White Ninja, page 35
“The same is true of the Darkness. It, too, is a universe, but because it is one of almost limitless power, its potential is often abused, corrupted. That is the nature of power.
“All power is transitory. In its ephemeral nature lies its infinite malleability, and its potential to warp the spirit of human beings. If you touch it, you will not die. But you will change. In what ways even I cannot say.”
“I am afraid to change,” Nicholas confessed.
“If you do not change,” Kansatsu said simply, “I cannot help you. If you do not change, the dorokusai who pursues you has already won. You will never be able to use the emeralds your grandfather bequeathed you. You will remain Shiro Ninja forever.”
Nicholas was shaking as if with a fever. The minutes stretched on, building an agonized silence. At last, slowly, Nicholas bowed his head.
Kansatsu closed his eyes. He seemed to resume breathing after a very long time. “All right, then,” he said. “The first thing you must do is to learn to speak all over again. You must learn to think in a new language. It is called Akshara, the language of eternity.”
“It is part of Tau-tau?”
“It is the very essence of Tau-tau,” Kansatsu said. “Without Akshara nothing else is possible.” He looked at the whiteness of Nicholas’s face. “Tell me, Nicholas-san, are you afraid?”
“Yes, sensei.” It was a hoarse whisper. The fear was coming in a flood, but then Nicholas realized that Kansatsu had called him Nicholas-san, and he could breathe again.
“Good,” Kansatsu said. “You should be frightened now. Your spirit is through being suspended. The time has come to plunge yourself into the abyss.”
Nangi and Tomi arrived at The Silk Road after midnight. The tokudashi parlor was packed with sweating businessmen, a colony of milling ants, dressed alike, wreathed in acrid cigarette smoke.
Tomi paused for a moment, fascinated by the expression on the men’s faces, replicated over and over. She knew what they were watching, knew what was in their minds, and she marveled at the power behind that one image. She wondered whether women could become so obsessed over one portion of the male anatomy. She did not think so. Women were not so much involved with the physical as they were with the emotional. Not that they couldn’t be sex-driven, but certainly not in the way men often were.
Mega-amplified music almost blasted them back to the entryway; the strobes came on, momentarily blinding them. Tomi blinked, flashed her credentials at the bouncer. She had to shout to be heard over the music.
She led Nangi around the perimeter of the main club room, past a stained and greasy cardboard sign marked NO ADMITTANCE.
The warren of corridors was like a catacomb carved from the earth. Nangi followed Tomi as she wended her way past identical-looking doors. The corridors were shabby, the walls filthy, paint peeling, air vents clogged with soot and grime fluttering feebly. Bare light bulbs hung on twisted lengths of flex from the exposed sockets in the blackened ceiling.
Tomi paused at a door. She had to pound on it in order to be heard over the rock music. She heard a response and opened the door. Inside was a tiny room furnished with a slab dressing table, a mirror surrounded by several lights, one cane-backed chair, a rusty sink. A young woman in a thin, ratty robe stood staring at them.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said in a dull voice, and turned away from them to apply makeup. She watched their reflections warily in the mirror.
“Atoko,” Tomi said, “this is Mr. Nangi. He’s a friend of mine.” She turned to Nangi. “Atoko shared Mariko’s dressing room with her. She found the body.” Then turned back. “We’d like to ask you some questions.”
“About what?”
Tomi slipped a photo of Dr. Hanami out of her pocketbook, placed it on the dressing table in front of the girl.
Atoko glanced down at it, said, “Who’s this?”
“I thought you could tell us,” Tomi said.
Atoko shrugged, went back to applying her makeup.
Nangi, with his limp exaggerated, walked over beside the girl. He reached up, plucked a photo stuck between the mirror and its frame.
Atoko said, “Hey!”
Nangi allowed her to take the photo from him. “Your brother or a boyfriend?”
Atoko pushed her lower lip out sullenly, stuck the photo back in its niche.
