Vulcan's forge m-1

by Jack Du Brul

  “Two days ago you disappeared for the night without telling me,” Ohnishi continued, “and now you are questioning my orders. Forget about Jill Tzu and concentrate on your other duties. Tonight we shall begin the bombings. Nothing serious, just a small show of force directed at those who oppose the referendum.”

  Kenji stood, his body flowing from the chair as if made of quicksilver, yet tensed as only a martial arts expert can be. “I will see to it personally.”

  He glided off the terrace, his tabi-shod feet merely brushing the tile. Once out of sight of Ohnishi, any trace of subservience evaporated and his handsome face took on an even keener edge. He mumbled, “You feeble-minded old fool; you have no idea who or what you’re dealing with.”

  He went back to his private office to ensure that Jill Tzu never filed her interview with Takahiro Ohnishi.

  Jill raked her fingers through her thick hair in utter frustration. She pursed her full lips, forming a seductive kiss, then blew a loud raspberry. Her feet were up on the control console of the studio’s editing room, her long legs stretched almost to the bank of monitors. She swung them down, ignoring the fact that her culotte shorts had just given her technician a view he’d brag about for a week.

  “This isn’t working, Ken,” she muttered darkly.

  “Give me a break will ya, Jill? We’ve been at this for six hours. It’s not like you’re going to get a Pulitzer for this,” the scraggly-bearded techie said in his defense.

  “Yeah, but just maybe it’ll be my ticket to the network. Just think about it, Ken. If I leave, you won’t have anyone bitching at you at all hours of the day or night.”

  “Keep wearing those shorts and you can piss and moan all you want,” Ken teased.

  “Watch it, I know a good sexual harassment lawyer.” Jill smiled for the first time in an hour. “All right, let’s go through this one more time.”

  This day in the editing room was the culmination of three months’ work on Takahiro Ohnishi. Jill had begun hunting down her story shortly after the reclusive billionaire had moved to Hawaii and Referendum 324 had first been proposed. At thirty-two, she was already too cynical to believe in coincidences and she’d begun looking for a connection between Ohnishi and Honolulu’s controversial mayor, David Takamora, and his even more polemic actions.

  She’d found, just through her own television station’s financial and scheduling records, that Takamora had purchased more advertising space during his campaign than his public files showed he’d had the money for. At just her station, there was a discrepancy of nearly one hundred thousand dollars, and she knew he’d campaigned just as heavily on the other channels. Where had the secret funds come from?

  Jill lacked any concrete evidence that Ohnishi had privately funded the majority of Takamora’s campaign, but she was damned sure that was what had happened. Ohnishi, with his billions, had bought himself a city.

  A journalism professor had once told her that only prosecutors in courtrooms needed proof. A reporter never needed to prove anything, all she had to do was implicate and wait for the self-incriminating defense. A few years later an aging editor said at his drunken retirement party that news never happened, it was created.

  Jill’s piece on Ohnishi was nearly ready. In fact this morning’s interview had really been unnecessary; she’d just wanted to meet the man, to get a better sense of what made him tick.

  She and Ken watched in silence as the first half of the piece ran. Stock footage of Ohnishi, David Takamora, and the violent street gangs currently preying on white tourists in the city were interspersed with close-up shots of Jill doing commentary in front of city hall. As the scenes began focusing more on the gangs, especially one violent image of four Asian youths beating an elderly white woman, Jill reached for the goose-necked microphone and began laying in a new voice-over, one not from the contrived script she had written, but one from her heart.

  “Hawaii is the Aloha State. The word means love as well as good-bye in the native tongue, and in these times it means both simultaneously. Good-bye to love. Good-bye to everything that our island paradise has stood for since Captain Cook first came here two hundred years ago, and good-bye to the traditions that reigned on the islands since the first inhabitants 1,500 years before that.

