Angel Eyes (52 page)

The train shot by them, rattling through the tunnel, its whistle screaming. When it had passed, they emerged, and Tori headed for the spot where she had left Fukuda. The track was clear. She looked around, then shouted as a hand grabbed her leg from the side of the track bed.

She saw Fukuda's twisted pain-filled face, black and white, ribbons of soot streaking her pale skin, devoid of blood. The face, more like a mask, striped like a giant cat's, opened its mouth, and Tori saw her own death mirrored there, the tiny metallic dart about to be shot out of its mouth tube.

Tori tried to pry Fukuda's fingers from her flesh, but they were like iron bands, pulling her down to the track bed. Fukuda's mouth raised, her cheeks hollowed to expel her final, deadly breath.

The noise of the explosion, magnified by the confines of the tunnel, made Tori jump. Fukuda's mouth closed with an audible snap, her body convulsed, and Tori saw the bullet hole flower blood just over her heart.

Tori began to snake, sat right down where she had been standing.

Russell hurried up to her, limping on his good leg. He pointed the gun at Fukuda's head, as if for a moment he could not quite believe that she was dead. "Come on! "he shouted. "Can't you feel it? Another train's on its way!"

Tori did not move. She was staring at the blank face of Fukuda. It seemed in that horrific instant that she saw her future, black and bitter, there. The end of the path she had set out on when she had discovered that in some way she needed to confront death again and again.

"Tori, goddamnit, get up! Your vendetta's finally over!" Russell knelt down beside her. He picked her up, carried her back to another worker box, shoved her in, crawled painfully in beside her. The darkness was electric with sound and vibration.

"She's dead." Russell's voice was hoarse. He was shivering with shock and pain. "I hope you're satisfied."

He was trying to examine her, but the lack of light made it impossible. "How badly are you hurt?"

"If you hadn't kept calling to me," Tori whispered, "I would have been the one left lying on the tracks." She put her head wearily on his shoulder, felt his arm come around her. She closed her eyes, but that only made her more dizzy. She felt unutterably sick.

"Russell, your leg-"

The tunnel was lit up as if by a display of fireworks, and they were shaken by the train's rumbling passage. When it was gone and semidarkness had descended again, Russell said, "Everything's all right. We'll make our way out of here now."

But when he pulled Tori to her feet, she immediately collapsed, and seeing her stricken face, he said, "Tori, what's the matter?"

"You're wrong, Russ. It's not over." Tori thought again of her hand slipping in the Akita's blood, sliding up the narrow hilt of the shuriken knife that she had removed from the stairway wall, being cut by the blade.

"I can't move," she said, showing him the swollen wound, black as death, on her middle finger. "Fukuda's damned homemade toxin has poisoned me."

BOOK THREE

THE ZEN POLICEMAN

It is always with the best intentions that the worst work is done. -OSCAR WILDE

TEN

TOKYO/STAR TOWN/MOSCOW/ARKHANGELSKOE

"That bastard Hitasura.''

Big Ezoe, standing in the wet subway tunnel beneath the Kinji-to, looked down at the broken body of Fukuda. He saw the blow tube still gripped between her teeth, noted with sorrow that the tiny steel shuriken had not been launched. On the other hand, her ferocious expression, not unlike a tigress about to strike its prey, filled him with satisfaction. She had died a warrior's death.

"That bastard Hitasura.''

Still, he did not like losing a member of his family, especially one as valuable as Fukuda had been.

The rumble of the subway trains in adjacent tunnels filled the flickering semidarkness, building to crescendos, then dying away in echoes.

"That bastard Hitasura came in here with his troops and did this."

Koi, the hard machine who had once been Honno Kansei, knelt by his side. Her fingers touched the crepuscular flesh of Fukuda's cheek. ''Hitasura's men didn't do this.'' Her voice was cool, detached. "Before she was shot, she went one on one with someone. Someone better than she was."

"Tori Nunn." Big Ezoe spit out the name. "That's why, at the first sign of the trap, Hitasura escaped the Kinji-to to get his men. He brought them back into the museum, down here into the subway system where Fukuda had lured Tori Num. He risked the Metropolitan Police for that woman. She's teamed up with Hitasura again. That's bad news for me.''

