The Miko - 02 (80 page)

“Then what?”

Oh, good, Minck thought. This man
is
clever in addition to being resourceful. He has killed two of my agents and evaded termination from another—my most deadly, my most traitorous Tanya. Perhaps he can do what none other I can call on could. Perhaps, he thought, as he began to talk of Tanya Vladimova and her ultimate betrayal, of her manipulation of the “Spearfish” ops, which was Alix Logan’s detention / protection, this man can destroy that which Protorov and I, jointly, created.

Inside, C. Gordon Minck began to glow. Like a man who has won back his life at the brink of death, he was suffused with an eerie kind of elation that made his fingertips tremble.

It was not difficult to sell Croaker on what he must do. Minck had two powerful motivations which he offered the man sitting across from him and which Minck was quite certain he could not refuse. If the situation were reversed, Minck was aware, he would have been hooked just as much as he perceived Croaker was becoming.

Revenge and patriotism. These were the two reasons that Minck suspected Croaker would accept this bargain. Tanya had personally tried to kill him and his charge; that was something Croaker could not tolerate. He wanted her now, and Minck could not blame him at all. They both wanted her, he explained. It was merely that Croaker was in a position to get her while Minck was not.

Then there was the Russian angle. No one liked that, least of all Minck himself. Croaker was right behind him there.

“You’ll have full diplomatic immunity,” Minck concluded, “a new identity as far as Customs and Immigration are concerned. You’ll have full support over there if you need it.” He waited a beat. “And you’ll be linking up with an old friend of yours, Nicholas Linnear.” He had saved what he suspected would be the best for last. The clincher.

And Croaker bit.

But a half hour after the detective lieutenant had been provided with a new passport, birth certificate, business papers, et al; money in the form of American dollars, Japanese yen, and American Express traveler’s checks, and delivered to Dulles International to make his flight to Tokyo, Minck abruptly broke down and, for the first time since his long incarceration in Lubyanka, wept bitter tears. He thought of what had been done to him and what, in retaliation, he had been forced to do.

Meanwhile, the object of Minck’s love and hate was at the moment debarking at Narita Airport outside smogbound Tokyo. She had not had a pleasant flight. Just after takeoff from Kennedy she had taken two sleeping pills and had fallen into a leaden slumber which had been dominated by visions from her childhood. Protorov stalked her dreams like a sentry, on horseback and on foot, weaponed and booted; wherever she went he was there before her.

Tanya was back in grade school in Rechitsa, the closest town to the rural hamlet where her family lived. Already there was friction at home. Her older brother, Mikhail, did not approve of their father being a policeman. As such her father was in touch with the KGB, whose black-raincoated agents appeared at the house from time to time to remind him to report all unpatriotic activity within his purview.

Within six months Mikhail would leave him, and within a year, at eighteen, would become one of the more militant—and successful—dissidents working inside Russia.

But by that time the headmaster of the school in Rechitsa had journeyed by an old and dilapidated car out to Tanya’s house to speak to her parents. She had been offered a scholarship to a fine academy with facilities that, regretfully, the headmaster’s school lacked. She was an extremely bright girl, he said, and deserving of this chance. But certain sacrifices had to be made. This new academy was in the Urals, a good 750 kilometers away.

Tanya’s mother had cried at the prospect. After all, her son had already gone. But Tanya’s father was firm. He was only a country constable, he said, and he wanted at least one of his children to have the benefits he had never had.

So it was settled, much to the relief of the headmaster since a great deal of pressure had been put on him by Protorov himself to bring Tanya to his academy. Quite naturally, her parents and Tanya herself had no idea of the skew of the new school’s curriculum.

After she arrived there and discovered where she was and what she would be made into, she dutifully wrote home every week. Never did she hint to her parents or to anyone else, for that matter, as to the academy’s true nature, though in truth, perhaps, she longed to tell her father, knowing how proud he would be and how this knowledge might help assuage the terrible ache he felt inside from Mikhail’s betrayal.