  “Where once we melded and blended into one people, neither all caucasian nor all Polynesian nor all Asian, today we stand divided from our neighbors and friends. Now all it takes is having eyes a little too round or skin a little too light and anyone on the street can become a target. Racial hatred has grown here like some cancer, some dread disease without cause whose cure seems equally elusive. Fostered by men like Takahiro Ohnishi, with his well-publicized views of racial purity, and van-guarded by youth gangs bent on violent expression, the state has been galvanized into two intractable camps: those who want Referendum 324 and those who fear it as many have feared tyranny before.

  “Last night, the vice president called Referendum 324 the beginning of a secessionist movement, and perhaps he’s right. The last time America faced a crisis like this, the Southern states withdrew from the Union because they believed in their way of life, one built on the conviction that people of other races are inferior. Today a segment of Hawaii’s population believes they have a mandate to control everyone’s lives because there is a little more Japanese flowing in their veins. They say that their Samurai ways are superior, that they can calm the streets once again if we agree to live under a system that stifles freedom of expression and the belief that every one is created equal. In this reporter’s opinion, that sounds an awful lot like extortion.

  “As the ronin scour the streets for white faces to victimize, their emperor sits inside his glass and steel home, safe behind a wall of hatred and bigotry. Since his arrival a darkness has descended, a black veil that no one seems able or willing to lift. Today, the hotels along the beaches, the condos near Diamond Head, and the cruise liners are all empty. People are afraid to come to Hawaii. I spoke with one hotel manager yesterday who told me that tourists are already canceling reservations for next year.

  “A self-generating downward spiral has been created by the actions of those who now seem to control our streets. As more tourists are frightened away, more people will lose their jobs and seek the security and fraternity represented by the gangs, thus increasing their ability to terrorize. Only this morning the President placed the troops stationed at Pearl Harbor on full alert in order to protect the federal government’s interests on the islands.

  “Who is going to protect our interests?

  “Mayor Takamora’s police force does not act to control the gangs. Will he ever ask for the National Guard to step in and take control of a situation he can no longer handle? For surely we face a crisis as dire as any these islands have faced since the first time a Japanese force descended in 1941.”

  Jill angrily pushed the microphone aside as she watched a monitor displaying David Takamora’s announcement four weeks earlier that he wanted to run in the gubernatorial elections in the fall.

  Ken was too stunned to speak for an instant, and when he caught his voice, he stammered, “Jesus, Jill, you can’t run that.”

  “Of course I can’t. It’s the truth, and right now we’re not allowed to report the truth,” she said bitterly.

  The in-house phone rang. The unit was built into the console next to where Jill’s feet were propped back up against the complicated machine. She snatched it up, tucking her hair behind her right ear as she swung the receiver to her head.

  “I know, I know, forty-five minutes to air.” Only her producer would disturb her in the editing room.

  “You’ve got five.”

  “What in the hell are you talking about, Hank? We don’t air for an hour.”

  “You know the rules, Jill. Every piece that chronicles the violence must be cleared by Hiroshi.” Hiroshi Kyato was the station’s news director.

  “That’s bullshit and you know it. You can shove your five-minute deadline. I’m not
some second-class citizen.”

  “Wait, I didn’t mean anything by it, I mean I don’t mean any disrespect for who you are. It’s just, well, you know…” His voice trailed off.

  The producer backpedaled so fast that it truly stunned Jill. Race was polarizing the station, too. Jill was half-Japanese, and Hank was a caucasian from New Jersey, and he was now deadly afraid that he’d offended her.

  “Hold on, Hank,” Jill said quickly. “What I mean to say is that I’m not a cub reporter on her first assignment. I know what the boundaries are. I don’t need Hiro and his thought police telling me what to say on the air.”

  “I’m sorry, Jill,” Hank said tiredly. “I’ve been on edge ever since Hiro agreed to help Mayor Takamora reduce tensions in the city by running tamer pieces on the situation. So far you are about the only reporter who hasn’t called me a graduate of the Josef Goebbels School of Broadcast Journalism.”

  “Haven’t you talked to Hiro about this?”

