Angel Eyes (54 page)

Koi was thinking that Yasuwara was the second man who had said the mysterious American didn't give the appearance of being a businessman. The Kaga vice-president had made the same observation. In a moment she said, "Does Kaga buy the hafnium outright from Estilo?"

"No. That's part of why I was retained. Michita buys the hafnium from the West German firm by withdrawing funds from a blind offshore trust held at a bank on the Caribbean island of Monserrat. I found a way for Michita to be involved without him having any connection with the account."

"What do you mean?" Big Ezoe said. "He has to make the deposits."

"He doesn't," Yen Yasuwara said. The sweat was streaming down his face, mixing unhealthily with the coagulating blood. ''That is taken care of by a third party.''

"Yeah?'' Big Ezoe said. ''Who?''

Yen Yasuwara hesitated only long enough to see Koi's talon come up to the level of his eye. He blinked furiously, swallowed hard. "Hitasura." He said it as if it were a sigh and all the air was escaping from inside him.

There it is, Big Ezoe thought. The link no one wanted to admit to, the one even Kakuei Sakata had not dared commit to print in his ledgers.

Big Ezoe looked at Yen Yasuwara in the rearview mirror. The lawyer's terror filled the interior of the Mercedes like a perfume. He said to Koi, "Can you believe this? Hitasura, Michita, and Kaga are all in on this sweet deal."

He turned his gaze back to Yen Yasuwara. "Why," he said carefully, "are Michita and Hitasura using illegal offshore profits to fund the manufacture of nuclear reactors no one knows about?"

"Because of the strict laws here against atomics," Yen Yasuwara said. "Also, they're building them for export."

"Selling them to the highest bidder, right?"

"No. It's on consignment for a single vendor." There was a weariness now in Yen Yasuwara's voice, as if he had seen the future and understood that it held nothing for him. "I put the deal together, so I should know. The items are being shipped to Russia. To an anti-Russian underground organization there known as White Star.''

The lights had gone down in a simulacrum of night, but in the starless darkness Irina could see Odysseus all the better. It was as if his skin, luminous during the "day," picked up a phosphorescence in the absence of light. Irina, comfortable in the saltwater pool with the Hero and his blue dolphin, scissor-kicked slowly, languidly.

"I have to warn you," Odysseus said, "I've been irradiated. I was exposed to cosmic radiation while I rode between the stars."

"Do you mean to tell me even heaven has its pitfalls?"

The ???? gave her an ironic smile. ''You're not concerned?''

"Why should I be?" Irina said. "Lara and Tatiana certainly aren't."

"It's their job to be with me," Odysseus said seriously. "They're prepared for the consequences."

Irina touched him. "I'm sorry I was so flip."

"Don't be." She could see his smile widening, and it was like the sun striking water. ''I miss humor so much here.''

"I'm afraid that is a failing of Mars's." She gave a little squeal as Arbat, the blue dolphin, raced between her treading legs.

"She likes you," Odysseus said. "Odd. I'd have thought she'd be jealous."

Arbat surfaced, clicking furiously, and Irina put her hand on the bottle snout. ''She knows I don't want to take you away from her."

"Yes," Odysseus said. "She knows."

Waves lapping all around them. The scent of salt and phosphorous. Irina's mind, in proximity with this astounding human engine, had begun to unfold in skeins, stretching itself like a hermit at last emerging from her cave.

''What else does Arbat know?''

Odysseus's eyes were pale against his pale skin. ''Did Volkov tell you to ask me that?''

"No. Why would he?"

There was a silence for a time; even Arbat was quiescent.

"No reason," Odysseus said at last.

"You don't like him much."

"Let's not talk about Comrade Volkov," Odysseus said. "The subject's so tiresome.''

Irina tried to accept this. "Tell me how you know Natasha Mayakova."

"In the early days after my return from space, there was no pool, no Arbat. I was bored, so I was taken into Moscow, often to the theater. I saw Natasha in The Seagull. I was quite moved, and asked if I could go backstage to meet her. I was taken with her right away."

"Yes, indeed," Irina said. "I thought at first that I was going to dislike her, but then people have a way of fooling you once you get to know them."

