Secrets of the Apple (18 page)

In the end he decided it wisest to play stupid and sent her on a business trip to L.A. where she was met at the airport by a well-respected personal shopper who had worked with Tanaka Inc. executives on several occasions. When Kate returned he intended to look blank and businesslike, a man who was clueless about such feminine particulars.

Two days later Kate sauntered into his office wearing old jeans and a big white shirt, holding an envelope containing an itemized sheet wrapped around a bundle of receipts. “The woman with the plastered hair said she was supposed to bring me ‘up to code,’ whatever that means,” she said, handing him the envelope and dropping into a chair. “Why didn’t we talk about this?”

“We talked about a clothing allowance. You didn’t want to shop in São Paulo, so I sent you to L.A.” He gave his most casual shrug and let his eyes slowly drift back to his computer screen, labeling the subject too insignificant to continue, but she pressed forward.

“We traded for a book allowance.”

“You won an extra perk with your savvy negotiating.” Again he tried to feign offhandedness, but she picked up the envelope and shook the receipts onto his desk.

“Your wolf ears are sticking out of your wool suit, Ryoki.” She pointed to the total at the bottom of the itemized sheet. “Quit playing dumb.”

“I’m helping you get ready to go, that’s my part of the deal.”

Kate looked at him like a mother patiently waiting for Junior to tell her the whole truth. “I gave you the benefit of the doubt and went through with it, but if you can’t explain yourself, I will send everything back.” Ryoki fidgeted in his chair, causing it to lurch abruptly to the left and making him bite his lip.

“I need my people to take me seriously,” he said, pulling out his handkerchief and dabbing at his lip.

“That doesn’t enlighten me.”

“Among the Japanese, window dressing can be more important than you maybe understand.”

“You’re calling me curtains, Ryoki. Try again.”

“Come on, Kate, don’t do this,” he said, but she continued to look at him expectantly. He cleared his throat and took a drink from the water cup on his desk, buying time until he could find the words. “I’ve always insisted on Japanese assistants, even in London, so taking you down to São Paulo is going to be seen as out of character for me.” He didn’t want to explain how American TV programs in Japan made American women look promiscuous as cats to Japanese men. With a pang he remembered his own blonde collection, his secret pride for the last three years. He thought he’d been so clever, using Western women like Kleenex, dodging all consequences. He hadn’t, though. His reputation would now rub off on Kate and the thought that she would inevitably be lumped in with those women made him sick enough to regret every blonde he’d ever met. “If you aren’t established as a legitimate asset right up front, we both lose credibility, and it’ll be uphill until December.”

“You mean you don’t want anyone to think you brought a toy to the office,” she said, slashing straight through his coded explanation.

“You’re going to be an outsider as it is. I need them to give you a chance.”

“I understand what you’re trying to say, but we should have talked about this ahead of time.” She sounded less angry now, but not entirely mollified.

“Would you have gone to L.A. willingly?”

“No, I think this is much too big an investment for a temporary employee.”

“I essentially bought you a set of uniforms. I couldn’t in good conscience make you pay for them yourself.”

“Uniforms?” She sat chewing her lip.

“This is no different from your book allowance.”

“It’s not the same.” Her eyes lowered to the carpet as a blush crept up her neck. “It might change things if I’m walking around in your wrapping paper.”

“Wrapping paper?” Ryoki envisioned a paper-wrapped girl he’d once seen jumping out of a huge prop cake at a bachelor party, not very original but a big crowd pleaser. The comparison made no sense to Ryoki who had focused on nothing but the possible effect on his career, so he cut to the relevant question. “Do you understand why I did it?”

“I understand sticking to a dress code, but new clothes won’t hide me. After the first week people will decide for themselves.”

“But do you understand?”

“Yes,” she said grudgingly. “But we’re setting a dangerous precedent.”

“House rules,” he said. “Sometimes we have to make it up as we go along.”

She considered him a moment, lips pursed, eyes narrowed before rising to go to her cubicle. “House rules implies common consent,” she muttered to herself.

