Zero. Part 3

"No. No. You were right. My father was no shogun; he had no desire to take control of all the clans. But I do. I will be the shogun that he refused to become. You have promised to make me so. I will be the first of a dynasty like the Tokugawa.This is not so different from the sixteenth century, is it? Today the oyabun"-he was speaking of the gangland bosses-"of the various Yakuza clans bicker and fight among themselves. Then, as now, the local warlords were continually feuding one against the other. Until leyasu Tokugawa, seeing a better way, was able to unite all the warlords under his banner. He became the first shogun-the supreme warlord-wielding power of a magnitude hitherto unknown. All of j.a.pan lay at his feet. Now the same is true for me. It has begun. The Taki-gumi lieutenants have made me their oyabun. Within weeks, even days perhaps, all the Yakuza oyabun will swear allegiance to me, Masashi Taki,first Yakuza shogun!"

Shiina waited the requisite amount of time before he nodded, dismissing the subject. "There is still the question of what was stolen from you."

Masashi frowned. "It is still missing."

"Yet I have heard that Philip Doss is dead."

"That is true," Masashi admitted. "He died in Hawaii. There was a car crash.

He went up in flames. This occurred two days before my brother Hiroshi's demise. For the second time we were close to getting Doss. My under-oyabun in Hawaii, Fat Boy Ichimada, reported Doss's arrival on Maui.

I instructed Ichimada to get him. Unfortunately, the car crash put an end to that."

"And the Katei doc.u.ment? Did that, too, go up in flames with him?"

"It is possible."

For the first time, the old man showed a flicker of anger. "And just as possible that it did not. We must find out, Masashi. If that doc.u.ment falls into the wrong hands, we are undone. Decades of planning will be for nothing.

We are on the verge of victory. We need only another month or two. And then we will change the face of the world forever."

"Fat Boy Ichimada tells me nothing could have survived that crash," Masashi said.

"And . . . ?"

"And what?"

Shiina was finished with the lemon. He cleared the stone surface in front of him. A bird had lit on a branch above his head. He waited for it to finish singing, as if it were a partic.i.p.ant in this discussion. At last Shiina said, "Where there is moonlight at night, it is easy to see the face of the water.

It is a task anyone may perform satisfactorily. But at those times when the weather is overcast or when the moonlight is absent, it takes another kind of skill to discern the water's whereabouts." With the dregs of the citrus juice he drew one circle, then two, then a third, darkening the stone. "Has it not occurred to you, Masashi? Philip Doss stole the Katei doc.u.ment from you. You sent your men after him. For a week they searched for him. Three days ago they got a lead. You sent Ude. Ude came close to him. Just a whisper away. But at the last moment, Philip Doss managed to elude him. Doss disappeared. Only to surface in Hawaii to be killed in a car crash."

"So?"

"So." Shiina filled in the third circle with the juice so that in the light it became more prominent than the other two. "Has it not gotten through to you that someone else got to Philip Doss before we did? You sent Ude to find him, not to kill him. At least not until Doss revealed the whereabouts of the doc.u.ment. Now Doss is dead. He can no longer tell us.

"So, I ask you again: Where is the Katei doc.u.ment? Did it burn with Doss in the crash? Did he manage to hide it somewhere before his death? Did he, for instance, give it to someone? Send it to his son? Or has your man Ichimada got his hands on it?" Shiina's black eyes bored into Masashi's. "I don't have to tell you the worth of that doc.u.ment. If Ichimada has it, he means to use it.

He could have anything he wants from us for its return. Even an end to his banishment to Hawaii. Isn't that right?"

Masashi thought for a long time. At last he said, "Ude."

Kozo Shiina nodded. "Yes. Send Ude to Hawaii, to Fat Boy Ichimada. Ichimada knew Philip Doss from the old days. Who knows? Perhaps they were friends.

Here." He handed over a small snapshot. It was black-and-white and grainy, as if it had been shot from a long lens. A surveillance photo.

Masashi recognized Michael Doss. Had Shiina had the son watched in Paris? It seemed so. He pa.s.sed the photo to Ude. "Michael Doss," he said, and the big man nodded.

"Let us get to the bottom of this," Kozo Shiina said, "and terminate it, once and for all." His eyes bored into the two men. "We must retrieve the Katei doc.u.ment no matter the cost."

