Linnear 01 - The Ninja (46 page)

‘But my mother misunderstood him. She supposed that he wanted sons to carry on the Tomkin line and that anydiing else

would be considered a failure. I suppose it’s a measure of how far she really was from him that she could have been so wrong about him.

‘She was naturally ecstatic that she had given birth to a girl. So she named me Gelda. It was a way of getting back at my father without him knowing, you see. Gelda. Gelding. Get it? Sure you do.’ She turned away as if from the memory.

‘You could change it,’ he said reasonably and for the first time she gave a completely natural laugh. It was quite beautiful, he thought. ‘I guess I’m just perverse,’ she said. ‘I carry it now as a reminder.’

‘Of what?’

‘What’s it your business?’ she snapped. All the warmth that, so soon, had suffused her voice, was abruptly gone.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell you the truth.’ It was a desperate gamble, one which he had hoped not to make. He had no choice now. ‘I need your help with an investigation.’

‘With what?’

This was it. ‘I think your father murdered Angela Didion.’

‘So?’

It was not what he’d expected and he was momentarily nonplussed.

Gelda seemed pleased. ‘I see you’re speechless,’ she said, laughing. ‘Good for you. Did you think I’d say, “I hate his guts, copper, but he’s still my father?” Bullshit. It wouldn’t surprise me if he did kill her.’

‘You mean, in your opinion, he’s capable of murder?’ His heart hammered in his chest; this seemed like a straight gift from heaven.

‘In my opinion?’ She laughed. ‘Yes. In my opinion my father’s quite capable of murder. Laws, I remember, were not things for him to be concerned with.’

She had moved fractionally so that she was facing him in three-quarters profile and he could see her eyes and the hurt within them, deeply buried.

‘Did you know about Angela Didion?’ he asked quietly.

‘You mean that he was balling her? Sure. I was there one day when she walked in. She did it so you knew right away it was like she owned the place, you know?’

‘Did you talk with her?’

She smiled. ‘We didn’t exactly get along. There was a kind of instant repulsion, as if we were magnets with the same polarity.’

‘I thought you and your old man didn’t get along.’

‘We don’t.’ She seemed quite close to him now, though he had not been aware that any shift had taken place. ‘But sometimes my father is impossible to ignore. That happens maybe twice a year.’ She shrugged. ‘Who knows? Maybe he wants to see if I’ve changed any.’

‘Changed in what way?’ f

‘It’s none of -‘ The fire in her eyes died and she said, quite sweetly, ‘That I’ve given up girls. He can’t stand that in me. I suppose that’s one of the reasons I like them more than men.’ She shrugged. ‘A shrink said that to me once. I walked out. I didn’t need to pay him fifty dollars an hour to tell me what I already knew.’

‘How’d Tomkin come to know at all?” ^“About me and girls? Oh, he found me at it one day on the summer estate on Gin Lane out near South Hampton. That was after we’d sold the Connecticut estate; after Mother … died.’

‘What did he do?’

‘My mother was a suicide. He -‘

‘No, I meant when he found you and the other girl.’

‘You know, even my sister Justine doesd’t know this part of it; I’d never tell her and, God knows, my father never would. He treats her like my mother always did. He dotes on her as if she were a cripple. She was the baby, after all. But she was slim and athletic while I was heavy. No matter what kind of diet they put me on and, believe me, they put me on them all, I never could lose weight. My mother never let me forget that; she made me ashamed of it.’

She paused. ‘I don’t know how I got on to that.’ She wasn’t really talking to him any more. ‘Anyway, my father found me with this girl. It was about a week before my mother died. Deepest summer. I had met Lisa on the beach - her parents had the estate at the other end of the Lane - her father and stepmother whom she hated. Our hate brought us together, I suppose. But we also loved each other’s bodies. Truly. There was a

purity to our love that I’ve never been able to find again.

‘It was so hot that day, even so near the water. Everything was lying limp and bedraggled. We were lying at the edge of my estate in the lee of a line of high hedges. We were on the border, clad only in our badiing suits. It was like we were naked, only better. We couldn’t keep our hands off each other. We took off our suits and made love. It was very beautiful.

‘We were still holding each other wetly when I saw my father. I imagine he had been there for a time, perhaps from the very beginning although I have no true way of knowing.

