Angel Eyes (40 page)

"The woman belongs to me," the Yakuza said. He had gone very still. One arm was out from his body, rigid, the other one was close to the lapel of his suit jacket.

Greg said, "You've got it all wrong, pal. Slavery was abolished almost a hundred years ago.''

"The world doesn't belong to America," the Yakuza said.

"Yeah? Well, it sure doesn't belong to Japan."

The Yakuza grinned. "Not yet."

"Greg, come on,'' Tori said. ''We didn't come here to debate cultural differences."

"Stay away, woman! This does not concern you, "the Yakuza growled, curtly dismissing her.

"Like hell!" Tori said, for the moment forgetting everything she had been taught. "When you threaten my brother, you threaten me."

The Yakuza slowly turned to her, said in the most condescending voice, "You're cute, you know that?" He produced a snub-nosed automatic. "But that's all you are, so-"

At that point Tori jammed the stiffened fingers of her right hand into the Yakuza's solar plexus. His eyes opened wide and he was jolted backward.

Greg lunged for the automatic, and the Yakuza's left hand chopped down on his forearm. As if in slow motion, Tori saw the Yakuza turn his gun on Greg; she went for the nerve cluster in his right arm, and using her own left arm as a brace, bent the Yakuza's gun arm backward until she heard the snap.

His savage kick caught her on the edge of her pelvis. She cried out in surprise and pain, slammed into him again and, almost simultaneously, heard the report of the single shot.

The Yakuza's face went white, he said something unintelligible in all the electronic noise and commotion, then slipped to the floor. Blood, a dark flower, spread its lethal petals.

Tori bent, touched him on the side of the neck. Then she grabbed Greg and pushed her way through the throng, farther and farther, blue and yellow mutating the shadows all around, the origami unfolding, unfolding, the strained faces now so alien to her.

Outside in the spangled night she said, ''Come on! Let's go!"

Greg hesitated. "But that guy's wounded. He might die. I think we ought to wait."

"Greg, he's dead. He had no pulse. The only thing that will happen if we wait is we'll be killed. That guy was Yakuza, a gangster of the most dangerous sort.''

Greg seemed bewildered. "But we can explain . . . they'll understand-"

"The only thing his family understands is giri-obligation. And their obligation now is to destroy us. For the love of God, come on!" Pulling him away from The Lemon Crush. "Even if we run, there'll be trouble!"

Who had killed the Yakuza with the demon on his wrist? Tori? Greg? Or had he, himself, pulled the trigger by accident? No one would ever know. The simple fact was that he had died as a result of the bullet wound.

"That was really something!" Greg exclaimed later. They were sitting in a cheap dive somewhere in the sludge pit of Kita-senju. "I've never seen you defend me, Tori. It's always been the other way around.''

"It was a stupid incident," Tori said sourly. "It never should have happened."

"But it did. The happenstance of life! It's like why I came here to a place I 'd never been to before, a culture I know nothing about. Like fate. Karma, wouldn't you say?"

"It never should have happened. If you hadn't-"

"No, no. It showed me something. Something I was supposed to see."

"I don't know what the hell you're talking about." She was still angry with Greg, still partly in shock over what had happened. She had never liked guns; now she liked them even less. But staring at her brother across the dirty table, she saw another kind of light in his angel eyes. It was the same disturbing darkness she had seen that late afternoon years before when he had risen from beneath the water of the pool in Diana's Garden where she had held him as the air had leaked out of him.

It was as if the shooting had galvanized him-no, that word wasn't quite right. It was more like it had elated him. But that could not be possible, Tori told herself over and over. Her brother, the golden boy, the NASA astronaut, couldn't harbor such an antisocial, such an amoral emotion. No, not Greg. But she was facing the incontrovertible evidence.

"Don't you? But you must understand. You're the mystic in the family, Tori. That's why you came here to study, isn't it? Me, I'm the pragmatist. The mathematician, the pilot, soon to be the man in the moon. I hope. But first, I've come here to see you.'' He looked at her. ' 'You don't understand.''

"No."

Greg nodded. "Okay. After how you defended me, I guess you deserve to hear this, and anyway, we're far too drunk to have it make a difference." He took a deep breath. "I imagine you always thought I loved the pool, the diving."

