The Kaisho (8 page)

“I’m sorry.” She said nothing. “Justine, Seiko was only doing her job.”

“Then she’s too efficient by half.”

“How can you be angry with her for being efficient?” He looked at her carefully and was struck by how strange this house had become. It was like a suit you had liked in the store but didn’t in the clear light of day. “This isn’t about Seiko calling you, is it?”

She turned away, her palms flat against the counter, her arms like rigid poles. Her long dark hair was disheveled, her body almost painfully thin. “No,” she said in a strangled voice, “but it is about Seiko.”

He saw the extreme tension in the hunch of her shoulders, the way she stood spread-legged. She had unconsciously assumed the stance of a street fighter spoiling for a confrontation.

Nicholas was about to say something, then thought better of it, intuiting that she would use anything he said now as further provocation.

Justine turned, her face dark with anger that had been pent-up too long. “Are you having an affair with Seiko?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Tell me the truth, damnit! Anything will be better than this hell of suspicion.”

He took a step toward her. “Justine, Seiko is my assistant, period.”

“Is that the whole truth? You’d better search your soul before you answer.”

“Why would you doubt me?” Her stricken face hung before him and his heart broke. “Justine…”

“You’ve spent so much time with her.”

“It was necessary.”

Her shoulders shook. “Taking her to Saigon—”

“She knows Vietnam far better than either Nangi or I. I couldn’t have completed my business in Saigon without her.” He went to her, took her in his arms.

“Oh, Christ, Nick, I’m sorry. I don’t know…”

At his touch all the tension went out of her, and a heat flowed through her to him. His lips came down over hers and her mouth was already open, her tongue hungrily entwined with his. Her heat suffused him, warming a body whose bones, it seemed, had indeed grown cold in the bitterness of her accusations.

It had been unfair of her to suspect him, he knew, even as he was uncomfortably aware that it was unfair of him to continue to imprison her here in a land she despised and could never understand.

He opened her shirt, held her breasts in his hands as the nipples grew taut and hot. Her mouth would not relinquish its hold on him, and he thrust his hands down farther, unfastening the Western belt, dragging her jeans off her thighs.

He was so hard he pushed up against her urgently, but she shoved him back with surprising strength, slipping to her knees before him. She undressed him with sure knowledge.

“Justine—”

Her hand encircled the base of him while her hot mouth slipped over the tip. He tried to pull her up and away, but she resisted him. He did not want this now, to see her submissive, so terrified of losing him that she would do anything to keep him hers. He wanted only to lose himself inside her, to block out all else, in their intimate twining to remove her doubt about him and their life together. But, in the end, her busy tongue and lips obliterated his resolve, and he dug his fingers into her thick hair, feeling her head move back and forth.

At last, he found the strength to drag her away from him. He picked her up as if she were a child, and her thighs came around him. He could taste the sex in her mouth as it came down over his. He found her open and waiting, and with a deep groan, she impaled herself on him to the hilt. She was so wild that he had no choice but to cede control of their movements to her. It was all he could do to keep up with her. He felt her belly ripple as her nipples whipped back and forth across his chest. He felt the tremoring of the muscles on the insides of her thighs, and the vibrations of her hard, breathless grunts into his mouth.

There was no rhythm, just a clawing, animalistic response of pleasure and, surely, of pain as she bit him deep enough to draw blood. With that, her ecstatic spasms began in her groin, spiraling outward until she shook and trembled as if in the grip of a terrible illness. She cried out, and tears flew from the corners of her tightly closed eyes. The dense cloud of her wet hair engulfed him as he felt her working her sex against him in stages, as she rose higher and higher in a series of orgasms that brought him over the edge. He felt her fingers on his scrotum, clutching urgently while she whispered incoherently into his ear, and he collapsed to the floor with her still clasped tightly in his arms.

She was weeping uncontrollably, and he kissed her lips, her cheeks, eyes, forehead, and temples.

“Justine, Justine, as soon as I get back from Venice, I promise we’ll go to New York.”

For a long time she said nothing, her face buried in his shoulder, her mouth half-open as she tasted his sweat and blood. When, at length, she looked up into his face, he was sick to recognize the despair there. “Please don’t go, Nick.”

