Second Skin (70 page)

‘That was more than a year ago.’

‘Yes, I know.’ Akinaga seemed lost in contemplation for a moment. ‘It is said in some quarters, Linnear-san, that nothing will make you react. Is that true? I wonder. You did not weep at your wife’s funeral, and I dare say you won’t weep here today.’ He lifted a knobby forefinger. ‘But, if you indulge me for a moment, I would dearly like to see further evidence of such
Japanese
stoicism.’ His eyes were alight. ‘Your wife – Justine, wasn’t it? – died in an automobile accident.’

Nicholas’s heart closed up. ‘That’s right.’

Akinaga leaned in a little so that Nicholas could smell the fish and soy paste on his breath. ‘Actually, no. She was being followed by one of my people. She saw him and panicked. Ran right into the front of that truck.’

Nicholas felt the rage building inside him. He knew Akinaga was baiting him; it had galled him that Nicholas was so easily resigned to the deal he had set out. He wanted to punish Nicholas, to exact a response, another pound of flesh from him before the deal was consummated.

Akinaga shook his head. ‘That must have been tough to take. I admire a man who takes a blow to his bowels and doesn’t flinch. Good for you.’ He smiled thinly. ‘And here’s another. That friend of hers who was in the car with her when it burst into flames – who was it again? Oh, yes, Rick Millar, her former boss. They had just come from an all-night session in his hotel room. They fucked their brains out.’ He was staking out Nicholas’s face like a wolf in enemy territory. ‘That’s right, she was cheating on you, so maybe after all I did you a favor.’ Then he turned on his heel and left with the swagger of a modern-day shogun, trailing his men in his wake like a comet heated by sunlight forming an incandescent tail.

Nicholas stood beside Kisoko in the library of her town house. It appeared stark with the shelves bare. Boxes were stacked neatly on the scarred wood floor, and the Persian carpet had been rolled, wrapped, and tied. The artwork had been crated and the furniture was either already gone or covered with white dustcloths. Light from a bare bulb where the cut-glass chandelier had been spilled down, its harshness melancholy, making the room seem cavernous. Already, it had the slightly musty smell of departure.

‘The meeting with the Denwa Partners went well, I hope?’

‘Yes,’ Nicholas said. ‘Without Mick to cow them, they agreed to give us more time. Although, I imagine Nangi-san’s appearance had something to do with it. And Kanda Tōrin proved a big help. He knows these people better than I do.’

‘That’s good,’ Kisoko said. ‘You and Tōrin-san should come to some form of working relationship.’

‘We will now.’ Nicholas studied her face. ‘Did you know that Tōrin was in Akinaga’s debt, that he had been working for the
oyabun
since before he came to work at Sato?’

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I had no idea, and neither did Okami-san or Nangi-san.’

‘I found out about Tōrin and told him I knew. He despises Akinaga but lived in fear of him.’ Nicholas smiled. ‘I believe he’s more frightened of me now. As I said, he’s been very cooperative.’

Kisoko seemed paler than usual in the dusty light. ‘Do you think you should fire him?’

‘Possibly, but perhaps not. Tōrin knows more about Akinaga than I could ever find out on my own. I can use that. Plus, Nangi-san was right about him – he’s got a sharp mind.’

He turned away, no longer wishing to talk about Kanda Tōrin. He had other things on his mind. With little life left, the house seemed inhabited by ghosts. Nicholas imagined his father here. Better to think of the Colonel now, than of what Akinaga had told him. Better to think of Koei or Nangi or Tanaka Gin or Tōrin, anything but the horror of Akinaga’s boast – yes, damn him, it
was
a boast – that he had been ultimately responsible for Justine’s death, had known so much about their lives that he knew the relationship between Justine and Millar better than Nicholas did. What if he was right? Nicholas asked himself. What if Justine had been cheating on him? She had been so unhappy, so lost, and he had all but abandoned her to Tokyo while he fulfilled his debt of honor to protect Mikio Okami. She had begged him not to go. He had called her twice that night and had gotten no answer. Had she been out or had she been so upset she had not wanted to talk to him? Had she been in bed with Rick? It could have happened that way, he knew. The truth. What was the truth? He’d never know, but then again he didn’t want to know. Honniko had seen that, had had the good sense not to approach him in the deathly silence of the Nichiren temple after Akinaga had sucked all the oxygen, all the holiness, from the place. She had stared, silent as an image of Buddha, feeling the white-hot cinders of rage and grief sparking off him like fireworks.

