The Miko - 02 (71 page)

Nangi decided to test him. “It was nothing at all.”

“Enough for the police to be called in, yes?”

“Traditionally the police are summoned when more than a score of Chinese assemble in one place in the Crown Colony,” Nangi observed blandly. “It gives Her Majesty’s Government something to do.”

“Even the voracious crow knows when to quit the corner field, Mr. Nangi.”

This all had the appearance of an elaborate charade. It was as if Liu felt compelled to drag out the hoary cliché of the aphoristic Chinese. But why? Surely he knew that it would not impress a Japanese. Then it occurred to Nangi that charades were never acted out unless there was an audience.

Shadows wreathed the rafters inside the Sun Wa Trading Company. Outside, the Light had failed, so that even the skylight far above had turned opaque and impenetrable. Sawdust on the floor, the spices rich and pungent. If there was movement in the darkness, Nangi could not detect it. Yet his sense that he and Liu were not alone was inescapable.

“How bad was the run, Mr. Nangi?” Liu was pouring more tea. It seemed he was bent on carefully delineating the boundaries of his superiority.

“I am certain that you already know that, Mr. Liu,” Nangi said carefully. “All runs are bad in and of themselves. That’s obvious.”

“What is obvious to me, Mr. Nangi,” Liu said, sipping his tea again, “is that you will not make it without our direct intervention.”

“That occurred to me as well. That is why I called.”

Perhaps this was all Liu had wanted in the first place: a humbling by verbal admission, for he nodded now as if accepting a compliment. He inclined his head toward the contract. “I trust you will find each clause you required satisfactorily rendered.” He spoke as if it had been he who had made all the negotiating concessions; as if it were he who were under the gun and not Nangi.

For a moment Nangi did nothing. To make an immediate move would have cost him too much face, and he had already given up more than he could spare by agreeing to this meeting. After a suitable amount of time had elapsed, he took up the document and commenced to read. Every sentence froze his spirit, every clause to which he was being forced to sign his name made him sick at heart. The moment he touched pen to paper, effective control of his
keiretsu
would be transferred to Liu’s masters in Peking.

The Chinese had placed an old-fashioned fountain pen squarely in the middle of the table top. Nangi would be obliged to reach for it.

“We plan no immediate intervention or policy change,” Liu said. “There is absolutely no cause for alarm.”

“I was thinking of the thirty-five million dollars,” Nangi said. “It must be delivered by eight
A.M.
tomorrow morning.”

Liu nodded, unperturbed. Where were his “firm’s” prior commitments now? “If you would ask Mr. Su and whichever other bank officers you designate to appear at the All-Asia Bank’s main vault in Central, that sum will be handed over to them.”

Oh, yes, Nangi thought. I’m certain you’re quite familiar with our vaults, thanks to Comrade Chin. But what he said was, “That will be entirely satisfactory.”

And then, deliberately ignoring the fountain pen Liu had set on the table, Nangi extracted a pen of his own and signed the last page of both sets of contracts. Retrieving his pen, Liu did the same. He pushed the top copy back to Nangi’s side.

“A little more tea, perhaps?” His eyes danced in the darkness.

Nangi declined. Folding away the document, which felt hot and unclean to his hands, he was about to rise when Liu’s motion stayed him.

From within the Chinese’s breast pocket a shiny red envelope appeared. Liu handed it to Nangi without a word.

Nangi looked at him enquiringly.

“We Chinese have a custom, Mr. Nangi. It is most civilized. The sum inside that envelope is payment for transfer; transfer of ownership, of power, call it what you will. With the physical transfer there can be no loss of face because there has been an exchange, one for the other.”

Nangi nodded respectfully, as if they were two men exchanging pleasantries on a park bench. But in his heart he seethed, the anger crackling through him, making his pulse skip a beat. Nothing in his outward manner conveyed his inner resolve. To Liu and whoever else might be watching, concealed in the shadows, he was a clever businessman at the crevasse of defeat.

Carefully, Nangi slid the red envelope away next to the document that lay like a lead weight against his heart. He pushed away from the table and, taking up his cane, rose and walked awkwardly out of the Sun Wa Trading Company to where his chauffeured car was waiting for him.

