Zero. Part 20

Fat Boy started his car, pulled out into the street. Now it's going to be a race, he thought. And the finish line is Michael Doss.

It was raining.

Her face on the wall: a shadow, larger than life.

Michael was staring at Eliane.

"I came here," she said, "because I was tired of cities. Cars, apartments, offices. They were exhausting me."

The last thing he wanted was to be attracted to this woman. He found that he had to keep reminding himself that he was here to discover her link to the Hawaiian Yakuza. If her boyfriend was in Fat Boy Ichimada's clan, he might provide a nonaggressive way into the oyabun's compound.

"I was becoming ill all the time," Eliane was saying. " 'Your resistance is down,' my doctor said. 'Your adrenal glands are depleted,' my chiropractor said. The city was polluting me."

"Which city?"

"It doesn't matter," she said. "They're identical. At least their pernicious effects on human beings are."

It was easy for him to show nothing on the surface. As he moved with her through the rooms of the house, he made all the appropriate noises. The place was undeniably spectacular, even in the rain, nestled as it was between two volcanic mountains.

"Here I can renew myself. In the home of G.o.ds beyond time."

The rain, cascading down the emerald-and-sapphire mountains. It was extraordinary. Akin to being sited in the valley between a pair of the giant earth dragons the Chinese believed crisscrossed all terrain. In such a setting, her overt mysticism was contagious.

"Can you feel them, Michael? Can you feel their power? The energy of these mountains?"

The odd thing was that he could.

The rain drummed against the skylight in Eliane's bedroom. What was difficult was to damp down on his inner feelings. He stood in this s.p.a.ce and was reminded-despite his best efforts-of his atelier on the Avenue Elysee Reclus.

Of the night when Za came to stay.

"You're so quiet." Turning to him. "I'm talking too much." She laughed. This, too, she did unselfconsciously.

"No," he said. "I'm enjoying it. It's difficult to speak in the face of these mountains."

"Yes. I felt the same way when I first came here. They're awesome without being intimidating."

At first it was impossible for him to fathom the link his mind had forged between Za and Eliane. He found that he did not want to leave this place that Eliane had made into her home. Some people can live in a house for years without ever giving any sign that it had been theirs. Just the opposite seemed to be true for Eliane. She told him that she had been here less than a month,but already she had managed to make this house hers. It smelled like her, felt like her. Her presence suffused the rooms like perfume.

"Time seems to slow down here. You know, Michael, the Hawaiians claim that their hero, Maui, climbed to the top of Mount Haleakala, reached up and grabbed the sun, slowing its progress across the sky so that his island home would be sun-drenched forever. Sitting here, it's possible to believe that story."

"Even in the rain?"

It was when they were sitting on the lanai, drinking iced tea, that he felt the blow on his heart. He remembered the moment his eyes had opened that night with Za. They had just made love. The rain was running down the skylight panes, reflecting onto their twined bodies.

"Oh yes," Eliane said. "Especially in the rain. See there?" She pointed. The magnificent rainbow, its colors so vibrant they made the eyes ache, arched across mountaintops still obscured by swirling cloud. "It means that the sun is out even while it is raining."

Back then, he had looked at Za's face for the first time in many minutes. Her eyes were closed, her face in absolute respose. Perhaps she had been asleep.

There was not a line to be seen. Not the hint of a crease. Because her face was without expression, it was possible to see all the way inside her.

"Here," Eliane said, "rain has the power of drama."

"In j.a.pan as well."

Eliane did not turn her head. "In j.a.pan," she said, "rain is beautiful, stately, perfect in the angle at which it strikes the ground or the water. In Hawaii, it is wild, full of energy and light. Free of all constraints."

Lying next to Za, he had discovered that what he had fallen in love with was not Za at all. She was aligned with no ideology, no person, no philosophy. It was as if her spirit were composed of clear crystal. It shone. It refracted light into varying colors depending on the nature of the light and the angle at which it was struck.

But at its core, it possessed no color of its own.

Then Za had opened her eyes and, filled with love, had said, "I want to stay.

Not just tonight. Not until tomorrow. I want to be with you forever."

It wasn't just that he had seen her as more than human, this model of his mind's ideal. He realized with a painful lurch that he had mistaken the crystal of her spirit for the purity of Seyoko's soul. It saddened-and frightened-him that he should still be searching for what had already been denied him. Seyoko was long dead, but he could not give her up. The memory of her was insufficient to sustain him.

Thus, when Michael closed the door behind Za the next morning, it was for the last time. She was gone. Her image on his canvases remained. But that was all.

It was wholly his doing, his inadequacy. In her pain he had briefly found a weapon to use against himself. Her tears had awakened him to the agony of una.s.suageable longing he would carry around forever.

"Did you live in j.a.pan?" he asked.

"For many years, yes." Eliane said. "After a while, Tokyo's furious energy only made me want to sleep."