  “Sure did. He told me to hand over every segment about the violence or hand in my resignation.”

  “All right, listen, my piece isn’t done yet, or, well, it is, but I’m not going to let that son of a bitch cut it up. I’m going to take it home tonight, tone it some. If anyone is going to censor my work, it’ll be me. I won’t be the person to cost you your job.”

  “Jill, you can’t do that. Your story belongs to the station. It’s not your private property.”

  “Try and stop me, Hank.”

  Jill set the phone back in the cradle and popped the tape from the editing machine, slipping it in her handbag slung across the back of her chair. She stood.

  “What are you going to do?” Ken asked from behind his thick glasses.

  “I don’t know yet.” She left the darkened room.

  The subtle chirping of cicadas was a rhythmic accompaniment to the moon-drenched night. The air was warm, but charged with the humidity of a recently passed thunderstorm. Jill sat on the lanai of her condo, her bare feet propped against a patio table and a glass of zinfandel idly twirling between her long fingers.

  She’d been home for a couple of hours, but the long bath and half bottle of wine had done little to calm her frayed nerves. Three months she’d been working on the Ohnishi piece, three fucking months, and it would be chopped up into tiny pieces on the cutting room floor and run as a human interest story, no doubt. If she’d ever questioned the connection between Ohnishi and Takamora, she had her proof now — and the links ran even deeper, to her own news director. Was no one immune to this racial factionalism other than her?

  She was really wondering if it was all worth it. All the sacrifices she’d made in her life, all the thought she’d put into her career, and here she was, about to have her accomplishments hacked apart because they cut too close to the truth.

  “Son of a bitch.” Despite herself, she was almost in tears.

  Everything in her life had been built around journalism. She’d let almost everything else go in order to reach the upper echelons of her profession. Few boyfriends lasted more than a month or so of her eighty-hour work weeks. She’d spent her last vacation working as a temporary secretary at a sewage treatment plant, tracking down allegations of groundwater contamination.

  Her infrequent talks with her mother invariably turned to Jill’s lack of a husband and children. Every time Jill bragged about a breaking story, her mother would ask where her grandbabies were. Jill would always end the conversation angrily defending her career, but would always be racked with guilt, knowing that her mother was partly right.

  Jill did want a husband and children, but she also wanted to be a journalist. There was a balance between the two that she just couldn’t seem to find. How much of her career should she give up for a family? How much family should she forego for a career?

  And now her career might be about over. She could refuse to hand in her story and face probable dismissal, or she could cut the piece herself, destroying every shred of her integrity.

  She wondered if she should send the story directly to New York. She had a few friends in the network — maybe she could get someone to watch it, see if it was worth running on the national feed. Lord knew nothing like it had been sent from Hawaii in a long time.

  Her phone rang. Jill got up from the lanai to answer it, but as soon as she put the receiver to her ear, the line went dead. Crank call or wrong number, she didn’t care.

  She finished the last bit of wine in a heavy swallow and put the empty glass in the dishwasher, leaning against the tiled counter. She’d exhausted two of the three traditional female relaxation techniques, the bath and the wine, and there weren’t any stores open this late, so she couldn’t go shopping. She decided on a masculine diversion — she’d go out. Sitting at home and brooding wasn’t her style anyway. She could do the voice-over in the morning, but tonight she wanted a diversion, something to get her mind off her job, off her parents, off everything.

  There would be a vast assortment of eligible bachelors at the tourist hotels near the beach. Before heading into her bedroom, she put an Aerosmith CD into the player and cranked the volume to seven. The heavy bass and pounding tempo immediately made her feel better. Defiantly bad-girl music for a bad-girl type of night.

  She spent over an hour choosing her outfit and makeup. Finally she was dressed to kill, from black tap panties to a hip-hugging Nina Ricci dress. Six hours a week in a gym ensured that she had a body that would turn even a blind man’s head.