‘He saw me looking at him. His face was red and he seemed to be having trouble breadiing. He scrambled towards us in a crouch, screaming. His hands flailed the air. Lisa was terrified. She grabbed her suit and ran off down the beach. My father hadn’t even looked at her.

‘I lay on the ground, paralysed. With fear, I thought. Now I know better. That first moment when I had looked in his eyes, I knew what he had been doing while he was watching us - it was as unmistakable as the mark of Cain; he made it that way. I might have been horrified but I was not. The idea made me excited; he had watched me make love and I had turned him on.

‘I watched him come towards me. There was something clouding his eyes which I couldn’t place then. I had never seen him this way before; I was seventeen. He seemed a totally different person to the one I had known as my father; he had come out of himself.

‘He took me there where I lay, staring up at him, thinking myself helpless under him. He plunged into me with such force that I cried out and, immediately, I felt his wrist between my lips. I bit down on it with my teeth; I sucked up the blood I had caused to come out of him. I felt as if I were being stuffed all the way up to my throat.

‘It was over so quickly that for a moment I thought it had never happened. But there was the salty taste in my mouth and the wet soreness between my legs; I couldn’t walk without some pain for two days after.’

She stopped and her head turned. She became aware of him again. ‘There, I’ve said it; I’ve spewed it all out and’now that’s

supposed to make me feel better. But you know, it doesn’t. I still feel the same lousy rotten feeling inside. I loathe myself. Not because he did that to me. But because I didn’t fight him; because deep down I didn’t want him to stop. I revelled in feeling his come jetting deep inside me. Oh, God! Oh, my God!’ She was weeping now, her frame shuddering as if it might shake itself apart.

She fell forward and he caught her. His hands slid under her arms and he stood up with her. Her legs had no strength and he had to support her half propped against him. Her shudders transferred themselves to him as if they were seismic quakes, the vibrations entering him. He felt her long silky hair gently brushing back and forth against the side of his face; the strength of her perfume; the heat of her flesh beneath her elegant clothing.

She cried for a long time and even after her sobs had subsided she continued to cling to him, her hands locked behind his neck.

^_Then he heard her whispering. ‘I must be mad. I must be mad.’

‘C’mon.’ He said softly but with a great deal of force. ‘Let’s get you the hell out of here.’

Nicholas thought about the three names as he went up in the elevator to the top of the tower and Raphael Tomkin’s plush office. Hideoshi. Yodogimi. Mitsunari. What the hell had Terry meant? Nicholas knew him almost as well as Eileen had but he couldn’t fathom this cryptogram. All right. Start at the beginning. Hideoshi is the ninja. Assume? No, it’s a given. Then who are Yodogimi and Mitsunari? Were there three people involved? It seemed to go against all the laws of ninjutsu but, of course, it couldn’t be ruled out. Deduction was so easy in literature. Elementary, my dear - he wished Holmes were here with him now.

Yet he felt a kind of familiarity with the names. Of course he knew all about the historical personages, their personal histories: the sweep of the past come alive. But this was the present, divorced from the past.

He looked up, watching the neon indicator moving relentlessly from left to right as if ticking off the seconds, the minutes, the years. Time, he thought.

My God! What am I thinking? I’ve been too long in the West; I’ve become one of them. He felt then a kind of secret •shame, something that was difficult to admit to, even within himself.

Wasn’t I taught that the present is never divorced from the past? Why have I pushed that away continuously? Why have I suddenly, at age thirty-three, dropped out of life? Given up my job, left the city, begun to hibernate - yes, that’s the right word - out on the beach like it was Malibu, some far-off lotus land devoid of worries or responsibilities?

Abruptly he felt something rising within him; something dark and ugly and unstoppable. A tsunami - the tidal wave. It reared up at his back, rushing recklessly towards’ him. Had there been no warning?

There had been plenty of warning. He had just been too preoccupied or merely too dense to see it. Or far too close.

He felt as if he were suffocating and he put his hand out, palm against the texturcd wall. It was slippery with sweat. He imagined that he was Amelia Earhart blithely flying through the cotton-candy skies on her way to - where? He couldn’t remember. No matter. Travelling, working the controls. When suddenly.

