The Miko - 02 (3 page)

“Well then.” She took his hand and led him from the chilly curling wavelets up above the high-tide mark, strewn with the dark wrack of sea grape and odd bits of ashy wood, as perfectly smooth as stones. She turned her face up toward the sun. “I’m glad winter’s over; I’m happy to be out here again with everything returning to life.”

“Justine,” he said seriously, “I just wanted to know whether there had been any—” He broke off, searching for an English equivalent to the Japanese thought. “Any echoes of the incident. After all, Saigō programmed you to kill me with my own sword. You never speak of it.”

“Why should I?” The light turned her eyes dark, concealing all their delicate colors. “There’s nothing to say.”

There was silence for a time, and they were engulfed by the rhythmic suck and pull of the sea along whose edge they had begun to walk again. Near the flat horizon a trawler hung as if suspended in a gulf of piercing blue.

She was looking out there, as if the ocean’s expanse contained within it her future. “I’ve always known that life isn’t safe. But up until the time I met you, I had no reason to care one way or another. It’s no secret that I was once as self-destructive as my sister is.” Her eyes broke away from the glitter of the horizon. She stared down at her laced fingers. “I wish to God it had never happened. But, oh, it did. He got hold of me. It’s like when I had chicken pox as a kid. It was so bad I almost died; it left scars. But I survived. I’ll survive now.” Her head lifted. “I
must
survive, you see, because there’s us to think about.”

Nicholas had stared into her eyes. Was she keeping something from him? He could not say, and he did not know why it should worry him.

She laughed suddenly, her face becoming that of a college girl, innocent and carefree, the light dusting of freckles over her creamy skin catching the warming sunlight. She had a pure laugh, untainted by sarcasm or cynicism. There were no danger signs in it as there were in many people.

“I won’t have you here beside me tomorrow,” she said, “so let’s make the most of today.” She kissed him tenderly. “Is that very Oriental?”

He laughed. “I think it is, yes.”

Her long artist’s fingers traced the line of his jaw, pausing at last to touch the tender flesh of his lips. “You’re more dear to me than I thought anyone could ever be.”

“Justine—”

“If you’d travel to the ends of the earth I’d find you again. That sounds like the unrealistic statement of a little girl, but I mean it.”

To his astonishment, he saw that she did. And he saw in her eyes at that moment something he had never seen there before. He recognized the determination of the
samurai
woman that he had encountered years ago in his mother and aunt. It was a peculiar combination of fierceness and loyalty that he thought nearly impossible for the Occidental spirit to attain. He was warmed by how proud of her he felt.

He smiled. “I’ll only be gone for a short time. Hopefully no more than a month. I’ll make sure you don’t have to come after me.”

Her face had turned serious. “It’s no joke, Nick. Japan
is
at the ends of the earth, as far as I’m concerned. That country’s terribly alien. Anywhere in Europe I may be somewhat of a foreigner but still and all I can trace my roots back there. There’s at least
some
feeling of belonging. Japan’s as opaque as a stone. It frightens me.”

“I’m half Oriental,” he said lightly. “Do I frighten you?”

“I think, yes, at times you used to. But not so much now.” Her arms slid around him. “Oh, Nick, everything would be perfect if only you weren’t going.”

He held her tightly, wordlessly. He wanted to say that he’d never let her go but that would have been a lie because in less than twenty-four hours he would do just that as he boarded the plane bound for Tokyo. Too, his Eastern side—and his training—made him a private man, inward directed, the enigma of the blank wall. Nicholas suspected that his father, the Colonel, had been much the same way though he had been fully Occidental. Both father and son had secrets even from the women they loved the most in life.

He took a deep breath now, felt the change in pressure, the ozoned air, so thin and dry it clung to the back of the nose.

The 747-SP was banking to the left in a slow, lazy arc, chasing the streaking cloud layer until pale green fields, striped with perfectly regimented furrows, began to appear. Then, in the distance, the snow-capped crown of Fuji-yama, majestic and immutable. He was home again.

Then they were into the heavy smog layer, lying like a pall over a festive party, drifting in an ever-widening circle from the intensely industrialized areas of the swarming metropolis.

