Ninja, p.49
Ninja, page 49
Nicholas thought about what Croaker had told him of Gelda and he had to smile to himself. What would Tomkin do when he found out that Croaker and his daughter were seeing each other? Apoplexy might be an accurate term.
“That bastard’s got a hard-on for me and I’ve got no idea why. He’s got this crazy notion that just because I was balling Angela Didion, I killed her.”
Nicholas watched him, rubbing the electronic bug back and forth between the calloused pads of his fingers.
Tomkin snorted derisively through his nostrils, giving Nicholas the image of a horse rearing. “Hell, that broad got around, you know? Doing people she didn’t even know. Got a kick out of that, giving rim jobs to guys she pulled off the street. Just like that—Boom! Only it wasn’t always guys, see. The broad was nuts. Definitely nuts. If I’d’ve known about that—you know, a closet lezzie—I wouldn’t have—hell, she disguised it well enough.” He waved a hand and gold glinted. “Anyway, it’s all ancient history now—that’s how I see it. But that cop won’t let it alone, you know? He’s like a fucking dog with an old bone nobody wants but him.”
“He’s doing his job.”
“He ain’t doing his job!” Tomkin cried. “That’s the whole goddamned issue.” He pounded the table. “The Angela Didion thing is a dead issue for everyone on the entire fucking New York Police Force except Croaker. What’s he think he’s got? A calling from God? Well, I’m telling you, he’s got nothing. I got his number; loves to see his name in the papers.” He swiveled back and forth in his chair, very fast, as if he had a surplus of nervous energy. “Goddamned glory hound. He’s not gonna ride me to any headlines. He needs to be taught a lesson, that’s all.” He glanced up, no longer half-talking to himself. “What about this guy—the ninja?”
“Well, that’s what I came to talk to you about. So far, he’s been setting the pace. What I think we have to do now is reverse the situation. We have a chance if we can control the environment. We have to, in other words, be on the battleground before him.”
“So? Set it up. That’s what I’m paying you for, isn’t it?”
“It’s not that simple, unfortunately.”
“Well, do what you have to do. I don’t care what it is. I want him out of the way. Permanently.”
“It involves you directly.”
“Of course it does. He’s been sent here to kill me.”
“He’s here to kill me, too.”
“What?”
“I know this man. There is an old score to be settled. It’s nothing to do with you.”
“I see.”
“Except that it may lead us to his entrapment.”
“How?”
“Through one of his bugs.” Nicholas lifted the tiny disk so Tomkin could see it clearly. “You see, this is currently inactive. It’s one of the new contact type, which simply means that once it is reapplied to a surface, it becomes active again.”
A gleam came into Tomkin’s icy eyes; deceit was a currency he understood. “You mean—”
“We reactivate it. And use it. Chances are he’ll believe there’s been a minor dysfunction and—”
“What if he’s smarter than that? This guy’s an expert. I’ve heard stories about ninja—”
“I don’t,” said Nicholas, “think it will matter at all. He wants us both and, if he thinks he can get us together, he’ll take the chance, even if there’s the suspicion of a trap. It’s one I’ve set up, you see. It’s a challenge and he cannot back down without losing an awful lot of face. That he will not do.”
“It amounts to inviting him over,” Tomkin said slowly.
“Yes.”
The blue eyes regarded him cannily. Nicholas could almost hear the sound of his mind ticking over, weighing probabilities just as if he were making a computer-assisted business decision. But then, in a curious kind of way, it was a business decision.
“Let’s do it.” His voice rang unhesitatingly.
Afterward, as Nicholas detached the bug and dropped it into the thick cotton bed he had fashioned for it in one of the desk drawers, Tomkin said, “Can everything be arranged by the night after next?”
“There won’t be any problem.”
“Good.” He picked up the phone as Nicholas turned to leave. “Hey,” he said, “you didn’t tell me you were having problems with Justine.”
Nicholas froze, silently cursing Tomkin. Had he been spying on his daughter again? How else would he know?
