The Kaisho (67 page)

“I did not know whose house this was, Kisoko. You know my way. My own name is too well known for me to obtain the truth in certain situations.”

Kisoko regarded him for some time. Nangi heard the stertorous ticking of an ormolu clock, the creak of timbers above their heads. But no sound from outside penetrated the library’s walls. It was as if the world did not exist. Only in here, between the two of them, did life go on.

“And what truth did you expect to find under the guise of Seizo Abe?”

Ever since he had recognized Kisoko, Nangi was wondering what to make of Seiko coming to the house of Mikio Okami’s sister. Perhaps he had been wrong to suspect Seiko; perhaps her involvement with Vietnamese of dubious repute was incidental to Vincent Tinh’s treachery and subsequent murder. In any case, with their shared history he did not—could not—suspect Kisoko of duplicity.

“I came here this morning wondering about an employee of mine, Seiko Ito,” he said at length. “I am ashamed to say I followed her here last night. She is troubled and, perhaps, in trouble. I wanted only to help her if I was able.”

“Without letting her know.”

“She would not, I fear, react well if she did.”

“I see.” Kisoko’s finger tapped Seizo Abe’s business card as if it possessed real weight and history. Nangi could see that she was turning over something difficult in her mind.

“Kisoko, I want to reassure you that my concern for Seiko is quite genuine.”

Kisoko nodded.

“She has become an increasingly important member of my staff. Now there is an opportunity for her to be sent to Saigon to take charge of my affairs there. You can see why I must be absolutely certain I can count on her.”

Kisoko laughed. “But this is wonderful news, Nangi-san, and from my point of view the best thing for her.” She sighed. “Such a sad creature. But so talented! She comes here because she believes she is helping me, which she is. But I am also helping her. She has a good heart, Nangi-san, but I fear that often her heart has betrayed her.”

“So you have taken her under your wing?”

A telephone rang somewhere in the house. Kisoko made no move to answer it. In a moment, it had ceased to ring.

“Oh, nothing quite so formal. Seiko would never tolerate that.” Kisoko shrugged. “I suppose she has become used to being alone, to keeping her life shielded from others.” She smiled wanly. “In that she is not so different from the rest of us,
neh,
Nangi-san?” She shook her head. “The best I can do is to provide her with an arrangement. She gives me investment strategies and I provide her with whatever emotional base she can tolerate.” Kisoko gave him a small, deprecating smile. “She has no family, you see. No one to turn to but me.” She shrugged. “The trade-off, I believe is a fair and useful one.” She cocked her head. “Have I eased your mind?”

Nangi nodded. “The truth is nothing like I imagined. Frankly, I’m relieved.”

“Good. I believe Seiko will thrive beneath the responsibility. Saigon will be good for her.”

“Then it’s done.”

The doors to the library opened. Nangi, turning, saw a wide-shouldered man sitting in a wheelchair. His heavily muscled chest, arms, and shoulders were clad in a form-fitting polo shirt. He regarded Nangi with soft brown eyes. There was something unspoken, perhaps a sadness that predisposed his long, handsome face toward a brooding introspection.

“The phone call is for you,” he said to Kisoko in a deep, well-modulated voice.

Kisoko said, “Tanzan Nangi, meet my son, Ken.”

Ken, studying Nangi’s cane as if it were a written sentence to be parsed, abruptly inclined his head.

“Son?” Nangi cocked his head. “I never knew you had a child.”

Kisoko smiled and he imagined he could hear the ice melting in the kitchen freezer. “Ken was not with me when we... knew each other. He was away at school. I saw no reason to speak of him.”

She was right, of course. His affair had been with her, not with her family.

She rose with a rustle of silk, brushed his hand with hers. “I must take this call. I won’t be long.”

Nangi and Ken were left watching each other warily like sumo wrestlers before a match. Nangi dutifully kept his gaze away from Ken’s nerveless legs, tried to keep the pity he felt off his face.

“It’s been a long time since your mother and I saw each other.”

“I know.”

Nangi made a show of looking around. “This is a beautiful house.”

“Mother inherited it.”

Ken said this with a clipped anger that took Nangi aback. “She was lucky, then,” he said.

“Do you think so?”