"No," Koi said, rising. "It's bad news for her."

The first streaks of sunlight, pressed like orange pulp through the gun-metal gauze of the clouds, filled the eastern sky. When they struck the curve of the Sumida River which Big Ezoe's apartment overlooked, the sluggish water was transformed into a ribbon of molten lead.

Koi stared out and down at the increasing dazzle, broken now by the pewter bow wave of a fishing boat heading toward the Tsukiji Fish Market. There were so many shades of gray on the river, in the long shadows along its banks, that Koi kept counting them, as if there was a lesson to be learned in attempting to measure infinity.

"We have several tasks before us," Big Ezoe was saying. "First, I want us to find a way to usurp Hitasura's deal with Kunio Michita. Michita must be paying Hitasura a fortune for his go-between work. The breadth and depth of the political corruption Sakata's ledgers revealed is breathtaking; the tapestry of bribes they recorded is priceless. Why should he have his fingers in that pie and not me?

''But it will not be easy. As you know, there is a gap in Kakuei Sakata's ledgers. The physical connection between the two-Hitasura and Michita-is never mentioned. Is it because of ignorance or by design?

"Second, we must punish Hitasura for his transgressions against members of my family. Third, we must destroy Tori Nunn for her part in all this. She murdered Fukuda."

There was a gull on the river, Koi saw, whose body incorporated every shade of gray in its environment as it passed from shadow to light to shadow again. I am like that gull, Koi thought. I am every shade of gray. I am my environment.

"I would have liked," she said, "to have had more time with Fukuda. I was looking forward to that."

Big Ezoe stared at her. She was lit from behind by the early morning light coming in through the windows. Her features, cloaked in darkness, seemed unreal to him, so much like the god mask at the Bunraku play that, for a moment, he was transfixed, for he could not tell one from the other.

Then she moved, and orange light brushed her cheek, warming her flesh, illuminating one dark eye. And, with a shock, he saw in there the hint of some mad thing, a black force like a maelstrom still far off on the horizon of night, and it made him shudder, for he suspected that it would be a struggle for him to control it.

Big Ezoe pushed these disturbing thoughts aside, said in a businesslike voice, "I want you to think back to when you were working for Kunio Michita. Can you give me a list of names, important clients and associates he saw with some regularity-say, more than three times a month?''

Koi began, just as if she were a computer sorting through vast files. "Of course," she said, reeling off more than a half-dozen names. ''But that's not counting the Kaga people involved in the joint venture with Michita," she said.

"What kind of joint venture?"

"A combined research and development laboratory," Koi said. ''But I don't see how that could be of interest to us."

Big Ezoe looked at his watch, made a quick call. When he hung up, he said, "I think it's time we went to breakfast."

"Bathe me first," Koi said. Her eyes were glittery with hunger. "Then we will go and do what must be done."

Big Ezoe was unused to being ordered around. He found that he did not much care for it. He opened his mouth to protest, then closed it again, deciding that at this point it was far better to humor Koi than to oppose her. With Fukuda gone, he needed Koi-not that he could ever afford to let her know this. But, with the manner in which Fukuda was disposed of, if he did not retaliate quickly and successfully, his loss of face would be devastating to his authority over his people. So he acquiesced as obediently as if he were a woman.

The bath was modern primitive; an Sshaped curve of translucent glass blocks created a wall of aqueous green light that shimmered its diamondlike reflections on the gushing water. Outside, the geometric grid of Tokyo was reduced to smears of gray, an incomplete template for a city of the future which Koi would, through the force of her will, perfect.

Rare Ainu fetishes hung on the wall opposite the glass bricks, the stark faces of dark gods now consigned to myths already forgotten. But for Koi, in these hard visages of the gods of Japan's indigenous ethnics lived the souls of the clouds, the rain and wind which for centuries had scoured Nippon, carving it into its present image. Here were the keys to the kingdom, the real Japan, lying in wait with its breathless heart beneath the modern iconographic facade where image and symbol were melded to create a new language devoid of significance.

Naked, Koi climbed into the steaming water, sinking down until she sat in the lotus position, the hot water streaming onto the top of her head, surrounding her in spray.

