第62节
em.
'Ray Simons will put you in the picture. We've got a good little team
here, but now that you two have arrived we can really start moving."
He signed off with a snappy parade-ground salute and strode away. It
had all gone much better than he expected. He hadn't fooled either of
them, but they both had enough savvy not to make waves.
Simons eyed Kelso. 'Well, I'm glad that's over. What d'you say start
with a clean slate?"
Kelso grasped the offered hand. 'Sure. No hard feelings?"
'None whatsoever." Simons began walking backwards.
'See you back at the hut - okay?" He turned and hurried after
'Brickman'.
Jodi and Kelso watched them disappear round the corner of the far
workshop building, then exchanged blank stares. Jodi was the first to
find her tongue.
'Well, well, well . . ."
'Exactly,' said Kelso. 'Just what the fuck is going on?"
Precisely the same question - phrased somewhat more elegantly in
Japanese - was being posed with equal urgency by Consul-General Nakane
Toh-Shiba, Lord Min-Orota and, with the aid of fleet-winged courier
pigeons, by Lord Hiro Yama-Shita. But they too found themselves
obliged to draw speculative conclusions from the few facts available.
The Consul-General, concerned by reports that the road convoy had been
twice delayed before arriving at Fin, asked the two house-women to
explain exactly what had happened. Su-Shan and Nan-Khe, who had been
living in terror of this moment, recounted their part of the story in a
shrill falsetto, fluttering their hands and twittering like
panic-stricken canaries.
Listening to them was like having his head pierced with long needles,
but Toh-Shiba bore it stoically, then sought out Clearwater, whose
luminous presence once again graced the bedroom of the lake-house. Now
bathed and freshly clothed in a gossamer-light kimono bearing a design
of wild flowers and dew-soaked summer grasses, she was invited to
soothe her master's troubled spirit by renewing her acquaintance with
his pleasure-machine.
Only then, when the weeks of pent-up passion had been spent and he was
left lying on his back with the deliciously painful feeling that his
balls were about to catch fire, did the Consul-General ask for her
version of the same event.
Called to account for each moment of captivity, Clearwater admitted to
being unmasked and subjected to a physical examination but swore on her
life that the ronin had asked no questions and she had volunteered no
information of any kind. She said nothing about her midnight encounter
at the post-house with Noburo, Steve and the Herald, Toshiro
Hase-Gawa.
To have spoken of this would have placed the cloud warrior in mortal
danger. But the subject never came up. Nakane Toh-Shiba's questions
were based on what the house-women had told him - and they had slept
throughout the entire episode.
During one of his regular official visits to Lord Min-Orota's fortress
at Ba-satana, the Consul-General recounted the details of the
kidnapping and volunteered the opinion that it was an ill-fated
enterprise based on faulty intelligence. Anxious to put the best gloss
on things, Toh-Shiba plumped for the simplest and most obvious
explanation: a group of ronin, alerted to the presence in the convoy of
a sealed carriage-box, had made off with its occupant in the hope of
extracting a hefty ransom then, finding the mask hid a worthless
long-dog, had promptly abandoned her and the two house-women by the
roadside.
Kiyo Min-Orota listened carefully, nodding in agreement as the
Consul-General concluded that, while all such acts of criminality were
regrettable, this particular incident was, essentially, a minor upset
that need not worry any of them.
'It is, without doubt, a convenient theory which I would be happy to
embrace were it not for one, small, irksome detail." Kiyo paused to
let his opening shot sink in, drawing a certain satisfaction from
watching Nakane Toh-Shiba's bullish confidence become tinged with fear,
uncertainty and doubt. The Consul-General might be a well-connected
fellow-nobleman, but he engendered scant respect and Kiyo always