Eric van Lustbader - China Maroc 01, page 56
“It’s all right,” Jake said, stroking her hair.
“Jake,” she said, “I was so frightened for you.”
He held her more tightly. What was there to say?
He became aware of Venerable Chen at his side. “Is the young lady all right?” the Shanghainese inquired.
“The young lady is fine,” Bliss said, wiping away the last of the tears with her knuckle.
“Good.” He gave a quick nod. “Now, if you will follow me. There is no point in my having to listen to stupid questions for which I have no answers. The fornicating police will be here at any moment.”
He led them to the far end of the mezzanine, through a door marked PRIVATE.
“Now,” he said, slowing his pace as they entered a quiet, spacious office, “I do believe, Mr. Maroc, that I owe you a drink.”
_______
Mystified, Sawyer said a hurried good-bye to the Hus. He hastened down the temple’s stone steps. He could just see Ng nearing the top of the street. Sawyer was himself more than halfway up when he saw Ng turn right, disappearing around a corner.
He quickened his pace and, puffing slightly with the unaccustomed exertion, reached the summit in time to see Peter Ng enter a warehouse. The sign out front told Sawyer that the place specialized in ginseng root.
Sawyer immediately slowed his pace. He mopped his brow with a white linen handkerchief, thinking, It’s damnably hot to be chasing all around the Western District after my comprador.
The front of the warehouse was open. A large Isuzu truck was backed up to the opening and two young men in headbands and sleeveless shirts were busy throwing cartons from a stack inside into the back of the truck. As he came abreast of them, Sawyer could see a third man, quite a bit older, with a clipboard and an abacus. He tallied the cost as the young men loaded.
Sawyer took the opportunity to step out of the brassy sun. In the shade and relative coolness just inside the corrugated-steel awning of another warehouse just across the narrow street, he could smell a pleasant mixture of spices. The men went on with their work. Good joss had delivered to him an excellent vantage point; because of the Isuzu they could not see him.
From here he could see Ng speaking in low tones to the man with the salt-and-pepper hair. Sawyer squinted through the sunlight in an attempt to focus on the other’s face.
It was broad and flat, a Cantonese peasant face. There was something about it. Sawyer did not know what it was, but the more he looked at that face, the more certain he became that he knew it. But from where?
Ng and the Cantonese were huddled together. The two young men ignored them, moving back and forth like powerful automatons, delivering their cartons.
In that moment the Cantonese gave them a quick glance and, with a jerk of his head, moved off to the left with Ng. Deeper into shadow but closer to Sawyer. Their angle changed and Sawyer felt his stomach give a sick, queasy roll.
A mi tuo fo! he thought dizzily. I don’t believe it.
As the Cantonese shifted, the left side of his face came partially into view. The outer corner of his eye was dragged down by a livid scar.
White-Eye Kao, Sawyer thought.
Several years ago there had been a problem at one of Sawyer & Sons’ limited-access electronic facilities. Plans for two prototype systems disappeared. Working on his own, Sawyer had had plans drawn up for a dummy prototype. Setting infrared photography equipment in place, he had taken pictures of the spy.
Rather than having him arrested, Sawyer had hired a firm of excellent and absolutely discreet surveillance operatives to follow the man. The firm reported to no one but Sawyer himself, and the tai pan had kept all written material on the case locked in a vault to which only he had the combination.
Sure enough, the firm had traced the dummy plans back to a source. Sawyer could still remember the moment of holding the black-and-white photo, grainy from the high-speed film, the image unrealistically flat from the long lens. He’d remember that odd scar anywhere.
Sawyer was trembling now, but he did not know whether it was from rage or fear. The thing about White-Eye Kao was that he was a high-level Soviet agent.
The tai pan shifted his gaze. He could see a white-painted metal staircase running up the right side of the concrete wall from the loading platform to offices high up. Bamboo shades were partially drawn across dusty windows, but he could make out a figure moving behind them, lit from behind by fluorescent light.
