Now the shadow was at the end of the first-floor fire escape landing and DeLong sighted carefully, using both hands, one cupped over the other to steady his aim He fixed on the point of the access to the hanging ladder. His forefinger tightened on the trigger. Wait. Tidal breathing. Wait. Now. Here he comes. Shots, three in rapid fire.

  Nothing happened.

  DeLong raised his gun, puzzled. Where was the bastard?

  Then he picked up movement on the street in the periphery of his vision. Impossible, he thought. How the hell had he made

  the drop without using the ladder? And without a sound?

  He swivelled, legs spread, aiming the .38 in the classic pose he had been taught so well at the Academy. Silence. No movement. He tried to recall the path of the motion and extrapolate ...

  Felt the presence so close that he was startled. He dropped to one knee, fired fast and accurately on reflex. But in the space of that last instant he saw the figure leap at him. The left hand was extended and DeLong could make out a short black-wood stick, blunt-ended, as big around as his own nightstick. He braced for an overhand blow and thus was totally unprepared for the horizontal thrust. He was dumbfounded by the useless gesture.

  The rounded end just touched the cloth of his uniform over his heart. It was only then that he jerked to the searing pain lancing through him as the seven-inch stiletto blade, powered by a high-thrust steel spring, shot out from the end of the wooden stick, puncturing from front to back. It speared his heart, went through one lung and DeLong was dead before he hit the ground.

  The flying form was by him, veiled by the first gout of blood, heard DeLong's last gasp which, to the policeman's dying brain, sounded like the loudest shout in the world.

  Nicholas led Croaker back through the apartment. Women, half-clothed, stood in the doorways, staring curiously at them.

  Ah Ma, having received the warrant papers from Willow, stood stone-faced with Penny at her side. Willow was in the back suite the Japanese had used, seeing to the boy and trying to soothe the girl's shattered nerves. Willow is wonderful in a crisis, Ah Ma thought, resignedly. The way I used to be. She sighed silently. I do not want to go in there, she thought. Once it would have been the first place I'd run. To help. But no more. Times have changed and so have I. She put one arm around Penny's shoulders, as much to keep the girl beside her as to reassure her.

  'You should have caught him,' Ah Ma said in Mandarin to Nicholas. 'Now he may come back here. He won't be happy. His security was broken.'

  'He won't be back,' Nicholas reassured her. 'He has already killed the leak.'

  They had to go out by the front, the long way around, surely, because in the dark and without radio linkage they could not chance egress via the back window. Gunfire still came to them, sporadic and muffled by the intervening walls of the building. In the hallway a dog was barking and someone one flight down had turned up a TV set, perhaps to drown out the noise from outside.

  'Christ!' Croaker said, rubbing at his eyes as they pounded down the stairs. 'What a goddamned mess.'

  More shots as they emerged into the hot sticky night and they , ran down Doyers, heading for Pell Street.

  They saw the blue-and-white first, slewed at an angle. Nicholas saw the two bodies immediately. One was outlined in the foreground, the other cloaked in a spider's web of shadows at the end of the street. He paused, his eyes searching from left to right and back again.

  Croaker pushed past him, his gun at the ready, but checked when he saw the first body. Slowly, warily he went towards it in a semi-crouch and, on one knee, turned it carefully over. He recognized DeLong at once, was appalled at the amount of blood. He searched in vain for any sign of life. His hand came away soaked.

  He got up and, crabwise, scuttled quickly down the street, checked Binghamton's cooling body. He stood up and bolstered his gun. He came back, passed Nicholas without a word and slid in behind the wheel of the patrol car.

  He called dispatch, asking for the meat wagon and the associate M.E. on call. Then he sent out an A.P.B. He was still on the phone when Nicholas came up, leaning on the frame of the open door.

  'He's long gone, I'm afraid.'

  Croaker cradled the receiver, put his head onto the back of the seat, closing his eyes. 'They were my best team.' His eyes snapped open and his big fist pounded the steering wheel so hard it jumped. 'The best goddamned team!' He sighed. 'I'm sorry now I didn't listen to you. I don't know who that guy out there is but -'

  'Lew,' Nicholas said, 'slide over. I want to talk to you before the crowd comes.'

