Floating City (36 page)

But Nicholas, looking down at her with a mixture of pity and rage, knew that there would be no salvation for any of them. His heart was broken, but what did that matter now? He had made his choice. He had lain down with Yakuza and had gotten up covered in blood.

Banked fires, night grows late—
then comes a sound of rapping
at the gate.

—Kyoroku

Nicholas awoke to the soft calls of the fishmongers. He had dreamed of Koei, and now his mind was filled with her. He had not had that particular dream in a long time. What had triggered it?

All his days and nights with her were preserved in his memory as if suspended in time. Sights, sounds, smells, and most of all, feelings were as vivid now as they had been when he had been with her. If Koei had been his right arm, he could not have felt her loss any more profoundly. His love for her had transcended the mere physical; it bloomed in the night when he was alone like some exotic and ethereal flower, even during the years he had been married to Justine. And, of course, the circumstances of that loss made it that much more painful. He had been betrayed by his surrogate family, by following in his father’s footsteps, by his own instinct in befriending members of the Yakuza.

He had destroyed an innocent young man in his stumbling attempt to right a wrong. In the process, he had uncovered a nest of unpardonable sins. But he had yet to discover which had been
his
unpardonable sin: causing Yasuo’s death or living in the Yakuza world? Little wonder he had grown up hating them so.

He felt a stirring beside him, turned and saw Seiko’s face as she lay on her side beneath the covers of the futon. Silently, he pushed the covers aside, walked to the sliding doors that opened onto the window of the room. They were on the second floor of a
ryokan,
a traditional inn on a side street off the Shijo-dori, one of Kyoto’s wide, bustling avenues. The Shijo-dori might have been as modern as any avenue in Tokyo, but take a turn off it on almost any side street and, like this one, you’d find a semblance of the old Kyoto, with its wood-frame houses and narrow lanes.

Before leaving Saigon, Nicholas had temporarily installed a cousin of Van Kiet’s in the Sato International branch office to monitor the local factories’ output but to make no policy decisions. Considering the suspicions he harbored, he did not want to entrust the job to Seiko.

He, Tachi, and Seiko had flown into Osaka, then had taken the fifty-minute shuttle bus to Kyoto because Van Kiet had discovered two receipts in V. I. Pavlov’s wallet—a testament to the meticulousness of the Russian—one a roundtrip for transfers by bus to and from Osaka airport and Kyoto. The other was for a Kyoto nightclub called Ningyo-ro, the Doll Pavilion. Oddly, Pavlov had been carrying no receipt for a hotel or
ryokan.

Outside, small trucks laden with fresh, glistening fish were being off-loaded onto the street as the morning sorting began. The fish market, just around the corner, was only open until noon, and six days a week the narrow street here ran with blood and brine.

Nicholas, standing at the window, looked down on the rubber-booted fishmongers and saw a dark crevasse, black water roiling and empty of life. So many years had passed since he had learned his lesson; so many years since he had turned his back on the Yakuza and Mikio Okami, his father’s best friend. And then, last year, Okami had popped up, wanting Nicholas to make good on the promise Nicholas had made to the Colonel to come to Okami’s aid should he ever need it. Now, in an insane twist of fate, he was sworn to protect Okami. In so doing, he had been drawn into a world he could no longer define. That eventually brought Lew Croaker and Nicholas in contact with Okami’s assassin, a Vietnamese named Do Duc, whom Nicholas had killed.

“Nicholas.”

He turned, saw that Seiko had arisen. The room was redolent of broiling fish, which the kitchen downstairs was no doubt preparing for breakfast. Soon he would have to confront Tachi, the Yakuza
oyabun,
the
tanjian.

“You look so sad. Would you like some tea?”

“Very much, yes.
Domo.”

She went out of the room, filled an iron kettle with water, then returned to a hibachi sunken into the tatami and began to heat it. He watched her take green cut leaves out of a canister, spread them like a carpet into the kettle. When the water was ready, she poured it in, then closed the lid, letting the tea steep.

They sat facing each other. She handed him a full cup. He drank first. He could feel her wanting him to speak. He missed Lew. Their periodic phone debriefings were necessarily terse and to the point, underscoring the synergy the two men produced when they were together.