It's not that she reminds me of Za, he thought now, his heart beating faster.

She reminds me of Seyoko.

"Don't you miss it?" Michael said thickly. "j.a.pan."

"I belong nowhere," Eliane said. "I have no ties, no affiliations. Like cities, ties to people, to causes, exhaust me. The crosscurrents of responsibility are like shackles. Have you ever read Gulliver's Travels'? That is how alliances make me feel. Like Gulliver bound to the ground in Lilliput.

I am content to be."

Now came Eliane. Her mysticism drew him. Her unconditional surrender to the forces of nature spoke to him on the most profound level. Because she was wholly uncivilized in an elemental way, she was unaffected by any of the man-made restraints that so disturbed him.

Michael would not understand this until much later, but his attraction to hermirrored his father's affinity to the clandestine life afforded by the Seventh Service, and then by BITE.

It was apart from the rest of the world, yes. It reinforced his sense that he was someone special, yes. But more than anything else, it represented the ultimate freedom.

For Philip the ability to do anything, to be anybody, to choose from this bewildering multiplicity, was something that he had worked on all of his adult life. In his own mind, it had been his ultimate achievement.

For Michael, it had come more naturally. His training in Yoshino had taught him to embrace life-to appreciate its unending diversity. Possessing the freedom to choose was essential to his nature.

"The sun," Eliane-said. "Oh look! Here come the moun-taintops!"

Michael had forgotten why he was here. Transfixed by nature, he watched with an artist's eye as the white smoke, the bannered remnants of the rain, tore itself to shreds along the snaking peaks. Like the unseen fingers of a prestidigitator, the wind plucked the riven fragments away. Golden sunlight streamed down upon the mountainsides, revealing treelines, sparkling, slender cascades of water. Birds, trilling sweetly, streamed by overhead.

He had to get up, he knew. Otherwise, the pull would never allow him to leave.

But just as he was about to move, Eliane turned toward him. The sunlight transformed her hair into spun copper. In an instant he saw a painting, the pose perfect, her expression cutting through the masks that all people wore.

Masks that temporarily turned off animation, spirit, life.

"You can't leave now," she said.

And he knew that she was right.

Michiko went through the same ritual every morning.

It began an hour before the call was scheduled to come in. Bathed and dressed, she would go out into the garden. There was always someone at her side, always a man, always big, always with a gun hidden under his jacket. Someone loyal to her stepbrother Masashi. He would hold a parasol above her head. On clear days it protected her from the sun, on stormy days it kept the rain off her face.

She would walk slowly down the stone path until she reached the large, flat rock from which three separate paths diverged. Taking the right-hand one, she would listen for the woodfinch that made its nest in the cherry tree that grew beside the high stone wall. In the spring, she liked to sit within the bower of the tree and listen to the frantic cheeping of the woodfinch's hungry chicks.

Just past the cherry tree, near the far wall of the garden, was the weathered wooden shrine she had transported here and erected to Megami Kitsune, the fox-G.o.ddess. With the help of her companion, she would kneel, light joss sticks, bow her head in prayer.

Always, she prayed for two things. One, that the call would come. Two, that her granddaughter was still alive. Always, when she returned from her prayers, her hands and feet were as cold as ice.

She would sit in her house, the telephone beside her, and shiver as if with the ague. She refused anything to eat, though her cook would beg her to take even a mouthful of food. She refused tea. Nothing would pa.s.s her lips, not even water, until she heard the shrill briing! of the phone and, s.n.a.t.c.hing the receiver off its cradle, would wait with fluttering heartbeat for the sound of her granddaughter's little voice.

"Granny?"

Michiko would close her eyes, weeping silent tears. Her granddaughter was alive for another day.

"Granny?" Like the voice of a wood sprite in her ear.

"Yes, darling girl."

"How are you, Granny?" The sweet voice Michiko knew so well at the other end of a phone line, emanating from- where? If only Michiko knew where Masashi was holding her.

"I am fine, little one. And you? Do you have enough to eat? Are you gettingenough sleep?"

"I am bored, Granny. I want to come home. I want-"

And the line would go dead, every time.

Despite herself, Michiko screamed at the dead line: "Little one! Little one!"

Weeping bitter tears.

Masashi had left instructions to disconnect in the middle of the child's sentence. It brought home with an irrational finality the scope of his control over the situation. In this instance, he was G.o.d: the bringer of life, and of death.

Three times a week, Masashi Taki spent mornings at the warehouse at Takashiba Pier. Almost precisely in the center of the western bank of Tokyo Harbor, Takashiba was a high-density enclave within a high-density city. Here, shiploads of produce, hardware, software, drygoods, were continually being offloaded for consignment to thousands of companies throughput the country. At the same time, goods of all kinds were being transshipped to virtually every nation in the world. The result was a maze of interweaving consignments that dizzied even the efficient j.a.panese Customs machine.

