Linnear 01 - The Ninja (32 page)

‘Yeah, well, this is a ninja, Lieutenant. Compared with a professional hit man he’s Houdini, Superman and Spiderman all wrapped up into one.’ Vincent tapped the table with the tip of his forefinger. ‘The man’s a sorcerer.’

Croaker stared into the other’s eyes, trying to find some hint of irony. He found none. ‘You’re serious, aren’t you?”

‘At the risk of sounding melodramatic, deadly serious.’

The waiter returned and they ordered dinner along with more safe. ‘Take your time,’ Vincent told the waiter, who nodded and went out.

‘Linnear took me to a kenjutsu dojo today,’ Croaker said.

‘Which one?’

‘I don’t know the name of it. I met the sensei. Man named Fukashigi.’

There was an odd look in Vincent’s eye. ‘You’re quite a privileged person. Very few Westerners are allowed entrance. And for Nicholas to take you…’ He whistled silently.

‘Yeah,’ Croaker joked. ‘And that was after I’d insulted him. He certainly doesn’t hold any grudges.’

Now Vincent’s eyes were sad and he said, ‘It was not for him to be angry but for you to know that you have now lost face.’

‘Lost face? What do you mean?,’

‘Simply this. Relationships are based on respect - mutual respect. With that comes trust. And obligation. I will not ask you what you did - no, don’t tell me, I have no wish to know -but I will say that if you have offended him then his respect for you has lessened.’ ^

‘What the hell do I care what he thinks of me?’

‘Ah, well, perhaps you don’t.’ Vincent smiled. ‘If that’s the case, no more may be said of the matter.’ He took a deliberate sip of his safe, refilled the cup.

Croaker cleared his throat and, after a time, said, ‘Finish your last thought.’

‘I was merely going to say that it is not up to Nick to forgive you - that he has already done, otherwise he would not have taken you to see Fukashigi. It is up to you to seek to restore the former balance.”

‘How would I do that?’ Croaker asked suspiciously.

‘•Ah, if I knew the answer to that one, I’d be quite the wise man.’ Vincent shook his head. ‘And tonight, Lieutenant, I’m not feeling wise at all.’

There was a man at the sushi bar with invisible putty on his face. It built up his flat cheekbones, flattened his wide nose, deepened the sockets of his eyes. Even his mother would not have recognized him, and she had been a most intelligent woman.

He was halfway through a plate of sashimi when Vincent and Lieutenant Croaker entered the restaurant and were shown to a tatami room. He did not turn his head but caught them in the periphery of his vision.

Several moments later, he pushed his plate delicately away from him and walked the length of the room to the rest room. The place was dark and crowded, buzzing with conversation. He had to pass the tatami rooms to get there. The rest room was empty. He washed his hands, peering at himself in the mirror. The door opened and two men walked in. The man went out, past the thin shoji walls. He paid for his meal and left.

Outside in the heat of the summer night, he hailed a cruising taxi. He had to make four switches before he found one suitable for his purposes.

At precisely 8:18 p.m. officer Pete Travine pulled the patrol car over so that the side wheels scraped the kerb. It was his second cruise down Twenty-eighth Street and he was certain now that what he saw in the alleyway between a brownstone and a tailor’s shop had not been there when he had made his first trip twenty minutes ago. He had been thinking of the old days, when all cops rode in tandem. Now, because of the city’s serious ongoing fiscal crisis, they were still experimenting in certain areas with solo patrols, despite concerted PBA opposition.

The radio squawked intermittently, but there was nothing in his vicinity. He parked the blue-and-white and got out a flashlight, played it over the darkened alley. The beam of light hovered over a line of garbage cans painted silver. It was quiet here: no pedestrians, only the soft susurrus of the light traffic along Lexington.

He opened the kerbside door, slid out. With one hand he unsnapped the top of his stiff leather holster, the guard he wore while driving.

He went cautiously across the sidewalk, his flash flicking the darkness. There was an open grille gate leading to four or five steep concrete steps to the alley proper. The right wall - the brownstone’s - was blank for all of its three storeys. The left wall had windows beginning on the second storey of the building. There were apartments over the tailor’s shop. Odd lighting, subtly kaleidoscopic, leaked from these. Television sets were on.

Travine went down the steps. He thought briefly of calling

in but decided against it. He wanted to have something concrete for them.