“The number of women in this puzzle is interesting,” Nicholas had said to Croaker. “We have the two sisters, Margarite and Celeste, one based in New York, the other in Venice, where she works for Okami; Dominic’s mother, Renata Loti, who is a major influence-peddler in Washington; now this woman Vesper, who’s involved with Dedalus. What’s odd is how all of them are in positions of, if not outright decision-making, then of real power.”

“Do you have a theory?” Croaker had asked. “Right now I could use all the help I can get with Vesper because she doesn’t fit any of my preconceived notions.”

“Neither do any of the other women. But I have the impression that in some way neither of us are seeing, Vesper is a key. Keep that in mind when you get to London.”

“You will never trust me, will you?” Seiko’s voice broke into his thoughts. She was looking at him over the edge of her cup.

“Nangi uncovered evidence that Masamoto Goei, the theoretical-language team leader on my Chi Project, was involved in stealing the Chi neural-net chip. There is suspicion that you helped him smuggle it into Vietnam to Vincent Tinh.”

“I’m guilty.”

“What?”

She nodded. “I helped Goei, but not for money as Tinh thought, and not for ideology as Goei believed. It was to help Tachi and Van Kiet get inside Floating City. The illegal clone Tinh had Abramanov cobble together from stolen elements from the Chi Project and the American equivalent Hive computer gave them a foot in the door. Or so they theorized. Unfortunately, Tinh—who was the key, the liaison with Rock—refused to cooperate, even when Van Kiet put pressure on him.”

Nicholas thought about this for some time. Was she lying or telling the truth? The sexual vibrations she set up in resonance every time he projected his psyche made it impossible for him even to make a guess. Everything she said seemed plausible, but did that make it the truth? Was he among friends or in a nest of deadly vipers?

“Then who murdered Tinh? It seems to me that from what you and Tachi have told me, Rock had motive and opportunity. Yet I have no tangible proof.”

“Does it really matter? Vincent Tinh is dead. Nothing you can do now will bring him back.” She took a breath. “He deserved his fate.”

“The truth matters a great deal to me.”

She put her cup down. “I’ve told you the truth.” She put out her hands, palms up. “Use your Tau-tau.”

He said nothing, made no move, but his eyes bored into hers until she was obliged to blink.

She swallowed more tea, then said, “I want to tell you something. I had a brother, Matsuro. I’m going to tell you about his death because he died under... particular circumstances.” She paused then, as if she might reconsider.

Carefully, she put down the teacup, stared at it fixedly. At last, she said, “Matsuro was special; his mental and physical ages were not synchronous.” She blinked once, as if she saw him now, in the mirror of the teacup. “He was two years younger than me, but inside he was just a little boy. He did not understand...” Her voice faded out as her eyes clouded with tears. “He did not understand the world.”

Her fingers laced and unlaced themselves in her lap. “At that time, five years ago, I lived with them—Matsuro and my mother. At night I was in charge of him. My mother works nights; she runs a Kyoto
akachochin.”
An after-hours bar. “Every night I would give Matsuro his bath before he went to bed. It was a kind of... ritual that he loved. I would tell him stories and we would talk and he was so relaxed he would almost seem normal.

“I was seeing someone then, a Vietnamese commodities expert who taught me a great deal about the foreign stock markets.” She stopped again, her throat clotted with memory and emotion. She swallowed hard, reached for the teacup, then stopped midway. “You see how it was, he called that night. I hadn’t seen him in two months—he had gone to Saigon on business. He phoned me the moment he returned. I... I only meant to leave Matsuro for a moment, to get the phone. But it was him, and I had missed him so much and he had so much to tell me, I got caught up...”

Her head went down, and slowly tears fell onto her hands, unmoving now in her lap.

“I have no excuse... none that will suffice for my inattention. It was only, I don’t know, seven, eight minutes when I remembered my brother, alone in the tub half-full of water. I dropped the phone, ran into the bathroom.” She had to stop again. Like a mountain climber who has ascended to heights where the air is very thin, she had to adjust to the harshness of a new reality.