Sawyer mopped at the back of his sweating neck. Buddha protect me, he thought. What is the comprador of Sawyer & Sons doing talking with a Soviet spy?
The tai pan had taken no action against White-Eye Kao, figuring that the enemy he knew was far less dangerous than the one unknown. Six months after the last theft, he had had to lay off thirty or forty people. He had made certain that the spy inside the facility was one of them. Now, however, he wished he had delivered up his evidence on White-Eye Kao to the Special Branch.
There was movement, and suppressing his shock, Sawyer concentrated his attention. The door above the two men was opening; a shadow was emerging, coming down the staircase. Sawyer could not make out who it was, the gloom was so dense in the warehouse’s interior.
He heard a voice raised, and Ng and Kao broke off their conversation. Now Sawyer noticed an odd thing. The demeanor of the two changed radically at the third person’s approach. It was clear from their stance and their expressions that they were in the presence of a tai pan of sorts.
My God, Sawyer thought. I know how high up White-Eye Kao is in the Soviet hierarchy. This must be the tai pan of Russian spies for all of Hong Kong.
Of course, Sawyer did not expect to recognize the person, and when he did, as they came into partial sunlight, his palsied hands rose in pure reflex, using his Kodak Disc camera to take shot after shot after shot. His mind was so frozen that he kept depressing the shutter long after the disc had been used up.
Peter Ng. Snap! White-Eye Kao. Snap! Sir John Bluestone. Snap! Snap! Snap!
“What you ask is patently impossible.” Venerable Chen stood up. There was a small porcelain panda on his desk. He picked it up, warming its cold, smooth skin in the palm of his hand. “Besides, the godown war is between Formidable Sung and myself.”
“It affects all members of the Green Pang,” Jake pointed out. “If just one man dies because of the wars, there is his family to consider.”
“They are adequately recompensed,” Venerable Chen said shortly. “We know how to take care of our people.”
“But even one life lost is too many,” Bliss said from the corner of the sofa. “Wouldn’t you agree, Honorable Chen?”
The Shanghainese turned and regarded her. She was curled up like a cat, knees to chest, a double old-fashioned glass filled with Scotch clasped between her hands. He was about to remind her of her place when he remembered that he had been curled in just such a position after the explosion in the lounge. It made him think twice about reprimanding her.
“Death is in the nature of who we are,” he said evenly. “No one can change that.”
“Of course not, Honorable Chen,” Jake said. “But strictly from a business point of view, one finds that streamlining often results in a leap in net profit.”
“Any good businessman knows that, Mr. Maroc.”
“Streamlining can also encompass compromise.”
Venerable Chen went behind his desk and sat down. He set his panda back in its place atop a pile of envelopes.
Jake took the silence as an invitation to him to continue. “One compromises every day of one’s life. The h’yeung yau that one pays policemen to stay away from one’s operations, the intimidation one employs among shop-owners, the infiltration of the Special Branch that allows one to make one’s smuggling runs of guns, gold, and the poppy’s tears—all these things, which are sometimes taken for granted in business, are forms of compromise.
“One must give up either money or manpower in order to get what one wants. Why should it be any different with the godowns?”
“Because, Mr. Maroc, I want all of the godowns for the Green Pang. It is our hereditary right. I have my duty to perform.”
“When it comes to hereditary rights, then surely the Hakka, Hong Kong’s true residents, should control the godowns. When it comes to duty, I agree absolutely. But tell me something, Honorable Chen. How much money have you taken in from the godowns since the start of the war?”
“None.” Venerable Chen said it without emotion of any kind.
Jake got up and stared out the window at the South China Sea. “Were I the comprador of the 489 whose triad was in the midst of this war, this is what I would counsel him to do. Contact the chief Hakka and make this proposal to him: let all the sons of the Hakka who can no longer tolerate spending all their lives on shipboard take to the land, as is their wish; let them manage all the godowns currently under contention; assign them an administration fee of, say, fifty percent. The other fifty would be divided equally between the Green Pang and the 14K.
