Floating City (5 page)

“I don’t know your name.”

He shrugged. “Call me Trang. One name’s as good as another, isn’t it,
Chu
Goto?” Trang smiled, revealing white, even teeth behind pouty lips.

Nicholas grabbed his jacket and they went out. He didn’t bother to lock the door behind him; he had paid for the room in advance and he wasn’t coming back.

“You always pick such, ah, luxurious accommodations?” Trang’s voice had a husky, midrange tone, as if he were a heavy smoker and drinker, which, Nicholas thought, could be all too true.

A bevy of half-naked women were lounging in the entryway to the hotel. They were as over-made-up as rock groupies and just as young, Nicholas thought. What a life. They made sucking sounds with their lips and grabbed at their breasts as the two men pushed past them. They smelled of cheap perfume and of sex.

Trang had long, quick strides and Nicholas found himself having to push himself in order to keep up with the Vietnamese as he darted amid the late-night throngs that swarmed along Liem Van Chau Boulevard. Choking exhaust from the traffic combined with clouds of smoke from street stalls in which meats and vegetables roasted over charcoal fires.

What Nicholas had told the skittish friend of Shindo’s friend was that he had obtained a prototype of a second-generation neural-net chip. What he needed was a theoretical-language technician who could decipher the new technology and build a workable machine around it—fast. And whoever it was, Nicholas had cautioned, had better know how to keep his mouth shut. The idea had been that whoever had put together Tinh’s computer with a first-generation neural-net chip would jump at the chance to get his hands on a second-generation chip, because upon learning of the illegal computer, Nangi had moved to shut it out of the East Asian gray market.

The promise of a second-generation chip was like being offered a billion dollars tax-free—the possibilities were unlimited for constructing a cybernetic machine so advanced it would blow all competition out of the water.

Seventy-two hours later, the friend of a friend had phoned him to give him the particulars of the meeting. Nicholas had agreed to the date and time—the next day at midnight—but had changed the venue to the Anh Dan Hotel in Cholon, where Shindo was familiar with the layout, including entrances, exits, and cover as well as the general surroundings. That was sensible, as well as prudent. It was essential, Nicholas had long ago discovered, to catalog what he called “the smell” of a site for any rendezvous—a mosaic of sight, sound, smell, taste, and feel. Because to know when a site didn’t smell right you had to be familiar with all the pieces that fit together to make the whole.

Nicholas understood the pressure under which Shindo had been operating. It was imperative in paranoid Vietnam to make any inquiries under cover of maximum security. Unstable political factions still vied for power with a fractured military, mountain insurgents, and ethnic vigilantes, so all foreigners were automatically suspect. But beyond that, neither Shindo nor Nicholas knew the identity or the strength of the enemy. Vincent Tinh and those in his operation may have been involved with drug smugglers, black-market munitions specialists, power-crazed Chinese mountain warlords, Yakuza—the list was endless. Still, there was one ubiquitous truth: all of these factions were exceedingly dangerous and all had spies in and around Saigon. Outnumbered and outgunned, Nicholas knew he had to step carefully lest the weight of his unknown enemy come down on him and Shindo all at once.

“Trang,” he said now, taking a chance, “how long did you work for Vincent Tinh?”

“Vincent Tinh?” Trang was brought up short, a stone in the stream of traffic eddying around them.

“Yes.” Nicholas searched Trang’s face looking for duplicity, but finding something else, something he couldn’t put his finger on.

A deafening roar filled the street as a covey of motorbikes swept past, the echoes of their exhaust thrumming off the shopfronts. A blast of rock ’n’ roll sped like a manic race driver, Mick Jagger wailing about war.

“You worked for him, didn’t you?” Nicholas said.

Trang swung his head so that his eyes went blank in the streetlights. “If I had, I’d be dead now.”

By which answer Nicholas knew he had hit a raw nerve. Even if Trang hadn’t worked for him, he knew some of what had happened to Tinh and why. That made him instantly valuable to Nicholas.

He reached out. “Just a minute, Trang—”

But Trang pulled away, darting ever faster through the swelling throng, and Nicholas found himself sprinting after the Vietnamese. What the hell was he up to?

