Ninja, p.23
Ninja, page 23
Her impulse was to gasp but she clamped her teeth shut in time. The undertow was pulling her inexorably out to sea. She tumbled in its grasp, not end over end but around, as if she were a cylinder. Dizzied, she struck out blindly for the shore. She was an excellent swimmer and her breath capacity was good. Still, her first priority was to gain the surface.
Whirling, she struck out upward but made little headway. The grip upon her was as real as if a sea serpent had appeared from some unseen abyss and had wrapped its slippery coils about her.
She broke the surface, gasping and coughing. But in doing so she had lost ground to the sea. She tried to lift her head, shake her eyes clear of the stinging salt water so that she could get an accurate fix on the shoreline. She was jerked under.
She began to panic. Her stomach heaved and she shivered, not even swimming now but merely struggling futilely. Why hadn’t she screamed when she was in the air? She tried to rise again but the fierce grip would not let her. She sank. And in sinking, found her way home. Near the murky bottom the stillness was absolute. She wondered at this for a moment, her mind still trembling in fear until she realized that the tug of the current was gone. She reached out blindly, encountered rock. She pulled, keeping herself at this level, and began to make her way into shore.
Her lungs turned to fire and once her left thigh seemed seized in a cramp. She let it fall loose for a moment, relaxing her muscles, and it subsided. She went on scuttling over the bottom like an enormous crab. She desperately wanted to shoot upward to the surface but her terror of the undertow was absolute. She pushed on. Her eyes felt as if they were popping out of their sockets and an unquiet wind blew in her ears, roaring.
At last she felt the warmth of the shallower water and, simultaneously, the gentle push of the tide onto the rising sand.
She sprang upward, uncoiling her body fully, breaching the surface, sounding like a whale. She gasped and snorted, her insides turning to jelly. She felt the sand against her soles and, as she came out of the water, she found her legs would not support her. She fell to her knees and a wave inundated her. She fell over.
She heard the sound of raised voices as she vomited seawater into the surf. Then strong hands had her under her armpits. Her head hung down on her chest and she coughed.
“Are you all right?”
She tried to nod, only vomited again, heaving wretchedly. She felt the dry sand against her back. She was aware of her whole body gasping. She felt as if she would never get enough air inside her. Her lungs worked like bellows and the sound was so harsh and rasping to her ears that she might have been an asthmatic. There was a folded towel behind her head, elevating her face. A pins-and-needles tingling broke out along her cheeks and lips. She tried to raise her arms but they felt as if they belonged to another person. There was no strength left within her.
“Take it easy,” someone said above her. “Take it easy.”
She closed her eyes, feeling as she did so a kind of kinetic vertigo as one does after stepping off a violent ride at an amusement park. In her mind, she still spun in the grip of the undertow. Gradually this faded and, as it did so, her breathing began to return to normal.
“Okay now?”
She nodded, not daring yet to speak.
“Live around here?” It was a feminine voice.
She nodded.
“We’ve called for a doctor.”
“I’m all right,” she said. Her voice sounded strange to her.
“He’ll be here in a minute.”
She nodded, closing her eyes again. She thought of Gelda and the time at the seashore when they were both in the water. Perhaps Gelda was nine; she was six. They were playing and, as a joke, she had poked Gelda in the ribs. Her sister had turned to her, a look of fury on her face, and, reaching up her arms, had clamped her hands onto the top of Justine’s head. Down Justine had gone, under the water. At first it was all right. But then she wanted to get up, to breathe. Gelda held her down. She struggled, but still Gelda would not relent. In her mind, she pleaded with her sister, then she reviled her. When at last Gelda had let her up, she was hysterical. She ran from the water, crying, right into her mother’s arms. She had never told anyone what Gelda had done to her but for a week she would not look at, let alone talk to, her sister. Gelda’s only response had been to silently gloat.
Justine opened her eyes to find Doc Deerforth bending over her, talking to her. She reached up and, shuddering, cried against his chest.
