Authors: Eric Van Lustbader
“Yes, I know just how powerful. Who do you think sent me?”
It was a calculated risk, but a necessary one to help him maintain his control over her.
“Christ, you can’t mean it,” Margarite said in alarm. “That would kill him.”
Do Duc shrugged as he came and sat down beside her. “Life is full of surprises—even for me.”
“No, no, no,” she said in a breathless voice, “you’re lying to me.” She shuddered. “I know Dominic’s friends. They’re utterly loyal. If you harm him, they’ll come after you. Doesn’t that worry you?”
“On the contrary. I welcome it.”
He watched the emotions flurry across her face.
“My God, who are you?” she whispered. “What sins have I committed that would bring you here?”
“Tell me, are you as innocent as your brother is guilty?”
She ignored the tears as they rolled slowly down her cheeks. “No one is wholly innocent, but I—this is like Judgement Day. No matter what I do I will have blood on my hands.”
“In the end, we’re all animals. We’ve got to get dirty sometime. This is your time.”
She pulled out another cigarette. “Become like you, you mean? No, never!”
“I wish you wouldn’t.”
Margarite put her hand around the lighter, then apparently thought better of it. She returned the unlit cigarette to the filigreed box.
“It frightens me that you know Dominic is going to call.”
“Yes, I know.”
“His friends…”
“He has no more friends.”
He dipped his fingertip into the sticky residue of the spilled brandy, brought up on it not only the sweet liquor but a tiny shard of glass. She watched as he pressed the glass until it pierced his skin and drew blood. By this gesture of machismo she reckoned that pain in one form or another was a significant component of his personality. She filed this inference away, not yet able to deduce its usefulness.
She wondered why he hadn’t assaulted her. He had had every opportunity to take advantage of an entire array of provocative situations: while she was naked in the bath, while she was dressing as he watched, anytime while they had been here in the library. Certainly, after she had recovered from the initial shock of his presence, she had given him every opportunity, knowing that he would not be thinking clearly trapped between her thighs and his blood filled with testosterone.
She had to try something to extricate herself from this nightmare. She shifted on the sofa, hiking up her skirt to the tops of her thighs. She saw his gaze shift from the blood on his fingertip to her flesh. His gaze had weight as it rested on her, and heat. She could feel her cheeks beginning to burn.
“What is it about you?” She did not recognize her own voice.
Do Duc looked at her. His fingertip traced a red crescent on the trembling flesh of her inner thigh. He stroked higher, into the spot where she was warm, even now. She felt a kind of connection, and she did what she could to draw him on, to make the heat rise in his blood.
The harsh jangle of the phone made her start. She stared at it as if it were a deadly adder. He took his hand away, and her one chance was gone.
“Answer it,” Do Duc ordered, staring into her terrified eyes.
Margarite hesitated, trembling. It didn’t have to be Dominic; it could be anyone, she told herself. Please let it be anyone but him.
She snatched up the receiver with a convulsive gesture. She swallowed, then said hopefully, “Hello?”
“Margarite,
bellissima!”
Dominic’s voice said in her ear, and she slowly closed her eyes.
Year after year
On the monkey’s face,
A monkey’s mask.
—Matsuo Basho
So early in the morning Tokyo smelled like fish. Perhaps it was the Sumida River, still home to hundreds of fishermen plying their ancient trade. Or, thought Nicholas Linnear, perhaps it was the steel-hued haze that squatted like a gluttonous guest over the sprawling metropolis.
Somewhere in the countryside far away the sun was struggling up over the mountaintops, but here in the heart of the city it was still dark. Just a hint of predawn light turned the shadows nacreous.
As Nicholas ascended the Shinjuku Suiryu Building in the nonstop chairman’s elevator, he considered the formidable array of decisions awaiting him at Sato International, the vast
keiretsu,
industrial conglomerate, he ran jointly with Tanzan Nangi.
Nangi was the canny Japanese, a former vice minister of MITI, Japan’s all-powerful Ministry of International Trade and Industry, with whom Nicholas had decided to join forces, merging his company, Tomkin Industries, with Nangi’s Sato International.
