The Nicholas Linnear Novels (43 page)

By his very technique, this man avoided that. Again and again, he would bring me slowly up the pain curve, keep me hovering on the brink for long moments—but he never let me topple over into the numbness of the other side. He knew precisely how long I could take it and brought me down each time.

All the while the questions were repeated over and over. Not shouted, the tone calm and even friendly, he spoke in an intimate voice as if we were close friends meeting in a bar, talking about old times.

It was odd, this combination. We became, after a while, as intimate as lovers. I wanted to trust him, to tell him all my secrets, to break down the last barriers between us. The pain, too, changed over time. It became—how shall I put it?—less painful? Yes, that’s it. Less painful. I still can’t understand how it was done. Of course, I knew even then that he was working on my mind as well as on my body. But somehow that didn’t help any. I seemed powerless to stop what was happening. I felt things slipping away from me, as if I were losing my balance on slippery ice. Then even the ice was gone and I felt myself settling down into a kind of muddy slime, sinking lower and lower. There seemed to be no bottom.

All this time the pain was ebbing and, as it did, I felt myself wanting to trust him more. He was my friend and I became guilty at holding out my secrets. How selfish I was! How unworthy of his friendship.

It was not numbness which overtook me now—I told you he would not allow that. It was another sensation. Pleasure. It crept up on me while I was concentrating on not answering his repeated questions. This was taking more and more energy and once or twice I had to bite my tongue in order to stop myself from telling him everything he wanted to know.

I felt, at that moment, my self slipping away from me, revealing, underneath, another person I knew not at all. It seemed to me, then, that this man knew more about me than I did and this terrified me.

Now I found myself wanting to tell him more than ever. Once I did, I was convinced he would hold and comfort me. The pleasure grew. I began to rejoice in the pain, to want it, for it was my link with him and I began to feel that I would be lost without it, that once it ceased I would have nothing and, therefore, be reduced to nothing. Time ceased to have any meaning. There was no past, no future, just an endless now with its bright connection. My mouth was hot with my own blood as I fought to hold back telling him everything.

Abruptly, it was gone. The pleasure-pain. Everything. I was lost. Alone in the tent, I began to cry, great dry racking sobs—my body had been so depleted of moisture during the night that even tears would not come. I was terrified of being alone, like a child cruelly left by its mother. I had been reduced to a kind of psychological infancy in which I now depended on my inquisitor as a baby does its mother. I had been left alone so that it would be hammered home. I knew then that the moment he returned and started on me again, I would talk and talk and talk. Nothing would stop me.

I became abruptly aware of a sound in the tent. It came from behind my head. I thought he had returned and I wept for joy. There came some scraping sounds. I tried to twist my head but I could see nothing except the heavily fluttering tent top.

“Get up!” It was a harsh whisper in my ear.

“What?” It sounded moronic. A combination of the dehydration and my swollen tongue made me sound like a cross between a heavy drunk and a lobotomy case.

“Get up! Get up! Get up!” the voice hissed.

I felt hands under my back, forcing me to sit up. It seemed a novel experience. For a moment I stared stupidly down at my body, perhaps expecting to find the flesh shredded into ribbons or blackened bamboo shoots under my nails. There was no mark on me. I shuddered as I forced myself to remember the pain.

“This way!” the voice said, urgently. “Come on! Move yourself! There’s no time to sit around!”

Gingerly, I swung off the wooden trestle table and turned. It was my friend, the crippled Japanese. His face was drawn with worry. His extended arm held open a flap of the tent on the far side. Through it I could see the bright green of the jungle. The daylight hurt my eyes and for a moment I felt a sense of intense vertigo.

I stumbled across the room and he had to reach out to stop me from falling over. “I’ll never make it,” I said.

“Yes,” he whispered “you will. They won’t follow you in the daytime.” He gave me some water then looked away from me as I gulped it greedily down. “We’ve all had enough of this,” he said softly. “It’s no use, so pitiable.” He moved on his crutches. “Come on. There’s no time to lose. We can’t let them find you like this, can we?”

I went to the open tent flap. My chest seemed to be pounding so hard that I thought I might drop dead of a heart attack before I had taken ten paces.

“I don’t know how to thank you,” I said as I passed him.