"Well, sure," Tori said, confused. "You were always so good at it."

"Not always," Greg said. "You see, I never wanted to dive. Never. Never. Dad made me. He shamed me into it. I was afraid to get on the diving board, so one night he made me go with him to the UCLA Olympic diving complex. Dad had done all their new outdoor lighting, so he had access to everything on campus.

''He took me by the scruff of the neck and climbed with me all the way to the top of the high-dive board. By this time I had a good idea of what he was going to do, so I was crying. Even after all this time, I'm ashamed to admit that. I was so frightened, I almost wet my pants.

"Dad took me to the edge of the board. He pushed my head down, forced me to look. Arc lights on the water. It was such a long way down! My teeth were chattering, and he had to hold me up.

" 'Go on!' he shouted at me. "The only way you'll learn to dive is to dive!'

" 'But I don't want to dive!' I protested.

" 'You're too young to know what you want!' he shouted. 'Do as I say!' And with that he shoved me off the end of the board."

Greg shuddered. "Christ, but it was a long way down. I remember the wind whistling in my ears and the world turning, turning. I think, for just an instant, I saw him standing at the end of the diving board, smiling. Or maybe I just thought I saw him. I don't know. The lane lines painted on the bottom of the pool were rushing up, so goddamned clear I was sure there was no water in the pool. Then I hit the water and all me breath exploded out of me.

"Dad came and got me. I was limp as a noodle, but he just lapped me on the back a couple of times to make sure all the water was out of me. And up we went again. This time I gritted my teeth and went down on my own. By the fourth clumsy dive, I ached all over and I was ready to listen to his instructions."

Greg's eyes were bleak as he looked at Tori. "That was how I learned to love diving."

"But it was horrible! How could you ever have loved it after such an introduction?"

"That," Greg said, "is what I've been asking myself ever since then."

"Tori?" Russell Slade said in the present of futuristic Roppongi. Across the kissaten the bank of Quotron machines-Free Use to Patrons!-flashed their minute-by-minute update of the progress of the stock market. "Where have you been these past several minutes?"

"I-" Tori made an effort to come fully back to the present. "I was thinking of what Deke said about the hafnium." Why am I lying to him? she asked herself. "All the terrible possibilities, given the kind of minds, the evil out in the world."

''Yeah, well, there's no use dwelling on nightmares,'' Russell said. "We'd just better make sure the nightmares never occur. Where is this hafnium ending up? That's what we've got to find out. The question now is, will Hitasura help us?"

"Let's go find out," Tori said.

Getting an audience with Hitasura was approximately as difficult as finding the treasure chamber inside the Pyramid of Cheops. He was a cautious man-some said paranoid, but these were his enemies, and their envy evidently distorted their judgment. There had never been an assassination attempt made on Hitasura, and this spoke volumes for his strategy and caution.

This was not to say that he was inactive. On the contrary, Hitasura was a hands-on oyabun. He was as yet perhaps too young to feel comfortable with delegating power to his lieutenants. Just as well. In the three years since he had come to power, he had already found it necessary to execute two lieutenants whose loyalty was to the yen rather than to himself.

Tori had met Hitasura ten years ago, when she and Greg had been hiding out from the members of the Yakuza family who had sought to avenge the shooting of the man with the fire-spitting demon on his wrist. That family was the chief rival of Hitasura's family, and Hitasara-a mere lieutenant then-had taken it upon himself to protect Tori and her brother.

Some years later Hitasura's sister had been kidnapped by members of that same family on an unrelated matter of giri, and it had been Tori who had penetrated the stronghold where she was being kept. The family had thought themselves clever, stashing Hitasura's sister in a Western brothel where they were certain Hitasura would never come because he would stand out like a peony in a patch of dandelions.

In the process of getting her out, Tori had killed four Yakuza of the rival family, and had been wounded in the left shoulder. At that moment Hitasura had sworn eternal friendship. The giri he felt toward Tori was immutable, absolute. It would be unthinkable to question his loyalty.

Tori made half a dozen calls, all from different phone booths on the streets and in hotel lobbies, before she got the response she had been seeking.

