The Miko - 02 (5 page)

Tomkin was silent for a moment. Then, abruptly, he grunted and began to undress. It was as close to an apology as he was going to come. When he, too, was naked, he drew out his towel and the key to the locker.

“Don’t use it,” Nicholas said.

“Why not?”

They stared at each other for a moment, then Tomkin nodded. “Loss of face, right?”

Nicholas smiled, opening the wooden door beside the bank of lockers. “Come on,” he said.

They stepped into a chamber perhaps twenty feet square. The floor was the same cedar slats but here the walls were of gleaming blue tile. The ceiling, of smaller tile, was a mosaic whose center was the interlocking wheel pattern of the company’s logo. The room was taken up by two enormous bathtubs both now filled with steaming water. Two young women stood in attendance.

Without hesitation Nicholas stepped in front of them, allowing them to pour scalding water over him, then begin rubbing him down with soapy sponges. After a moment spent taking this in, Tomkin followed him.

“This I understand,” he said, allowing the woman to wash him. “First get clean, then let the heat relax you.”

They were rinsed off carefully, shampoo provided for them, then, dripping, their flesh steaming, walked to one of the steaming tubs.

Here the water was even hotter, making Tomkin cringe. They discovered niches within the walls of the tub so that they could sit with just their heads out of the water. Tomkin’s face was red, beads of sweat rolling freely down his cheeks. He found that if he moved it made the heat intolerable. Nicholas’ eyes were closed, his body relaxed. There was no sound save the soft, hypnotic lapping of the wavelets their own bodies created in languid movements within the bath. The tiled walls were stippled with moisture.

Tomkin put his head back against the wood, stared up at the Sato triple wheel. “When I was a kid,” he said, “I remember I hated to take a bath. I don’t know why. Didn’t think it was manly or something. There was a fag kid in school always smelled like he’d come from the bath. Jesus, I hated him. Beat his brains out one day after class.” His chest moved up and down slowly with his breath.

“I thought, you know, that it’d make me some kind of hero with the other kids, but it didn’t.” His voice lapsed for a moment before resuming. The drip of the water was like a metronome. “I remember my father coming after me, throwing me into the tub, scrubbing me with that kind of powdered cleanser—Ajax or something. It hurt like hell, I can tell you. ‘Cry,’ he said. I can just hear his voice. ‘It’ll do you a world of good,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow you’ll take a bath on your own so I won’t have to clean you this way again.’

“Yes.” Tomkin nodded. “My father certainly taught me the wisdom of keeping clean.” He closed his eyes for a moment as if picturing the scene all over again.

Nicholas looked at him and thought of his dead friend. Lew Croaker had been so certain that Tomkin had had Angela Didion murdered. That obsession had a peculiarly Japanese flavor to it because it sprang from Croaker’s blind obedience to the dictates of the law. “Nick,” his friend had once told him, “I don’t give a rat’s ass what Angela Didion did or what her rep was. She was a human being, just like all us slobs. What I’m doing…Well, I figure it’s something she deserves. If she can’t get justice, then no one at all deserves it.”

What Croaker termed justice Nicholas knew as honor. Croaker knew where his duty lay and he had died in that pursuit. It was a
samurai
’s death, Nicholas knew that very well, but it somehow did not ease the sadness that welled up in him in odd quiet moments or erase the emptiness he felt inside him, as if a vital part of him had been abruptly severed.

“Nick, you and Craig Allonge get along well.” Tomkin was speaking of the company’s chief financial operations officer. “You know that I rely on him a great deal. Besides me, he knows more about the real running of Tomkin Industries than anyone. He’s close to its heart.” If Tomkin was trying to make a point, he did not finish. Instead, he seemed to veer onto a tangent. “Craig’s going through a particularly hard time now. He’s moved out of his house. He and his wife aren’t quite seeing eye to eye since she told him about her lover.”

Tomkin moved involuntarily and sucked in his breath with the searing heat. “It’s a helluva situation. Craig told me he wanted to move into a hotel in town, but I wouldn’t hear of it. He’s staying with me until he decides what to do. I told him I’d help him with the divorce if that’s what he wanted. I’ll also pay for a counselor if he thinks there’s any chance of a reconciliation.” He closed his eyes. “But, more important for the moment, he needs a real friend. I’m his boss; I can’t be his friend, too, not in this way. You like him, and I know he thinks the world of you. And you know the real meaning of friendship.”

