Floating City Read Online Free Page B

because, in the end, there was no difference, really—they needed the war. Insanity had become the norm for them, their reality, and they were sunk so far in it they couldn’t get out. They dreamed of the war—it drew them like a flame, fed their worst instincts, buried their humanity beneath a foul bed of killing lust—and they never wanted it to end.” His eyes lifted from the tiny ember to Nicholas’s face. “What happened was this: I killed him in the manner he asked me to.”
    The contralto, nearly finished, was abruptly drowned out as another couple threw themselves into sexual convulsions, louder this time, so that Nicholas had the impression that the man was taking the woman quite violently up against their common wall. If they weren’t careful, they’d be electrocuted by the live wires as had a man and his whore earlier that day, or so the leering proprietor had informed them. Sex and death, never far apart, were almost indistinguishable in Saigon, Nicholas thought.
    The cockroach was unperturbed, unlike Nicholas. But then it hadn’t understood Shindo’s story. The floor was vibrating to the ancient ritual, and Nicholas was sure he could smell female musk. He moved across the room, away from the disturbance, away also from the open window, which could announce his presence in this native area as surely as if he’d been centered in a gilt frame.
    “He’ll be here soon, if he’s coming at all,” Nicholas said. “Time for you to leave.”
    “I still think it’s a mistake for you to see this man alone. We know nothing about him.”
    “I’m the one who knows the ins and outs of the neural-net chip. If he’s suspicious and quizzes you, we’ll be dead.”
    “We can both—”
    “No. He told me it had to be one-on-one. If I were him, I’d turn tail the moment I saw the two of us.”
    From his new vantage point Nicholas could see a wedge of the teeming street. Cyclos, three-wheeled cab-bikes, whizzed by alongside old Soviet-built trucks belching clouds of noxious diesel smoke. Flocks of cyclists squeezed by on either side of the larger vehicles, and every so often a so-called marriage taxi rumbled by, old American gas-guzzlers from the fifties or sixties, finned like a spaceship, wide as a boat. Packs of ragged street urchins played dangerous games of pickpocket with businessmen seeking to open low-overhead, high-volume manufacturing in newly booming Saigon by day and an unbridled sexual smorgasbord in Cholon by night. Soldiers in their khaki uniforms rubbed shoulders with saffron-robed Buddhist monks, scantily dressed prostitutes, and a legion of amputees and the deformed. There were always the maimed in Vietnam, young adults scarred by the war and children deformed by its aftermath, dioxin-based chemical defoliants such as Agent Orange.
    As they had repeatedly for months, Nicholas’s thoughts returned to Mikio Okami. Okami was the Kaisho—the head of all the Yakuza clan heads, the oyabun. He had been close friends with Nicholas’s father, Col. Denis Linnear, during the American occupation of Japan in the late 1940s. Nicholas had promised his father to help Okami if the Kaisho should ever need it.
    That time had come. Okami had had a stormy relationship with the members of his inner council for some time. It appeared that Okami’s final break with them had occurred over his alliance with Dominic Goldoni. The inner council had been part of a scheme that Okami had set in motion. Known as the Godaishu—Five Continents—the group implementing the scheme had been woven from carefully chosen elements within the Yakuza, Japanese government, Mafia, and U.S. government to create what could only be described as an international criminal conglomerate, skimming off staggering sums of money from arms as well as from legitimate businesses. As profits multiplied, the inner council began to agitate to move into other, darker areas of business, such as drug trafficking.
    Okami and Goldoni both rebelled and had