Past the line of garbage cans was deep shadow but something protruded part way out into the semi-light, casting strange shadows upwards along the brick wall. It was these that Travine had seen and questioned.

He stood over the shape now. He took his hand from his gun butt, crouched and reached out one hand. An old burlap sack partly covered the shape but this close Travine could see the face, one cheek to the wall. Two fingers laid at the side of the neck confirmed that the man was dead.

Travine got up and, without disturbing anything, went up the steps to the street. He looked both ways. A couple passed, arm in arm, walking downtown along Lex. There was no other movement. He called in, then phoned the M.E.‘s office. ‘I don’t want this to wait until tomorrow,’ he told the associate on call. ‘I want something tonight.’

Then he went back to the body to I.D. it but there was nothing. No wallet, no money, no cards, nothing. Yet the man was obviously no derelict. He touched the body again. Not yet cold. He stood up. In the distance the night was split by the sound of sirens, growing louder.

Through fingerprints, they were able to establish the identity of the man. That took a little over three hours and at that moment they began to wonder what had happened to his taxi.

Vincent came out of Michita looking for a cab.

He was not a little drunk and not in the least bit ashamed of himself. He felt as light as a balloon despite the sultry, steaming night. All the cares and worries which had clung to him, weighing him down for months, had sloughed away, dead skin shed.

He walked a little unsteadily, realizing it, curious about it, even happy with it. He’d needed this loosening up.

He breathed in the heavy night air, leaden with exhaust fumes, the odours of fried cooking from the corner coffee shop. He felt as if he were on the Ginza in Tokyo, with its bustle, its crowds, its bright neon jungle advertising nightclubs and Western products.

He watched people streaming by him, feeling a bit giddy. He fought down the impulse to giggle and then thought, why not? He giggled out loud. No one appeared to notice.

He began to walk west. Traffic from Sixth Avenue sounded like surf breaking against a far-off shore. He thought of Uraga where the ships of Admiral Perry had docked in 1853, ending two hundred and fifty years of Japanese isolationism. The mysterious surf rolling in towards the Floating Kingdom. Better if we had not given in to that Pacific Overture. Far better. The ageless barrier holding Japan in magical thrall had been breached. It was a mythic tale, as all of Japanese history tended to be, throwing bigger-than-life shadows on the screen of memory.

Down the block, almost at the corner of Sixth, a cab started up, pulling slowly out from the kerb, coming towards him. Just before it pulled abreast, its hack light went on. It caught his eye, a spinning jewel in the night. He was still in Japan.

He waved at it drunkenly and it pulled over to the kerb. A Checker, big and roomy. And air-conditioned.

It was a custom job, not fleet-owned. Inside, there was no plastic partition and the front seats were beige leather buckets. Vincent gave the driver his address and settled back. The cab started up.

Even in the crowded modern streets of Tokyo, Vincent was thinking, amid the urban clutter, the European business suits, one would abruptly come up an ancient Shinto shrine tucked away somewhere between two buildings. One could hear the ghostly tinkling of the bronze bells, sewn in a vertical strip, green with the patina of time; one could smell the incense gently swirling the air. For those moments the exhaust fumes, the pollution, were eliminated and the soul of ageless Japan reigned unsullied by Western encroachment, summoning the ancient gods. It was dark in the cab. He gazed out at the glowing lights of the city, realized that they were moving quite slowly. He leaned forward. ‘Hey,’ he said, Td like to get home within the hour.”

He saw the back of the driver’s head move and, raising his gaze, saw his eyes in the strip of the rear-view mirror. He saw that the man was Japanese, looked for his name on the I.D. card on the extreme right of the dashboard. The light was out and he could not make it out. He spoke to the driver in Japanese, apologizing for his rudeness.

That’s all right,’ the man said. ‘It’s been a hard night for everyone.’

They had come round onto Forty-fifth, heading west. The taxi swung right at the corner onto Eighth Avenue. Here the street was lined on both sides by a combination of junk food restaurants and sleazy porn theatres. The sidewalks were filled with hookers looking to feed their habits, black con men, low-grade pushers and Puerto Rican strong-arm boys: the vast white underbelly of the city in all its gritty, sorrowful splendour.

The driver went through one intersection on the change, hit a red light on the next.

