A Knife Edge (6 page)

“Dr. Tanaka wasn't discovered missing for some time—twelve hours, according to statements,” I said. “Isn't that a long time to not notice somebody missing?”

Boyle shook his head again. “It might seem that way, but no, not really. The expedition was over. And everyone saw how drunk Tanaka was when he left. I guess everyone assumed, as I did, that he was in his room, sleeping it off. And, because we had no work to do, I was happy not to disturb him.”

I doodled on the notebook like I was making an entry, because in fact I'd just found a problem in the professor's statement. He'd contradicted himself about
not
seeing Tanaka leave the party. “How about you, Professor Boyle? Were you drunk too?”

“Yes. It was a celebration, and I was celebrating.”

“How about you, Mr. Abrutto?” I asked.

“As I said, I wasn't there. I was on the bridge, on duty, on my third mug of coffee, I think—nothing stronger.”

“And you heard and saw nothing unusual?”

“Afraid not. A storm was coming through and the weather updates were looking pretty ugly. As we weren't under way, I was concentrating on those.”

“Do you mind if I have a look at the doctor's stateroom?” I asked.

“Sure, no problem,” said Abrutto.

“Do you need me to come along too?” inquired the professor.

“No, I don't think so,” I said. “Not unless you want to.”

He didn't.

“I'm sorry I can't be of more assistance, Agent Cooper,” said Boyle, squeezing himself out from behind the table. “If you don't mind, I've still got a lot to do before I leave for the States this afternoon. If you need to ask me any more questions, here's my card.” He pulled out a slim silver holder, slipped out a card, and put it on the table.

“Thanks for your help, Professor,” I said. A logo for Moreton Genetics dominated the card, the
M
and the
G
twisted around each other in a double-helix pattern. I slipped the card into a back pocket and gave him one of mine. “In case anything comes to mind,” I added. He nodded, and fed my card to his wallet.

Boyle grabbed his jacket and left. I moved out from behind the bench and picked up my coat.

“You won't need that yet, Agent Cooper. It's even warmer where we're going. You can get it on the way back.” Abrutto stood and opened a hatch at the back of the mess, revealing a narrow hallway, and stepped through. Durban and I followed. The smell of diesel was stronger here. It was hard to breathe. A short walk down the hallway brought us to a door with police tape across it. Fingerprint dust powdered the door and a plastic bag was taped over the door handle. Tokyo P.D. had treated the room like a crime scene, not because a crime had necessarily been committed, but to preserve its integrity until someone like me absolved them of further responsibility.

I knew from the police report that only two sets of prints were found on the door handle: Tanaka's and those belonging to the man who checked his room, Master Abrutto. A deckhand had reported no sound from within when he had knocked, so he'd fetched his boss. I also noted in the report that nothing appeared to have been disturbed within the room. I peeled off the tape, opened the door, and took a look inside. The room was roughly the size of a large suitcase, but thoroughly unremarkable otherwise: steel walls, a porthole, a desk, and a few dirty clothes in a
small pile on the neatly made bed. It was unslept in. On the desk sat Tanaka's computer, an Apple PowerBook, open, the screen-saver parading snapshots of deep space. I knew that one—I used it myself.

The computer had been untouched by anyone other than Tanaka, according to forensics. His were the only fingerprints found on the keyboard, and a report from the hard drive showed the last use had been before the doctor disappeared. In short, there was nothing in the least out of order here.

We toured the ship and I talked to several other crew members, including the technician who helped Tanaka maneuver the submersible. No one had anything to add. The general consensus was that there'd been a party, there was music, there were no women. So how much partying could anyone do? No one particularly remembered seeing Tanaka, drunk or otherwise. The doctor was, apparently, the type who kept to himself, not unfriendly but no party animal either.

Next, we did a turn around the stern deck. I couldn't see how Tanaka could possibly fall in unless he'd climbed up on the gunnel and lost his balance. I did note that, iced up, the decks were slippery as hell. I shuffled along, keeping my feet in contact with the ice, and came around behind a large red drum leaking rust. It was a spool of greased cable, part of the mechanism that launched the submersible sitting under the crane that dominated the ship's stern. I took a look over the ship's side. The black water was a long way down, flecked with light snow that melted moments after settling. Once over the side, getting back up on deck unaided would be tricky, if not impossible.