Nangi, concerned by the distance between them, limped across the carpet to where Ken sat, still as ice. “Well, I just meant...”

Something seemed to happen to Ken’s face. He peered at Nangi curiously, as if Nangi had just changed color or sex. Watching Nangi lean on his cane, he said, “Mother never told me. Does it hurt much?”

Nangi did not need more than that cue. “Sometimes. At others, it’s quite bearable.”

Ken seemed to think this over for quite some time. “You know, I used to dream about you. Yes, it’s true. I always imagined I hated you, yet, curiously, now that I’ve met you I seem to be unable to summon up that hatred.”

“I appreciate that. I may have hurt your mother but I never stopped loving her.”

“Perhaps that’s so. You were the second man she was crazy about who hurt her. Maybe neither of you meant to.” He shrugged, his muscles rippling. “Karma,
neh,
Nangi-san? My mother engendered certain responses in men. They could no more help it than she could.” He closed his eyes. “She’s still so beautiful.” They snapped open. “I’d like to show you something.”

Nangi nodded and they went out of the library, past a set of back stairs. Ken opened a narrow modern door, seemingly out of place in this house. They went into a small elevator car, and Ken pushed a button marked
3.

The elevator came to rest and Ken opened the door, led him down a carpeted hallway wallpapered in a pattern of cabbage peonies, large as human heads, joined by arabesques of thorned vines. The hall held the smell of steel and oil.

Ken opened the door, wheeled himself through. Nangi, following, found himself in a dojo, a martial arts gym. It was a windowless room, the light spilling down from a skylight in the center of the high ceiling. Arrayed around the four walls, from the tatami floor to perhaps hip height in an average man, was the most astonishing collection of steel-bladed weapons Nangi had ever seen. From the oversize
dai-katana,
the traditional weapon of the samurai, to a series of normal-sized swords,
katana, wakizashi,
the long knives used, among other things, to commit seppuku, ritual suicide; antique iron war fans with tessellated edges honed to razor sharpness;
manrikigusari,
spike-and-chain weapons; all manner of
shuriken,
small, pointed projectiles most often used by ninja.

Ken sat at the edge of the tatami. “I think you’ll appreciate one of those. It’s from the early sixteen hundreds.”

Nangi, knowing that the wheelchair could not be rolled over the tatami, considered telling Ken he wasn’t interested. But he suspected that Ken would take that as a terrible loss of face.

Ken twisted his torso without, somehow, moving his legs. Nangi watched with a combination of fascination and horror as Ken dragged himself off the wheelchair, arranged his inert legs on the tatami. He began to crawl in a curious way, using his powerful shoulders and arms. Nangi limped after him on stockinged feet.

Ken reached the wall where a succession of
katana
hung in scabbards of lacquered leather, hand-tooled with silver. Those deep brown eyes began a contemplation of his collection. Then he took one down, slowly, lovingly drew the blade out into the light. The steel, so finely honed that the very edge seemed invisible, rippled as Ken moved it, seeming not a solid object at all but a river of light, ardent with intent, as if it were a Zen koan.

“It’s curious,” he said. “When I was whole, I never thought twice about weapons. It was only afterward that they came to mean something to me.”

Reverentially, he replaced it in the scabbard, handed the whole to Nangi, who examined it as closely as a museum curator.

Ken, clearly pleased by this scrutiny, said, “Somehow, I knew you would appreciate the swordmaster’s art.”

“They were part artist, part Zen philosopher, those ancient masters.” Nangi’s eye followed the flow of light over the blade, like mist upon a frozen lake. He lifted the point, and the light rushed down toward the hilt. “The
katana
is the representation of the artist and the picture, the higher self and the lower self, love and will as distinct from habit and memory.” He cut the air with the blade as if slicing through a body. “The Way to modify the past with the physical will of the present.”

Ken’s smile, tender and beatific, made him seem like a little boy, rather than the man in his forties he must be. He seemed content at last.

“Time seems to stand still here in this house,” he said as he took the
katana
back from Nangi in a motion that was close to a formal rite. But grasping the precious
katana,
he frowned, as if remembering a recent bad dream.

“Nangi-san,” he said, lifting his head, “you came here because of Seiko Ito.”