Now, hours later, standing in a place that was a pasture of grave memories, it occurred to him for the first time that honor was a cruel and willful mistress.

Kisoko crossed to a sideboard on which stood a tray with a half-empty bottle of Scotch and two cut-crystal glasses, and his uneasy musings were shattered.

‘Where will you and Nangi-san go?’ he asked.

‘Anywhere he can rest completely,’ Kisoko said, splashing Scotch into two glasses. ‘My son, Ken, has left for the United States, so nothing is keeping me here for the time being.’ She brought the glasses back to him, her heels clicking across the wooden boards. He wasn’t surprised she hadn’t brewed tea; the occasion called for something more fortifying. She was dressed in white, the color of mourning: Shantung silk suit, gloves, a pillbox hat with a veil that had been in fashion in the sixties and was so again. She looked very chic in Western garb. He gazed into her sad eyes as they clinked glasses. They drank to the memory of Mikio Okami.

‘Well, hell,’ she said, throwing her empty glass across the room, ‘he had a long and fascinating life.’

Nicholas, looking at the shattered glass, said, ‘I wish I could have saved him.’

‘You did in a way. At least you redeemed him. He came to love you, Linnear-san, as he had loved no other, including me.’ There was no jealousy in her voice, certainly no envy. ‘He could be a difficult man. He certainly was a thorny brother. I wanted to look after him, you see, because from a very early age danger swirled around him like a whirlpool, but that kind of behavior only infuriated him. He adored the danger, thrived on it, really. So I tried to do what I could from the shadows’ – she smiled – ‘when he wasn’t looking.’

‘With Tau-tau.’

‘Yes.’

‘Did he know you were a
tanjian?’

‘I have no idea. That was not a topic we would have discussed. Possibly he did.’

‘About Kshira –’

‘Yes. I thought you’d get around to that.’ She went to the sideboard, her high heels click-clacking along the floor, saw there were no more glasses. Nicholas offered her his and she took it gratefully, splashing in more Scotch, drinking it more slowly than the first glass. ‘I must be careful. I imagine alcoholism runs in the family.’

She perched on a covered chair, crossed her legs. She might have been posing for a portrait, and Nicholas felt Nangi was a lucky man. ‘All the dark stories about Kshira turning people mad –’

‘I’ve seen it happen.’

She glanced up at him. ‘I have no doubt you have. Kshira is not for every
tanjian.
Between Akshara and Kshira, it’s by far the more potent of the two forms of Tau-tau. And because of that, little is understood of it.’ She decided to abandon her own warning and downed the remainder of the Scotch in one long gulp. ‘I am a Kshira adept, Linnear-san, so believe me when I tell you Kshira turns mad those who cannot control it. Do not turn away from it and it will not harm you. Learn from what is inside you. Explore carefully and you will be richly rewarded.’ She gave him an enigmatic smile. ‘But I believe you have already learned this lesson.’

‘And Shuken – the Dominion – the combination of Akshara and Kshira, does it exist? I have heard conflicting opinions.’

Kisoko’s eyes regarded him silently, slyly. ‘And what do you think?’

‘I think I don’t know enough about it to make a judgment.’

‘Oh, you know far more than most
tanjian,
Linnear-san.’ She rose, replaced the glass on the sideboard. He wondered if the glance she gave the Scotch bottle, almost as empty as this house, was one of longing. She turned to face him. ‘You see, you hold the answer to your own question inside you.’

‘What do you mean?’

Click-clack, she came across the room to where he stood. For a long moment, she stood, regarding him solemnly. She was filled with sudden emotion, he could tell that much, and he felt the two of them on the brink of a personal revelation, a shared intimacy he could not even guess at. ‘Akshara and Kshira coexist in
you,
Linnear-san.’

He stood stunned, pinned to the spot. Of course she was right. The answer to Shuken’s existence had been inside him all this time. He was living proof that the integration of the two sides of Tau-tau was possible. Kansatsu, his
sensei,
had miscalculated. He had not believed Nicholas strong enough to handle Kshira because he himself had been driven mad by it. A kind of relief flooded Nicholas and he wished Koei were here at this moment to share it.

