Zero. Part 27

But over and above anything else, she felt, it was so American. And perhaps because of that, perhaps because she was sick of j.a.pan, tired of doing nothing and longing to be home again, she spoke of everything. Because she was at ease in these rooms that so reminded her of home. Everything that was in her heart.

As they ate steaks from Omaha, potatoes from Idaho, greens from Long Island, as they finished off one bottle of vintage Bordeaux and broke open another, Lillian found herself relaxing in a way she had not done since she had come to j.a.pan. Part of it, she was certain, had to do with her own agitated state of mind: The longer she was in j.a.pan, she found, the more she hated it. She could not adjust to the customs, the layers of formal, semiformal and intimate ways of speech that dominated j.a.panese life. She found their religions-Buddhism, Shintoism and Zen-not only impenetrable but somehow vaguely threatening. The j.a.panese did not believe in heaven or in h.e.l.l, but rather in a kind of reincarnation that to Lillian at least smacked of the supernatural. In fact she found, to her horror, that the supernatural was everywhere in j.a.pan. The j.a.panese were basically animists-they saw spirits in every nook and cranny of their surroundings.

But just as much, she found that her new mood was engendered by something within David Turner himself. For one thing, he was a terrific listener. He possessed a natural empathy. She did not find herself fighting-as she often did with Philip-to understand an essentially mysterious personality. Also, he was a terrific teacher. She found his face handsome, yes. But also-and far more important to her-sensitive. What Philip saw as asceticism in Turner, Lillian recognized as intellectual. She was astounded by the scope of his knowledge, the plethora of philosophies and ideologies he had within his grasp-all of which he was able to convey to her.

Without having any clear idea how, Lillian found herself telling him what she had never told anyone in her life. About the time when, as a senior in highschool, her best friend had been stricken with leukemia. Lillian had been terrified. Afraid to be witness to how the disease had altered her friend, she had put off going to the hospital as long as she was able.

But guilt and shame finally overtook her, and she went one morning. She remembered her teeth chattering with fear and anxiety as she rode up in the enormous elevator. On an intervening floor, two male nurses swung in a patient on a wheeled stretcher, and Lillian thought she would fault. She could remember, with an eerie iteration, the bottle of clear liquid, suspended above the stretcher, swinging and dripping, swinging and dripping.

Stepping out into the white, white corridor, Lillian had felt a giddiness not unlike the sensation just before she was overcome by ether when she had had her tonsils out. She needed some time to catch her breath, to allow the vertigo to subside. At last, she found the room.

She pushed the door inward and entered. She remembered that the window was open. The curtains were fluttering like the wings of a bird. She could hear street sounds wafting in.

But there was no Mary. Only an empty bed, neatly made. Awaiting the next patient.

Lillian heard a sound behind her and whirled. "Mary," she said wildly, but it was only a nurse. "Where is Mary?"

"Do you mean the young girl who-"

"Mary Dekker!" Lillian was shouting.

"Oh my dear, but she expired early this morning," the nurse said.

"Expired?" Lillian had said, thinking it was such an odd, antiseptic word.

"Didn't they tell you at Admitting?" the nurse continued. "They should have-"

Lillian was screaming.

In the end, they had put her in the bed that had been Mary's. They gave her a sedative and called her home.

Sam Hadley had come to the hospital to fetch his daughter. "You've got to understand, Lil," he told her as he drove her home, "that Mary's fought her war. She lost, but she was no less brave for that."

The sedative had worn off. Lillian could not stop weeping.

"You could learn a thing or two from Mary, I think," her father said. He did not look at her. He did not like tears. He could not see what purpose they served. "She was your best friend. She deserved your support when she needed it most. Don't cry for her, Lil. Mary certainly doesn't need your tears now.

And crying for yourself is merely a sign of weakness. What earthly good will it do you? Now that you've wept, will it make you stronger? Will it give you courage?

"You've got to have courage, Lil, to survive in this world. Life's not all candy canes and rainbows. Your friend Mary could have told you that. But you chose to hide your head in the sand. I can't say that I understand that kind of reaction. Nor condone it. I'm disappointed in you, Lil. This isn't how I expect a child of mine to act. Bravery is to be rewarded, celebrated. Not shunned and hidden from."

Then, years later, there was her brother Jason's last night on American soil.

