The air around her was still buzzing from his presence when the phone in her clutch bag began to ring. Muffled, thankfully. She was always forgetting to put it on vibrate, but, then, she told herself, a journalist couldn’t always be switching her phone from ring to vibrate every fifteen minutes--and couldn’t afford to miss a call because she couldn’t have her phone strapped to every outfit she owned.

“Make it matter,” she answered, seeing from the caller ID that it originated from her own desk at The Times.

“The retired captain isn’t talking,” her assistant, Mike, began. “He--and his wife, who usually answers both the phone and the door--is claiming ‘no comment’ with such reverence I’m beginning to think it’s his personal version of Hail Mary.”

“That’s to be expected.”

“Two officers at the scene, one rookie. The senior, homicide, double decorated. Reports of a third man, unidentified--but sounds like conspiracy-bull to me. Easier scapegoating that way.”

“Don’t infer, it’s too soon for that.” She often had to call down her eager intern with a plea for caution.

“Yeah, okay, but what’s next?”

“Order some takeaway, go home. Tomorrow we’ll begin the sticky work of talking to the wives and girlfriends of Gallo’s dead. It won’t be easy, but it’s what we're left with for the moment.”

“Eh, I’m not so hungry, Chief. I’ll start in on tracking down the numbers we’ll need tonight, okay?”

“Your call.”

Sashee keyed off the connection, and resettled the phone next to her copy of the night’s invitation in her clutch bag. She remembered the day of its arrival in her mailbox. She had told neither her guardian nor Ian Nottingham that she had taken a job in New York. She had not intentionally tried to hide her life or her person from them, yet the invitation’s arrival had surprised her. It signified that her move had not gone unnoticed. Nor her silence.

The summons she received was not for a private dinner, to which she was more accustomed attending, nor for a specific holiday. Rather it was to a (for Kenneth Irons) run-of-the-mill evening reception/fundraiser for some local interest or other in the art community. The only thing the occasion (and doubtless the cause) had going for it was his coveted patronage.

Perhaps the lack of intimacy the occasion afforded pointed to the fact that he was feeling as nervous and unsteady about meeting with her as she was about meeting him. Perhaps, but most likely, she knew, not. Kenneth Irons did not have nerves, any more than he had reservations or second thoughts.

“When the world trusts one, Sashee,” he had told her often enough, “the greatest transgression one can then commit is to distrust oneself.”

Yet that was exactly what she found herself doing.

She had been born Sashuji Hieromoto, first and only still-living child of Tam and Midori Hieromoto of Kyoto, Japan. It was a prestigious position to occupy in the world, both then, and now.

Tam was CEO of Vorschlag Industries’ Kyoto office, her godfather was international financier Kenneth Irons, and he and her father were so close that there had even been an elaborate joke between them (someone like Cranston-Jones had told her this once, long ago at another party)--that Irons would cast the deciding vote to give Hieromoto the position of Kyoto CEO on a single condition--that Tam make a gift to him of the Hieromoto first-born. Which, Sashee thought, was really Mr. Irons’ way of bestowing two gifts at once: honoring the Hieromoto family with his patronage not only to her father, but to Tam’s descendants as well. And so she had gained a wealthy and powerful godfather that no one had ever expected would need to become her guardian, and she, his ward.

Because when she was four, the fire happened. Some nights she dreamed that she could remember it, but of course that was silly. She hadn’t even been there. If she had, she would be, like her parents and fourteen others in the Vorschlag lab that night, nothing more than memories written in ash. And she was very much alive.

Her parents were the ghosts--the ancestors--that watched over her, and Kenneth Irons became the earthly embodiment of their wishes to her, the medium through which she knew them, and through which she understood the world.

She was raised apart from him; boarded at the finest schools on several continents, save the occasional summer holiday in whatever exotic port of call he--or the restrictions of his business--chose for them. But she never felt neglected, never any less a part of his family. For years he and Ian and she kept Christmas and the New Year and many other holidays of note. Summers in Ceylon, fall holidays along the Rhone or shopping in Hong Kong, Spring Break on Santorini.

In time she came to realize that even if she were sent for only four times a year--and then if only for a week or two at a time--she saw him more than many other girls at her schools saw their biological parents.