Nicholas settled back in the scalding water, thinking, Westerners are so unpredictable. They bluster one minute, insensitively ignoring civilized courtesies, then the next, show an inordinate amount of insight and caring. “I’ll do what I can as soon as we get back,” he said.

At length, Tomkin turned his head toward Nicholas, and when he spoke his voice had unaccountably softened.

“Nicky,” he said, “are you going to marry my daughter?”

Nicholas, half-dreaming, nevertheless heard the touch of desperation in the other man’s voice and wondered at it. “Yes,” he said immediately. “Of course. As soon as we get back to the States.”

“You’ve discussed it with Justine?”

He smiled. “You mean have I proposed? Yes.” He heard Tomkin exhale deeply and opened his eyes, looked at the other man. “We have your blessing?”

Tomkin’s face darkened and he gave a harsh bark that Nicholas recognized as an anguished laugh. “Oh, yes, for all the good it might do you. But don’t tell Justine. Christ, she might decide not to marry you just to spite me.”

“I think those days are over.”

“Oh, you’re wrong about that. Nothing will ever be right between me and my daughters again. There’s too much bitterness on their part, too much resentment of the way they think I’ve interfered in their lives. Rightly or wrongly. I’m not even sure I know which now.”

Time to break the mood, Nicholas thought, and he clambered slowly out of the tub. Tomkin followed, and they went through another door into a steam room. They sat on hexagonal tiles while the long vertical pipe coughed and belched pockets of water that ran down, gurgling into the drain. Then, with a great gout of sound, the steam began to shout from the open end of the pipe and talk became impossible.

Precisely five minutes after they entered, a warning bell rang. They could no longer see one another though they sat fairly close together. Periodically, the pipe running along the tiled wall to their left screamed like a banshee, delivering forth a new cloud of steam which wrapped itself around their shoulders with a new wave of heat.

Nicholas touched Tomkin on his beefy shoulder, and they went out through the second door set into the far wall.

They were in a fairly large, dimly lighted room that smelled faintly of birch and mentholated camphor. Four long padded tables were aligned along the periphery of the room. Two tables were occupied by dark lumps that they soon could make out as bodies. A young woman stood by each table.

“Gentlemen.” A male figure sat up on the table to their right. He bowed slightly. “I trust you are more relaxed than when you entered our doorway.”

“Sato,” Tomkin said. “It took you—” But feeling the pressure of Nicholas’ hand on his arm, he changed in midsentence. “This’s a helluva way to greet us. The Okura couldn’t’ve done as well.”

“Oh, no, we cannot come up to that standard.” But Seiichi Sato nodded his head in acknowledgement of the compliment. “Linnear-san,” he said, turning slightly, “it is an honor to meet you at last. I have heard much about you.” He swung his legs around, lay back down. “Tell me, are you pleased to be back home?”

“My home is now America, Sato-san,” Nicholas said carefully. “Much has changed in Japan since I left, but I trust there is more that has remained the same.”

“You missed your calling, Linnear-san,” Sato said. “You should have been a politician.”

Nicholas wondered who was lying on the table against the far wall.

“Lie down, please, gentlemen,” Sato said. “You have not yet completed your course in relaxation.”

They did as he bade, and immediately two more young women emerged from the semidarkness. Nicholas felt the splash and roll of oil, then skilled hands kneading his muscles.

“Perhaps you are already wondering why these girls are not Japanese, Linnear-san? Do not think I am not nationalistic. However, I am a realist as well. These girls are from Taiwan.” He chuckled. “They’re blind, Linnear-san, could you tell that? The prevailing explanation is that their affliction allows them a more sensitive sense of touch. I am inclined to agree. Ever since my first trip to Taiwan in ’56, I have dreamed of bringing Taiwan masseuses here to Japan. What do you think, Linnear-san?”

“Superb,” Nicholas grunted. The girl was turning his rocklike muscles to butter beneath her talented fingers and palms. He breathed deeply into the expansion, experiencing an almost dizzying sense of exhilaration.

“I was obliged to remain in Taiwan for ten days while we jury-rigged a deal that was falling through. I assure both you gentlemen that the only worthwhile features of that country are its cuisine and its extraordinary blind masseuses.”

For a time then there was only the soft somnolent slap of flesh against flesh, the sharp camphor smell of the liniment that somehow increased the overall sense of drowsiness.

