The Nicholas Linnear Novels (18 page)

After a time, she sighed deeply and stepped out into the bedroom. She crossed to the bed and, bending over, slit open the bag. She took out the bottle of cologne, Chanel No. 19, opened it and dabbed it on her richly glowing skin. Then she stepped into the cream silk teddy she had bought, luxuriating in the feel of the sensuous fabric. This was how Terry would see her when he arrived.

She turned down the open doorway and a frown creased her brow. Darkness prevailed there and, while it was night now, the sunset having slipped away while she was in the shower, she was certain she had turned on the lights there when she had come in. Or had she? She shrugged and went through the doorway.

Halfway to the small porcelain lamp on the table next to the sofa, she paused, turning her head. Had there been some movement in the room to her extreme left? Now she saw only clumps of dense shadows. Outside, a cat yowled twice as if it were being skinned alive, then there was the brief clatter of metal garbage can lids in the cement alley on the side of the house, coming clear through the wall. The music was still playing. Henry Mancini. A bittersweet melody that she knew ended the side of the record. Mancini was so romantic.

She crossed to the table and threw the switch; the lights in the bedroom went out. She turned around, oblivious for a moment to the fact that the lamp had not lit. The music was over and she was conscious of the minute sounds of the tone arm lifting, setting down on its cradle and the turntable stopping. There was only one sound now, very close to her, and she realized that it was her harsh breathing.

“Is anyone there?” She felt foolish.

The total absence of sound was infinitely more frightening than if she had heard a voice reply. She looked down at the glowing dial of her watch and all she could think of was: Terry will be home soon.

As if drawn toward the unknown, she went slowly across the living room until she was standing on the sill of the doorway. She peered in, trying to see in the gloom; the curtains were closed and here, at the back of the house, the trees of the backyard intervened behind the closed windows, the working air conditioner, vitiating the lamps from the neighboring houses.

She went into the bedroom, her hand feeling along the wall for the light switch. But before she got to it, she heard the click of the stereo from the other room; heard, after a tiny delay, Mancini’s piano and the double bass begin a jazz duet. Soon the drums joined them and then the strings. Last of all was the sax, a crying, almost human voice among the myriad instruments. The music was filled with tension.

She whirled toward the doorway, could not see through it. Something or someone blocked her view. She took a step forward and gasped as something slithered forward in a blur, wrapped itself around her right wrist.

Crying out inarticulately, she stumbled backward. She flung up her arm in an attempt to free herself but the thing—whatever it was—followed her silently, relentlessly; the grip on her wrist tightened until she thought her bones might break.

“What do you want?” she said inanely. “What do you want?” Her mind, numbed by fear, could think of nothing else to say. It was as if the night, through some magical incantation, had become a sentient being.

She felt the edge of the bed against the backs of her knees and, as if this solid barrier brought her back to reality, she launched herself forward. She did not believe in ghosts, not even in the
kami
of her ancestors as tangible objects able to grasp out at the living. Her mouth opened and she bared her teeth, ready to bite into whatever had hold of her.

She felt the solidness of pressure in front of her and bit down. But at that moment her head was jerked backward and upward and her teeth snapped together painfully.

“Oh, my God!” she heard herself say. It seemed to come from another world.

She stared into a face. The head, as, she supposed, was the body, swathed in matte black fabric. A tight hood and a mask that left only his eyes exposed. These were no more than six inches from her own. They were as dead as stones in a pond.

“Oh, my God!” She felt so vulnerable, bent back in a grip she had no hope of breaking, and this, more than anything else, terrified her.

When he moved he was upon her before she could even cry out. She felt his grip shift and it seemed that she was in the grasp of something elemental, like a whirlwind, a force of nature. For surely no man—nothing that was human—could have so much power.

Where his gloved fingers dug into her, they seemed to dissolve her flesh and pulverize the bone beneath. All air was abruptly gone from her lungs; it felt as if she had been thrust to the bottom of the sea. Her insides turned to water. Death rose up on all sides like a specter on an enormous poster. Her gorge rose and she tried to vomit. She retched pathetically against the restraint to her mouth. She tried to swallow and could not. Her eyes were blurry with tears. She blinked wildly, began to strangle on her own vomit.

