Angel Eyes (63 page)

"Go on," she said, concentrating now on the present. "I assume, then, that you've been working for the Mall for years.''

"Oh, no. Not the Mall. For Bernard Godwin himself." Hitasura permitted himself another small smile, as if he were a dieter doling himself sweets. "Working with individuals, I've found, is far more rewarding than being part of a machine. I think you understand that well, Tori-san." He shook his head. "I must admit I never understood your consenting to come back to them. Why did you do that?"

"Because," Tori said, "I had nothing else."

Hitasura pursed his lips. "Poor girl. If I had known-"

"Forget it. I wouldn't have been interested." She put her head in her hands. "How could I have been so wrong about Bernard. He's trafficking in that supercoke, after all."

''Are you kidding?'' Hitasura said. "He'd try to skin me alive if he knew what I was up to."

Tori raised her head, staring at him. She had the sensation of her heartbeat being slow and painfully heavy, as if her heart was being set in cement. "What are you saying?"

"In some important matters, Bernard is slightly behind the times. I attribute it to his essentially altruistic nature. I find that odd in a man who must, in his chosen profession, be so profoundly pragmatic. But there you are. People are often far more complex than you ever give them credit for being."

"You were supplementing what he was paying you, is that it?"

Hitasura nodded. "Essentially, yes. Bernard's an excellent business partner in some respects, but in others he's sorely lacking. His obsession to free the Soviets from their Russian masters has blinded him to many things, including my method of getting the hafnium into Japan. He didn't ask, and I didn't tell. He was too busy making sure those teeny-tiny hafnium-controlled reactor cores were being fitted inside some kind of prototype nuclear devices."

"My God." Our worst nightmare has come true, Tori thought.

But either Hitasura didn't get it, or he didn't care. He laughed. "It was rather neat, I thought, using Bernard's altruism to make me rich. Until you came back, nosing around. What a pest you've become, Tori-san. Such a disappointment, especially in a friend."

Tori was appalled. Her head was throbbing, and she felt as if she had been struck in the stomach, but she knew she had to press on, get all the poison out at once in order for some sense of healing to begin. "And Ariel Solares?"

"Oh, him.'' This discussion appeared on the verge of boring Hitasura. "He was like Royce, nosing around, getting suspicious of what might be happening under his nose, behind closed doors. He had become a liability to Bernard-and to me. I had him killed."

With her heart in her throat. Ton said, "Did Bernard order Ariel's murder?"

Hitasura laughed. "God, no. Bernard hadn't the stomach for it. We discussed it, of course. But he was too afraid of Solares's friendship with Estilo. But I knew better. I knew that Solares had got further in his investigation of us than Bernard suspected. I did what had to be done for the good of all of us."

Tori slumped in her chair. There was a feeling of desolation inside her, the same terrible sensation one got when one squeezed the life out of another human being. Every time it happened, she felt somehow diminished, as if a piece of her soul were being chipped away, falling into a fathomless blackness from which it could never be retrieved.

Now she saw another reason had prompted Estilo to warn her. It was not only a question of friendship, of his caring about her. It was also revenge. Tori remembered the eerie story Estilo had told her about the German twins in Buenos Aires who had been so cruel to him, and how he had waited to gain his revenge on them by turning their love and trust in each other into fear and hate. Estilo lived by his own unique brand of justice. Not for him the bullet in the back of the head, that was too quick. His definition of revenge was dominated by the verb ''to suffer.''

It seemed clear now that Ariel had told Estilo of his suspicions about Bernard, and when Ariel was murdered, it was natural for Estilo to think that Bernard had ordered the hit in order to protect himself.

This was to be Estilo's revenge: he wanted her to find out everything so she could bring Bernard down for him.

With an effort of will, Tori brought herself back to the present. "You were Bernard's eyes and ears inside Kaga, weren't you?"

Hitasura nodded. "My people are very highly placed in many useful industries. We may not control them yet, but we certainly can manipulate them when there is a need.''

"And me? Why did Bernard seek me out all those years ago? If he had you and Murashito, what did he need me for?"

"That I can't say for certain," Hitasura admitted, "though knowing Bernard as I do, I suspect he wanted someone to keep an eye ?n m?."

"I guess I didn't do such a hot job."

