[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]the bows, where the soldier she'd poleaxed was making a fuss in the chain
locker. She'd turned the bridge lights to red on her first visit, and strode
through the blood-coloured gloom to the winch/anchor console. She tapped one
finger against her lips as she inspected the controls, then reached out and
flicked a switch. The starboard anchor dropped to the lake and splashed. Its
chain rattled massively after it, links whipping through the chain locker
where the soldier was.
The rasp of falling chain drowned the man's scream, though it must have been
short anyway. If she'd waited till dawn, she thought, she'd have seen him exit
through the eye of the anchor port in a red spray, but she shivered at the
thought of his blood spreading over the surface of the lake. The anchor
chain's thunder sounded through the ship, making the deck beneath her tremble.
Unbraked, the chain kept on spilling out under its own weight.
There was a boom as it stopped; she couldn't tell whether it parted or held.
She rubbed one of her breasts absently, grimacing slightly when she touched
one of the places where they'd burned her, and reflected that revenge could
taste remarkably bland when you'd stopped feeling.
Hisako Onoda came to the conclusion there was almost certainly nobody left to
kill on the
Nadia
. She decided to go and see Mr Dandridge, who deserved a visit like nobody
else did.
It was all still hopeless, she knew, but this was better than doing nothing.
The crumpled black Gemini Orrick had knifed lay draped over one end of the
pontoon.
She looked at one of its bulky silenced engines, worked out how to take it off
and dragged it over to where the
Nadia
's own inflatable lay moored. She stuck the military engine's prop in the
water, pushed the starter. The engine trembled, rumbled; even idling, the prop
tried to push itself under the pontoon. She switched the outboard off,
unbolted the Evinrude from the sternplate of the
Nadia
's Gemini and let it slip into the black waters. She replaced it with the big
military engine, working by the light from the ship above, and sweating with
the effort, arms aching. The pontoon was on the near side of the ship to the
other two vessels.
She had the walkie-talkie switched on, and was vaguely surprised it had stayed
silent; it seemed nobody had heard or seen anything on the other two ships. As
she worked she waited for gunfire, or the radio to rattle off some
incomprehensible Spanish at her, but -- in that perverse sense -- waited in
vain.
It took her two trips to bring all the weaponry down to the boat. She topped
up the outboard fuel tank with one of the jerry cans on the pontoon, then
stowed that with the missile launchers and explosives in the bottom of the
inflatable and restarted the engine.
She pushed the Gemini away from the pontoon. The inflatable purred off into
the night, taking a curving course towards the bulky rectangular shape of the
Nakodo.
Her mother kept a scrapbook. It glossed over the time she was in hospital.
Sometimes when she was home she would look through the scrapbook when her
mother wasn't there.
The pages flipped through her fingers; the glued-in programmes with her name
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in them, the cuttings from papers mentioning her individually, a few cassette
inserts, some magazine interviews and features, and as the pages slipped and
sped and fell through her hands she thought that the times the heavy pages
covered had themselves gone just as fast, just as suddenly and inevitably.
The years mounted up, like a sentence. She played, and her modest fame grew.
She tried a few more times to board a plane, from single-engine Cessnas to
747's, but could not ever suffer the doors to be closed. She got as far as
Okinawa for a couple of holidays, and went to Korea for the Olympics and a few
concerts, but pressure of work stopped her from making sea journeys that
lasted any longer. There was talk once, by a Greek ship owner impressed with
her playing, of her string quartet playing on board a luxury cruise ship for
anything up to a year; state rooms, good money, and a world cruise ... but she
visited one of the cruise ships in Yokohama and decided she didn't much like
the people, the decor or the idea of being expected to play the safe,
predictable music that seemed to be expected of her. So it came to nothing.
She grew to know Japan well; the places she didn't go to with the orchestra
she visited alone, on her frequent vacations. Mr Moriya fretted that she
wasn't maximising her potential, which she took to mean making all the money
she could, but then she scarcely knew what to do with what she did have. She
paid off the loan on the Stradivarius, bought a house in the hills above
Kamakura, which cost a fortune, and had long since paid the loan on her
mother's little apartment, but she didn't know what else to do. Driving didn't
interest her; she always had a small Ronda, but hated the crowded roads and
was always relieved to get out of the machine. She felt awkward and
conspicuous in very expensive clothes, and couldn't see the point of jewellery
you worried about. She saved, for want of anything better to do, and thought
vaguely about founding a school in her later years.
Mr Moriya decided she was right to go for quality rather than quantity, and
renegotiated her contract with the orchestra. She started to ration public
appearances, and only recorded when she absolutely had to. Western music
critics who heard her made flattering comparisons; she thought about going to
Europe but kept putting it off. She was looking forward to travelling on the
Trans-Siberian Railway, but it seemed like something she should do only once
each way (to reduce it to some sort of absurdist commuter journey each year
would seem like sacrilege), and was anyway nervous of actually playing in
Europe. At first she had worried that nobody would want to listen to her,
then, when it became clear they did, that she'd been built up too highly, and
they'd be disappointed. Mr Moriya, to her surprise, didn't try to pressure her
into going. He seemed content to let the offers mount up, the venues increase
in size, and the proposed money inflate.
She fell into the music, whenever she played. It was real; colourful. Her
life, for all the friends and holidays and for all the respect of other
musicians and adulation of audiences, seemed, if not actually monochrome, then
missing some vital component; as if one colour was missing, one gun in the set
misfiring, so infecting the image with its absence.
One day she trudged through the woods north of Fuji, taking the old path she'd
first travelled as little more than a child, struggling with her water-warped
and salt-stained cello and case.
When she got to the bald summit of the hill, the little clearing where she'd
watched Fuji dance in the flames she'd made, she discovered it had become a
picnic area; half a dozen smiling, chattering families sat at stout wooden
tables, unpacking boxes, spreading dishes, opening bottles, taking their
rubbish to cheerfully bright plastic bins which said 'Thank you'
when you fed them. Children's laughter filled the place, and smoke from a
portable barbecue
wavered like some incipient genie. in front of the view of Fuji. Western pop
music tinkled from a ghetto blaster hanging from a tree.
She turned and walked away, and never went there again.
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She was halfway across the kilometre of dark water between the
Nadia and the
Nakodo when the radio came alive in her trouser pocket. The noise startled
her, made her let go of the throttle, clutch at her thigh where the speech was
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