Floating City by Eric Van Lustbader Read Free Book Online

see her for what she was: a beautiful Vietnamese with clear skin, large, luminous eyes, and long, cascading hair. The hat, then, had been an essential part of the disguise, not an affectation. He had to admire her; there was no trace of the portrait she had so skillfully painted of Trang.
    “What happened to Trang?”
    She smiled with pouty, sensual lips as she steered around an oncoming boat, giving it a wide berth. “Let’s make it simple and say Trang was killed back there on the street.”
    “No. A man who worked for me was murdered, and you simply left him—”
    Her head turned toward him and her black eyes bored into his. “That man could have been you. You’d do well to remember that. Did you see what was left of his skull? What you seek is both illegal and very dangerous, Chu Goto. Whose responsibility is the man’s death, mine or yours?”
    Nicholas opened his mouth to reply, but his tongue seemed to have trouble working. She had startled him not only with what she said but with the force she had used.
    “Men changing into women, a murder in the street, running from an unknown and unseen enemy. What’s going on here?”
    “This is your journey, Chu Goto. You asked for it.”
    Nicholas said nothing, digesting all that had happened from the moment this disguised woman had appeared at his hotel-room door. What rankled him the most was that he hadn’t immediately seen through her mask. His pride had been pricked, and what was worse, she appeared to understand this. What exactly did she know about him? He had assumed that here in Saigon he wouldn’t be recognized.
    “You must trust me,” Bay said in an urgent tone. She maneuvered the boat into a darkened, deserted slip on the opposite shore. Nicholas estimated that they were just over three miles southwest of where they had boarded the boat. “I’m going to take you to the man you want to see.”
    “The theoretical-language technician?”
    Bay nodded her head. “The Russian Jew, yes. Abramanov.”

2
Tokyo/Saigon
    Akira Chosa, oyabun of the Kokorogurushii family, drank in the dense, resonating knell of the shrine bell. The bell, made of a composite of bronze and copper, was the height of three men. It had been cast more than 250 years ago at the same shrine foundry that had turned out some of the finest samurai armor and katana Japan had ever seen.
    At dawn, dusk, and midnight the bell was rung by a trio of Shinto priests propelling a thick beaten-bronze post, hanging horizontally by the side of the bell. Its hemispherical head was wrapped in a square of specially woven indigo cloth that was replaced each year on the last day of winter in a ceremony that took the better part of an entire day.
    Chosa, a devout Shintoist, had attended this ceremony every year since he had attained manhood, and more than once he had knelt, shaven head bowed, in the midst of these priests, praying to the gods of the shrine’s sacred camphorwood trees from which it was built, the piercing white snow that lay atop its eaves, and the crepuscular moon that illuminated them all, with blood on his hands, the remnants of affairs of business or of honor.
    This was before he had been elevated to the rank of oyabun, but the blood marked, like the rungs on a ladder, his ascent through the ranks of the Kokorogurushii.
    Chosa could not fail to hear the beating of the great shrine bell and be moved. Like art, this symbol of his inner beliefs affected him far more deeply than did his dealings with humans, which, in his opinion, were insignificant and ephemeral. In the end, Chosa fervently believed, only the cosmic symbols survived in the mind, the heart, the spirit, the places of eternal wandering.
    As the sound swelled, enveloping him, he wept. He licked his lips, tasting in his saliva this deep tolling as if it possessed the bitter tang of hardened steel. It did not seem to matter to him that, twenty floors up, he could not see the shrine, hidden as successfully as a mushroom in a