The Kaisho (41 page)

And so it remained virtually unchanged by the passing years until perhaps five years ago, when, after falling on hard times, it was bought by a foreign firm and the name was changed again, to Avalon Ltd.

Who bought the company?
Nicholas had asked.

Now that’s the curious part,
Fornovo had said, setting the Domino aside.
No one seems to know.

Nicholas awoke to sunlight spilling through the window. He turned over in bed, found Celeste sleeping beside him, her clothes still on. Her face, extraordinarily beautiful, was cast half in sunlight, half in the blue shadows of the dregs of night. The TV was still on but, the tape having finished hours since, was spewing out a soundless spray of gray and white particles, like a beam from some science-fiction weapon.

He looked down, found himself also fully clothed. He could not even remember lying down. Exhaustion, complete and blessed, had overtaken them without warning.

He lay where he was, too content for the moment to move. He knew he should call his office; Seiko must be frantic by now. But why should he let her know where he was? She would only want to give him an update on the Saigon situation, and he had no desire to hear it. Besides, she and Nangi would be able to take care of anything that arose.

These excuses, he knew, were old and wearing thin. Slowly, almost painfully, like the progress of a degenerative disease, the truth was dawning on him. He was fleeing a marriage that had come apart, a relationship that had run so far off course he was powerless to set it right. Guilt had done its best to strangle the truth, to keep alive paper-thin fabrications that were laughable in the pragmatic light of day.

But, as another facet of the truth was revealed to him, he knew it went deeper than that. He was running away from his old life: his retirement into marriage, a supposed family, a settled job, the minutiae of responsibility settling upon his shoulders like soot. He was being buried alive.

The profound sense of freedom he had felt the moment he had donned the Bauta mask was exhilarating. He did not want it to end. He wanted his old life back.

Carefully, he turned his head, staring into Celeste’s sun-struck face. And then there were his growing feelings about this wondrous woman. If he were not married, he knew he would be falling in love with her. And then, the truth, writhing and extending itself like a scar upon flesh, revealed yet another facet of itself: What did his being married have to do with it? The concept of love precluded outside circumstance. He
was
falling in love with her.

He sat up abruptly, got out of bed. Soundlessly, he padded into the bathroom, stripped and stood under a scalding shower for five minutes. He soaped up, then turned the hot spigot off, felt the chill of the needle spray puckering his skin like the first barometric drop of an incoming storm. He turned his face up into the torrent, as if the water could scrub his mind as well as his body clean.

Wrapping a towel around his waist, he returned to the room to discover Celeste rummaging through her small suitcase.

“Christ, I slept like the dead,” she said.

He went quickly by her, not trusting himself to speak or even be near her at the moment.

Bearing her clothes, she disappeared into the steamy bathroom. The room seemed immediately small and meanly impersonal without her presence, and without thinking too much about it, Nicholas pushed open the door into the bathroom.

Celeste was in the tub, soaking. He crossed to a small wooden stool at the foot of the tub, opened the French windows, then sat down.

Celeste was wearing a mask. It was composed of dark mud and minerals, another luxe perk offered by the hotel. Her eyes were closed and her face was in repose.

“Have you come to seduce me?”

“No,” he said, tasting the lie on his tongue.

Her eyes opened, their aquamarine color all the more startling contrasted against the mud. “Can you feel Okami-san?”

“The future is blank, Celeste.”

She regarded him silently for what seemed a long time.

“I’m frightened, Nicholas.”

“Yes, I know.”

“I’m not used to that.”

He nodded. “Perhaps all we need is to help one another.”

She turned on the hot-water tap. “I need to wash off this mask. If you stay, you’ll get wet.”

Twenty minutes later, she emerged from the bathroom. Her hair was still damp from the shower, plaited into a thick French braid. This more tempered style contrasted sharply with the lush wildness of how she had worn it in Venice, a city of excesses. It made her seem less impetuous, and also more introspective, melancholy. In Venice, a city many thought of as melancholy, she had been as exuberant as sunlight on the water. What would she be like here? he wondered.