When Lieutenant Croaker left Nicholas outside the dōjō, he called in through the car radio to see about messages. McCabe wanted him to call back—that was no doubt about the Tanaka-Okura thing; Vegas had dropped by to talk; and Finnigan wanted a progress report.
He was rolling crosstown and the traffic was fierce. “If you can still catch Vegas, tell him I’ll be back around four-thirty, okay?” He did not want to speak to the D.A. yet and as for Finnigan—fuck him!
No other calls. Croaker tried to clear his mind of the anticipation. But oh, how he wanted that call to come in. “That’s it,” he said. “Patch me through to Vincent Ito at the M.E.’s, will you?” The heat sat on wavy lines along the street. He wiped at his sweating forehead. When Vincent came on the line, Croaker set up a dinner. Vincent suggested Michita and gave Croaker the address.
Croaker went through Central Park at the Seventy-second Street Transverse and, moments later, he had pulled up outside the three-story brownstone that housed Terry Tanaka’s dōjō. There he interviewed all of the instructors. He called for a police artist to draw a composite of the strange Japanese who had visited the dōjō on the afternoon of the double murder. None of the people he interviewed had seen the man before or since. None knew where he had come from. The aikido sensei recalled his name as Hideyoshi, but that meant absolutely nothing to Croaker. Still, it was conceivable that the man was the killer or was, at least, tied in with him in some way.
It was well after four by the time he was finished. There had been no prints at Terry’s save for the two victims’, but he called for a print team to dust the dōjō anyway. It was not good practice to overlook any possibility, however remote. Who knows, he thought, we may be lucky and pull something. Then he asked for a detective sergeant to canvass the block to see if any neighbor had seen the man.
In the office he checked in with Irene, threw the two polythene bags of clothes and personal effects of Terry and Eileen into a corner.
He checked for calls. Nothing.
He was about to open the bundles for tagging when his doorway was darkened by Vegas. He was an enormous man with a full beard and eyes like points of lightning. His skin was so black it took on blue highlights in the fluorescent lighting of the station house.
“Hey,” Croaker said, turning his head.
“What it is.” Vegas’ voice was like the rumble of distant thunder.
“Heard you wanted to see me.”
“Yowsah.”
“Take a seat.”
Vegas sat down with a grunt. He wore faded jeans, Texas cowboy boots and a gray and black cowboy shirt with pearl snaps. “I gots to get outa there,” he said. He meant Narco. “I am being driven up the fuckin’ wall.”
“Sallyson?” He was the captain.
“You mean Captain Ahab.” Vegas snorted. “The fuckin’ bastard’s ready for the funny farm.” He leaned forward, his elbows on his long thighs. “Look, Lew, I want in here. Homicide.”
Croaker looked at his friend. He had known Vegas for a long time. They had been hooked up in plenty of wild busts; did each other favors all the time and never did one lightly. “Finnigan’s not an easy sonovabitch to take, my man,” Croaker said seriously. “He is one mean motherfucker.”
“Don’t make no nevermind to me, Jack,” Vegas said. “Long as I get away from Narco—those boys ain’t funny no more.”
Croaker squinted up at him. “Let’s see. Homicide’s not the only answer. Why, you could slip right into Vice, no trouble at all.”
Vegas’ face looked pained. “Sheeit! Sure, I could make a bundle, takin’ my part of the grease each month. Only trouble is, you sawed-off sonovabitch, those fuckers don’t allow no black man in on the big-time scam, you dig? They don’ want me over there.”
“Well, Vegas, I sure as hell don’t know whether Finnigan would want you either.”
“You know he’s an okay motherfucker when it comes to skin, Jack. Wassamatter, don’t you want to work with me?”
Croaker laughed. “I sure as hell would love it but right now the old man ain’t too pleased with me.”
“Shit! That ain’t no big thing. You know how he is. Next time you land a big one an’ the mayor hands him another bronze pin, he’ll be back kissin’ yo’ white ass.”
Croaker grinned. “Maybe so. Maybe so.”
“Ain’t no two ways about it, Jack.”
