Vulcan's Forge

by Du Brul, Jack

  Ironically, he had just accepted a temporary position at the USGS as a private sector consultant to liaise with major American mining concerns for the smooth implementation of the President’s new environmental bill and discuss this plan for possible adoption by some foreign companies. His career was coming full circle in a way, but this time through the government’s grist mill, he’d be walking away in two months with no strings attached.

  “You look like shit,” Harry observed.

  Mercer glanced down at his wrinkled Hugo Boss suit and clammy-feeling shirt. Two days of dark beard shadowed the decisive line of his jaw. “You spend twenty hours on an airliner and see how you look.”

  Harry swung his leg off the couch and grabbed a flesh-colored piece of plastic from the floor. With three deft movements that his nearly eighty-year-old hands didn’t seem capable of, he strapped the prosthetic leg on just below his knee and flexed the articulating ankle.

  “Much better.” He tugged down the cuff of his pants, stood and walked casually over to the bar without the slightest trace of a limp.

  Mercer poured him a whiskey. “I’ve seen you do that a hundred times and it still gives me the creeps.”

  “You have no respect for the ‘physically challenged’—I think that is the new politically correct term.”

  “You’re a decrepit old man who probably had his leg shot off by a jealous husband as you leapt from his wife’s boudoir.”

  The two men had met the night Mercer moved into the area. Harry was a fixture at the neighborhood bar, Tiny’s, a place Mercer discovered to be a sublime distraction from unpacking ten years of eclectic junk collected from all over the world. The unlikely pair became best friends that night. In the five subsequent years, Harry, no matter how drunk, had never told Mercer how he’d lost the leg and Mercer had enough respect to never pry.

  “You’re just jealous that your body doesn’t make a good conversation piece in bed.”

  “Harry, I don’t pick up women at the exit to circus freak tents,” Mercer retorted.

  Harry conceded the point and asked for another drink.

  If anyone had been listening, the next hour’s conversation would have seemed as if it were between bitter enemies. The sarcastic remarks and biting jokes sometimes got downright vicious, but both men enjoyed this verbal jousting, which was often the main source of entertainment at Tiny’s.

  A little after midnight, age and whiskey forced Harry to a tactful retreat to the couch, where he promptly fell asleep. Mercer, despite the jet lag and beer, still felt refreshed and knew any attempt to sleep would be futile. He decided to get some office work done.

  His home office was all rich leather and oiled woods, forest green carpet and polished brass. Other than the bar it was the only truly finished room in the brownstone. He knew that the decor was somewhat cliché, but he liked it just the same. The numerous prints on the walls were of heavy mining equipment: walking drag-lines, huge dump trucks, and skeletal drilling derricks that towered eight stories. Each print was signed with a thanks from the president or owner of some company that Mercer had helped. On the credenza, discreetly lighted from below, was a large chunk of opaque blue stone. Mercer’s hand caressed it as he walked to his desk.

  He had phoned his secretary at the USGS from Jan Smuts Airport in Johannesburg and had asked her to fax all of his memos and messages to his house, knowing that insomnia always followed an international flight. There were at least fifty sheets of paper in the tray of the fax machine.

  The majority could be ignored for at least a few days; only a couple had any urgency at all. Working through the pile quickly, he almost missed the significance of one sheet, from the deputy director of operations at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. It was an invitation, dated six days earlier, to work aboard the NOAA research vessel Ocean Seeker in an investigation of an unknown geologic phenomenon off the coast of Hawaii. The deputy director had requested Mercer’s presence because of the paper he had written two years earlier on the use of geothermic vents as possible energy sources and rich mining areas.

  Mercer had heard of the tragic loss of the ship with all hands. It had made the newspapers even in South Africa.

  The invitation itself was not the cause of his racing heart or shallow breathing. At the bottom of the invitation was a list of the specialists already assigned to the survey. The first name was Dr. Tish Talbot, marine biologist.

  Mercer had never met Tish, but her father was a good friend, a man to whom Mercer owed his life following a plane crash in the Alaska Range. Mercer had been returning from his first private consulting job when his plane had suddenly lost power. The pilot had been killed landing in a rock-strewn field and Mercer had broken a leg, a wrist, and a bunch of ribs. Jack Talbot, a grizzled tool pusher on the North Slope fields at Prudhoe Bay, had been camping near the crash site on a one-week leave. Talbot had reached Mercer within ten minutes of the crash and tended him overnight until he could signal a rescue copter with a flare salvaged from the wrecked plane.

  The two men had seen each other infrequently in the years since then, but their friendship lasted. And now, Jack’s only daughter was dead, a victim of a terrible accident. Mercer empathized with his friend, feeling hollow inside when he imagined the pain that Jack must now be facing. Mercer had known such pain, losing his parents when he was only a boy, but no parent ever thinks that they will outlast their child. Many say that that is the worst kind of agony.

  Mercer turned off his desk lamp. He left Harry on the couch in the rec room, not wanting to kick his friend out at two in the morning. Mercer’s huge bed didn’t really look inviting, but he made the effort anyway. His sleep was fitful.

