The Nicholas Linnear Novels (41 page)

So it would happen on the top floor of the office building, in the plush office—that would be superbly fitting. Not tonight and perhaps not the next; there were too many matters to tie up, too many things yet to be settled. The night after next, then. No need to rush it. He went over every phase of the buy again, feeling a tingling in his groin beginning. The only matter that now concerned him—because it was out of his control at the moment—was whether he had been too obvious. Perhaps he had miscalculated in killing Ito. Then he thought: No, it’s what I had planned to do from the start. It’s what he needs.

The tip of his erect penis breached the water. He stared at it, fascinated.

“Time,” he said and the girl opened the drain. He stood up. The hot water rolled down his flesh. His torso and limbs were hairless.

He stepped out of the tub, brushed aside the thick towel the girl had opened for him. “No,” he said. “Lick the water off me.” He watched the boy, who had not moved all this time, as the girl bent to her task.

Yes, he thought. There is plenty of time. Enough for me to return here tomorrow night. Release was instrumental to his functioning properly. Between his spread legs, the girl continued to lick at him.

In the bedroom, he smoked another pipeful, repeating his offer to Sparrow. The girl was the only one who was still dressed. She came and stood before him when he commanded, her eyes at her feet. With one blurred gesture he ripped the silk robe from her. She had small firm breasts, the nipples long and hard. Narrow waist and hips, thick pubic triangle. Her skin was raised in goosebumps. Still she would not look at him; he liked that.

He reached his left hand up. It was so big that his fingers were able to completely encircle her slender neck. Her skin was so soft there. With his other hand he touched her briefly where her flesh was raised, interested in the oddity.

Holding her thus, he drew his right hand away, slapped her breasts so that they shook. She grimaced but made no sound. The Japanese turned his head slightly so that he could see the boy’s reaction; he had not moved. The Japanese swung at the girl’s breasts again, this time from the opposite side. She gasped and immediately bit her lower lip. Sweat started out along her hairline; her flesh was damp beneath his fingers.

When he hit her a third time, it was with considerably more force. She gave a short cry and her legs collapsed from under her.

The Japanese took her under the arms, threw her on the bed. There was a piece of silk tied to each of the bedposts. He took these and, one by one, tied them around her wrists and ankles until she was spreadeagled, unable to move. Her chest was heaving and it glistened with sweat. She moaned, half-unconscious.

The Japanese crossed the room, took the ceramic bottle of sake back to the bed and fed it to her. She coughed twice. Her eyes flew open and she swallowed convulsively. He kept the lip of the bottle to her lips until all the liquor was gone. Then he got onto the bed, straddling her. He faced her crotch and spread legs; her breasts were beneath him.

“Come here,” he said to Sparrow. The boy moved to the side of the bed, climbed up into the position the Japanese indicated. He crouched between the girl’s legs. His eyes went to her crotch. He fell over, dazed. The right side of his face was numb. Moments later, it began to sting. It was very red.

“Don’t do that,” the Japanese said. “Look only in the direction of
this
.” He pointed to his rampant penis.

Now the Japanese settled over the girl’s face. He felt the heat of her breath, the soft tickle as her lips opened. Her tongue began to probe his anus.

“Now,” he commanded the boy. Sparrow leaned forward, opened his mouth.

Soon the Japanese closed his eyes. He began to talk in expletives. Neither Sparrow nor the girl understood his words; they were in Japanese. They could not, however, mistake his tone.

As his excitement mounted, so did the obscenities he uttered. He reached down without knowing it, grabbed painful handfuls of the girl’s inner thighs, leaving marks and red welts, and, as he exploded into Sparrow’s mouth, he hit her once between her thighs so hard that she fainted with the pain.

Seeing the look in the Japanese’s eyes, Sparrow backed away off the bed. It was his turn now.

Doc Deerforth was thinking about the war. He sat in his old wooden chair behind the desk in his office, a cup of steaming coffee half on the pale blue blotter in front of him. His head was turned slightly so that he could gaze out through the screen window, past the ancient oak, out along Main Street. This time of the morning there was little evidence of activity. It was not yet seven o’clock.

Without looking, Doc Deerforth reached for his cup of coffee, took a long sip. He scalded his tongue but he took no notice.