  Croaker turned to look at him as he slid over to the passenger's side. Far off, they could hear the wailing rise and fall of a siren. It could have been an ambulance.

  'I know who the ninja is.'

  Croaker sat perfectly still for a moment.

  'How long have you known?'

  Nicholas blew out a breath as if that would relieve the heaviness he suddenly felt. The deaths in the present had combined with the deaths in his past, rushing forward to engulf him once again. He felt very tired and very sad.

  'Not long, really. In the hallway outside Ah Ma's.'

  'I see.'

  And then he told Croaker everything, spewing it all out as if that might cleanse his soul, relieve him of a burden which, he felt now, he had been carrying far too long.

  'Do you mean to tell me,' Croaker said, when he had finished, 'that Saigo isn't after Tomkin at all? That he's after you?'

  'Yes and no,' Nicholas said wearily. 'He is going to kill Tom-kin all right, unless we stop him, but I believe he took on the job to get to me also. It's the only way all of the killings make sense.'

  'I see that, of course, but this is like a blood vendetta.'

  'It's a matter of honour.'

  'But you must have known it was coming.' The siren's wail was louder now, a cry in the night, and the sound of excited voices pitched back at them off the brick walls. 'Weren't you afraid of -?'

  Nicholas gave him a wan smile as he shook his head. Time to go, he thought. 'I am prepared for it. I've been prepared for a long time now.' He climbed out of the car. Every muscle seemed to ache and his head throbbed as if it were in a vice. He leaned in so that Croaker could hear him as the blue-and-white drew up, followed by the ambulance. The street lit up red and white, red and white like the entrance to an amusement park.

  'You see, Lew,' he said with infinite slowness, 'I am a ninja, too.'

  'Nick, wait!'

  But he was already walking past the oncoming people, crowding into the street, into the glare of the dense night.

  'Sam.'

  Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. He had never said that word in his life yet he thought it now. 'Yes?' 'Sam.'

  'Who is this?' 'Are you still my rabbi?'

  'Oy, Nick. Nick! Is it really you?' Goldman's voice was light.

  'It's me.'

  'My God, how are you?'

  'All right. How's Edna?'

  'Edna? Edna's fine. Dying to see you. Where are you?' Silence. 'Nick, are you all right?'

  'To be honest, no."

  'Just a minute. What...?' The sound of muffled voices came to him, a conversation from another world. A world where there-were homes and families, children. Mortgage payments and, perhaps, a two-week trip to Europe in the spring. What was he doing here, anyway?

  'Listen. Are you in the city ? Edna says to come right up. It's a Friday night. She's made chicken soup. With lokshen. Your favourite, remember?'

  'I remember.' He remembered everything now.

  'So come over. We'll eat. We'll talk.' Pause. 'You'll make Edna very happy. She's been worried about you.'

  He rested his head against the acoustic panel of the booth. Traffic raced by him, just beyond his reach.

  'Yes,' he said after a time. 'Okay. I'll be over.'

  He hung up and hailed a cab. The Goldmans lived in the Dakota on Seventy-second and Central Park West. They took the Bowery, which turned into Third Avenue, all the way up to Forty-second Street where the taxi turned left, heading cross-town to Eighth Avenue.

  Just after Broadway, Nicholas leaned forward, tapped the intervening plastic partition. 'I've changed my mind. I'll get off here.' He paid and got out.

  He had been idly staring put of the left-side window as they passed the long line of movie marquees along that tawdry street when he had seen the film titles.

  He watched the two-way traffic, crossed to the south side of the street. He walked west, past a couple of the new-era glass and chrome porn shops, proudly announcing 'Couples Welcome'. The doors were thrown open in one and a tall black man in wide hat and tight green trousers lounged in the doorway. 'Hits,' he murmured, 'loose joints, coke, speed. Quality stuff.'

