Part 45 (1/2)

'Are you sure we've met? I've been trying to place you but your name doesn't ring a bell.”

'That doesn't surprise me,' said Kelso. 'When Simons here mentioned your name, I thought I knew you but, uhh . . . like Jodi . . . I've obviously got you confused with some other guy.” He shrugged. 'It happens.”

'All the time,' said 'Brickman'. Never mind. We'll have plenty of time to get acquainted in the next few weeks.

Welcome aboard.” He shook hands with both of them.

'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 f.u.c.k is going on?”

Precisely the same question - phrased somewhat more elegantly in j.a.panese - was being posed with equal urgency by Consul-General Nakane Toh-s.h.i.+ba, Lord Min-Orota and, with the aid of fleet-winged courier pigeons, by Lord Hiro Yama-s.h.i.+ta. 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-s.h.i.+ba 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 gra.s.ses, 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 pa.s.sion had been spent and he was left lying on his back with the deliciously painful feeling that his b.a.l.l.s 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 n.o.buro, Steve and the Herald, Tos.h.i.+ro Hase-Gawa.

To have spoken of this would have placed the cloud warrior in mortal danger. But the subject never came up. Nakane Toh-s.h.i.+ba'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-s.h.i.+ba 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-s.h.i.+ba's bullish confidence become tinged with fear, uncertainty and doubt. The Consul-General might be a well-connected fellow-n.o.bleman, but he engendered scant respect and Kiyo always enjoyed taking the over-fleshed c.o.c.ksman down a peg or two.

'I'm not sure I understand...”

'Oh, come now, isn't it obvious? The ronin lost forty-six hors.e.m.e.n in the course of capturing their prize ' The Consul-General reacted with astonishment. 'You know of this already?”

The lie came easily. 'I heard in a roundabout way that a convoy had been waylaid and that the ronin had been hotly pursued. But until this moment I had no idea they had made off with, ahh. goods belonging to you. The point is, the ronin lost a great many men only to find themselves in possession of a long-dog and two Vietnamese house-women.