Aces Abroad

"A pay phone, in the Roppongi district. The club where Hiram got in trouble is somewhere around here."

"It's just… we never really had a chance to talk. With Jayewardene there and everything."

"I know."

"I went looking for you after Wild Card Day. Your mother said you were going to a monastery."

"I was. Then when I got here I heard about that monk, the one up on Hokkaido."

"The ace."

"Yeah. His name is Dogen. He can create mindblocks, a little like the Astronomer could, but not as drastic. He can make people forget things or take away worldly skills that might interfere with their meditation or-"

"Or take away somebody's wild card power. Yours, for instance."

"For instance."

"Did you see him?"

"He said he'd take me in. But only if I gave up my power."

"But you said your power was gone."

"So far. But I haven't given it a chance to come back. And if I go in the monastery, it could be permanent. Sometimes the block wears off and he has to renew it. Sometimes it doesn't wear off at all."

"And you don't know if you want to go that far."

"I want to. But I still feel… responsible. Like the power isn't entirely mine, you know?"

"Kind ou I never wanted to give mine up. Not like you or Jayewardene."

"Is he serious about it?"

"He sure seems to be."

"Maybe when this is over," Fortunato said, "him and me can go see Dogen together." Traffic was picking up around him; the daytime buses and delivery vans had given way to expensive sedans and taxis. "I have to go," he said.

"Promise me," Peregrine said. "Promise me you'll be careful."

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah. I promise."

The Roppongi district was about three kilometers southwest of the Ginza. It was the one part of Tokyo where the clubs stayed open past midnight. Lately it was overrun with gayin trade, discos and pubs and bars with Western hostesses. It had taken Fortunato a long time to get used to things closing early. The last trains left the center of the city at midnight, and he'd walked down to Roppongi more than once during his first weeks in Tokyo, still looking for some elusive satisfaction, unwilling to settle for sex or alcohol, not ready to risk the savage Japanese punishment for being caught with drugs. Finally he'd given it up. The sight of so many tourists, the loud, unceasing noise of their languages, the predictable throb of their music, were not worth the few pleasures the clubs had to offer.

He tried three places and no one remembered Hiram or recognized the sign of the duck. Then he went into the north Berni I

Fortunato slowed to watch the dynamics at one of the Japanese tables. Expense accounts kept the water trade alive. Staying out all night with the boys from the office was just part of the job. The youngest and least confident of them talked the loudest and laughed the hardest. Here, with the excuse of alcohol, was the one time the pressure was off, their only chance to fuck up and get away with it. The senior men smiled indulgently. Fortunato knew that even if he could read their thoughts there wouldn't be much there to see. The perfect Japanese businessman could hide his thoughts even from himself, could efface himself so completely that no one would even know he was there.

The bartender was Japanese and probably new on the job. He looked at Fortunato with a mixture of horror and awe. Japanese were raised to think of gaijin as a race of giants. Fortunato, over six feet tall, thin, his shoulders hunched forward like a vulture's, was a walking childhood nightmare. "Genki desu-ne?" Fortunato asked politely, with a little bow of the head. "I'm looking for a nightclub," he went on in Japanese. "It has a sign like this." He drew a duck on one of the red bar napkins and showed it to the bartender. The bartender nodded, backing away, a rigid smile of fear on his face.

Finally one of the foreign waitresses ducked behind the bar and smiled at Fortunato. " I have a feeling Tosun is not going to do well here," she said. Her accent was Northern England. Her hair was dark brown and pi

"I'm looking for a nightclub somewhere around here. It's got a duck on the sign, like this one. Small place, doesn't do a lot of gaijin trade."

The woman looked at the napkin. For a second she had the same look as the bartender. Then she worked her face around into a perfect Japanese smile. It looked horrible on her European features. Fortunato knew she wasn't afraid of him. It had to be the club. "No," she said. "Sorry"

"Look. I know the yakuza are mixed up in this. I'm not a cop, and I'm not looking for any trouble. I'm just trying to pay a debt for somebody. For a friend of mine. Believe me, they want to see me."

"Sorry"

"What's your name?"

"Megan." The way she thought before saying it told Fortunato she was lying.

"What part of England are you from?"

"I'm not, actually." She casually crumpled the napkin and threw it under the bar. "I'm from Nepal." She gave him the brittle smile again and walked away.

He'd looked at every bar in the district, most of them twice. At least it seemed that way. Hiram could, of course, have been half a block farther on in the wrong direction, or Fortunato could simply have missed it. By four A. M. he was too tired to look anymore, too tired even to go home.

He saw a love hotel on the other side of the Roppongi Crossing. The hourly rates were on the high, windowless walls by the entrance. After midnight it was actually something of a bargain. Fortunato went in past the darkened garden and slipped his money through a blind slot in the wall. A hand slid him out a key.

The hall was full of size-ten foreign men's shoes paired off with tiny zori or doll-sized spike heels. Fortunato found his room and locked the door behind him. The bed was freshly made with pink satin sheets. There were mirrors and a video camera on the ceiling, feeding a big-screen TV in the corner., By love hotel standards the room was pretty tame. Some eatured jungles or desert islands, beds shaped like boats or cars or helicopters, light shows and sound effects.

He turned out the light and undressed. All around him his oversensitive hearing picked up tiny cries and shrill, stifled laughter. He folded the pillow over his head and lay with his eyes open to the darkness.

He was forty-seven years old. For twenty of those years he'd lived inside a cocoon of power and never noticed himself aging. Then the last six months had begun to teach him what he'd missed. The dreadful fatigue after a long night like this one. Mornings when his joints hurt so badly it was hard to get up. Important memories begi

Nothing was as addictive as power. Heroin was a glass of flat beer in comparison. There had been nights, watching an endless throng of beautiful women move down the Ginza or the Shinjuku, virtually all of them for sale, when he'd thought he couldn't go on without feeling that power again. He'd talked to himself like an alcoholic, promising himself he'd wait just one more day. And somehow he'd held oui. Partly because the memories of his last night in New York, of his final battle with the Astronomer, were still too fresh, reminding him of the pain the power had cost him. Partly because he was no longer sure the power was there, whether Kundalini, the great serpent, was dead or just asleep.

Tonight he'd watched helplessly as a hundred or more Japanese lied to him, ignored him, even humiliated themselves rather than tell him what they so obviously knew. He'd started to see himself through their eyes: huge, clumsy, sweaty, loud, and uncivilized, a pathetic barbarian giant, a kind of oversized monkey who couldn't even be held accountable for common politeness.