Interestingly, both men had inherited the top position in their respective conglomerates, Nangi from his best friend’s dead brother, Nicholas from his late father-in-law. For this, and many other reasons, there was a unique bond between the two men that could never be severed.
Nicholas stepped off the elevator at the fifty-second floor, walked past the deserted teak-and-chrome reception lobby, past silent offices and workstations, into his own office, which, together with Nangi’s, comprised the entire western-facing end of the floor.
He crossed to a low couch in the welled seating area alongside a huge window and sat staring out at the city. The haze, pale as green tea, was a filthy nimbus, occluding his coveted view of Mt. Fuji.
He knew that very soon he needed to return to America, not only to sit down face-to-face with Harley Gaunt, but also to lobby in person in Washington against the rising tide of animosity toward the admittedly arrogant Japanese. Gaunt had hired a man named Terrence McNaughton, a professional lobbyist, to work on their behalf, but Nicholas was beginning to believe that in these retrogressive times persuasion by proxy was not enough. Nicholas had thought of flying to Washington many times during the last several years, but always Nangi had convinced him of the need to stay here, to lobby their pro-international stance with the Japanese themselves.
Nicholas, Nangi had argued with unassailable logic, was uniquely qualified to do this since the Japanese did not view him as an
iteki,
a barbarian outsider. Nicholas’s father, the Englishman Col. Denis Linnear, held a special place in the hearts of the older generation of Japanese, for he had been seconded to Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s SCAP headquarters just after the end of World War II. It was he who had liaised so successfully with the upper-echelon officials when MacArthur had given the defeated Japanese a new democratic constitution that had survived into the present. When Colonel Linnear had died, his funeral was as widely attended and reported as that of any Japanese emperor.
Nicholas became aware of Tanzan Nangi emerging onto the floor before he actually saw him. Nangi was now well past middle age. His face was striking, but not in any normal way. His right eye was an unseeing milky-white orb set behind a damaged lid forever frozen half-shut. Otherwise his face might have been that of a topflight diplomat who knew the exigencies of his world and how to maneuver among them.
Nangi tapped on the half-open door to Nicholas’s suite with the end of his walking stick that was capped by a carving of a dragon. Depending on the time of day, his state of health, and the weather, he moved more or less stiffly on legs that had been damaged during the war in the Pacific.
The two men greeted each other with warmth and the minimum of formality. It would have been far different had anyone else been in the room with them.
They savored their green
macha
tea in the silence of close companionship, then commenced their morning business—the strategic planning for Sato, which they liked to have set before the rest of the staff arrived.
“The news is very bad,” Nangi began. “I have been unable to come up with the capital you feel we so desperately need to expand into Vietnam.”
Nicholas sighed. “Ironic since business is so good. Look at the last quarter’s figures. Demand for the Sphynx T-PRAM is far exceeding our current production capabilities.” The T-PRAM was Sato International’s proprietary computer chip—the first and only programmable random-access memory chip on the market. “That’s why we need to expand into Vietnam as quickly as possible. Ramping up new manufacturing facilities that meet our standards and which also hold down production costs is an exhausting marathon.”
Nangi sipped his tea. “Unfortunately, Sphynx is only one
kobun
in the
keiretsu’s
vast network of businesses. Not all of them are doing so well.”
Kobun
was a divisional company within the
keiretsu,
the conglomerate.
Nicholas understood the reference. Unlike Tomkin Industries before the merger, Sato International had always had ready access to capital until now, when the ground rules in Japan had suddenly changed. The most radical difference between American and Japanese corporations had in recent years turned from being a valuable asset to a dangerous liability. All major
keiretsu
in Japan were either owned by or folded into a commercial bank. In Sato’s case, it was the Daimyo Development Bank. This cozy relationship within the
keiretsu
allowed it to borrow money for expansion or research and development at low rates and with exceedingly generous terms.
