The Miko - 02 (37 page)

But when she was finished, the self-consciousness returned. She could do more things with eyes than anyone else he knew, and now as she lifted her head and stared at him, he saw the shyness and the need for his approval. There was that peculiar coolness swirling in the depths that he recalled vividly from their first meetings that was far better than a verbal warning to keep him at arm’s length.

He swept her up, laughing. “But of course I think it’s wonderful! It’s about time you came out of your shell.”

“Now, listen, Nick, I didn’t say I’d keep at it or—”

He set her down. “But you said that you enjoy it.”

She abruptly had an air about her so fragile and insubstantial that he hugged her to him as if she were a lost child.

There was a gleaming silver limousine waiting for them as they emerged from the swinging glass doors. Nicholas stopped, but Justine tugged at the crook of his arm.

“Oh, come on,” she said. “I decided to splurge part of my new salary. Indulge me.”

Reluctantly, Nicholas gave his bags over to the uniformed chauffeur and, ducking his head, slid into the plush back seat next to Justine. She gave instructions to the driver and they slid out into the slow-moving traffic on their way to the Long Island Expressway.

“I see Gelda decided not to meet her father.”

Justine looked away from him. “You didn’t hear my asking to look at the coffin.”

“That was all taken care of ahead of time. There was no reason for us to be there.” Silence in the car, like a beaded curtain between them. “Your father—”

“Don’t start this again, Nicky,” she said sharply. Her head turned and he saw the anger in her eyes. “I never for a moment understood why you went to work for him. My father, of all people! He was such a despicable man.”

“He loved his daughters.”

“He didn’t love himself; he didn’t know how to love anyone else.”

Nicholas put his hands between his knees and clasped his fingers. This might be a bad time to tell her, he thought. But he could think of no good time. She had a right to know; he wasn’t that Eastern that he could keep this from her.

“Your father gave me complete control of the company.”

Thrumming of the powerful engine, deep and rich, the slide of Queens’ semi-urban sprawl drifting by them. And a feeling of helplessness.

“That’s a bad joke, Nick,” she said. “Don’t even make it.”

Mentally he sighed, steeling himself for the storm. “It’s no joke, Justine. He wrote a codicil to his will six months ago. His sixty percent of the voting shares makes me the new president of Tomkin Industries. Bill Greydon was a witness, and he witnessed my signing the codicil in Tokyo.”

“You
signed
the bloody thing?” She was twisted around on the seat, her back stiff, pressed tightly into the opposing corner. “You agreed to that…!” She shook her head in disbelief, for the moment words failing her. “Oh, Christ but it’s madness.” Her voice had turned throaty as if her throttled emotions were aswim in her words.

She put her hand up to her face as if to block out the image of him sitting so close to her, as if that would erase what he had revealed to her. “Oh, God, no. No, it can’t be.” She tore her hand away from her eyes and glared at him, her chest heaving with her rage.

“I thought it was finally over. I thought my father’s death would once and for all put an end to it, that it would sever me wholly from how he had chosen to live his life. Because as sure as we’re both sitting here, Nick, Tomkin Industries was built on the blood and bile of everyone my father felt he had to defeat in his climb up to the top.” She gave a small, bitter laugh and looked as if she were going to spit. “The top of what? Can you tell me that, Nicky? What was it that was so important that he treated my mother and Gelda and me as
…things
, useful to him when he needed us but beneath his notice when he was otherwise occupied—by getting to the top.”

Nicholas said nothing, knowing that his best bet was to allow her to run her course.

“And now”—that laugh came again so chill that it seemed to border on hysteria—“now when I’m finally about to get my life into some kind of order, you tell me that I’m again bound to Tomkin Industries
body and soul.
”

“I only said that I had signed the codicil.”

“And of course that has nothing to do with me,” she cried. “We’re going to be married in a month, or has going
home
made you forget so soon?”

