to the ill-fated foray into the Cu Chi tunnels.

Lights from the city were cast across the muddy water like ghostly craft, only to be split apart by the wakes of their real counterparts. As he watched, the lights winked out in one
quan,
a common enough occurrence here. But in his current mood it was a melancholy sight. For all the capital flowing into Saigon it was still a miserable little third-world backwater. Its sweaty aspirations toward becoming a low-cost free-market manufacturing hub were made wretched by its inability to master even the rudimentary services mandatory in any city.

Nicholas thought of the dead woman Bay and the battered child prostitute who had propositioned him and Tachi at the Temple of the Whales. Somehow these two symbolized all the failed hopes of the populace here, dazed by historical betrayals and abrupt shifts in ideology and economy. Saigon was itself a floating city, cut adrift from both Vietnamese tradition and Communist cant, infected by foreign infusions of greed and lust that were poisoning its already unstable infrastructure. Business would survive—even prosper—of that he had no doubt. But what about the people? How would they survive?

Van Kiet red-eyed and saturnine, said nothing before he had downed three shots of liquor. Then he spat over the side of the boat. “I’m going to spend the night on the road, look for someone to shoot, and I won’t care, seeing the poor bastard’s face in the dust, covered with blood, because I won’t be seeing him, I’ll be seeing Tachi’s back with a bolt right through it.”

Nicholas let him talk because that was what Van Kiet needed now. He was a violent man, given to wild swings of temperament, with an anger burning inside him that was expiated a little bit every time he pulled the trigger. He was barely civilized in a country that had never fully caught the concept of civilization. Vietnam was a warrior nation. Born in blood, it had feasted upon the indigenous Chams, the neighboring Cambodians and the Laotians. It was not a place where peace had been allowed to alight, let alone flourish.