“Yes, I did.”

Ken nodded. “I am concerned about her. She is a willful woman with, I believe, a self-destructive bent.”

Nangi, looking from the
katana
to Ken’s handsome face, said, “What makes you say that?”

“You know she holds herself responsible for her brother’s death.”

“I had no idea.”

“It’s a terrible secret she must bear. He was retarded and he lived with her. She left him unattended in the bath while she made love with her boyfriend, who had just returned from a three-month trip to Vietnam. Her brother slipped under the water and drowned.”

Nangi felt unaccountably hot, as if Seiko’s shame had somehow become his.

“That was six years ago,” Ken said, “and I don’t believe she’s been the same since.”

“How do you think she’s changed?”

Ken shrugged. “So many ways. For one thing, she began to hang out with dangerous people.”

“How do you mean dangerous?”

“People no good for her. People who would do anything, commit any crime in order to make money.”

Nangi stood very still, listening to the blood sing in his veins. “Is this true now?”

Ken nodded sadly. “I wonder whether I am betraying her by telling you this.”

“Perhaps you’re saving her. Can you give me any names?”

Ken’s dark brown eyes gazed up into Nangi’s face. “There is one man she has mentioned. Masamoto something...”

“Masamoto Goei?” Nangi asked, his heart almost coming to a full stop.

Ken snapped his fingers. “Yes. That’s the name. Do you know him?”

Goei was the team director of the Chi Project who had contacted him concerning the neural-net clone. As a theoretical language technician, he should have been able to completely analyze the clone by now. And yet Nangi was still awaiting his final report. Now there seemed a good reason for Goei’s procrastination.

Nangi’s eyes ached. He felt a pounding headache coming on. With considerable effort, he pulled himself together. “Tell me, Ken, does your mother know anything about Seiko’s... associates?”

Ken gave an ironic smile. “You know Mother. She absorbs everything she wants to absorb. As for the rest”—he shrugged—“it doesn’t exist.”

Nangi nodded. Yes, that described Kisoko up to a point. “I think I’d better be getting back. I expect she’ll be wondering where I got to.” He looked down at Ken, pitying him despite his resolution to keep that suspect emotion well buried. “Thank you for the information. I’ll do what I can to help Seiko.”

Ken nodded wordlessly. He was staring at the
katana
laid across his thighs. Perhaps he had already forgotten that Nangi was still there.

Nangi left him there, dreaming amid his useless weapons.

Back in the library, Kisoko was waiting for him as dutifully as a wife. “Ken respects you. He rarely lets anyone see the dojo. It’s his private space. Even I scarcely go there.”

“I’m sorry about him.”

“Oh.” She turned briefly away from him, fiddled with the teacups, now cold. “He’s adjusted well to his disability. You of all people can appreciate his courage.”

“Yes.” He waited some time, but she seemed incapable of continuing. He felt abruptly sorry for her, taking in a stray like Seiko, wanting her to be something she obviously was not. Needing, perhaps, a child who was physically whole, even one who was emotionally damaged. There is always in the human heart the hope for transformation.

Kisoko stood very close to him and whispered, “I have missed you. My heart wishes...” She looked away for a moment. “Ah, but I must not humiliate myself again. Once was enough suffering.”

“Kisoko—”

She lifted an arm as if to ward him off, but when his fingers gripped her shoulder, he immediately felt her weight against him, the consequence of his rejection of her. She had wanted marriage, something he could not give her. She longed for marriage with all her heart, but he could not imagine it, with her or with anyone else. He was one of those rare men who preferred the hardy silence and utter calm of a solitary existence. His life was complicated enough, he felt, without permanently adding a female to the equation.

But it was times like this when he profoundly regretted the path he had chosen for himself.

“If I hurt you,” he said, “then surely I hurt myself as well.”

She was weeping, slow, silent tears running from the corners of her eyes.

“Why should I cry,” she whispered, “for you?” She shook her head almost immediately. “No, not for you, or for me, either. But for love. Only love.”

She had had a great hurt sometime in her youth, that much he knew from fragments of their talks after making love, intimations gleaned from her reactions to him and to certain intimate situations. That it had forever left its wound deep inside her he had no doubt.