  Now the movie marquees came one after another in a seemingly unending line on both sides of the street. Most were porn houses but one, the one Nicholas had seen from the cab window, was not. Here there was a kung fu triple bill. Two of the films starred Bruce Lee.

  Nicholas dug out a buck-fifty and went inside. The place smelt old and musty. It was lighter than was normal in most theatres. There was a crowd of black and Puerto Rican kids clamouring around the soda machine at the back.

  He took a seat. The place was almost filled. On the screen Bruce Lee was talking earnestly with a couple of evil-looking Japanese in dubbed English. The audience was noisy, restless for the action sequences. Dialogue they did not appreciate.

  Nicholas sat back, watching Lee for a time. The years had not diminished his aura-. His spirit seemed to leap off the screen, making the most slipshod productions worth watching.

  Nicholas recalled the first time they had met. It had been in Hong Kong, ironically, after the period Lee had spent in Hollywood, working as a bit player in films and TV and teaching stars enough of the martial arts to get by in front of a camera.

  He was beginning to be somewhat of a star in his own right then. They had taken to each other immediately but time and logistics had worked against them and they had never seen each other again.

  Lee's death had come as a shock to Nicholas. Not that someone would try to kill him - he knew enough about Lee by that time to understand that the man's uncompromising nature had become a thorn in some decidedly unsavoury sides - but that an attempt had succeeded. He had always wondered how it had been done; now he thought he knew.

  Outside, it was still stifling and, in this place of hot lights, fast food, dirty dope and even dirtier deals, more so than elsewhere.

  It took him fifteen minutes to find an empty cab and half that time to reach the Dakota; there was little traffic.

  He had stayed at the decaying theatre just long enough to catch one of Lee's gorgeously choreographed action sequences, motivated, as usual, by revenge. Tonight there seemed nothing artificial about that.

  Goldman, dapper as ever in a pale blue pinstripe shirt and midnight-blue linen slacks, met him at the door. He smiled warmly when he saw Nicholas, extending a firm hand. 'Nick. We were getting worried about you. He turned, still in the doorway. 'Edna, it's him.' He pulled Nicholas inside, pushed a rum on the rocks into his hand. 'Here. It looks like you need this.'

  Edna, a dark-haired chubby woman, bustled into the living room from the swing door to the large kitchen. She beamed, raised her hands. 'Tateleh!' She kissed Nicholas on both cheeks. She had the kind of incandescent inner warmth that made mere physical beauty irrelevant. 'Where have you been so long, you haven't come to see us?' Her voice held just the right balance between love and reproach.

  He smiled thinly. 'It's good to see you both.'

  'That's it,' she said as if she had discovered a rare artifact. 'You've lost weight. Come." She took him by the hand. 'We eat first. Whatever it is you want to talk to Sam about can wait for a full stomach.'

  They ate in the kitchen with the yellow and beige wallpaper and the old West Side fixtures, the oval table of fine-grained mahogany richly waxed, covered with a beautiful embroidered white-on-white tablecloth. A brass Menorah stood on a wall shelf above the table, at its centre.

  Afterwards, as Edna cleared the dishes, Sam nodded silently to Nicholas and they excused themselves. Edna kissed them both before they left. 'Whatever is wrong,' she told him with absolute faith, 'you can fix it. Right, Sam? Am I right?'

  'You're always right.' He ushered Nicholas into the living room.

  Beige and pale green predominated. Edna despised brilliant primaries, perhaps because she saw her childhood on 189th Street in those colours. The effect was a soothing one, like being in a cool forest during the heat of the day.

  They sat on the beige velvet couch and Sam put his feet up on a matching ottoman. An antique clock ticked lightly from its owl-like perch on the white marble mantelpiece. A great bunch of dried eucalyptus in a pale pink ceramic vase stood within the grate, wafting its pungent scent into the room. There was a Utrillo on the opposite wall and, on another, a small Dali. In their bedroom, on pale blue walls, were a Picasso and a Calder which, of course, Edna detested. They were all originals but they were displayed with a pleasing lack of ostentation.

  'It has come back,' Nicholas said softly. 'All my past, like a great tidal wave."