She had spent it with him. He was filled with the onset of battle. His face was flushed, alight with a frightening glow she had seen many times in her father. His antic.i.p.ation was such that it strangled the list of arguments she had composed ahead of time. She had promised herself that she would use this last night together to try to persuade him not to go off to Europe. But when the time came, her words froze in her throat. Instead, she allowed his enthusiasm, his strength, to dominate her. So the next morning she watched his transport lift off into a sky as gray as lead, without ever having tried to dissuade him from going.

"It was what happened with Mary all over again," Lillian said to a concerned David Turner. "I lacked the courage to do what I had to do. And seventy-two hours later, Jason was lying dead on the beach at Anzio."

Turner leaned forward. His thick black hair caught the light, giving it a bluish sheen. "Don't you think," he said gently, "that you're putting a bittoo much responsibility on yourself, Lillian? I mean, let's imagine for a minute that you had spoken up that night with your brother. Do you think that anything you could have said would have changed his mind?"

Lillian looked at him.

"Besides, his orders had already been cut. Even if you had managed to change his mind-which is highly unlikely-what could he have done about it at that late date? Gone AWOL?" He shook his head. "Events had already taken their course."

"But it would have meant something to me," Lillian insisted.

"Such as what?"

"That I have the courage of my convictions."

"Despite what your father the general says, life is lived by cowards. Wisdom, Lillian, comes not from making war on one's fellow man, but from an understanding of the necessities of history." Turner took her hand in his.

"Don't you see that you needn't live your life by the dictates of your father?

He is a militarist. He has based his life on impressing his will on others.

That is his function, after all. His twisted philosophies have got you tied up in knots. You cry, and he tells you you're weak. You cannot confront death, and he tells you you're weak. It's happened so many times when you were young that now you yourself believe the lie. Surely you don't need me to point that out to you."

But, of course, she did. It wasn't until this moment that Lillian understood her motivations. Or the depth of her loathing for her father and all he stood for. She told Turner all this. It was such a relief to do so. Turner-bless him-had seen it and, by gently pointing it out to her, had freed her from what she had always seen as a weakness. Because she had been told so by her father!

Oh, how her hatred of her father burned inside of her! And all because of David Turner.

"You've changed."

"Really?" Philip said. "How so?"

Lillian closed the book she had been reading. "It's hard to say." She pursed her lips. But, of course, she knew. He was somehow, mysteriously, no longer vulnerable. Though she still needed him-or, more accurately, needed something she had glimpsed within him-she suspected that he no longer needed her.

They were sitting across from one another in the living room of their small apartment. Streetlights sifted across the ceiling like spun sugar.

Occasionally, a pa.s.sing vehicle dusted the rug between them with moving light.

"When I first met you," she said, "I felt as if I had squeezed through the bars of a cage and was standing very close to a beautiful but wild creature. I mean deep down, I felt. . . there was a strength I wanted to hold on to and never let go of."

"Like your father."

"No!" she cried, alarmed, and then laughed when she saw his face and knew that he was joking. "Oh G.o.d, no. Nothing like my father." Or Jason, she thought, my brother, whose strength was so like my father's it froze me at just the time I should have acted. Jason, flying off into the last sunrise, the good soldier.

But Jason's death wasn't my fault, right? David said so.

"And now?" Philip asked. "What's changed?"

She put the flat of her hand on the book cover. "Do you know," she said, not wanting to tell him, because that would mean admitting it to herself, "that I think the thing I hate most about my father is his purity of purpose. His strength is the strength of the righteous. He had a sword at home that he took me to see one day. It had belonged to his father, who was a cavalry officer in the First World War.

" 'Do you see this blade, Lil?' my father said, taking the sword out of the sheath. 'It's made of a solid sheet of steel.' He slammed it down onto a block of concrete. 'It won't bend, Lil. It is strong. It is indomitable. Have you ever asked yourself about the meaning of life? Well, here is the answer.' "

She kissed Philip's cheek. "That is not your strength. When I met you, it was the first time I had come in contact with a strength that, well, that flowed.I guess that's the only way to describe it. It wasn't a solid sheet of steel.

It wasn't indomitable."

Philip closed his eyes. "Have you ever seen a j.a.panese longsword? A katana?"

"I must have. But I don't remember."

"Then you haven't seen one," he said. "You'd remember it, all right. The katana is forged from a piece of steel that is heated and beaten. It is folded and refolded upon itself ten thousand times. The result is the finest blade the world has ever seen. A true katana can pierce armor. It would shear through your grandfather's cavalry blade as if it were cheese. So much for your father's concept of indomitability."