Mr. Irons faithfully managed her father’s sizeable financial portfolio until he taught her to do so herself. She pestered Ian, when he was also on holiday from school, to show her the simpler things that he had been taught in his arcane studies: phrases in a new language, the complex process of making an exotic tea, the best way to lose a tail when one is being followed. She regretted that she had not been a better student for him.

Ian. She did not remember the first time they had met, any more than she remembered the first time she and Mr. Irons had met. She did recall being told that Ian would be her brother, and this she had accepted without question. But as a child she had no concept of what a brother was to be, and as an adult she now knew that what Ian was, was unlike any brother of anyone she had met in the interim.

Though older than her by several years, as a young boy he had seemed a pet to her, canine in his ways. Ferocious and near-bloodthirsty violent in her defense, yet hesitantly affectionate and loyal in his commitment to her, as though she were the pet and he the owner. As he grew, she saw less of him. Mr. Irons was always good for a mention of him, of course, whether in a letter or a quarterly phone call, ‘Ian is doing well at school,’ ‘Ian is off on holiday, seeing the world--he rather liked Siam--shall I tell him you’d like a postcard?’ But the boy she remembered had turned into so much smoke by the time she was herself graduating, and at eighteen she had been too caught up in other concerns to notice.

Sashee had decided to pursue Journalism as a major, and though Mr. Irons approved, he did not hesitate in mentioning that there would be no job open to her within the Vorschlag empire.

“We must keep our interests separate, Sashee,” he had said, “we must be as two neighboring countries with open borders and similar concerns, but no more. In this way we avoid any inference of impropriety, and therefore, remain well above suspicion. One must never underestimate the power of suspicion coupled with perceived impropriety.”

And they had been those two neighboring countries, distant in their relations, but not impassive about one another’s welfare.

There were occasions in grammar school when it would come to light that she was Kenneth Irons’--the Kenneth Irons’--ward, and there would be a brief, perhaps month-long, charge of wild excitement through the dorms, among the faculty. Several times reporters or paparazzi would try to interview or photograph her, interested in not only her ties to Irons but her ties to the Hieromoto fire, as well as her father’s fortune, of which she was sole heir, with a stock portfolio containing, among other important properties, controlling interest in Vorschlag Kyoto Laboratories.

In one tabloid rag she was referred to as something “Irons plucked from the fire,” in a horrible, sentimental article, painting him as a saint who stepped in when she lost her family (every picture of her was as an infant or toddler, though the story was published when she was fifteen), as though she would have gone hungry or unclothed without his protection.

Between the two of them they had never spoken of such articles or pictures specifically. The subject made her uncomfortable. Without him she did not know where she would be. Many less-scrupulous opportunity seekers would no doubt have longed to exploit her holdings--if not her--and she always considered herself most fortunate that her father named a man as scrupulous and kind as Kenneth Irons guardian.

Mr. Irons had never said he loved her. Which, she realized, was a great relief to her. She did not call him father, and had never been asked to do so. Only when she spoke with Ian did she use it, out of Nottingham's own primitive terminology used to name the relationships among their familial triad.

Mr. Irons had cared for her, attended to her needs, sent gifts on birthdays, allowed her to become an adult with a mind of her own. For that, she was thankful. For that, she felt something very close to love for him.

He had never apologized for the fire, in the way people always did when they realized she was that Hieromoto.

“There is no need for apology, no need to accept blame,” he had told her in regard to some other matter. “When one has not personally been at fault. Do not say, ‘I am sorry,’ to someone who has experienced a hardship, rather say, ‘That is unfortunate news,’ or, ‘How regrettable.’ To apologize perfunctorily is to cheapen true contrition and penitence for one’s actions when it is required. And it is never acceptable to behave cheaply, Sashee.”

When she turned twenty-four he had her sent the confidential Vorschlag files regarding the lab fire and the ensuing inquests, both legal and in-house. He had told her that it was in her best interest as an investor in the company to know what had and had not failed the night her parents died. Beyond this, the event went unreferenced between them.

It was in grad school, while she had those very files, that she met Kim Tranh. He had wanted to talk about the fire, about Kenneth Irons, about Vorschlag, about her connection to it all. She had found him tiresome and incorrigible in the worst possible of ways. And then she had fallen in love with him.

She hardly blamed herself, now. Kim hadn’t meant to fall in love with her, either, but his passion for researching the expose he was trying to write about Irons and the company had somehow spilled over into a passion for Irons’ ward. She refused to talk about the fire, about Irons, about Vorschlag, about anything he wanted to talk about. He was completely smitten.

