The Kaisho (59 page)

If he was alive, he did not yet know in what state it might be. His thoughts, still chaotic as the molten magma of the universe, seemed to exist wholly on their own, without the confines of brain or corpus, a pinpoint of light flickering uncertainly in the cosmic night.

No past, no present, enriched these thoughts, and this lack of context made logic as evanescent as a dream. There was no evidence of breath, of blood pumping, of an urgency for movement. How could movement exist without brain or body to give thought density and substance?

But the tolling of the bell continued, not a sound, for he had no ears with which to hear, but a pulse, an atonal voice belonging to neither man nor machine, an implication that somewhere in the vastness a context did, indeed, exist.

Light, a shadow upon the soul. So he did exist after all.

He was born into a house of metal. It seemed to be somewhere underground, a vast conical space filled with sapphire light and the sharp echoes of industry. He inhaled the scent of metal, hot and amorphous, cool and oiled, but at least he was breathing.

His eyes, learning to focus all over again, saw being constructed at different automated stations arms, legs, feet and hands, torsos, hydraulic fingers, and infrared eyes. Slowly, before his still-bleary gaze, the perfect beasts were being formed. It was as if he were witnessing Creation, somewhere between God’s mind and Vulcan’s forge.

Or maybe it was just a robot factory. By which deduction he was at least able to make an educated guess as to his current whereabouts. He wasn’t dead, he was in Tokyo. How in the world had the Messulethe got him here?

No other humans here, just the precise movements of metal cylinders through shadow and light. The hivelike thrumming of engines, the heartbeats of ten thousand disembodied souls, the happy operatic singing of life being fabricated from steel, titanium, high-density plastics, silicon chips, and fiber-optic cables.

He inhaled, enjoying the sensation as another fragment of evidence that he was indeed alive. The air-conditioned, triple-filtered atmosphere was cleaner than any country air could be, but was nevertheless redolent of the foulness of machines. It seemed to hold a static charge like clouds filled with incipient thunder, and far away an effulgent flicker of lightning pawed the air like a restless animal.

Abruptly, an intense, disorienting stab of vertigo replaced the light and sound barrage, and the world closed into a pinpoint of undifferentiated gray. His eyelids fluttered closed.

A sharp pain jerked him back to consciousness.

“Wake up! You’ve slept too long as it is!”

The voice sounded disturbingly familiar.

He started, a shiver racing down his spine as he recognized his own face bending over him. His own lips curled into a smile, his own eyes crinkled in delight.

“Welcome to your new life.” His own voice reached his ears like a hallucination. “It will be a short one. But I promise you it will be full of surprises.”

Nicholas passed out.

Croaker watched Margarite as she stood in the shower and soaped up. He could see nothing but a vaguely outlined silhouette, yet he could not take his eyes off her. Here they were in a run-down Montauk motel, in the same room together because she had insisted that she did not want to sleep alone. What was it she feared more, Robert’s imminent return or her husband’s?

He had checked the scene out the window as soon as she had gone into the bathroom: oil-stained blacktop, only a few cars parked where, in summer, would be a sea of painted metal and chromium, and across the street, the odd kind of fast-food place existing only on the East End, with its tacky red-and-yellow plastic sign,
CHICKEN
&
SEAFOOD
, open late hours, lit up by frosty fluorescent lights and a Bud Light sign, its neon leaking vivid color into the darkness.

It was by this illumination that he had spied the wiseguy, burly body, bland, oval face, coming out of the store, a cardboard box filled with two coffees and some sandwiches balanced in one hand rather than two. The free hand hung loosely at his side, as he had been trained, ready for a quick draw or anything else that might come his way.

Croaker watched him as he got into a black Ford Taurus parked more or less in front of the fast-food joint. The inner light came on briefly, and Croaker got a glimpse of a second wiseguy.

He was quite certain that these were Tony DeCamillo’s men. He was unsurprised. They would not have been difficult to locate, especially for a man with Tony D.’s resources. After all, they were using Margarite’s Lexus with a known license plate. Under those conditions, Croaker knew it was virtually impossible to keep your whereabouts secret for long.