  Hawaii

  Jill Tzu eased on the brake of her Honda Prelude and slipped the transmission into neutral. Her car slowed to a stop about twenty yards away from the main gates of Takahiro Ohnishi’s estate. She tilted the rearview mirror downward until her mouth was in sight and deftly applied another slick layer of lipstick. She pursed her lips, flashed a professional smile to herself, then opened her mouth wide. Satisfied that the makeup was perfect, she canted the mirror back.

  As a female reporter, she knew the necessity of a glamorous appearance on camera. Despite her abhorrence of such sexism, she was pragmatic enough to know that she alone wasn’t about to change the custom.

  Yet it wasn’t her stunning beauty or her dancer’s legs that got her this interview today, it was her heritage.

  Takahiro Ohnishi was easily the wealthiest man in Hawaii. In fact, he was the twelfth richest man in the world, with interests as diverse as real estate, medical research, shipping, and mining. He had offices on six continents, seven palatial homes, and nearly thirty thousand employees. Despite the global aspects of his holdings, he remained rooted in one tradition, that of Japan.

  He had built his empire on an ethnic pyramid with himself, a native born Japanese on top and his key managers at least pure Japanese regardless of their country of birth. The next level down had to be three-quarters’ Japanese or more, and so on until only the lowliest of workers had no Japanese blood at all. Ohnishi employed two entire law firms to battle the hundreds of cases of discrimination filed against his companies. To date they had not lost a single case.

  His obsession with his Japanese heritage consumed his personal life as well. Ohnishi had never married, but the numerous mistresses who had come and gone during his seventy years were all Japanese. If he found even the slightest trace of any other heritage the affair would end on the spot. All the servants in all his homes were Japanese, and even his rare press interviews had to be conducted by reporters who were at least half Japanese.

  And that brings us to me, thought Jill Tzu, the daughter of a Hong Kong Chinese banker and a Japanese interpreter.

  She eased her car into gear and approached the wrought iron gates of Ohnishi’s principal American residence. The house, twenty miles northwest of Honolulu, was isolated by acres of sugarcane fields and pineapp
le plantations.

  Once, asked why he remained so secluded, Ohnishi responded honestly, “Everyone I need is brought to me; why should I scurry around?”

  A lean guard approached her car. Jill lowered the window, getting a delightful mixture of cool auto air-conditioning and hot lush air.

  The first thing she noticed was the automatic pistol slung from the guard’s hip and the quality and cut of his uniform. This was no simple rent-a-cop.

  “Yes?” he said courteously.

  “Jill Tzu from KHNA; I’m here to interview Mr. Ohnishi.”

  “Of course,” the guard replied. He pressed a button on one of the pillars supporting the gates and they slid open silently.

  Jill accelerated, surprised that she hadn’t been asked for identification.

  The crushed limestone drive leading to the house was a pristine white trail through a vast emerald lawn. The drive curved around stands of trees and shrubs, artfully placed so the house was hidden until she rounded the last bend. When she saw the building, she was stunned.

  Jill had expected traditional Japanese architecture on a grand scale, yet what was before her was unlike anything she had ever seen before. Takahiro Ohnishi lived in a glass house, modeled somewhat like the entrance to the Louvre designed by I. M. Pei, but much, much larger. Tubular steel struts supported small panels of glass in a framework that could only be described as obtuse. Spheres, cones, and slab-sided rectangles melded together in a multisided building that was not displeasing to view. Jill could see completely through the home to the shallow valley which stretched beyond.

  Still not over her initial shock, Jill drove up to the porte-cochere and slid out. Her heels clicked against the white inlaid marble as she walked toward the glass front doors. Just as she reached them, they were opened by a servant.

  “Miss Tzu, Mr. Ohnishi is waiting for you in the breakfast garden. Would you please follow me?” The butler was Japanese, of course, wearing a somber black livery reminiscent of the early part of the century.

  “Thank you,” she replied, slinging her purse over her shoulder.

  The interior spaces of the house were broken by stark geometrical walls. The structures were not bound by any normal parameters of construction. Some hung ten feet or more in the air, and others were mere ripples across the floor. The foyer was a massive open space, domed by a delicate lattice of steel and glass that cast a spiderweb shadow on the white marble floor. Stairs, landings, and balconies cantilevered into the foyer as if defying gravity. Having no basis of comparison, Jill simply assumed that the decidedly Oriental watercolors and paintings on the walls were priceless.

  The butler led her through several rooms, some traditional Japanese and some Western in style. At the open doors of an elevator, the butler indicated that Jill was to proceed alone.

  “Mr. Ohnishi is waiting to the right as you exit the elevator.”

  There was a discreet chime and the doors slid closed.

  Feeling like an ant in the bottom of a kitchen sink, Jill smoothed her cream skirt against her legs as the brushed stainless steel elevator sedately ascended. When it stopped, Jill stepped onto a breezy loggia, forty feet above the ground. She turned to her right and saw a table set for two people, the silver glinting in the early Pacific light.

  “I am delighted to be able to share my breakfast with you, Miss Tzu,” Takahiro Ohnishi said as he stood.

  “I am delighted that you invited me,” Jill replied, walking toward the table.