F
our weeks later Ryoki sat on the plane trying to type. He’d always hated working on planes. Something about sitting too long, confined in the canned air of the cabin, listening to the drone of the engines left him feeling wooly-headed and vaguely hopeless. Kate had already taken one of the mild sleeping pills he always carried for overnight flights and dropped off immediately. That was good. Tomorrow would be busy and there had been too many late nights recently, too many last-minute preparations. His eyes drifted sideways as he typed, unconsciously watching her as she slept. Jolted by an air pocket, he blinked and turned back to his screen only to discover his left hand had inadvertently strayed one key to the right and he’d typed a whole paragraph of gibberish. Irritated, he highlighted and hit delete.

The moment they’d boarded their flight, the barest shifting sensation began to creep over him, like a plane that alters course by a single degree and winds up thousands of miles from its intended destination. It was nothing, really, just a natural reaction to a new situation. So far everything had gone precisely according to plan, right down to the uneventful departure. Brian Porter had driven them to the airport himself, walking them to the security checkpoint, shaking Ryoki’s hand and kissing his niece goodbye, no significant looks or words of advice, no portentous emotion or touching public scene. Yet Ryoki had sensed a balance adjustment as he passed through security, as though Brian had given Kate away, entrusted her to his care. Ryoki shook his head to push the thought away, unwilling to let his imagination lead him into the wild.

He glanced at Kate again out of the corner of his eye. Maybe he was just reacting to her new clothes. She wore an austere coffee-colored suit she’d dubbed Japanese, though he suspected it originated in New York or Milan. Even so she’d managed to thwart him, knotting a red silk scarf to her briefcase, the tails fluttering like butterfly wings as she walked. In that severe suit, her expression in repose, she looked utterly unapproachable, a beauty chiseled in cold marble, and he understood why she took such pains to soften her appearance. Perhaps he had gone too far, asking her to change her wardrobe. A month ago she’d called the new clothes “his wrapping paper,” which seemed silly at the time. But when she’d walked out in that suit, he’d felt a physical tug in his gut as if the intimacy token had advanced a single square. Maybe he should have trusted her judgment. Too late for second guessing, better to just get over it.

“Excuse me, sir,” the flight attendant broke into his thoughts. “Do you have your breakfast menus?” Ryoki handed her the booklet with his completed breakfast order. “And your wife’s?” she asked with a fixed, patient smile. It took Ryoki a moment to realize she meant Kate. Not bothering to explain, he picked up Kate’s menu, quickly circling every sweet thing on it and handed it to the attendant.

Flight attendants were usually careful about making such errors. She must have been tired, not thinking. He looked at Kate again. Her arm lay on the armrest outside the blanket. He glanced around. Everyone else in first class was fully reclined, asleep or drifting off, no one was watching. He touched her hand, just to put it inside the blanket, she got cold so easily. He thought of her pink nose and exposed arms as she pruned her roses. Surely she’d be better off in a warm, moist climate. Brazil was a good choice for her.

He pulled the blanket up to her chin, where his hand lingered. Without conscious permission, his fingers moved to her cheek and for an instant he allowed himself to feel the softness he’d wanted to touch since January. Guiltily, he moved his hand away. He knew he was attracted, but that didn’t have to mean anything.

He’d met attractive women all over the world, forgetting their faces almost as soon as he passed into the next room. He wanted something different from Kate, his first platonic female friend, and he understood it would take time before he learned to see her purely as a person. Fortunate she never invited his caress, a man can only take so much. Ryoki turned back to his computer and typed a whole sentence before getting stuck on a word and losing all gumption. With a sigh he stowed his laptop and swallowed a sleeping pill.

The atmosphere inside Guarulhos Airport in São Paulo felt damp and heavy, a bit of a shock after the dry cool of the plane. Outside customs they were met by Ryoki’s “company wife,” Makoto Arima, a keenly intelligent man of thirty-five who had served as his right-hand man and closest friend almost since the day his father had first paired them up, shortly after Ryoki left school. They were glad to see one another and the two men bowed and exchanged greetings with all the understated warmth two reserved heterosexual men can muster.