  Goldman reached for a hardwood box, took out a cigar, lit it slowly.

  'I've lost the present somewhere along the line. I no longer know where I am.'

  He deliberately blew the blue smoke away from Nicholas. 'Nicholas, as Shakespeare so cleverly put into Ophelia's mouth, "We know what we are, but we know not what we may be."'

  'Sam, I didn't come here for homilies!' he exploded.

  'Nor did I mean to give you any.' He took the cigar out of his mouth, laid it on a crystal ashtray. 'Look, it is totally unreasonable to expect to know or understand everything about yourself. The human being is such a complex animal that we have to be content to muddle through things as best we can. Some days, it just doesn't seem nearly enough. At other times...' He shrugged with some equanimity.

  'I understand all that. But you're the expert on history. I am only partly a Jew. I haven't had the training. I don't -'

  'It has nothing,' Goldman said seriously, 'at all to do with training. One learns the meaning of being a Jew just as one learns the meaning of being a human being - by living life, not by learning the Torah.

  'It comes from what you feel inside and the important thing is that you do not deny what is inside you. Doubt and fears; uncertainty of the present and the future all stem from that. Your self must be free to go in whichever direction it must go.

  'The spirit flies, Nicholas - it is the only thing we possess which can. It is a sin to tie it down, to deny your spirit its breath. Life is nothing without it. We merely survive, from day to day, in a kind of unthinking limbo.

  'Does this answer your question?'

  In the night-silence of the tower on Park Avenue, he sat with Raphael Tomkin. At the moment, Tomkin was on the telephone. Somewhere in the world, it was always some time between nine and five and that meant business was rolling. Decisions, vital to one subsidiary or another, and thus vital to the corporation as a whole, required the' mind of the mover and the shaker. Three continents awaited the outcome of such trans-Atlantic or tram-Pacific conversations.

  While Tomkin talked on in mega-figures, a kind of semi-secret corporate shorthand, Nicholas looked at the tiny bit of metal and plastic he held between his fingers. He turned it like a miniature world, though in truth it was only a disk and thus flat, so that it caught the lamplight, its face turning to a slow dazzle.

  Just possibly, he thought, this little piece of the electronicized present could be the key to it all. The past, the present and the future. It could end right here, if he chose. If he chose.

  And he desperately wanted it to be his decision.

  He felt, quite rightly, that Saigo had taken all initiative from him and he felt stripped bare, naked and defenceless because he had not seen what was happening.

  Saigo had been leading him around by the nose until he was dizzy, laughing all the way. It was a technique from the Go Rin No Sho. What was its name? To Hold Down a Pillow. Restrict the enemy's useful actions while encouraging his useless ones. Lead him around as if he had a ring through his nose and, when he is in total confusion, strike.

  'Where've you been?' Tomkin asked, cradling the phone. He looked slightly rumpled at this time of the night, his cream-coloured linen suit wrinkled at the insides of the elbows, his medium-width grey silk knitted tie slightly askew. The flesh of his face had lost the pink glow it maintained for most of the day, seemed pummelled into a kind of uneasy truce - submission was a flat-out impossibility - by the long hours. Lines at the corners of his eyes had become noticeable but they merely made him seem that much more human. Nicholas still felt himself wondering which was the facade.

  'In Chinatown.'

  Tomkin grunted, swivelling round in his high-backed leather chair. His hands played idly across his desk's electronic console as a Greek peasant might fondle his worry beads. 'Chinatown, huh? With that bastard, Croaker, I'll bet.' He stared into Nicholas's face and his eyes, like chips of blue quartz, were merciless. They were sailor's eyes, Nicholas thought. The eyes of a man well seasoned to the sardonic tricks of the sea and the open sky. They were the eyes of a survivor; shipwrecked, his crew drowned, this man would make it onto some beachy shore and, like Crusoe, vanquish time though perhaps not solitude. 'You better not get too friendly with that cop. Just a friendly warning, 'cause I'm waiting for that motherfucker to step one inch out of line. Then I'm gonna break him in two.'

  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.

 

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