The Kaisho (71 page)

Akshara—everything Kansatsu had taught him—was useless. The man with his face made the two strides across the cage, hauled him to his feet.

And then, in an instant’s flash of insight, he understood. He let go of the basic litany, abandoned all the lessons of Akshara he had so assiduously learned and, instead, listened only to the tolling of the inner bell.

Unpinned, bathed in the radiance emanating from his
tanjian
eye, he broke the hold on him. He struck with a quick
atemi
that the Messulethe easily swept aside. Nicholas, abandoning aikido, dropped to the level-horse stance, smashing the outside of his forearm into the Messulethe’s right hip. The Messulethe struck out in an appallingly swift kite, striking Nicholas a glancing blow on his shoulder, struck out again.

This time Nicholas had lowered himself far enough so that one knee was on the ground. Very fast now, he intercepted the blow with the callused edge of his left hand and, rising up, swept the Messulethe’s extended arm out and away in an unnatural arc intended to break bones.

The Messulethe moved with astonishing speed, twisting his torso into the attack so as to negate the unnatural position of his arm. At the same time, he delivered a vicious kite meant for Nicholas’s kidneys.

Nicholas, in the right-angle horse position, directed a snap-kick to the Messulethe’s groin. Both blows struck almost simultaneously, and both men went down. But Nicholas rolled and, angling his knuckles down, struck the Messulethe, delivered a short
twan ch’uan
to the Messulethe’s forehead.

His own head snapped back, but he was already caught in the viselike grip of the Messulethe’s powerful legs. Kneed in the stomach, he tried to twist away and caught another kite on the jaw.

He slumped back, and the Messulethe, on one knee, stamped at his armpit, extending his arm out, twisting it. Nicholas felt the tendons being strained beyond tolerance, and his left hand scrabbled under his body. His fingers closed around a broken chair leg and he smashed it into the side of the Messulethe’s head just above his ear.

The Messulethe staggered, his grip on Nicholas broken, and Nicholas was up, kicking him a glancing blow. He fell on him, knowing he had only moments in which to kill him before the Messulethe’s superior psyche reasserted itself. He used the heel of his hand, in an
atemi
meant to splinter the nose cartilage, send it directly into the brain. It was invariably a lethal blow, and the mind had to be absolutely centered, the organism in mortal danger, the resolve wholly unimpaired because once committed there was no turning back, death was the only possible result.

Nicholas was certain he had that resolve in him, the conviction that this soul must be dispatched, that there was no other option available, that without this singular attack his risk was intolerable.

But the blow never landed. The heel of his hand stopped perhaps a centimeter from its objective, hanging in the air. Then the muscles of his wrist and forearm began to spasm if he had plunged them into a bed of live coals.

Nicholas, deep in mind-no mind, continued to resist the Messulethe with his upper body, even while his left leg kicked out, mindless, as if in galvanic response. The toe of Nicholas’s shoe caught his enemy on the point of his hip, where the flexor muscles covered an important nerve nexus for the lower body.

The Messulethe fell and, as his concentration shifted, the numbing force of his psyche lifted. Nicholas slammed the edge of his hand into the spot between and just above the Messulethe’s eyes, a crucial point in the line of the major conception meridian. The Messulethe’s eyes crossed, and Nicholas could feel the almost total withdrawal of his psyche as he hovered at the point of unconsciousness. Still, Nicholas felt the squirming of his enemy’s powerful mind, trying to break through the temporary paralysis, and he knew he had only moments in which to act.

He threw himself headlong across the enervated form, ripped the key from the Messulethe’s belt, and leaping at the doorway, unlocked it.

A fusillade of needles scourged his mind as the Messulethe, recovering with appalling rapidity, lashed out with his psyche, trying to keep Nicholas from leaving the cage. Nicholas stumbled, fell to one knee, almost in Celeste’s lap. She wrapped her arm around his waist, and together they loped awkwardly away from the cage. Celeste looked back, terrified, but the Messulethe was still lying on the ground. Had Nicholas killed him? She hurried them on.

