Linnear 02 - The Miko (61 page)

Nangi said nothing, wondering what the young man was getting at.

“Well, it has been mine,” Fortuitous Chiu said, just as if Nangi had interjected a comment. “And this one is no exception.”

“Does she love the Communist?”

“Oh, yes. I think she does. Though what she could find of sufficient promise in that lice-ridden motherless goat I cannot imagine. But what she feels for him is, I believe, irrelevant.” He cleared another plate, pulled another toward him. On went the soy sauce and the chili paste. “That is because it is clear to me that she loves money much more.”

“Ah,” said Nangi. He sensed the tides rolling back. “And where does she assuage this burning desire? From friend Liu?”

“Yes, indeed.” Fortuitous Chiu nodded. He had worked up quite a sweat eating. ‘The pox-infested dog enjoys giving her presents. But I fear that he is not as generous as our Succulent Pien would wish.”

“Thus she wanders afield.”

“So I have been told.”

Nangi was quick to anger; he was walking a fine line here. “Who knows what you do?”

“No one but you.” At last Fortuitous Chiu was finished. He pushed the last plate away from him. His face was shiny with grease and sweat. “But something she said to Liu caused me to make enquiries. Succulent Pien lives in the Mid-Levels, on Po Shan Road. That territory belongs to the Green Pang Triad.” He produced a white silk handkerchief and carefully wiped his face. He grinned. “It just so happens that my Number Three Cousin is 438 of the Green Pang.”

“I don’t want to owe anyone in a Triad a favor,” Nangi said.

“No sweat.” Fortuitous Chiu washed away his words. “Number Three Cousin owes his rise in the Green Pang to my father. He’s delighted to help. No strings attached.”

Nangi thought he could go into culture shock talking to this one. “Go on,” he said.

“It seems that someone else is plowing the same fragrant harbor that Comrade Liu is.”

“And who might that be?”

“I’m not a miracle worker. I need some time to find out. They’ve been very careful to cover their tracks.” He leered at Nangi. “Number Three Cousin and I may have to do some on-site inspection during the night.”

“Does the Green Pang have to be involved?”

“I’ve got no choice. It’s their turf. I can’t make a bowel movement over at the Mid-Levels without letting them in on it.”

Nangi nodded. He knew well the power of the Triads in Hong Kong. “What did Succulent Pien say to get you started on this?”

“Redman,” Fortuitous Chiu said. “Charles Percy Redman. She used his name. Know him?”

Nangi thought for a moment. “Shipping tai-pan, yes? British fellow. Family goes way back in Hong Kong.”

“That’s Redman,” Fortuitous Chiu acknowledged. “But what almost no one else knows is that he’s an agent for Her Majesty’s Government.”

“Redman a spy? Madonna!” Nangi was genuinely shocked. “But what’s his connection to Succulent Pien? Is she somehow raiding him?”

“Looks that way, doesn’t it?”

This is all very interesting, Nangi thought. But how does any of it help me with the Communists? My time is running out. If I don’t give Liu an affirmative by phone by six tonight, the deal’s off. I’ve got no capital, the All-Asia will fail and, eventually, so will the keiretsu.

“Is there more?” he asked.

“Not until I climb into bed with Succulent Pien and see what she’s got between her thighs.”

“It’s a pillow like all the rest,” Nangi observed tartly. “I need something before six.”

“This evening?” Fortuitous Chiu’s eyes opened wide. “No way, Jose. She’s home and not going anywhere. She had her amah go shopping for her. I think she’s whipping up a midnight snack for a friend. Early tomorrow morning’s the best I can do. I’m sorry.”

Nangi signed deeply. “Not nearly as much, I’m afraid, as I am.”

Night. The drip-drop of rain pattering all around them. The sky was black and impenetrable save for a tiny patch, a nacreous gray behind which the full moon rode as ghostly as the face of a former lover. The warm water moved in minute wavelets up to their bare flesh, reflections of the swinging yellow lanterns in the trees behind them in a white spangle, diffused and softened to a rich glow by the stream rising all about them.

A double strand of manmade lights, curved like a string of lustrous pearls around the neck of an exotic African princess, showed the way toward a black humpbacked shadow rising out of the undulating land. And behind its bulk must be the sea, for Nicholas could already scent the salt tang.

