The Nicholas Linnear Novels (182 page)

“You haven’t gotten it yet, have you, Doctor?” Nicholas was livid. “Someone—maybe it was you—did something to me while I was on the operating table. For Christ’s sake, tell me what happened!”

“Linnear-san, you must calm yourself,” Dr. Hanami said, resorting once again to age-old rituals in order to quell the modern demons that seemed to have invaded his office. “These outbursts will do no one any good, least of all yourself. When you have returned to a state of serenity, you will be able to see everything in its proper light.”

“You’re not going to tell me, are you?”

“Linnear-san, I assure you there is nothing more I can tell you.” He glanced again at Nicholas’s file, as if to give added weight to his words. “Your operation was successful in every way. As for your claim, I can find no medical reason to—”

Dr. Hanami stopped. He looked up, realizing that his patient was already gone.

Nicholas had lost faith. He saw in a flash of terrible clarity that all his training had been in vain. He saw that without
Getsumei no michi
he was nothing. His spirit, diminished because he had been denied his ultimate place of refuge, of intimacy with the world around him, of strength, was withering. Cut off from the kind of communion with the universe that had sustained him through his most painful ordeals, which had nourished him during his brief stab as a family man and a businessman, he felt like the lone survivor of a shipwreck, cast upon a hostile and alien shore.

He thought of his mother, Cheong, and knew there was only one thing for him to do now. His mind flew back in time to the dreadful autumn of 1963, when he had fallen hopelessly in love with Yukio and had, thus, incurred the wrath of his cousin Saigo.

Nicholas,
Cheong had said to him,
your grandfather, So-Peng, was a very wise man. It was he who said one is never truly alone in Asia.
Cheong had drawn out a box made of copper. Nicholas had seen it once before, when his father had shown it to him, a legacy of his grandfather, So-Peng. On its enameled and elaborately lacquered top was a fiery, scaled dragon entwined with a rampant tiger.

Carefully, almost reverently, Cheong had opened the box. Inside were four rows of glittering emeralds, fifteen in all.

You are free to use six of these emeralds,
she had said.
To convert them into money if your need is sufficient. Originally there were sixteen. One was used to buy this house.
She had taken a deep breath.
There must never be less than nine emeralds in here. Ever. No matter the reason, you must not use more than six.

As you know, Nicholas, my father, So-Peng, gave your father and me this box when we left Singapore. It is a mystical box. It has certain powers.
She had paused, as if waiting.
I see you’re not smiling. Good. I believe in the power of this box, the nine emeralds, as did So-Peng. He was a great and wise man in all things, Nicholas. He was no fool. He knew well that there exist on the Asian continent many things that defy analysis; which, perhaps, have no place in the modern world. They relate to another set of laws; they are timeless.
She had smiled gently.
So I believe. If you believe, then the power will be there for you when someday you need it.

Nicholas believed in the legacy of his grandfather, the power of the fifteen emeralds in the mystic box. He had put away the treasure, secreting it within his house when he and Justine had returned to Japan. For while he had no intention of ever using the emeralds, he wanted them near him, could feel their pulse in his heart as one feels sunlight warming one’s flesh.

Cast adrift, Nicholas knew that he had to get home as quickly as he could. Now he understood that the time had come to put the magic of the emeralds to work.

He had lost faith. Now he understood, and the terror flooded fully through him. It was not merely that he had lost his ability to find
Getsumei no michi,
not merely that he had lost his memory of his ninjutsu training. He had lost faith in everything he had believed in.

There could be only one explanation for that:
Shiro Ninja.

It was clear that if he was indeed
Shiro Ninja,
Dr. Hanami had not been responsible for his loss of memory; it was not a medical problem at all. He almost turned around then, so he could apologize to Dr. Hanami, but he was too wrapped up in his own fear.

Somewhere in Tokyo he had an enemy, one of such power that it beggared the imagination. Who could it be? Why had he been rendered powerless through
Shiro Ninja?

Nicholas, shivering, imagined himself amid the vapor of his recent nightmares, and shuddered. He imagined that the emeralds’ magic could save him from drowning in that colorless vapor. Falling and drowning. Part of him, perhaps, even suspected that his grandfather So-Peng had known this day would come and had prepared him for it by ensuring that he would receive the box, just as once the Colonel and Cheong had received it.

