The Kaisho (73 page)

Celeste did not want to think of the nightmare of navigating the truck, driving highways, then perilous, snaking roads on the left, past signs she could not read, banging and shearing the gears, Nicholas half-slumped beside her.

“This man, my
sensei,
taught me everything I know about Tau-tau,” Nicholas continued when he had slaked his thirst. “Seeing how ineffective it was against the Messulethe, I began to wonder. And then in the cage, between consciousness and unconsciousness, my dreaming mind conjured up this man again, and I saw him—
I saw him, Celeste
—deceiving me. He was teaching me only those things he wanted me to know.”

Something stirred in the brush beyond the stand of bare ginkgo trees, and they both turned their heads. But it was only a small animal, foraging for fallen nuts.

Nicholas arranged himself so that his back was against the stone basin, as if he drew strength from contact with it. “This man was exceedingly clever,” he said after a time. “I took his teachings at face value even after I unmasked him. I’m now astonished that I could have been so naive.” He looked at her. “Celeste, I think what he taught me wasn’t simply Akshara. I believe now it was an incomplete combination of Akshara and Kshira. What if this dark side of Tau-tau has begun to change me?”

Celeste smoothed his dark, damp hair off his forehead, kissed him gently. “I’m sure you’re wrong,” she said reassuringly. “The effects of being in that cage with the Messulethe can’t be shrugged off so easily.”

He knew what she was saying, that the shock of the drugs and the interrogation had made him prone to paranoid delusions. But she was wrong. He could not shake the terrifying feeling that Kansatsu had somehow sabotaged him. He remembered how Kansatsu had told him that Nicholas had come to see him high up on the Hodaka many times, though Nicholas knew that moment had only occurred once.

Time,
Kansatsu had said,
is somehow akin to the ocean. There are tides, currents, eddies which at certain nexus points overlap, creating a kind of whirlpool of events that repeat like ripples until, having spread sufficiently outward, are spent upon a rocky shore.

Nicholas, who had only begun to journey outside time, knew better now than he had then what Kansatsu was speaking of. If Kansatsu was able to live and relive moments in time, he might easily have foreseen his death at Nicholas’s hands, just as he would have understood the inevitability of it and, accepting it as karma, gone about exacting his revenge by planting a kind of psychic time bomb inside Nicholas’s head. The question Nicholas faced now was how to get it out.

There was a way, but it was so dangerous, so filled with unknown pitfalls, he did not know whether he dare take it. He wondered whether he had a choice.

It was at that moment that the birds ceased their songs, and Nicholas and Celeste, their eyes meeting in recognition, both knew that he was coming for them.

The Messulethe.

“Dead?”

“I’m afraid so. It was tragic. An automobile accident.”

“Jesus God. Justine dead.”

Lew Croaker stared into Tanzan Nangi’s face. He looked older, his face more lined and weary than Croaker had remembered it.

“Does Nicholas know?”

Nangi shook his head. “As you have heard, he has been out of touch for some time.”

Croaker sat down and Margarite put a hand on his shoulder. He had told her all about Nicholas and Justine on the flight over. They were bleary-eyed but not as tired as they could have been. They had shared a sleeping pill Margarite had found at the bottom of her cosmetics case and so had slept soundly for six hours.

They were in the living room of Nicholas’s house outside Tokyo proper. Massive cedar beams crisscrossed the ceiling, and the late autumnal light spilled into the large room through enormous plate-glass windows. Thickly padded couches and oversize chairs filled the central tatami space, two steps lower than the surrounding wood-floored area. Along the walls were ranged Western artwork and brilliantly colored textiles from France and Italy. The house smelled of oiled wood, straw, and rosemary.

Nangi felt this was the logical place to come. When Seiko had given him the message, he had been furious that she had not interrupted his meeting. But he quickly put his anger aside and did some fast thinking. Seiko had given him Croaker’s message verbatim and that, along with a thorough cross-examination of her, had given him enough clues as to Croaker’s tone and attitude to understand the urgency of the trip.

Considering his own current situation—as well as that of Sato International—he did not want anyone to know of Croaker’s presence in Tokyo. That ruled out the office as well as his own residence. Neither did he want to take the chance of meeting them in so public a place as a hotel lobby.

