Eric van lustbader chi.., p.57
Eric van Lustbader - China Maroc 01, page 57
Lantin lit the redolent opium, and Daniella inhaled. She had never experienced drugs of any kind firsthand before. Of course, her training in the sluzhba had included an extensive program on drugs of all kind, including their effect on different parts of the brain, nervous system, coordination, and so on.
She and Lantin shared the opium, and when the pipe was cool he returned to the kitchen. Through flared nostrils, she could smell fresh coriander and preserved chili.
She resumed reading. The opium gave her the ability to absorb what she read and think independently at the same time. The leather, initially so cool on her bare buttocks, was now as deliciously warm as a lover’s lips. She squirmed in the chair, aware of her body’s flush. Réage’s story was turning her on despite herself.
The smell of leather, so manly, mingled with the cooking scents to create a kind of wholeness that Daniella could not explain, but only wonder at. Yin and yang.
Her resolve to break irrevocably away from Lantin flickered like a candle in the wind. The truth was, she enjoyed the things he bought her, the luxury within which he immersed her. He was decadent and, oddly, that thrilled her. This gown was decadent. With every breath she took, she could feel the silk caressing her flesh. Mozart’s sublime music caressed her ears, Réage’s French caressed her mind.
She was filled up with emotion, soaking in discrete moments of desire. There was no yesterday, no tomorrow. Only an endless now.
She read steadily until she heard Lantin’s voice.
“Get up.”
She obeyed.
She was wearing the high-heeled pumps he had bought her. Through half-glazed eyes she saw his gaze of lust as it glided over the thrust of her breasts, the stiff peaks of her nipples, the shallow bowl of her belly. The heels made her legs seem endless; the stockings gave them a sheen as if they were coated with oil.
Lantin changed the record. “Are you hungry?”
“Yes.”
“Walk across the room.”
She began, but he redirected her until she stood beneath the glassed-in bookcase.
“Hold out your hands.”
She did so, and before she knew what was happening, he had slipped a pair of gleaming chrome-plated handcuffs over her wrists. She heard with an odd kind of echo the snik-snik of the ratchets closing over her flesh.
Daniella was slightly dazed. If he had said “Hold out your wrists,” she might have had some inkling as to his intent, especially considering the book he had given her to read. As it was, she stood staring stupidly at him. There was already a great bulge in his jeans. She wondered whether the constriction was very painful.
“Turnaround.”
She seemed incapable of any movement. She felt his hands rough on her shoulders, spinning her so that she faced the glassed-in case. He took her wrists by the manacles and slipped the chain linking them through an eyehook screwed into one of the higher bookshelves. This drew Daniella upward until the heels of her shoes barely touched the floor.
“We will eat in a moment.”
She felt her Dior gown being pulled aside. The scrape of the jeans’ zipper abraded against the gently flowing Mozart, a scar disfiguring an otherwise exquisite face.
Daniella became aware of what he was going to do a moment before it happened. She thought of Réage’s character and what she had been asked to do for love: to prove her devotion. This debasement was the first of many.
She cried out at the invasion of his hot, oiled penis. It seemed to have grown to four times its size. Her back arched instinctively, but this only presented her buttocks to him more completely.
His carnal heat was on her like a blanket. She felt as if she were being penetrated by a horse; there was nothing pleasurable about it. The shame and sickly fear served to evaporate the euphoria of the opium. Mozart’s ephemeral stateliness now seemed hollow and mocking.
She thought of O. Of how her lover had taken her thus, how his friends had availed themselves of her in the same manner. How she had been whipped and then made love to. How the ring her lover had selected and which bore his initials had been put through her labia as an eternal symbol.
She thought of how O had endured all this for the love of her man, and she wondered whether this was what Lantin ultimately had in mind for her. Certainly this was the beginning of what he saw as a learning process. She saw that he had given her the book to read so that he would never have to say to her, “Daniella, this is what is to come.”
Yet he had missed the essence of the story. O had been asked at every stage if she would accept what was to come. And at each stage she had agreed. Until the strength of her commitment, and the knowledge it lent her, had freed her of woman’s traditional chains, giving her an extraordinary power over others.
Lantin had asked Daniella nothing. He had never sought her consent. He had gleaned from Réage’s story only the most superficial emotions. Male dominating female. He had not recognized O’s submission as strength, but rather had seen it erroneously as weakness. He saw weakness in all women.
Thus he made up Daniella’s mind for her.
She let him have his grunting, sweat-sticky orgasm inside her. She turned her defilement into a rite of passage, a search for self, as Réage meant O’s to have been. In the end she would have to thank Lantin, for it was through his cruelty that she began to see herself as a free creature rather than as a woman who was dependent on the more powerful men around her to scale the heights she desired for herself.
Still rampant from his rape, Lantin reached up and slipped the chain off the eyehook. He unlocked the handcuffs so that they fell away from her red wrists, landing at her feet. They felt hot against her toes, as if they burned with her shame.
He was deep inside her. Daniella felt as if she had dysentery. She was beset by cramps. She wanted to cry with the pain but she would not allow herself that release. Not in front of him.