Once, Nicholas fell heavily, bringing them both down, and Celeste cried out, blood on her palms as she skidded, feeling the creeping along her nerves of not only what had been done to him, but what was coming after them, the heat through the vivid electric discharges, billowing along the reinforced concrete floor, a low mist with form and substance, the lethal rhythms of the Messulethe reaching out for them.

But, with a heavy grunt, she hauled him to his feet, propelled him on, and kept him at it, with that
thing
so near her mind she could feel it singe her like a bright leap of flame. The terror was running through her, but she kept him at it, put across the ferroconcrete beehive of the robotics factory with its spinning blue lightning arcs, its scents of hot metal and fused plastics, the presence in her mind growing stronger, seeking to fill her limbs with lead as they stumbled past lines of stainless-steel heads being fitted onto blocky inhuman shoulders. Infrared-lensed eyes stared unblinking as the running shadows struck them and were gone. Kept him going in this cold crucible where machines created more machines, where the miracle of creation in a manner inconceivable even decades ago was occurring every minute of the day and night.

Down!
The voice in her head confused her.
Get down!

And Nicholas struck her a swift blow behind her knees so that she went down in an instant. She was aware of him, of his body spread over hers, and of a great heat like a concentrated beam running along the backs of her legs where they were exposed.

A crack like a bolt of thunder and she whimpered, the percussion shaking the floor, and then Nicholas was dragging her to her feet and as she was pulled past a section of wall, she stared wide-eyed at the ovoid indentation in it, as if it had been struck by a gigantic fist.

He hauled her around the end of the wall, and the light dimmed. They were in a corridor, and up ahead, she could see a set of stainless-steel doors, which he hit full tilt, using his shoulder and his momentum to slam them open.

They found themselves in a wide service entrance, and they ran as best they could up the long ramp, through another set of metal doors, onto a loading platform, deserted save for a heavy-duty truck.

Nicholas jerked open the door, slid behind the wheel. He looked under the floor mat, above the sun visor for keys. Not finding them, he used a screwdriver he found on the floor to pry open the steering column.

Watching him hot-wire the truck, Celeste felt her stomach rebelling. It was eerie seeing the face of the Messulethe, knowing because she was linked with it that Nicholas’s mind lay beneath it. Still, she had thought she would pass out the first time she saw his eyes staring at her from out of that face she had learned to fear above all others.

“Nicholas!”

She shook him and he groaned, his forehead coming up off the steering wheel, his fingers resuming their work on the wiring.

Celeste looked up, shivering. At the edge of her mind was that awful sensation, as if some beast were snuffling obscenely through her innermost thoughts. She felt the onset of the heat, rushing up the ramp at them, and she screamed wordlessly, her terror an anodyne for her nausea.

The engine barked to life and Nicholas slumped back in the seat, near exhaustion.

“Celeste, you’ll have to drive.”

“But I’ve never—”

“Get behind the wheel!”

He slid over, displacing her, and she settled herself, her feet feeling for the pedals.

Celeste gunned the engine just as the metal doors blew open with such force that one of them was ripped free of its hinges. She pressed herself back into the seat as she banged the gears into reverse and, with a squeal of tires, launched the truck out of the loading bay, swinging it around, a whoosh behind them that Celeste, rigid in her seat, refused to look at.

Then she slammed the truck into first, gunned the engine, hitting second a little early, the gears grinding in protest, then kicking in as the speed came up, and they were on the road.

“Wrong side!” Nicholas shouted. “Get over to the left!”

An air horn sounded so close Celeste jumped as they veered crazily away from a semi coming in the opposite direction, Celeste cutting it way too close, the wail of metal scraping against metal, paint strips whipping by, and the rumble, heavy as an earthquake, as the sides of the two trucks hit once, twice.

And then they were past, Nicholas slumped beside her, the truck roaring like a wounded animal as they accelerated away from the killing ground.

The shapes, humped and bestial, like the leviathan and the devil, moved in grainy silhouette until they moved sufficiently into the one light, an unshaded photographer’s lamp that threw off light with the violence of heat.

Nangi sucked in his breath as the true nature of what the two men were doing to one another became apparent. Nangi, part of a culture where the traditional Western taboo against homosexuality was nonexistent, was nevertheless shocked. Not by seeing the men naked together, but by what they were perpetrating on one another.