The Takashiba warehouse was a joint venture between the Takis and the Yamamotos. Increasingly, the activities there were taking precedence over all other Taki-gumi clan activities. Which was, Masashi thought, just as it should be.

The men with whom he met were always the same: paizo, the big soldier who Masashi had put in charge of training the new recruits; Kaeru, the small, heavily tattooed adviser left over from Wataro Taki's regime; and Kozo Shiina.

After the initial period in the late 1940s when Masashi's father had come to power, Wataro Taki had outlawed such vicious strong-arm tactics as Masashi now routinely employed. Wataro had been content to allow the threat of violence to speak for him and instill loyalty in those who made his profits. Masashi was not so benevolently inclined. Besides, be had something to prove. Much as he disliked to admit it to himself, Wataro Taki had made an indelible mark on the history and development of the Yakuza. It was inc.u.mbent on his successor to reach for new heights, to surpa.s.s the achievements of the past generation.

Masashi liked to have his meetings in the workout room he had had built onto a section of the wooden catwalk that ran a dizzying forty-five feet above the underground warren beneath the warehouse. This bas.e.m.e.nt was large enough to contain laboratories filled with Yamamoto Heavy Industries' most sophisticated equipment, storerooms, as well as workrooms as large as entire factories.

The workout room was dominated by gleaming Nautilus machines backed up against packed earthen walls that had been part of the foundations of buildings dating back almost four hundred years, to the time of the Tokugawa shogunate.

Masashi liked to meet the men bare-chested. Sweat ran in thick runnels over his hairless chest. Muscles bulged as he worked on one machine after another.

He spoke while he pushed his magnificent body to its limits. He was never short of breath, and he never ceased his activity no matter how long the meeting went on.

"Daizo," he said when they were all gathered, "your report."

"The boys are coming around," the big man said. "They are a wild pack of dogs, as you can well imagine. They came to us as dope smokers, hopheads, motorcycle riders." He laughed shortly. "They called themselves outlaws. But they were just a bunch of punks. They lacked discipline. Huh! They had never heard the word."

"All fighting machines must have discipline," Kozo Shiina said. He looked neither at Daizo or at Kaeru. Rather, his gaze was fixed on the play of Masashi's ropy muscles as his mind remembered when his own body had been as strong and elastic. "The armies of even the crudest of history's military commanders possessed discipline. A war cannot be won otherwise."

"The recruits will be disciplined," Masashi said easily. "Daizo will see to it. They are like sheep, these rough boys, neh, Daizo? They have no self-image, so they look to a leader to give them what they themselves cannot." He climbed off one machine, mounted another. "Where is their leadernow, Daizo?"

The big man grinned. "Hanging upside down in the center of their sleeping quarters."

"Is he dead?" Kozo Shiina inquired in much the same voice he used to ask his fishmonger if his catch was fresh.

"The place is beginning to stink," Daizo said, and laughed. "They asked when I was going to cut him down. I told them I was letting him cure. I told them when I'm ready to feed him to them, I'll cut him down."

"Already the new ones fear Daizo more than they ever did the man who was their leader," Kaeru said. He was an older man, taciturn, seemingly without any ego at all. He was a master strategist. It was he who designed the method by which the mountains of hardware were being transshipped from their diverse points of origin, pa.s.sing through Customs unsealed and arriving day by day in this warehouse. "Already I can see emotions behind their eyes. I see the coalescing of an army."

Kozo Shiina nodded. He, too, appreciated Kaeru's mind. In the bald man he perhaps recognized a kindred spirit. Shiina was not one to underestimate the value of human thought.

"It is s.p.a.ce that we desperately need," Shiina said. "Our forefathers knew that when they went to war with China. In this land of plenty, we have no s.p.a.ce to move. We are like ants milling about a single hill, black with our bodies. Already we crawl all over one another and think nothing of it. We have become inured to this horror of a future that is already upon us.

"The war and its immediate aftermath have shown us that this nation can be mobilized. That it can, indeed, work miracles. And it can do so again, if given the opportunity.

"This is our goal. Now we do not have far to go, and we are relying on your expertise, Daizo, in turning this rabble into an efficient army."

"They will be ready," Daizo said.

"What about the hardware?" Shiina asked Kaeru.

"As you know," the bald man said, "our recent dealings in the drug traffic had allowed us to use the same complex networks to smuggle hardware into j.a.pan.

The real danger was Customs. If any of those packages were discovered, the resulting furor would make it extremely difficult for us to continue a.s.sembly."

"More than that," Shiina said, "the army would be swarming all over the docks looking for related items."

"Correct," Kaeru said. "Therefore, after setting up the drug networks, I set about taking care of Customs. There are many avenues of persuasion open to me.

I merely chose the most advantageous ones."

"The coerced officials," Shiina said. "What do they know?"