Linnear 02 - The Miko (7 page)

He looked from one foreign face to another; one bleak, forbidding countenance to the next. They’re just businessmen, he told himself. Nothing more. Nangi said nothing, which, in Tomkin’s opinion, was a giant step forward.

“Proposals and counterproposals must not be made in haste,” Sato said. “The war is often lost through the impulsiveness of an intemperate nature. As Sun Tzu so wisely tells us, ‘When the strike of a hawk breaks the body of its prey, it is because of timing.’”

He stood up and bowed as Nicholas and Tomkin rose automatically. Nangi rose awkwardly, stood swaying slightly. “At tomorrow afternoon’s meeting,” Sato continued, “we will discuss this further when associates and legal counsel are all present to add their wisdom to our own. For now, I would hope you will find time to enjoy our city.” They murmured their assent and he said, “Good. My car will be at the Okura at two P.M. tomorrow to bring you here.”

He bowed again, formally, and Nangi did the same. “Until tomorrow, gentlemen. I wish you a restful evening.” Then he took Nangi out of the room before another word could be spoken.

“That goddamned sonuvabitch Nangi.” Tomkin paced his hotel room. “Why didn’t my people brief me about him?” Back and forth while Nicholas watched. “That bombshell he laid on us about having been a MITI vice-minister, Christ. Do you think he’ll actually block the merger?”

Nicholas ignored Tomkin’s agitated state.

Tomkin answered his own question. “I know he’s for sure gonna try to sweeten their percentage.”

Nicholas had picked up a large square buff envelope off the writing desk. He flicked its stiff corner with a fingernail.

“Stop playing and tell me what you think, goddamn it.”

Nicholas looked up. “Patience, Tomkin,” he said softly. “I told you in the beginning that pulling this merger off would require patienceperhaps more patience than you have.”

“Bullshit!” Tomkin came over to where Nicholas was standing. His eyes narrowed. “You saying they’re outmaneuvering me?”

Nicholas nodded. “Trying to, at least. The Japanese are never open about negotiation. They won’t come to terms until the very last instant because they’re looking to see what will happen in the interim. Nine out of ten times, they feel, something will occur to their benefit. So until then, they’ll do their best to keep us off balance.”

“You mean like Nangi,” Tomkin said thoughtfully. “Put a fox in the henhouse.”

“And see what evolves.” Nicholas nodded again. “Quite right. Perhaps, they reasoned, the friction would bring out your real anxiety in making the deal and they could negotiate better terms tomorrow or Monday.” He tapped the envelope against his finger. “The Japanese knew that you never come to a negotiation showing your true nature. To deal effectively with you, they must find this out. It’s called To Move the Shade. It’s from the warrior Miyamoto Musashi’s guide to strategy. He wrote it in 1645 but all good Japanese businessmen apply his principles to their business practices.”

“To Move the Shade,” Tomkin said thoughtfully. “What is it?”

“When you cannot see your opponent’s true spirit, you make a quick decisive feint attack. As Musashi writes, he will then show his long swordtoday we can transform that into meaning his negotiation spiritthinking he has seen your spirit. But you have shown him nothing of value and he has instead revealed his inner strategy to you.”

“And that’s just what happened a few minutes ago with Sato and Nangi?”

Nicholas shrugged. “That depends on how much they actually drew you out.”

Tomkin touched the tips of his fingers to his temple. “Well, it doesn’t matter worth a damn,” he said a little breathily. “I have you, Nick, and between us we’re gonna squeeze these bastards into the box I have waiting for themMusashi’s strategy or not.”

“Like the disparity in profit figures?” Nicholas said sardonically. “You told me Sphynx’s share would come to a hundred million but the figures you gave Sato indicate that Sphynx and the Sato kobun will be splitting a hundred and fifty million between them.”

“Ah, what’s fifty mil more or less,” Tomkin said, massaging his temple with some force. He grimaced. “Goddamn migraines.” He looked at Nicholas wearily. “My doctor says it’s purely a product of the world I live in.” He made a rueful smile. “You know what he prescribed? A permanent Palm Springs vacation. He wants me to rot by the side of a pool like the rest of those flyblown palms.” He winced at the pain. “But he ought to know, all right. He’s writing a book called Fifteen Ways to a Migraine-Free Life. He thinks it’s going to be a bestseller. ‘Everyone gets migraines these days,’ he says. ‘God bless stress.’”

