The Kaisho (19 page)

McNaughton stretched out his legs. Thus relaxed and comfortable, he eased the tension in his guest. “Because Linnear’s company is involved in a number of sensitive advanced computer projects, the senator’s anxiety level has reached the boiling point. He wants Linnear brought up on charges, he wants the merger terminated forthwith.”

“What kind of charges could he possibly hit Nick with?” Gaunt asked, alarmed. “Nick has done nothing illegal.”

“Sure that statement can hold water? Can you swear that you know everything that goes on at Tomkin-Sato?”

“No, but I—I know Nick. He wouldn’t—”

“Not good enough, son. I’ve heard rumors. Something to the effect that Tomkin-Sato has been using the technology they got from Hyrotech-inc. to make their own form of the classified Hive computer and are now selling it overseas to the highest bidder. Hive is the property of the U.S. government. Improper use of it would be a treasonable offense.”

Gaunt looked bleakly at the older man. “C’mon, this is bullshit, Terry.”

“Davis Munch doesn’t think so. He’s the Pentagon investigator attached to Rance’s committee.”

“Pure raving paranoia.”

“Depends on what Munch and his ferrets have uncovered—”

“There’s nothing sinister to uncover.”

“Eye of the beholder,” McNaughton said. “It’s how they go about making what they’ve found sound sinister.”

“Hey, this is America, Terry. People don’t get railroaded like this. I mean, not on this scale—in the glare of the national spotlight.”

McNaughton leveled a jaundiced look at him. “That’s a mighty dubious statement, son, especially coming from you. But even if it passed scrutiny, we haven’t had a mind like Rance Bane’s in the driver’s seat since—oh, well, I suppose McCarthy will do as the most odious example.”

Gaunt’s anxiety level was escalating dangerously. “So what are you saying, bottom line?”

McNaughton sat forward, punched a button on an ivory plastic console. “Marcy, we’ll have that coffee now.”

He sat for a moment, silent, tapping his fingertips together in an unknown rhythm. In a moment, the door opened and his long-legged assistant brought in coffee and Danish on an exquisite chased-silver service.

“Much obliged, Marcy,” McNaughton said as she set it on the coffee table. She asked if there was anything else, and when he said no, she left.

He stared fondly at the coffee service. “Memento of bygone days. Thatcher gave it to me after I—” He gave a sly smile. “But, no, even now I can’t talk about that.”

He made himself busy pouring the coffee. He added cream and one teaspoon of Demerara sugar to Gaunt’s—he never forgot anything. He took his own black.

“Danish?” he asked as he handed Gaunt his cup. “Those prune ones are particularly good.”

Gaunt shook his head. At this moment, he doubted if he could hold anything in his stomach. He sipped his coffee, watched McNaughton select a pastry, bite into it with perfect white teeth.

It was only after the Danish had been eaten and he had poured himself a second cup of coffee that McNaughton answered the question. “Bottom line, we got a terminal problem. See, it’s gone beyond a question of image. That’s my meat, and I could turn something like that around on a dime. But this is no go; believe me, I’ve tried. Rance’s got his hooks into Tomkin, and he’s not about to let go until he’s shaken it apart.”

“We’ve got to stop him.”

McNaughton stared at Gaunt and said, “You’re a scion of this city, son. Think about what you’ve just said.”

“But—”

McNaughton was shaking his head. “No buts on this one, Harley. I’ve got power, so have my friends, but Bane is beyond us. Christ, he’s beyond even the president’s control. He’s a man who scares this town shitless because he’s got the kind of ground-roots evangelical support that even the most entrenched politician isn’t going to fool with. Right now he’s a juggernaut under full steam, and them that’s in his way better step aside ’less they want to get crushed.”

In the silence that prevailed, Gaunt could hear Marcy or someone like her working her word processor. A phone rang, was answered. A door slammed.

At last, Gaunt could procrastinate no longer. “Terry, because this is so important, I want you to spell it out for me, chapter and verse.”

McNaughton nodded, drew his legs up under him so that his bootheels scraped across the floor. “Okay, here’s the way it is, son. You—that is to say Tomkin Industries—pay me a fair bit of change to do my best lobbying on your behalf, and that, I assure you, I’ve done.

