The Kaisho (64 page)

“How does this transformation relate to Ginnie Morris?” he asked.

“It doesn’t. It is—how shall I put it?—a signature.”

“A signature?”

“Yes.” Renata nodded. “The white magpie is significant because of the practitioner, not the sacrificial victim.”

Croaker took a step forward, his heart thudding heavily in his chest. “You mean that this feather can tell you who committed the murder?”

“Precisely. The Nung priests are known to take animal familiars upon their initiation. I would think none of them these days take the white magpie.” She turned away, worried her lip with her small, white teeth.

“If you know who murdered your son, you must tell me.”

Renata passed fingers over her forehead as if brushing away wisps of hair. “Among the Nungs the white magpie is a bird of exceptional power. It is a bird through which God speaks to the priests. It is divine. The one who uses its feathers...”

The silence seemed to roll over them like a newly tarred road, sticky with portent. Croaker began to say something, thought better of it as he glanced at Margarite. She was silent, eyes half-closed as if against a bright light that was in danger of blinding her.

Renata took a deep breath, seemed to be gathering herself. “As I have said, the white magpie is a bird of singular power, but taking it as one’s familiar is, almost invariably, catastrophic. Quite simply, it invites destruction by the gods.” Her nostrils flared briefly, as if she inhaled a new scent. “In Nung history, those who sought the voice of God through it were driven...”

“Mad?” he finished for her.

There it came again, that curious crescent smile. “No, the result of the transgression was not madness. It is something far worse.” Renata half-turned so that the stallion could see her as well as scent her, put her hand upon its withers, stroking rhythmically.

“What could be worse than madness?” Croaker wondered out loud.

“Listen to me. There is a logic to this,” Renata said, continuing to focus her attention on the horse, as if by the motion of her hand on the animal’s withers she could manufacture tranquillity out of foreboding and dread. “Those who wish to be divine are slowly skinned alive, layer by layer stripped of their humanity—their ability to feel emotion, to be affected by the world around them. Slowly, they slip into a shadow world where though they are able to affect the world around them, they are unable themselves to be touched by it in any way. They are like the walking dead.” She looked at him somberly. “Here we have the origins of zombies, vampires, and the rest of mankind’s names for the undead.”

Renata’s eyes were like colored jewels through which Croaker imagined he could glimpse the dangerous shadow play of another world. “This is not an ordinary person who committed these murders.” She hesitated but a moment. “He will not be tracked down by ordinary methods.”

“I need to do more than track him down. I have to stop him.”

“That may be impossible.”

“I can’t accept that.”

A sardonic smile curled Renata’s lips. “You have not met this person. You and Margarite and I, we live on the flesh of animals, on the grains of the earth. This one is different, I assure you. He gains his sustenance from more ephemeral sources.”

“But he is mortal.”

Renata did not answer him at once. At length, she said, “If you put a bullet in his brain or a knife in his heart, he will die. In that sense, yes, he is mortal. But he is also Messulethe, and if you do not kill him at once, you will be in mortal peril.”

“You mean he will be able to function wounded better than I could.”

“What I mean for you to do is to remember what I have told you about the white magpie and its powers.” Renata momentarily dropped her eyes to the photo of the Soul Ladder. Then she looked up, cocked her head. “You don’t seem skeptical.”

Croaker shook his head. “I’m not.” Thinking of Nicholas, he added, “I have a friend who has a similar kind of control over his body.”

Now he was aware that Renata was studying him with keen interest. She had ceased to stroke the horse.

“What is this man’s name?” Croaker asked.

“He goes by many names,” Renata said. “Let me see. In this country he has used Donald True and Robert Ashuko.”

Robert,
Croaker thought, glancing at Margarite. But her head was bowed, darkened by a veil of hair and shadow.

Renata stirred. “His Vietnamese mother named him Do Duc. He took a Japanese surname, Fujiru, when he fled Saigon after murdering his employer, a French arms dealer who more or less raised him. God alone knows his true surname. His father was an unknown entity; it may be only wishful thinking on Do Duc’s part that he was indeed Japanese.”

Croaker took some time to absorb all this. “May I ask how you know as much as you do about this man?”

