Angel Eyes (78 page)

"But don't you see the good he's done? Bernard's opened up the door, and for the first time in decades a new light is shining in."

"But at what cost?" Tori said. "Greg, you don't know how much blood has been spilled because of him."

"I know how much blood has spilled here over the past eighteen months, and how much more would have been spilled without his efforts-and yours."

Tori knew he was right-but she also knew that Bernard had to be taught a lesson. His free reign above the law must be put to an end.

"Tori, at least talk to Dad before you make up your mind," Greg said.

"We'll both talk to him," Tori said. "I'm taking you home."

"No." In the electric silence Greg said, "I'm not going back to America. I can't leave here, not now. There's too much to do. I've made too many friends, bound myself with too many unbreakable ties."

"Greg, you can't mean it!"

"But I do." Seeing her stricken look, he said, "How can I explain it to you?" He thought a moment. "Did Dad ever tell you the story of the Zen Policeman?''

"Yes," Tori said so softly he had to bend close to hear her.

"Well, that's me, Tori. The Zen Policeman, locked away at the crossroads of an eerie corridor, in a strange structure, in an alien land. But I've come there for a reason-believe me I've had enough time to come to understand that-and it's a reason that's larger than I am as an individual."

"But what about our family? What about home?"

"My family will come see me, God willing. And as far as home is concerned, it's no longer here for me. I have another home. It's inside myself now."

Tori began to cry. "Greg, Greg. I've just found you. I don't want to lose you again."

"Ah, Tori. Who are you weeping for? Me? Or yourself?" He put his hand under her chin, lifted her head up. "Don't you see that you can be through living in my shadow?''

She tried to laugh through her tears. "But who'll help me with Mom and Dad? You know I can't cope with them without you."

"You don't mean that, Tori. You never needed me to intercede with Mom and Dad, you just thought you did. It was easier to want my relationship with them, than to fight for your own.'' He kissed her lightly. "This is your life. Tori. Have the courage to live it."

At that moment Russell stuck his head into the room. ''What's taking you so long? I've gotten a reply from Bernard. He wants us back in the States right away."

Irina came out of the shower cubicle with a towel wrapped around her. She looked from Greg to Tori's tear-streaked face. "Is everything all right?" she asked.

"It's just the good-byes," Tori said, wiping away her tears. "I hate long ones.''

She took Russell's hand, stared once more into those angel eyes.

Greg said, "Give my regards to Diana's Garden," as Irina slipped an arm around his shoulders. And then, because he was anxious for her, "You'll talk to Dad. Promise me you will."

Tori said, ''I'll give them both your love."

Just before she turned away, Greg said enigmatically, "Remember the Zen Policeman."

Tori saw the small smile on his face, and wondered at its meaning all during the long flight home.

HOME

LOS ANGELES/STAR TOWN

Tori returned to Los Angeles and Diana's Garden in the midst of a dreadful heat wave that had kept polluted air inverted over the sprawling city for more than a week. Children and people over the age of sixty-five or with breathing disorders were being warned to stay inside. It was a Los Angeles not that much different from the Tokyo they had so recently left.

Russell told her he was staying at the airport to wait for Bernard's flight in from the East Coast. Tori said that she was not going to stay. They sat facing one another for a time in the dimly lit interior of the 727. They both seemed in an emotional as well as a physical limbo. They had slept fitfully on the flight home, both still too tired to feel the full extent of their exhaustion.

At last Russell said, "Just before we landed, we got a fax from Bernard sending us his heartiest congratulations."

''Honestly, I don't know whether to laugh or cry.''

"Me neither."

"I don't understand." Tori looked at him. "After all that's happened, how can you wait for him here, as if it's business as usual?''

"I've still got a job to do."

Russell leaned over, poured himself coffee, stirred in sugar. "After Moscow, we know it isn't so cut and dried, is it?" He sipped some coffee. "Is Bernard guilty? And if so, of what? And is it anything we ourselves aren't guilty of as well? I'm no judge in these matters, Tori, and neither, I suspect, are you. The truth is buried too deeply under conflicting layers of altruism and obsession. In any case, I've got to work things out with Bernard during the debriefing, come to some sort of compromise, or I'll have to quit the Mall."