Tomkin went and sat down on the edge of the plush sofa. He opened the small refrigerator just beyond, poured himself a drink. “What’ve you got there?”

“It’s a hand-delivered invitation. I got one as well.”

Tomkin put down his drink. “Let’s see it.” He tore open the flap, pulled out a stiff, engraved card. “It’s in goddamned kanji” he said angrily, pushing it back at Nicholas. “What’s it say?”

“You and I, it seems, are invited to Sato’s wedding. It’s on Saturday.”

Tomkin grunted, downed the remainder of his drink in one gulp. “Christ,” he murmured, “just what we need now.” He looked up as he poured himself another. “How about you?”

Nicholas shook his head and Tomkin shrugged. “Just trying to get your liver in shape. These sonsabitch.es drink their Suntory Scotch like it was water. You go out with them of an evening, you’d better be prepared for the onslaught.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” Nicholas said coldly. “I’m well aware of their habits.”

“Sure, sure,” Tomkin said. “Just trying to be friendly. You did all right on the battlefield with those two jokers.” He gestured with his glass. “You speak to Justine yet?”

Nicholas shook his head. “She didn’t want me to take this trip at all.”

“Well, that’s only natural. I’m sure she’s missing you.”

Nicholas watched Tomkin wade through his second Scotch on the rocks and wondered if that was an antidote to his migraines.

“It’s more than that,” he said slowly. “When Saigo got to her he used saiminjutsu on her, a little-known art even among ninja.”

“A kind of hypnosis, wasn’t it?”

“In a way, in Western terms. But it went way beyond that.” He sat down next to Tomkin. “She tried to kill me. It was the hypnotic suggestion Saigo planted within her, but still.” He shook his head. “My healing broke the saiminjutsu spell, but the deep remorse she feels… I was not able to erase.”

“She blames herself? But it’s not her fault!”

“How many times have I assured her of that.”

Tomkin swirled the dregs of his drink around and around. “She’s a tough one. Take it from me, I know. She’ll get over it.”

Nicholas was thinking of how badly Justine had taken his decision to work for her father. Her bitterness toward what she saw as her father’s manipulation of her life up until just several years ago was understandable to him. They were, he felt, two people unable to communicate with each other. Tomkin had expected certain things from her and, not finding them, had reacted in his typical overbearing manner. Justine simply could not forgive him for his various intrusions into her life.

Repeatedly he had used bribes or threats to discourage a succession of boyfriends. “My father’s a master manipulator, Nick,” she had told him over and over again. “He’s a bastard without a heart or a conscience. He’s never cared about anyone but himself, not me, certainly not Gelda; not even my mother.”

Yet, Nicholas knew, Justine was blind to the kind of men she had been attracted to. They had been manipulators allfar worse than her father ever had been. No wonder Tomkin had been so hostile toward him when they had first met. He naturally assumed that Nicholas was another in the long line bent on using his daughter.

It was impossible to make Justine see that it was his very love for her that obliged him to interfere in an area that, up until now, she had been unable to handle. This did not absolve Tomkin, but it seemed a realistic starting point for the two of them to come together and possibly understand each other.

The tirade that had followed Nicholas’ announcement of his going to work for Tomkin Industries, if only temporarily, had been followed by days of uncomfortable silence; Justine had simply not wanted to talk about it further. But in the last days before his departure it had seemed to Nicholas as if she had relented a bit, and was more at ease with his decision. “After all,” she had said as she saw him off, “it’s only for a while, isn’t it?”

“What?” he said now, setting his concern for her back in its niche in the shadows of his mind.

“I asked who Sato’s marrying,” Tomkin said.

Nicholas looked down at the invitation. “A woman named Akiko Ofuda. Do you know anything about her?”

Tomkin shook his head.

“She’s the newest major interest in your partner’s life,” Nicholas said seriously. “I think it’s time you thought about hiring a new team of researchers.”

With great difficulty Tanzan Nangi turned fully around. At his back the snow-clad slopes of Fuji-yama were fast disappearing into a vast golden haze the consistency of bisque. Tokyo buzzed at his feet like a giant pachinko machine.

“I don’t like him,” he said, his voice like chalk scraping a blackboard.

“Tomkin?”

