Zero. Part 7

Ude looked down at his cup. He was very still. The sounds of someone stirring in the corridor could be briefly heard. In time, he said, "The Taki-gumi must remain preeminent."

"I have promised Masashi that I will make him the first shogun of all the Yakuza clans."

"Masashi is not Wataro," Ude said. "He does not have the magic. He is not the one."

"But I am," Kozo Shiina said. Which was, after all, what this meeting was all about.

Ude considered carefully before he answered. "I will do what you wish."

Kozo Shiina nodded. "You will not change anything. You will continue to take orders from Masashi. But now you will report everything to me. On occasion you will do as I request. For this, I will protect you. I will elevate you." The old man watched him. "In return there will be an obligation."

"What kind of an obligation?"

"First," Shiina said, "you will take a later flight. This must be done because you must make a detour to Joji Taki's hous."

"And what will I do at Joji Taki's house?" Ude asked, curious.

"I will tell you everything you must say to Joji Taki," Shiina said. "It is very simple."

"Nothing," Ude said, "is ever simple."

"Except for you," Shiina said forcefully. "From now on, the only thing you must keep in your mind is your obligation to me."

"Giri," Ude said. "Giri," Shiina acknowledged.

The big man bowed his head before his liege lord. "So be it."

It was raining.

Her face was on the wall: a shadow, larger than life.Michael was dreaming of Za.

He had begun a series of paintings of women, using a different model for each, but he had abandoned the project prematurely, not really knowing why.

Then he saw Za at a studio and understood immediately. It was one woman he wished to paint, not many. She was the woman. He hired her and began what was to become his most celebrated series of work: The Twelve Inner Aspects of Woman.

Michael made it a rule never to become involved with his models. But Za was different. He had fallen in love with her.

Za lived with a man, but that had no moral meaning for her. Za thought only of what was happening to her at the moment. Tonight-not to mention tomorrow-could not have meant less to her.

Having a relationship with someone, she said, was like owning something. Soon all the value one once saw in the object was gone. What was left was only the act of ownership. It was raining. Blue rain. The streetlamps on the Avenue Elysee Reclus turned the rain blue. It clattered against the panes of the skylight in Michael's atelier.

The night Za finished her work and did not go home.

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

Her flesh wet, as if she had been rained on.

Michael had not wanted to take her to bed. He wanted her here, in front of the half-finished painting. There was a sense that the primitive energy from the act they were about to perform would infuse the painted image with uncanny life.

Already he had the artist's intimation of greatness about this work.

His flesh trembled as it came into contact with hers. She had enormous eyes, black as pitch, black as her cap of hair. The shortness of her hair accentuated the sweep of her jaw, her long neck, the bone structure of her shoulders.

The hollow of her throat was filled up with darkness. Against her pale flesh, it possessed tangible weight. Michael felt as if he could drink the darkness from that hollow.

Za's eyes fluttered closed as his lips opened and his tongue licked the slightly salty sweat from the side of her neck. Her arms encompa.s.sed him, her fingertips stroking his muscular back.

His head lifted and his lips found hers, already open, waiting. Her legs were twining around him as if she sought to climb onto him, or into him.

They were still standing, and now she turned slowly in his arms so that her back was toward him. His hands slipped down from where they had cradled her head. They covered her high b.r.e.a.s.t.s. The nipples, large and full of color, were so hard she gasped when she felt his palms brush them.

She leaned her head back onto his shoulder and opened her mouth. Their tongues nickered and met again. There was an exquisite sensation in Michael's groin as she circled her b.u.t.tocks against him. Her slim, firm arms were lifted over her head as she thrust herself into him, back and front.

He dropped to his knees and turned her slowly around to him. The spasmodic light, as lightning forked above their heads, illuminated the planes and dells of her body. The blue rain reflected down on her fully, shadows clothing her in transparent layers.

Her scent was strong as Michael put his hands between her thighs. She opened her legs, bent her knees so that the intimate forest of hair descended toward his upturned face.

He felt her give an involuntary shiver; the muscles in her lower belly rolled as they contracted. Her spread fingers pressed hard against the back of his head.

Her open mouth gave out little cries, but they were of a tone of voice Michael had never before heard her use. It was as if they were being wrenched out of some hidden depths, some private place she would not let the world see. Except now. With him.

"I love your mouth there," she whispered. Then the cries began again.Perhaps it was then that Michael understood that it was not merely Za with whom he had fallen in love. It was Za the image; Za the icon. The Za that had been created in his mind-his painter's mind-when he had first seen her. He had wanted her then, in this way, but he had not known it; or if he had, he had pushed it deep down inside him. Into his private place.