Croaker longed to tell Vegas about the Didion case: his suspicions and what he was working on. It was only procedure, after all—you needed a backup in any operation—but he knew that he could not do it. Not that he did not trust the man—they had saved each other’s lives too many times for trust ever to be a factor. It was unfair to the other man. It was one thing for Croaker to put himself in departmental jeopardy, quite another to rope someone else in unwittingly.
Croaker reached out, slapped the other’s leg. “Okay, you got it. I’ll ask Finnigan soon’s I think the times’s right and we got a chance of him not biting my head off.”
Vegas gave him a wide grin. “I dig. I dig.” He got up, towering over Croaker. “You lay it on him an’ we’ll see what pops up. Meanwhile, this is one nigger that’s got to hit the streets again. Sallyson’s given us all quotas to fill, dig? Sheeit!” He turned and waved. “Later.”
“Lay one on for me,” Croaker said.
Vegas smiled. “Only on the prettiest one, Jack.”
“I don’t know, Nick, it seems as if I’ve been here for a hundred years.” Vincent looked down at the peanut he was shelling. “It’s funny but Tokyo seems like a dream to me, nothing more.”
“You ought to go back, then. If only for a vacation.”
“Yeah, I suppose I should.” He popped the peanut into his mouth.
They walked down the tired stone steps into the Central Park Zoo. They strolled over hexagonal tiles, smelling the mingled musk of the animals in the heat. They walked north, toward the Monkey House.
“But I won’t. I know that now.”
“There’s nothing stopping you. Nothing at all.”
Vincent shook his head. They went down the stone steps to the plaza. On their left, beyond the great empty cage meant to house the avians, they could see the Seal Pond, where now several new sea lions dove and dashed alongside the elderly female, the lone survivor of happier years here. “It’s my family, Nick. My sisters. If I went back, I would have to see them. Duty. I can’t face them. Not now. Not after what I’ve become.”
Near the Monkey House a swarthy man with a thick mustache and a sailor’s hat stood next to a pair of green metal cylinders. He made helium balloons in front of the wide eyes of a group of children. Each time he did it, it seemed like a giant sucking in his breath.
“What have you become?”
The other turned his head. “That’s just it. I don’t know anymore. But I’m not what I once was. I’ve been assimilated; I feel as if I’ve been corrupted by this place. My values have changed. The traditions are crumbling around me.” There was a crowd in front of the gorilla cage watching delightedly as the family inside was hosed down by a female attendant. The mother reached out and, putting her palm against the water, sprayed the onlookers. There were squeals and the crowd broke apart momentarily. Laughing, they surged back toward the cage. Next door, the haughty orangutan looked on unperturbed, studying the odd creatures through the bars of his cage as if for research for a book.
“Come on,” Nicholas said lightly. “I remember when we first met. You, Terry and me. It was at Michita, remember? We were all kind of lost then—all in the same way. Which is why, I suppose, we all coalesced at that spot.” He smiled, or tried to at least. “A bit of home.” He shook his head. “But what was it that brought us together? Was it merely that we were all slightly homesick? I don’t think so.”
“Eileen used to say that it was the martial spirit which linked us. Like a magical umbilical. I think she must have thought we were like children in that way.”
Nicholas shook his head. “No. You’re wrong there. She respected that in us. She didn’t—I suspect couldn’t—understand it. But she recognized its power and would not interfere. That was why she always declined to come when the three of us got together. She knew she would be out of her element even though we would make every effort to make her feel comfortable. Terry told me once that she said she thought she’d only inhibit us and she was right.”
“I don’t know,” Vincent said. “It all seems so far away to me now as if we were talking about the customs of Finland. I’m not sure whether I understand it anymore.”
“That’s just talk—so many meaningless words. The way a Westerner would think. Open your mind and you’ll still feel it. Being here can’t make it go away.” He seemed to be telling himself as well as Vincent. “We were born in the land of the martial spirit. It binds us more powerfully—timelessly—to one another than a blood bond. What has been taught us will never leave us, you know that. You’re still the same person, at the core, who got off that JAL plane twelve years ago.”