Dust motes floated in the air and each one seemed to him to have a history, a tale to tell, a bright spark in the ocean of time.

‘Kisoko,’ he said at length, ‘you have been very kind to me.’

‘My brother loved you as a son, and that is how I think of you.’ She had a direct gaze that reminded him of Koei’s. He felt unaccountably comfortable with her and was suddenly sorry she was leaving. ‘You have a special destiny, a significant karma. I feel it like the beating of the sun’s rays on my back.’

‘Like my father.’

‘Oh, no.’ She seemed shocked. ‘Not like his at all. Your father was an architect and like all architects he was a dreamer. That was why he and my brother made such a good team. The Colonel dreamed the future and Okami-san made it so. He was the doer. But your father’s plan for a peaceful and powerful new Japan was always doomed to partial failure.’

‘Why?’

‘Only God can imagine the future and make it so.’ Kisoko stared into a column of light slanting in through a window. So dense was it that it seemed solid enough to walk on. ‘Men are only men, after all,’ she went on in the dreamy voice of reminiscence, ‘no matter how extraordinary they may be. They cannot imagine all possibilities – there were too many variables even in the monolithic structure that the Colonel created here of the Liberal Democratic Party, the bureaucracy, big business, and the Yakuza. Human nature undid him.’

She turned to stare into Nicholas’s face, and for an instant her features were so aflame that Nicholas saw her as she had been in her magnificent youth. ‘You see, your father was not a greedy man so he could not imagine his grand scheme being undone by greed. But humans are a greedy lot – money, property, debts of honor, influence, and power – they want to amass them all. Greed is what brought the LDP down, greed is what made our current recession, greed has stymied our government, made weaklings of strong politicians pushed into an awkward coalition where no one has control and compromise blocks every effort.’

Nicholas thought a moment. ‘But it was a magnificent scheme my father imagined and to a great extent it succeeded.’

‘Yes, it did.’ She took out her compact and began to apply lipstick, by which gesture he divined that the subject was closed.

He waited a moment while she blotted her crimson lips. He watched her as she moved around the room, touching the edges of things – bookcases, moldings – as if they were old friends who needed her reassurance. Or perhaps it was she who needed the reassurance.

‘I have some questions,’ he said.

She paused, her hand on polished wood.

‘Mother Superior said you were a member of the order.’

Her hand found every curve and turning of the carved wood, dark and mysterious with age. ‘That’s right.’

‘And it was you, not your brother, who owned the buildings once housing the
toruko
known as Tenki and which now contains Pull Marine and Both Ends Burning, among other establishments.’

Kisoko’s eyes flicked up at him. ‘The property was in my name, yes, but the money came from the order.’

Nicholas shook his head. ‘I don’t get it. What was the order doing here during the Occupation?’

‘I need some air,’ Kisoko said, abruptly disengaging herself from the room. ‘Will you join me?’

Nicholas followed her as she went to one of the curtains behind which was a brick wall. She pushed on the center and it swung open on a central post. Nicholas stepped through and found himself in a truly astonishing space.

Swirling gravel paths, still damp from days of rain, led through a series of dwarf maples and conifers like stops on a mountain road. Water burbled in a small pool within which spotted carp swam in indolent circles. Obviously, the warehouse abutting the dwelling was nothing more than a hollow shell within which this jewel-like garden had been planted.

‘Do you like it?’ Kisoko asked with a sudden and sweet shyness.

‘Very much.’

She seemed pleased. ‘There is so little space in Tokyo in which to breathe.’ She sighed. ‘This is the one place I will be sorry to leave behind.’

She sat on a backless stone bench, and something about her posture or the brave stoicism that set the features of her face reminded him of photos of Jacqueline Kennedy at the funeral of her husband. Outside, in the afternoon’s custardy light, the years seemed to slip off her like old skin, revealing the young woman the Colonel had known, the person she still was.

‘In all ways the order attempts to serve God.’ She looked down at her gloved hands composed in her lap. ‘It came into being to do His will.’ Her head turned in a direction that led him to believe she was staring into the past. ‘This is not often easy. God moves in mysterious ways; He has, on occasion, given signs to the chosen of the order. These invariably come in visions. But the visions are open to interpretation. And sometimes –’ She halted abruptly and she passed a hand across her face. ‘Sometimes there are false visions.’