Floating City (37 page)

“No, not a lie, just not the... entire truth.” She took a breath. “I wanted to approach you myself, but I was paralyzed with fright. What if you rejected me? I was sure I couldn’t bear that. So I did nothing. But I spoke of you to Tachi, and several months later he told me there was an opening for your assistant. He urged me on, prepared me for the interview.”

“So by that time Tachi had moved from Kumamoto to Tokyo. He was working for Tomoo Kozo.”

Seiko nodded. “He was smart, everyone knew that, and he rose quickly in the ranks of the Yamauchi. It wasn’t long before he had Kozo’s ear. Kozo liked him, I think, because he knew Southeast Asia; soon enough he began running that sector for the clan.” Despite her best efforts, tears were rolling down her cheeks. “Tachi is obsessed with infiltrating Floating City. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know. But now I’ve told you everything. I’m empty, except for my guilt over my brother’s death and my love for you.”

“The fact is you know next to nothing about Tachi. You see his direction as a kindness when it might very well be nothing but artifice.” There came a discreet knock on the door, but he ignored it. “What if he trained you, deliberately set you up to interview for a job inside my company?”

Then the sliding fusuma was swept aside and Tachi was standing in the hallway, looking at them both.

“Time for breakfast,” he said cheerily.

“Hey, you look great in a uniform, you know that?”

Croaker, striding purposefully toward Gate 19 in the International Departures Lounge of Dulles Airport, was brought up short.

“Yeah,” said Bad Clams Leonforte. “You look like you belong in one of those ads, you know, ‘Fly the friendly skies.’”

“Wrong airline,” Croaker said, looking beyond Leonforte. He was anxious to get on his flight. Besides, he couldn’t stand the sight of the man. But he had threatened to put a bullet through Margarite’s head if Croaker didn’t cooperate, and Croaker had to grit his teeth in order to keep himself in check.

“No, really. A million bucks. I oughta think about having a pilot’s uniform made for me. My mistress would sure get a kick out of it. I can imagine—”

“I’m late. What are you doing here?”

The wide, mad grin. The hands spread wide. “Why, I’m looking after you, Lew.” He gestured, the image of sartorial elegance in his putty-colored Armani suit, a camel-hair overcoat thrown across his shoulders. His $600 loafers gleamed in the airport lights. “C’mon, we’re gonna have a little talk.”

“Much as that fills me with delight, I can’t. Some other time, maybe.”

“Now.”
That dark band of red flickered in Leonforte’s eyes as his jaunty grin disappeared. “What do you think, I’m gonna make you late for your plane? Forgetaboutit. It won’t go anywhere without you, I promise. It’s got highly valuable cargo, right? And I got influence.”

Croaker could see at least three of Leonforte’s gorillas lounging around the terminal at strategic locations. It was all very professional, this box they had him in. He allowed Bad Clams to lead him through a door that read
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
.

He found himself in a spartan-looking room without windows. An old swayback sofa in green Naugahyde, three or four chairs, and a folding table on which stood a coffeemaker, paper cups, plastic stirrers, sugar, Sweet’N Low, and Cremora made the place seem cheap and mean.

“All the comforts of home,” Bad Clams said, expansive again. His changes of mood were abrupt enough to give you whiplash, Croaker thought. “Christ, you’d think they’d treat their pilots better than this.” He ran his fingers through his tangle of curling hair as he swung around to face Croaker. “So how’s it hanging?”

“Fine. Just let me do my job without your greasy fingers getting caught in the gears.”

“Touchy, touchy.” Bad Clams waved a forefinger. “You gotta learn to take my fraternal interest in you in the spirit in which it’s offered.”

“Come off this crap, will you. It’s bad enough you have me over a barrel without my having to put up with this circus sideshow.”

He knew it was a mistake when he said it, but this man set his teeth on edge. Bad Clams was in his face in one long stride. He slammed the flats of his hands against Croaker’s chest, sending him reeling back against one cinder-block wall. Croaker curled his biomechanical hand into a fist but did not raise it.

“Don’t dis me, bro, as the
mooinyan
uptown say.” Bad Clams nodded, stepped back. “And speaking of sideshows, what the fuck are you doing following Vesper Arkham around? You spend any more time with her, you’re gonna need my help bad.”

“That kind of help I don’t need.”

