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

I instructed Ichimada to get him. Unfortunately, the car crash put an end to that."
"And the Katei document? Did that, too, go up in flames with him?"
"It is possible."
For the first time, the old man showed a flicker of anger. "And just as possible that it did not. We must find out, Masashi. If that document falls into the wrong hands, we are undone. Decades of planning will be for nothing. We are on the verge of victory. We need only another month or two. And then we will change the face of the world forever."
"Fat Boy Ichimada tells me nothing could have survived that crash," Masashi said.
"And . . . ?"
"And what?"
Shiina was finished with the lemon. He cleared the stone surface in front of him. A bird had lit on a branch above his head. He waited for it to finish singing, as if it were a participant in this discussion. At last Shiina said, "Where there is moonlight at night, it is easy to see the face of the water. It is a task anyone may perform satisfactorily. But at those times when the weather is overcast or when the moonlight is absent, it takes another kind of skill to discern the water's whereabouts." With the dregs of the citrus juice he drew one circle, then two, then a third, darkening the stone. "Has it not occurred to you, Masashi? Philip Doss stole the Katei document from you. You sent your men after him. For a week they searched for him. Three days ago they got a lead. You sent Ude. Ude came close to him. Just a whisper away. But at the last moment, Philip Doss managed to elude him. Doss disappeared. Only to surface in Hawaii to be killed in a car crash."
"So?"
"So." Shiina filled in the third circle with the juice so that in the light it became more prominent than the other two. "Has it not gotten through to you that someone else got to Philip Doss before we did? You sent Ude to find him, not to kill him. At least not until Doss revealed the whereabouts of the document. Now Doss is dead. He can no longer tell us.
"So, I ask you again: Where is the Katei document? Did it burn with Doss in the crash? Did he manage to hide it somewhere before his death? Did he, for instance, give it to someone? Send it to his son? Or has your man Ichimada got
his hands on it?" Shiina's black eyes bored into Masashi's. "I don't have to tell you the worth of that document. If Ichimada has it, he means to use it. He could have anything he wants from us for its return. Even an end to his banishment to Hawaii. Isn't that right?"
Masashi thought for a long time. At last he said, "Ude."
Kozo Shiina nodded. "Yes. Send Ude to Hawaii, to Fat Boy Ichimada. Ichimada knew Philip Doss from the old days. Who knows? Perhaps they were friends. Here." He handed over a small snapshot. It was black-and-white and grainy, as if it had been shot from a long lens. A surveillance photo.
Masashi recognized Michael Doss. Had Shiina had the son watched in Paris? It seemed so. He passed the photo to Ude. "Michael Doss," he said, and the big man nodded.
"Let us get to the bottom of this," Kozo Shiina said, "and terminate it, once and for all." His eyes bored into the two men. "We must retrieve the Katei document no matter the cost."
Lying in his old bedroom, Michael heard the scraping of the branches of the crabapple tree against the side of the house, just as he had when he was a child.
Sometime during the past several years his father had installed security lights outside. Now their glare, only partially filtered by the foliage, made patterns on the ceiling.
He tried to calm himself, but to no avail. Too many memories here. Too much unhappiness. Too much left unsaid. He thought of all the things he had wanted to say to his father but had not. Perhaps it was only a simple pleasure because it was so basic, but he had been denied it. It wasn't, Michael realized now, that he had had a bad relationship with his father. It was that they had had none at all.
He thought of delicate shadows, tendrils of the cryptomeria transfigured by the moonlight into a wild gypsy's dance. In his mind he heard the bamboo flute, the progression of its melody forever bitter.
In Tsuyo's home, where much of the sensei's teaching had taken place, Michael, younger, more ignorant and utterly alone, had waited for the inevitable to take place.
Nothing, not even the inevitable, merely happens, Tsuyo, the master of many arts, had said to Michael upon Michael's arrival in Japan. Everything, even the inevitable, arises from out of the great warrior's spirit. The great warrior's spirit fills
everything; it is everything. It is the sole cause of all events, great and small.
But isn't there a place where the great warrior's spirit does not exist, where it isn't everything? Michael had asked.
Tsuyo's face turned grave. In Zero, he said. In Zero there is nothing. Not even the hope of an honorable death. For a Japanese warrior, Michael knew, nothing could be more terrible than zero.
There was a slender vase in the place where Michael slept while he was with Tsuyo. It was of fired clay that seemed to have no intrinsic color of its own. Each day at dawn, the one flower it contained was changed. And it was Tsuyo, not a disciple, who replaced the flower. One morning, curious, Michael awoke and went outside. There, in the garden, he found the sensei kneeling before his flowers. Carefully, Tsuyo chose one, then anotherЧone flower for each student, each and every day.
It is the master's responsibility, Tsuyo once told Michael, to attend to the minutiae of life. Only then will he appreciate the infinite palette that life offers. In small pleasures, one learns, there is profound satisfaction.
Michael had wanted to put this unconfirmed wisdom to the test. He could think of no better place to start than with Seyoko.
Seyoko was a small, slender girl, the only female student in this exclusive school. She was also the best student. She wore her hair long (when she trained, it was pulled back from her face in a thick, braided ponytail) with straight-cut bangs that almost covered her eyes. When Michael dreamed of herЧ which was oftenЧthese dreams centered on her hair. Once he awoke believing he was still suspended high over a moonlit ocean, balanced on Seyoko's thick, gleaming braid.