Sato stirred beside Nicholas, sending soft ripples away from them both. “Out there,” he said softly, “tell me that sight is not one of the most beautiful in the world, a sight that makes Japan unique.”

Nicholas followed the direction, saw the steep falloff of the cliffs down to the Pacific and on its heaving bosom the rhythmic bobbing of tiny orange lanterns hung from the prows and the sterns of the squid boats as their masters and crews bent to their task.

“They seem as small and fleeting as fireflies,” Nicholas said. His eyes were somnolent. It had been a long, hard day full of anxiety and fear for his friend’s life. And now the hot water was working its magic on his tensed body, loosening his knotted muscles, the cords in his neck and shoulders relaxing, the day’s accumulated tension leeching away from him.

It was not that his anxiety about allowing Sato to come had disappeared entirely. But with him here and Koten guarding the front of the rotenburo, he felt more confident than he had at the outset.

Sato luxuriated in feeling good. He stretched his long legs outward into the gently swirling water, sighing deeply with the sense of well-being this spa engendered in him.

It was then he felt something against his left calf, soft and warm, bumping, bumping, bumping with an odd kind of insistence.

Languidly, he leaned forward, imagining himself a crane gliding through the currents of a narrow inlet to the sea. His searching fingers grasped what felt at first like a bed of seaweed. Curious, Sato drew it upward slowly. It had great weight.

The rain let up. Racing clouds became visible as the lanterns’ glow illuminated their billowing undersides. Now they slid apart and the cool, opalescent light of the pocked moon crowned the silhouette of what he dragged upward from the steaming water.

Sato’s muscles bulged with the effort and he was obliged to use his hands even with Nicholas helping him, struggling with the monstrously heavy thing that now fell across his legs beneath the water.

Slowly it rose like a specter out of the deep, and Nicholas made a sharp movement beside him, grunting.

“Oh, Buddha!” Sato whispered. His hands shook so much that droplets flew from the thing like rain, off the great tiger curving around one shoulder, flung down the muscular back, the extended talons of the rear paws indented along the buckled ridge of the spine. Movement as if the colored tattoo had come alive.

“Oh,what have they done to you, Phoenix?” Sato cried softly.

Those eyes, milky and unseeing in death, fixed him as the bloated face rose, glittering in the moonlight, the teeth clamped together in pain and determination.

Akiko was thinking about the promise she had made to Saigo. Or, more precisely, to Saigo’s kami.

She rolled over on her futon, passing ah arm across her eyes. Red light blotted out the darkness. Giri. It bound her like steel manacles. Not for the first time, she found herself wishing that she had not been born Japanese. How free it must be to be American or English, and not feel gin. Because Akiko knew that if she did not feel giri she would not be bound by it. But she was Japanese. Samurai blood flowed through her veins. Oh, not the blood of the famed Ofuda. She had chosen that name upon her majority for much the same reason that Justine had chosen to call herself Tobin instead of Tomkin; she wished to conceal her past.

But had there ever been a time when she had thought of herself as Akiko Shimada? She did not even know her mother’s last name. In Fuyajo only given names were used, and oftentimes those were not real ones. Ikan. Had her mother been born with that name? Had she taken it inside Fuyajo? Or, what was just as likely, had those who ran the Castle That Knows No Night assigned it to her?

She put her hands down between her thighs, cupping herself. She could still feel the aftertremors, the expansion of her inner flesh that Nicholas’ stroking had caused. She would never be the same now. And, terrifyingly, was not sure that she wanted to be.

Then what of her vow? Revenge had shaped so much of her life, had given her purpose when she thought that she had none. Without the solace of revenge to warm her soul, she might have withered and died. Those who had driven her out of Fuyajo were long dead, put to endless sleep as she hovered over them in the night. But they were old men, and that was not true justice as she saw it. She could do nothing about their longevity; to her way of thinking they had seen the procession of too many days. Still she had avenged herself.

Life must have a shape. Revenge was her destiny. She must have been someone evil in a previous life, she had thought, for her karma in this one to be so unremitting.

Now Nicholas Linnear threatened that dark harmony. She supposed that she had known it from the moment she had first seen him in person at Jan Jan. He had melted a heart she had thought made of granite and ice. She thought in her arrogance that she was beyond love.

She was wrong.