Nothing.

Not a thing. No sky, no clouds, no land below, no stars above.

Had the past overtaken her, too?

The elevator doors sighed open and he stepped out into the corridor, stiff-legged. He went to the outer edge, looked out at the streaming city through a pane of gkss so newly installed that it still carried the wide white X through its centre. He seemed oblivious.

It seemed so obvious to him now. Yukio should have given him the clue. His memory of Yukio stood between him and Justine like a guardian ghost baring her teeth. It was this spectre within him that had hurt Justine so. He clenched his fist unconsciously. Still a part of him after all this time. But he knew how hollow a statement that was. The psyche bore no notion of time, that was a rational response to a basically irrational question.

Abruptly, the force of his feelings for Justine broke the surface like a geyser rupturing the glass surface of a still pond. How stupid could he have been I

Having made up his mind, feeling calmer than he had for a while, he quickly went down the corridor and pulled open the metal doors to Raphael Tomkin’s office.

Frank stood just inside. His eyes blazed when he saw Nicholas and his right hand twitched. Nicholas went by him without a second look.

‘Hey, you can’t -‘

But Tomkin had looked up from behind his desk and had already waved him to silence. ‘It’s all right, Frank,’ he said amiably. ‘Nicholas is now on the payroll, isn’t that right?’ He redirected his gaze towards Nicholas.

The office was immense, perhaps slightly smaller than a grand ballroom. This seemed, outwardly, impossibly excessive until one saw that the space was divided up not by walls but by furniture groupings, forming out of the whole a kind of mini-apartment.

Here to the left was what amounted to a living-room with a one-step-down sunken parquet floor surrounded by a C-shaped sofa in crushed velvet from Roche Bobois. A low smoked-glass and chrorne coffee table sat in the centre, above which swooped a crescent-necked floor lamp.

To the right, nearer the long bank of windows, was what could be classified as a professional engineer’s workroom, complete with drafting table, flexible light source and a black plastic tabouret. Near by was a vertical metal file for storing architectural plans. There was even, on its top, a scale model of the tower as it would look when completed, including the central atrium garden, plaza and trees along its eastern and western peripheries.

Far to the left in the dimness of the office’s interior, Nicholas could make out a tiny kitchen with half-refrigerator, a stainless-steel sink and, above, an electric oven. Next to it a door stood open revealing a full-size bath. The rear corner on the left had been transformed into a library. Bookshelves climbed two walls. There were two strong, shaded reading lights hovering at the

sides of a pair of clubby high-backed leather chairs which, looked well lived in rather than new. All that was missing was a massive glass ashtray holding a meerschaum.

Lastly, there was the office proper, directly ahead of him, where Tomkin sat now. The magnificent hardwood desk had quite obviously been custom-made. It was a beautifully blank piece of furniture from this side but, on walking around to its reverse side, one found it revealed itself as housing a complex data centre. Nicholas thought it more resembled a console of a 747 than it did anything else. There was a bank of four phones, each colour-coded; a telex; a NYSE ticker; the set of TV monitors for the now obligatory interior surveillance system and a number of other gadgets whose functions totally eluded him.

Tomkin was on the phone. He waved Nicholas to a plush chair in front of the desk. Nicholas looked down. The left armrest contained its own phone. He lifted the receiver, pressed an unlit button for a clear line, dialled Justine’s number in West Bay Bridge. He let it ring six times before he hung up. She might just be out on the beach. On an impulse, he tried her city number. No answer.

He got another line, asked Frank for Abe Russo’s extension, dialled it. When he got the construction foreman on the line, he asked him for a list of all oriental men currently working on the tower project.

That’ll take some time,’ Russo said shortly. ‘I got a lotta work. I don’t know -‘

‘Let me put it this way,’ Nicholas said slowly. ‘If we don’t get these names, this project may be halted - permanently.’

‘Okay. I’ll get it right up to you.’

‘I appreciate your assistance,’ Nicholas said. ‘And, Abe. I want you to do this all yourself. Don’t involve anyone, is that clear? And, listen, when you’ve got the list, I’m going to want to see all the men on that list. Think about how you’re going to do that without giving them any advance notice. No leaks, all right? Good.’ He hung up, suppressed a desire to try Justine once more.