Croaker had turned away from his contemplation of the Taurus and its hulking occupants when Margarite partially opened the door to the bathroom. It was already overheated in the room, with no way to lower the thermostat, and the steam from the shower was making the bathroom unbearable. The smells of mildew and surf drifted like dust in the air. The wiseguys wouldn’t make a move until Tony D. arrived, and that wouldn’t be until morning. Croaker had all that time to figure out how he was going to handle the confrontation without anyone getting hurt.

Staring at Margarite’s shifting outline, he knew he had other matters with which to occupy himself for the time being. He still found himself having to adjust to the new reality, that she, not Tony D., was heir to Dominic Goldoni’s domain and all that implied. She had in her hand the power of Goldoni’s shadow world, where governors, police chiefs, justices, congressmen, would all do her bidding.

He saw now how Goldoni had outsmarted them all—the feds
and
his enemies. He had given up vital information to WITSEC, yes, had rolled over on those around him, beneath him, so that they would believe he was helping them dismantle his empire. But he had given the feds nothing of himself or how he ran his domain. In the end, he had not even retired to the soft life they had created for him in Marine on St. Croix. And as for the Leonfortes, his enemies, their sights were set on Tony D., a false target.

If he was being truthful—and he believed tonight was a time for ultimate truths—he was both frightened and elated by Margarite’s intelligence. He had never met anyone like her, had, further, never even imagined anyone like her could exist. Perhaps this was a failing in him, he wasn’t sure, but certainly his being with her had the profound effect on him of a close encounter of the third kind. Margarite was as alien and as marvelous to his way of life as if she were an extraterrestrial.

She emerged from the bathroom wrapped in a towel. She appeared to have no inhibitions.
You know my soul,
she had said when she had undressed in front of him.
Why should I hide my body from you?
Then she had laughed.
Tony insisted we turn out the lights when we made love.

Perhaps that bastard Tony D. was only being practical, Croaker thought, not caring to see the aftermath of his brutal handiwork, weals and black bruises in scattered constellations over her flesh.

Looking at her now, Croaker thought he could love this woman in a way he had loved neither Gelda nor Alix, but immediately he was suspicious of the emotion. It was all too easy for men to confuse love with lust at the outset of an affair, to convince themselves they felt something in their heart, when the stirring occurred quite a bit lower.

It was said that men coveted beauty in their mates, and women power. How many men had Croaker come upon in his time in Homicide who were intimidated by women with power? There was an almost instinctual reflex mechanism at work. He had always been interested in the fact that he had never felt it. True power in a woman was so rare, so precious, he found it an aphrodisiac. This, too, could explain the feeling welling up in him.

Night and Margarite.

“Why are you looking at me that way?” Her eyes, luminous in the steamy glow from the bathroom light, appeared so innocent of guile or subterfuge that for a moment Croaker could almost believe that their conversations of today had never occurred, that she was just a battered housewife—beautiful, desirable, lonely—who needed refuge and protection. Everything would be so simple, then, all his decisions made for him without the shadow and light of a far more complex reality.

He cleared his throat, began to walk past her toward the bathroom.

“I need a shower,” he said thickly.

She reached out, put her arms around him, and he could smell the delicate scents of soap and freshly scrubbed skin.

“It’s too soon,” she said, “to take a shower.”

She lifted one shoulder and the towel unwound itself from around her body. He could feel her dampness through his shirt.

“You smell like an animal,” she whispered as she drew his head down.

Her lips blossomed under his, soft and passionate, her tiny tongue curling against his teeth. He thought he should say no, thrust her away from him now, at this moment, the only moment it would still be possible, but instead, he circled her in his arms.

She let out a throaty moan, and her legs drew up, her bare ankles crossing and locking over his buttocks. The bed seemed far away and, suddenly, superfluous. Her breasts flattened against him, and the heat broke from her in waves.

Their lips parted for a moment, and he said, “Tony—”

“I don’t want Tony,” Margarite breathed, her hands busy at his belt. “I want you.”

