Angel Eyes (47 page)

Irina blinked. How long had she been standing here? She took a step out of the shadows, then immediately retreated. Across the street Natasha was emerging from the old Moscow Arts Theater.

She glanced at her watch. Now that's interesting, she thought. Rehearsals aren't half over with yet. Where can she be going?

Irina set off after Natasha, watching as she headed up Gorky Street, through the crowds. At the last instant Natasha ducked into Druzhba, the Freedom bookstore. Irina waited a moment, then followed her inside.

The bookstore was crowded with tourists, but Irina did not see Natasha. She went quickly through the store and out the back, caught a glimpse of Natasha turning a corner. Irina hurried after her and found herself, more or less, back at the old Moscow Arts Theater. There she saw Natasha getting into a black Zil which pulled immediately out into the street.

Irina turned away as the car passed, then ran to the anonymous-looking blue Volga that Mars had procured for her from God only knew what government stockpile. While it had been parked, someone had stolen the windshield wipers, which were in short supply and consequently in great demand by Moscow motorists. She cursed herself for forgetting to take them with her.

Irina followed the Zil through the city, then out of it. Forty minutes later they were entering the environs of Zvezdny Gorodok. Star Town.

When Mars saw the blue Volga he had loaned to Irina parked across from the Hero's compound, he ordered the driver of his Chaika to pull over fifty yards away. He sat in the darkened interior and watched the Volga with the kind of suspicion one reserves for the broken lock on one's apartment door.

Across from where the Volga sat, a shiny black Zil was parked in front of the entrance to the Hero's building. As Mars watched, Natasha Mayakova came down the steps, ducked into the backseat of the Zil, and it began to turn around.

Mars got out of the Chaika and, as the Zil drove away, he came up to the Volga. He pulled open the door, stared down into Irina's face, white with fear, and said, "What the hell are you doing here?"

"Mars!" Irina put a hand to her throat. "You scared me half to death!"

He smiled. "I'm sorry, koshka, but you gave me quite a turn when I saw you here in the Volga. Are you interested in cosmonauts now?"

Irina stepped out of the car. "Why is it," she said, "that there are no peppers or zucchini to be had in all of Moscow, but there is always plenty of money for cosmonauts and rockets to the moon?"

He frowned. "To Mars," he corrected. "We've already been to the moon." He shrugged. "The system has been around for over seventy years, and it isn't yet perfected. But we're getting there."

"Rockets or food, is that it?" Irina said. There was a silence for some time. When she saw that he wasn't going to answer her sardonic question, she decided she'd better switch topics. "Actually, I'm working," she said.

Mars's frown deepened. "Working? How so?"

"I've been following that Zil all the way from Moscow."

"Natasha Mayakova's car? What on earth for?"

"You know her?"

"Certainly," Mars said. "I know everyone who goes into that building."

"Isn't that where the Hero lives?" And when he nodded, she added, "How does Natasha know him?"

"The more pertinent question," Mars said, "is why you are following Natasha Mayakova all around Russia." Then he snapped his fingers. "She isn't the woman Valeri has been seeing."

Irina nodded.

"Good night," Mars said. "Now there's an intriguing thought."

"Are you going to see the ?????" Irina asked. "I'd love to meet him."

"I'm afraid that's out of the-" Mars hesitated. He looked at Irina. But why not? he thought. What more perfect way to assuage the Hero's burning animosity than to let him talk with Irina. She was ingenuous enough to appeal to him, more than intelligent enough to keep him engaged. And since she was his friend, she might in some way offset the damaging effects the Limited Distribution report on the Odin-Galaktika II cosmic ray experiments had had on the interrogation. The bond of trust that had been forming between himself and the Hero, no matter how tenuous, had been ruptured.

Mars decided that Irina being here at this moment was just the stroke of good fortune he needed. Though he did not altogether believe in omens, this seemed to be as close to one as he was likely to encounter.

"All right," he said, taking her by the elbow. "If that's what you'd like, I'm sure it can be arranged."

Irina heard the lapping of the pool first, then the siren call of the dolphin. "My God," she exclaimed, "what a magnificent creature!"

She went to the edge of the pool, knelt down, held her hand out to touch the dolphin's bottle nose. "What's your name, handsome?" Irina said, then gave a tiny startled scream as the Hero's head burst up through the water.