“But now, the advice I’m going to dispense is personal. We go back a long way, you and I. I came to your college graduation when your father couldn’t, up on the Hill fighting for a bill he had sponsored. I have only fond memories of him—and I think I’ve been a good friend to you.”

He leaned forward. “As I see it, you have only two options. One is to go before the Committee and answer all of Bane’s blistering questions with the foreknowledge that you are going to go down with the ship. Because make no mistake, as sure as we’re sitting here now, Tomkin-Sato is doomed.”

Gaunt’s throat was dry, and he took the last of his cold coffee, almost choking on some dregs.

“What’s the other option?” But he already knew.

“The other option is in my opinion the one you should take,” McNaughton said in measured tones. His eyes were fever bright and it seemed as if his mouth had lost its ability to smile. “Bail out. Resign. Get clear of harm’s way. Let the juggernaut have its day. Let it destroy what it will: Tomkin Industries and Nicholas Linnear.”

Margarite Goldoni’s eyes flew open and her heart pounded painfully in her breast. Her clawed fingers filled with fistfuls of satin sheet. There it was again, she thought wildly, that awful sensation of falling.

She lay in her bed beside her softly snoring husband, her knuckles white with gripping, panting a little as she stared blindly up at the ceiling. Always it came as she emerged from sleep, slipping from her unconscious like some bitch in heat.

That curious sensation of falling.

Not down a flight of stairs or off the edge of a swimming pool, but into a kind of nothingness—a void filled only with her own terror.

And then she would come fully awake—as now—filmed with a cold sweat, filled with the certain knowledge that something precious had been irrevocably taken from her.

At first, the nightmares had been flicker flashes of her unreal journey across America in search of her brother’s death, heated, insensate emotions coloring the images like spray paint madly spattered across a series of rooms. Then, she would dream of Dominic or, more accurately, his elaborate funeral, flowers everywhere, limousines parked fender to bumper, feds videotaping everyone who crossed the street to the cemetery. And everywhere as she stood beside the gleaming mahogany and cherrywood coffin, open mouths, keening silently, turned in her direction until she could no longer bear the noise and she was forced to look down into the open grave, where Dominic lay, mutilated and headless, beginning to rise up, broken skeletal fingers scrabbling at the loamy dirt, on his way up to where she stood, rooted to the spot with a terror that threatened to fill her lungs, her throat, her open mouth.

And waking from these nightmares, covered in sweat and shivering, she would tell herself, yes, of course, she felt a profound sense of loss, she had lost her brother, had been a party to that loss.

But eventually, in the clear light of day, at a meeting at the office, or later with evening shadows spreading into the kitchen, as she fed Francie dinner, would come the knowledge from deep down in her unconscious that this loss transcended grief and guilt. It was something far more personal.

Margarite lay, tense and white, listening to the rasp of her respiration, turning over this sense of loss as if it were a three-dimensional object. It put her in mind of the summer she was eleven. Her father and stepmother had taken her to see her grandmother—her father’s mother—who, as it turned out, was dying.

The old lady was as crooked as a Venetian walking stick, bent as if she carried each year of her life on her shoulders. Her hair was white and pulled back tightly in a neat bun, and forever afterward Margarite was to remember her plain black dress, which she wore in the hot sun without so much as a drop of sweat appearing on her brow.

She had trouble hearing, and she had few of her teeth remaining. Sometime before, she had had her larynx removed, and her voice emanated from a small box, more of a vibration than true speech so that Margarite had to bend close to understand her.

Her grandmother had fed the family, and afterward, she gave Margarite’s hand a secret squeeze. She had led her granddaughter into her bedroom, which was filled with sepia-toned photos of herself as a child, her parents, her confirmation, and her wedding in Venice. Margarite saw photos of her father and his sister, who had died of cholera when she was a child.

Margarite’s grandmother narrated each photo, then went to the top drawer of her old walnut dresser. She took out something, which she pressed into Margarite’s fist just before they left, murmuring in her ear as she kissed her, “This is for you. It belonged to the forebear of my great-grandmother. She had it with her when she arrived in Venice centuries ago. She was a refugee and this was all that was left of her family, who had died in a great war that lasted twenty years.”