“I—Justine, I have no choice.”

“I’m begging you, just stay with me a few days. Take time off from work, from… everything. We’ll go away, into the countryside—to Nara, the
ryokan
you like so much.”

“That sounds wonderful, but this trip is not of my making. I can’t—”

“Just tell me what’s so important in Venice and I swear I’ll try to understand.”

“An old friend of my father’s needs my help.”

“Who is he?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You mean you don’t know him?”

“Justine, I gave my word to my father just before he died. I have a duty.”

She shook her head, tears rolling down her cheeks again. “Ah, now we come to it. Your duty. Don’t you have a duty to me?”

“Please try to understand.”

“God knows I’ve tried, but this Japanese concept of
giri,
of a debt of duty, I most certainly do
not
understand. And, d’you know what? I realize now I don’t want to try anymore.” She rose unsteadily, stared down at him. “First it was your business, then your friendship with Nangi, then your trips to Saigon with Seiko. Now this—a duty to a father who’s been dead for years to help someone
you’ve never even met.
Christ, you’re as crazy as all the rest of them!”

“Justine—”

He reached out for her but she had already spun away from him, was fleeing down the hall. In a moment, he heard a door slam, but he made no move to go after her. What would be the point?

Sadly, he got up, slowly dressed himself with wooden fingers. He went silently out the back door, through the whispering cryptomeria. The sky was misted gray, a soup thickened by swirling clouds that hung low like the robes, of ghostly daimyo from ages past. He made his way through the garden and, before he knew it, found himself ascending the slope filled with a copse of carefully planted ginkgo, ancient of ancients, their white trunks like sentinels, the vestiges of their copper bilobed leaves trembling like the fingers of an oracle.

He had no conscious idea of where he was headed until he topped the rise and, below him, saw the lake. The water was invisible beneath the curling layer of nacreous mist.

Father,
Nicholas thought.

He crouched on the boggy bank of the lake, looking into the mist as if it were an alchemist’s mirror that could break the barrier of time. In that mirror, he saw the Colonel and himself, younger and innocent, as the elder Linnear gave him the present of Iss-hogai, the
dai-katana,
the long samurai sword that, many years later, Nicholas had hurled into this lake.

He could feel Iss-hogai now, just as he could see it as it struck the water so many years ago, plunging vertically to the bottom. And now, as past and present began to collide, it seemed so close to him that he could reach out and touch it.

He had thought he was quits with it then, that he had no more need of its power to inflict death, but like his past with his father, like his present with Justine, there was an essential element, unknown, as yet unwritten, that remained unresolved.

The Colonel, whom Nicholas loved and revered, had nevertheless had a secret life wholly apart from Nicholas and Cheong. Nicholas had discovered years after the Colonel’s death that he had murdered a dangerous political radical named Satsugai. He was the husband of Nicholas’s aunt, Itami, and though she despised him, still she was his wife. The Colonel’s action had had the profoundest effect on Nicholas’s life when Satsugai’s son, Saigo, had sought to murder Nicholas in revenge.

The phone call from Mikio Okami had stirred waters that, for a long time, had remained unruffled.

The Colonel’s secret life. What had he been up to with Mikio Okami? Why had he made friends with a Yakuza
oyabun?
Nicholas had no answers to these questions. He only knew that, in seeking them, he was being drawn once again toward his father—and toward the unknown past.

At last, he rose, went as silently as he had come, returning through forest and glade, past dreaming gardens, along stone paths laid centuries ago, to the kitchen of his house.

For the longest time he stood looking out the window at the cryptomeria and the cut-leaf maples whose boughs were dancing in the wind he had only moments before felt against his flesh.

At last, he turned to the counter, reached for a cup, measuring out the
macha,
the finely cut green tea leaf.

He took up the reed whisk, waiting for the water to boil.

Harley Gaunt was in the middle of a crisis of Brobdingnagian proportions. Bad enough that Tomkin-Sato Industries was losing accounts, pressured no doubt by retrocessive Democrats espousing pernicious isolationist economics with the feverish zeal of born-again Christians, but now the corporate headquarters here in Manhattan was literally under siege by consumers incensed by what placards on the street below misidentified as “consorting with the enemy.”