As she wept on her futon in the otherwise deserted house of her husband and her prey, she beseeched the Amida Buddha only for absolution and death. For the thoughtoh, Buddha! the knowledgethat she could love just like any other mortal sent waves of panic through her. She had set her life on a certain course, believing specific things about herself.

But now the ache she felt through to the core of her spirit whenever she thought of Nicholas Linnearwhich was to say all the timeblasted her in the furnace of revelation. For she was sworn to destroy him.

She thought about turning away from her vow, of letting peace flow down around her. She dreamed of surcease.

But then she parted her naked thighs and stared down at the delicate flesh of their insides. On each writhed a flaming horned dragon, multicolored tattoos of fantastic workmanship.

And she knew that peace was not for her; or love either. For Kyoki had marked her soul just as surely as he had her flesh. There was no hope of surcease.

She had had her respite, the one lull in the storm, and for that time had reveled in the joy of another life. Giri bound her, heart and spirit. What had begun must be seen to its final conclusion.

She thought of Saigo again, standing strong and handsome in the forest glade in Kyushu, the sunlight striking his shoulders, silvering his hair. How his presence had altered her life!

She rose and went through the silent house. It already seemed dead and buried, the thick bars of sunlight beating against the closed panes of glass, seeking entry. But this was a house of the dead; the sun no longer held any dominion here.

Akiko glided from room to room as if fixing each space, each object in her mind for the last time. She touched everything; she moved everything. In this manner she came upon the mini tape recorder by which Koten had been eavesdropping on her husband.

When she rewound the tape and pressed “Play,” she heard all that Phoenix had said to Sato.

Rain puckered the skin of the rotenburo, splashing against their shoulders, beating against the tops of their heads. Neither of them felt a drop.

In the distance the beckoning amber lights of the squid boats winked on and off through the downpour as Nicholas and Sato hauled on Phoenix’s corpse, pulling it slowly out of the heated water.

“Amida!” Sato whispered through the sibilance of the rain, and scrambled hastily out of the pool, holding the small patch of cloth over his groin while he searched in the wetness and the dark for another one.

He returned as quickly as he could to where the ninja was stretched out by the side of the rotenburo, his legs crossed at the ankles, his arms spread wide. Sato placed the small square over Phoenix’s private parts.

“The indignity of it,” he murmured as he hunkered down beside Nicholas. There was no one else about; the rain had seen to that. “This is no way to die.”

“It was not how he would choose to go,” Nicholas said, and pointed. “Look here.” A hole, black and gaping, disfigured the back of Phoenix’s head. “This was done by no samurai.”

Sato looked sadly down at the corpse, white and bloated, spat upon by the storm. “It could be a KGB execution.” His voice was a trifle unsteady. “I had a cousin once in the Kempeitai. He knew all about such things and he told me. A bullet through the brain, that’s the Russian style.”

“Whoever did it,” Nicholas observed, “had to be very good indeed. This man was ninja sensei.”

Sato put his head in his hands. “He had information for us. Perhaps he got careless. He was certain that the Soviets had no knowledge of his pursuit.”

“He had to have been surprised here. He would never have died otherwise. This could not have happened in a pitched battle. They were here, waiting for him.”

Sato lifted his head. His eyes were red rimmed and perplexed. “But how?”

Nicholas did not like the answer he was about to give. “If there’s a traitor in the keiretsu, perhaps he is closer than that. Inside your kobun.”

“Nonsense,” Sato said. “No one from my kobunabsolutely no oneknew where I was going. Phoenix’s call came to the house. Only you were there. Akiko”

“And Koten.”

“Koten?” Sato’s eyes were wide all around. “Oh, Buddha, no!” Then he considered. “He has been with me the last three or four times Phoenix phoned.” He shook his head. “But even so, I took great pains to make certain I was alone when we spoke.”

“You mean it was impossible for him to eavesdrop.”

“Well, no. I mean” Sato slammed fist into palm. “Koten is sensei of sumai, the most ancient form of his art: combat sumo. Phoenix knew him, trusted him.” He looked to the sky. “Muhonnin!” he cried.

Between them steam rose slowly from Phoenix’s cooling body and it seemed as if the twisted, multicolored tattoo that covered his shoulder and back was rising with the mist, the only part of him still alive.