“Justine, for God’s sake—”

“No, no. This involves me as well as you. But bastard that you are, that never occurred to you, did it? Admit it, damnit!” Her eyes were fiery and her cheeks were pink and burning with her anger. “You know how I felt about my father; you knew how I felt about his company. I thought that you working for him would be temporary. I thought…Oh, Christ!” She put her head in her hands, her rage dissolving into tears of helplessness. “Oh, how I hate you! Look what you’ve done to us!”

Nicholas put his head back against the plush velvet, closed his eyes. “It
was
supposed to be temporary, Justine.” His voice was soft, gentle, assuring as he used the opposite side of
kiai
to manipulate his tone. “But life is fluid, events cause us to change our plans. There’s a flow to—”

“Oh, don’t you dare start with your idea of
karma
,” she snapped. “I don’t want to hear any of that obscure mumbo jumbo. Try it out on your Japanese friends, not me!”

“Justine,” he said simply, “we’re both exhausted. A great deal of thought went into my decision and I—”

“But not about me, not about how
I
felt!”

“There’s more to it than what you want, Justine,” he said, abruptly angry.

“Now you listen to me. I spent all my life listening to what my father
told
me, listening to what a long succession of boyfriends
told
me. And I obeyed them all just like a good little girl should. But that’s all over and done with. Because, you see, there
isn’t
more than what
I
want. I’ve never in my life had what
I
wanted; I was always afraid to try for it because of what my father
told
me, what my boyfriends
told
me; how to behave, what to do, what not to say.

“Now it’s me and only me. I control my own life; I control my own destiny, not my father, not anyone else. Not even you, Nicholas.”

She leaned toward him, moving out from her corner of the seat. Her skin was red, her normally full sensual lips pulled taut and thin. “At last I’m free, and no one is putting me back in my cage again. I won’t be chained to anything,
especially
something so heinous as Tomkin Industries.”

“Then we have something of an impasse,” Nicholas said.

But Justine was already shaking his head. “Oh, no, Nick. That’s your definition of this situation. But the truth is this: as long as you’re involved with my father’s company I don’t want to see you, I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to know you exist.”

In the great spacious hall of martial arts on the thirty-eighth floor of the Shinjuku Suiryū Building, Masuto Ishii was working up quite a sweat. While others spent their lunch hours over
soba
and Suntory Scotch, Ishii used that time to give his physical self a workout.

Three times a week he rose before dawn to run ten miles along twilit streets before returning to his tiny bachelor’s apartment in the Ryogoku district, showering, and dressing in impeccable dark suits for work. The other four days he spent the early-morning hours in this same gymnasium. Since he allotted his section chiefs forty-five minutes for lunch, he felt a duty to conform to the same spartan schedule. That was too little time for a whole panoply of exercises, so midday he confined himself to the repetition of one or two difficult maneuvers culled from the various disciplines with which he was conversant.

Thus when Akiko found him he was in the midst of the
irimi
variations of
jo-waza,
stave
aikido.
There was no one else about, the vast Sato staff emptying out of the building like locusts upon the gleaming field of Shinjuku at precisely twelve-thirty. For a time she watched him intently.

Long muscles rippling, filmed with a light sheen of sweat that lay on his chest like mineral oil, his oval head down, the bull-like chest barely moving as his concentration deepened. She remembered the long, lingering look he had given her on her wedding day. She had seen the veiled lust in his eyes then and had wondered: had it been her he had wanted to get at, or was it the symbol of what his superior was about to possess? For Akiko sensed Ishii’s adoration of power as strongly as if it were animal spoor. Not for him the quiet contentment of home and family, of his secure position as number-two man at Sato Petrochemicals. In his heart he was no man’s right hand but, rather, wished only to select his own line of command from top to bottom.

This was in her mind as she came across the polished floorboards, feeling their supple springiness beneath her white socks. She had left sandals and cloak at the door, after first locking it from the inside. No one else was here, no one would come; there was only the two of them now.

Ishii became aware of her only when she was very close. The particular
irimi
he was working on had been one whose perfect execution had eluded him even after months of the most diligent practice. Still, he was not frustrated, nor was he angry at himself. He had just come to a decision to pass on to another variation when his break in concentration revealed Akiko.