She smiled. ''At least that's not the career man I used to know talking."

"That Russell Slade is dead." He frowned. "But you should be here when Bernard arrives. He'll be here any minute."

"Debriefing or no debriefing, Bernard can wait," Tori said, kissing him. "I can't. My family comes first now. Besides, I'm not ready yet to confront him. I need some time to get this all in perspective. If I don't know how I feel about him, I'm sure to make a shambles of the debriefing."

Russell said, "Sure," but something in his eyes gave her pause.

"What is it, Russ?"

"Listen," he said, holding on to her, "you're not going to pull one of your patented stunts and disappear over the horizon?"

"No," she said seriously. "I don't have reason to do that anymore."

Still, he would not let her go. "We have so much to say to each other.''

She touched him on the cheek. "Are you afraid we won't have the time?"

Russell poured himself more coffee. "When I was in college, I had a recurring dream about coming to the end of a vast, flat, featureless plain across which I had been walking for years. In front of me was a sheer drop into blackness, and I would wake up, terrified because I did not want to take another step forward." He looked at her. "Now I think I'd prefer stepping over the edge than staying on that flat, featureless plain."

"Then we'll step over it together," Tori said. She threw her arms around him, kissed him good-bye. "We'll have as much time as we need, I promise you.''

She went off the plane. There was a sickly, burnt smell in the brown air, as if all of Los Angeles was on fire. With her diplomatic credentials, she passed quickly through Customs and Immigration. She stopped to get some work done at the Mall facility at the airport. Russell was so mobile he had insisted that the Mall have stations at the airports in Washington, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

It was there that Tori ran into Bernard Godwin. They stood in silence, looking at one another for some time.

"Ah, the prodigal returns," Bernard said. Oddly, he seemed smaller than she remembered. But that patrician countenance had not changed. "Can I buy you a cup of coffee?"

"No."

"I'd like a chance to talk to you."

"Russell's waiting." Tori got her work back. She signed the receipt with Russell's name, thanked the agent.

Bernard started all over again. "You and Russell did one helluva job."

"For you," Tori said at length. "Only for you, Bernard."

"That's nonsense and you know it."

Tori said nothing.

"What's the matter? I gave you everything you wanted: reinstatement, a field command, Russell. I even gave you your brother back."

Bastard, Tori thought. He deserves to be cut off at the knees. And then she told him how Hitasura had used him to further the manufacture and distribution of the supercocaine. She saw the blood drain from Bernard's face by degrees. He put one hand out to steady himself. She did not make a move to help him.

When she was finished, she said, "It's important to remember that there's a price tag for everything, Bernard. Even freedom."

She left him there, shaken and mute. She had thought that telling him would make her feel better. She was wrong.

When Tori arrived at Diana's Garden, Laura Nunn was over at Universal, shooting something called The Black Fox Dossier. It was a spy film. She played the mother of the hero. Very fitting.

On the other hand, to Tori's utter astonishment, Ellis Nunn had taken the day off. He had spent the hour from six to seven in the morning making his essential overseas calls from his den in the huge house. Laura Nunn's limo had picked her up at five to take her to the studio for makeup.

Tori had arrived after her mother had left, but before anyone else was stirring. She had let herself into the house, had left whatever baggage she had in the enormous entrance hall, and had stolen up to bed. She had given her parents no notice of her coming but, as usual, her room was immaculate, ready for her. She collapsed gratefully onto her bed.

When she woke up, she looked out her window, saw her father strolling beside the pool. The sunlight, already red and dripping with heat, fell across his broad shoulders. In a moment he stopped, looked up toward Tori's bedroom window, and she saw him full on.

She was immediately struck by this fact: no matter how much time and energy he had spent trying to be American, he still had that classic Russian face. It was a beautifully sculptured face, rugged but somehow not harsh. His eyes, so similar to his children's, gave his countenance its splash of warmth and gentleness. Tori could imagine him striding purposefully down Gorky Street.

