"Van Lustbader, Eric - Zero(eng)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Lustbader Eric)

SPRING, PRESENT
PARIS
TOKYO
WASHINGTON
MAUI
Michael Doss began exhaling the Shuji Shuriken just at dawn. The Shuji Shuriken, literally "cutting the nine ideographs," referred to the reciting of the nine magic words. Centuries of Taoist tradition had been taken up by certain esoteric Buddhist sects involved in swordsmanship, ninjutsu and the like.
As always, Michael imagined the playing of the Japanese bamboo flute, the instrument he had heard during much of his training. Its hard-soft, yin-yang notes, reverberating only in his mind, cut through the customs, dialects, mannerisms, of whatever country he might be in to achieve some pristine, essential truth required to give the Shuji Shuriken life. It was not enough to speak the nine self-protecting words; they had to be summoned and, once done, handled with the utmost care and attention.
There was, after all, a kind of magic at work, ancient and powerful.
Sitting cross-legged beneath the branches of a nodding plane tree, Michael lifted his right hand, palm toward the earth.
"U," he said. Being.
He turned his palm upward.
"Afu."Nonbeing.
His hand descended to rest on his knee. Across the rooftops, Paris was coming awake. The pinks in the sky were brightening along the ruffled tops of the clouds.
"Suigetsu." Moonlight on the water.
In the foreground, the almost mathematical structure of the Eiffel Tower rose at his back. Still black from the remnants of night, its gridlike starkness against the pastels of the rest of the city made its proximity positively awesome.
"Jo." Inner sincerity.
"Shin." Master of the mind.
The first rays of sunlight sparked against the tower's upswept tip so that it seemed for an instant to have been struck by lightning.
"Sen." Thought precedes action.
"Shinmyoken." Where the tip of the sword settles.
The sounds of stiff straw bristles swiping the dirt from the sidewalk below, a brief, exclamatory dialogue between Mme. Charvet and her daughter, the yelping of the dog with the maimed forepaw. The quotidian noises of the neighborhood.
"Kara." Empty: the void. Virtue.
"Zero." Where the Way has no power.
Michael rose. He had already been awake for two hours, practicing the swordsmanship he had been taught in the Shin-kage school. Kage, the basis for everything Michael had learned, meant response. That is, to react rather than to act; to be defensive rather than take the offensive.
Now he went through the high lead-glass doors from his terrace into the cool dim interior of his apartment. It was on the top floor of a gray stone building on the Avenue Elysee Reclus, a location that Michael had carefully chosen because of its proximity to the tower and the particular light afforded the Pare du Champ, at its foot.
Light was important to Michael Doss. One could even say essential. He threw off his gi, the traditional outfit of the Japanese swordsman, consisting of cotton trousers beneath a kind of divided skirt and a black cotton jacket tied at the waist with a belt of the same color. This last denoted rank.
He showered, changed into faded jeans, stiff with a multitude of smeared colors, and a white collarless shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He slipped Mexican huaraches on his feet and padded into the kitchen, where he poured himself a cup of green tea. Opening the refrigerator, he scooped up cold, sticky rice with two fingers, munching as he went through the long, littered living room.
Though he owned one of the finest printing firms in the world, Michael went into the office only a couple of times a week. Then it was only to supervise the manufacturing of the special color dyes that he had invented, patented, and that had earned his firm an excellent reputation. Museums, galleries and the most prestigious modern artists lined up to have his company print limited editions of their works for them, so true and brilliant were Michael's dyes and the complex coloring process he had refined.
At the far end of the enormous apartment he threw open a set of inlaid double doors, and sunlight abruptly illuminated him. The deep-set olive-tinged eyes, the black, wavy hair that had a tendency to become unruly when, as now, it was left too long. His featuresЧthe prominent cheekbones, rather heavy jawline, narrow foreheadЧseemed almost biblical. People thought him stern, unforgiving, often difficult to move to laughter. But never judgmental. His saving grace.
The light flooded in from the skylight in the roof. Below was a huge space made up of bare walls and floor. In the center of the spaceЧfor, without furnishings of any kind, it could not in truth be called a roomЧstood a great paint-flecked wooden easel. Beside it, a paint box on a stool lay open, a palette and brushes sitting on its corner.
Michael crossed the space and stood in front of the canvas that the easel displayed. He sipped his green tea while his practiced eye roved over the painting. It was of two male figures, perhaps a generation apart. The figures were facing each other in a spare yet powerful landscape that managed to hint at a field by the edge of a forest. The overwhelming light of Provence underscored the tension between the men.
Michael was analyzing compositionЧwhat one did not paint was as important as what one did paint. And color, the har-moniousness of greens. As the Japanese said in summer, "Yappari aoi kuni da!" It is a green world!
After a time, Michael decided that here was too much forest-green, there too little apple-green. It gave the whole, he decided, too heavy a spirit. No wonder yesterday's work had left him unsettled.
He had just begun to squeeze out his paints when the telephone rang. He was not in the habit of answering the phone while he was working. He had only heard the ring because he had failed to close the heavy doors to his atelier. In a moment, his machine took the call. But not five minutes later, the phone rang again. The fourth time this happened, Michael put down his palette and answered the ringing himself.
"Allo?" He automatically spoke in French.
"Michael? It's Uncle Sammy."
"Oh hell, I'm sorry," Michael said down the overseas line, switching to English. "Is it you who's been calling?"
"It was imperative I get through to you, Michael," Jonas Sammartin said. "The real you."
"It's good to hear your voice, Uncle Sammy."
"It's been a long time, son. I've called to ask you to come home."
"Home?" Where was home? Michael wondered. Home is here on the Avenue Elysee Reclus, for now.
"Yes, home," Sammartin said. "To Washington." His uncle cleared his throat. "Michael, I'm afraid your father is dead."

Masashi Taki waited patiently while Ude cleared a path for him through the densely packed hall. It was cedar-lined, buttressed by rough-hewn cypress beams. It was windowless, being at the center of the Taki-gumi compound in the Deien-chofu district of Tokyo, where huge houses and estates still existed. Great banners, covered in ancient calligraphy, hung from the ceiling in rows, giving the hall the aspect of some medieval gathering place.
He was in the traditional meeting gallery of the Taki clan, the largest and most powerful of all the Yakuza families.
Yakuza was a conglomerate term for the powerful gangster underground that, through the genius of Wataro Taki, had become in recent years international in scope, moving into legitimate businesses in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, and into real estate and resort ownership in the Hawaiian Islands.
A hushed silence spread through the crowd of lieutenantsЧ bosses of their own subfamilies within the Taki-gumiЧand kobun, the street soldiers who were, after all, the clan's life-blood.
Masashi was the youngest of the Taki brothers. He was thin and dark, long-jawed like a wolf. In this he resembled his late father, Wataro Taki, godfather of the Japanese Yakuza society. His prominent cheekbones, unusual in a Japanese, lent his face a sculptured look that he had cultivated into a hardness that was intimidating.
Leading him toward the front of the room was Ude. He was a massive man, possessing those two most admired Japanese traits: bulk and strength. He was Masashi's feared right arm: the hammer of his lord's retribution.
As Masashi headed toward the raised dais at the far end of the hall, he could see his older brother, Joji, already at the place of honor before a stylized six-spoked wheel, the great family emblem of the Taki-gumi. This was yet another page that their father, Wataro Taki, had taken from the book of Japan's feudal past. In those days, each samurai warlord