"I don't know about that. You know what I'm doing, and Bernard doesn't."

Tori said, "Tell me something. What would have happened to me if I hadn't bought Murashito's bullshit about Royce raping his daughter? What if I had gone ahead and killed him? "

Hitasura shrugged. "Nothing, I'm quite certain. By exposing Murashito, you effectively killed him, anyway. He became useless to Bernard."

"So you two had to find someone to take his place," Tori said. "Enter Kunio Michita."

"That's right. In fact, you did us a favor. Kunio Michita's far more venal than Murashito ever was. He's more powerful, too."

"God, what a fool I've been."

''In America,'' Hitasura said, ''history shows that your countrymen make heroes of fools." His hand slid around the grip of his pistol. He lifted it, aiming it at Tori's chest. "It's a pity you'll never see America again.''

Tori stood up, and she felt his tension soar.

"Don't," he said, tracking her with the muzzle of the pistol.

"Why not do what I want," Tori said, "if you're going to shoot me all the same?''

"I don't want to kill you," Hitasura said. "Not really."

Tori shook her head. "Too late for remorse."

"Not remorse. Regret. You were a good friend, while it lasted."

"While it suited you, you mean."

Hitasura shrugged. "I have no interest in semantics."

"I've no doubt," Tori said. "You can't make a profit on it."

"It's exceedingly odd," Hitasura said with some admiration, "but in many ways you are not at all gaijin-not at all the foreigner." He shrugged. "I suppose there are still some things in the world I do not understand."

"I would like to know one thing," Tori said. "Who are you sending the nuclear units to? Who is Bernard's contact inside Russia?"

"A last request," Hitasura said, then shrugged. "Why not? Who are you going to tell?'' He laughed. ''Bernard's befriended a man named Valeri Denysovich Bondasenko. The man's a Ukrainian; he's spent his entire career, it seems, suppressing minorities for the Kremlin while secretly working for their unification. Sounds like my kind of guy, but I don't know. From what Bernard says, Bondasenko genuinely hates the Russians, but then again he could be KGB. It's happened before, I understand. I don't personally trust any of these Russians. Far too inscrutable. What is it they want, anyway? To bury the West or to make money from it? It's tough to put your trust in a schizophrenic, but apparently that's just what Bernard's done.

''And now God help him, because we just got an emergency coded cable: something's happened in Moscow, and the situation is rapidly getting out of hand. Bondasenko's White Star organization has sprung a serious leak. Knowing that, I've washed my hands of Bernard as quick as you can slide a clam down your throat. There's a dead drop we use at the Hotel Rossiya in Moscow, addressed to a Mrs. Kubysheva. I wouldn't use it now if you paid me fifty million yen. I don't need any of the complications that inevitably come from trying to be a saint. In this day and age, a saint is synonymous with a sucker."

Hitasura looked at her. "Is that it for your last request? Can we get on with it?"

"Yes," Tori said.

Hitasura pulled the trigger. The explosion was loud in the booth, but amid the sound and vision of pachinko, no one noticed. Besides, the booth's glass panels were both bullet-and soundproof.

Tori was slammed back against the glass, a hole torn in her jacket just over her heart. She collapsed, and Hitasura was across the booth in one stride. He stood over her, much as he had stood over Big Ezoe in the corridor of the Kaijin tea house in Shimbashi.

He kicked Tori's thigh with the toe of his shoe, but there was no sign of movement. He squatted, put the muzzle of his pistol against her forehead in preparation for the shot that would make certain she was dead.

At that moment Koi tore open the door to the glassed-in booth. Hitasura, hearing her, swung the pistol in an arc toward her.

And in that instant of hesitation, Tori's right hand blurred upward, her hardened heel smashing into the base of his nose with such force it drove the cartilage in one piece back through his sinuses, into his brain cavity.

Hitasura's expression was one of dismay. It was frozen on his face as his upper torso tumbled backward. His head hit against the leg of one of the chairs, but he was past caring.

Koi came over to where Tori sat with her back against the glass panel. Koi stared down into Hitasura's face, then she knelt beside Tori.

"Are you all right?"

"He's dead, isn't he?" Tori's voice seemed far away.

"Yes."

"Another part of me gone.'' Tori closed her eyes. Her heart was pounding furiously, and no amount of prana would slow it. "I didn't want to hurt him. I never came to hate him." Then she looked up into Koi's face. "This killing must stop."