Lying in his old bedroom, Michael heard the sc.r.a.ping of the branches of thecrabapple tree against the side of the house, just as he had when he was a child.

Sometime during the past several years his father had installed security lights outside. Now their glare, only partially filtered by the foliage, made patterns on the ceiling.

He tried to calm himself, but to no avail. Too many memories here. Too much unhappiness. Too much left unsaid. He thought of all the things he had wanted to say to his father but had not. Perhaps it was only a simple pleasure because it was so basic, but he had been denied it. It wasn't, Michael realized now, that he had had a bad relationship with his father. It was that they had had none at all.

He thought of delicate shadows, tendrils of the cryptomeria transfigured by the moonlight into a wild gypsy's dance. In his mind he heard the bamboo flute, the progression of its melody forever bitter.

In Tsuyo's home, where much of the sensei's teaching had taken place, Michael, younger, more ignorant and utterly alone, had waited for the inevitable to take place.

Nothing, not even the inevitable, merely happens, Tsuyo, the master of many arts, had said to Michael upon Michael's arrival in j.a.pan. Everything, even the inevitable, arises from out of the great warrior's spirit. The great warrior's spirit fills everything; it is everything. It is the sole cause of all events, great and small.

But isn't there a place where the great warrior's spirit does not exist, where it isn't everything? Michael had asked.

Tsuyo's face turned grave. In Zero, he said. In Zero there is nothing. Not even the hope of an honorable death. For a j.a.panese warrior, Michael knew, nothing could be more terrible than zero.

There was a slender vase in the place where Michael slept while he was with Tsuyo. It was of fired clay that seemed to have no intrinsic color of its own.

Each day at dawn, the one flower it contained was changed. And it was Tsuyo, not a disciple, who replaced the flower. One morning, curious, Michael awoke and went outside. There, in the garden, he found the sensei kneeling before his flowers. Carefully, Tsuyo chose one, then another-one flower for each student, each and every day.

It is the master's responsibility, Tsuyo once told Michael, to attend to the minutiae of life. Only then will he appreciate the infinite palette that life offers. In small pleasures, one learns, there is profound satisfaction.

Michael had wanted to put this unconfirmed wisdom to the test. He could think of no better place to start than with Seyoko.

Seyoko was a small, slender girl, the only female student in this exclusive school. She was also the best student. She wore her hair long (when she trained, it was pulled back from her face in a thick, braided ponytail) with straight-cut bangs that almost covered her eyes. When Michael dreamed of her- which was often-these dreams centered on her hair. Once he awoke believing he was still suspended high over a moonlit ocean, balanced on Seyoko's thick, gleaming braid.

She wore no makeup, although at sixteen she was not too young to use it. He remembered one evening when she arrived at a party Tsuyo gave for his students (a score in number), her lips painted a brilliant red. The effect was so startling that Michael spend the rest of the evening listening to the thudding of his heart.

As with all the students, there was a slender vase in Seyoko's room. It was Michael's plan to go out into the master's garden before dinner and pick a flower of his own choosing, which he would place in the vase in Seyoko's room so that after dinner, when she returned, it would be waiting for her.

Tsuyo lived in a tiny hill town three hours north of Tokyo.

From his garden one could see the j.a.panese alps. Often it seemed as if the sky were permanently ringed by these darkling slopes.

It was in the foothills of these glacial ridges that much of the students'training was carried out. The morning had begun bright and sunny, with only a few fluffy clouds scudding in the high winds. Just after lunchtime, the weather had changed abruptly. The winds had shifted, bringing heavy, moisture-laden air off the sea. Soon the sky lowered ominously, as zinc-colored clouds, streaked with dark, clotted undersides, stretched across the region. Thunder began to boom, made dull and echoic by distance.

Tsuyo, one eye on the weather, saw no reason to break off his lessons, but as a precaution, should a rain squall come up suddenly and cut students off from one another, he broke the cla.s.s up into pairs. Michael and Seyoko were put together.

And they were together when the rain hit, slicing in almost horizontally, driven by a wind turned cold and howling. The world around them disappeared beneath sheets of gray-green water, so opaque they seemed lifted whole from the sh.o.r.eline many miles to the south.

Michael and Seyoko clung to the layered shale, dark and running with rainwater. They were perhaps three hundred yards above the treetops of the valley within which Tsuyo's house was nestled. Pressed against the slick, slanting rock face, they were pummeled by wind, lashed by the downpour.