Since Justine’s death, Nicholas’s house had remained empty, save for the cleaning woman. Nangi had keys to the place, and its remote location made it ideal. He had taken his car to the airport, had met Croaker—and his companion—himself, driving them directly here.

But not before he had gotten rid of Seiko. She was the only person in the office who knew of Croaker’s arrival, and he did not want her around while the meeting was taking place.

He had assigned her to Vietnam to temporarily take over the Sato Saigon office. He gave her Jisaku Shindo’s name, but told her the private investigator was a production consultant hired to help integrate the relatively new overseas office with headquarters. He instructed her to help Shindo in any way she could.

The whole idea of providing her with so much freedom was risky, but Nangi was used to risk. He phoned Shindo, told him she was on her way and that she was suspected of working against the company. He knew this was the best he could do for now. He had no real evidence of her perfidy, except hearsay, and he was not prepared to act prematurely. Besides, she was less important than the people she reported to. If she was guilty. Perhaps her sense of freedom in Saigon would be her undoing. If so, Shindo would be there to document her fall.

Goei, the Chi Project leader, was another story. He had damned himself with his coded fax, and although Nangi’s people were still deciphering it, Nangi had no doubts as to his guilt. In the best of all possible worlds, Nangi would have preferred to keep him in place and under twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance. But he did not have that luxury. He knew that the moment he handed Goei over to the authorities he would at the very least mitigate Senator Bane’s allegations against Nicholas and Sato-Tomkin, and with luck, destroy the case against them: Goei was the one who had leaked the Chi Project Technology to Vincent Tinh in Saigon, not Nicholas. And because Goei could now be directly linked to Tinh, who had proved himself a renegade ready, willing and able to betray Sato-Tomkin, the
keiretsu
would be exonerated as well. So he had had Goei arrested and had handed Seiko her new assignment.

She had seemed thrilled. Also relieved, which disturbed him. He had packed her off to Saigon that morning with a weekend suitcase of clothes, promising to have the rest of her things sent as soon as possible. She had not protested, understanding better than most the emergency Vincent Tinh’s death had created. Whatever misgivings he had about letting her go were soon submerged by Croaker’s arrival and the subsequent revelations of events that had taken place in the United States.

Nangi listened closely as Croaker told him about being brought in to solve Dominic Goldoni’s murder by Lillehammer, his growing suspicions that Lillehammer was more than he made himself out to be, and the subsequent revelations that Lillehammer had his own personal agenda to pursue against the Vietnamese assassin Do Duc Fujiru. Croaker was intrigued to learn that Nangi already knew about Harley Gaunt’s death and its aftermath, but he surprised Nangi when he recounted Margarite’s relationship with her stepmother, Renata Loti, with her brother, Dominic, and revealed the legacy of running his empire he had left her.

When Croaker finished telling him of Margarite’s suspicion that the war between the Leonfortes and the Goldonis was far more than a simple blood feud between Mafia Families, Nangi turned to Margarite, said, “You have told Croaker that your brother gave you access to the secret information he held on high-ranking officials of government and law enforcement. Where did this information come from?”

“A secret source,” Margarite said. “His name is Nishiki.” Abruptly restless, she got up from her seat, walked tensely back and forth over the tatami.

“Did your brother ever allow you to meet this Nishiki?” Nangi asked.

“No. I... My impression was that Dom never met him himself. He was just a voice. But my stepmother knows who he is. She sent us over here to protect him from Do Duc.”

“So Croaker-san has said.” Nangi looked shrewdly at Margarite Goldoni DeCamillo, wondering if she could be trusted. He trusted Lew Croaker, Nicholas’s closest Western friend, but that was all he could afford to take for granted. “Did your stepmother give you a name?”

“Yes. We’re supposed to see a man named Mikio Okami.”

Nangi stood very still for some time. “Okami is the Kaisho, the head of all the
oyabun
of the Yakuza,” he told them. “But his enemies have already moved against him; he’s missing. Now you tell me that you believe he himself is Nishiki—Dominic Goldoni’s source.”

“Faith seemed certain of it,” Margarite said. “But what if he’s already dead?”