Koi nodded, reached over, picked Tori up. She put her hand beneath Tori's jacket, her blouse. "Wearing this Kevlar vest was a risk," she said. "What if he'd aimed his first shot for your head?"

Tori said, as they stepped over Hitasura's body, "Then that would have been me lying there. It would be all over."

Tori's knees buckled, and Koi caught her.

"Now you must repay me for helping you," Koi said. "There is something I must do, and I fear I cannot do it alone."

Sengakuji. The resting place of history's revered heroes, the splendid forty-seven ronin. The place where Kakuei Sakata had purified his spirit, where he had regained his honor by committing seppuku, ritual suicide.

In-ibuki, Koi's soft abdominal breathing, changed to yo-ibuki, the hard, aggressive breathing of battle and stress. Wordlessly, she pressed the translations of Sakata's ledgers into Tori's hands, then knelt on the carpet of grass.

Among the gaily waving flowers her white garb stood out starkly. She hoped that this one spot of purity among the vibrant colors would remain in Tori's memory as it had in hers from the day of Sakata-san's death. She could still remember the wind whipping his loose white leggings, the glare of sunlight on his blade at the instant before he reversed it, plunging it into his lower belly.

Tori bent down, closed her hand over Koi's where it clasped the short killing sword. "Don't do this," she said urgently. "I beg you to reconsider. There are alternatives."

"For you, perhaps," Koi said, "but not for me. I see now that I have trod too long and too heavily down one path.''

''But you have a friend now,'' Tori said. ''Your life is already changing."

But Koi was already shaking her head. "An illusion. A pleasant one, I've no doubt you think, but also a treacherous one, for no matter how much I may fight against the violence inside me, it will overtake me. If not today, then tomorrow or the day after. My spirit is unclean. It longs to be purified."

She turned her head toward Tori, and Tori could see the tears in her eyes.

"Oh, my dear," Tori whispered.

The tears ran. "It's not me I think of now, but others I no longer wish to harm. You."

With that, Koi plunged the blade to the hilt into herself.

"Koi!"

Koi's lips rounded and a tiny "Oh!" escaped her bloodless lips. She drew her elbows in. Her whole body was shaking. With an effort that Tori found unimaginable, she dragged the buried blade from left to right, cutting herself open.

The stench was appalling. Steam came from her, like a mist over spectral fields. She slumped over the buried blade, her bloodied, white-knuckled fists. Blood crawled down her thighs, soaking into the grass.

"It grows dark," Koi whispered. "Don't go."

"I'm here," Tori said. Despair and helplessness mingled inside her. In her mouth was the nauseating taste of fresh blood.

"It grows darker still. But the mountains ... the mountains are alive . . . with light."

Death came to Koi like a cloud obscuring the moon, a film covering her staring eyes, seeing their mysterious mountains, alive with a light only she could see.

It took a long time to fill Russell in, but after what had happened in the pachinko parlor, it was no longer in Tori's interest to remain in Tokyo, so Tori locked herself in with him in the main cabin of their 727 and, as the jet took off, went over everything she had been told and had discovered a step at a time.

She told him about the coalition of Michita, Yen, and Hitasura that Bernard had created. She told him about Hitasura having Ariel Solares murdered because Ariel, like Tom Royce before him, had begun his own investigation of the clandestine affairs within the clandestine affairs of Mall Central. She even detailed her own unwitting role in playing watchdog to Hitasura and in helping Bernard come up with Kunio Michita, a far better and more powerful business partner than Tok Murashito had been.

It was good for her to have to explain everything to someone else. She had had so many shocks in so short a time, she needed to talk about these things out loud in order to make sense of them. Still, it surprised her how calmly Russell took the revelations.

"You were right on target with Bernard," Tori said. "It tears me apart to think how he used both of us. How I hate him now."

Russell was quiet for some time. Then he said, "I wish you could learn to respond with your brain and not with your heart. This is a time to consider objectively what has happened." He sat forward. "Think, Tori. Bernard put together this bizarre coalition of Michita, Yen, and Hitasura for a reason. He saw what no one else did: an unprecedented opportunity to seize what appears to be the ultimate chance to free the minority peoples of the Soviet Union.''