She wore black leggings, a sapphire-blue suede blouse, a puffy-sleeved silk jacket embroidered with a phoenix on its back. Her feet were clad in sensible black flats. They had had two and a half hours before their flight from Venice, and she had made good use of the time, stuffing a soft-sided weekend bag with everything she thought she would need.

“Ready for espresso and
petit pain?”
she asked on the way down in the minuscule elevator. It had glass sides so that they could see the curving marble staircase through whose heart they descended. Nicholas, so close to Celeste, was aware of the smell of her, subtle hints of frangipani and cinnamon beneath rosemary and peppermint, the aromatherapeutic scents of bath gel and shampoo. It seemed to him that he was drawn toward her in an almost tidal pull, an ebb and flow as familiar to him as the pulse of his blood through his veins.

To stop himself from pressing himself against her he thought of Justine. Distance had put clarity to their relationship. Sadness and suffering, long withheld, had given birth to resentment and anger. He recognized now that they had both been wounded by the death of their infant daughter, though it must have been in vastly different ways. In insisting they stay on in Japan he saw that he had taken away a part of herself, when his only thought was to add to it. But was that the whole truth? How much of an element was his selfishness, his burning desire to get to
kokoro,
the heart of his own natural history? The revelations of Tau-tau consumed him, he knew that—but now he had to face the consequences of that obsession. The price of truth was always high.

In the lobby, they made their way to the small restaurant with its pale ash tables, ebony chairs, steel and leather banquettes. Just to the right of where they sat was a tiny courtyard into which spilled sunlight unfiltered by either tree branch or roof eave. The pale pebbles, rearing water-racked boulder, and miniature hinoki cypresses conjured up Japan in the deliberate methodology of the Western gardener, more homage to form than understanding of substance. And yet its easy confluence of natural elements caused him to become instantly nostalgic for the East, where the tao of emotion was swathed in layers of ritual, custom, and symbolism.

“I don’t feel like real food, do you?” Celeste asked.

“Not really.”

She ordered for them; her French was excellent.

The truth had given Nicholas a sense of liberation. His sadness for what had been, and what might have been, was slowly being supplanted by his excitement at being close to the edge again. The perilous journey was what fueled him, what made life worth living. He was just realizing now how far from his personal center he had drifted these past years.

“How far?”

“What?” Instantly, his attention refocused on her.

“I was wondering how far away you were.”

He smiled, less startled now that she had explained her comment. For a moment, he had thought she had been reading his mind. He drizzled marmalade over a broken crust of his
petit pain.
“I think I’d like another espresso,” he said.

He felt from her a desire to push him, to open him up as she might an expensive compact in order to gaze at herself in a new mirror. But was her interest in him merely curiosity? It was most odd, but even after their experiences together he felt in some respects as distant from her as he had the night they first met behind their Venetian masks. He was used to reading people, getting behind their facades, but with Celeste he was finding that for every step he took toward intimacy, he was in some manner shoved back a corresponding step.

He slipped two small cubes of sugar into the black depths, stirred the espresso, sipped it delightedly.

She licked bread powder off her fingertips, put her elbows on the pale ashwood, and leaning close to him, said, “Do you really think this Avalon Ltd. is a clue left behind for us by Okami-san?”

He thought of her on the
vaporetto
in Venice, cold wind in her face so that she blinked back tears, her thick hair streaming from her face. The anger she had expressed then caught him in a viper’s grip, and aware that he knew nothing about her, he wondered whether it had truly dissipated.

“Follow the sequence of what we found carefully folded in Okami-san’s study and where, step by step, it has led us. Okami is a meticulous man—and a supremely clever one. I would say, yes, it’s a deliberate message for us.”

“What if it
is
a clue, but it wasn’t left by Okami-san?”

“That possibility has occurred to me, but we won’t know until we arrive at Avalon Ltd. itself.”