Protorov. She tried him from the airport while waiting for her one bag to come through, then again when she reached the pulsing overpopulated heart of Tokyo. She used the four-digit access code and received the same answer both times: dead air.

That in itself was not alarming, but Pyotr Alexandrovitch Russilov’s presence at her hotel was. She registered, had her bag sent up to her room, then allowed the lieutenant to guide her back outside where they strolled amid jostling throngs of gray-suited men carrying black rolled umbrellas just as if they were Londoners. Many wore white masks over nose and mouth, an increasingly common sight in this city.

Tanya judged that Russilov did not look at all good. His color was pale and he had picked up a nervous habit sometime recently of turning his head to see what was happening behind him. She liked none of this.

But she liked even less what he had come south to tell her.

Her skin was like crepe, the most delicate of rice paper crumpled beneath a powerful fist, translucent still even after seventy-nine years.

“I will be eighty tomorrow,” she told him. There was no pride in her voice, merely wonder that life could last so long.

Even now she was one of the most beautiful creatures he had ever seen. As a child he had often compared her beauty to his mother’s. He had always found her perfect symmetry losing out to Cheong’s more exotic beauty. It was natural, perhaps, for him to be loyal to his mother. But there had been something more: he had hated her for being Saigō’s mother, and was blinded.

“Is there anything else I can get you?” Itami asked.

His head was lowered. “No,
Haha-san.
” Mother. Much had passed between them for him to be able to call her that, from the time he had come stumbling to the portals of her house.

She lived where she always had ever since he had known her, on the outskirts of Tokyo, to the northwest, not far from the spot where Sato and Akiko had been married. Nicholas had made an arduous journey south from Hokkaido, breaking into a clothing store at night and, armed with fresh clothes and some money, trekking down to Hakodate. He could have stolen a car but did not want to leave such a clear trail to those who might follow or even for the police who would inevitably investigate the break-in at the clothing store. They would pursue their investigation with the assiduousness with which the Japanese approached every task. The less he gave them, the more secure he felt.

He used buses occasionally and, when he was able, hitched rides. He avoided both main highways and railways, however, knowing trails were more easily left there.

At last, at the southern coastal town he took the ferry across Tsugarukaikyō to Aomori on Honshu’s rocky northern tip.

Lacking papers, he could not rent a car, and in any event preferred to utilize buses again, heading roughly south in a zigzag, nonlinear route.

He had been terrified at the thought of seeing his aunt again. It was he who had murdered her only child; it had been Nicholas’ father who had garroted her husband, for which Saigō had in turn poisoned the Colonel and, years later, had pursued Nicholas all the way to New York.

He did not know how she would greet him; he could not imagine what he could possibly say to her. What were words—
any
words—in the face of the finality of death. Nicholas thought that the words “I’m sorry” were perhaps the most inadequate in the English language. But there was nothing much better in Japanese or in any of the world’s tongues for that matter.

The house was built by an architect who had been elderly when Itami and her husband, Satsugai, had commissioned him. He revered the old styles of the seventeenth century, which, he had said, were still the best. Time was their proof, had been their victory.

He had designed this house after one in Kyoto called Katsura Rikyu, an imperial villa from four hundred years ago which was still the finest example of the blending of the manmade with the natural to be found in all of Japan.

“What I try to do,” the old man had said, “is to impose my spirit upon nature so that it appears to remain natural.”

That the result of his handiwork was exquisite in the Japanese sense of the word was without question. Perhaps too many of these details had been too subtle for Nicholas’ mind when he was younger for he had not loved the house as a whole but only one room: the one in which the
chano-yu
was performed.

And it was to this room that he was conducted after he had been met at the door by servants, Itami informed of his arrival, bathed, and his hurts attended to by a bent old man who spoke to himself in a constant singsong but who nevertheless knew what he was doing.