“Ask me about Manchester United,” she said one day when she grew weary of rotely responding, ‘no comment,’ as he harassed her on the way to a seminar.

“What?” he was out of his element now.

“Go do some homework, Frosh,” she had teased him, “and come back when you have something interesting to say to me.”

Two conversations about Manchester United, one weekend trip to Marseilles, three bags of Kim’s clothes moved into her apartment, and the closest thing she had ever had to a marriage proposal later, there had been a fight. Kim had behaved himself for a long time, minding his own business where Vorschlag was concerned, even beginning to focus his considerable journalistic fervor on a new piece about certain government resistance cells in Mainland China.

But left alone one afternoon, he had found the files on the fire that she had yet to return to Mr. Irons and the confidential Vorschlag archives.

She accused him of snooping around her things and not trusting her. He accused her of blindly refusing to learn anything about her past or the man who had so exquisitely orchestrated her present. It was true that Kim likely knew more about Irons’ public life than she did, perhaps more about his private life as well. But it was not something Sashee felt the need to pursue.

.

Once, while at school in Brussels, a horrifying rumor began to circulate among her schoolmates--started by yet another tabloid--that Mr. Irons and her mother, Midori, had been in the grip of a torrid affair at the time of the fire. Which naturally led her pre-teen schoolmates to suspect Irons' ward of being Irons' daughter. One of the crueler jokes to come from this was that her roommate, (who it was believed had the way to know such things) knew for a fact that midnight black-haired, Asian-featured Sashee was a natural blonde.

“She’s a bastard Irons!” they would shout on the hockey field. She cried a great deal that semester.

At Easter, when she was sent for, she pulled together all the courage in her twelve-year-old frame and went to Mr. Irons’ office, asking him point-blank about the lurid speculation of an affair--but she could not bring herself to ask about the possibility of having been fathered by him.

“Sensational!” was his unexpected reply. “Truly sensational! You say your entire dormitory is ablaze with this? Astonishing!” He looked down at her, her feet not able to reach the floor from the leather wingback chair she had collapsed into, spent, after blurting her carefully planned and rehearsed inquiry.

“It must have taken a great deal of valor on your part to pose such a question to me, Sashee. Do not think that I take the effort on behalf of your dead mother’s honor lightly. Quite the contrary. Your forthrightness and poise go well beyond my expectation of you.” He smiled slightly. “I shall make sure not to pigeonhole the estimable Hieromoto again.” He gave a small, and gracious, inclination of his head.

“As for these, accusations...” He stood up and went to stand behind her chair, out of old habit handing her his watch. Under his careful supervision she had liked to play with it as a child. And its weight in her hands at that moment did go far to steady her for what he was about to say. She turned around in the chair, twisting to see his face.

“We are above them. You. I. Your brother, Ian. Such claims, Sashee, are like low clouds seen from a far distance. They may appear to be hills--mountains even--to us on the horizon. But they are without substance, they change form and shape even as we look at them. We are here, and they are there. Persons such as we are cannot be troubled by such insubstantial things.”

She could hear his watch ticking, even as she felt its movement flutter in her hand.

“It is because we are so far above gossip-mongers...these slothful girls at your school...others, that they hurl such vile things at us in order to weigh us down, to coerce us into joining them at their level. The clouds will always be there, Sashee, in one form or another, but they are not where we are. They are below us. We will never be where they are.”

As she left his office she was both ashamed and satisfied with his speech. Ashamed that she had distrusted him when he had never given her a reason to do so, ashamed that she had trusted the word of strangers over that of her guardian. Appalled, that in crediting such slander from the mouths of people who were nothing to her, that she had fallen well below what Mr. Irons knew to be her own level. She felt her disloyalty like a stone weight in her belly. She could see that the whole business was all very dirty to Mr. Irons, and so very beneath him. And she had troubled him about it as though it mattered. And in doing that she had betrayed to him that she had believed their lies. Had believed him capable of such base actions.

.

Knowing that he was indignant, Sashee worried that he might call her school to speak to the headmistress--other parents at the school often did as much. But instead, when the time came for her to return for classes, she found her luggage checked to Brisbane, and the ticket she was given at the station showed her destination to be the same.

“He collects things,” Kim had shouted at her during the fight, “works of art, companies, lackeys, political administrations--people. Aren’t you even curious, Sash? Why did he collect you?”

