Secrets of the Apple (44 page)

“Leave me alone,” she warned.

“Get—get—go!” he gasped, tracking the snake, looking for an opening.

He didn’t look up, but he heard her turn and run. The hungry snake paused, tasting the air before shifting in pursuit, giving Ryoki a chance. He leaped, stabbing with all his weight, skewering the base of the skull, driving the spike a foot into the earth. The body still writhed and he hammered down with his heel, feeling the sickening crunch of bone and teeth. His heart pounding, he looked up, expecting to see Kate wild-eyed and standing at a safe distance. “Kate, Kate. It’s all right now,” he called, but she was gone.

He felt he had to explain and ran back to her cottage, finding the door ajar just as he had left it. “Kate?” he called. No response, nothing but a creeping silence, as though clicky bones and clammy hands had stolen through the open door and now lurked behind the couch. He entered the bedroom, a mysterious wrongness teasing the hairs on his arms. “Kate!” he yelled, “Kate!” poking his head into the dark, quiet bathroom. His pulse notched up, a ghastly worry spilling through his veins as reason fought back.
Nothing wrong, irrational.
Yet he rushed from the cottage, sprinted through the garden, tore open the back door, flashed through the main house, and exited the front where he paused, hands on knees, to take stock and catch his breath, hoping to laugh at himself. But something caught his eye. Clear off at the bottom of the drive, the white light atop the pedestrian gate winked off, indicating someone had just passed through and clicked it shut.
Keys, she must have her keys.
Taking a deep breath, he flung himself all the way down the curvy drive, cutting across the lawn and through the bushes. His momentum slammed him straight into the pedestrian gate, banging his shoulder and rattling the bars. He craned his head left and right.
There she is!
Kate’s light suit just visible, bobbing down the dark sidewalk, headed toward the corner and the neighborhood security booth, the guard and his hut almost invisible in the blacker shadows of an enormous tree.

Exhaling a great breath, Ryoki inserted his key and punched in the code that would release the lock.
Buzz-whir-buzz,
followed by an abortive snap. Cursing he punched the code again.
Buzz-whir-whir—
jammed.

A stifled scream cut the air, faint, short gurgly.

Ryoki threw himself against the bars, rattling his cage as he made out the light suit struggling, the guard’s dark bulk, hands crushing her throat, dragging her into the hut, light suit kicking against the window, a crunch of glass, a muted war.

“
Tomare!
Tomare!
” Ryoki roared, not hearing his own Japanese as he ordered the guard to stop.

Desperately Ryoki waved his arms in front of the security camera, banging the intercom button with his fist, barking instructions as the main parking gate swung gravely inward, activated from inside the house. At the soonest possible gap Ryoki shot to the sidewalk, hurling himself toward the security booth, every stride seeming to hover motionless in space, all time passing in a series of frozen rests, making it a hundred years from the gate to the hut. At last his arm reached through the darkened doorway, his hand slowly closing the distance, clenching the man’s arm, then a wrench, a twist, the measured splintering of humerus and scapula, the shattering of glass, a Brazilian skull crashing through the window already webbed by Kate’s flailing foot.

The guard’s radio crackled to life.
“Tem a moça? Fazer ela ficar quieto e vamos reunir ao ponto de encontro.”

Keep her quiet… get to the meeting point…
It was all planned. Gathering the woozy Kate against his shoulder, Ryoki stood breathing into her hair, feeling her body shake and shake until her teeth chattered and he wanted to cry. He stared at the guard draped over the window sill, barely conscious, one arm twitching against the jagged glass.
I could kill him. I want to kill him.

Instead he jerked him by the hair.
“Quem foi no radio?”
he shouted.

“José,” the guard croaked, too disoriented to lie.

“Quem é você?”
Ryoki spit, demanding the guard’s name.

“M-Marc-co,” he stuttered softly before passing out, blood pouring from his nose and his forehead, trickling black across his cheek and down his neck, a dark stain spreading from his collar, just visible in the dim moonlight. In disgust Ryoki loosened his hold, letting the guard slump unconscious over the little desk.

Lifting Kate into his arms, he exited the hut only to be swarmed by his own security men—guns, flashlights, sirens in the distance. Kate raised her head and looked at him, eyes half closed, her shaking calmed to a caustic tremble.