"And others," the Hero said, "only fool themselves."

Irina swam closer to him. "Is there anybody here with us?"

"Volkov's gone. Lara and Tatiana are sleeping. There's only us, and of course the monitors. But they can't pick up anything that goes on in the pool except for Arbat's clicking, and the technicians can't make heads or tails of that."

''I think it's awful that you have to be monitored,'' Irina said.

"Join the line."

"I'll ask Mars if he can do something about it."

Odysseus threw his head back and laughed. "You do that," he said. "I only wish I could be there to hear his reply."

"Why do you laugh? Mars has a great deal of power, you know."

"Him. Well, if you can persuade him to call off the dogs, I'd be very grateful."

"Don't you get tired of this pool?" Irina asked.

"Don't you get tired of Russia?" he said, mimicking her tone.

"Is that a joke?"

"Not in the least. I don't consider freedom a subject suitable for humor."

"Yes," Irina said. "I do get tired of the life here."

"Well, that's a step in the right direction."

She longed to say more, to tell him all about Cambridge: the students, the Cokes and pizzas, the rock 'n' roll, but the words got stuck in her throat.

Odysseus floated for a time in silence. He was staring up into the darkness as if he could see the stars through the roof, through the dull cloud cover over Zvezdny Gorodok, as if his eyes were beacons or radar dishes.

Irina was getting used to his silences. It did not mean that he wasn't listening to her; on the contrary, his silence was a sign of his intense concentration. It came to her after a time that his silences were not like normal gaps in conversation, but, if only one knew how to listen, contained their own form of communication.

''What was it," Irina said now, ''that you left behind up there in the space between the stars?"

Odysseus went very still. His eyes, much like the dolphin's, glittered in the bits of electronic light that, here and there, were scattered throughout the pool room. ''How did you know that?'' There was astonishment in his voice.

"I don't know. I knew." Irina seemed as bewildered as he was. "I... heard something in the silence. Or perhaps it was an image I saw."

Odysseus said, ''I was thinking of the part of myself that did not come back to Earth with me."

"Which part was it?"

"I don't think it's definable, like a leg or a hand.'' Odysseus thought for some time, grappling with finding the right words. "A piece of what I had been was burned away during the event, I know that for a fact. But something new was added, and then a piece of it was taken away again, and that is far more terrible to live with. Is this making any sense to you?"

''As much as anything in the world makes sense,'' Irina said.

Odysseus said carefully, "But what I'm talking about is not from this world-or any other you can conceive of.''

Irina said nothing. She was acutely aware of floating, hanging in a phosphorescent space, detached, more apart than ever from the people around her. It was as if a moat had been added to the pane of glass that separated her from the people in the Moscow streets, as if now she were moving through an altogether different medium-and, without knowing it, had been for some time.

"Let me try to explain," Odysseus continued, "because I want so much to share this with someone other than Arbat, and Comrade Volkov is incapable of any real form of understanding." He licked his lips. "If I tell you 'Here is a flame, put your hand in it,' you would fully expect to be burned. But what if you weren't burned? If I take you to the top of a building and say, 'Walk over the edge,' you would fully expect to fall to the ground. But what if you didn't? It is six in the morning, time for sunrise, but when you go outside, there is no sun.

"All these are answers to what I was given up there in the space between the stars. But they are only partial answers." He stirred beside her. "If the universe is vast, then the inculcation of ideas is even more vast. And the only thing that is infinite is the inception of 'reality.' Because reality encompasses even time. Reality is so unimaginably huge, so pervasive, that it defies even the dictates of time.''

Irina pondered this for several minutes. Then she said, "In an odd way, you're a refugee, aren't you? Something happened to you up there. As if you stepped through a doorway into a new reality, and now you no longer belong here."

Odysseus said, ''That's it precisely!'' Something that had been hidden or absent before had come into his face, softening it, giving it more of a human scale, instead of the massive intensity of a fifty-foot-high image.