“My 489 would get his money every month without tying up manpower in running the godowns and in fighting a war that can, realistically, never end. Further, it would put the Hakka forever in his debt, since the problem with their current generation is reaching epidemic proportions. It would be ideal for the young men and their fathers. It would give them a new business on dry land and would keep them close enough to their ancestral home so as not to break up the family unit.
“Ah, the face he would gain by instituting such a sweeping reorganization!”
Venerable Chen stirred after the longest of silences. “Mr. Maroc, I was wrong about you. You are a devil, but not in the way I had at first thought. A mi tuo fo, you are as deviously cunning as a Chinese.” He laughed now, an infectious, boyish sound.
“I think in you I have found my secret weapon!”
Nichiren lay within Pearl’s slender arms. He listened to her gentle snoring, smelled the faint trace of liquor on her breath, mingling with the soft scents of her perfume and her sexual oils. The windows were wide open and he could hear the sleepy drone of the nocturnal insects. He felt the light down on her velvet arms as she stirred, in the midst, perhaps, of some kaleidoscopic dream.
All these sights, sounds, smells, and touches were as familiar to him as the certain array of colors on an artist’s palette. Each time before, when he had come to Hong Kong, the confluence of these sensations had served as a powerful palliative to send him off to a deep and dreamless sleep from which he would invariably wake ten hours later, refreshed and relaxed.
Tonight, sleep seemed as far away from him as the shores of Japan. For it was not of Pearl he thought.
It was of Kamisaka.
Something deep inside him was growing out of season. Kamisaka found him in the bars of spectral moonlight, which, at last breaking though the heavy cloud cover that had turned much of the night heavy and clammy, penetrated the open window, throwing themselves in reckless abandon across their entwined legs.
Though Pearl’s prowess in the pillow ways remained undiminished, Nichiren had felt incapable of entering her licentious world. Try as he might, something inside him had remained adamantine, unshakable. It was as if a barrier not of his own manufacture had somehow been built inside him during a moment of unconsciousness. He had awakened to find himself irrevocably changed.
And, lying here in the semidarkness with these hedonistic comforts strewn in satiated abandon all about him, he knew that it was Kamisaka who had erected that wall inside him.
His dislocation here was a physical manifestation of her. For he felt called back to Japan not only by his innate love of his adopted land but now, too, by a human spirit. He saw for the first time that the power this kami could wield was greater than any other on earth.
This revelation shook him to his core. The fact that his feelings for another human being could supersede all his arduous training, the seeds planted within him long ago by his mother, stunned him into immobility.
It was odd. He felt as if he were lying in a perfect hammock, beneath perfect towering pines whose crenellated branches allowed the perfect amount of sunlight through to warm him. There he swung in short, languid arcs.
Content.
How could that be? Hadn’t his mother told him that true contentment did not exist? Just as perfection in man’s world did not exist.
Now he began to suspect that she was wrong.
Because now he knew how it felt to belong, knew as surely as he was lying here in Hong Kong that Yumiko had never belonged in that way, that she had had no conception of what that might mean to her spirit. He had lived his life until now as the outcast—as she had—either having it thrust upon him by circumstance or, after a certain period of indoctrination by his mother, opting for it actively. There had been, he had found, a certain degree of spiteful satisfaction in engendering in others exactly the reaction he had learned they would choose to put on him anyway. His control of the circumstances of his pain and anger seemed important at the time, even necessary for his survival.
And yet, oddly enough, this journey to revelation, which had begun with Kamisaka, had only come to its full fruition through the catalyst of Mariana Maroc. Mariana had been the first person to show him that he could be liked for himself. A friendship had sprung up between them as unmistakable as it was strong in the short time they had known each other. Something inside her had touched him deeply, perhaps because of how she had come to feel about him, despite her predisposition to hate him.
Her death had struck him across the heart. He realized that it brought to light secret emotions inside him. He had found at last that he could feel.