“You know,” Nangi said, “I had a sister once. She had a lot of boyfriends when she was young. Just about your age, I should think. How she loved the boys to come around! How she encouraged them! Not, I think, with any evil intent. She was a good girl. She just enjoyed their company so.” He took several limping steps away. “Sometimes, though, she would get into trouble.”
Atoko cocked her head in his direction. “What kind of trouble?”
Nangi looked at her, as if startled that she had actually been listening to him. He waved his hand. “Oh, well, sometimes another girl’s boyfriend would be sweet on my sister. Not that my sister did anything to encourage them. Oh, my, no. It just happened.” Nangi gingerly took another step. “But her girlfriends never understood. They blamed her, of course, because they could not bear to blame their own boyfriends.”
“But that’s exactly what happened!” Atoko exclaimed. She put down her eyeliner, stared at Nangi. “Mariko and I were such good friends until…” Her eyes lowered and she pointed to the photo of Dr. Hanami. “Until him.”
“He preferred you to Mariko?” Nangi asked.
Atoko nodded. “For a time. Then he switched back and forth, without us at first knowing. In the end I think he believed he was in love with Mariko, but by then it was too late. Mariko wanted nothing more to do with me.” There were tears in Atoko’s eyes; she would not look at herself in the mirror. “Poor Mariko, she was a good girl. She didn’t deserve…Oh, damn!”
Nangi and Tomi exchanged glances, and Tomi went to hold Atoko while the tears streamed down her face.
“I’m all right,” Atoko said at last. She took a handful of tissues, dabbed at her face. “Oh, shit, I can’t go on stage like this.” She began to cry again. “I thought I was finished grieving for her.”
Nangi waited a moment, then said, “Can you tell us anything about the man in the photo Detective Yazawa showed you?”
Atoko shrugged. “What’s there to tell? He was a rich guy who loved to cheat on his wife. I got the impression that he liked being around us because we were young. He soon grew tired of me. But in a way it was different, I think, with Mariko.”
“Different in what way?” Tomi prompted.
“Like I said, he thought he was in love with her.”
“Do you think hey do anything for her?” Nangi asked suddenly.
Atoko paused in reapplying her makeup. She stared into the mirror at nothing, at the past. Then her eyes cleared. “You know, the funny thing is, when he was with me, practically all he talked about was his wife. I think he would have done anything for her.”
“Was he here the night of Mariko’s murder?” Tomi asked.
Atoko would not meet her gaze. She nodded at last. “I lied about that. I…was ashamed of how my friendship with Mariko had ended. I…didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want anyone to know.” She took a deep breath. “But, yes, he was here that night. He had a date with Mariko. I saw him, his face white as milk as he rushed out of her dressing room. I heard him vomiting in the alleyway outside. That’s when I went into Mariko’s dressing room and…found her.” She bit her lip, looked away from them. “I’m sorry. I should have told the truth from the beginning.” Her eyes met Tomi’s in the mirror. “I’m a good girl.”
Justine was staring into Senjin’s lambent eyes. It was like staring into the night sky, strewn with mysterious stars, filled with shadows whose shapes so familiar in daylight had taken on hidden meanings, extracted from the depths of her own imagination.
Tau-tau, and more than Tau-tau, the forbidden magic of the dorokusai, was at work here. She could not know, and if she had known, she would not understand.
Senjin, the vampire, continuing what Haha-san had begun, was doing to Justine what he did to all his women—what he had done even with Dr. Muku before he had plunged the phosphorus-laced cigarette into his eye socket, into his brain—he was sucking out of them their life, seeking as he did so the key to them (the key, had he but known it, to himself): their secret fears, their humiliating weaknesses.
Justine, taken out of time by Senjin’s conjuring, looked down upon her life, observing, much as Nicholas had many months before while undergoing his operation.
Now she did Senjin’s bidding, as Nicholas had while Dr. Hanami’s scalpel had probed his brain for the tumor.
“Where does your husband keep the box, Justine?” Voice like a silken whip, urging her to speak. “Where has he hidden the emeralds?”