“That thought had crossed my mind as well,” Nangi said, “until I started putting some clues together. Regarding the allegations against Nicholas and Sato-Tomkin, I have found the traitors inside the company. One of them, Vincent Tinh, was murdered last week in Saigon. It seems he was involved in just about everything you can imagine that’s illegal. But who murdered him? The Saigon police were of no help. But the curious thing is his body was claimed by a man purporting to be Tinh’s brother. He had no family at all. And this man said he worked at a company called Avalon Ltd.

“I’ve done some checking. Though Avalon Ltd. claims no knowledge of this man, it is an exceedingly strange concern that appears to be a conduit for transferring money across international borders. Now I have discovered that the man who came for Tinh’s body was Japanese and Yakuza. It seemed clear that I was being deliberately directed to Avalon Ltd.

“All these factors lead me to one conclusion—that Mikio Okami is alive and in hiding, that he is secretly sending clues concerning his enemies to those who can best help him.

“You see, members of Okami’s inner council were compelling him against his will into an alliance with a man named Leon Waxman, a man I knew in Tokyo many years ago who had subsequently become a major player in the shadows of Washington.

“I think Okami must have rebelled. I told him I thought Waxman was unreliable, and so Okami secretly abandoned the Godaishu, forming another alliance he had been secretly cultivating for years—one with your brother, Ms. Goldoni. Dominic was murdered because of this alliance, and Okami has been driven into hiding.”

“But is he safe?” Margarite asked.

Nangi looked at her. “Even if he is, there is so much power arrayed against him, I wonder how long he can survive.”

When Faith Goldoni opened the door to her house, Lillehammer smiled and said, “Will Lillehammer, Mrs. Loti. Charmed to meet you at last. May I come in?”

Faith, staring at the working end of the pistol he was pointing at her heart, said, “But of course.”

As she led him past the grand foyer and into the hallway, she heard him say, “There’s no one else at home, Mrs. Loti. I checked.”

“I’m sure you did.”

He nudged her along. “The kitchen and then out the back door.”

She could tell now without him saying anything that they were headed for the stables. She knew what that meant. In a way, she wondered that this moment hadn’t occurred some time ago. It was only recently, when Lillehammer’s lover, Douglas Moon, had sold her the videotape and she had viewed it, that she had recognized the man observing them as Johnny Leonforte. He looked very different, to be sure, what with the passage of time and the lopsided face, but this was a man with whom she had been intimate, and the moment she had seen the image she had known who he was. It had been long ago, but truly not far away. Those days in Tokyo during the Occupation had set the scene for everything that was to come. Those days were etched into her memory as if with a laser.

How long had Johnny known who she was? She did not live in the shadows as he must, and although she had had some subtle plastic surgery done in Los Angeles while getting her tucks, she was still Faith Goldoni. Johnny would have recognized her.

Johnny alive!

At first, she had found it inconceivable. But she had survived against all odds, why not him? And he had an innate advantage over her—he was a man.

“Open the door.”

She did, and smelled the pungency of the horses, the manure, the silage. The animals turned their heads in her direction, snorting.

“Don’t worry,” Lillehammer said, “I’m not going to shoot you. Too many questions that way.” She turned around, her back against one of the stalls. “You’re going to be kicked in the head by one of these.” He gestured at the horses.

Faith could feel the tackle against her back, moved a little to ease the pressure. “Nobody will believe that. I’m too good a horsewoman.” Not only to ease the pressure, but to get a grip with her left hand on the leather and steel.

“They’ll have to believe it,” Lillehammer said, moving closer to her and the horses, “because it will be the coroner’s findings. There won’t be another mark on you. No sign of foul play.” He smiled. “Believe me. I’m a master at this.”

“Why are you doing this?” She did not expect an answer, she wanted merely to reinforce his sense of control.

“Here’s a big stallion.” He gestured with the pistol. “Open the stall door.”

It was what Faith had been waiting for. She opened the stall door with her right hand while, with her left, she lifted the tackle off its hook, flung it with a practiced flick of her wrist. It acted much as a whip would, the thick leather and steel slapping into the side of Lillehammer’s face and neck, drawing blood.