He thought about his Source. I am your savior, the electronic voice had said in his ear time and again. Nichiren had never met his Source; he believed that he never would. That was all right. He had been given the most compelling reasons during his recruitment. By obeying the Source, he would save himself, and in working clandestinely for China, he would be helping to destroy the Soviets.
Nichiren’s love for Japan was well known to his Source. The Soviets were inimical toward Japan. That had been enough.
Now Nichiren was not so certain. He stood in the center, it seemed, of a vast, darkened theater. Before him was the image of Yumiko. But he saw her now as if through an insect’s multifaceted eyes. She was his mother whom he loved; she was a scarred woman whom he pitied; she was the presence who had begun him on his training; she was the creator of a terrible, vengeful demon she had bound into him through some arcane ceremony.
He saw before him now Yumiko’s flesh. She who had been so beautiful was now hideously disfigured. For a moment, then, Nichiren heard the chanted words his mother had spewed out during the calling forth of his namesake.
Abruptly he felt strangled. Even his closeness to Pearl grated on him as if her arms, so soft and dreamily around his lap still, had turned to writhing tentacles, sucking him to her.
With a great gulp of breath, he swung his legs out of bed. He got up and silently crossed the dappled room.
In a moment he was dressed, slipping out the front door like a wraith arisen from the mist of the land. When he reached the street, the moon was already down, and in the depths of the night, the blackness was complete.
In the end, it was Yuri Lantin who decided his own fate. He overruled Daniella, who had said that she would like to go back to her apartment for dinner. Death, she said as a joke, always tired her out.
At Lantin’s, she sat in his plush leather wingback chair. His house was large enough to contain a study. If he had a child, Daniella supposed, this would have been its room.
It was lined with massive mahogany shelves filled with the literature of the world. Whatever else Yuri Lantin was not, he was certainly well-read.
There was a mahogany drop-leaf table on which was perched a thick-framed portrait of Lantin when he was much younger. He was smiling into the camera. His uniform, and perhaps his expression as well, made him seem dashing and somehow innocent. Beside it was another table, less aesthetic but sturdier, on which sat a high-domed typewriter. The walls were painted a deep luminous blue, the ceiling and moldings cream.
Daniella was dressed in a side-slit Dior gown of pure satin silk. She had never even seen such a gown except in photos, let alone worn one, before Lantin had bought this for her. Its sheen was tactile, especially because she was naked beneath its clinging wrap. Naked save for garter belt and sheer silk stockings.
Lantin had chosen her wardrobe, but Daniella did not complain. She felt precisely as if she were taking a steaming bath, and she was luxuriating in the experience.
Before he went into the kitchen to prepare dinner, Lantin had selected a volume from one section of the bookcase that was glassed-in and locked. It was bound in calfskin and had gilt edges. It was The Story of O, by Pauline Réage. It was in the original French. Daniella had never told him that she spoke and read eight languages fluently. One of them—her favorite besides Russian—was French.
She had never read or heard of The Story of O, but after twenty or so pages she was beginning to get the idea. Mozart was playing on the stereo. Every fifteen or twenty minutes Lantin would appear and either turn over the record or change it. Always Mozart. It was difficult to get foreign pressings of such astounding virtuosity and aural clarity.
The subtle combination of the silk gliding against her flesh, R6age’s heady prose, and the gorgeous music was beginning to dizzy her. It was almost possible to believe that she was in Paris, her old recruiting ground, rather than in drab Moscow.
Lantin came in to flip the record. Mozart began again, drenching the room in glorious melody. Lantin, wearing Calvin Klein jeans and a cowboy’s denim workshirt, walked barefoot across the Oriental carpet and popped fois gras in her mouth. It melted as she chewed, and she made a sound deep in her throat.
That was when he offered her the opium. It was as dark as night, filling the tiny bowl of a long-stemmed pipe of Chinese ivory the color of a chrysanthemum. The bowl was carved and felt odd beneath her fingers.