Justine knew—or, in any event, she remembered Nicholas frantically rushing into the house, digging beneath the floorboards, seizing the box. His sigh of relief when he opened it. How could she forget? But there was something she was forgetting. What was it?
“I’ll take you,” Justine heard herself saying. “Come with me.” Taking his hand, her body filled with an energy that made her teeth chatter.
She showed him the spot in Nicholas’s workout room, showed him how to push aside the post, how to unearth the box. Just as Nicholas had…what was she forgetting?
Senjin brought up the box into the light. He realized that his hands were trembling. At last, he told himself, the emeralds! The last link with Eternity, for which he had been searching, it seemed, all his life. Ever since, at least, he had been told of the mystic emeralds’ power and what it could unleash.
He opened the box and gasped. Six emeralds, only six. Where were the other nine? He needed nine. His hands scrabbled over the dark blue velvet, tearing it into shreds. Six were not enough; in fact, as he knew, the number could be quite deadly. But not for him.
He scooped up the emeralds, put the empty box back in its cache.
Senjin turned to Justine. He could see the Tau-tau imprisoning her, coloring her eyes, making her do what he ordered. “Where are the other emeralds?” he said sharply. “There are only six here.”
“I don’t know.”
Senjin studied her bewildered face. “Are you certain? Think hard.” But she must know. Some part of her perhaps had seen or heard something, a tiny incident that she could not connect with the disappearance of the remaining gems. He would have to find out, look into her mind, dig deep, as a surgeon might, for what he was looking for.
“I am,” Justine said. “I don’t know. I thought they were in the box. I saw them in the box when Nicholas—” She stopped abruptly.
“What is it?” Senjin asked. “Go on.”
“I—I…” She grimaced suddenly, put her hands to her temples. “Oh, my head hurts!”
Senjin knew immediately what was happening. Some deeply buried part of her was fighting him, resisting this direct approach. Perhaps Linnear had told her directly that she must never reveal the emeralds’ hiding place. That would be enough to set up the moral conflict. He decided to try another approach. After all, he had the time. And, in any case, it might prove interesting on other levels.
He pocketed the emeralds, put the workout room back in order. Then he took her out of there, out of the house entirely. On the engawa the night had settled in. The cicadas were buzzing and, here and there, fireflies danced among the cypresses and the cryptomeria.
“Talk to me,” Senjin said to Justine. “Tell me about yourself; tell me what you can’t tell anyone else. Above all, I want you to remember.”
Justine sat on a cedar lounger Nicholas had made just after they had moved in here. It was her favorite spot, looking out as it did on Nicholas’s garden.
“When I came here to Japan, I loved it,” she whispered. “Why not? It was exciting, exotic. I was filled up with the unfamiliar sights, smells, sounds of the country, and that was enough to sustain me. A year later I seemed to hit a wall. I had taken care of setting up a household in a foreign land, or so I thought. My husband hired a Japanese woman to help. I became pregnant. It all seemed to be on track. But it wasn’t. It was terribly, terribly wrong. I missed my family and my friends. There was no one here but my husband and his friends. They weren’t enough, and then my daughter was born and I lost her. I became negative about everything. Now I hated Japan; now all I could think about was going home to our house on the ocean in West Bay Bridge on Long Island. Oh, how I longed to be there! How I long to be there now!”
Justine was trembling with the force of the emotions these memories were exacting from her. She felt a need to catch her breath. But she suspected that if she stopped, she would not finish, and now she needed to do that more than anything else, because that was what Senjin was willing her to do. “Then old disturbances I thought I had successfully dealt with when I was younger began to resurface and I felt as if I were back where I had started so many years ago.”
She felt now as she had felt then, a resurgence of the past, the ripping asunder of the fabric between past and present, the rushing of something hidden overtaking her.
“When I was much younger,” she continued, “and also at a low point in my life, I turned in desperation to analysis. I hated my father for paying no attention to me, for despising my weak-willed mother. I needed someone to talk to, someone who could set me straight.” She looked at Senjin Omukae. “I suppose you wouldn’t understand.”
