Read Online The Miko - 02 by Eric Van Lustbader - Free Book Online Page B

temporarily, had been followed by days of uncomfortable silence; Justine had simply not wanted to talk about it further. But in the last days before his departure it had seemed to Nicholas as if she had relented a bit, and was more at ease with his decision. “After all,” she had said as she saw him off, “it’s only for a while, isn’t it?”
    “What?” he said now, setting his concern for her back in its niche in the shadows of his mind.
    “I asked who Sato’s marrying,” Tomkin said.
    Nicholas looked down at the invitation. “A woman named Akiko Ofuda. Do you know anything about her?”
    Tomkin shook his head.
    “She’s the newest major interest in your partner’s life,” Nicholas said seriously. “I think it’s time you thought about hiring a new team of researchers.”
    With great difficulty Tanzan Nangi turned fully around. At his back the snow-clad slopes of Fuji-yama were fast disappearing into a vast golden haze the consistency of bisque. Tokyo buzzed at his feet like a giant pachinko machine.
    “I don’t like him,” he said, his voice like chalk scraping a blackboard.
    “Tomkin?”
    Nangi arched an eyebrow as he extracted a cigarette from its case. “You know very well whom I mean.”
    Sato gave him a benevolent smile. “Of course you don’t, my friend. Isn’t that why you assigned Miss Yoshida—a woman —to meet them at the airport? Tell me which Japanese business associate of ours you would have insulted in that fashion. None, I can tell you! You even disapprove of the amount of responsibility I accord her here because it is, as you say, man’s province, and not the traditional way.”
    “You have always run this kobun as you have seen fit. I begrudge you nothing, as you know quite well. But as for these iteki, I saw no earthly reason why we should lose valuable man-hours by reassigning an upper-echelon executive for their convenience.”
    “Oh, yes,” Sato said. “Tomkin is a gaijin and Nicholas Linnear is something far worse to you. He’s only half Oriental. And then it has never been determined to anyone’s satisfaction how much of that is Japanese.”
    “Are you saying that I am a racist?” Nangi said, blowing out smoke.
    “Not in the least.” Sato sat back in his swivel chair. “Merely a patriot.” He shrugged. “But in the end what does Cheong Linnear’s lineage mean to us?”
    “It’s a potential lever.” Nangi’s odd triangular eyes blazed with a dark light. “We are going to need every weapon in our arsenal to bring down these brash iteki —these barbarians who think of us as so much rice they can gobble up.” Nangi’s shoulders quivered at odd moments as if they had a will of their own. “Do you think it means anything to me that his father was Colonel Linnear, the ‘round-eyed savior of Japan’?” His face screwed up in contempt. “How could any iteki feel for us, Seiichi, tell me that.”
    “Sit down, old friend,” Sato said softly, taking his eyes off the older man to save him face. “You already hurt enough as it is.”
    Nangi said nothing but, walking awkwardly, managed to sit at right angles to Sato, his back erect, his thin buttocks against the very edge of the chair.
    Sato knew that Nangi was lucky to be alive. But of course life was a relative thing and this thorny enigma was never far from his thoughts, even now after thirty-eight years. Did the man tied to the iron lung think life was worthwhile? So, too, Sato sometimes wished to crawl inside his friend’s head for just the moment it would take to learn the answer to the riddle. And in those moments shame would suffuse him; precisely the same kind of shame he had felt when his older brother, Gōtarō, had found him sitting, sexually aroused by their father’s book of shunga , erotic prints.
    There was no privacy in Japan, it was often said. The crowding because of the lack of space that had existed for centuries; the building materials—oiled paper and wood—that the islands’