I love your mouth there.

It was not Za the model who had said that.

I love your mouth there.

It was Za the icon. Za the painting that Michael was even now in the process of completing.

Her taste, the texture of her inner flesh, wetly flowering open to him, would find its way into the painting. Tomorrow or the next day or the next he would find a way to translate these aspects into color, form, a pattern. s.e.xuality existed on so many levels, could be expressed on so many more.

"I love your mouth there," she whispered. "There. Yes, there." Gasping now, bent over him so that he felt her b.r.e.a.s.t.s again. She wanted as much sensation as her nipples could take. Up on her toes, her hamstrings pulled tight, her pelvis bucking faster and faster. Nails sc.r.a.ping along his back as she approached the end.

He could feel her inner muscles beginning to spasm now, and this was a great spur to him. His p.e.n.i.s was so hard. His t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es were drawn up tight, contracted as they were just before he would come.

"Now. Now. Yes, now!" Quick beats, her voice changing yet again, melting with an emotion stronger even than tenderness.

Pushing, pushing. Yes, pushing as her o.r.g.a.s.m washed over her, squatting down, engulfing him in hot, hot wetness, urging him all the way in as she sat on his lap, as she felt around behind him for his aching b.a.l.l.s and squeezed.

Her wet mouth on his. He was gripped by her, immersed in her wetness, his own spasms beginning. And he pa.s.sed from dream state to wakefulness with the fluidity of the tide, as he always did. The dream evaporating at precisely the same point, as it always did.

Sadness welling, and an acute sense of loss.

Was there anything to counteract them?

"Suigetsu."

It was not only at dawn that Michael incanted the Shuji Shuriken, cutting the nine ideographs.

Suigetsu. Moonlight on the water.

He also spoke the nine magic words when he was agitated.

Suigetsu was a tactic of sword fighting-kenjutsu-that he had been taught. It referred to the shadow cast by one's opponent. If one calculated the shadow's length and then stood just outside its range, one would be safe from harm no matter how aggressive one's opponent's attack might be. But moonlight on the water was a two-edged sword. It also referred to the tactic of stealing inside that crucial radius of shadow in order to attack one's enemy.

"Suigetsu." He had spoken the word, and it had formed within the room. A shadow within the shadows. Blacker. Moving.

Deep in the fugue state that was required for the incanting of the nine ideographs, Michael still felt the agitation. Za was a dimming memory. The effects of the dream had dissipated. But he remained deeply disturbed by the dream-or, more accurately, by its implications.

He remembered the pose Za had been in when he had entered the room that night.

She had turned her head toward him, and in the blue light, with her hair pulled tightly back from her face, her features had taken on the aspect of a person long dead.

The spirit of Seyoko seemed to have risen from her unknown grave at the bottom of the valley. The moment was short-lived, but so intense that Michael had found his knees shaking, his belly turned to water.

Had he made love to Za because he desired her? Or because part of him had rejoiced in at last intimately connecting with his beloved Seyoko? That second thought terrified him enough so that ultimately he had been forced to push Zaaway from him, so that he would never have to answer that question. Not ever understanding that his fright of living in the past paralyzed him. The terror he himself devised made him powerless to exorcise Seyoko's ghost from his psyche.

It was no wonder, then, that he could not complete the incanting. Its end lay before him like a blighted path down which he dare not venture. For the Shuji Shuriken was far too potent to invoke in any but an unruffled state of mind.

Nothing worthwhile was ever accomplished without complete concentration, he had learned. Agitation was one of the two primary enemies of concentration.

Confusion was the other.

Strategy dictated that either-or, ideally, both-be instilled in the enemy.

Thus were battles won. This was true in business as well as in martial arts, since the former was merely an intellectual extrapolation of the latter. All truly successful businessmen were masters-sensei-in strategy.

Michael had always thought of his father as a sensei of sorts. Uncle Sammy had been correct in at least this one matter: Philip Doss had an extraordinary mind. Perhaps he was, in his own way, something of a visionary.

It had been his idea for Michael to go to j.a.pan. Only there, he had said, could his son be taught in the highest, purest levels of kenjutsu.

He thought of Jonas's request. Of how insane it was. And yet... something inside him wanted desperately to go wherever Jonas wanted. If only to keep hold of the tenuous thread that had been Philip Doss. To discover all he could about his father's life-and death.