“Don’t,” he said. “We’re from totally different worlds. We could never understand each other.”

“Oh no?” I stuck out my hand. He touched it for a moment, then released it quickly as if he was embarrassed again. “One last thing,” I said. “Who are they?” He knew who I meant.

“You don’t want to know.” He began to turn away. The tent flap was coming down like the curtain between our two worlds.

“Yes I do. Very much.”

His back was already to me. “Ninja.” I heard his voice float back to me as if from a great distance.

“I wished him luck,” Doc Deerforth concluded, “but I don’t think he heard. I turned and ran into the jungle, away from the camp, away from the ninja.”

He sat staring down into the remains of his eggs as if they were a doorway into the past. The skin of his high forehead where the white hair had receded over the years was shiny with sweat. For the first time in what seemed like hours, Nicholas heard the stertorous ticking of the clock on the wall.

After a while, Doc Deerforth lifted his head. His eyes seemed weary as they looked into Nicholas’. “I’ve never told anyone what happened,” he said softly. “Not the men in my unit; not my CO.; not even my wife. I told you, Nicholas, because I was certain you’d understand.” His gaze was steady now, the eyes seeming to bore holes right through Nicholas’ skull, X-raying his brain.

“You know, then.”

Doc Deerforth didn’t need to nod; his eyes told Nicholas what he wanted to know.

“What are you going to do?”

“Do?” Doc Deerforth seemed genuinely surprised. “Why, nothing. What
should
I do?”

“I know how you feel,” Nicholas said, “about them.”

“About that one,” Doc Deerforth corrected him.

“They’re like that, most of them.”

“Are they.”

“It’s the way they’re trained. Their training is even more rigorous than a samurai’s because its tradition is bound in such secrecy.”

“Tradition. Odd, isn’t it, that such stringent traditionalists should be the perpetrators of such violent anarchy.”

“I never thought of it that way but, yes, you’re quite right.”

“I want you to get this one, Nicholas.” Doc Deerforth pushed his cold plate away from him. “I know you’re the only one who can. The police don’t know—”

“No, they don’t.”

“—anything at all about this. It’s very fortunate that you’ve become involved. Have you thought about that?”

The day was bright, not a cloud in the sky. The dazzle off the car’s chrome was so intense that he put on his sunglasses.

Nicholas left the town behind as he drove back out to Dune Road. He slid into the driveway at the side of his house, picked up the
Times
lying outside his door. He glanced uninterestedly at the headlines, went down the steps onto the beach.

He came up on Justine’s house from the right, so he could not tell if her car was there. Both the screen door and the outer door were closed but the
Times
had been taken in. He went up the sandy stairs.

“She’s not in.”

Nicholas turned. Croaker was just coming around from the left side of the house. He was dressed in a rumpled brown suit. His tie was pulled half off. He looked as if he hadn’t slept in two or three nights.

“Car’s gone.”

“What are you doing here, Croaker?”

“Let’s take a walk.”

He led Nicholas down to the beach.

“You’re not exactly dressed for it,” Nicholas observed.

“That’s all right. I like sand in my shoes. Reminds me of when I was a kid. We used to stay in the city during the summer. Never had any money to go anywhere. We used the hydrants. Turned them on and cooled off.” The water crashed and creamed past them on the right. Far down the beach, blankets were being set up. A portable radio blatted out disco, all booming bass and tattoo percussion. “There were seven of us. I don’t know how my old man made ends meet. But you know, once a month during the summer, as regular as clockwork, he’d call me over just before he went to work. ‘Lewis,’ he’d say, ‘c’mere. I have something for you.’ He’d give me enough money for carfare out to Coney Island and an ice cream. He knew I loved the beach. ‘Promise me one thing,’ he’d say every time. ‘Take a towel. I don’t want your mother to worry. Okay?’”

Someone went running out into the surf, laughing. One could see heads bobbing in the water past the surf line. A woman in a Danskin one-piece walked toward them, a bright beach towel slung nonchalantly over one shoulder. Nicholas thought of Justine, wondered where she’d gone.

“Yeah, we’re old friends, the sand and I.”

The woman was close enough for them to see how beautiful she was. Her long hair had been streaked by the sun. She ran past them to meet her lover.

Croaker squinted up at the sun for a moment. “I threw Alison out of the house last night.”