She wore no makeup, although at sixteen she was not too young to use it. He remembered one evening when she arrived at a party Tsuyo gave for his students (a score in number), her lips painted a brilliant red. The effect was so startling that Michael spend the rest of the evening listening to the thudding of his heart.
As with all the students, there was a slender vase in Seyoko's room. It was Michael's plan to go out into the master's garden before dinner and pick a flower of his own choosing, which he would place in the vase in Seyoko's room so that after dinner, when she returned, it would be waiting for her.
Tsuyo lived in a tiny hill town three hours north of Tokyo.
From his garden one could see the Japanese alps. Often it seemed as if the sky were permanently ringed by these darkling slopes.
It was in the foothills of these glacial ridges that much of the students' training was carried out. The morning had begun bright and sunny, with only a few fluffy clouds scudding in the high winds. Just after lunchtime, the weather had changed abruptly. The winds had shifted, bringing heavy, moisture-laden air off the sea. Soon the sky lowered ominously, as zinc-colored clouds, streaked with dark, clotted undersides, stretched across the region. Thunder began to boom, made dull and echoic by distance.
Tsuyo, one eye on the weather, saw no reason to break off his lessons, but as a precaution, should a rain squall come up suddenly and cut students off from one another, he broke the class up into pairs. Michael and Seyoko were put together.
And they were together when the rain hit, slicing in almost horizontally, driven by a wind turned cold and howling. The world around them disappeared beneath sheets of gray-green water, so opaque they seemed lifted whole from the shoreline many miles to the south.
Michael and Seyoko clung to the layered shale, dark and running with rainwater. They were perhaps three hundred yards above the treetops of the valley within which Tsuyo's house was nestled. Pressed against the slick, slanting rock face, they were pummeled by wind, lashed by the downpour.
Seyoko was shouting at him, but it was impossible to hear what she said and he shifted to move closer to her. A slice of shale, loosened perhaps by the storm, gave way beneath his foot and he skidded off the narrow ledge. He stumbled and flailed, feeling himself tumbling off the ledge. His knees slammed into the rock face as he reached up to grab a handhold on the ledge. He was dangling off the side of the mountain, the squall beating mercilessly against him. Seyoko stretched herself along the ledge, reached down to help him up. The wind was howling, gusting against them in quick, angry bursts. Michael felt his strength giving out. He was supporting his weight while fighting the wind, which threatened to fling him outward into the dark void.
He strained upward, saw Seyoko fully extended, reaching down, her fingers grabbing at his shirt, digging in as she hauled upward. The gale, increasing in strength, caused her to lose her grip momentarily. Michael felt himself slipping downward, and he shouted involuntarily.
Then Seyoko renewed her grip. He saw the fierceness in her face, the determination. Nothing was going to make her lose her hold on him again. With agonizing slowness, Michael inched his way up the jagged rock face until he was able to get his hips back up onto the rock ledge. His right leg made it upward and he thought, I'm safe!
He heard the crack then, an eerie sound that seemed to rip through his entire body. He turned his head, as if part of him already knew the nature of that sound. He saw the section of the rock ledge on which Seyoko was stretched break apart in a great gout of mud and shattered shale. He cried out as he saw Seyoko's body begin to fall. "Hold on to me!" he screamed into the wind. "Don't let go of me!"
But it was too late. Seyoko, as if divining that only one of them could be saved, had opened her hands. Michael felt the palms of her hands, her fingers, sliding over his back as she loosed her grip.
Then the storm took her, flinging her into the abyss. Whirling like a pinwheel, she floated for an eternal moment within the dark heart of the maelstrom of wind, rain and shattered rock. Michael saw her face, calm, serene, staring out at him.
Then, with an obscene abruptness, she was gone, swallowed whole into the maw of the squall.
Michael heard himself breathing. He swung in a shallow arc, half on and half off the ruined shelf of rock. The wind tugged at him, as it must have done to Seyoko. And for a split instant he thought of letting go, of following her into that heart of howling darkness. A despair so profound that he lost all sense of his center overcame him. He beat at the unforgiving stone with all his might, hating it for what it had done to her. Only when he tasted his own blood, when the pain of the cuts, bruises and abrasions he had inflicted on himself broke through his semistupor, did he swing himself all the way up onto the gouged-out ledge.
Much later, in the silence of the night, the aftermath of the storm, did he creep out into Tsuyo's garden. He lifted his bandaged hands and clumsily cut a single blossom.
He went into Seyoko's room. Nothing had been disturbed. Search parties were still out, in what would be a vain attempt to retrieve her body. The police, already there when Michael made his way down the mountain slope, had taken statements from everyone involved. Tsuyo had left to deliver the tragic news to Seyoko's parents.
There was a peculiar quiet inside the house. Michael took a wilted flower out of the vase, replaced it with the fresh one he had just picked. But he felt nothing. Now Seyoko would never see it, and he would never understand the profound satisfaction derived from this small pleasure.
He breathed in the air, pulling in the scent of her. He saw again her face as she spiraled away from him. What would have happened between them had not the storm caught them on the rock face? He felt a longing well up inside himself, a sadness he could not define. It was as if a thief had stolen his future from him. Like a warrior's death without honor, it made life's present hollow and devoid of meaning.
I am alive and she is not, he thought. Where is the justice in that?