It was quite like malaria, he thought now. Once caught it could never be cured entirely but would return over and over in diminished attacks like an unpleasant reminder of the past. It might even be seasonal, he suspected, coming on most strongly during the hot days of July and August, the dog days when even out here in West Bay Bridge the sun was so withering, the atmosphere so sticky that the leaves on the trees seemed to wilt.

He never seemed to think of the war during the winter.

He picked up the phone, dialed Ray Florum’s number at the police station. He let it ring six times before cradling the phone. He had dialed Florum’s private line. No one would pick it up but Ray himself.

Where the hell was he? Doc Deerforth thought irritably. Then he glanced at his watch, saw how early it was. Ray didn’t come in until around eight. Still, Doc Deerforth wanted to know if there had been any progress toward capturing the ninja. He felt an irrational anger which, he knew, stemmed from fear.

The front doorbell rang and he jumped. For a moment he considered ignoring it, but when it came again, he got up and went through the house.

“Nicholas,” he said, blinking into the light. “Come in.” He closed the door. “What brings you here so early? Are you ill?”

“I didn’t wake you up, did I?”

Doc Deerforth laughed. “Hell, no, son. Just sitting here dreaming.” He peered closely at Nicholas. “You don’t look at all well. I think you better come along with me.”

“I haven’t slept, that’s all,” Nicholas said, allowing himself to be led into the house. But instead of taking him into his office, Doc Deerforth led him to the kitchen.

“A good breakfast will do you a world of good,” he said. He opened the refrigerator, took out a carton of orange juice, handed it over. “Here, help yourself.” He looked up. “Bacon and eggs all right with you?”

“Hey, you don’t have to—”

Doc Deerforth waved away his words. “Course I don’t have to. I
want
to.” He smiled, carrying eggs to the stove. “Besides, it’s been a while since I had a guest for breakfast. Do me good. I’ve been sitting around too much lately.” He began to prepare the food. He got more coffee going, then put up the bacon. The sizzling of the meat gave him a peculiarly warm feeling. He wondered over that until he recalled he used to cook breakfast for the girls. That seemed so long ago. “I s’pose you want to know what Florum’s been up to,” he said. Nicholas sat down at the table, poured himself some juice. He looked up expectantly. “Nothing,” Doc Deerforth continued. “There’s not a damn thing for him to go on.”

“I’m not surprised,” Nicholas said. He told the other about what had taken place in the city.

“Friends of yours, huh?” Doc Deerforth said when he had finished. “That’s a bit of bad luck. I’m sorry.” He turned the bacon. “You think he’s really after Raphael Tomkin?”

Nicholas nodded.

“Then why these other killings? None of the victims seem to have any connection with Tomkin.”

“They don’t. At least, not as far as I can tell.”

“Then what’s he up to? He could have been in and out a half-dozen times by now.”

“I’ve thought about that.” Nicholas glanced down at his juice as if he might find answers there. “For one thing, it’s not so easy to get to Tomkin. That kind of penetration takes time.”

“All the more reason for him to keep a low profile. They don’t like the limelight.” He drained the bacon, started on the eggs.

“Normally that’s true,” Nicholas agreed. “But this man’s different. He’s shrewder than most. Look, he’s going up against a man who’s been a target three or four times before. There are good reasons why Tomkin is still alive. The ninja figures a simple penetration won’t do it. Something a bit more complex is called for. You know how they are. He’ll have to go in himself. There’ll be no remote-control gadgets; he won’t use the long gun.”

“I know.” The kitchen was filled with the smell of the food. Doc Deerforth took out the bread, gave it to Nicholas to toast.

“All right. The idea is to confuse the enemy. It’s an ancient form of strategy in kenjutsu and on the battlefield. Use different forms of attacks; attack from different sides. While your enemy is wondering what you’re up to, you attack decisively and he’s defeated.”

Doc Deerforth eyed Nicholas as he brought the plates over to the table. “And you think this is what the ninja is doing?”

“It seems logical, yes.”

Doc Deerforth began to eat, frowning in concentration. “You’ve thought of other possibilities, naturally,” he said after a while.

Nicholas looked up. “What other possibilities?”

“I don’t know. But they’re devious bastards. I could never pretend to know what was in their minds.”