Nicholas’ mind returned to the mysterious fourth man. He was well acquainted with the convoluted byways of Japanese business structure, so different and alien to Westerners. He knew that despite the fact Sato was this
keiretsu
’s—enterprise group’s—president, still there were many layers, many men in power, and there were those in the highest reaches of power in Japan who the outsider and even most Japanese never saw or knew about. Was this one of those men? If so, Nicholas had to believe Tomkin’s admonition of extreme care on the long trip across the Pacific. “This deal with Sato Petrochemicals is potentially the biggest I’ve ever put together, Nick,” he had said. “The merging of my Sphynx Silicon division and Sato’s Nippon Memory Chip
kobun
is going to bring untold profits over the next twenty years to Tomkin Industries.

“You know American manufacturers; they’re so goddamned slow on the uptake. That’s why I decided to start up Sphynx two and a half years ago. I got fed up with relying on these bastards. I was always three to six months behind schedule because of them and by the time I got their shipment, the Japs had already come out with something better.

“Like everything else, they’ve been taking our basic designs and making the product better and at a far lower price. They did it to the Germans with thirty-five-millimeter cameras, they did it to us and the Europeans with cars. Now they’re gonna do it to us again with computer chips unless we get off our asses.

“You better than anyone, Nick, know how goddamned hard it is for a foreign company to get a toehold in Japan. But now I’ve got something they want—want badly enough to allow me fifty-one percent interest in my own company. That’s unheard of over there. I mean, they took IBM to the cleaners when they opened up in Tokyo.”

Nicholas recalled the incident well. Japan’s all-powerful Ministry of International Trade and Industry, known more colloquially as MITI, had sprung up after World War II to essentially help guide Japan’s economy back onto sound footing. In the 1950s, MITIs chief minister, Shigera Sahashi, became the
samurai
bent on discouraging what he saw as a massive invasion of American capital into Japan.

He also saw the enormous potential worldwide market coming for computers. Japan had no computer technology whatsoever at the time. Sahashi used IBM’s desire to open up Japan for its trade to effectively create a national computer industry.

MITI already had set policies severely limiting the involvement of foreign companies in Japan’s economy. The ministry was so powerful that, in effect, it could exclude all foreign participation without its consent.

Sahashi allowed the formation of IBM-Japan but as soon as the fledgling company was set up, he set about showing them what they had stepped into. IBM, of course, held all the basic patents that Japan required to begin its own homegrown industry.

In a now historic meeting with IBM-Japan, Sahashi told them: “We will take every measure possible to obstruct the success of your business unless you license IBM patents to Japanese firms and charge them no more than a five-percent royalty.”

When the understandably appalled IBM officers indignantly accused the Japanese, through him, of having an inflated inferiority complex, Sahashi said, “We do not have an inferiority complex toward you; we only need time and money to compete effectively.”

Stunned, the Americans were faced with the difficult choice of having to withdraw IBM completely from a major part of its planned worldwide expansion or capitulating to MITI’s total domination.

They chose to submit, and for years afterward Sahashi would proudly recount the details of his triumphant negotiations.

“I learned from that fiasco.” Tomkin’s voice had brought Nicholas back. “I’m not so greedy that I’ll put one foot in the trap before I know what the hell’s going on. I’m going to use the Japs, not the other way around.

“I won’t spend dollar one on a Japanese company until the deal’s set. I’ve got the patented advance, but there’s no way I can manufacture this new-type chip in America without the costs making sales prohibitive. Sato can give me that; he controls Japan’s sixth largest
konzern.
He can manufacture this thing cheaply enough to make this venture profitable in a big way.”

He laughed. “And I do mean big, Nick. Believe it or not, we’re looking at a net profit of a hundred million dollars within two years.” His eyes were on fire. “You heard me right. One hundred million!”

Nicholas might have been sleeping when the hands lifted from his muscles. He felt better than he had in years. He heard muffled movement in the room and then Sato’s commanding voice. “Now we shower and dress for business. In fifteen minutes Miss Yoshida will fetch you.” He stood up, a thick, black shadow. Nicholas twisted his head to try to get a good look at him, but all he could discern was that Sato was not tall by American standards. Behind him, the specter of the fourth man stirred and got to his feet. Nicholas shifted his gaze, but Sato’s bulk was between him and the mysterious stranger.