Tengu (22 page)

During the day, she watched the old man as he drilled the others in martial arts exercises in the clearing beside his hut. Westerners tended to think that all Japanese studied martial arts. In reality, the idea that most Japanese were black belts was as laughable as the idea that most Americans were cowboys. What was more, martial arts training was often associated with more conservative elements in Japan. For many younger Japanese, the arts carried with them the noxious whiff of old Japan, a discredited remnant of imperial embarrassment. To find such a person here, training these men, only heightened her anxiety.

Eventually, the days took on a sameness—her captors permitted her out of her prison twice daily to use a latrine; food and water came in battered old tin pails. No one spoke with her other than to give curt orders. Her guards were Filipinos but she noted the others, the men who surrounded the old man, watching her carefully. Their glances were not curious, nor were they cruel. They looked at her the way a hunter scans a dog working a distant field: a means to an end that would flush prey into motion.

She had decided that these people were from the Middle East, perhaps Arabs judging by their appearance and what talk she had been able to overhear. She tried to use her daily trips out of the cell to collect information.
Sort of a mini-fieldwork
, she told herself bitterly. In a world that had rapidly spun out of her control, the effort of analysis offered the comfort of familiar effort and the illusion of self-determination. Twice a day she moved slowly around the clearing with her guards, stumbling occasionally and acting as if she did not immediately understand their directions. It gave her more time to observe and learn.

The day they brought in the new captive the camp was literally buzzing with the foreign clatter of Arab and Filipino languages. Even if she couldn’t understand them, she could tell that this new captive was someone special.

Her cell was on the end of the camp farthest from the main entrance, and it made close observation difficult. Hatsue peered through her small window, craning her neck toward the camp entrance. She could see a group of men, including the Arabs, crowding around the trailhead.

When the crowd parted and they dragged the captive into the clearing, Hatsue felt mildly deflated. He was a short, stocky man, clearly unsteady on his feet. He moved like he was old.

Hatsue had a hard time relating their excitement to the small, defeated figure they dragged across the clearing to the steps of the old man’s hut. The Arabs looked up expectantly and the buzz of the crowd died down.

He emerged, that horrible old man, wearing the same traditional and incongruous garb in which he had greeted her and holding the same old-fashioned ceremonial
tessen
fan. Hatsue watched as the old man slowly and menacingly descended the steps from his hut, and she shuddered as the ring of young armed men closed around the new prisoner. After a time, the old one strode back up the veranda steps and gestured imperiously with his fan. They dragged the captive off to a space between two posts, newly installed the day before.

The man was strung up between the posts, his extended arms and legs creating an X. The crowd watched the old man expectantly. He stood there, seemingly oblivious to their inquiring looks. Then with a slow sweep, he gestured.

In her cell, Hatsue jerked back involuntarily as the tessen pointed in her direction. She slunk down into a corner, madly hoping that she was wrong. But the guards came for her.

They dragged her over the rough ground of the camp to stand before the captive. He was an older man, compact, with a shaved head beginning to show stubble. He was Asian. He watched her approach, and, while his eyes seemed clear enough, there was a rim of white around his mouth and a slackness to his face.
He’s been
drugged
, she thought. Part of her remembered her trip to the camp and she wished faintly that they had done the same to her.

The old man with the fan appeared by her side as if he had glided down the steps of his hut. He cackled at her and she could smell his stale breath.

“Allow me to introduce your rescuer,” he told Hatsue. “Yamashita Rinsuke.”

She looked at the prisoner suspended between the poles. The man there looked at her and nodded his head ever so slightly in acknowledgment of the introduction. The name meant nothing to her. The slight flutter of hope at the thought that someone was trying to save her was almost immediately smothered by the reality of the situation. In her fantasies, she expected armed men to storm the camp and free her, all dark uniforms, gunmetal, and efficiency. The prisoner before her looked dirty and unsteady. A man, alone and unarmed and powerless.
He’s no different than me
, she thought. But she tried to disguise her feelings. When the old man with the fan saw the lack of response on Hatsue’s part, he prompted her.