“Hit a nerve, didn’t I?” He laughed. “You got a damn good poker face, but I don’t need to see your expression to know.”
“Just what do you know?”
Tomkin shrugged. “Just that she’s in the city; out with another guy. Don’t know who he is but I will soon enough.” He dropped his eyes, began to dial. “It’s too bad, really. I would’ve liked you two to stay together. You’re good for her. Now I’m afraid she’s gone back to her old ways.”
“Where is she?”
“Hello? Yes—”
“Tomkin—” Nicholas’ tone cut through the space between them.
“Hold the line a moment—” Tomkin put his palm over the receiver. “What did you say?” His voice had turned a touch treacly.
“Where is she?”
“At a discothèque. On West Forty-sixth Street.” He rummaged with one hand on his desk top. “I know I have the name of it somewhere. At least, I had it earlier…. Ah, here it is.” He read off a slip of paper, giving Nicholas the name. His eyes lifted. “Know it?”
“I don’t go to discos, normally,” Nicholas said. His voice was as tight as a coiled spring. Across from him, Tomkin looked as if he had devoured a particularly tasty sweet.
“No, I suppose not. Otherwise you might have run into her before this. It’s an old hangout of hers. Perhaps you ought to try it sometime.” He turned away into the phone in dismissal.
For a time he spoke as part of a conversation that had no meaning, listening with his free ear to the sound of the elevator’s doors sighing shut, the quiet hum of the machine as it took Nicholas down to the lobby far below.
When that sound had ceased, he reached out one hand and opened a desk drawer. Without turning his head, he replaced the receiver of the phone.
He stared down at the bit of plastic and metal with a kind of rapt fascination. A light line of sweat broke out on his forehead, the way it did every time he made a major business decision. His heart thudded and his pulse rate increased.
He licked his lips and, carefully, deliberately, he brought the bug out of its bed and attached it to the side of the desk.
He swung around, away from it so that he looked out on the winking late-night face of the city. West. The entire country was before him though, of course, he could not see it. At length he began to speak.
“I suppose,” he said, almost meditatively, “it depends on how much you want him. But what if—what if I could guarantee Nicholas Linnear. I could hand him to you on a platter. As easy as pie, yes?” He swung around and now he addressed directly the bug hanging like a bloated spider. “I’ll bet that’s worth a lot to you. As much as a life. What do you say?”
He reached out and detached the bug, returning it to its drawer, precisely as Nicholas had placed it. Tomkin was a meticulous man.
Then he sat back with his hands behind his head, waiting for the phone call he was certain would come. The fully loaded pistol clinging in its holster to his damp shirt beneath his suit jacket felt heavy and warm and infinitely comforting.
In matters like this, he thought, one never knew.
“Someone wants to see you.”
The phone had rung just after Croaker had walked in but, despite that and despite the fact that she had already put the machine on, Gelda had picked it up herself.
She had come into the living room to answer the door and both of them were still there in the semi-darkness. She watched him now as she listened to the voice in her ear, as he stood in the oblique bars of light and dark so that they climbed his legs to just above his knees. His face was illumined by the fat wedge of lemon light from the bedroom.
“G, are you there?”
“Yes, Pear.”
“I thought you had drifted away for a moment. Have you popped anything?”
“Not tonight, no.”
He seemed afflicted with a weariness that went far beyond a lack of sleep. It was as if all the endless hours in the office and on the streets and in the courtrooms had built up a sly accretion impossible to discard which now lay heavily upon him like a gray and ageless second skin.
“Just a professional question,” Pear said, mistaking Gelda’s silence as an expression of annoyance, “that’s all Seeing as how there’s—”
“Not tonight.”
“I know I haven’t given you any notice. That’s because it’s the senator.”
Gelda knew what that meant. “Get him someone else.”
“G,” Pear said slowly and patiently, “he wants you. There is no one else. You know how he is.”