He had the presence of mind to know he must be gentle with her, no matter how passionate she became. He understood the importance of that, as he knew, eerily, that Robert had been with her. Robert, who had mutilated and murdered her brother; who had given her back her own life.

She kicked with her heels, and his trousers slid to the floor. She tore at the buttons of his shirt. His arms ached from holding her as the blood and strength began to pool in the area below his waist.

He picked her off him, placed her on the floor, knelt over her. For a long moment, he stared into her huge, liquid eyes, witness to her true nakedness—her desire for him, her need for Robert, her rapture at being on the threshold of her empire, all wrapped up into one shifting pattern, so complex and numinous that all at once he felt himself drowning there. It was too much to contemplate the transcendent become immanent, and he sought to lose himself in the heavy pulse of his blood.

He lowered his head to her breasts. Light from the bathroom picked out the peaks of her, leaving dark and mysterious the soft curves and sweeping dells. There was a scent rising from her. He inhaled it like incense as he licked her hard, dark nipples, as he circled her navel, slid his lips down the center of the slight curve of her belly.

She groaned deeply, gripping the sides of his head, her fingers stroking and caressing him as his tongue slipped into her. Her legs drew up involuntarily, her thighs splayed wide. He could hear her ragged breathing, and this, more than anything, fired him. It was the only sound in the room, rhythmic, deeply erotic, almost a sobbing torn from the very core of her being.

“Oh, God, oh, God, oh God!” A chanting in the darkness as her head whipped back and forth, as her muscles tensed, as she lifted her pelvis up toward his lips and tongue, then jerking in erratic motions, her legs locked around his back, trying to draw him closer, to have so much of him inside her when—

The spasms, when they came, were so intense that the entire lower half of her body arched up off the floor. Her sex expanded like a flower, her sweat mingling with other, more intimate fluids. And then, in the aftermath, her panting, ragged and muffled by one arm thrown across her face.

Then, as he knelt there, he heard her slither around. She knelt in front of him, her heavy breasts hanging so delectably, he reached out to cup them. She put her hand over his biomechanical one. She kissed him deeply, then licked her own fluids off his face.

Her head lowered, her mouth at work on his nipples, then lower and lower, nibbling, teasing, until the incredible liquid warmth engulfed him.

But, almost immediately, he drew her away as gently as he could. Aware as he was of her bruises and what they represented, he could not bear to see her in that position, bent over him, submissive. He wanted other things for her—and for himself.

He lay on his back, drew her over him until he felt another kind of wetness engulf him. She arched her back, breasts thrust upward, riding him, a bit awkward at first, but increasingly ecstatic in this unfamiliar position.

The feel of her on him as he was in her was indescribable. He held her breasts, staring up into her face, drinking her in, the light across one cheek, firing the planes of her face, making her appear both more and less than she did in the full flood of sunlight, turning her into an embodiment of the secrets she held so vigilantly inside her.

The air rushed out of her, and she took his hands from her breasts, spread his arms wide on the floor as she pressed her torso against him, as if holding him down as her hips rose and fell on him. Her fingers twined with polycarbonate, graphite, and titanium.

Her eyes were wide, her face very close to his. He licked her, and she whispered with a kind of awe creeping into her voice, “I’m going to come again. I can’t... It’s...” Her eyes closed, her fingers caressed his neck, little noises in the back of her throat as she worked over him.

“Please,” she gasped. “Please...”

He could hold himself back no longer, didn’t want to anymore, but abandoned himself to his own pleasure, his buttocks clenching, all his strength gathered in one spot, then released like a pent-up stream rushing over descending rapids.

They crawled onto the bed, slept in sticky exhaustion, twined one around the other, no beginning, no ending, one.

Wan daylight, the color of an old oyster shell, opened their eyes.

“My detective.” Margarite smiled, kissed him tenderly. They unwrapped themselves slowly, as if reluctant to shed the aura that like night and shadow had protected them from the vicissitudes and hard decisions of real life.