On the way home, Margarite had opened her sweaty hand to see revealed there a carving in amber of the most beautiful woman she had ever seen. She had never told anyone of that gift, and when months later she stood at her grandmother’s graveside, she clutched the carving in her hand to ward off the sensation that something irretrievable had been taken away from her.

Now as she lay panting in her bed she was swept anew by a similar feeling. The death of her brother had been a blow to her, but her part in it, extorted though it may have been, continued to torment her.

She had been forced by the man she knew only as Robert to effectively choose between her daughter and her brother. It was a hellish decision, one in which she had known she could not emerge unscarred. But what choice did she have save to bring him to Dominic Goidoni? Fran-cine had to be safeguarded at all costs, and oddly, she had believed Robert when he had promised her that if she played her part well, he would not harm her daughter. He had been true to his word, disappearing as if from the face of the earth after he had left her—and Francie—in the sleazy motel room off Highway 95, just outside Marine on St. Croix, Minnesota.

Again, she asked herself now if he had somehow enchanted her. With a mounting sense of horror, she recalled all too clearly her desire, could feel now, though he must be very far away, the weight of him, his heat like an intensely erotic charge. The scent of him, rising.

No, I cannot think the unthinkable.

Involuntarily, she put her hands on her sex, felt the wetness there, and knew what sin lay like a stone in her soul. With an effort she wrenched her mind away, trying to concentrate solely on Dominic.
But what was it about Robert? What had he taken from her; and what had he given her in return?
Dominic: the one man in her life who had believed in her, who had seen beyond her femaleness to the mind that she possessed, had used her in secret and seclusion like a nun behind the ivied walls of her cloister.

These men are all like children,
she thought,
playing at being pope. Do they know they’re living in the real world?
Beside her, Tony DeCamillo slept heavily, little grunting snores escaping from him in spurts. She felt as detached from him as if he were in London. She had never known how much she despised him until Dominic had hit upon his complex and audacious plan to use Tony as his successor. The idea of being a Family capo had immediately gone to Tony’s head. Was it so surprising? He had an aptitude for influence—the Hollywood mentality, a legacy from his show business clients. Power was the only commodity worth a damn in the film business, and Tony had had plenty of experience amassing it for himself. When Dominic had opened the door to a whole new world, Tony had been only too delighted to step in.

Except that he had no concept of what that world actually entailed—only she and Dominic knew. Dominic had told him that she would be the conduit between the two, Tony’s involvement with Dominic—even social—had to be kept to a minimum because of the nature of Tony’s law practice.

Then Dom was murdered. Margarite remembered the moment when she was forced to tell Tony how it was going to be from now on, that his power and influence were only an illusion. It would have been all too possible, she realized in retrospect, to have predicted how he would react. That Sicilian thing came to the fore, his rage had been towering, and he had struck her so often that she had ceased to feel his blows save as a form of numbing pressure that pinned her to the wall of their bedroom. She bit her lip. How much of that had Francie heard? Did it matter? All or half, it would have the same effect on the girl, an effect Margarite seemed incapable of reversing.

Why did Dominic make me his sole confidant?
she asked herself. Her intense pride in their special and secretive relationship all too often warred with the crushing responsibility that was his legacy. She felt a brief moment of despair, an emotion with which the old Margarite was all too familiar.

Then Robert rose in her mind like the breath of the sea.

Lying now in her bed, listening to the night and to the film playing in her mind, Margarite knew that she had crossed some kind of Rubicon. Somehow everything was different when she had returned home; now she heard Robert’s voice whispering in her mind:
And what else have I given you, Margarite? Now you know you have the strength of purpose… to do
anything.

Like it or not, he is the source of these profound changes,
Margarite thought.
I know he took something from me and I hate him for that, but, oh, God, what is this thing he has left me in return?

Suddenly, as if he were a genie uncorked from a bottle, her mind was filled with him. And through the water of her unconscious she saw the stone, her sin lying at the bottom of her soul.