He stood there in the half-light like some mythic animal come to life; a creature someone had mistakenly dressed in human clothes. He seemed only partially aware of her.
“The answer’s still no.” She could not be more aware of him.
“And what of Dare when she comes to town again?” Pear had obviously caught something in Gelda’s tone of voice.
And, abruptly, Gelda knew that she had answered the phone because he was here. “No. Even for Dare. Those days are gone. I am out.”
“I see.” There was no hurt in Pear’s voice, no hint of recrimination.
Gelda felt light-headed, as giddy as if she had just consumed an entire bottle of Dom Perignon. She also felt happier than she ever had before.
“We’ll miss you, G. I’ll miss you.” It was like Pear, at a moment like this, not to mention the clients.
“I’ll never forget you,” Gelda whispered.
A soft laugh. “I should hope not. Good-bye, G.”
Gelda put down the receiver, went over to Croaker. “What happened?” She put her arm around him, walking him into the bedroom.
In the warm lamplight, she saw the dried blood on his hands. “Won’t you tell me?” she said in a voice calmer than she felt. “You look so sad.”
“I’ve just come from seeing two families. A pregnant wife and a mother of three small kids.” He looked at her despairingly. “Have you ever had to tell someone that the person she cares most about is dead?” He took a deep breath. “Well, I have. But never before when I knew those deaths were my fault.” He stared at his brown hands, stained as if they had been dipped in dye, crusty as if covered in sea salt.
“Why don’t we start at the beginning,” she said softly, taking his hands in hers, drawing him forward. “The blood has to come off first.”
The place was all mirrored chrome and black smoked glass, multi-leveled like the hanging gardens with floors of translucent glass under which colored lights flashed in time to the music.
The air vibrated with percussion and electric voices, strung like a Christmas tree with garlands of perfume and perspiration and burning pot.
Somewhere was the bar, obscured behind a forest of raised arms, swirling hair, shiny mindlessly concentrating faces. Dance dance dance: the imperative was clear, treading an atavistic path, the primitive’s tribal revivals, an ecstatic communal orgy, trivialized to the point where all possible consequence was nullified.
Like moving through a dream. All senses assailed relentlessly until distortion grew like weeds in the abandoned front yard of reality. Every step forward carried with it the burden of two in retrograde. He thought of Alice down the rabbit’s hole and wondered if Carroll could have had this in mind. Only Coleridge might have dreamsmoked this up; it seemed the habitat of a damaged archangel.
At the bar there were leather-padded seats on which no one sat, a line of jackdaws ironically eyeing a busy cornfield in summer.
Nicholas sat and ordered a drink out of form. He was not thirsty. He watched the lamé glitter in the spiraling lights, the neon shoes with heels impossibly high. Multicolored eye makeup seemed to cover half the faces of women who turned toward him again and again in the course of the dance. Flesh was entirely incidental, it seemed; arms and breasts and thighs were painted like lizard skin. Their expressions recalled to him vivid scenes from Metropolis.
He was searching for Justine but in this madhouse it seemed useless: like running after Yukio in Kumamoto. Doors closing in his face as fast as they were opened.
Then what Sam had said to him earlier in the evening began to seep through into his consciousness. What difference did it make what he was now as long as he knew what he wanted to be; what he wanted. It was no longer 1963, part of another lifetime. But he knew that he would never truly be free until he understood it all. Without understanding, he knew, assimilation was impossible. The kijin—the goblins of his past—would be appeased by nothing less.
“What are you doing? C’mon, c’mon, c’mon and dance.”
She was a sloe-eyed blonde in a lavender crepe de chine dress which showed off her ample breasts to maximum effect.
“Don’t you wanna”—her bird’s head swayed seductively—“get in the swing? C’mon, c’mon.”
“No, I don’t think—”
“—apricorn, right? You must be. Dour.” She pronounced it dower. “All Capricorns are dour. But—”
“I’m not here to dance,” he said, feeling foolish. “I’m here to find someone.”