“This is the man your family pinned its hopes on for a rescue.” He gestured contemptuously at the prisoner and smiled bitterly. “This!” Hatsue could see that there were emotions roiling the old man as he struggled to find words. Instead, he moved in and the folded fan shot out in a blur. The tip drove into the solar plexus of the captive and his body jerked against the bonds, spasming. Hatsue could see the prisoner struggling against the temporary paralysis of the nerve endings as he fought for breath.

The hideous old man watched impassively for a moment. When the prisoner finally sucked in a lungful of air, the old monster drove in again. The ropes jerked, the body contracted, and the struggle began anew. The men around Hatsue watched, their eyes bright and expectant.

It went on for some time. The old man worked his captive mercilessly, with a measured, almost clinical approach. The nerve strikes were delivered with a brutal precision, the end of the iron war fan driving deep into soft tissue, grinding on pain receptors, until the grunting captive danced in agony. He was bathed in sweat.

So was the old man, Hatsue noted. There was a rage burning, seeping out of his very pores. It did not seem to her that it could go on as long as it did—certainly either the torturer or the victim would be consumed in the process—but it was a measure of the old man’s terrible skill that the session stretched out for some time. Finally, when the overload on the nerve endings acted to dull the response of the victim and he sagged for longer and longer periods between attacks, the old man stopped. He gestured for the prisoner to be cut down, then wheeled on Hatsue. She shrank back, a jet of fear shooting through her.

“Care for him. As long as he lasts, you last.”

The old man turned away. The guards prodded her toward her cell and dragged her new charge behind them.

18
COUNTDOWN

In my dream, Sarah Klein sat on the edge of the bed in the half-light. The sheet had fallen down around her waist to the soft swell of her hips. The shadows played along the muscles in her back. Sarah’s dark hair fell down and hid her face, half turned away from me. I stretched out and reached for her, but her head came up in alarm at a noise off in the darkness, and she jerked just out of my reach. I stretched out again, but the bed was too wide, and the pounding sound that had alarmed her now made Sarah jerk farther and farther from my embrace.

Eventually, the banging on the door of my hotel room brought me back from that deep place, and I rolled off the bed, groggy and befuddled with yearning.

Micky pushed a room service cart into the room and Art closed the door. “Geez,” my brother said. “Took you long enough.” I looked at the two cops and grunted. They started pouring coffee into cups and took the stainless steel tops off various plates of food.

I splashed some water into my face from the bathroom sink and staggered back into the room. It was pretty standard surroundings and if you didn’t look out the window, you could have been in almost any generic upscale hotel in the world. A big bed dominated the relatively small space. Directly across from it there was an armoire with a TV crouched inside. A compact writing desk with a straight chair was tucked on the far side of the armoire, almost as an afterthought. A padded easy chair sat in one corner, strategically placed for TV viewing, next to the chair, a floor lamp. Light washed in from the broad bank of windows at one end of the room: when I had gone to bed, I hadn’t even drawn the blinds.

My brother and his partner sat on the end of the bed and watched me. Micky jerked a fork at one of the plates. “We’re gonna roll soon. Better tank up.”

I nodded in agreement but sank to the floor instead and started stretching. I had spent considerable time in the shower before falling asleep at dawn, trying to get clean and hoping that the heat of the water would take away some of the muscle soreness I had from the
eskrima
match. Fat chance.

Eventually, I got up and ate. There wasn’t much conversation: this was a fueling exercise, not fine dining. Besides, nobody really wanted to talk about last night. But we knew we needed to.

“Ueda called to say they were workin’ on some things,” Micky finally said. His tone suggested he was discussing a particularly offensive activity. “When we get the call, we’ll probably have to rocket outta here.”

Art had been eating steadily. Then he grunted. “For what it’s worth, and this may not come as a shock, I don’t think that guy Marangan is playing with a full deck.” He inspected the remains of his scrambled eggs carefully, and then used a piece of toast to scoop the dregs up and into his mouth. Art looked at me, waiting for a comment.