So this was William Justice Lillehammer, the older, taller one. The young blond, energetic, intense as a Method actor, with the astonishingly supple body, seemed born for this kind of reckless abandonment.

Nangi leaned forward and, directing the remote at the VCR, rewound the images to a certain sequence. He had already watched the 8mm tape Manny Mannheim had brought from the late Harley Gaunt through several times, and now he was taking notes.

The phone rang.

“Moshi.”

“Nangi-san, I have been able to trace the phone number you gave me.”

This was Jisaku Shindo, the private investigator Nangi had engaged, and he was speaking of the number Nangi had copied off the ghostly fax machine he had discovered in the capsule office Masamoto Goei had rented in the Ginza.

“It’s here in Saigon, all right,” Shindo said, “in an office building directly across the road from your own office complex.”

“Who owns it?”

“A company that’s nonexistent, as it turns out.” Nangi could hear the PI shuffling through the pages of his notebook. “It appears as if your own man Vincent Tinh paid the rent every month.”

Nangi closed his eyes for a moment.

“Nangi-san? There’s quite a bit more.”

“I’m listening.”

“Okay. A friend of a friend of mine works in the coroner’s office, so I got to take a look at the autopsy report on Tinh. He was burned in sulfuric acid, all right, just like Van Kiet told you. But they also dug twenty-five bullets out of him.”

“Twenty-five?”

“Right. From the caliber of the bullets and the pattern of the wounds, I’d say he was on the wrong end of some kind of heavy-duty machine gun. A military weapon would be my guess, but I’m following it up.”

Good Christ,
Nangi thought.

“There’s one more thing,” Shindo said. “The friend of a friend was on duty when the body was picked up. He claims the man was Japanese. He also swears he was Yakuza.”

Nangi’s mind was reeling. “How could he know that?”

“Little finger of the man’s left hand. The top joint was missing.”

Yakuza often cut a digit in such a way in order to swear allegiance to a
oyabun
or to atone for a committed sin, to affirm their subservience.

“Good work.”

“Thank you, sir. I’ve used my contacts and I’ve managed to get an interview with Inspector Van Kiet tomorrow morning. The idea is to find out what form of persuasion will work best on these people. They’re all utterly corrupt.”

“I trust you’ll be successful. Keep me informed.”

“As always.”

Nangi broke the connection, sat back on the couch in his study. It was very quiet in the house, something he dearly loved, but now, abruptly, he longed for sound—a radio playing rock music, or a woman’s voice. He found himself again at the same gate, thoughts of Kisoko curling around him like mist.

But there was no time for her now. Tomorrow, Lew Croaker would be here with God only knew what news. Before then, Nangi knew, he had much to do.

Part of his mind chewing over what Shindo had told him, he began again to watch a certain section of the video in slow motion. This time, however, he ignored the main attraction, the two bodies coupling so oddly. Instead, he watched the extreme upper right of the frame where his eye had caught a flicker of movement.

He saw it come and go and return, like the shadow of a flame cast upon a wall, and he switched on the digital enhancer. Immediately, the images shot into focus, all traces of fuzziness and motion-smear—a consequence of shooting in the low light—vanished.

And Nangi found himself staring right into a face.

The face was turned slightly away from the lens of the video camera, observing the sexual acrobatics with eerie dispassion.

Nangi hit the digital freeze button, stared for a long time at the face. It was partly in shadow, but curiously, the sections of darkness helped define and reveal the features of the face.

The odd thing was that he recognized it.

And it was the trigger his memory needed to pull up Okami’s reference to William Justice Lillehammer.

Nangi could recall the conversation as if it had occurred yesterday instead of two years ago. Okami had been in Tokyo on one of his infrequent visits. Nangi remembered the place—the Meiji Shrine. It had been springtime, when everything was shedding the somber colors of winter. The air had been perfumed with the heady scents of budding flowers.

I am on the edge of a great precipice,
Okami had told him.
I must make a decision either to live and die as I have up until now or to make a great leap into the unknown.