He did not want to come out of her, but her calf muscles were trembling so hard now that he had no choice. He withdrew, and to Daniella it felt as if a swordblade were slicing through her bowels. She put her forehead against the glass case until it fogged with her panting breath.
Sweat drenched her, and she could smell the musk of sex swirling in the room along with the Mozart.
The music followed her as she staggered into the hallway, into the bathroom, where she fell against the door and vomited all over the tile.
Twenty minutes later, after she had cleaned up, taken a chilly shower because as usual the hot water wasn’t working properly, she stood before the medicine chest. She looked at herself in the mirror on the door and quickly opened the chest to rid herself of the sight.
It took her several minutes before her vision concentrated enough for her mind to understand what she was looking at. A bottle with a fairly new prescription. Sleeping pills.
She took them out, and while Lantin was busy in the kitchen completing his preparations for dinner, she went into the bedroom and threw all the pills into the bottle of Starka he always kept by his bedside. Twenty.
Gingerly she sat on the bed, watching fascinated as the thin coating slowly dissolved in the alcohol. Soon there was no trace of them. The bottle was less than a quarter full. She thought of the concentration of chemicals inside that bottle. Like swallowing poison, she thought. Almost.
It was so painful to sit on the hard dining room chair that she had to bite her lip through most of the meal. Lantin did not notice, or perhaps if he did, he felt it best to make no comment. He spoke as if nothing untoward had happened.
Daniella was astounded. It was as if he was unaware that she might have some feeling one way or another about being taken, or as if he did not care. She did not know which was the worse reality.
As was his habit, when he got into bed he drank three fingers of the Starka out of a water glass. In the airless dark, Daniella waited, feeling the sweat congealing on her flesh. Being so close to him now gave her goosebumps, as if he were a bear or a great cat who, though ostensibly trained, might strike her down at any moment.
At last she could stand it no longer. “Yuri?” she said. Then, in a somewhat stronger voice, “Yuri.”
No answer.
She turned over. She could just make out his profile. He looked like the Devil.
She reached out and, breathless, poked him in the ribs. She made a fist, beat down on his chest above his heart. She slapped him hard across the face.
Then she clambered across his still body and, reaching back, dragged him out of bed. This was no time, she thought, to take a chance.
Grunting with the effort, she took him up under the arms and pulled him across the room. The rug proved a bit of a problem. His heavy heels dragged it over the polished wooden floor, adding to his weight, until she dropped him and untangled it from beneath him.
Down the silent hallway they went. Daniella could hear the stentorian ticking of the clock on the mantel. Her breath was hot in her throat, and the stooped position she was in caused a return of her cramps.
In the kitchen, she opened the oven door and blew out the pilot light. Then she turned Lantin over on his belly and slid him up onto the Bakelite lip. Shoved head and shoulders into the aperture. Then, already gagging on the fumes, she turned on the oven full blast.
It took her fifteen painful minutes to dress, break into his cache of secret files, and remove all traces of her presence, including prints, from the apartment. By then the place was so thick with gas it was possible to hallucinate.
How many wars had he fought? The war against Chiang; the war against the capitalists; the war against the faan-gwai-loh. But the greatest toll of all had been taken in his war against himself.
Like a mountain climber who, after a long, exhausting ascent, stands wreathed in cloud, Zilin was now increasingly absorbed by his thoughts.
His secret life, dedicated to the fruition of the yuhn-hyun, had been kept from everyone. Every day had been a battle with security. On the surface he had to seem to be working toward the goals set by each succeeding regime. Of course, he had had his say, he had pulled the strings at which time had made him adept. But it had not been enough. Despite his work, present-day China was a shambles of political quicksand, indecisive priorities and allocations, and, above all, inability to devise a long-range plan for China and stick to it.
Perhaps, Zilin thought, it was not inability but unwillingness. Ever since Mao’s disastrous five-year plans, there had been a reluctance within the governmental hierarchy to return to that kind of thinking, no matter the urgency of the need.
We are an unwieldy nation, he thought dispiritedly. We are too many people, too little educated in a quality fashion. Our Communist cant shackles us to an unsupportable economy. Our continued fear of Western “contamination” dooms us to an endless infancy in the modern business world.
Time and again, Zilin thought about the examples of Chinese initiative and business acumen in almost every country of the globe. In most cases, they paid the price for it. Philippine-born Chinese were still denied citizenship in that country, even after their families had lived there for many generations. In the 1960s, thousands of Chinese were slaughtered in Malaysian and Indonesian race riots, principally because of their business dominance in those areas.
A decade later, the socialist regime in Hanoi had forced Vietnamese Chinese into the South China Sea, rather than harbor such potentially destructive capitalists in their midst. Today, the two most successful business tycoons in Jakarta were born on mainland China. But rather than risk the racial, they had renamed themselves Soedono Salim and Surya Wonowid-jojo, Indonesianizing themselves.
Today, while the Chinese in Indonesia are not subjected to mutilation and death as they once were, they are still persecuted in a way. The government has decreed that the Bumiputras, the sons of the soil, Islamic native Malays, have first rights on all new business enterprises. Further, “foreign” businessmen are “encouraged” to take on Bumiputras as business partners.