His head came up, sweat sparkling like dew across his black, close-cropped hair. He bowed immediately, voicing the traditional greeting, “
Ikagadesuka,
Oku-san.”

Somewhat distantly, Akiko returned it.
“Hai. Okagesamade. Arigatogozaimasu.
” It was schoolgirl’s rote, that was all. “Tell me,” she said, “are you as assiduous in your work on the merger as you are at
aikido
?”

“I do what is asked of me, Oku-san.”

Akiko gave the top of his head a bleak smile. She could see his scalp, burnished as brass. “And that is all that you do?”

At the last upward inflection, Ishii’s head lifted and his deceptively soft brown eyes gathered her in. For an instant Akiko felt like an image upon a plate, developing. Then he blinked and the sense was gone. “I am not a robot, if that is your meaning,” he said deliberately. “I create for the company as well as serve it.”

“In what way?”

“With my mind.”

“You are an impudent man,” she said coldly.

“My apologies, Oku-san.” He bowed again. “Please forgive me.

Her lips curled upward and she held out a hand, closing her fingers around the stave. She pulled, and he took a halting step closer to her. She made him aware of her as a woman in the way she stood, in the attitude of her head; her expression recalled the moment of his searching look on her wedding day. She melted into him.

“This is what you want, isn’t it,” she whispered into his ear.

She felt how startled he was at her aggressive stance and laughed to herself. He was pulled by the conventions of his mind, drawn by her heat. It was his moment of indecision.

Using that, she broke the stave across his right shoulder with a variation of the
iai
draw, too swift to see clearly. His mind was stunned, his body immobilized at the same time.

Now a part of her felt sorry for him. Kneeling, bent and broken before her, without even uttering one animal mewl of protest, where was his maleness, his traditional superiority? He was nothing now: not an image or an icon, not a protector or a provider; he was, she saw, not even an enemy. He was merely a means to an end.

His face was raised toward her. His skin was covered in pristine beads: the sweat of pain. His ragged breath broke from his partly open mouth like the sigh of an engine winding down.

For a long time Akiko stared down at him while all manner of thought flung itself like rain in her mind. Then she withdrew her blade, seeing its long, gleaming length mirrored in his eyes. She felt his terror and thought, There are no more warriors left in the world.

Then, with neat precise swipes of her
katana
, she cut off his feet.

When the long black Mercedes slid to a halt, the driver came around, opened the rear door, and Seiichi Sato emerged into a morning sparkling with dew. There were two other men with him besides the chauffeur; as was the custom with all VIPs in Japan, he never went anywhere without them. This time, though, he bade them stay where they were inside the car.

Alone, he walked slowly up the pine-needle-strewn path into the precincts of the Shinto shrine where he had gotten married. This was part of his weekly pilgrimage. If he was in Tokyo, no matter the weather, he would make the trek to the lakeside.

Far below him he could see the bright white dazzle of sunlight off the water through the thick stands of pines and cryptomeria.

On his way up to the inner sanctuary Sato passed beneath the crimson-lacquered
Myōjin torii
gate and, just beyond, paused to drop something in the offering box. Reaching just above it, he pulled the rope that rang the sacred bell which would awaken the resting
kami
who dwelled in this place and alert them of the presence of the arriving supplicant.

Inside the main sanctuary building, Sato knelt before the tables laden with offerings. Grouped around the tables were carved figures of sitting archers, spearmen,
samurai
wielding
katana.

Before the closed doors of the inner chamber wherein the
kami
resided stood the
Gohei
, a wooden wand with bits of folded paper hanging in zigzag fashion from it. Beside it was the
Haraigushi,
the purification wand, a small branch from the sacred
sakaki
tree.

Above, banners depicting the clouds and the moon hung, indicating the presence of the
kami.
Draped from one of the standards which held the banners was a brocaded cloth in which were hung the sword and jewels as well as the shield and halberd of the shrine. These were symbols both of the power of the
kami
in matters of wisdom and justice, and of protection against evil.