Trang was hurrying southeast, toward the Kinh Ben Nghe Canal that acted more or less as the southern boundary of central Cholon. A pair of monks in saffron robes, their faces serene and observant, turned their heads as he pushed by. A gaggle of kids tried to grab at him, their outstretched arms like a forest of sea anemones. A streetwalker eyed him from behind outlandish false lashes. She looked like a Carnaby Street tart circa 1969. It appeared as if all of Saigon were caught in a weird psychedelic time warp, desperately trying to reconjure its salad days, which were, perversely, during the height of the war.

Nicholas had nearly caught up to Trang when he thought he saw Shindo moving toward him at the periphery of the crowd. Then the image was gone, and he hurried after Trang, who slipped through the throng as easily as an eel through a coral reef. Nicholas’s anxiety increased as he recalled Shindo’s warning about this place. This was his turf, not Nicholas’s.

He slipped past a cluster of people, sprinted across a brief clear section of street, and made a lunge for Trang. Someone was heading toward the Vietnamese from the opposite direction. Nicholas was reaching out to protect Trang when he heard a sharp report.

At almost the same instant, the head of the man beside Trang blew outward like a cracked melon. A hail of blood, tissue, and shattered bone erupted, and Nicholas found himself prone on the ground. The smells of incense and death mingled in his nostrils. A shocked silence gripped the narrow street, followed by the first wail of a human voice, picked up and echoed by others.

Nicholas, on his knees, sank into Akshara, spiraling downward toward
kokoro,
the heart of all things. He chose one of the ages-old rhythms of Tau-tau, beating upon the membrane of
kokoro,
creating the psychic resonance that transformed thought into deed. Light flashed, then dimmed, colors bled one into another as time warped outward and away. Thus armed, he opened his
tanjian
eye, expanding his psyche outward. The man was dead. Automatically, his psyche searched for another
tanjian
presence, but found none. And then, his attention returning to the corpse, he saw the dark tie, narrow as a knife. It was no longer patternless. A Jackson Pollock-like spray of blood was spiderwebbed across it.

Oh, Christ,
he thought.
It’s Shindo.

He reached out, but Trang was suddenly crouched beside him. “No! There’s no time!” he shouted in Nicholas’s ear, and hauled him to his feet. Trang made an abrupt turn to the left, disappearing into darkness. Nicholas, with one quick glance back at Shindo’s sprawled body, followed him.

What happened was this: I killed him in the manner he asked me to,
Shindo had said about his lover. But now Nicholas realized that he had been talking about himself as well. He couldn’t stay away from Vietnam. The war had caught him up in its malignant thrall, and in the end he died as he had wanted to, in-country, from an enemy bullet.

Together, Nicholas and Trang hurtled down one narrow back alley after another in such rapid succession that Nicholas lost all sense of direction. He supposed that was the point: if he was confused, so would be anyone trying to pursue them. He wanted to ask Trang a dozen questions, chief among which was, Had that shot been meant for him?

At last, they broke out onto Tran Van Kieu Street. Ahead of them, the dark waters of the Kinh Ben Nghe Canal gleamed in the lights from the city. They raced toward the bridge upon which Con Gluoc Street spanned the canal. Beneath it was utter blackness.

Trang slipped beneath the bridge. Nicholas hesitated for a moment, looking back over his shoulder. He did not care for the darkness. He did not know Trang, could not for certain trust him. What if this was a setup?

What good were these doubts? he asked himself. If Trang was for real, he needed him. Shindo was dead and Trang was now his only lead in the investigation. All he knew for sure was he’d never find out standing still.

He ducked his head, slipping into the blackness. He was immediately up to his knees in filth. The stench was overpowering. But now, as his eyes adjusted, he saw a dim outline of a small boat tied up against the stone pilings. Trang was moving in the darkness, and Nicholas heard a rustling of cloth. Then Trang clambered into the boat, untied it, and pushed off while Nicholas leaped aboard. The craft rocked dangerously, and Nicholas was obliged to stand spread-legged in the center in order to bring it back to stability.

By that time they had emerged from beneath the bridge. Nicholas scanned the shoreline, looking for anyone with an inordinate degree of interest in them, but the exercise was fruitless. Too many faces, too little light, and the inconstant rocking motion of their passage defeated him. He opened his
tanjian
eye, searching for a malign presence, but the welter of people provided too much interference. Mind reading was not among the advantages of the
tanjian.
Adepts could, by a clever combination of psychic insight, observation, and intuition, come to an approximation of it, but it was not true mind reading and had to be treated with a great degree of caution.