So-Peng. Cheong had told him so much about her father, yet increasingly now, when Nicholas thought of him, he realized how little he knew of the man and his life. Much less than he did about the Colonel’s English parents—his father, a middle-class London banker, level-headed, honest, content; his mother, a wealthy Jewess who, despite her money, was never accepted in English society, dark-haired, green-eyed, tempestuous, curious, and very smart. She had had two sons, one of whom, William, had died of smallpox. Three years later, in the winter of 1915, she had given birth to Denis, Nicholas’s father.

Nicholas was so wrapped up in his thoughts of the past that he failed to see the young woman heading into Dr. Hanami’s office as he left it. They hit head-on, even though she tried to step hurriedly back. Startled, Nicholas automatically apologized, began to move toward the elevator bank.

“Linnear-san!”

He turned, found the woman following him. “You are Nicholas Linnear.”

There seemed no interrogative in her inflection, but he said yes just the same.

“Hello. I’m Tomi Yazawa. Detective Sergeant with the homicide division of the Tokyo police.” She flashed him her credentials, which he studied with the kind of amused curiosity he normally reserved for outlandish headlines in tabloids.

“Good morning, Miss Yazawa,” he said. “How is it you know who I am?”

“I’m looking for you, Mr. Linnear.”

“Indeed. Well, perhaps some other time. This really isn’t the best—”

The elevator doors opened and Nicholas got in. Tomi followed.

“Ah, persistence,” Nicholas said. His mind was far away from Tomi Yazawa and what she might want of him. Whatever it was, he decided, it could wait for a more propitious moment.

“Persistence is a required course at the academy,” Tomi said.

If Nicholas recognized this as a joke, he gave no sign of it. All he wanted to do was get down and out of there.

“I appreciate that this may not be the best time for you,” Tomi said, “but I must talk with you immediately.”

Nicholas discovered that he was gripping a piece of paper in his left hand. He uncrumpled it, saw there in Dr. Hanami’s hurried scrawl the name and phone number of Dr. Muku, the psychiatrist, which the surgeon had given him. He wondered briefly why no address had been included. Then he saw the suite number and realized that Dr. Muku must have his offices in this same megabuilding. Cozy, he thought. How many patients did the two cross-pollinate? He imagined the two doctors as tennis players, sending their patients back and forth across the net, picking up finders’ fees with every swing. With an angry growl he mashed the paper into a ball, flung it against the brushed bronze of the elevator wall.

“Mr. Linnear—”

The doors opened on the enormous lobby dominated by a sculpture composed of black rock, waterfall, and foliage, and Nicholas strode purposefully out.

Tomi bent, snatched up the crumpled slip of paper. She had just a moment to glance at what was written in it before she hurried out after him. She caught up with Nicholas near the automatic doors. They were glazed a soft bronze color so that the sunlight coming through them was devoid of heat.

“Mr. Linnear, please—”

“Some other time, Sergeant Yazawa.” Nicholas went through the doors.

Out on the street Tomi said forcefully, “I must speak with you on a matter of life or death, Mr. Linnear. Your life. Your death.” This gave him pause, and she took advantage of it. “I wanted to tell you in a more politic manner, but you leave me no choice. According to a communiqué we intercepted and decoded late yesterday, you have been marked for assassination by the Red Army one week from today. I have been—”

Tomi broke off as a scream reverberated against the mammoth facade of the sky-rise. An instant later the sun was momentarily blotted out as a shape hurtled to the sidewalk not ten yards from where they were standing.

“Jesus!” Nicholas breathed. “A jumper!”

Tomi had broken away from him and was threading her way through the already gathering crowd. Nicholas went after her, saw her kneeling by the side of a male figure. He had landed on the small of his back, and his spine and legs were broken in so many places that his shape had already ceased to resemble anything human. Blood seeped along the sidewalk in a spiderweb pattern radiating out from the broken body. Bits of glass shimmered on the concrete, here and there pink and red and dark brown.

Gingerly, Tomi reached out, turned the head toward them. The back was completely smashed in, but the face, though bloodstreaked, was recognizable.

“God almighty!” Nicholas said, and Tomi looked up.