In America, however, the Chinese flourish. Among many, En Wang, an emigrant from the mainland, has shown his genius in designing computer networks. Zilin regretted now that he would never see America for himself.
But in these days of pain and fear, he regretted most his decision to leave his wife and his mistress. For the first time in his life, doubts about himself had begun to assail him. He was, after all, just a man. Nowadays his youthful dreams, in which he had believed himself to be the reincarnation of a Celestial Guardian of China, seemed farfetched indeed. His increasing pain made him aware with every breath he took that he was merely a man, as mortal as those around him.
And now he felt the closing presence of Wu Aiping all around him. Fluttering wings of death beat in the shadows of his office and villa. At night the darkness closed around him like a cloak clutched in the senior minister’s hands, bearing down on him. The sweat rolled off his emaciated body.
There were times when he wished he could weep. He wondered, then, how he had ever been able to leave Athena and Sheng Li. In the past he would have called it strength. Now he suspected that it was sheer callousness. How could he have been so unfeeling? How could he have left his two sons, one a child, the other merely an infant?
He had been driven by his dream. By the haunting vision of the yuhn-hyun, which had been born so many, many years ago in the Jian’s garden in Suzhou. Artifice in the appearance of nature. That was what had sustained him for so long. It was what had kept him alive, but he suspected now, in sorrow, that it had also warped him beyond his own understanding.
He was Jian. The creator.
But for the first time he questioned the nature of his creation. He wondered whether the future of China was truly more important than his own happiness and the happiness of those he held dear. He had been witness to such cruelty, such stupidity, such inhumanity in his climb to power. He had done what he could, but it was, of course, never enough. He could never have stopped the evil flow. The eternal fluttering of the ring’s banner had not let him. He had had to blend in, to seem to go along with those who had grasped the power. He could not have survived otherwise. Mao would have killed him. Later he would have been destroyed along with Mao, the Gang of Four, all the others.
Increasingly he had begun to suspect that he was unable to feel any emotion, after all. My sons, my sons, he thought. I must have my sons back! Not even China means as much to me as they do now.
A chime sounded softly in the villa, and Zilin rose, sighing. He went to his transceiver and flicked on the power. With half his mind still immersed in deep thought, he went through the rituals to ensure security.
Contact.
They performed the recognition codes without a hitch.
“Report,” he said.
“I …” The voice faltered and Zilin came out of his reverie.
“What is it? What is the matter?”
“I do not know,” Nichiren said from a far-off place. “Something seems to have changed.”
“In Hong Kong?”
“Inside myself.”
“Explain yourself,” his Control said with a calmness he did not feel.
“How? I was never taught to understand my own … emotions.”
“I thought I had accomplished that by breaking you away from your mother’s control.”
“I wonder whether that is enough.”
“I do not understand.”
“I want …” For a time there was only the crackle of the ether. “I want an end to this.”
“An end to what?”
“To obeying orders, to being under discipline, to being a part of the yuhn-hyun.”
“What are you saying? This is impossible! Do you have any idea how long it took me to set you up in just such a way, so that you would become irresistible to Daniella Vorkuta? As long as she was running you, you reported to me everything she said or did. I already had a line on her recruitment of Chimera, the Soviet mole inside the Quarry. That was my reason for ordering you to get Mariana Maroc and the fu shard out of Hong Kong. Chimera had somehow found out about the fu and had sent out a ‘seek and terminate’ directive on Mariana.
“Daniella Vorkuta has been a primary element in the yuhn-hyun, though she is totally oblivious of the fact. She has taken care of General Karpov for me; if I know her at all, she will have found a way to do the same with Yuri Lantin. Once that happens, we can move without fear. Lantin is our most feared enemy inside Russia. It was he who ordered the termination squad up to Tsurugi. It is he who seeks to strangle China by provoking her into a war he feels certain she cannot win.
“Listen to me. I have saved you from the utter anarchy and nihilism of your youth, and in so doing, I have furthered the yuhn-hyun. The positive ring. Without it, Buddha only knows what would have happened to you. You must think about that. You have your duty.”
“I believe I have a duty to myself also. That has been weighing heavily on my mind of late, something I learned not long ago. A lesson given by Jake Maroc’s wife.”
“You will listen to me—!”
“I want my own life!” The cry was that of a lost child, and it froze Zilin. “I want my own life and I will have it!”
Then the connection was gone. Just like that, such a slender thread, from father to unknowing son.
Zilin’s hand trembled as he replaced the microphone and shut down the power. The yuhn-hyun, he thought. Fifty years of planning. The sacrifices he had made to become Jian.
I want my own life!
A cry in the night. Raw emotion that Zilin himself had felt growing inside him for weeks now. His longing to see his sons face to face, to let them know that he was alive, that he loved them, that he had always loved them even as he was abandoning them, was so intense that it overpowered the pain lighting up his body like lightning.
He shook where he sat, trembling with emotions he had pent up, it seemed, for almost an entire lifetime. What matter that he was Jian? His sons had been lost to him for all these years. He saw now that one could not equate the one with the other.