It occurred to Nicholas that they were too vulnerable out on the water, and he turned his attention to Trang in order to tell him this.

Trang had disappeared. In fact, Nicholas saw with a jolt, he had never existed. The slim figure running the noisy outboard motor was without the fedora and suit, and now Nicholas recognized that it was feminine in every way. This was the oddity he had instinctively registered earlier but could not quite pull into the light of consciousness.

“Shit,” he said, sitting down heavily, “who the hell are you?”

“My name is Bay,” the young woman said. He could now see her for what she was: a beautiful Vietnamese with clear skin, large, luminous eyes, and long, cascading hair. The hat, then, had been an essential part of the disguise, not an affectation. He had to admire her; there was no trace of the portrait she had so skillfully painted of Trang.

“What happened to Trang?”

She smiled with pouty, sensual lips as she steered around an oncoming boat, giving it a wide berth. “Let’s make it simple and say Trang was killed back there on the street.”

“No. A man who worked for me was murdered, and you simply left him—”

Her head turned toward him and her black eyes bored into his. “That man could have been you. You’d do well to remember that. Did you see what was left of his skull? What you seek is both illegal and very dangerous,
Chu
Goto. Whose responsibility is the man’s death, mine or yours?”

Nicholas opened his mouth to reply, but his tongue seemed to have trouble working. She had startled him not only with what she said but with the force she had used.

“Men changing into women, a murder in the street, running from an unknown and unseen enemy. What’s going on here?”

“This is your journey,
Chu
Goto. You asked for it.”

Nicholas said nothing, digesting all that had happened from the moment this disguised woman had appeared at his hotel-room door. What rankled him the most was that he hadn’t immediately seen through her mask. His pride had been pricked, and what was worse, she appeared to understand this. What exactly did she know about him? He had assumed that here in Saigon he wouldn’t be recognized.

“You must trust me,” Bay said in an urgent tone. She maneuvered the boat into a darkened, deserted slip on the opposite shore. Nicholas estimated that they were just over three miles southwest of where they had boarded the boat. “I’m going to take you to the man you want to see.”

“The theoretical-language technician?”

Bay nodded her head. “The Russian Jew, yes. Abramanov.”

Akira Chosa,
oyabun
of the Kokorogurushii family, drank in the dense, resonating knell of the shrine bell. The bell, made of a composite of bronze and copper, was the height of three men. It had been cast more than 250 years ago at the same shrine foundry that had turned out some of the finest samurai armor and
katana
Japan had ever seen.

At dawn, dusk, and midnight the bell was rung by a trio of Shinto priests propelling a thick beaten-bronze post, hanging horizontally by the side of the bell. Its hemispherical head was wrapped in a square of specially woven indigo cloth that was replaced each year on the last day of winter in a ceremony that took the better part of an entire day.

Chosa, a devout Shintoist, had attended this ceremony every year since he had attained manhood, and more than once he had knelt, shaven head bowed, in the midst of these priests, praying to the gods of the shrine’s sacred camphorwood trees from which it was built, the piercing white snow that lay atop its eaves, and the crepuscular moon that illuminated them all, with blood on his hands, the remnants of affairs of business or of honor.

This was before he had been elevated to the rank of
oyabun,
but the blood marked, like the rungs on a ladder, his ascent through the ranks of the Kokorogurushii.

Chosa could not fail to hear the beating of the great shrine bell and be moved. Like art, this symbol of his inner beliefs affected him far more deeply than did his dealings with humans, which, in his opinion, were insignificant and ephemeral. In the end, Chosa fervently believed, only the cosmic symbols survived in the mind, the heart, the spirit, the places of eternal wandering.

As the sound swelled, enveloping him, he wept. He licked his lips, tasting in his saliva this deep tolling as if it possessed the bitter tang of hardened steel. It did not seem to matter to him that, twenty floors up, he could not see the shrine, hidden as successfully as a mushroom in a forest of cryptomeria. Hearing the beating of the bell was what was important.