“No? Right now, I’m your magic godfather—pun intended. And where you’re goin’, I do believe you’re gonna need all the help you can get, even from this goombah.” Bad Clams sneered. “Fuck you, buddy. I know just what you think of me, that I’m one small step above a gorilla in a zoo.” He pointed his forefinger at Croaker’s chest. “Fact is, I don’t give a rat’s ass what you think of me, okay? Just so we got that straight. You got your right to be an asshole just like everybody else, I won’t lose sleep over it.

“The only thing you gotta keep in mind from now on is I got my eye on you, okay? Just ’cause you’re flying the pond don’t mean I won’t know where you go and what you do. Don’t try to cross me in London or wherever the fuck you wind up with this thing, because I’ll come down on you with both my hobnailed boots strapped on and it won’t be a pretty picture, all right?”

“I’m reading you loud and clear.”

Bad Clams laughed. “Yeah, you even sound like a pilot. What did you do, wave your fed badge in front of the airline’s nose?”

“Something like that. They loaned me this pilot’s uniform and I’m deadheading with a couple of flight attendants on the second London run of the day.” He watched Leonforte carefully. “Are you done intimidating me? Can I go now?”

Bad Clams waved a hand in the air. “Do whatever the fuck you want, Lew. Just remember that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Think of the consequences before you leap, not after. I take no prisoners.”

The giant aircraft was late in taking off, and sitting in the back of the plane, Croaker wondered whether it had anything to do with him. He had been the last person boarding, checking on Vesper from the doorway area. She was seated in first class, along with all the other millionaires.

He didn’t want to think about Bad Clams Leonforte, but the madman just would not go away. How had he known when and where Croaker would show up unless he was having him followed? And if he could be believed, he was able to keep an international flight on hold while he psychologically twisted Croaker’s arm.

It was beginning to look as if Bad Clams was as unusual in his way as Dominic Goldoni had been in his. What kind of world had he fallen into where underworld figures wormed their way into a highly clandestine bureau of the federal government, engaged in international economic warfare with Japanese Yakuza, and pretty much had the run of legitimate businesses? These people were not your normal
gavones
from Sicily who broke heads to intimidate their enemies and indiscriminately spilled blood when they didn’t get their way. These were not crude men, but rather calculated thinkers with the kind of prescience that allowed them audacious leaps of deduction that went beyond mere canny business sense. Goldoni’s successes had entered the realm of legerdemain, but he seriously doubted that Bad Clams, the egotist, the pseudophilosopher with the hair-trigger temper, was in the league of either Goldoni or his own father, the brilliant Leon Waxman.

Waxman, the man of a thousand faces and identities, had been known as Jonathan Leonard when he served in the U.S. Army during the occupation of Japan in the midforties, but he had been born John Leonforte.

Johnny had had three children: Bad Clams, Michael, and a daughter, Jaqui, who had died in a car accident when she was twenty. Michael was the real mystery. A genuine rebel who could not deal with authority on any level, he had been put to work in Special Forces in Vietnam. Soon thereafter, he went AWOL somewhere in the Laotian backcountry where even the superspooks in Special Forces had not been able to find him. Whether he was dead or alive was anyone’s guess.

As for his father, Mikio Okami believed he had killed Jonathan Leonard when they had clashed in Tokyo in the spring of 1947, but Leonard had survived, had made his way to a hospital, and had had reconstructive surgery on his face after having his wounds patched up. When he recovered, he had become Leon Waxman. How he had come to the attention of the spymaster Sen. Richard Dedalus was a mystery for another day, but the fact remained that he had become the head of Dedalus’s agency until his unmasking and death late last year.

Croaker had learned most of what he knew about Bad Clams’s father from Faith Goldoni, Dominic’s mother, who had known him in Tokyo. She also had changed names freely. Now known in Washington power circles as Renata Loti, she was a lobbyist of extraordinary influence. Margarite had taken Croaker to meet Faith, and he had seen what an extraordinary woman she was. She had been responsible for bringing Leon Waxman down.