Seyoko was shouting at him, but it was impossible to hear what she said and he shifted to move closer to her. A slice of shale, loosened perhaps by the storm, gave way beneath his foot and he skidded off the narrow ledge. He stumbled and flailed, feeling himself tumbling off the ledge. His knees slammed into the rock face as he reached up to grab a handhold on the ledge.

He was dangling off the side of the mountain, the squall beating mercilessly against him. Seyoko stretched herself along the ledge, reached down to help him up. The wind was howling, gusting against them in quick, angry bursts.

Michael felt his strength giving out. He was supporting his weight while fighting the wind, which threatened to fling him outward into the dark void.

He strained upward, saw Seyoko fully extended, reaching down, her fingers grabbing at his shirt, digging in as she hauled upward. The gale, increasing in strength, caused her to lose her grip momentarily. Michael felt himself slipping downward, and he shouted involuntarily.

Then Seyoko renewed her grip. He saw the fierceness in her face, the determination. Nothing was going to make her lose her hold on him again. With agonizing slowness, Michael inched his way up the jagged rock face until he was able to get his hips back up onto the rock ledge. His right leg made it upward and he thought, I'm safe!

He heard the crack then, an eerie sound that seemed to rip through his entire body. He turned his head, as if part of him already knew the nature of that sound. He saw the section of the rock ledge on which Seyoko was stretched break apart in a great gout of mud and shattered shale. He cried out as he saw Seyoko's body begin to fall. "Hold on to me!" he screamed into the wind.

"Don't let go of me!"

But it was too late. Seyoko, as if divining that only one of them could be saved, had opened her hands. Michael felt the palms of her hands, her fingers, sliding over his back as she loosed her grip.

Then the storm took her, flinging her into the abyss. Whirling like a pinwheel, she floated for an eternal moment within the dark heart of the maelstrom of wind, rain and shattered rock. Michael saw her face, calm, serene, staring out at him.

Then, with an obscene abruptness, she was gone, swallowed whole into the maw of the squall.

Michael heard himself breathing. He swung in a shallow arc, half on and half off the ruined shelf of rock. The wind tugged at him, as it must have done to Seyoko. And for a split instant he thought of letting go, of following her into that heart of howling darkness. A despair so profound that he lost all sense of his center overcame him. He beat at the unforgiving stone with all his might, hating it for what it had done to her. Only when he tasted his own blood, when the pain of the cuts, bruises and abrasions he had inflicted on himself broke through his semistupor, did he swing himself all the way up ontothe gouged-out ledge.

Much later, in the silence of the night, the aftermath of the storm, did he creep out into Tsuyo's garden. He lifted his bandaged hands and clumsily cut a single blossom.

He went into Seyoko's room. Nothing had been disturbed. Search parties were still out, in what would be a vain attempt to retrieve her body. The police, already there when Michael made his way down the mountain slope, had taken statements from everyone involved. Tsuyo had left to deliver the tragic news to Seyoko's parents.

There was a peculiar quiet inside the house. Michael took a wilted flower out of the vase, replaced it with the fresh one he had just picked. But he felt nothing. Now Seyoko would never see it, and he would never understand the profound satisfaction derived from this small pleasure.

He breathed in the air, pulling in the scent of her. He saw again her face as she spiraled away from him. What would have happened between them had not the storm caught them on the rock face? He felt a longing well up inside himself, a sadness he could not define. It was as if a thief had stolen his future from him. Like a warrior's death without honor, it made life's present hollow and devoid of meaning.

I am alive and she is not, he thought. Where is the justice in that?

It was the most wholly Western thought he had had in seven years.

When Tsuyo returned from his sad journey, he recognized this question in the face of his pupil. And thereafter, he sought to show the Way that would, if not provide the answer, at least allow Michael to ask other questions that would lead him to his own path.

Michael, in his own room in Bellehaven, threw the covers off, put his feet on the cool bare wood floor. He went to the window to get more air. Pulling aside the white crinoline that he had found old-fashioned even when he was young, he saw a shadow pa.s.s across one of the lights. He started slightly, seeing with eyes clouded by the past: Seyoko alive again. Then reality shifted into focus and he recognized Audrey's copper-colored hair. She wore jeans and an oversize cream-colored sweater with padded shoulders. She walked with her arms wrapped around her chest.