Now, however, Japan was in the grip of an economic crunch of a size and gravity unknown since the horrors of the immediate postwar period. It had begun in 1988 with the government’s misguided efforts to prop up an economy already suffering the first effects of a far too strong yen by artificially creating a land boom. Investing within their own country, these ministers reasoned, would mitigate, at least to some extent, the value of the yen. And the theory worked—up to a point. Then values began to stretch the bounds of reality. And still Japanese businessmen—cash rich and arrogant in their seemingly unflagging success—poured money into real estate. Inevitably, the bubble burst. Overleveraged on property they could no longer unload even at steep discounts, many businessmen went under, losing vast fortunes virtually overnight.
The carnage grew, widening like ripples in a pond. Money-center banks that had blithely extended credit for what had appeared to be gilt-edged real estate were left with foreclosed properties that could not resupply them with sufficient capital. They were forced to draw down assets to pay the huge loan losses, and within the space of a year their balance sheets were stained with the red that is the only blood a banker recognizes.
Daimyo Development Bank was no exception. Though hit less hard than some that were now out of business, the bank was weathering an exceptionally rocky period, and its losses had recently become a significant drag on Sato International’s bottom line. As recently as six months ago Nangi had had to replace Daimyo’s chairman, and still the mess was far from being under control. It was a source of particular humiliation to him since he had once been the bank’s director.
The new watchword in Japan was
risutora,
something heretofore unheard of: industrial contraction. Japan Inc. was coming to grips with restructuring, a painful reduction in factories, consumer goods, and Japan’s most precious resource, superbly trained and loyal personnel. In a country where the expansionist
bigger and better
had been the key economic phrase for over four decades,
risutora
was a bitter reverse course, indeed. Thankfully, Nangi and Nicholas had never allowed their
keiretsu
to become bloated and inefficient. And Nicholas’s role within the conglomerate was increasing exponentially, since he had more experience with significant economic downturns than any Japanese. Still, the crunch in their operating capital was real enough.
“Still, one way or another, we’ve got to come up with the capital,” Nicholas urged. “If we don’t get involved there in a major way—and quickly—we’re going to find ourselves run over by all the other major
keiretsu.”
“I need to give the situation some more time,” Nangi cautioned, not for the first time. “Vietnam is still newly opened, and I don’t fully trust the government.”
“What you mean is you don’t trust the Vietnamese at all.”
Nangi swirled the dregs of his tea around in his cup. He disliked this tension between them. Ever since Nicholas had first gone to Saigon several years ago to recruit this man Vincent Tinh as their director in Vietnam, Nangi had been worried. Tinh was a Vietnamese and Nangi supposed Nicholas was right, he did not trust them. So much money already committed to this strange, newly capitalist Vietnam, and Nicholas had been pushing him to commit so much more. What if the Communists returned and nationalized all private business? He and Nicholas would lose everything.
“These people are opaque to me,” Nangi said, raising his eyes from the shifting runes of the tea leaves.
“They’re just different.”
Nangi shook his head. “The Hong Kong Chinese are different and I deal with them all the time. They’re devious, but I must admit I enjoy their intrigues. I have no feel for the Vietnamese.”
“Which is why I’m handling them,” Nicholas said. “But just look at the bottom line. Profits from the small amount of goods we now manufacture out of Saigon under Vinnie’s direction are astronomical. Think what these lower manufacturing costs would do for the
kobun
whose profits are currently in a downward spiral.”
Of course, Nicholas was right, Nangi thought. He most often was in these matters. Too, he could not minimize Nicholas’s success in predicting trends in business.
He nodded. “All right. I’ll do what I can to squeeze the capital we need out of some rock somewhere.”
“Excellent,” Nicholas said, pouring them both more tea. “You won’t regret your decision.”
“I hope not. I am going to have to call on some of my Yakuza contacts.”
“If only you knew the Kaisho,” Nicholas said with no little sarcasm.
“I know you have no respect for the Yakuza. But then again you’ve never made any effort to understand them. I find that particularly curious considering the pains you’ve taken in assimilating virtually every other aspect of Japanese life.”