“—do it together.”
“You don’t understand. There is a woman here. A woman.”
“So?” She took his hand, crimson nails gleaming, changing colors, lines of light flacking. “Let’s dance, dance, dance until we find her.”
He broke away from her grip.
“Don’t you want to have fun?” she cried after him.
Went up to the second level, blues and greens like a grotto of waving kelp. Synchronization had begun to set in and he felt his pulse throbbing to the beat of the music flailing the air with the abandon of a reaper at his wheat field.
And, at last, he saw her on the highest level, partly obscured by the scaffolding of the circular staircase. He had to wait several minutes, the narrow path clotted and blocked: dancing up, dancing down.
Disappearing in a wave of arms and heads bobbing and he went up the iron stairs two at a time. Black leather walls like a padded cell, smoked glass far too fragile for the height: what if someone should stumble in thrall and fall? What then?
Light in reds and yellows, turning white and gray against the black leather, disconcerting, like seeing a color TV show on an ancient set; everything somehow just slightly out of phase.
There she was. With a tall broad-shouldered man with lank black hair and the sallow skin of a Puerto Rican. He wore a sleeveless undershirt with a red, blue and gold Point Beer button, high-waisted deep red trousers.
“Justine.”
Her head whipped around and light caught at the crimson flecks in her near eye. Watched him silently until her partner whirled her around in a blur.
“Justine.”
“What’a’you want, man? Don’t hassle my chick, hey. Keep cool, okay?”
“Justine. Look at me.” He reached out.
“Hey, man. Hey, hey. No way to act. You ain’t listenin’. Drift away now. She don’t want no part o’ you.”
Noted in passing, the dilated pupils, the reddened nostrils.
“Why don’t you go to the men’s room and do some blow?”
“Now, hey man. I’m through talkin’ to you.” The click unheard in the throbbing of the leather room but the gleam of the switchblade was unmistakable.
“Justine.”
“Don’t talk to her, man.” One shoulder lowered. “Now this’s for you.”
He was very fast and he knew how to use it, trained in the street where there are no rules except the need to survive. This kind could be far more dangerous than the professional because of the unpredictability. The eight-inch blade could rip open his abdomen in a fraction of a second.
Blocked the initial thrust with his left forearm and, pivoting, slammed the edge of his right hand into the Puerto Rican’s hipbone. There was no sound save for the music; their violent motions, dancers’ movements assimilated into the fierce kineticism of the leather room.
The Puerto Rican’s mouth opened wide, his head thrown back in precisely the pose of the man in Munch’s The Scream. He moved to right himself and Nicholas jammed his shoe against the outer edge of the other’s right instep. All balance fled him and he pitched sideways, between two startled couples. His outflung arm smashed someone in the face as she whirled by.
It all might have been a scene from a comic opera but Nicholas did not feel like laughing.
Justine looked from him to the fallen man, clutching his hip. The switchblade lay on the mottled floor like a centerpiece at a bizarre wedding which no one seemed to want to pick up and take home.
“Justine—”
“How did you find me? What do you want from me?”
“Justine.”
“I can’t take any more. Please, please, please. Can’t you see I’ve been crying—”
“—over you. Over you.”
“Justine. I came here—”
“And I don’t care anymore if you know it.”
“—to tell you I love you.”
Tears rolled silently from her eyes. The air was as thick as honey with music: aching voices, insinuating rhythms, erotic percussion. “Please.” Had she heard him?
“I love you.” They touched in a kind of radiation of energy and misspent emotion. “Justine, I—”
“…cried in the sand in front of your house with the night and the sea and that’s never happened to me before.” And he thought, lying on the long pale sea-foam sofa with Justine’s long warm body next to his: You’re wrong, Croaker. I can feel. I do feel.
“Don’t be ashamed of it.”
“I’m not.” The first faint crumbling of his past, sliding downward to be buried at last beneath the churning waves of the sea. “I wouldn’t have told you otherwise.”