It was long after midnight when the doctor and the last policeman finally headed down the curving drive and out the gate of the Tanaka mansion. A tearful Lucas had seen the ugly bruises purpling Miss Kate’s neck, and bravely stepped forward to add what he could to the investigation, a description of José and a confirmation that Marco da Silva would know the location of his hideouts. Seeing the protective hand Senhor Tanaka placed on the boy’s shoulder, the sympathetic chief inspector recorded the information as an anonymous tip, phoned in to the crime scene by a concerned citizen.

With the exception of a driving headache and some fierce bruises, Kate proved to be unhurt, though she kept obstinately to herself, shivering in the heat, allowing Ryoki to handle the police. By 12:45 a.m. she had drifted to the bedroom next to Ryoki’s, to lie down for a minute, she mumbled. By 1:30 a.m. Ryoki had himself fallen into bed, though sleep was slow in its approach, just crawling along the sheets when the phone rang at 4:33 a.m. His father. Heart attack. Private jet, 10:00 a.m., Guarulhos International.

T
okyo’s Narita Airport should have been familiar, but all the edges felt bent and indistinct, an improbable pretense of normalcy stretched taut over a roiling and shifting foundation. Ryoki could remember very little of the hours since the phone call, except an odd sense of slingshotting from one world to another.

“Heart attack, not expected to live.”
The words skidded through his mind over and over, looking for purchase in a reality he could understand. His father, Hiroshi Tanaka, fifty-five, non-smoker, teetotaler, a healthy, vigorous man devoted to regular exercise and a careful diet. There had to have been some mistake, a switched chart at the hospital. All the way to his parents’ house he kept picturing himself graciously forgiving the errant lab technician, or the overworked nurse, or the exhausted doctor who caused him to rush nearly twelve thousand miles for nothing.

He stood in the foyer of his childhood home slipping out of his shoes, Kate standing by, quiet and professional, a blue silk scarf tied around her neck. His mother came to greet them, dark smudges under her pretty blue eyes, lines of worry creasing the edges of her mouth, her shoulders sagging. He reached out to embrace his mother and kiss her cheek, reassurances pressing behind his teeth:
Don’t worry, it will be all right, I’ll make some calls, straighten this out, you’ll see.

Kate embraced his mother with such open affection that Ryoki understood why she had insisted on coming, not even taking time to recuperate, and making him promise to keep the previous night to himself. Of course the scarf might give it away, if his mother knew Kate felt the same way about scarves and turtlenecks as she did about bracelets and wristwatches.

“I’m here, Michiko,” Kate said. “What needs to be done?”

His mother looked so Japanese next to Kate, the way she moved, the way she spoke. It occurred to him that he had not merely followed his father in love; he had leaped way out in front.

“I’m going to show Ka-chan to her room,” his mother said, putting her arm around Kate’s waist. “Why don’t you look in on your father? He’s in the sunroom.”

For a moment Ryoki stood watching the retreating women, hesitant to plunge into the house alone and unarmed. Down the long hallway, past the picture landing, right, quick left, past the hiding spot where he used to gobble illicit sweets, the thought of which brought Lucas to mind.

He passed by the uniformed nurse drinking her tea, and peeked into the spacious glass room protruding out into the garden, a sophisticated, temperature-controlled feat of modern engineering designed to look a hundred years old, commissioned by his father who said he wanted to read outside during a thunderstorm.

The room had been completely rearranged, the furniture pushed to the walls to make way for the big hospital bed and all the impressive equipment that blinked and beeped, tracking every breath and heartbeat. At least two of the machines had been developed by Tanaka Inc. Ryoki himself had proudly overseen their unveilings in both London and New York, touting their life-saving efficiency with all the arrogance of the chronically healthy. Looking at his father surrounded by all that advanced, wildly expensive technology, it struck him that his company had promised their products could save lives, when in truth they could only measure its passage.

Ryoki’s knees began to shake. He settled into the armchair next to his father’s bed and watched him sleep. Beating tension had propelled him halfway across the world; he needed to do
something.
Draw a sword, slay a dragon, produce a miracle from his pocket, a cure magicked by a Nepalese holy man. But there was nothing to do but sit and watch.