Nicholas looked away for a moment. “I knew several in Japan.”

Doc Deerforth’s eyes blazed briefly. “Did you?”

“That was years ago.”

“Time doesn’t mean anything to them.” Nicholas knew he was talking about his own experience. He put down his fork, said nothing. “They’re not human,” Doc Deerforth said after a time. It was so quiet between the words that Nicholas could hear the ticking of the clock on the wall. “At least, there’s something quite inhuman about them—as if they were vampires or something. Something supernatural.” His eyes had turned inward as he strung out the banner of his memory.

“Our war,” he continued, “was quite different from any other, from what it was elsewhere. Where we were, it was never a matter of companies taking a ridge and holding it in the face of an enemy counter-offensive. There were no front lines, separate territories, retreats or attacks. There was only a kind of holding on. A desperate stubborness against this terrible fluidity which brought you to the front in the morning and behind the enemy at sunset without having moved at all during the day.

“We were never quite sure just where the enemy was. Specific orders were sporadic at best and, when they came, it seemed clear to us that the generals had no idea of the actual situation. We lived in a kind of loosely controlled state of anarchy. It was our only protection from the panic which continually besieged us.

“The time I’m telling you about was late in the war. Almost all of us had been in the Pacific Theater from the beginning. Many of us were in no condition to fight. Malaria, amoebic dysentery, those and other diseases I had never encountered before were what we lived with. But, after a while, we began to fear even the cholera less than the nights.

“The nights brought the infiltrations, silent and lethal. We seemed incapable of stemming them. We doubled the perimeter guard, began patrols of the compound itself. Nothing helped. The commander, in desperation, mounted a series of night patrols. They shot at shadows or the calls of night birds. They hit nothing and were, in turn, silently killed.

“These incidents built themselves eerily. Then some idiot mentioned
Dracula.
He had a dog-eared copy of the Bram Stoker novel and it quickly made the rounds. The fear magnified itself. What else could you expect under such circumstances? Man is notorious for inventing creatures to explain away the otherwise unexplainable. It was something out of a Gothic horror novel. Even now, with so much time in between, it doesn’t seem like a joke. We were used to fighting soldiers of flesh and blood, not shadows which melted away in the light. If we could have caught just one, even—caught a glimpse—we’d have had some idea of what we were up against.

“Fear has an uncanny way of escalating. We were none of us cowards. We had all done our share of killing. Even I—even I had been called upon several times…. We were in danger of being overrun. But now we were experiencing something else—something quite beyond our ken. It sounds foolish, I know, but believe me, Nicholas, when I tell you what happened….”

We were struggling across Leyte. The enormous naval battle of Leyte Gulf was behind us. On the sea the Japanese were destroyed, but on land it was another matter entirely. We did not yet own this small island and Luzon, the main island, was still in Japanese hands. They were undermanned and frightfully undersupplied. We thought we had them beaten at Leyte Gulf; that it was the end.

It wasn’t.

A new Japanese commander had arrived from Tokyo just before the battle began. Vice-Admiral Ōnishi of the First Naval Air Fleet in Manila. Two days after he arrived, he traveled to Mabalacat, a small town fifty miles to the northwest. It was the site of the Two Hundred and First Air Group. There he chaired a meeting that was, although none of us knew it then, one of the war’s most fateful conferences.

Not long after, we heard the first reports. Many of us, knowing the wildness of scuttlebutt, did not believe it. But then, no more than a week later, we saw it for ourselves. At first we thought the Zeros were after us but they screamed by overhead as if we had not existed. Then we saw our ships out to sea, an aircraft carrier and two destroyers. They did not strafe our ships, these Zeros, nor did they dive-bomb them. They merely careened into them. We were certain that the first one had been hit and crashed. But as they one after another followed the same suicidal course, we began to understand. Yet we understood not at all. How could rational men do this? It seemed inconceivable. We thought perhaps they had been brainwashed; the Japanese were notorious for their methods. Anyway, that was the prevailing opinion.

Yet something about this theory stuck in my mind. I could not believe it. Psychological reorientation takes time, I knew that. Certainly it could not have been accomplished overnight. It took time and that was the one thing the Japanese did not have. No, I was convinced it had to be something else. But what?