The Kaisho Read Online Free PDF Page A

animals. We’ve got to get dirty sometime. This is your time.”
    She pulled out another cigarette. “Become like you, you mean? No, never!”
    “I wish you wouldn’t.”
    Margarite put her hand around the lighter, then apparently thought better of it. She returned the unlit cigarette to the filigreed box.
    “It frightens me that you know Dominic is going to call.”
    “Yes, I know.”
    “His friends…”
    “He has no more friends.”
    He dipped his fingertip into the sticky residue of the spilled brandy, brought up on it not only the sweet liquor but a tiny shard of glass. She watched as he pressed the glass until it pierced his skin and drew blood. By this gesture of machismo she reckoned that pain in one form or another was a significant component of his personality. She filed this inference away, not yet able to deduce its usefulness.
    She wondered why he hadn’t assaulted her. He had had every opportunity to take advantage of an entire array of provocative situations: while she was naked in the bath, while she was dressing as he watched, anytime while they had been here in the library. Certainly, after she had recovered from the initial shock of his presence, she had given him every opportunity, knowing that he would not be thinking clearly trapped between her thighs and his blood filled with testosterone.
    She had to try something to extricate herself from this nightmare. She shifted on the sofa, hiking up her skirt to the tops of her thighs. She saw his gaze shift from the blood on his fingertip to her flesh. His gaze had weight as it rested on her, and heat. She could feel her cheeks beginning to burn.
    “What is it about you?” She did not recognize her own voice.
    Do Duc looked at her. His fingertip traced a red crescent on the trembling flesh of her inner thigh. He stroked higher, into the spot where she was warm, even now. She felt a kind of connection, and she did what she could to draw him on, to make the heat rise in his blood.
    The harsh jangle of the phone made her start. She stared at it as if it were a deadly adder. He took his hand away, and her one chance was gone.
    “Answer it,” Do Duc ordered, staring into her terrified eyes.
    Margarite hesitated, trembling. It didn’t have to be Dominic; it could be anyone, she told herself. Please let it be anyone but him.
    She snatched up the receiver with a convulsive gesture. She swallowed, then said hopefully, “Hello?”
    “Margarite, bellissima!” Dominic’s voice said in her ear, and she slowly closed her eyes.

Book 1:
Old Friends
    Year after year
    On the monkey’s face,
A monkey’s mask.
    —Matsuo Basho

1
Tokyo/Marine on St. Croix/New York
    So early in the morning Tokyo smelled like fish. Perhaps it was the Sumida River, still home to hundreds of fishermen plying their ancient trade. Or, thought Nicholas Linnear, perhaps it was the steel-hued haze that squatted like a gluttonous guest over the sprawling metropolis.
    Somewhere in the countryside far away the sun was struggling up over the mountaintops, but here in the heart of the city it was still dark. Just a hint of predawn light turned the shadows nacreous.
    As Nicholas ascended the Shinjuku Suiryu Building in the nonstop chairman’s elevator, he considered the formidable array of decisions awaiting him at Sato International, the vast keiretsu, industrial conglomerate, he ran jointly with Tanzan Nangi.
    Nangi was the canny Japanese, a former vice minister of MITI, Japan’s all-powerful Ministry of International Trade and Industry, with whom Nicholas had decided to join forces, merging his company, Tomkin Industries, with Nangi’s Sato International.
    Interestingly, both men had inherited the top position in their respective conglomerates, Nangi from his best friend’s dead brother, Nicholas from his late father-in-law. For this, and many other reasons, there was a unique bond between the two men that could never be severed.
    Nicholas stepped off the elevator at the fifty-second