“He was a friend of Michael Leonforte’s in Vietnam. The two of them—along with a man named Rock—got into some very nasty business over there.” She held up a hand. “Please don’t ask me how I have so much information on the Leonfortes. That is privileged information.”

“But, as you have said, you know who I am and you know that Margarite trusts me enough to have brought me here.”

Renata nodded. “True enough, Mr. Croaker. But on the other hand, you are reporting to William Justice Lillehammer.”

“What of it?”

Renata brushed her hands together to get off them whatever was left by the horse. She regarded him levelly. “I wonder how much I should trust you.”

“Are you going to tell me that Lillehammer has his own agenda I’m not privy to?”

“Why should I? You obviously already know.”

“I suspect as much, that’s not the same thing.” Croaker shrugged. “Anyway, whatever Lillehammer’s real objective, I’m in too deep to turn around. I have Margarite to think of now.”

“Margarite is a married woman,” Renata said crisply.

“You forgot the adjective
happily.”

Renata did not blink. “I did, didn’t I?”

There seemed to be a kind of curious contest of wills going on here, but Croaker was unable to fathom its basis. What role was the older woman acting out here besides the protective mother?

Croaker intuited he had to be careful, otherwise this invaluable interview would be prematurely terminated. “She needs Tony D.,” he said. “I wouldn’t take her away from what she has to do.”

Now Renata did blink, and he knew he had scored an important point.

“Why don’t we go outside,” Renata said.

The pale moon hung in a sky clear of rain or mist. The wind had picked up, but they were protected within the viney shadows of the loggia. Beyond, moonlight fell like a curtain of silver lace. They stood very close together.

“Margarite’s destiny was sealed by my son’s death,” Renata said. “Do Duc murdered him, and it was surely done on Caesare Leonforte’s order, but there is a reason Caesare chose Do Duc. He didn’t merely want Dominic dead. He wanted what was in Dominic’s mind.”

Now Margarite turned into the moonlight, and Croaker could see that she had been silently weeping. Her agony stabbed him through the heart.

“Are you saying Dominic was tortured before he was killed?”

Renata nodded slowly, her gaze on Margarite. “There can be little doubt. The question is, how successful was my son in holding out against Do Duc?”

Croaker said, “You know this man better than we do. You—”

“Whatever Robert wanted to get out of Dom you can be sure he got it.” The words seemed forced out of Margarite’s mouth.

Renata had gone quite white, and Croaker could see that she was holding on to her equilibrium with a good deal of effort. At length, she gathered herself sufficiently to say, “You met him.”

“Yes.”

Croaker found it interesting that Margarite did not elaborate and Renata did not ask her to. After a long time, when only the horses stamping in the stable seemed capable of movement or even breath, Renata turned her head toward Croaker. “If this is the case, then we must assume the worst. Mr. Croaker, you must get to Tokyo as quickly as you can.”

“Why? What’s so urgent?” He looked from the enigmatic face of one woman to the closed face of the other.

“Dominic’s source of information is in Tokyo?”

Renata nodded woodenly.

Again, he thought of Nicholas, as he had ever since he saw the evidence of the eerie ritual of Dominic Goldoni’s murder. Surely, Nicholas would be able to help him now that he would be going to Tokyo. His heart leapt at the thought of seeing his friend again.

“I’d better report all of this to Lillehammer.”

“I think that would be most unwise,” Renata said flatly. “He’s unlikely to have your open-mindedness and understanding.”

“True, but in any case I’ll need a passport, funds, and backup. Without Lillehammer’s support in a country as foreign as Japan, I’ll be dead in the water.”

“I can provide everything you need,” Renata said so breathlessly Croaker at once understood how critical this change in his status must be to her. “In addition, I can protect you from him.”

“Who? Do Duc? With what you’ve already given me I think I can take care of myself.”

Renata was shaking her head. “I was speaking of Will Lillehammer.”

She produced a rolled-up copy of that day’s
Washington Post
from beneath her jacket, handed it to him.