There was no aspect of nightlife that interested him so he went directly back to the hotel. Food tasted like ash and stuck in his throat as if it were the contract itself that Liu and his masters had coerced him into signing. Stoically he went on eating until his plate was clean, and then could not remember what it was that he had ordered. It did not matter.

Undressed, he lay atop his bed and stared up at the ceiling, at the river of the past. As always,
kanryōdō
consumed him. Once a warrior, always a warrior, he thought. It was impossible to hang up your
katana
, even if, as in his case, it was figurative rather than literal.

The face of Makita, his
sempai,
floated through the clouds of his memory as it often did. Rather than allow them to take out his diseased stomach, he had committed
seppuku.
He had asked Nangi to be his second and, acquiescing, Nangi had taken up his mentor’s long sword and with one swift overhand strike had ended the excruciating pain of the two
wakizashi
slashes, the first lateral, the second vertical, that Makita had managed to inflict himself.

And though it had been the honorable thing to do, though Nangi had had no choice but to comply with his
sempai
’s wishes, still he was ashen as he stared at the bloody blade, his friend and surrogate father’s head on the
tatami
; he shook all over as if he had contracted ague. His skin felt feverish and dry and there was no saliva with which to swallow.

Surely, Nangi had thought, Christ could not have wished such a thing. And he had fled to church where, in the Confessional, he had spewed out what he had done in rapid-fire bursts like retching. But even that could not cleanse him and he spent the next six hours on his knees before the image of Christ on the Cross, praying for forgiveness.

It had been Sato who had come for him, persuading him to leave that sanctuary where the real world could not intrude. “My friend,” Sato had said softly, “you cannot possibly blame yourself. You did what had to be done, what any
samurai
would do. You stood by your friend when he needed you the most. What more can you ask of yourself? It was
giri.
”

Nangi’s eyes had been full of pain and self-loathing. “It was not the Christian thing to do, Seiichi-san.”

To which Sato had had no reply but to get Nangi out of there.

Thoughts of Makita inevitably led Nangi back to
mabiki
, the decades-long weeding-out process he had performed at MITI for his
sempai.
How many had he “slain” in this way, destroying any chance they had for advancement in Japanese bureaucracy? Always he asked himself that question, because always he was uneasy with what he had done.

Shimada had been the first one; Shimada had been the beginning of
mabiki.
He had paid for his greed and his shortsightedness. He could not see change coming, and thus Nangi had doomed him to humiliation or death. Shimada had chosen the honorable path and had committed
seppuku
, opening the way for Makita’s immediate appointment as first vice-minister of MITI.

Shimada had been the hardest one. After that, the
mabiki
was easier to handle, the concept easier for Nangi to accept.
Kanryōdō
’s precepts had hardened his heart.

Now, sweating in a hotel room in a foreign colony clinging with the tenaciousness of woodbine to the very tip of the Asian continent, his great dream lost to him, he wondered piteously whether he had murdered in the name of Christ.

He was never quite certain whether the ringing of the telephone had roused him out of slumber or deep thought. In any case, he rolled over and grabbed for the instrument. The glowing dial of his wristwatch told him that it was thirteen minutes before four
A.M.
A Chinese might have found this an inauspicious numerical combination; Nangi did not care.

“Yes?”

“It’s Fortuitous Chiu,” came the thin voice down the wire. “I’m on Po Shan Road, a block from Succulent Pien’s flat.” He sounded a bit out of breath.

Nangi sat up. “Haven’t you been able to find a way in yet?”

“Been in and out already.” Now Nangi recognized the excitement in the other’s voice. “I think you’d better get down here pronto.”

“What is it?”

“Forgive my bluntness, sir, but I don’t think you’d believe me if I told you outright. If you see for yourself, that’ll be another story.”

“I’m on my way,” Nangi said, his heart beginning to beat fast. The sweat had dried on his skin. Swinging his legs over the side of the bed, he reached for his cane.

The vault was as airless as it was lightless. Behind him Nicholas could hear the circular door through which he had stepped sighing closed. He heard the pneumatics and was not cheered.