  Just as she was resettling her breasts in the strapless dress, there was a crash of breaking glass. She whirled toward the sliding glass bedroom doors as a darkly dressed figure burst through the gauzy curtains. The first man was quickly followed by two more, their booted feet crushing the shards against the teal carpet.

  Jill screamed shrilly. For an instant her panic overcame the natural urge to flee, and that hesitation cost her.

  Two of the men raced toward her, guns clamped in their gloved fists. Jill began backing away, but a pistol whipped out and caught her on the jaw, snapping her head around and knocking her to the floor. She was unconscious before her diamond pendant necklace settled in her cleavage.

  The man who had struck her peeled off his black ski mask. It was Takahiro Ohnishi’s assistant, Kenji.

  “Tie her,” he ordered.

  He searched the house until he found the room Jill used as an office. Two walls were lined with expensive video equipment, the type used for high-quality editing work. More than likely her piece on Ohnishi was here. Kenji rifled the filing cabinet and desk with professional adroitness, but turned up nothing.

  In disgust he went back out to the living room. On a small geometric lucite table near the front door rested a thick manila envelope. He tore it open and a videocassette slid into his hand. He returned to the office and slid the tape into a VCR.

  Jill Tzu’s story ran for the first and only time. As Kenji had suspected, it documented his employer’s known violations of civil employment laws and Ohnishi’s support of Honolulu Mayor David Takamora’s gubernatorial election bid for the fall. Jill had also managed to slip in several references to the escalating violence surrounding the campaign and the possibility that Ohnishi was financing that as well. Popping the tape from the VCR, Kenji slid it into the inside pocket of his dark windbreaker.

  He returned to the bedroom where Jill was laid across the bed, hands cuffed behind her and a gag stuffed into her lipsticked mouth. She was still unconscious.

  Nevertheless, Kenji whispered into her ear, “An excellent piece of reporting, Miss Tzu. You are correct on all charges. Mr. Ohnishi is financing the violence in Honolulu. Though not for much longer, I assure you.” He turned to his henchmen. “Let’s go.”

  They bundled Jill into the bedspread and carried her from her home as if she were a rolled-up carpet. The cicadas paused as the party ducked through the bushes toward their hidden vehicle.

  Twenty miles away, thunderous applause swept across the Honolulu Convention Center
as Mayor David Takamora took the stage, sending a palpable compression wave echoing through the cavernous hall. Twelve thousand people filled the room, many waving placards in support of Honolulu’s controversial mayor. The air was charged with the energy of the massed throng as their hero raised his arms over his head in recognition of the crowd’s adoration.

  Under the glare of the television crew’s klieg lights, Takamora appeared much more handsome than he did in person. The lights and makeup hid the pocks of adolescent acne on his face and darkened the thin strands of silver that wove through his thick hair. He held his body erect and confident, showing off a lean stomach that was nothing more than a girdle and a continual holding of his breath. The effort would inevitably cause severe back pain after the speech.

  Such small hoaxes can be forgiven in most men in their fifties if they did not go deeper than the surface. In Takamora’s case, it would take more than a little makeup to hide the flaws in his personality and morals.

  Pathologically ambitious, Takamora had turned to the darker side of politics to gain his current office. From the very beginning of his career as a board member of the city’s building commission, he had made it clear to any developer who cared to listen that he would almost joyfully take bribes to help a project gain quick approval.

  He amassed several hundred thousand dollars in just a few years and used that money as a war chest to battle for the mayor’s office. Some said that he cut so many deals to get on the ballot that he kept a knife on his desk rather than a pen. He waged one of the ugliest campaigns for mayor of any American city in history. His main opponent, a councilwoman of excellent standing, withdrew from the race when her daughter was brutally raped after leaving a Honolulu nightclub. Takamora didn’t know if the rape was coincidence or the act of an overzealous assistant.

  Now he stood poised to go far beyond his own ambition. He was the last of the speakers at this pro-Referendum 324 rally, and the crowd was already roused to a fever pitch.