All chickens eventually come home to roost,
Gaunt thought as he stared gloomily out his office window at the gathering demonstration. As he watched like a hawk in its aerie, he saw a CNN remote TV truck pull up. Within minutes, the local TV stations were represented, then the networks, as usual dead last.

Christ,
he thought,
I need Nicholas over here. We’ve ridden the economic roller coaster of our merger with Sato International all the way up to the top of the loop, and from where I’m sitting the ride down is going to be scary as hell.

His intercom buzzed, and he answered curtly, “Suzie, is that Mr. Linnear on the line?”

“I’m afraid not, Mr. Gaunt,” his secretary’s voice spoke out of thin air, “but your ten-o’clock appointment is here.”

“What ten-o’clock appointment?”

“You remember, he called late yesterday. I told you I put it on your calendar just before I left for the day.”

“I don’t…” But Gaunt was already turning from the stomach-churning scene out his window, his eye catching the hastily scribbled notation on the calendar section of his computer terminal.

“Who the hell is Edward Minton?”

“He’s from Washington,” Suzie said, as if that solved the riddle. “He flew in first thing this morning on the shuttle to see you.”

Gaunt’s stomach knotted. He didn’t like the sound of that. Those Democrats on the Hill were positively incendiary on the subject of the Japanese. According to them, an economic war was brewing, and all Americans required the benevolent protection of the Democratic Party in order to avoid the economic humiliations plotted for them in some moldy subbasement of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo.

Tojo lives!
might well be their battle cry, though he had begun to notice springing up like noxious mushrooms in a humid climate posters of the Imperial rising sun of Japan encircled with a red line, another red line running diagonally through it.

These were to him nothing more than a symbol of the moral bankruptcy of his country—an advertiser’s dream, where even the most complex issues could be reduced to simplistic decals.

Gaunt closed his eyes for a moment. He was a massive man, with as much fat as muscle, a three-letter man in college athletics who, typical of his kind, assumed that heavy physical exercise once accomplished need not be continued to maintain form. He had been a wide receiver of no little renown and, on the mound of a baseball diamond, had once possessed a slider that justifiably intimidated the opposition. Only being hit in the shoulder by a wicked line drive had kept him out of professional sports.

Lucky for him, no doubt, since even if his bank account would have swollen, his mind would have atrophied. The fact was that Gaunt was possessed of an intelligence rare in his chosen field of administration. He could summon up that astonishing leap of insight usually the purview of programming geniuses and maverick entrepreneurs. This was how he had come to the attention of Nicholas Linnear and why Nicholas had promoted him to managing director, North America, of Tomkin-Sato Industries.

Now that intuition told him that his ten-o’clock was poison. He put his fingers to his forehead, closed his eyes for a moment as if with force of will alone he could cause Edward Minton to disappear.

“Mr. Gaunt?”

“Yes, Suzie.”

“It’s ten-fifteen.”

Gaunt sighed. “In that case send Mr. Minton in.”

If Gaunt’s body had lost the hard athlete’s edge it had possessed in college, his face had not. It was still firm-jawed, and there was no wattle under his chin as, astonished, he had noted in many of his classmates at their last reunion. His hair, still thick, was flecked with gray, but this matched the sprays of that color in his brown eyes. What lines appeared in his face were like those etched by a fine sculptor—they seemed to belong there, to, moreover, have always been there, part of his craggy strength, his canny insight.

Edward Minton was, on the other hand, a whole different story. Tall and thin, he had that stoop-shouldered mien of those made self-conscious at an early age of their ungainly height. He had skin the color of wax paper, by which hue Gaunt’s worst fears were realized: he was government-issue, and right now that was as ill an omen as a crow in a cornfield.

Minton wore a three-piece suit, shiny at the elbows, rumpled at crotch and sleeves, of an indeterminate color and material. No doubt it was fire-retardant. He wore steel-rimmed spectacles above a straight nose, thin lips. Behind them were the clear blue eyes of the raptor. Gaunt was unsurprised to see a gold Phi Beta Kappa chain strung from the watch pocket of his vest. Politicians were like dogs, Gaunt observed silently. They liked best to lie down with their own breed.