Alone and in total darkness, he moved to where his
haragei
told him was the center of the vault. Then he stood still, his senses questing. A desk and several chairs, a lamp unlit, some machinery which it was beyond him to identify in the absence of visuals. A kind of wooden scaffolding whose purpose was also a mystery to him.

Took stock. He was on Hokkaido but he did not know where since Koten had blindfolded him after binding him hand and foot. He had then been carried to what he could only guess was the trunk of the Soviets’ car and locked in. They had driven for just under an hour. Giving the car an average speed of forty-five m.p.h. put him in a radius of approximately thirty-five to forty miles from the
rotenburo.
He knew that was not good enough.

Humming invading the void of darkness in which he stood, broke through his thoughts. It was subtle, might not have been discerned by a normal man.

Immediately Nicholas went toward the sound, sniffing like an animal, quick, shallow breaths. Scented it when he was fifteen feet away from the vent high up in the wall and turned away, getting away from that side of the room. It would only prolong the time that he had left before the chloroform derivative took effect on him. But he needed all the time he could get now.

“I don’t see why we’re waiting so long,” the doctor said pointedly. “It only takes the gas three-and-a-half minutes to fully permeate the vault space.” He waggled the wrist on which his chronometer was fastened so that those around him would not miss the fact that it had been almost fifteen minutes since the gas—an interesting mixture of a soporific in the chloroform group and a powerful peyote concentrate, altered to be effective when inhaled rather than ingested—had been pumped into the room.

“Patience, Doctor,” Viktor Protorov said calmly. “I fully appreciate your enthusiasm to sink your spikes into a new client, but I think I know what is best in this case.”

The doctor shrugged his shoulders, began a ragged rendition of “The Czarist and the Revolutionary,” a folk song his grandmother had taught him when he was a child, just to show these others that he was not the total Protorov puppet that they were.

With the doctor and Protorov were Pyotr Alexandrovitch Russilov, Koten, and a pair of junior lieutenants under Russilov’s direct command. The most recent Alpha-three codes had brought Protorov word that Yvgeny Mironenko, the GRU colonel, had received enough vouchers from his compatriots for Protorov to hold a special session of the General Staff. All the senior generals would be in attendance. All that was required now, Mironenko’s most recent communiqué had said, was for Protorov to bring the generals proof of his power.

Proof of my power, Protorov thought now.
Tenchi!
Then, for the first time in history, the GRU and the KGB will be united in a common cause. The Kremlin will shake to the sound of our bootsteps, the old men will fall before us like stalks of wheat; the day of the bureaucrat will be a memory; all the Russians will be on the march. The day of the Second Revolution will have dawned!

With great difficulty he kept his elation concealed; not even Russilov must suspect the vast changes forming on the horizon. Not yet. He will have his hands full running the Ninth, Protorov thought. I do not want to give him too much, too soon.

“All right, clear the vault,” he ordered.

One of the junior lieutenants, responding to a hand sign from Russilov, Shut one valve, opened another. A pair of 150 h.p. suction fans drew the noxious fumes out of the room. When the red light ceased to glow, replaced by the green one, Protorov ordered the vault door unsealed.

Koten went first, then Russilov and the two junior lieutenants. The doctor and Protorov brought up the rear. Inside, they could smell nothing. The air was pure and clean again.

The men fanned out into the vault as if they were a line of gentlemen on the hunt: arrogant in the knowledge of their elite status, yet wary of a new and extremely dangerous prey.

“He seems quiescent enough,” the doctor said, pushing his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. “I don’t think there is going to be anything different about him.”.

Thinking him a fool, Protorov signed to Koten. As the enormous
sumō
moved across the room, Protorov paced him at a tangent that took him to a spot directly in front of where Nicholas lay on his left side.

“Breathing is deep and regular,” the doctor said, circling the fallen figure “No eyelid flicker; pulse is slowed, skin color is consistent with deep delta unconscious state.” He recited these medical observations like a litany against that which he did not understand and therefore could not control.

From his position, Protorov signed to Russilov to move into position just behind Nicholas. “All right,” he told Koten.