She was angry to the point well beyond words, and she knew Kim could see it. Mr. Irons had never asked for her trust, her fealty, but she had long ago, sitting in that wingback chair, holding his watch, pledged it to him without question.

“There are nearly confirmable reports,” Kim pleaded with her. “That your father was preparing to head a buy-out of Vorschlag’s Kyoto interests. To stop the takeover Kenneth Irons could have murdered your father! Is Tam Hieromoto’s honor so little to you that you do not even care to investigate such grave charges?”

Kenneth Irons, a murderer? And what’s more, the man behind the death of her own family? She opened the door and told him to get out. She never expected that her angry farewell was to be forever.

Three weeks later, in Beijing, pursuing a lead on his new project, Kim was killed in a student protest. Government forces intent on quelling the demonstration dumped the bodies of those killed into unmarked graves, and their deaths went unreported to the public, a non-event. If Ian had not been standing beside her door one day during the fourth week, she would never have known at all. Kim would simply have disappeared.

As it was, the knowing did not make it easier to handle. She completed the last of her courses, waived walking at graduation, and planned for what to do next. Her heart was elsewhere. She did not see Irons, though he sent a perfectly-proportioned-for-the-occasion flower arrangement to the memorial service she planned for Kim. She did not see Ian, though many times she felt she nearly did, and that all she had to do was call his name and he would coalesce familiarly from among the shadows.

She took an assignment with The Wall Street Journal reporting on child labor abuses in Myanmar, though she knew they would have preferred to trade on her name with a flashier story, but she did the job and proved herself worthy if keeping it. Over the next year and a half she slowly earned new associations for the Hieromoto name as a dependable, well-trained reporter, whose views were fair and unbiased until she had the facts, and who could be trusted with ever-bigger, ever-more provocative stories. She skipped Christmas at the Valhalla estate without sending her regrets, pursuing a hardship assignment in Sudan instead.

She imagined that hearing Mr. Irons’ voice again might cause her to ask questions she was not even sure yet that she required answers to, questions that she knew as a journalist she had not done the necessary research to pose. So, she investigated other people’s wars; their lives, their deaths, fires, adoptions--their misgivings, and in doing so, hoped to defer her own.

In time she healed somewhat over Kim, adding his memory to that of her parents. Two months ago she had taken the job in New York, as a special reporter with The Times. She had not contacted Mr. Irons about her move from her previous home base in Copenhagen. In retrospect, she could not say if the slight to her guardian and benefactor had occurred from conscious decision or subconscious omission.

She had found Kim’s one-page note when she moved, in the pocket of an old shirt he had left at her apartment. The notes were brief but complete, little more than a crib sheet for his planned Vorschlag expose, written in his native Vietnamese. They were likely all that was left of his one-time quest. Where his other papers and research were located, she had no idea. Kim had a common conspiracy journalist’s affliction: a habit of stowing anything he thought was important elsewhere, allowing himself only such a crib sheet that he could carry on his person at all times. When the time finally came to write the piece, he would then dig up/ransom from a safety deposit box/pry up the floorboards and liberate his secret stash.

Sashee did not want this list of sources, contacts and events, and had only kept it at the moment she found it because she was feeling sentimental. She had thrown the shirt out.

Now the crib sheet seemed too valuable--rather, too potentially damning--if it were to fall into the wrong hands. What news magazine or tabloid wouldn’t slaver for negative intelligence--true or rumored--about world-famous magnate Kenneth Irons? She feared Kim’s sheet, so much so that she could not bring herself to leave it anywhere, and carried it around with her at all times, which was doubtless just as risky.

She had not fact-checked any of the information on the sheet. Sometimes she told herself she was keeping it because it was all she had of Kim’s. Her Kim Tranh talisman. What it could protect her from or ward off--beyond grief for his loss--she could not say. Even now it rested in her purse, along with her Nokia and Palm Pilot, and the invitation for tonight.

She was mildly surprised such contents tolerated one another. A personal request, on linen paper, hand scribed in India ink asking that she attend Mr. Irons’ reception, rubbing up against a grubby, sushi-stained piece of rice paper so potentially-explosive that even loyal VCN anchors would no doubt surrender their very souls only to smell it.