  She extended her hand, which Ohnishi ignored. Pissed at herself, Jill remembered whom she was dealing with and bowed deeply. Ohnishi replied with the barest nod of his head. “Won’t you sit down?”

  Ohnishi did not look like an industrialist. He was thin and frail, with a voice made tenuous by the years. His snowy hair was sparse, revealing red blotches of scalp. His face was cadaverous, sallow and drawn. His hands were darkly liver-spotted and bony, like the claws of a small bird.

  “Miss Tzu, I did not invite you, I merely caved in to your persistence. One hundred and fourteen calls and seventy-eight letters are enough to make any man capitulate.” Jill believed the comment was meant to be charming, but his flat delivery made her uncomfortable. In fact, Ohnishi made her uncomfortable. He looked like a corpse that refused to stop moving.

  She smiled her best reporter’s smile. “I’m glad you did. Any longer and the station was going to make me pay for the stamps I was using.”

  A servant appeared and poured coffee into her cup, adding one spoonful of sugar. Jill looked at him queerly, wondered how he knew she took her coffee this way.

  “I know much more than that, Miss Tzu, otherwise I would have never let you on the grounds,” Ohnishi said, reading her expression, possibly her mind, for all she knew.

  “Is that why no one asked to see my ID or search me when I came here?” She meant the question to be friendly, but it sounded almost defensive.

  “I had you followed from your home at 1123 Blossom Tree Court in the Muani Condominium development. In fact, I’ve had you followed every day since granting this interview,” Ohnishi said so casually that Jill could not respond for a moment.

  “Did you learn anything interesting?” she said sarcastically, her anger now beginning to rise.

  “Yes, a lovely successful woman like you needs to get out more.”

  Jill’s anger evaporated at his reply. “That’s the same thing my mother tells me.”

  Much later, Jill realized his use of her mother’s exact words was no coincidence.

  “I am sorry if my actions make you uncomfortable, but a man in my position must be cautious.”

  “I understand. I don’t particularly like it, but I understand.”

  The servant reappeared and placed a bowl of fruit in front of Jill. Again he gave nothing to Ohnishi.

  “As my aide Kenji told you on the phone, I do not allow cameras on my property nor is this conversation to be recorded.”

  “It won’t be, I assure you,” Jill said, setting her coffee cup into its saucer, fearful of spilling anything on the crisp linen cloth or cracking the translucent porcelain. She did not realize that she had been x-rayed twice since entering Ohnishi’s home, once at the front door and again in the elevator. Her verbal assurances were superfluous.

  “I must say this is an amazing home,” Jill remarked to break the silence.

  “Believe it or not, this structure was designed in 1867 by an obscure Tokyo architect, long before the technology was available for its construction. He took his own life only a few months after completing the drawings, knowing that his genius would never be appreciated in his time. It is supposition on my part, but I believe he thought his suicide would give his work the immortality it would never receive through construction.”

  “I did not know that you were such a student of history.”

  “Everything we know, Miss Tzu, is history. Just because it is not taught in schools from dusty texts does not lessen any information’s importance.”

  “I don’t think I understand.”

  “Allow me to explain. The latest piece of information, no matter how current, is already history. I can look at a stock ticker as the trading goes on and already the information I’m seeing is history. Maybe it’s only a second old, but the events have already happened and nothing in my power can change them. If I decide to buy or sell based on that information, I would be basing that choice on history. All knowledge is like that and all decisions are made that way.”

  “What if I decide to do something on a whim?”

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t know, say, quit my job.”

  “In that case, you would have a history of job dissatisfaction, a knowledge based on past performance that you could find another job, and confidence that you have put sufficient money in a bank to ensure security until you begin working again. All of these factors make your decision not whimsical at all, but rather calculating in fact.”

  “I never thought about it in that way,” Jil
l said, intrigued.

  “That is why you are not worth eight billion dollars and I am,” Ohnishi remarked, not boastful, just stating the truth.

  “I asked your assistant if there were any taboo subjects for this interview and he assured me that you would be candid about anything I asked.”

  “That is true.” The servant cleared Jill’s fruit plate and brought a silver salver of raw fish and thinly sliced beef. He placed some on her plate along with rice and several varieties of seaweed.

  “Aren’t you eating, Mr. Ohnishi?” Jill asked after the servant vanished, again leaving his plate empty.

  “My stomach and some of my small intestine were removed several years ago after I was diagnosed with cancer, Miss Tzu. I’m afraid I must eat intravenously. I may sample some of these dishes later, but I can’t swallow them. It is an unpleasant sight I assure you.”

  Jill was thankful he did not get more graphic.

  “I know your basic biography, Mr. Ohnishi,” Jill began the formal interview, a Waterman pen poised over her notebook. “You were born in Osaka, but your parents immigrated to the United States with your two older sisters when you were an infant. Your father was a chemical engineer working for UC at San Diego.”

  “Correct,” Ohnishi interrupted. “My family all died during World War Two when Roosevelt imprisoned all Japanese nationals. My sisters died of typhus; they were barely into their teens. My mother died soon afterward of the same disease. The day he took his own life, my father told me to never forget them. I was seventeen years old.”