“There are many psychiatrists here in Japan,” Senjin said noncommittally.
Justine rolled her head away from the moonlight. “The doctor I saw was a woman. She looked like a dark-haired gypsy. I felt embarrassed coming to her, the rich lapsed Catholic, emotionally bankrupt, my pockets bulging with money. Funny. I remember what I was wearing on my first visit: a Mary Quant miniskirt and polka-dot blouse I had just brought back from a shopping spree in London. Afterward, looking at myself in a full-length mirror, I was so appalled, I showed up the next week in jeans and a work shirt, and never let Honi see me in anything else again.”
Justine paused. It was hard work dredging up the past, facing up to the unhappy, spoiled brat she had been. She had never even spoken of this to Nicholas. How was it, she asked herself, that she was able to confess her sins to this man? Then the question slipped, unanswered, from her drugged consciousness.
“Honi wore huge silver earrings from Mexico, multicolored peasant skirts woven in Guatemala. She was totally unconcerned with how she looked, and I learned by example. She taught me to look inward at those dark, dank places inside myself I would rather ignore. It was hard work—at times impossible, I thought. Many times I broke down and sobbed, unable to go on. But Honi was always there, and her strength eventually became my strength, as if she were an empath, able to draw the inner pain out of me and into herself.
“She had an infinite capacity to absorb pain, like an icon or a saint. Often, when I was with her, I thought of myself in church, my idealized church which accepted suffering rather than displaying it in numbing profusion. I thought of Honi as a nun in a holy order, myself as a novice who must pass test after test in order to prove herself worthy.
“That was my problem, you see—I could never think of myself as being worthy of a decent relationship. Loving someone else and being loved in return was simply out of the question. But gradually I came to see that Honi loved me. She saw all my flaws, digested all my sins as I disgorged them. And still she accepted me. Still she loved me.
“What a revelation that was! Of course, at first I couldn’t—or wouldn’t—believe it. But Honi wore me down. I came to her like a wild animal intent on gnawing itself to death. She taught me not to bite myself, then she healed my self-inflicted wounds.
“‘I will bear the weight of your sins when you cannot,’ she told me. ‘Justine, it’s important for you to realize that you’re not alone anymore.’ And, of course, I thought, where’s the catch? What does she want from me?
“Honi was the only person in my life who wanted nothing from me. She loved me so that I could learn to love myself.” She turned her head back. “Do you love yourself, Senjin? It seems to me that you don’t. It seems to me that you’re too involved with the mechanics of keeping your environment in check. Nicholas is the same way. He melts into the darkness, he treads silently, at times I am certain that he has stopped his breathing. He has mastered all these things, yet he is not the master of himself. I sense the same thing in you, Senjin, am I wrong?”
Senjin said nothing.
“Being with you is like being with my husband. Can you tell me how that is possible?”
Senjin knew but he would never tell her. Instead he reached out for her. He had known that this evening would turn interesting.
Justine felt suspended above an abyss, entangled in her own roiling emotions. She felt Senjin’s touch like an electric current surging through her, and she thought in disbelief, This is not happening, I cannot feel what I am feeling, my body is betraying me, just as I am betraying Nick. She felt as if she had a fever, her legs weak, her lungs raw, coherent thought as distant and unreachable as a star.
Moonlight drifted like lace through the trees. I should be alone, waiting for Nick to return, she thought, but I’m not. I’m with this strange Japanese man and I want him against me, on me, in me.
Justine wept into the soft, fragrant hollow of Senjin’s neck as she clung to him, as he lay her on the porch, bound her wrists and her ankles. Her mind was on fire, but it could not match the heat of her body.
Senjin felt the heat as if it were emanating from a forge. This moment was very sweet for him. He had dreamed of just this triumphant moment, a transcendent experience, surely.
“I promised you an example,” he said, “of the mingling of pleasure and pain. The oneness.”