“Oh no, I’m not. Not by a long stretch. I don’t talk the same, I don’t think the same way. America has changed me and the process seems irreversible. I can never go back. I no longer belong to Japan and I don’t feel like I belong here. The West has taken something very valuable from me, snatched it away while I wasn’t looking.”
“You can get it back. It’s not too late.”
Vincent looked at him, put his hands in his pockets and walked on. They were near the arch on top of which perched the famous clock that chimed in each hour with a parade of animals dancing in a semicircle. Beyond was the Children’s Zoo, its bright laughter and clip-clop of hastily running feet.
“I haven’t told anyone this, not even the police. I got a dead-line call the night Terry and Ei were murdered.” He looked up. “But the more I think about it, the more certain I am that I did hear something, after all. Some music.”
“Do you remember what it was?”
“Yeah. I’m pretty sure it was Mancini.” He did not have to add that Mancini was Eileen’s favorite composer.
Vincent shivered. “It was like Terry was calling to me from beyond the grave.” He lifted a hand hastily. “I know. I know. I don’t believe in that kind of thing. But, damn it! It was as if he was trying to tell me who did it.”
“You mean he knew the murderer?”
Vincent shrugged. “Maybe I’m making too much out of it. I don’t know anymore. I just wish—I wish you had been in the city that night, that’s all. Christ, they were your friends, too!”
Nicholas said nothing, stared at the smiling children eating ices, sticking out their patinaed tongues at the solemn apes. He wished he felt something. Grief was a useful emotion; better that than carrying it around with you like a hunchback. He felt an abrupt stillness as if he were at the eye of a raging hurricane. Safe and protected, he nevertheless was witness to the devastation going on all around him. Was there a way to stop it? He knew a way, most definitely, but he was reluctant to take it. Vincent was still looking at him, as if by his gaze alone he would wrench some confession from Nicholas’ bowels. It had to be done, then. As he knew it from the moment the deal had been proposed. There was obligation; there was duty. Vincent was right. They were his friends.
Vincent touched his arm. “Sorry, old friend,” he said. “It’s me. I’m on edge. You can see it. Jesus, it’s not fair to take it out on you.” He smiled thinly. “You see how Westernized I’ve become.”
Nicholas returned the smile with more warmth than he felt. “No. You were right. Neither of us has forgotten the importance of obligation and duty.”
“Listen, Croaker’s invited me to dinner. Why don’t you join us? At the place.”
“All right.” Nicholas nodded. “I’d like that.”
Vincent glanced at his watch. “Back to the salt mines. See you later.”
Nicholas searched through the park for a phone, finally went out on Fifth Avenue. He called Justine. Doc Deerforth answered.
“What’s the matter?” Nicholas said. His heart was racing.
“A slight accident. Nothing to worry about. But I think you ought to come out if your work permits.”
“What happened?”
“Justine was caught in the undertow. She’s all right.”
“Are you certain that’s what it was?”
“Reasonably. What do you mean?”
“Were there other people around? Did anyone see anything suspicious?”
“There were plenty of people. A neighbor helped drag her out of the surf. No one mentioned anything else.” “Can you stay with her until I get there? I’ll take the first train out.” He looked at his watch.
“Sure. There’s nothing pressing. My service knows where I am. But if there’s an emergency—”
“I understand. Doc—tell her I’ll be there.”
“When she wakes up. Don’t worry.”
He hung up and hailed a cab, took it to Penn Station. Downstairs at the Long Island Rail Road counter he bought a ticket, found that he had twenty-five minutes to spare. He called Tomkin. There was a considerable delay. He stared out at the passing parade of people, scanning unconsciously. A pair of teenagers struggled with enormous backpacks and, just behind them, a young woman stood against a pillar waiting impatiently to be met. He wondered whether it was her boss who was late.
“Nicholas?” The voice came crisply into his ear.
“Tomkin.”
“I’m glad you called. Have you thought about my offer?”