Curiously, Faith had made no mention of Senator Dedalus. But what interested Croaker most now was Dedalus’s relationship with DARPA, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. He wondered if anyone there knew of Torch 315, whether they knew where it was going to be detonated on the ides of March, or whether he was making an interesting fiction out of a stew of disparate clues. He hoped this next step backward along Mikio Okami’s Nishiki network would provide some answers because he had a distinct premonition that Okami and the late lamented Dominic Goldoni were tied up with Dedalus. At the very least, they had been involved with Morgana, Inc., the shadow corporation that dealt in illegal arms trading.

The merry-go-round was getting filled up, Croaker thought: Dominic introduces his sister Margarite to Senator Dedalus, who oversees DARPA. Margarite, it turns out, is also cozy with Vesper, who is working for Morgana, Inc. And Vesper was also a member of Mikio Okami’s Nishiki network. All the players were there; it was now up to Croaker to figure out their roles.

He closed his eyes, and in a moment he was asleep. That was a mistake. He awoke with a start, a thin film of sweat riming his upper lip. His underarms were damp. He was still half in the dream, where like a magnificent stage drama, his worst fear had come to life: Two women moving on a shadowed stage, intimate whispers, the erotic slide of satin against skin. And then, like the sudden advent of a key light, a familiar voice piercing the semidarkness as Margarite orders Vesper to kill him.

Blue smoke like mist.

Copper shadows curling toward the ceiling, stirred by music from the semicircle of matte black speakers surmounting a mammoth karaoke machine. The computerized machine was fitted with a chromium grille so that it looked like the front end of an old American car. Its aggressively retro look was currently the rage in Japan. In three months that all-important look would change, out would go this karaoke machine, in would come a new one.

A small man in a business suit was attempting to sing “Be My Love” as he ran the flat of his hand along his temples to sleek his silver-streaked hair back like that of the moving image of Jerry Vale behind him.

As Nicholas and Tachi entered Ningyo-ro, the ultramodern nightclub in Kyoto that V. I. Pavlov had visited, they were engulfed by the tremoloed sounds blasting from the karaoke’s speakers. They stood, transfixed for a moment by the shimmering atmosphere, tangible as the cacophony of a construction site at full bore. The combination of dark colors and chrome rails and seatbacks, all lit by a thousand pin-spots, gave the room its own outré form of shadow and light. Beyond the main room was a smaller counterpart lit with black light. Shades of the seventies.

Ningyo-ro, the Doll Pavilion, was crowded, filled with smoke and gimlet-eyed Japanese all cross-referencing their contacts in industry, government, the bureaucracy, and the Yakuza. All these sectors were inextricably entwined in an elaborate institutional dance of favors met and payoffs proffered, intimidation exerted and face saved, that invariably bewildered any Westerner exposed to even a small part of it.

Nicholas and Tachi moved slowly through the crowd, making their way to the bar at the far end of the room. It was constructed of frosted glass, lit from below by tubes of fluorescent light, which threw into high relief the carvings of female No figures seen through a forest of bubbles not unlike those in old-fashioned Christmas lights or sixties Wurlitzer jukeboxes.

As they neared this deliberate film-noir artifact, Nicholas watched a slender waitress as she delivered drinks to a table of thickset Japanese businessmen. She looked like a doll in traditional white makeup. They turned their sweat-streaked faces toward her briefly, laughing among themselves. One reached for a beer, and Nicholas saw a thick swath of elaborate
irizumi,
the tattoos favored by Yakuza.

Nicholas and Tachi ordered Sapporo beers. Another foolish Japanese businessman was trying out his awful Elvis impersonation singing “Viva Las Vegas.” Try as he might, he couldn’t get the hip swivel. It was really quite laughable.

Tachi grunted. “It’s a big ‘if’ as to whether this Zao is here at all.”

“I don’t think so,” Nicholas said. “The Russian was fastidious with his accounting. He kept a receipt for this place. That means if he stayed overnight in Kyoto, he didn’t pay for it.”

“Maybe Zao put him up.”

Nicholas nodded. “Right. It makes sense.”

“But how are we going to find him in this din? It would be like looking in a haystack for a plastic needle. Not even a metal detector would help.”

He gave Tachi a grin. “We’re
not
going to find him; we’re going to let him find us.” Nicholas signaled to the bartender and, when he came over, leaned in so that he could be heard. “Tell Zao that Pavlov sent us. The deal didn’t go through and Pavlov’s unhappy.
Very
unhappy.”

“I don’t know anyone named Zao,” the bartender said.