Nangi arched an eyebrow as he extracted a cigarette from its case. “You know very well whom I mean.”

Sato gave him a benevolent smile. “Of course you don’t, my friend. Isn’t that why you assigned Miss Yoshidaa woman to meet them at the airport? Tell me which Japanese business associate of ours you would have insulted in that fashion. None, I can tell you! You even disapprove of the amount of responsibility I accord her here because it is, as you say, man’s province, and not the traditional way.”

“You have always run this kobun as you have seen fit. I begrudge you nothing, as you know quite well. But as for these iteki, I saw no earthly reason why we should lose valuable man-hours by reassigning an upper-echelon executive for their convenience.”

“Oh, yes,” Sato said. “Tomkin is a gaijin and Nicholas Linnear is something far worse to you. He’s only half Oriental. And then it has never been determined to anyone’s satisfaction how much of that is Japanese.”

“Are you saying that I am a racist?” Nangi said, blowing out smoke.

“Not in the least.” Sato sat back in his swivel chair. “Merely a patriot.” He shrugged. “But in the end what does Cheong Linnear’s lineage mean to us?”

“It’s a potential lever.” Nangi’s odd triangular eyes blazed with a dark light. “We are going to need every weapon in our arsenal to bring down these brash itekithese barbarians who think of us as so much rice they can gobble up.” Nangi’s shoulders quivered at odd moments as if they had a will of their own. “Do you think it means anything to me that his father was Colonel Linnear, the ‘round-eyed savior of Japan’?” His face screwed up in contempt. “How could any iteki feel for us, Seiichi, tell me that.”

“Sit down, old friend,” Sato said softly, taking his eyes off the older man to save him face. “You already hurt enough as it is.”

Nangi said nothing but, walking awkwardly, managed to sit at right angles to Sato, his back erect, his thin buttocks against the very edge of the chair.

Sato knew that Nangi was lucky to be alive. But of course life was a relative thing and this thorny enigma was never far from his thoughts, even now after thirty-eight years. Did the man tied to the iron lung think life was worthwhile? So, too, Sato sometimes wished to crawl inside his friend’s head for just the moment it would take to learn the answer to the riddle. And in those moments shame would suffuse him; precisely the same kind of shame he had felt when his older brother, Gotaro, had found him sitting, sexually aroused by their father’s book of shunga, erotic prints.

There was no privacy in Japan, it was often said. The crowding because of the lack of space that had existed for centuries; the building materialsoiled paper and woodthat the islands’ frequent and devastating earthquakes, the seasonal typhoons dictated be used in order to facilitate speedy rebuilding: these factors went a long way in guiding the flow of Japanese society.

Because real privacy, as a Westerner understands it, is physically impossible, the Japanese have developed a kind of inner privacy that, outwardly, manifests itself by the many-layered scheme of formality and politeness that each individual lives by because it is his only bulwark against the encroachment of chaos.

That was why the thought of stepping into someone else’s mind, especially so close a friend, brought the sweat of shame out on Sato. Now he riffled through the file they had compiled on Tomkin Industries in order to cover his intense discomfort.

“As for Tomkin, we should not underestimate him, Nangi-san,” he said now. Nangi looked up as he heard the note of weariness in the younger man’s voice.

“How so?”

“His blustering barbarian ways cannot mask for long his keen mind. He hit us squarely when he said that we’re much too dependent on foreign energy sources to allow ourselves to become isolated from the rest of the world.”

Nangi waved away Sato’s words. “A mere stab in the dark. The man’s an animal, nothing more.”

Sato gave a deep sigh. “And yet he’s quite correct. Why else would we be laboring so long and hard on Tenchi, eh? It is something that is critically draining our financial resources; it is the most desperate gamble Japan has taken since Pearl Harbor. In many ways it is more crucial to this country’s future than the war ever was. We were able to rebound from that defeat.” Sato shook his head. “But if Tenchi should fail or ifBuddha forbid!we should be found out, then I fear that there will be nothing left of our beloved islands but atomic ash.”

“Tsutsumu’s dead, along with Kusunoki.” The voice was flat and cold. It might have been conveying the message, “Here are ten pounds of rice.”

“Before or after?” By contrast this voice was heavy, thick with foreign inflection. ‘That is the only thing that matters.”

“Before.”

There was a muffled curse in a language the first man could not understand. “Are you certain? Absolutely certain?”