"Her name's Arbat," Odysseus said, laughing at the expression on Irina's face. "What's yours?"

Irina forgot all about the dolphin. She stared wide-eyed at the Hero, at his chiseled features, the pale, almost phosphorescent skin, the wide-apart eyes.

And what eyes! Pilled with all-color/no-color, she saw and didn't see (perhaps imagined) in their depths colors she never suspected existed. His eyes were absolutely translucent, like scrims across the front of a stage, at once revealing and concealing what lay behind them.

Irina was utterly captivated; she could not take her eyes off him, as if she could devour him, absorb into herself the timeless wavelength that she felt emanating from him.

The long lashes of his eyes were the only hair on his face. There was not even the shadow of a beard on his cheeks or lips, but rather than making him seem effeminate, the smoothness somehow increased his aura of sensuality. It was almost, Irina told herself, as if she were face to face with a merman, some mythical being, half human, half dolphin.

There was a playfulness about him that seemed similar to Arbat's, but Irina could sense a darkness that the chattering mammal did not possess. And it was this darkness at noon, this anomaly, this black hole in his human horizon, that drew her inexorably, until he was the only thing of which she was aware.

She heard Natasha saying, One day you will meet your Albee, and he will change your life utterly. The answer for you is to seize your moment. You must say to yourself, "Damn the risks!" and plow straight ahead.

"Irina. My name is Irina," someone with her voice whispered over the water.

"Welcome, Irina," the Hero said, pulling her into the pool with him so that Irina felt surrounded by the sun, the moon, the stars. A universe of strange music was washing over her, making her vibrate with an unknown excitement from the inside out. "Call me Odysseus."

Honno, staring out over the vast grid of Tokyo, thought how much the city resembled a pachinko board. Sunlight coruscated across the tops of the massive forest of high rises, steel and mirrored glass behemoths, leaving their middle floors in the pale, filtered light of an undersea world, their lower floors in deepest shadow.

She thought, I have only to open my hand, flick the ball of my wa-my intrinsic energy-outward, set it careening through the gutters and trenches I see down there. Just like pachinko.

How far she had come! How distant her other life seemed to her now, a set of fading photographs, ill-lit, slightly out of focus, best packed away in some dust-strewn attic, forgotten. Another person's life, surely.

"Mrs. Kansei."

Who is Mrs. Kansei? Honno thought as she watched a 747-SP, silver in the brilliant sunshine, begin its descent into Narita Airport miles away.

"I want another name," Honno said abruptly, turning away from the glittering, enthralling grid of Tokyo. "Isn't there something of a custom for Yakuza to take a new name?''

Big Ezoe nodded. "Sometimes, yes." He was watching Honno carefully, trying to absorb the changes firing through her. Each moment she seemed to alter, flickering like a series of dynamos being switched on one after another, illuminating the darkness of the night.

"Koi," Honno said at length. "I like Koi." The name she had chosen had many meanings besides the magnificent species of Japanese carp; it meant, variously, dark, strong, the power of the Imperial throne, even, as a verb, to change one's clothes. All these meanings seemed, in some fashion, to fit this new Honno.

''Koi,'' Big Ezoe said from his seat behind the massive black rosewood desk, a kind of free-form sculpture which Americans would recognize and cherish as retro.

"Your samurai friend, Kakuei Sakata, had good reason to commit ritual suicide." He shuffled the papers he had taken from the apartment of Asaku Hitasura, Giin's protege. "These are the complete translations of the ledgers Sakata kept. He was a meticulous man. Everything is here, details of corruption: bribes, extortion, ministerial appointments for private profit and professional gain. This is a veritable catalogue of sins: greed, lust, envy, gluttony, pride, you name it, it's certain to be here. And the trail goes from the industrialist, Kunio Michita-your former boss and Sakata's-all the way to the Ministry of International Trade and Industry. And what do you know? The one link between them all, the go-between, was not your friend Sakata-though he served that purpose as a facade-but my old enemy, Hitasura."

"Hitasura," Koi said, running her fingers over Kakuei Sakata's ledgers which she had liberated. "Isn't that the last name of the man I killed last night?''