"Now, at last, I see beyond all the lies, to the buried truth," she said. She was not looking at Big Ezoe nor at anything in the room. "Being born hinoeuma was a blessing, not a curse. Because I was hinoeuma, I was taken to the Man of One Tree, and there learned the ways of the warrior. But when I returned to the outside world, I was thrust once more into the caldron of my family, and I was obliged to suppress much of what I was taught by the Man of One Tree. I learned to fit in, to be the model daughter as preparation for being the model wife. I was no longer afraid of being hinoeuma, because the Man of One Tree had given me the strength I needed to combat it. He told me that I was now strong enough to decide not to be hinoeuma.

"But he was wrong-or, in the end, because he was a man, he lied to me. Here is the Truth: I am hinoeuma, and being so gives me an altogether different power. My evil passions, my bloody nature, is a divine gift."

And with this she rose up out of the bath, the water purling down her taut muscular body, a dark-haired leviathan, opal-eyed and omnipotent, emerging from the deep.

On the Tokyo waterfront mist was rising off the Sumida. It was already too late in the morning for the daily fish auction at the Tsukiji Fish Market, but the stalls were busy as the city's best restaurateurs continued to buy provisions for the afternoon and evening meals.

Big Ezoe and Koi emerged from the gray steel-paneled Mercedes, walked across concrete slick with water sluicing away fish entrails. They went to a little row of stalls, numbered 5 through 9, entered the tiny restaurant in the middle of the row.

It was more a coffee shop than a restaurant, a tiny kitchen behind a plain counter fronted by no more than a dozen stools in a sixteen-by-seven-foot area.

There was only one customer at the counter. A middle-aged executive with a pencil mustache wearing a regulation dark gray three-piece suit appropriate for corporation work. With a start, Koi recognized him as the senior vice-president for administration for the Kaga conglomerate, the man she had seen lose so much money at Big Ezoe's gambling house, the one she had had a hand in sending into debt.

The two men nodded to one another, but otherwise there was no traditional greeting. No names were exchanged, and Big Ezoe did not in any way seek to explain Koi's presence. Koi got the eerie sensation of being back in Kunio Michita's office because, for this moment, she had ceased to exist.

Big Ezoe ordered asari, a soupy dish made with a ladleful of fresh baby clams, white and briny. Koi asked for oyako-ni, a hot dish of eggs and browned onions, and three slices of toro sashimi.

Big Ezoe said, "There is a great deal of money outstanding.''

"I cannot pay principle," the Kaga vice-president said.

Big Ezoe nodded. "I understand. I will be satisfied with a payment of interest."

This exchange sounded to Koi as if it were a rote call and response. Nevertheless, the Kaga vice-president's head seemed to sink between his shoulder blades. But he nodded. Koi could not see his face.

Big Ezoe said, ''Your company has a joint venture with Kunio Michita. What does it involve?"

The mustachioed man seemed to consider this for some time. At length he said, "Our people stumbled upon a technology about two years ago. They thought it was a dead end, until Kunio Michita showed up and began talks with them.''

"How did Michita know about Kaga's technology?" Koi asked.

The mustache twitched. "Good question. We are still trying to find the answer. I have no idea how Michita did it. Perhaps like your friend here, he's got a spy inside Kaga.''

"And yet," Koi said thoughtfully, "Michita must have obtained the information from someone."

"In any event," the Kaga vice-president went on, as if this point were of no concern to him, "it seems Michita had a use for this technology even though it involved nuclear devices. We did not want to give him the technology, but we could see no conceivable use for it. It seemed logical, then, for the two companies to form a joint venture.''

"I see." Big Ezoe worked a tiny clamshell around his mouth until he had gotten all the delicious juice out of it. Then he spit it out. "So this joint venture isn't research and development at all."

"No," the Kaga vice-president said. "It's a manufacturing setup."

"What is it manufacturing?"

''I don't know. All I'm aware of is that we are getting illegal shipments of hafnium into the joint company.''

Big Ezoe said, "What the hell is hafnium?"

The Kaga vice-president told him about hafnium being used to manufacture control rods for reactor cores, and how hafnium kept absorbing neutrons long after other materials became saturated and had to be replaced. "It seems evident that the setup must be manufacturing parts for some kind of nuclear reactors,'' the Kaga vice-president concluded.