“Christ,” the stocky-muscled man beside him said, craning his neck for a better look, “I should’ve brought my goddamned gas mask.” A pudgy finger stabbed out at what lay beyond the Perspex window. “They’ve got an inversion layer worse than the San Fernando Valley.”

His lined, aggressive face was absorbed in the disappearance of the rising landscape outside. He had the eyes, Nicholas thought, of a seasoned Roman general, canny and weary at the same time. Both were a result of hard-fought experience, battles on two arenas, the huns in front and the political infighting behind.

The man’s hair was short cropped, a gunmetal gray; he was dressed in a handmade lightweight business suit of a conservative cut. He was a man who over the years had become accustomed to a measured degree of luxury, but the twist of his nose, the thickness of the lips indicated that such had not always been the case. He had not been born to money, Raphael Tomkin, millionaire industrialist for whom Nicholas now worked. He was the man whom Saigō had been paid to kill; and though Nicholas had protected him, defeating Saigō, this was the same man who, Nicholas was certain, had ordered the death of Detective Lieutenant Lew Croaker, Nicholas’ best friend.

Nicholas watched the profile of Tomkin’s powerful face without seeming to. American power, Nicholas had come to learn, was often merely skin deep, and for him to incise beneath that layer to the soft interior was not difficult. But Tomkin was atypical of his fellow board chairmen. His
wa
was very strong indeed, proof of his inner determination and rock solidness.

This interested Nicholas intensely because his vow to himself and to the
kami
of his dead friend was to gain access to the interior of this man and, once having possession of that knowledge, sow the seeds of his slow destruction.

He recalled his thoughts on learning that Tomkin had ordered Croaker’s seemingly accidental death in a car crash just outside Key West. Croaker had been there on his own time, and only Nicholas also knew that he had been running down the one solid lead in the Angela Didion homicide. She had been a high-fashion model who had once been Raphael Tomkin’s mistress.

A modern rendering of a well-known tactic of Ieyasu Tokugawa, greatest of all of Japan’s Shōgun, whose family ruled for more than a thousand years, keeping tradition alive, safe from dilution from the West:
To come to know your enemy, first you must become his friend. And once you become his friend, all his defenses come down. Then can you choose the most fitting method of his demise.

Nicholas’ vow of revenge had led him, despite Justine’s fervent arguments, to accept Tomkin’s offer of employment a year ago. And from the first day on the job, all their energies had been directed toward this moment. Tomkin had been brewing this proposed merger of one of his divisions with that of one of Sato Petrochemicals’
kobun.
Any deal with the Japanese was a difficult enough task, but this kind of complex merger of two highly sophisticated entities was utterly exhausting. Tomkin had admitted that he needed help desperately. And who better than Nicholas Linnear, half-Oriental, born and raised in Japan, to render that assistance.

The wheels bumped briefly against the tarmac and they were down, feeling the drag as the captain put the four powerful jet engines into reverse thrust.

Now as they unstrapped and began to reach for their coats in the overhead compartment, Nicholas watched Tomkin. Something had happened to him since he had first made his vow. In coming to learn about Raphael Tomkin, in gaining his trust and, thus, his friendship—a gift the industrialist did not give often—Nicholas had come to see him for what he really was.

And it was clear that he was not the ogre that his daughters, Justine and Gelda, were convinced he was. In the beginning he had sought to communicate this new aspect of Tomkin to Justine, but these discussions inevitably ended in bitter fights and at length he gave up trying to convince her of her father’s love for her. Too much bad blood had gone on between them for her ever to change her mind about him. She thought he was monstrous.

And in one way at least she was correct, Nicholas thought as they walked off the plane. Though increasingly it had become more difficult for him to believe that Tomkin was capable of murder. Certainly no man in his position got there by turning the other cheek to his enemies or those whom he had to climb over. Broken careers, bankruptcies, the dissolutions of marriages, this was the detritus that such a man as Raphael Tomkin must leave behind him in his wake.

He was smart and most assuredly ruthless. He had done things that Nicholas could never even have contemplated. And yet these seemed a long way from ordering a death in cold blood, a life snuffed out with Olympian disdain. His genuine love for his daughters should have precluded such a psychotic decision.