She watched his face as if he were asleep. "I wish," she said at last, "that I could understand what it is you love about this country."

"It's the people as much as the country."

"Sometimes I'm convinced that you must be crazy. These are the same people who bombed Pearl Harbor. Who sneaked up on us in the middle of the night."

"That's how they do things here, Lil," he said in such a reasonable tone that she shuddered. "Even war. It doesn't make them evil. Not all of them, at least."

"You see?" she said. "When you talk like that I don't know what you're saying."

"I don't see how I can make it any plainer."

"But I can't fathom anything about the j.a.panese," she protested. "They think in a wholly different way from me. They give me the creeps."

"I can't teach understanding, Lil," he said. "No one can."

Not true, she thought, pressing her hand against the book. David teaches me understanding. Each day I feel as if I know more. As if I'm blossoming open, like a flower. "I feel as if-as if we're two ships sailing on separate seas,"

she said. "Sometimes, Phil, you seem very far away from me."

He opened his eyes. "I'm right here." What else could he say? Who could explain the unexplainable? he asked himself.

How to explain what had gripped him at the edge of the ruined Temple of Kannon? How to describe Michiko's rising from the mist of that day? Because that was what Lillian wanted him to do. For better or for worse, he had fallen in love with j.a.pan. Now he felt a stake in seeing that it not only grew again-like the Temple of Kannon, which was being rebuilt from the ashes of its destruction-but that it grew in the right direction. That meant fighting Kozo Shiina and his Jiban in any arena they chose.

She tried to smile, but what she said next was so important to her that the expression died midway. "I can't tell you how much I miss the States, Phil.

It's like I've died here. Or I'm in limbo waiting for life to begin again."

"Life is all around you, Lil," he said. "If only you weren't so frightened of it."

If only you would take the time to teach me, she thought. "You see?" she said.

"You are different. You're content here now."

Perhaps, he thought, she's right. Because it's j.a.pan that has changed me. Now she is aware of my purity of purpose, of my commitment to the future here.

It didn't occur to him until much later that as far as Lillian was concerned, j.a.pan had very little to do with it. That it was Michiko whom she felt, as close beside him as his own shadow.

The phone rang, and Philip reached for it.

"I'm at Silvers's." It was Jonas. "You know where it is?"

"Yeah. Sure." Philip rolled out of bed. Not a "h.e.l.lo" or a "How are you?"

"What's going-"

"Get down here, buddy." Jonas sounded out of breath. "Right f.u.c.king now."

There was not exceptional activity on Silvers's block, except that the front of his house was cordoned off. Military police were guarding the area as if the president and the entire cabinet were inside.

Philip flashed his credentials. Even so, a square-jawed sergeant patted him down. "Sorry, sir," he apologized. "Orders."

Philip went up the stone stairs, opened the door."That you, Phil?" Jonas's voice. "I'm in the library. It's just to your right."

Philip went in and stopped in his tracks.

"Jesus."

"That's just how he was found."

There was blood all over the place. The rag was soaked in it; rivulets of it glistened along the polished wooden floor. Following them backward, one came to the nexus point.

Colonel Harold Morten Silvers lay twisted on the floor. Or what was left of him, anyway. It looked as if he had been hacked to ribbons.

"Who found him?" Philip asked.

"I did," a voice sounded.

Philip glanced at the other figure in the room. He saw the freshly scrubbed face of General Sam Hadley.

"This how you found him?" Philip asked.

His father-in-law nodded. "Silvers and I had a meeting. The door was unlocked but not open. I came in, called Sil-vers's name."

Despite the bizarre circ.u.mstances, Philip found himself wondering what Hadley and Silvers had to discuss. "No one else was in the house?"

"No one else responded," Hadley said.

"That's not what I asked." Philip had seemed to take over the investigation.

The general shrugged. "I can't really say. I found Silvers just as you see him. I touched nothing. I informed CIG command immediately."

"And they called you, Jonas?"

"David Turner did. He's giving his statement to the military police."

Philip went closer. It was difficult because of all the blood.

"What do you think got him?" Jonas asked.

"You mean the murder weapon?" Philip was bending over the mutilated corpse.

"So far, we've found nothing of a suspicious nature," Jonas said.