fund had. It wasn’t the largest fleet on the Street by any means, but the Co-
lumbus Group was one of the leaders. People looked to Columbus for ideas
and trends. Yamata had bought more than a trading house. He now had a real
position in the hierarchy of America’s money-managers. His name, largely
unknown in America until recently, would now be spoken with respect,
which was something that ought to have put a smile on his face, Winston
thought. But it didn’t.
The final sheet of paper got to his chair, slid across by one of his principal
subordinates, and, with his signature, about to become Yamata’s. It was just
so easy. One signature, a minute quantity of blue ink arranged in a certain
way, and with it went eleven years of his life. One signature gave his busi-
ness over to a man he didn’t understand.
Well, I don’t have to, do I? He’ll try to make money for himself and others,
just like I did. Winston took out his pen and signed without looking up. Why
didn’t you look first?
He heard a cork pop out of a champagne bottle and looked up to see the
smiles on the faces of his former employees. In consummating the deal he’d
become a symbol for them. Forty years old, rich, successful, retired, able to
go after the fun dreams now, without having to stick around forever. That
was the personal goal of everyone who worked in a place like this. Bright as
these people were, few had the guts to give it a try. Even then, most of them
failed, Winston reminded himself, but he was the living proof that it could
happen. Tough-minded and cynical as these investment professionals
were-or pretended to be-at heart they had the same dream, to make the
pile and leave, get away from the incredible stress of finding opportunities in
reams of paper reports and analyses, make a rep, draw people and their
money in, do good things for them and yourself-and leave. The pot of gold
was in the rainbow, and at the end was an exit. A sailboat, a house in Florida,
another in the Virgins, another in Aspen . . . sleeping until eight sometimes;
playing golf. It was a vision of the future which beckoned strongly.
But why not now?
Dear God, what had he done? Tomorrow morning he’d wake up and not
know what to do. Was it possible to turn it off just like that?
A little late for that, George, he told himself, reaching for the offered glass
of Moet, taking the obligatory sip. He raised his glass to toast Yamata, for
that, too, was obligatory. Then he saw the smile, expected but surprising. It
was the smile of a victorious man. Why that? Winston asked himself. He’d
paid top dollar. It wasn’t the sort of deal in which anyone had “won” or
“lost.” Winston was taking his money out, Yamata was putting his money
in. And yet that smile. It was a jarring note, all the more so because he didn’t
understand it. His mind raced even as the bubbly wine slid down his throat.
If only the smile had been friendly and gracious, but it wasn’t. Their eyes
met, forty feet apart, in a look that no one else caught, and despite the fact
that there had been no battle fought and no victors identified, it was as
though a war was being fought.
Why? Instincts. Winston immediately turned his loose. There was just
something-what? A nastiness in Yamata. Was he one of those who viewed
everything as combat? Winston had been that way once, but grown out of it.
Competition was always tough, but civilized. On the Street everyone com-
peted with everyone else, too, for security, advice, consensus, and competi-
tion, which was tough but friendly so long as everyone obeyed the same
rules.
You’re not in that game, are you? he wanted to ask, too late.
Winston tried a new ploy, interested in the game that had started so unex-
pectedly. He lifted his glass, and silently toasted his successor while the
other people in the room chattered across the table. Yamata reciprocated the
gesture, and his mien actually became more arrogant, radiating contempt at
the stupidity of the man who had just sold out to him.
You were so good at concealing your feelings before, why not now? You
really thinkyou’re the cat’s ass, that you’ve done something . . . bigger than
I know. What?
Winston looked away, out the windows to the mirror-calm water of the
harbor. He was suddenly bored with the game, uninterested in whatever
competition that little bastard thought himself to have won. Hell, he told
himself, I’m out of here. I’ve lost nothing. I’ve gained my freedom. I’ve got
my money. I’ve got everything. Okay, fine, you can run the house and make
your money, and have a seat in any club or restaurant in town, whenever
you’re here, and tell yourself how important you are, and if you think that’s
a victory, then it is. But it’s not a victory over anyone, Winston concluded.
Il was too bad. Winston had caught everything, as he usually did, identi-
fied all the right elements. But for the first time in years, he’d failed to as-
semble them into the proper scenario. It wasn’t his fault. He understood his
own game completely, and had merely assumed, wrongly, that it was the
only game in town.
Chet Nomuri worked very hard not to be an American citizen. His was the
fourth generation of his family in the U.S.-the first of his ancestors had
arrived right after the turn of the century and before the “Gentlemen’s
Agreement” between Japan and America restricting further immigration. It
would have insulted him had he thought about it more. Of greater insult was
what had happened to his grandparents and great-grandparents despite full
U.S. citizenship. His grandfather had leaped at the chance to prove his loy-
alty to his country, and served in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, re-
turning home with two Purple Hearts and master-sergeant stripes only to
find that the family business-office supplies-had been sold off for a song
and his family sent to an intern camp. With stoic patience, he had started
over, built it up with a new and unequivocal name, Veteran’s Office Furni-
ture, and made enough money to send his three sons through college and
beyond. Chet’s own father was a vascular surgeon, a small, jolly man who’d
been horn in government captivity, and whose parents, for that reason-and
to please /»’.v grandfather-had maintained some of the traditions, such as
language.
Done it pretty well, too, Nomuri thought. He’d overcome his accent prob-
lems in a matter of weeks, and now, sitting in the Tokyo bathhouse, every-
one around him wondered which prefecture he had come from. Nomuri had
identification papers for several. He was a field officer of the Central Intelli-
gence Agency, perversely on assignment for the U.S. Department of Justice,
and completely without the knowledge of the U.S. Department of State. One
of the things he had learned from his surgeon father was to fix his eyes for-
ward to the things he could do, not back at things he couldn’t change. In this
the Nomuri family had bought into America, quietly, undramatically, and
successfully, Chet told himself, sitting up to his neck in hot water.
The rules of the bath were perfectly straightforward. You could talk about
everything but business, and you could even talk about that, but only the
gossip, not the substantive aspects of how you made your money and your
deals. Within those loose constraints, seemingly everything was open for
discussion in a surprisingly casual forum in this most structured of societies.
Nomuri got there at about the same time every day, and had been doing so
long enough that the people he met were on a similar schedule, knew him,
and were comfortable with him. He already knew everything there was to
know about their wives and families, as they did about his-or rather, about
the fictional “legend” that he’d built himself and which was now as real to
him as the Los Angeles neighborhood in which he’d come to manhood.
“I need a mistress,” Kazuo Taoka said, hardly for the first time. “My
wife, all she wants to do is watch television since our son is born.”
“All they ever do is complain,” another salaryman agreed. There was a
concurring series of grunts from the other men in the pool.
“A mistress is expensive,” Nomuri noted from his corner of the bath,
wondering what the wives complained about in their bathing pools. “In
money and time.”
Of the two, time was the more important. Each of the young executives-
well, not really that, but the borderline between what in America would
seem a clerkship and a real decision-making post was hazy in Japan-made
a good living, but the price for it was to be bound as tightly to his corporation