Twenty minutes later a red 750 BMW swooped them up in the Ginza. They were squeezed into the front seat while wax plugs were put in their ears from behind and they were blindfolded. The BMW stopped and they were transferred to the roomier backseat. It accelerated into the city.

Neither of them spoke. Tori had cautioned Russell against any untoward word or gesture. "Just sit back and relax," she had told him. "Let what's going to happen happen." Russell had not protested, yet another sign that the new side of his personality that had emerged in Medellin was gaining dominance. Now he sat with uncharacteristic calm while they hurtled through the innards of Tokyo.

A sense of acceleration, the centrifugal force generated by turns, and the passage of time, were the only clues left to give them an inkling of where they were being taken. Tori had an intimate knowledge of the city, but this was like trying to back down a mountainside in a snow storm: calculating vectors and distances was next to useless; memory and feel were the only things that mattered.

Where would I be if I were Hitasura?

Somewhere on the streets. Tori started at this point and let her intuition unravel the puzzle. While one part of her brain was busy with time, turns, and speed, the other part was occupied with solving the mystery of where they were being taken. She knew of three of Hitasura's bases, but she had to take into account that she might be a year out of date. It could be very useful to know where Hitasura was taking them, especially if he had no idea that they knew.

This was basic tradecraft: knowing where you were at all times, whether you were with friend or foe. Still, Tori had another motivation, one that disturbed her profoundly. After Estilo's betrayal, she was unsure of everything and everyone. Caution was one thing, but full-blown paranoia could paralyze you. You had to know which way to jump at any minute, or, not knowing, sometimes trust. If trust was gone, only a great black chasm remained, yawning below her, waiting for the moment when she would fall.

The BMW came to an abrupt stop and Tori and Russell were bundled out of the car. Tori could not shake the odd feeling that they had gone around in circles. But she knew that the Ginza was not Hitasura's territory, so that was out. Or was it?

They were helped up a short set of stairs and, kept bent almost double, ushered through what seemed like a tunnel. Then they were allowed to stand up. They were pushed backward until they felt something soft behind their legs. They sat.

At last their earplugs and blindfolds came off. At the same instant a muffled roar of a diesel engine sounded. A moment later the unmistakable sensation of motion.

Of course, Tori thought. A vehicle! We had been driven in a circle to confuse us, to make us think we had gotten to another part of the city, when all along this van had been waiting around the corner. As soon as Hitasura's men had determined that she and Russell had not been followed, they had called for the van.

Tori looked around, blinking in the dim light. They were in what appeared to be a miniature living room. They were sitting on a sofa upholstered in an Oriental cotton print of blues, greens, and deep yellows. There was a brass coffee table, Chinese ginger jar lamps on matching mahogany side tables, a pair of dark blue upholstered wing chairs, even a couple of pleasant well-framed landscape prints on the walls. No windows, however. It was surprisingly comfortable, nonetheless.

"Where in the hell are we?" Russell said.

"A moving van," a deep rich voice said. They looked up, saw Hitasura, a tall, slender, dark-skinned Japanese, enter the mobile living room. "One of many in my fleet." He smiled warmly. "Should the need arise for you to move, one of these vans will handle everything in one load, you here in comfort, while below and behind you, your containerized possessions are safely stored, fumigated, and sanitized."

Hitasura sat across from them in one of the wing chairs. It was large enough to accommodate his height. "Tori, it is good to see you again." He might have been a handsome man, but there was no moderation to his features. He had hard eyes, a sharp nose, and an unforgiving mouth. There was a tea-colored melanin birthmark on the left side of his neck that ran up his jaw and encroached on the lower portion of his cheek.

"Hitasura-san," Tori said formally, "this is Russell Slade. A friend."

"Mr. Slade." Hitasura inclined his head. "Perhaps you will forgive the melodrama when I tell you that these rather elaborate precautions were necessary."

"What's happened?" Tori said, picking up on his tone.

Hitasura sat back, made a bridge with his fingertips. "I hardly know where to begin. It may be a war is brewing, Tori-san, though I hope I am overreacting.'' He looked at her. "My only brother is dead."