“Computer Giant Exec Found Shot to Death,” the headline read, and just beneath the banner was a photo of Harley Gaunt, Nicholas’s number one man in the States. According to a highly placed government source unnamed in the story, which Croaker read with mounting dread, Gaunt, Nicholas, and Sato-Tomkin itself were about to go under the spotlight of Sen. Rance Bane’s committee. Also, according to the story, Gaunt had decided to cooperate with the Committee. Apparently, its star witness’s murder had blown the lid off the entire investigation. Nicholas Linnear had been subpoenaed from Tokyo in order to answer serious but as yet undefined allegations of misconduct, but had refused to comply. Now Gaunt, a man presumably with inside knowledge of all of Sato-Tomkin’s dealings, and ready to spill it all to the Committee, was dead. The inference made by yet more unnamed, high-ranking government sources was clear. Linnear, from his sinecure in evil Japan, was suspected of ordering Gaunt silenced.

Croaker looked up at Renata, saw the moonlight glinting in her eyes. What could he read there, a surreptitious intimation of satisfaction, an absence of grace?

Renata took a deep breath, said, “The night before Mr. Gaunt was murdered he came to me. I gave him certain information on a man—incriminating evidence. The man was Will Lillehammer. But I—” For the first time she faltered, a crack forming in her demeanor. “I never dreamed the result would be Gaunt’s death.”

“You had this incriminating evidence and didn’t use it yourself? Why not?”

“I felt I was helping Mr. Gaunt. He appeared ill with desperation, and I... seemed to be the cure.”

There was a momentary pause, during which Croaker monitored her physical signs like a cardiologist observing a patient in ICU. “Tell me, what was Gaunt doing coming to you?”

“I was recommended to him. You know how it works in this town. Your contacts are everything, and God help you if you’re stupid or naive enough to confuse them with friends.

“I told Mr. Gaunt that Lillehammer worked clandestinely for Senator Bane’s committee. This seemed just the lead Mr. Gaunt was looking for. I armed him—”

“If you were arming him, you should have given him a howitzer.” Croaker looked at her as if she were a cobra just popped out of a wicker basket. “With your arsenal you should have gone after Will Lillehammer yourself.”

“If it was just Lillehammer I was after, I promise you I would have. But my enmity goes far deeper than that.”

“So you used Gaunt to—”

“Stop it!” Margarite had come between them before Renata could reply. She stared at Croaker. “I didn’t bring you here to rip at each other.” And in a quiet voice so only he could hear: “We all have our private motives, Lew, don’t we?” Her amber eyes were lambent in the skittish moonlight. “Listen to me,” she breathed. “Even detectives are not immune to emotion.”

“You’d do well to listen to her,” Renata said. “She is alight with the wisdom of her forebears.” She smiled, almost shyly, and Croaker thought he could see her as she must have been when she was a stunning young woman of twenty.

She touched his arm, said so softly even the trees spoke more loudly, “Here is the last secret my son left with me, the identity of the man who was his strength, his source of intelligence.” She leaned in closer, put her lips against Croaker’s ear. “Even Margarite doesn’t know. I promised Dominic I would never repeat what he told me in confidence, but now events dictate that I speak his name in order to save his life.

“Nishiki is Mikio Okami, the Kaisho, the head of all
oyabun
of the Japanese Yakuza.”

When Do Duc slipped the silicon-polycarbonate mask over his head, he felt as if flesh and blood, skin and bones, had been fitted over a face composed of smoke and dreams. He felt, in a word, safe.

I want,
he said to himself,
to feel.

Feeling was, after all, what Ao the Nung shaman had taken from him during the long, arduous initiation ceremony in the mountains of Vietnam. Not that the young Do Duc had been aware of it at the time. But even if he had been, would he have objected, considering the glittering new world Ao was offering him? It did not matter. This question, essentially metaphysical in nature, would never have occurred to that young Do Duc.

Feeling was, after all, what he tried so assiduously to suck out of his victims, most recently the late Ginnie Morris and Margarite Goldoni DeCamillo. But even he had to admit in a fever of reckoning that Margarite had been different. He could not kill her; could not because he did not want to. For the first time, Do Duc had understood an essential truth of nature, although for the moment he understood it in this most particular of cases only as it pertained to Margarite—that to kill another human being was in some mysterious way to diminish the nature of one’s own soul.