‘It’s a night like home,’ Vincent said in Japanese.

‘No one wanted it,’ the man said. ‘It should never have come.’

Vincent thought again of Perry’s four warships, riding in the harbour at Uraga. Perhaps he’s right, he thought. We never should have -

The driver had turned round. His face was blue and green in the dancing garish lights from a movie theatre. His mouth opened in a smile. A black oblong that might have belonged to a No mask. The eyes were like stones, radiated no possibility of warmth or friendship. This contrast between smile and animosity made him appear to leer frighteningly. Vincent was reminded of the first No play he had seen with its terrifying demon’s mask; at least that was how it had seemed to him at the age of six.

There was something odd about this face but in the low light he couldn’t tell. He leaned forward. It seemed as if the skin on the man’s face was blotchy as if -

He drew back, his mind stunned at what it had perceived. But his reflexes had been dulled by the alcohol and, even as he retreated, he saw the man’s face ballooning out towards him like the wedge of a viper. The cheeks billowed and the lips curled into an O. A fine mist shot from the aperture, caught him in mid-gasp. He had already inhaled some of the spray before he stopped breathing.

Croaker sat in the tatami room, cross-legged, his head propped on one fist, after Vincent had left. He called for more sake and thought savagely about going home. He gulped at the liquor. It was cold and he waited patiently for the fresh bottle. He liked the stuff. It had hardly any taste but generated a hell of a high.

He didn’t want to go home. No, no, he thought. That’s not it. I don’t want to go home to Alison. This both surprised and annoyed him. Surprised because even though he had known this might be coming for a while, it had now surfaced so strongly, so blatantly. Annoyed with himself because he had allowed things to slip this far. It wasn’t even that he was angry with Alison, he thought. He just didn’t want to have anything ‘ to do with her any more. He wondered for a time that two people could feel so much together for a time and then, later, not ‘. feel anything at all. Part of the human condition, he concluded philosophically, but a hell of a part.

The sake came and he allowed the waiter to pour the first cup. He downed it, immediately poured himself another. He itched to call Matty the Mouth but he suspected that if he did he might break this Didion thing to smithereens. It seemed to him now that the entire case was balanced on one shining ‘ point: getting the name and address of this broad.

He didn’t have to close his eyes to be able to picture again Angela Didion’s apartment, but he did so anyway. He went over it all again.

The first thing he noticed when he walked in was the smell. Sickly-sweet, it was ether combined with what? The darkened living-room had given up nothing but in the bedroom he saw the American Indian bone pipe and, sniffing it, smelled the opium. Tasted it on the tip of his tongue. Very high grade indeed. Hardly street stuff. But then this was Angela Didion’s’, bedroom and a woman who was purportedly the world’s highest-paid model could hardly be expected to have anything but the, best - of everything. He didn’t touch the pipe; he didn’t touch anything.

Slipping on his surgeon’s gloves, he crossed to the closet, opposite the enormous bed. The bedroom was all done in midnight blue, from the silk walls to the satin lampshades. There was only one lamp on when he came in, next to the bed. He left the room that way.

Carefully he opened up the sliding door. Inside he found silk dresses, six fur coats, ranging from .a full-length dyed Russian sable to a spectacular three-quarter silver lynx. Below, shoes from Botticelli and Charles Jourdan.

On the deep-pile rug between the bed and the closet was a black silk negligee. He skirted that on the way to the bed. It was a custom-made affair, moon-shaped. The sheets were midnight-blue percale but the rumpled quilt was covered in silk. It lay around Angela Didion’s ankles like dark surf, ready to claim her.

She lay half on the bed, half off. Her head hung over the edge, the long honey-blonde hair falling on to the floor. She was made up. Her eyes were mascaraed, her cheeks blushed, her lips painted. She was naked save for a thin gold chain, which she wore around her waist. There was no other jewellery. She lay on the left side of the bed. The right side was empty but the pillow on that side was indented as if someone had lain there. There were stains on the sheets, still damp. There was no blood. A pillow was wedged beneath the small of Angela Didion’s back.

Someone had done quite a job on her. Bruises, just beginning to darken, lay like boils along the sides of her neck, her chest and rib cage, her stomach. Her back was arched as if in ecstasy. There was no expression on her face whatsoever. No sign of pain or fear - or of passion.