A cone of cigarette smoke suddenly appeared from behind the spool. Being an investigator, I investigated. I maneuvered carefully around the drum and found a large, bearded man in a red, oil-stained jacket, sucking hard on a cigarette. The man looked at me, swung his eyes back to the dock, and acknowledged my presence by taking another drag.

“You part of the crew?” I said.

“Who's asking?” he replied, blowing a mixture of condensation and tobacco smoke over the machinery.

“Santa Claus,” I responded.

“Don't think much of your sleigh,” he said with a nod to the police cruiser now blanketed in snow, parked on the wharf.

“So then you know who's asking,” I said. “Why don't you smoke inside? Gotta be more pleasant than standing out here in the cold.”

“‘Gainst the rules,” he said. “Damn peckerheads on this cruise won't allow it.” He coughed, a sound like a car changing gears without a clutch. Something came into his mouth, which he chewed once or twice. I was thinking lung. He spat overboard and a globule arced through the falling snow, plopped onto the water and spread. Something came up from beneath and pecked at it, just in case it was edible. It wasn't.

I noticed that tobacco butts collected over a considerable time had stained brown the ice and snow under his feet. “Anyone else on board smoke?”

“Nope.”

“I'm looking into the death of Dr. Tanaka for the U.S. government,” I said, officially clarifying my presence on board.

“Good for you,” he replied.

“Did you know the doctor?”

“Nope.”

“Were you at the party the night the doctor went missing?”

“Nope.”

“What were you doing at that time?”

“What I always do after dinner's done. I secured the kitchen.”

“So … you're the cook?”

“Yep.” The man drew on his cigarette so hard I thought he was going to turn the thing inside out. He took a pack of Chesterfields from his jacket pocket, shook one out, and lit it from the butt. Then he flicked the butt into the water and blew a vast cloud into the air.

“You got a name?” I asked.

“Cooke. That's with an
e
on the end.”

“Your name's Cooke and you're the cook?”

“That's right. Al Cooke. He got eat.”

“He got eat?”

“By the shark. It was waiting.”

“Did you see the doctor fall in?”

“Nope,” Cooke said, clapping his hands together. A wave of cooled tobacco smoke and old sweat rolled over me.

If he hadn't seen the doctor fall, then he wouldn't have seen him get mauled by the shark, either. I looked at the man. I was familiar with the type, the type that saw nothing and heard nothing, even if he did. “Thanks for your time,” I said. I handed him a card with my D.C. number on it, just as I had with every other crew member I'd talked to. “If anything occurs to you, give me a call.”

“Yeah,” he replied, stamping to warm his feet. I did the same and realized mine had gone numb. I could see Durban and Abrutto waiting for me over at the gangplank, breathing funnels of steam. I moved off to join them.

It was obvious that there was nothing else for me to do here. The defense of the U.S. had lost an important asset, eaten by a fish that could care less.

As Durban and I walked toward the police cruiser, I was thinking of Sean Boyle. The professor didn't seem terribly upset about losing a friend and colleague. I could see that the guy was utterly consumed by his work. Had it even dawned on him that Tanaka was gone forever? “What do you call an Irishman who bounces off walls?” I asked.

“Ric O'Shea,” Durban replied promptly. “Everyone knows that one.”

She was right—they do. I was off my game, distracted. Just around the corner was the plane trip home, and my stomach was already grappling with a cold, sour knot because of it.

I
t was after 2030 hours by the time the taxi pulled up outside my apartment in D.C. I'd moved back to the city after being released from the hospital. My new residence was a one-bedroom apartment in a four-story block over a couple of restaurants duking it out for survival—a Korean barbecue joint on one side, vegan on the other. After three months' residency, I was on a first-name basis with Kim, the proprietor of The 38th Parallel, but was barely on nodding terms with the people in Summer Love, Kim's tie-dyed competitors next door, which says a lot about my dietary preferences.

“Vin. Good to see you.” Kim looked up from his cash register as I walked in lopsided, struggling with my suitcase. “Where you been?”

“Disneyland.”

“Hah, Disneyland, always Disneyland. You wan' the usual?”