Yet all the evidence Croaker had unearthed had led directly back to Raphael Tomkin summoning his bodyguard and authorizing him to end Angela Didion’s life. Why? What spark had ignited him to do such a desperate thing?

Nicholas still did not know, but he meant to find out before he meted out his revenge on this powerful and complex man. Perhaps this quest for knowledge would delay the time of his vengeance, but that had no real meaning for him. He had taken in with his mother’s milk the concept of infinite patience. Time was as the wind to him, passing unseen in a continuous stream, secrets held within its web, enactment inevitable but coming only at the propitious moment, as Musashi wrote, Crossing at a Ford.

Thus he had set for himself the task of first coming to understand his enemy, Raphael Tomkin, to peer into every nook and cranny of his life, stripping away flesh and bone until at length the soul of the man lay revealed to him. Because only in understanding the why of the murder could Nicholas find salvation for himself for what he himself must eventually do.

If he should fail to understand Tomkin, if he should rashly hurl himself down the narrow bloodied path of vengeance, he would be no better than his enemy. He could not do such a thing. His cousin, Saigō, had known just that about Nicholas and, using it, had caused the death of Nicholas’ friends. For mad Saigō had no such compunctions concerning murder. He had learned how to destroy life through
Kan-aku na ninjutsu
and, later, through the feared
Kōbudera.
But somewhere along the line the forces he was attempting to tame had taken him over, using him for their own evil designs. Saigō had possessed the power only to become possessed by it. In the end he had been too weak of spirit and it had driven him mad.

Nicholas took a deep breath and shook his head to clear his mind of the past. Saigō was a year dead.

But he was back in Japan and so the past had begun to crowd in on him like a host of
kami
chittering in his ear, all clamoring for attention at once. So many memories, so many sensations. Cheong; the Colonel; Itami, his aunt, whom he knew he must eventually see. And always Yukio, sad doomed Yukio. Beautiful Yukio stunning his adolescent mind when they had first met at the
keiretsu
party. The first contact between them had been electric with sexual promise. Her warm, firm thigh between his legs as they danced through the chandeliered room, staring into each other’s eyes, oblivious of the glare the young Saigō leveled at them from his place at his father’s side.

Though she be dead at Saigō’s hands, still her
kami
continued to haunt him. Though he loved Justine with all his heart, still his spirit danced that first dance with Yukio in a kind of private glowing world where death held no dominion. The mind was an awesomely powerful instrument and if the dead could ever be said to have been resurrected, Nicholas had brought Yukio back from her watery grave with the power of his memories.

And now his feet were back on his native soil for the first time in over ten years. It seemed like centuries. Closer to Yukio now, to all that had happened to him. Dance, Yukio, I’m holding you tight and as long as I do nothing can come between us, nothing can harm you anymore.

“Good afternoon, gentlemen.” A young Japanese woman stood, bowing, before them. “Sato Petrochemicals welcomes you to Japan.” Just behind her and to the left was a young Japanese male in a dark business suit and wraparound sunglasses. He reached out and took their bag claim checks. They had just cleared Customs and Immigration. “Junior will take care of your luggage.” Her smile was sweet. “Won’t you follow me, please?”

Nicholas hid his surprise at being met by a woman. Of course he would not tell Tomkin this but it did not bode well for their coming negotiations. He might find this creature charming and Tomkin might not care either way, but to any Japanese this would constitute a serious insult. The more important the emissary of the company who met you, the higher your status in the eyes of that company. In Japan, women were very far down the executive ladder indeed.

She took them through the congested heart of Narita, past scurrying tour groups, their leaders brandishing stiff calligraphied banners to rally them just as generals on the ancient battlefields of Japan had once done with their troops. Past regimented schoolchildren, uniformed and gaping at all the incredibly tall
gaijin
stumbling bewilderedly by them. Around old couples with brown paper shopping bags, sidestepping one brilliantly colored bridal party being seen off on their honeymoon.

Tomkin was huffing by the time the young woman brought them out into the vapid sunshine and across to the waiting limousine.