Michael felt like an outcast who, years later, on returning to the place of his birth, finds that he has no home at all. In the back of his mind, he had always known that there were aspects of his father that he did not want to confront. But now confront them he must if he was ever to come to terms with his father's death. He suspected that he would have no sense of peace until he did.

In his mind, he returned to j.a.pan. The seat of his peace. He recalled the night that Tsuyo had come home from his sad visit to Seyoko's family. It was late, but a lamp was still burning in Michael's room.

Tsuyo had come in. Michael had bowed, said all the proper words of greeting, but by rote. Time advanced slowly. Two shapes sitting cross-legged on the reed mats, shadows stretching away from their backs, mingling at their apex.

"How could it have happened?" Michael's hoa.r.s.e whisper filled the room with contentious accusations.

In the ensuing silence, he swung around, stared into the sensei's face. "You have all the answers. You tell me."

"I have no answers," Tsuyo said. "I have only questions."

"I have asked myself one thousand questions," Michael said bitterly. "And I come up with the same answer. I should have been able to save Seyoko." He put his head in his hands. "I have packed my bags, sensei," he said. "I am going home."

"Your home is here," Tsuyo said. "I do not understand."

"Don't you see?" Michael said. "Don't you get it?" There were tears standing in the corners of his eyes. "It was my fault! I should have found a way to save her! I didn't. Now she's dead."

"Seyoko is dead, yes," Tsuyo said. "No one will mourn her pa.s.sing more deeply than I. But her death was her karma. Why do you feel that you are involved?"

"Because I was there!" The words seemed to choke in Michael's throat, so thick with emotion was he. "I had the power to save her!"

"You had the power to save yourself," Tsuyo said softly. "Which you did. What more can you ask of yourself?"

"Plenty!" Michael said hotly.

"Look at yourself," Tsuyo said. "The blood is pounding in your veins. It is rushing up to your face. You are burning with it. You are giving full rein to your temper. Temper is your false mind. You can accomplish nothing-not even speak intelligently or correctly-when you are controlled by your false mind.

Your false mind throws up lies, deceits. It drains you of dear thinking and,thus, of power.

"Now your temper tells you that you must punish yourself. But your true mind, which you have managed to bury, knows the truth. It knows that you are guiltless for Seyoko's death."

"If only-"

"If only what?" Tsuyo said scornfully. "If only you were a lion, you would rend the flesh from my bones now. If only you were a gnat, I would reach out and slap you down. What nonsense it is you speak!"

"You don't understand!" Michael said helplessly.

Tsuyo, crouched, wrists on his knees, watched Michael carefully. "I went into Seyoko's room before I came in here," he said. "In my absence, someone has been placing a fresh flower in her vase each day." He c.o.c.ked his head. With his white head of hair, it was he who looked like the lion. "Do you know who that someone might be?"

Michael bent his head, nodded.

"Now I see it all," Tsuyo said. "This has nothing to do with Seyoko." His voice had turned hard. "It has to do with your selfish feelings toward her."

Michael's morose silence was answer enough.

"Finish packing in that case," Tsuyo said, rising. "This school has no use for you."

But of course Michael did not leave. As Tsuyo foresaw, his words, acting as a kind of galvanic spark, shook Michael out of his self-pity. And in the future, it was only when those moods of pa.s.sion-what Tsuyo called "temper"-arose within him that Michael would recall Seyoko and the ghost that still dwelled within the shadows of his spirit.

Philip Doss's death and the subsequent revelations of his life had shaken the moorings of Michael's meticulously unplanned life. Success-what others called brilliance-had allowed him to indulge this creativity as much as he wished.

Now, he suspected, that freedom, which was so important to him, was being threatened. Now Jonas wanted to harness him to the same gritty engine to which Philip Doss had been strapped-and which had ultimately killed him.

Aren't I mad, Michael asked himself, even to contemplate such a thing? He wished that Tsuyo were alive so that he could speak to him, ask his advice.

And then, tears burning his eyes, he realized that it was his father he most desperately wanted to communicate with. Where did the time go, Dad? he asked of the darkness. Where did you go?

In time, he rose from the lotus position and got back into bed. It was pitch-black in the room. The curtains barely moved. Heavy, moisture-laden air had come in off the Potomac. A low rumble. Somewhere, not far distant, lightning was flashing.

That was Michael's last thought before he dropped off into an uneasy sleep. It was only later that he would understand how severely his agitation had interfered with his concentration.

Surely that was the only explanation for his failing to notice what the pitch-blackness meant. That the security lights had not switched on.