Jake Maroc - Shan Part 61

Jake carefully moved Bliss off his lap. He was very tired. With an effort, he bent over his daughter. Her face, so long in his memory, seemed subtly altered somehow. Familiar in an altogether unfamiliar way.

"Lan," he said. "Lan."

Her lids fluttered open. Her eyes were filled with him. "Bah-ba," she said softly, disbelievingly. And began to cry.

"Time's gone so slowly," she whispered. "Oh, how I've missed you."

Summer/ Present Hong Kong Jake was going to go alone but Lan insisted on accompanying him. The sun was s.h.i.+ning with a fierce intensity. The stench of air-drying fish was everywhere. The waves of the South China Sea were chips of beaten bra.s.s where the sunlight hit them. In the troughs, deep aquamarine shadows crept, stealing the light.

Jake still did not walk well. The bullet had entered his right side just above the hip. Perhaps it had chipped off a tiny piece of bone or pierced a nerve, it was impossible to say. In any case, the pain stayed with him. Not that he minded that. It was proof that what had occurred up in the Shan had really happened.

Lan, when she awoke, could not remember seeing him moments before, let alone shooting him. In fact, she was a wholly different person. The anger and rage had all been expunged from her. She was his little girl again. Or, perhaps, he had returned to being her father.

Simbal's Shan had taken the head of General Kuo from its corpse and had held it before them as they had advanced into the camp. Without their general, the army could not exist. Those not already dead or wounded were disarmed and beaten and sent scrambling down the rocky scree. The old man with one shoulder higher than the other was flung like a rag doll after them. The Shan had no use for a Chinese.

Jake and Simbal had found him fifty meters down the steep slope, head down, his neck broken by an outcropping of granite. It was an ignominious death for a man who had wielded such awesome power.

Jake, crouching over the frail figure, could only wonder at the furies of the mind which drove human beings to such lifelong quests. His father had been such a man. So had been his enemy, Huaishan Han.

That was ironic and at the same time terribly sad. Huaishan Han had been the darkness to Zilin's light. But they were two sides of the same coin and that was a sobering thought, indeed. It made Jake wonder whether the Zhuan should retire at this moment. He did not want to look back on a life filled with interminable sorrow as his father and Huaishan Han had.

He recalled the session at McKenna's house with White-Eye Kao and wondered how he ever could have done so much vicious damage to one human being. The cause was just. Or was it? The line was blurring for him and that was a danger sign. It frightened him that he could justify the means through the end. Was that a product of being in the dark and the cold on the mountain? Huaishan Han had been like that. Had his father felt that way as well? Jake thought he knew the answer. Perhaps it was time, then, for him to step aside. Let someone else shoulder the burden of being tai pan of all tai pan.

He felt Lan's hand warm inside his now, felt the weight of the urn he held against his chest. He breathed deeply, abruptly overcome by sadness.

Simbal and Rodger Donovan had come with Jake to Hong Kong but not for long. There was another battle to be won: the one involving the power struggle at the Quarry.

Alone, Jake and Simbal had shaken hands.

"It's not over yet, is it, Jake?"

"No," Jake had said. "The world won't be safe from Kam Sang until we've managed to dismantle what they've built, dispersed the scientific team that worked on the project."

"The Shan," Simbal said. "The Shan won out this time."

"The killing ground," Jake said. "The place where it all began." On the mountain it is cold and dark, Zilin had cautioned him. That is where you are now. The Shan.

"I'm going to need your help," Simbal said.

"There's more than friends.h.i.+p between us," Jake had said. "There's trust."

After Simbal and Donovan had left, Jake learned from his hospital bed that Bluestone's combine had at last succeeded in acquiring more than fifty percent of InterAsia stock. But to do that, the tai pan's investors had mortgaged their businesses to the hilt.

He had thrown his head back and laughed for the first time in many weeks, so hard in fact that he had almost popped several st.i.tches.

"Let them have it," he had said to a semihysterical Andrew Sawyer. "They're finished now."

"It is we who are finished," Sawyer said in a lament.

"On the contrary," Jake said, wiping his eyes. He could scarcely believe it. The strategy had worked. His father had said, Yes, my son, gamble everything. But, Father, if I lose There is no point, Zilin had said, in gambling pennies. "Bluestone and his combine have paid almost a billion dollars for a company useless for their purposes."