Feeling better than he had in many days, Nicholas knelt alone in the room, turned toward the garden outside. The opening was all the length of the room and perhaps six feet high. However, the top half was covered by a rice-paper latticework screen, so that only the bottom part of the garden could be viewed while being immersed in the tea ceremony. It was a peculiarly Zen concept: to have as part of your surroundings the wonders of nature, yet only so much. Beyond that invisible boundary, it was felt, one would have been overwhelmed by the bittersweet delicacy of the cherry blossoms or the flamboyant fan of autumnal foliage and thus the concentration one needed for
chano-yu
—the harmony of this place—would have been broken.

Sunlight, splintered by the trees, splattered against the lattice, turning it the color of newly churned butter, warming the room in tone and temperature. A lone bird strode through the pebbles of the garden, pecking here and there.

A breeze sprang up and rustled the tops of the cryptomeria, making soft shadows move behind the screen, on the polished wood floor. Nicholas shuddered inwardly, remembering the trembling flight on the
hito washi
, the ruffling of his tattered clothes like pinfeathers, the rush of the night against his face, the fear that the inconstant wind might die in midgust, sending him diving hard against stands of bamboo.

Exhilaration and terror mingled within him like liquor, tingling his blood.

He was exhausted again. Physically the drugs had been dissipated, eliminated from his system. Yet their accumulated effect on muscles, tissue, and brain still lingered. Exercise was the only remedy for that.

She came into his sight with a stiff rustle of silk. He rose and bowed, his heart in his throat. He was overcome by the awesome majesty of her beauty. It was not as if time had not touched her, merely that she had somehow made it her friend rather than her enemy. Time followed her about like a tamed animal, present but quite irrelevant.

“Itami-san.” His voice was a reedy whisper.
“Oba.”

“Sit, please, Nicholas-san.”

He did so, not wishing to analyze what was in her eyes; what was in her mind.

After tea and rice cakes had been served, after they were alone again, she said, “It is so good that you have returned. My heart is gladdened to see you again,
watashi no musuko.
” My son.

Something broke within him and he bent forward until his forehead touched the glossy wood with the ache inside him. He wept, no longer able to hold all his emotions within him, his Japanese side ashamed even as he did so; but his Western side needed this release and could no longer be denied by any discipline on earth.

“Watashi no musuko.”
Her voice held such tenderness that she might, indeed, have been his mother. “I knew you would come back. I prayed you would have the courage.”

“I was afraid,
Oba.
” His voice, too, was tear streaked. “I was afraid because of what I had done. I did not want to face all the pain I have caused you.”

“You never caused me any pain at all, Nicholas,” she said softly. “You were always more a son to me than my own blood child ever was. His was a weak spirit, and he belonged body and soul to his father. Satsugai ruled him as the sun does the earth. It was Satsugai who determined Saigō’s life path; it was his paranoia which Saigō absorbed.”

Nicholas became aware that at no time had she referred to Saigō as “my son.” That was quite odd in a mother. His head came up and their eyes met. He found no anger there nor even any sadness. Rather there was a mix of resignation and love…love for him.

“He was totally evil,” Itami said. “I never before believed such a thing possible in a human being. Complexity, after all, vitiates extremes, or at least one believes that it should.” She shook her head. “Not in Saigō’s case. There was an uncanny purity to him that might have been admirable if it had been channeled in a proper direction.

“That it was not was a burden I was obliged to live with. I should be shamed to say that I wished him dead, but I am not. How could I be? Everything he came in contact with withered and died. He was a spirit-destroyer.”

“Even so,” Nicholas said. “I am not proud that I destroyed him.”

“Of course not,” she said. “You acted with honor. You are your mother’s son.”

All at once he realized that she was smiling at him. Without thought he did the same, his heart lightening just as the clouds roll back after the thunder of a storm.

For a long time they did nothing but that, basking in the presence of each other’s spirit, becoming reacquainted, finding a new, and unexpected, level to their relationship that the heavy baggage of the past had denied to them before.

“I’m glad you came when you did,” she said the next day. “We’ve had one or two earth tremors, nothing major, but uncomfortable enough.”