“I figure he’s a man on a mission,” I said. “They’re always just a little bit off . . . ”

“A little!” Micky snorted. “I’m used to usin’ all sorts of skeeves as informants, but this guy should be kept on a real short leash.”

I shrugged. “I got a whiff of it at his
eskrima
school.”

“Yeah,” Micky broke in, “I meant to ask you about that. What gives? You’re all in a sweat to get here and track Yamashita down, but you take the time to dick around with Marangan’s students.”

“I’ve learned some things, Mick. One of them is that you shouldn’t trust many people.”

“A sad yet true thing,” Art commented.

“The other is that you can tell a lot about people by fighting with them. They say the real masters can do it just by touching their sword to yours.” Micky jerked his head and looked at me skeptically. “It’s true,” I told him.

“So what’d you learn?” my brother asked.

“Marangan’s a pretty angry guy. He’s skilled and so was the student I fought, but there was something really . . . I don’t know . . . out-of-balance there.” It was a difficult insight to verbalize. There was a spiky quality to the energy at Marangan’s school: a stew of fury and pain and resentment simmered with something more complex that was still eluding me.

“Come on, Connor,” Art said, “you don’t think you’re reading something into this as a result of the rest of the night?”

“No,” I replied. “Remember when he grabbed that guy in the alley? I knew something bad was going to happen.”

Micky sat on the edge of his seat, elbows on his knees and his head hanging down. “Man,” he said, “the alley was just the warm-up.”

“We don’t have much choice but to use him,” Art said. “Marangan seems to be pretty wired in and we need the info if we’re ever going to find Yamashita.”

No one said anything for a while. Micky got up and looked out the window, brushing the flimsy curtains aside to get a better view. “You know, this whole thing is weird . . . the rhythm of it.”

“How so?” I asked.

“It moves in fits and starts,” Art explained. They had obviously been hashing ideas over before they came to my room. “First, the girl is kidnapped and the ransom demand is made. Okay, so far so good. But then they ask for Yamashita to be the bagman. It slows things down for a few days.”

“We’re assuming that getting Yamashita is a big piece of this” I reminded him.

“Yeah, okay. But then they
do
get him, and what happens?” Art looked at Micky, then at me.

“Well, not much until we got here . . . ” I started.

“Right!” he said in triumph. “We arrive and Mori gets taken out. Then we get to go crawling through the slime with Marangan all night trying to run leads down. It’s like someone’s playing this thing. On. Off. On. Off. Do you get it?”

“And,” Micky picked up the thread, “what’s with the snatch of Yamashita, anyway? I mean, why do they want him in the first place? If it’s for ransom, we haven’t heard a word. That’s unusual.”

“Maybe they wanted him for other reasons,” I said.

“Like what?” Micky pressed.

I shrugged. “Someone like Yamashita’s probably pissed off lots of people in his life . . . ”

“Anyone in the Philippines?” Art asked. It was the obvious question.

“Not that I know of.” But my statement wasn’t very confident. There are large swaths of Yamashita’s life that are closed to me. “The person who probably knew the most about him was Mori.”

“Now, of course, he’s not talking,” Micky said.

“The guy was always a disappointment,” Art agreed.

“That could be why Mori got killed in the first place,” I suggested. “If someone in this country wanted to kidnap Yamashita, Mori might know enough to be able to figure out who it was. So he was a threat to be eliminated . . . ”

My brother turned away from the window. “Okay, but why wait? Why take him out when they did?” None of us had a suggestion, so Micky continued. “So now who’s the next most likely person to have some information on this for us?”

“Why,” Art said smiling broadly, “Mori’s right-hand man, Mr. Ueda, our jolly tour guide to midnight Manila.”

I was beginning to follow their line of thought. “Sure! If he knows so much, why send for us in the first place?” I asked. “If he knew who the kidnappers were, he could have told the police and solved his problem.”

Micky was walking slowly around the room, absently opening drawers and inspecting the furniture while he thought. He sat down on the bed and looked in the night table. There was a Bible in there. The Gideons, it seems, are everywhere. Then Micky got up, folded his arms across his chest, leaned against the wall, and smirked.