Dressing quickly, he went through the silent house. Downstairs, shadows lay everywhere, like drop cloths in a house seldom used, so that only basic shapes remained.

He opened the front door and peered out at Audrey's startled face. Her hand was on the k.n.o.b.

"Christ," she breathed. "You scared the h.e.l.l out of me."

"Sorry."

"But then you were always scaring the h.e.l.l out of me." She hugged herself as if she was cold. "You love to move around in the dark. You were always pouncing on me. You said you loved to hear me scream."

"I said that?"

"Yes. You did."

"That was a long time ago," Michael said. "We're grownup now."

"We may be grown-ups," she said, slipping past him into the house, "but neither of us has changed."

Michael closed the door and followed her. She had gone into the study. Soft light burnished her creamy skin. She sat on a futon sofa, crossed one knee over the other, hugged a pillow to her. "Having you as a brother was like living with the bogeyman. Did you know that? When Mother and Dad were out was the worst. When we were alone together."

Michael stood in front of her. "You came to me in Paris when you were in trouble."

"Because I knew you wouldn't tell them-about the abortion. Because of your strict code of honor."

"You mean sometimes it comes in handy."

Audrey said nothing. He saw the freckles sprayed across the tops of her cheeks and remembered her laughing in a swing as he pushed. Years ago."It is a useful thing," he said. "But it's not something that can be turned on and off. One has to live by it completely or not at all."

Perhaps she heard him at last. She put her head back and closed her eyes. Some of the tension seemed to ebb from her. "Oh G.o.d," she whispered, "I've made such a mess of my life." Then she was weeping, her shoulders shaking.

Michael knelt and put his arms around her. He felt her embrace, the quick, surprising strength of her that accompanied the burst of emotion. Her head was in the hollow of his shoulder. "I never even had a chance to say goodbye to Dad," she cried softly.

"None of us did," he said.

She pulled away enough so that her eyes locked on his. "But he always spent time with you." She sniffed heavily. "You were his pride and joy."

"What makes you say that?"

"Oh come on, Mikey." She tossed her head. "You were the one he sent off to j.a.pan when you were nine, studying G.o.d only knows what kind of impossible philosophy. Training with j.a.panese swords-"

"Katana."

"Yes. Katana. I remember." She wiped the tears from her face. "Dad made sure that you never needed anyone. You were as independent and confident as the steel blade you learned to use."

He looked at her. "You're describing someone who is inhuman, not independent."

"Maybe that's what I thought you were."

She had bristled, and he recognized a resurgence of their old sibling rivalry.

He smiled a little to rea.s.sure her. "But I'm not, Aydee." He deliberately used the nickname their father had given her.

"There were things-intimate things, growing up things- that I longed to confide in him," she said. "But he was never there. Uncle Sammy always had him at the end of a very short leash."

"Now you're talking like Mom," Michael said. "Uncle Sammy was always here when Dad wasn't. He was like- well, Nana, the English sheepdog in Peter Pan. Uncle Sammy was there to protect us."

"That was because Dad was always away," she said. "Don't you see? Uncle Sammy monopolized Dad's time. He had his job, and he had you. He managed to be in j.a.pan often enough to visit you. In the end, there was nothing left for me."

"But you had Mom," Michael said. "You were always her favorite. I remember lying awake in j.a.pan and resenting being so far away from her. I never got to know her, Aydee, whereas you and she are far closer than Dad and I ever were.

You two tell each other things you'd never tell anyone else. I don't think Dad was that close with anyone, even Mom. They just never had that much time together."

Audrey put her head down. "Maybe," she conceded. "But maybe-this is what's kept me up tonight-maybe I failed Dad in some way. I think I was so busy resenting him that when he did come home, he didn't want to spend much time with me."

"Is that what you really believe?"

"I don't know," Audrey said softly. She put her chin on her forearms, closed her eyes. "Remember that time when Dad took us up to Vermont to teach us how to ski? G.o.d, but the weather was foul. The biggest snowstorm I'd ever seen came up while we were away from the lodge. We couldn't see a thing. I had no idea where we were. I started crying. I called and called, Mike. I thought Dad would hear me all the way back at the lodge. Do you remember?"

Michael nodded, remembering the fear he had felt for them both.