Nicholas looked at him silently.

Croaker gave him a quick smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Well, it wasn’t really like that. I think she wanted to go, too. Getting restless. Yeah. We both were.” He stuffed his big hands in his trousers pockets. “It was bloodless. Relatively. She’ll get over it. These things”—his shoulders lifted and fell—“you know, they pass and—”

They both stopped at once as if on cue. The sea rolled up near them. Over the slight hump of sand lay a dark straggle of sea grape.

Croaker looked down at his shoes, half sunk in the sand. When he looked up, he said, “Nick, Vincent’s dead. They found him last night.” He didn’t say where. “His neck had been broken.”

Nicholas took a deep breath and sat down in the sand. He wrapped his arms around his legs, stared out to sea.

“Nick…”

He felt numb, as if his brain had been anesthetized. He recalled Doc Deerforth talking about pain. This seemed more than enough. This was the day of Terry’s and Ei’s funeral.

“Jesus,” he said. “Jesus.”

Croaker crouched down next to him. “Nick,” he said gently, “there was no other way to tell you. There was the phone but I couldn’t do that.”

Nicholas nodded. Through the numbness, he understood. Croaker had recognized the debt he owed him. He appreciated the fact that the lieutenant had come all the way out here when he only had to have someone pick up a phone and dial. He remembered that the two had had dinner last night and wondered if this was, in part, Vincent’s legacy. If so, it was a fitting one.

“Nick,” Croaker said. He hesitated.

Nicholas’ gaze swung around.

“What’s going on? You have to tell me.”

“I don’t know. What do you mean? I—look, Tomkin’s involved. Up to his armpits. He received a ninja warning about a week ago. It fits in. I’ve seen it. It’s authentic. He has a lot of business deals with a number of high-powered Japanese firms. No one’s very buddy-buddy in business, least of all them. He crossed them in some way. Anyhow, it’s a mortal offense he’s committed. There’s no doubt they’ve sent one over to kill him.”

“It’s been tried before. Tomkin’s a grown-up bastard now. He doesn’t need your help.”

Nicholas shook his head. “That’s where you’re wrong. Without me, he’s a dead man.”

“But it makes no sense, don’t you see? The two deaths out here, the three in the city. None have any link with Tomkin.”

“They must,” Nicholas said, stubbornly. “Look, he’s even made an attempt to frighten Justine.” He told Croaker about the furred thing thrown through the kitchen window.

Croaker looked at him for a moment. Beyond, he could hear the surf hissing as it sucked at the beach front. The sounds of laughter were bright and brittle as if they had been made to be broken.

“What if,” Croaker said slowly, “that message wasn’t meant for Justine.”

Nicholas stared at Croaker.

“What do you mean?”

“I think it’s time we faced the facts. I think that warning was meant for you.”

Nicholas gave a short sharp laugh. “For me? Oh, don’t be idiotic. There’s no reason—”

“There must be,” Croaker said earnestly. “Look at the pattern. The two deaths out here. Terry and Eileen, now Vincent in the city. You’re the central point to all the deaths.”

“I didn’t know the second man out here.”

“No, but the murder happened close to you.”

“Lew, they happened close to a lot of people.”

“But only to one who’s had three friends murdered subsequently.”

It was logical of course, but, Nicholas knew, logic was often not the answer.

He shook his head. “I don’t think I can buy it. As I said, there’s no reason. It’s a smoke screen.”

“A hell of a smoke screen!” Croaker snorted.

“It wouldn’t matter to him, don’t you see? He must know that I’m involved through Justine.
I’m
the danger to him, not you or Tomkin’s muscle. He knows that. No, he’s after Tomkin, plain and simple. He’s just trying to muddy the water.”

Croaker held up a hand. “Okay, okay. It was just a theory. But I gotta tell you, I hope you’re right because I cared a hell of a lot more about Vincent Ito than I do about Raphael Tomkin.”

Nicholas looked at him. It was as close as they both could come to the outward recognition of their friendship. He smiled. “Thanks. That means a lot—to me. I know it would to Vincent, too.”

They stood up. Croaker had kept his suit jacket on despite the heat of the day. Now he was sweating profusely and he shrugged out of it. His thin white shirt was stained with sweat.