His face was quite close to hers, but it was as if she had been attacked by an inanimate object suddenly given life. She could smell nothing, see nothing; she had no clue as to what he was feeling, what he might want. She could not even turn her head from side to side, so intense was his grip upon her. Still she struggled merely to swallow and she did, given life once more. But now she saw before her the sloping mountainside in the south of Japan where she had stayed as a child during the last days of the war. She saw as clearly as if she were there again the tall stately pines swaying in the westerly winds, the straggle of
sokaijin
toiling up the long slope, a thin battered line, an exhausted snake that seemed to have no end, no beginning, merely one vast body. She thought of the
zōsui
, the vegetable stew, which had become their staple; the taste of it was strong in her mouth, the smell of the mountain turnips filled her nostrils. She had never thought that she would recall them with such full-bodied accuracy; it was in the nature of human beings to remember pleasure with more clarity than pain.

There was swift movement above her and her silk teddy shredded, parting from her body. She was naked. Her mind was filled up with Terry now because she was quite certain that this terrifying being would rape her; this secret knowledge of why he had come outraged her and calmed her at the same time. Death seemed to stand away, only a visitor to this feast instead of the guest of honor.

She felt his body over hers, not hot, not cool, but somewhere in between. His was not flesh, but neither was it marble. She felt somehow as if she were being lifted into a cradle, the position familiar. She closed her legs, locking her ankles, resisting him still.

So it was with a great sense of shock that she felt him grasp the pool of her thick hair, pulling it up, winding it with one hand into a long twisted cord.

She stared upward, above her head. There was sufficient light for her to see it, standing straight as a sword, blacker than the night.

Then, guided by him, it came down, wrapped around her neck. Until, nooselike, it began to tighten about her throat, however, she failed to understand what was about to happen. But as she fought for every breath, her nostrils flaring because his other hand still covered her mouth, she knew that her body was far from his mind. Was he hard? Would he come? Her mind was like a pond filled with squirming eels, monstrously debating these lewd questions while her lungs filled with less and less air.

No! Please! Take me, don’t kill me! Don’t! Please!
She tried to scream what her mind formed but the words only came out as animal grunts, further terrifying her. It was as if his inhumanity had somehow managed to strip her of her humanity.

The cord of her hair tightened as he heaved on it, arcing his back precisely as if he were making violent love to her. The muscles of her throat spasmed involuntarily; her lungs burned as if with a corrosive.
This can’t be happening,
she thought.
I can’t die. I won’t! No no no no
—
!

And then she was fighting, fighting to perform the most basic of functions which had become as difficult as climbing a mountain. Each breath was the most desperate of struggles.

She fought like a tigress, clawing at him with her nails, punching and slashing, using her knees and thighs in an effort to dislodge him, to deflect him from his monomaniacal purpose, but it was as useless as if she were fighting a brick wall. She was powerless against him. He was beyond the living. He was death.

As she choked on her own vomit, rising again like an inexorable
tsunami
, before her eyes bloomed the final firestorm. As her lungs filled with fluid, as she labored still for life, Eileen heard clearly the whistling, abrupt and diabolical, directly over her head and, looking skyward, saw the shadow of the lone bomber, coming like an unexpected eclipse, riding before the sun, saw part of it falling away toward the earth, as if it had contemptuously defecated on the Floating Kingdom, blossoming like a black flower in the bright blue and white sky.

Concussion. The furnace heat of hell. And light like the core of ten thousand exploding suns. Oh, my poor country!

Ashes, floating in the hot wind.

Terry said
sayonara
to Vincent through the taxi’s opened window. The day’s rain had given the city no relief from the sultry heat and humidity of midsummer. It reminded him of Tokyo.

“I’ll call you soon,” he told Vincent.

“Right. Let me know if you have any ideas.” Vincent leaned his elbows on the sill of the window.

Terry laughed. “I still think you and Nick are making more of this than is there.”

“We aren’t making up that poison, Terry,” the other said seriously. “Or the
katana
wound.”

“I don’t know, buddy. There are an awful lot of madmen in this city. What would a ninja be doing here, anyway?”