“You got jellyfish on the menu?”

He shook his head after a moment of consideration. “No, no, sorry…”

And to think I could have learned to hate it months ago. “Never mind,” I said. “I'll stick with the usual.”

“Yes, sure, sure. Good choice, good choice. One large serve of
bulgogi
coming up. You wan' rice?”

I nodded. The exchange with Kim was all very cheery. And,
in fact, I was cheered to be home, even though there was nothing and nobody waiting upstairs for me, not even a potted plant.

Kim's toothy good humor changed to a scowl as he barked the order to his wife like he was a vicious dog going at an intruder. His old lady seemed impervious to it and simply trudged off into the back room to rustle up my order. Mr. Kim attended to several other take-out customers over the phone while I flicked through a couple of old
People
magazines on the counter. The covers featured the usual parade of Hollywood fuckups, people who had every reason to believe they'd won the lottery of life, but were instead hooked on a brand of narcissism that ensured they were unable to love anyone as much as their own manufactured self-image. Divorces, tantrums, dishonest trysts, clinics, bizarre surgery, drunken traffic accidents, affairs. If it wasn't pathetic, it'd be hilarious.

I sifted through the pile. On the bottom lay a three-day-old copy of the
Post.
According to the front page, since I'd been away, Pakistan had had a change of government. A couple of soldiers in the previous president's bodyguard had decided they didn't like his policy of being friendly toward the U.S. and so they'd peeled open his vehicle like an orange with a dozen or so pounds of Composition B while he was still inside it. Fundamentalist gangs were roaming through Karachi and Islamabad beating up anyone who looked like they were living in the twenty-first century. India was jumpy. America was nervous. After years of relative quiet, shots had already been exchanged over the long-disputed territory of Kashmir. Everyone's nightmare was no longer just a bad dream: we now had a bunch of religious dimwits sitting on top of an unknown number of fission-boosted atomic warheads and the missiles capable of delivering them. Another pressure cooker—just what the world needed.

“Here you go, Mr. Vincent, sir. You enjoy.”

“Thanks.” I dropped the newspaper back on the counter and exchanged the plastic bag he was holding toward me for the handful of shrapnel jangling in my pocket. “Keep it,” I said,
knowing the tip was around five bucks. As Mr. Kim was also the building's unofficial security guard, I figured he'd earned it.

I avoided the elevator, my usual practice, and took the fire stairs to the second floor. The stairwell was poorly lit, with a little halfhearted graffiti here and there as if the artists could barely be bothered. I knew how they felt. The place was around forty years old and going through a kind of architectural midlife crisis. The ceilings were a little low, the rooms just a bit too tight for comfort, like wearing a sweater that shouldn't have been thrown in the dryer. The place was in need of a new coat of paint, or maybe a wrecking ball, I couldn't decide which. But the rent was cheap, and Mr. Kim's
bulgogi
—beef in soy sauce—was a real winner.

I arrived at my apartment, put down my suitcase, and fed the key into the lock. Problem. The door was already unlocked. It was only then I noticed a faint strip of light outlining the door's bottom edge. Did I leave the place that way, unlocked with the lights on, before heading off to Japan? No, I did not. There wasn't much inside worth stealing, but that didn't mean I wanted some stranger looting it. What I did have was a small safe bolted to the floor, where I kept various articles that were valuable to me—passport, birth certificate, favorite lucky rabbit's foot, my M9 Beretta service pistol as well as a worn U.S. Army-issue Vietnam War-era Colt .45 an uncle of mine confiscated from a dead VC. I put my ear to the door panel but heard nothing within. Was the intruder still inside, or long gone? I turned the knob and pushed. The catch scraped against the plate. The hinges squealed.
Shhh, goddamn it!
I hunched, ready to charge. And then the doorknob was wrenched out of my hand.

“How long does it take you to ride an elevator to the second floor?” said Major Anna Masters, standing in front of me, hand on hip, wearing one of my shirts and a smile.

“I took the stairs,” I said. Anna was the last person I expected to see. She was in Germany, at Ramstein Air Base, wasn't she? “What are you—” Our bodies slammed together. Our lips found
each other, tongues searching. I was instantly erect, like any good soldier should be.