“Do you know this man, Mr. Linnear?”

Nicholas nodded. “That’s Dr. Hanami, the surgeon who operated on me.” He looked up, could see the darkness like an open mouth where the window to Dr. Hanami’s consulting office had been.

Tomi and Nicholas pushed their way through the gesticulating mob. Inside the building Tomi showed her credentials to a uniformed attendant, told her what had happened, to call the police. Then they took the elevator up.

“By all rights,” Tomi said, “you shouldn’t be coming with me. We have no idea what happened up there.”

Nicholas said nothing, looked at her.

“He could have jumped,” Tomi went on. “Or he could have been pushed.”

“Why would someone want to murder a surgeon?” Nicholas asked.

“A grudge for malpractice?” Tomi shrugged. “Why does the Red Army want you dead?”

Nicholas continued to look at her. “You tell me. I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“I’m allowing you to come with me,” Tomi said, continuing a previous thought, “because I have been assigned as your bodyguard. I’m on the scene of a potential crime, so I’ve got to respond. You’ve got to accompany me.”

“Otherwise you would have stopped me?”

“Yes,” Tomi said. “I would have stopped you.”

“How?” Nicholas leaned toward her. He was not in the mood for either idle bluffs or for tough talk from someone he didn’t know.

The doors opened and they raced across the hall to Dr. Hanami’s office suite. They burst through the door to confront the white-faced receptionist who stared wide-eyed at them. She had her arms around a hunched woman, obviously a patient, who was sobbing in great, inconstant gasps.

“I’ve called the police,” the receptionist said to no one in particular, but she nodded as Tomi identified herself. She pointed to a closed door to her right. “In there. The doctor’s inner office.”

“Who was the doctor’s last patient?” Tomi asked.

“Well, he was,” the receptionist said, pointing to Nicholas.

“Was anyone with the doctor after Linnear-san left?”

“I don’t know,” the receptionist said. “The doctor asked me to leave him this hour free.”

“You saw no one go in there after Linnear-san left?”

“No.”

“Stay here,” Tomi said to Nicholas.

“Like hell,” he said, but seeing the gun in her hand, he kept well back.

Tomi turned the knob, threw the door wide open. Wind rattled the vertical metal blinds that had been ripped from their bottom moorings. To the left of the window was Dr. Hanami’s paper-strewn desk, his high-backed chair turned away from them as if he had leaped from it to the window. They saw that a side chair, leaning up against the sill, had been used to break the glass of the sealed window.

“Well, one thing we know,” Nicholas said. “It wasn’t an accident.”

Tomi went across the small room to the door on the opposite side. “What do we have here?”

She put her gun up, jerked the door open. “This leads right out into the hallway,” she said, peering out. “If Dr. Hanami was murdered, this was how his murderer got in and out without being seen by the receptionist.”

Tomi closed the door, went over to the shattered window, looking for blood, a note, or any other sign that might tell her whether Dr. Hanami’s death had been a suicide or a murder. She stared out the ruptured window at the vaporous city below. “God, it’s a long way down.”

“Sergeant.”

Tomi started at Nicholas’s voice, which was not loud but nevertheless got her attention. She looked in the direction in which he was staring. From this angle she could see Dr. Hanami’s high-backed chair in profile. There was a hand lying along the armrest.

Tomi took three quick steps, spun the chair around to face them. They saw a small, roly-poly man of middle age in a gray pinstriped suit. His long, unruly hair stood up from his scalp as if he had been delivered an electric shock. Wire-rimmed glasses were perched on his pale forehead as if he were plunged deep in thought.

Tomi could not help but let out a gasp as the corpse’s one blackened, ruined eye socket stared blankly at her.

“Jesus,” Nicholas said, “who the hell is this?”

“What the hell happened to him?” Tomi was peering at the lethal wound. “This is horrific.” Close to the corpse there was an unmistakable smell of roasted flesh. “He was burned with something small and very hot.”

“It must have had penetrating power,” Nicholas said.

Tomi moved back, took a pencil off the desktop, used it to lift up part of the corpse’s unbuttoned jacket. Carefully, she extracted a wallet from the corpse’s breast pocket. Dropping it on the desk, she opened it with the pencil point.