Floating City Read Online Free Page A

potent evil of Kshira.
    Was this, too, the fate Kansatsu had planned for Nicholas? Surely there was a time bomb ticking inside Nicholas’s head, readying itself to destroy him. And so, he was desperately trying to discover the secret of Shuken.
    But Shuken had proved a highly illusive state. It was achieved only through koryoku, the Illuminating Power. Nicholas had been told that Mikio Okami possessed koryoku, which had been a crucial factor in his rise to power, his dominion over all other Yakuza oyabun. Because of this, Nicholas had a personal stake in finding Okami alive and in good health: he wanted to extract from him the secret of koryoku and, through it, Shuken.
    “Put the gun away. You have other things to concern you,” Nicholas said, his thoughts returning to Shindo’s resentment of him.
    Shindo, firing up another cigarette from the butt of the last, seemed as distant as a statue of Buddha. The weapon disappeared as if it had never existed, but it was clear from his movements that he had a certain facility with guns.
    “Did you have friends in the war?” Nicholas asked, trying to connect with the PI. Shindo regarded him for a moment through a haze of curling smoke. He lounged against the greasy wall like a pimp in a brothel. “I knew people... on both sides.” He took a drag of his cigarette, blew smoke in a furious hiss. “I suppose that surprises you.”
    “Not really. In your business—”
    “Now you have real reason to distrust me.”
    So that was it. Shindo felt Nicholas’s arrival on his turf was an expression of his employers’ lack of faith in him.
    “If that was the case,” Nicholas said, “I would have terminated your contract immediately.”
    Shindo’s shoulder came off the wall, as if he might evince some interest now. “What do you know of the war, anyway?”
    Nicholas considered a moment. “So much has been written about how traumatized Americans were by the war, but it seems to me there was something else far more sinister at work, something most people either did not want to talk about or did not get. Kids from all over—from the inner-city ghettos and dying small towns—were given unlimited use of deadly weapons. They were trained to use submachine guns, hand-held rocket launchers, flamethrowers, and were told killing was more than okay; it was expected of them. I think for some of those men the war became an intoxication almost beyond imagining, a better high than pot or heroin; it was a mind-altering experience. But how could it be any different? These kids were thrown into a reality beyond law and endowed with the power of life and death.”
    Shindo was watching him now through eyes slitted by smoke and emotion. “Yes,” he said after a time. “It was just like that.”
    The couple next door had finished their sweaty exertions, and Nicholas could hear drifting in through the open window a few bars of a singer lamenting in Vietnamese-tinged French something about a soul alone and in torment. The sentiment, exaggerated by a voice filled with perverse sexual pathos, seemed perfect for Saigon.
    There was a peculiar note in Shindo’s voice, and Nicholas wanted to identify it. “The war was very personal for you.”
    Shindo walked across the room. “I had a lover. Once, he was a soldier. A grunt who served here.”
    “And survived.”
    “In a manner of speaking.” Shindo watched the glowing end of his cigarette. The song, building to a crescendo, cascaded through the room in a ghostly swirl. “In the end, he didn’t want to live anymore. He couldn’t. The demons the war had embedded in him were eating him alive.”
    It was odd, Nicholas thought, how one could tell a perfect stranger what was otherwise unthinkable. “What happened?”
    “What needed to happen.” Shindo seemed carved out of the humid night, as if he belonged here rather than in Tokyo. “I’ll tell you what’s funny. The people who were here, who were fighting the war—and now I mean both sides