For a moment Big Ezoe said nothing. He was astounded by the matter-of-fact tone in her voice. Had she felt nothing at all when she had crushed Asaku Hitasura's windpipe? Well, good. Fukuda had done her job well, then. But Big Ezoe's finely tuned sense of wa sent off a distant alarm.

This woman is an addict, he thought. She devours power in the same way others consume food. She cannot help herself; she needs it now simply in order to exist. For one such as she, there can be no such thing as honor or giri. She is bound on the wheel of her addiction as surely as a heretic was bound to the rack. I pity anyone who is foolish enough to get in her way.

"Asaku was the oyabun Hitasura's younger brother," Big Ezoe said. "Hitasura's people are already becoming meddlesome, combing the city for a clue to the identity of Asaku's murderer."

"Let them look," Honno said. "No one knows what happened except you, me, and Fukuda."

"I'll say one thing about Asaku," Big Ezoe said, "he was a genius at cryptography."

"He was arrogant," Koi said. "He dismissed me because I was a woman. He laughed in my face."

"That was because he was so angry at how easily you got into his apartment. You scared the shit out of him."

"That's not all I did to him," Koi said.

Big Ezoe thought of the moment when Honno, or Koi, as she now wanted to be called, crushed Asaku Hitasura's windpipe. He had seen in her face the image of a mask in a Bunraku puppet play. It was the mask of a god-though which god, Big Ezoe could not now recall-and it had been cleverly painted with features that managed to exhibit both ecstasy and despair. He had marveled at that mask. How he had wanted to meet the artisan who had so masterfully created it. And yet Big Ezoe had never inquired, afraid that the man would turn out to be mundane, altogether dull, not at all what he had pictured in his imagination.

Then, last night, he had magically found that expression reproduced on the face of a human being. How absolutely extraordinary! Big Ezoe, who loved and admired rarities, had decided that Koi was the rarest of the rare. He had sought to transform her, to make her-as he had Fukuda-into an extension of his psyche.

Fukuda had come to him essentially as Koi had, emotionally maimed. People-especially women, Big Ezoe had discovered-were peculiarly vulnerable when they were bloodied. Blood meant wounds that had not been able to heal, a flaw in the psyche.

Until last night, when he had seen the godlike expression on Koi's killing face, he had considered Fukuda to be his crowning achievement. It was then that Big Ezoe began to suspect that Koi would far outstrip his first model.

And later, when he had taken Koi back to the apartment he had given her, he had watched her while she took her cleansing bath. He had rolled up his sleeves, had covered her with soap, then sponged her down. Spraying her with cool water, watching the suds spiral down the drain, uncovering in sections her hard, unblemished body. Big Ezoe had caught himself eyeing her enviously.

After hosing down the tub to get rid of the residues of dirt and soap, Koi had filled it with steaming hot water, lay back to soak, and spoke the first words since her second act of murder. She said, "I was taught that women enter this world already bearing a guilt we can never fully rid ourselves of. We are unclean. Our bodies regularly run with blood, proof of the evil passions we cannot control." She stared at Big Ezoe. "How much more fully this applies to me, a hinoeuma woman, born in the year of the husband killers."

Big Ezoe had said nothing. He was content now to watch and to listen as he had done the night of the Bunraku play, as if he were again one of many, sitting in the darkness of the huge theater.

Koi had raised her arms, bringing her hands out of the water. Her clear skin was steaming, gleaming in the bathroom lights, center stage. Water dripped from her fingertips, and for the first time Big Ezoe noticed that her nails were lacquered the color of blood.

"But now," Koi had said, "now I know I have the power to exercise my evil passions as I see fit. I can exploit them, as I did tonight, or I can make them lie quiescently by my side like a slumbering lover." She put her head back, her eyes closed as she slipped lower into the water, so that to Big Ezoe her body already seemed insubstantial, its outline wavering. "The choice is mine."

And today she had chosen her new name: Koi. Like stepping out of old clothes, into new. Darkness. Depth. Power.

"No one knows," Koi said again now.

Big Ezoe came around from behind the desk, stood with her as she surveyed the city. The sky had already clouded up. Pollutants turned the pristine morning blue sky to a sickly yellow-gray. Fujiyama, the great mountain that symbolized Japan, was swallowed whole in man-made mist.