Vincent shrugged, having no good answer.

“See?”

“Hey, Mac,” the cabdriver growled, turning around. “Time is money and I ain’t got all night. If you’re gonna gab why doncha do it on the street, huh?”

“Okay,” Terry said, “we’re off.” He turned his face sideways, smiled and waved to Vincent as the cab pulled away from the curb.

He gave the driver his address and settled back in the seat. Somehow he regretted not telling his friend about the visitor to his
dōjō
in greater detail. He might have, he supposed, if they had not gotten so involved in this case that Vincent had been drawn into. Leave it to him to fabricate something like this. It was the kind of mystery that was just up his alley. Vincent was, Terry suspected, quite bored. Not so much with his job—there were, God knew, enough mysteries there to hold his attention. No, it was more that he was bored with being in America. Perhaps he wanted to go home.

With this, his thoughts turned to Eileen, waiting for him at home. At last all obstacles were washed away. Patience, my
sensei
used to tell me, can often be one’s most important weapon. You are too impetuous, my boy. Slow down and enjoy the pace which you yourself set. Abruptly, he remembered the caviar.

He leaned forward, his mouth near the grille bolted to the thick scarred plastic partition separating him from the driver. “Hey!” he called. “I forgot. I’ve got to make a stop at the Russian Tea Room before you take me to the address I gave you.”

The driver cursed and shook his head. “I’m gettin’ ’em tonight all right. Couldn’t y’ve told me soona, fella? Now I gotta go back down Ninth an’ cut ova—right into the teeth of th’ traffic.” He spun the wheel and, squealing, the cab swerved in mid-flight. There came the answering blare of horns, mingled with shouts and the screech of jammed-on brakes. Terry’s driver leaned out the window and shot his finger into the air. “Fuck off, y’sonsabitches!” he cried. “Why doncha learn how tuh drive, yuh assholes yuh!”

Terry took out a pencil and a piece of paper on the way over to the Russian Tea Room, found himself writing down the name,
Hideyoshi.
Then, after it,
Yodogimi
and, finally,
Mitsunari.
When he had finished, he stared at what he had written as if they were alien scratchings found on the side of a hill.

The cab jerked to a halt and the driver turned to him. “Do me a favor, Mac. Don’t leave me standin’ here holdin’ my dick, know what I mean?”

Terry shoved paper and pencil in his pocket and hurriedly left the cab.

It took him only a few minutes to place his order with the maitre d’ and pay for his two ounces of fresh Beluga. When he returned to the cab, the driver took off as if they were being chased by hijackers. “Gets so yuh can’t tell anymore,” he said, eyeing Terry in the rear-view mirror, “know what I mean? Guys come into the cab lookin’ as straight as can be. They ask yuh to stop and right away they take a powder, couldn’t find ’em with a battalion, know what I mean? Used tuh be able to tell, years ago; not now. Want me tuh go through the park?”

“Sure,” Terry said. “Yeah. That’ll be fine.”

It did not take long; the park was as still as a tomb, seeming detached from the surrounding sparkle of the high-rise buildings, pristine in the darkness.

He went up the high stone stairs of the brownstone, whistling softly. He was halfway to the third-floor landing when he began to discern the Mancini music coming through the door to his apartment. He smiled to himself, feeling warm and confident. Ei loved Mancini.

He turned the key in the lock and went in.

Immediately he knew that he must get into the bedroom. He slammed the door and was in absolute darkness, crouched, then rolling and scrambling across the living room.

He had smelled / seen / tasted / felt the differences in the apartment and had acted accordingly. He had heard nothing save the music. Mask, he thought. I might otherwise have stopped before I even opened the door. I’m certain I would have. Goddamn that music!

Eileen! his mind cried out just as he was hit.

He was perhaps three quarters of the way to the half-open doorway to the bedroom. He was struck viciously four times in the first second of the attack. He blocked three successfully but that allowed the fourth to get through. It smashed into him just above his right kidney. All the breath went out of him and he keeled over as his leg went numb. He rolled awkwardly across the floor, simultaneously aware of the low light seeping from out of the bedroom and a heavy sweetish scent.