Sawyer was white-faced. "Have you lost your mind, Zhuan? The entire fortune of the yuhn-hyun is tied up in InterAsia."

"Is it?" Jake said. "This afternoon I want you to go to our lawyer's. Tell him that you require the Redstone file." Jake was studying the other's astounded face. It was running the gamut of emotions. "In it you will find all the applicable papers. You remember the meeting when my father insisted that all the yuhn-hyun a.s.sets be signed over to me?"

Sawyer nodded. "No one was very happy about that, even your uncle."

"I know," Jake said. "But now you see why it had to be done. Our a.s.sets are no longer in InterAsia. Over a period of months after the public offering, they were moved from their various holding companies. Even the Kam Sang holdings are no longer within Pak Han Min. In fact, InterAsia Trading is nothing but a sh.e.l.l. The yuhn-hyun's profits flow through it but it owns nothing outright. I hope you don't mind Bluestone taking a one percent cut. That's a h.e.l.luva good dividend but I think it's a small price to pay for the collapse of Five Star Pacific."

"And Pacific Overland Trading as well," Sawyer cried. "Sir Byron Nolin-Kelly has been a thorn in my side for years. Now we have them all! Zhuan, you are a genius!"

You are a genius. Those words echoed in Jake's mind now as he laced his fingers with Lan's. They had a mocking ring to them. A genius. He was nothing of the kind. He was no more than a zombie now. His daughter had returned to him but Bliss was gone.

He clutched the urn tighter to him. It was decorated with calligraphy in blue: "If the seasons did not change/The world would cease to breathe/The universe would give out/And the Buddha would close his eyes."

In the urn were Bliss's ashes. Bliss, who had died in order that his daughter might live. He was grateful for her selflessness but, oh, he missed her with a sharpness that was almost unbearable.

They came to the spot where he and Three Oaths and T. Y. Chung threw out the remains of Zilin upon the water. Three Oaths and his family were already there. Prayers had been spoken into the wind.

The sea breeze rustled Lan's hair. During the time she had been here, she had allowed it to lengthen. It shone like black gold, drifting off her face in ethereal wisps.

There was no laughter when Jake had confronted Three Oaths. There was little to say. Jake had no explanation for what had happened. He no more knew why Lan had tried to kill him than he did how Bliss had been shot. He had not found the pistol in Lan's hand and no one else had been around to pull the trigger. A gun does not go off by itself.

None of this, of course, allayed his uncle's grief. But in this, at least, they were united.

"She wanted to go," Three Oaths had said. "She wanted only to be with you. I could not forbid her to go." He shrugged. "She did as she wished. As she always has done. It was her way." He turned away, wiping the tears from his cheeks. "I know that you blame yourself, Younger Nephew. In this you are wholly Western. It was her joss. I a.s.sign no blame. I am proud of what she did."

"Father," Lan said now, "it is time."

Jake nodded. He held the urn in front of him. A solid breeze was at their backs. An orange-sailed junk was leaning into the wind, heading for the typhoon shelter. Further out, tankers were steaming toward j.a.pan. On the beach, children played, building castles out of sand and dreams. With an inward sigh, he inverted the urn, scattering the ashes over the bosom of the ocean.

Reaching out, Lan touched the s.h.i.+ning side of the urn. In her mind was a buzzing, a pleasant cacophony that reached down to the soles of her feet. She was warmed by it, calmed. It was almost as if the voice of Buddha spoke directly to her. She heard the calling of the world around her.

She opened her eyes. "Father," she said, "s.h.i.+ Zilin, Bliss. I feel them. They're all around us."

Jake put his arm across her shoulders. "I know they are, Lan."

But perhaps he would never know what it was she truly meant.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR.

Eric Van l.u.s.tbader, author of the bestselling novels The Ninja and ]ian, was born and raised in Greenwich Village. After graduating from Columbia University with a B.A. in Sociology, he pursued a highly successful fifteen-year career in the entertainment industry. Since 1979, Mr. l.u.s.tbader has devoted himself full-time to writing. He divides his time between New York City and Southampton, New York, with his wife, free-lance editor Victoria Schochet l.u.s.tbader.