And here she was, Sashee Hieromoto, carrying around this powder keg of allegations. Sashee Hieromoto, respected journalist, go-getter, unable to bring herself to call a single number on that paper, so afraid that even tonight she might pull it out at any moment and practice a more grotesque form of betrayal than that on which she had ever reported.

She suppressed a wild desire to take Kim’s sheet out now and casually throw it into the large fire burning at her back. To be rid of it for good. But she knew she was caught in an endless catch-22. Her options: to keep the paper, to destroy the paper, to give the paper to Mr. Irons. She knew each of the actions open to her, each response to Kim’s sheet, were really concessions to a single, horrifying postulate. Each validated the idea that the information was threatening, and to deem anything threatening must also be to admit that it is true.

And, additionally, to admit that she had been keeping company with a man who collected such truths to one end: to expose to the world the man behind the success and creation of the Vorschlag empire. Kim had never seemed to understand that in that process he would also be exposing the man behind the success and creation of Sashee Hieromoto. A man to whom she owed a great deal more than what she owed even her biological parents.

Sashee forced herself to stop thinking. Such cyclical thoughts got one nowhere.

Currently she was working on an extended, multiple-part piece about New York’s finest. Her Washington sources were constantly circulating rumors of a Justice Department sting set up among certain precincts to root out graft and perhaps worse. She knew if she could manage to crack this, a Pulitzer could not be far away. It was a hot piece.

After her appearance at the party tonight she had an appointment to meet and interview a young officer’s widow, a Mrs. Woo, who had filed a heretofore unresponded-to complaint over how the NYPD’s Widows and Orphans Fund was botching the handling of both the investigation of her husband’s suspicious death and her subsequent pension settlement.

Across the room, Sashee watched Rob Cranston-Jones try his approach on two young ladies seemingly more open to his advances--and without the benefit of protection by one Ian Nottingham. Ian had cautioned her not to tell Mr. Irons what she had come with intent to say. Sashee did not waste time wondering how he knew any facet of what she arrived tonight thinking. Instead she shifted again in her shoes, subtly re-balancing her weight between them, and sipped on her Manhattan.

She looked around for Mr. Irons. He was not hard to find among the crowd. He towered over the others.

At the sight of him she felt the familiar rush of pride, pleasure and respect she had felt for him as a child. It seemed she had not seen him in a lifetime, and the questions and misgivings brewing so dangerously within her retreated.

She examined him as closely as she dared without staring. She noticed that he was looking worn around the edges. It occurred to her that he was getting older. His hair seemed a little less like its usual brilliant white frost, his face had a subtle greyish pallor creeping in from the planes of his cheeks, his chin. To someone less acquainted with Mr. Irons, these would go unnoticed, doubtless, but she found it distressing that she had never observed them before.

The idea of Kenneth Irons aging, his health and influence waning, was to her as it was to most children where their fathers were concerned: preposterous.

Ian was right, she decided. Tonight was neither the time nor place to speak to Mr. Irons about anything that might cause him distress.

She set what was left of her drink on yet another conveniently passing tray of empty glasses, and removed the Nokia from her clutch, dialing Mike.

“Call Mrs. Woo,” she instructed him. “Let her know that I have been unavoidably delayed, and ask her if she would be able to reschedule at the earliest possible time.” She hung up, closing the phone, and when she raised her head she saw Ian conferring with Mr. Irons for a moment, and she briefly wondered if their usual stern exchange was in regard to her. She did not have time for much conjecture on the point, though. In a moment, Ian was gone, and she heard Mr. Irons’ call out to her.

"Sashee...Hello!"

.

It was her moment. He had decided to take notice. And for all her perception as to his aging, he had abdicated none of his stature or elegance. Kenneth Irons was not only the most powerful man in the room, but also the best looking.

He crossed over to where she stood and pressed his hands together for a slight bow. “What a exquisite frock you've chosen to wear.”

She bowed her head and shoulders in response to both his greeting and the compliment, and offered him her hand.

Mr. Irons took it and embraced it between both of his strong ones. It disappeared into them. He moved a step toward her.

“Such intricate embroidery,” he smiled, his ever-curious mind keenly examining her dress. “Is it Niigatan?”

Sashee Hieromoto smiled back, swallowing a contented sigh. It was good to hear his voice again.

.

...the end...

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protégée: female who is protected or trained, or whose career is furthered by a person of experience, prominence, or influence.

by: Ph0tog 2002

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