She looked down at the remains of their breakfast. “Don’t you think,” she said, “that if the assassin got to him, he would be dead by now?”

“Only if Okami’s enemies want nothing from him than his demise.”

She seemed to be vibrating now, but from fear or exhilaration he could not say.

“You told me he never wrote anything down,” he said. “Whatever he has been working on is all in his head. It stands to reason his enemies would want his secrets before they have him killed.”

“Are you sure?”

“It’s what I’d do in their place.”

“Christ, you’re cold.” She looked away from him at the deep lustrous green of the miniature hinokis, and again he felt this peculiar attraction/repulsion from her mind that he could not fathom.

“Look, Celeste, if we aren’t able to think clearly and without emotion, we have very little chance of helping Okami.”

She nodded mutely, her eyes dark and unreadable.

He felt that it was time to go. On the way out he asked the concierge for the address of Avalon Ltd. The concierge looked it up, wrote it down on a slip of paper, handed it over along with a folding map of the city. On the back of the map was a schematic of the metro, and the concierge drew the route they needed to take.

At the Rue du Bac metro station, they took Line 12 north three stops to Concorde. They were now on the Right Bank. They transferred to Line 1 heading east.

“How much do you know of this alliance between the Yakuza and the Mafia that Okami-san spoke to me about?” Nicholas asked her.

“I suppose if I knew as much as Okami-san does, I’d be a target, too.” She swung her head to look past him, at an ad for Galeries Lafayette, the Parisian department store. “He told you about the Godaishu?”

“Yes.”

“Did he tell you that the Godaishu was his own creation?”

Nicholas stared at her. “He didn’t.”

“The Five Continents seemed a fitting name for an international conglomerate that spanned the globe. It was to be legitimate in all ways, the path that Okami-san had seen to keep the remnants of the Yakuza from being annihilated by increasing government controls and crackdowns.

“By the power of his personality and his office he convinced the inner council of
oyabun
to go along with him, but some were unsure, others clandestinely hostile to the idea.”

“Yes, Okami told me that they were afraid of losing the enormous influence and power their lawlessness gave them.”

Celeste nodded. “There was talk that the Kaisho had grown old beyond his usefulness, that he was increasingly bound to a world of his own imagining.”

“You mean the council believed him senile.”

“Someone was promoting the tale, in any event.”

“The man who now controls the direction of the Godaishu.”

She nodded. Clearly, she did not believe that Okami was senile. “Their growing estrangement caused Okami-san to rethink his own path. Someone was consistently undermining his orders, turning the council against him, so in desperation he shifted alliances, made deals behind the Godaishu’s back, began, in effect, to work against his own creation.

“Now the war is in the open.”

“Do you have a suspicion who has ordered Okami’s death?”

“It disturbs me that I don’t,” Celeste said. “But I have a recurring nightmare. In it I discover that
all
the
oyabun
of the Godaishu are in it together—and even Okami-san does not have the power to beat them down.”

“Is that possible, now that the hostilities are in the open?”

“I doubt it. Some of the
oyabun
are weaker than others, and there are suballiances based on
giri.
No, I believe there is one
oyabun
persuading the others that Okami-san must be destroyed, because despite my paranoid nightmare I can’t imagine all the
oyabun
of the inner council moving against the Kaisho no matter how much they disagreed with his plans.”

Nicholas considered this. “It seems logical, then, that this
oyabun
is the one controlling the Godaishu, Okami’s nemesis.”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll have to find him. And for that I’ll have to return to Japan. But not before I’ve made sure that Okami is safe.”

“But can’t you tell if Okami-san is all right? I mean, you’re psychic.”

Nicholas was beginning to understand her approach to him, and suddenly, he had what seemed like the answer to a question he had been asking himself. “Let’s get one thing straight: I’m not psychic,” he said immediately. “I don’t see the future or perform exorcisms; I don’t bust ghosts down to size.”

“But you can see things—feel them. You knew Okami was not in his palazzo; you saw the bloody Domino mask before we found it.”