Arima bowed politely to Kate and greeted her in his clipped English. She, equally polite, bowed and greeted him in Japanese before flashing a warm smile and inquiring whether his English teacher had been British. Arima smiled and nodded in return. Each knew of the other’s existence, had even spoken on the phone a few times. But this marked the first moment they had actually entered the same sphere of existence, one of Ryoki’s dreaded “Japanican” moments when the two sides of his heritage collided. Ryoki had informed Arima of Kate’s imminent arrival almost as soon as he knew himself and the conversation had included a number of pauses gravid with unspoken questions: Why her? What happened? Who is she? Now he watched Kate and Arima watch each other as they exchanged their pleasantries, both instinctively understanding that they
must
get along. Kate cracked a joke, naturally muffing the punch line.  Arima laughed a genuine, hearty laugh. Ryoki smiled in relief; it was a good beginning. As they walked toward the outer doors, he wondered if Arima saw Kate as he had seen her in January. The Pink Suit he met on that day seemed like a paper doll compared to the full-blooded Kate he now knew. Arima was sharp and perceptive, a little like Kate in that way. Perhaps he saw more.

Arima took charge of their luggage and ushered Kate and Ryoki into a plain black armored sedan, selected for its humdrum appearance to avoid drawing attention. Before they pulled away from the curb, Ryoki lowered his window halfway and ran his thumb across the top of the thick tinted glass before raising it again. It never ceased to amaze him that something as fragile as glass could be made to repel bullets. There had to be a reason Brazil was one of the largest markets for private armored vehicles. Even the driver was a trained bodyguard; Ryoki glimpsed the telltale bulge of his holstered weapon under his jacket. He’d been in plenty of third world countries, walked the streets fearless as an invincible young god. But in McLeary’s room he’d smelled his own mortality and now, sitting in the back of the armored car, he felt as though his fortune had tattooed a target on his back, delicate and intricate as printed money perhaps, but a target all the same.

Ryoki had visited São Paulo briefly once or twice, hurrying from the airport to his hotel to meetings and back to the airport, spending most of the trip in negotiations or bent over his work. This time, however, he would be calling the city home, and as they drove he gazed through the protective glass. People, people, people in all shades from chocolate to pale, millions seething among the endless concrete canyons that poked from the ground like his grandfather’s thick, midas fingers stretching up and up toward the hard, golden sun. After a time the glare hurt his eyes even through the tint, and he pulled a pair of polarized sunglasses from his pocket.

As they neared Morumbi, one of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods, glinting concrete gradually gave way to tree-lined streets, the tended green gardens of fine homes and the vegetation rioting over the walls of mansions hiding from the world like a child covering her eyes. It surprised Ryoki to find that this refined neighborhood, home to the state government palace, also quartered established shanty settlers. Protected mansions shared the air with shacks cobbled together from discarded wood, corrugated metal and jerry-rigged electricity. “Looks like the lion is lying down with the lamb,” he said to Arima, who didn’t get it. Privately Ryoki wondered whether his house had enough security.

He hadn’t chosen the house himself, nor had he actually visited it. He had been emailed photos with a property history informing him it had been built by a modern industrialist who needed a place in the city, but also longed for the sweet romance of an early nineteenth-century plantation. He envisioned building a secret garden in the city, hoping to create a common refuge where he could rebuild his scattered family. Seeing a chance in Morumbi, he purchased three large houses which he had razed and replaced with a Mediterranean-style mansion in the midst of lush, extensive gardens, all hidden behind a high tiled wall. But a few years later there had been a corporate takeover and the man’s heart had failed as he watched his company sold off in bits and pieces. After the funeral, his heirs cut a deal with a room full of lawyers, letting the house go for back taxes so they could each walk off with the maximum cash. Now the government had sold the high-maintenance property to Tanaka Inc. for a very reasonable price, a perquisite for pumping so much investment capital into the country.

As the car pulled up Ryoki recognized the tiled wall from a photo, a smooth wall so high it was difficult to see the jagged bits of glass set into the top between menacing spearhead spikes, each spear gracefully scrolled at the base to keep the warning decorative. The original architect and landscape designer, who had an obvious flair for the dramatic, had planned the curve of the drive and the heights of the foliage so the house would appear all of the sudden, slightly angled, like a beautiful model contemplating the view, ostensibly unaware of the photographer, but keeping on her best side.