“There is an image in my mind, and like a diamond in rock it endures. There is Matsuro lying facedown in the water. Water from the spout is rushing over his hair, moving it back and forth like the tendrils of a beautiful sea anemone. Otherwise, he is not moving.”

The tears dropped, one by one in an inexorable rhythm onto her lap.

“This is what I remember, the persistence of memory like a diamond that cannot be shattered. So hard, so cold. The rest is a blur: my pulling him up out of the tub, turning him over, giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, calling an emergency medical team, hugging him to me even when they came for him, the ride to the hospital—and, after, my mother’s wails, her screams, her anger at me. Because, you see, he was already dead when I came into the bathroom and I could not—
cannot
—accept what I’d done.”

Nicholas said nothing; words were inadequate in the presence of her profound grief. At once he understood a great deal about her: how cut off she felt from her parents, why she had found her way into this shadow world, filled with betrayal, fraught with terrible danger, and what she knew would inevitably happen to her when she had gone too far or had made one mistake too many: the ax would fall, her head would roll, and her guilt would at last be expunged.

Her grief was real; the memory had been pulled from her—of these things he could be certain. But what was her motive for this confession? Was she sincerely trying to prove her innocence with this vulnerability? Or was she a consummate actor dredging up a terrible personal tragedy in order to fool him into trusting her?

She loved him and she was deeply troubled. In the end, these were the only two things he could trust absolutely. It was not enough to evaluate the situation. Somehow he had to find a way to make it enough.

Nicholas rose, went to the window. The fishmongers were gone, and all that was left was the smell of eviscerated fish. Of course, the memory of Koei would haunt him now. Every instinct in his body screamed a warning. He knew firsthand what happened when one got involved in the affairs of the Yakuza. And yet here he was, sworn to protect the head of all the Yakuza
oyabun,
in the company of a half-Japanese, half-Vietnamese woman who may or may not have been involved in corporate espionage against his company and a young, ambitious Yakuza
oyabun,
steeped in the lore of the
tanjian.
Wasn’t there anyone but Lew and Tanzan Nangi whom he could trust?

“As long as you’re in a confessional frame of mind,” he said, “you can tell me if you have any doubts about Tachi Shidare.”

Seiko did not immediately reply. He could hear her rummaging around the room, but he did not turn to look at her. At length, she appeared at his side, dressed but as yet unmade-up.

“Tachi is not like the other
oyabun.”

“You mean he’s not infatuated with being beyond the law? He’s not obsessed with power and influence?”

She put her head down. She stood close to him, but he knew she was aware of the deep gulf between them. He had hurt her, perhaps irrevocably, by so harshly voicing his suspicions and then not believing her. But that couldn’t be helped now. The situation they were in—the need to find Okami before his enemies finished their order of assassination; the necessity to discover the nature of Torch 315 before it was unleashed on the ides of March—overrode any personal considerations.

“No. I didn’t mean... Of course, he’s like them in those respects. But... let me tell you a story. I was waiting on tables at my mother’s
akachochin
when he found me. He set me up in business in Tokyo so I could hone my skills.” She reached out to touch Nicholas, then, her hand in midair, thought better of it.

“I will tell you this now because I know that I must. I cannot bear your distance. Your distrust is like a knife blade through my heart, and toward morning when you tossed in your sleep and said her name, ‘Koei,’ my soul shriveled like a leaf in autumn.”

“Forget Koei.”

“But how can I? Because she was someone in your past? But it was she who you dreamed about last night when you could have had my flesh-and-blood arms around you.”

“It was a dream, nothing more.”

“You ejaculated against my stomach when you said her name.”

He gazed down at her with an ashen face. How long would Koei haunt him? As long as he remained in the company of Yakuza? No, no, impossible. Her memory must be put to rest.

There were tears standing in the corners of Seiko’s eyes, and she bit her lower lip in order not to burst into tears. “It was Tachi who sent me to interview for the job as your assistant. It was a wonderful job and I was so grateful to him. Then came the request to be the middleman between Masamoto Goei and Vincent Tinh.”

“Then the story you told me earlier about how you saw me at Nangi’s club was a lie.”