I shouldn't be understanding this, Irina thought. But I do. Isn't my own sense of a changed reality what's at the heart of my discontent? I am, like Odysseus, a displaced person, living in one reality, while inside being part of another. It all makes so much sense, although I doubt if I could say why to an outside observer. She shivered, thinking, I hope we are alone here. What would anyone else make of this discussion? Probably that we were both mad as czars.

There were tears in Odysseus's eyes. "You can't know how I despaired of ever finding someone who would understand.'' He kissed her cheeks, her eyes, her lips. He laughed. ''And to think it's Volkov himself who's provided me with my salvation."

Irina, who had begun to shiver when he had touched her, now quaked beneath his kisses. She felt consumed with fire, not only in her body, but in her mind as well. It was as if the line of communication they had together threaded had now sewed their souls into one combined whole.

"Space is a harsh mistress," Odysseus said. Irina could feel his words as well as hear them. "It draws you like a magnet, a siren, until you have no choice but to open up your soul to it. And then . . ." He put his head into her neck. "And then you step into the black water-the silence between the stars-and find that there is no bottom. You disappear into that silence, only to find that it isn't silence at all, but a riot of communication you have been too dull-witted to comprehend."

She felt his teeth on her flesh, his words in her ears in exactly the same way. "Immersed in a thunder of communication, your sense of humanness slips away, its importance diminishing to a point on the new horizon. Now comprehension is all that matters, understanding and being understood. An end to isolation, a chance to become one with the angels."

Irina was dizzy with sensation. The sensuality of his body was combining with that peculiar silent communication of his to create a whirlpool toward which she was being all too willingly drawn. Concentric circles 6f reality/time/energy seemed to surround her, pulsing in the darkness of the pool, heating the water she swam in, the air she breathed. Oxygen was being forced into her lungs as if through a bellows; there was a singing in her blood instead of a pulse.

The world disappeared.

In its place Irina hung suspended like a star in the blackest of heavens. And there was Odysseus, beside her, part of her, in her.

Sliding in as easily as if he had always been there. Irina, filling up with him, felt the moat disappear, the wall of glass dissolving. An end to isolation, a chance to become one with the angels. Her own isolation was at an end, as if her making love to the Hero was more than a physical act, as if it were emotional, as well as symbolic. She had at last found the strength to embrace something with every cell of herself, unequivocally, unreservedly, accepting it all, wanting it all, the good and the bad, the light and the darkness, because she was no longer terrified of the darkness inside herself, because in embracing Odysseus, she was also accepting all of herself, even the part that she had hated, feared, had tried for so long to disown.

Her breasts crushed against him, her erect nipples brushing his smooth, smooth flesh, her arms surrounding him, feeling the odd shape of his curved back, but not being afraid, accepting that as part of him.

Her eyes opened to watch his face lovingly, startled when his amazing eyes opened and she stared into their pewter depths, seeing behind them the images in which he had been immersed ever since the event in the nonsilence between the stars. Irina saw what he saw, felt what he felt. She was aware of their two hearts, beating in unison-surely an illusion-the ticking of a cosmic clock in the dark sea of reality/time/energy.

Her muscles were tensed as her hips moved, as her breath came in hot, excited spurts, but beneath that her bones had turned to liquid, as if she has been somehow transformed from human being into a creature of another design, as if the places where her bones were had been turned into conduits, filled with an alien fluid pulsing with the beat of their two hearts.

And in that shocked instant, when her hips speeded up but felt heavy with lust and longing, Irina saw/knew/sensed what it was that Odysseus had encountered in the space between the stars, the entity that had given him the tantalizing glimpse of its world/time/reality: a double-pumped engine like a heart, liquid "bones" beneath muscle as hard as a carapace, sense organs in a star-shaped cluster in what might be called a head, but with a body shape that was incomprehensible because it slipped back and forth between two and three dimensions.

Odysseus was not mad-or perhaps he was mad, and she was mad as well. But if so, then this madness was a state of grace, and Irina was grateful that it had come to her.

This thought exploded in her mind like lightning as her body spasmed, as the ???? exploded inside her, so deep that she felt him hard against her inner core, and this set her off again, moaning and thrashing against him, hearing his own deep-felt groan in her mind as well as in her ears.