He reached out and touched his father’s hand. His father’s skin, always a little darker than his own, had grayed down several shades, the smooth, virile flesh thinned and puckered like paper that had been repeatedly wadded and smoothed. This, this
oldness
could not have been the work of a single shocking episode. How could he not have noticed? Was his father thinner in December? Ryoki had been so harried, so frantic over his task in San Francisco, and so angry that his father was sending him alone. He’d been angry for so long. Why was that exactly? Perhaps he would remember when he wasn’t so tired. Surely there had been a good reason.

Ryoki lifted his head and saw his father watching. “I’m not dead yet,” he said. Ryoki jerked to his feet and bowed deeply before resuming his place.

“You made very good time. It seems like your mother just phoned you in Brazil. Of course, I sleep so much it’s hard to tell.”

Ryoki wasn’t sure whether his father was chiding his slowness or praising his speed. He nodded and said nothing.

“I’ve been getting very good reports on the new South American division. Things down there are ahead of schedule. I couldn’t be more pleased.”

Work
. Ryoki perked up. Now, here was something he knew, a subject indifferent to dangerous emotions. He started to report on the latest set of licensing agreements and the progress on the factory renovations, but his father held up his hand. “That’s all in your lap,” he said. “Don’t tell me what’s going on. Tell me how you feel things are going.”

“I’m pleased,” Ryoki said, his shoulders relaxing at last. His father looked so much better with his eyes open, sounded so animated, so normal. Perhaps his first instinct had been right: a false alarm, a mistake. His mind clung to the strength in his father’s voice.

The nurse padded silently into the room. She wore pink scrubs and a black flowery smock that made her look too young for her solemn expression. “Time for your medicine, and something to make you more comfortable, Tanaka-sama,” she said, injecting his IV with two syringes before bowing and leaving the room.

“I tell her two jokes a day,” his father said when they were alone. “And she never laughs. My goal is to see her teeth before I die.”

“She’s pretty,” Ryoki said.

“Yes, pretty.” There was an awkward silence as his father looked at him. “I assume you brought our little Ka-chan with you.”

“She’s not so little anymore.”

His father’s mouth twitched into a smile. “No, I don’t suppose she would be. I still think of her as sixteen, standing in the doorway of Brian Porter’s guest bedroom, holding a bat and looking for the baseball that had just smashed a window and destroyed my computer.”

“Kate plays baseball?”

“That was the biggest hit she ever made, straight over the catcher’s head.”

Ryoki smiled, too wrung out to laugh, even to humor a sick man.

“How do you like her?” he asked, still watching, studying his son.

Ryoki felt himself sliding onto uneven ground and wanted to go back to talking about work. “She’s sharp and efficient and—” But his father’s expression stopped him.

“I love her,” he said, praying his father would go no further.

“We thought you probably would, your mother especially.”

“I guess it’s fortunate we met,” Ryoki said.

“Ha, yes, ‘fortune’ is a good word,” his father said, his eyes beginning to droop, looking serene and quiet as he always did, resting after a long day at the office. Ryoki looked on, thinking to keep vigil while his father slept his morphine sleep. But his eyelids felt as though they were hoisting concrete blocks, one block each, then two blocks, three, heavier and heavier until the comfortable chair claimed him and he shared his father’s bedroom for the first time since he was a child.

His father slept the whole night through and awakened the next morning with better color and good spirits, reaching out to pinch his wife who giggled like a girl. Laughing and joking, he talked to his son about the company’s future, dropping personal hints about board executives, interjecting baseball anecdotes. By lunchtime Ryoki began to add up all the evidence for optimism, and decided that certainly there was a chance for a return to the coveted dull normalcy. He swallowed his whole lunch on the strength of that hope, and felt even more confident after eating.

That afternoon, his father watched Kate as she exited the room, her arms full of papers, sticky notes stuck to the back of her hand. “Something’s wrong,” he said.

“No, no nothing’s—”

“Does she love you back?”

Ryoki coughed, cleared his throat, poured himself a glass of water from the pitcher at his elbow. Gradually his father’s gaze fell to the covers, a furrow of worry or possibly disappointment between his brows, and a long, uncomfortable silence.