A half hour later, she joined Ellis Nunn in the dining room where a prodigious buffet breakfast had been laid out. He kissed her on both cheeks, in the traditional manner.

"Dobro pojalovatz," he said in Russian. Welcome home. "I'm damn glad you're in one piece." He gestured. "You must be starved. At least your mother thought so. She dragged Maria out of bed at an ungodly hour to prepare all this.''

"Mom was gone when I arrived. She's on the set. I got all the hot news from Maria on my way downstairs."

"Mmm. Well, Maria must have seen your bags in the entrance and done this on her own. She always did have a soft spot for you."

That was when Tori trotted out the photograph the Mall people had made at their LAX airport facility.

Ellis Nunn took the revelation with admirable sangfroid. "Imagine," he said. "Bernard and me caught in the act." He bent over, peering more closely at the sixteen-by-twenty-inch blowup of Ariel Solares's photo. "There I am with your mother, coming to meet Bernard. By God, that's eerie to see on film."

"It's a good thing the picture was taken by one of Bernard's own agents."

Ellis Nunn nodded. "Yes. I suppose it is."

When it appeared that neither of them was hungry, they drifted outside. They began to walk the grounds, as Ellis Nunn loved to do, first by the pool, and then into the sun-dappled gardens. The scent of lime was everywhere.

Tori ducked her head. ''Why didn't you ever tell me about La Lumiere d'Or?" She was speaking of the American-owned French firm Koi had told her about-which she now knew was owned by her father-that was the conduit for the MANDs' hafnium.

"What was there to tell? I have subsidiaries in Italy, Spain, Hong Kong, as well as France. I never told you about those, either. It never occurred to me that you'd be in the least interested."

Tori snorted. "I think I'd have been interested in La Lumiere d'Or's extracurricular activities.''

"They were none of your business." He looked at her. "Oh, don't look like that. I 'd say the same thing to your mother if she ever asked. Which she never has."

"But she was involved with the scheme that you and Bernard-"

''Bernard talked to her independently. As a woman of means, your mother has always made her own business decisions. She's good at it and, anyway, it saves wear and tear on the both of us."

"How exactly did Bernard rope you into paying for these MANDs? He told you about Greg, right?"

"Well, first of all, Bernard didn't rope your mother and me into anything. We both went into this with our eyes wide open. He outlined the risks."

Tori again heard Bernard Godwin's voice saying. No matter what we become involved in, we would never be brought before a court of law.

"Some risks," she said.

Ellis Nunn stopped, turned toward her. "I meant the risks to Greg and you, not to your mother or myself.''

"Oh." Tori did not know what to say.

They continued their walk. They strolled beneath the pergola, losing themselves in the blooms and vines of high summer. Tori thought of her father's tales of the Georgian peasants toiling heroically in their fields.

''What was it like there?''

Tori knew he meant Russia. ''It's not like home, Aunty Em.''

He grunted, and she remembered belatedly how he used to admonish her for using her wit at inappropriate times.

"I found Moscow . . . strange," she said immediately. "It was not what I had expected."

"Did you like it?"

Tori suspected that her answer was important to him, so she thought about it for some time before she spoke. "I didn't hate it," she said slowly. "I felt uncomfortable there, but that may just have been the circumstances. But it also had an-I don't know-a haunting quality, I guess you could say."

"Yes," Ellis Nunn said, and Tori could see that he was remembering his childhood, and that that past was as clear to him as was this dawning day.

"You didn't fully answer my question about how Bernard got you and Mom involved."

"I know."

There was silence for a time. Ellis Nunn stopped them in the center of the pergola. The wisteria twined over their heads, creating a cool, green bower. "How did Greg seem to you?"

"Changed," Tori said, and she saw her father wince. "It's only to be expected, after what he's been through."

"Which is what? Even Bernard had no idea what the Russians were doing with him or why they were keeping him captive."

"It seems that he and his Russian cosmonaut counterpart were part of a highly secret experiment involving controlled exposure to cosmic rays.''