The Nicholas Linnear Novels (6 page)

He sat up abruptly, his heart racing. A runic chanting, as if from far away across the distance of a sea, abruptly metamorphosed into the drifting crash of the surf, coming clear to him through the open window, the cry of the gulls. Still he knew the meaning of that arcane chanting….

He took several deep breaths. Japan clung to him now like a fine gauzy veil, enmeshing him. What had recalled it to him so intensely?

He looked around, saw the tip of Justine’s nose and her soft sensual lips, partly opened as she breathed, the only parts of her not covered by the sheet, blue and white and gray, rippling like the sea. She slept deeply now within its heaving bosom.

What is it about her, he wondered, that pulls me like a current? Oddly, he felt adrift upon the tides. Watching her, the soft rise and fall of her warm body, he knew that he was being drawn back to Japan, into the past where he dared not tread….

An unutterably delicious sensation woke him. He opened his eyes to find her thighs close to his face. He inhaled her musk, realized her lips were around him. Her tongue licked softly, lasciviously, and he groaned. He reached out to touch her but her thighs moved away. He watched, instead, the movement of her mount, tracing with his eyes the highly arched configuration, deeply bisected at its base, the soft curling hair glistening moistly down the center, her flesh as tumescent as his, an arrow of delight.

The pleasure ribboned out before him, a highway endlessly extended. Each time he was on the verge of coming, she used her hands on him, lifted her mouth away, encircling the base until the anticipatory spasms subsided. Then she would resume and the crescendo would begin again, over and over until his legs shook and his heart pounded and he felt as if he were burning with a fever, pleasure pooling and radiating at the same time, leaden with the amount of it running through his pelvis and genitals.

He became aware of her breasts swaying against his belly and he reached down, cupping them, rubbing the nipples until, involuntarily, her thighs opened, rushing toward him.

Every touch was now so exquisite that he felt muscles jumping all over his body at each contact. She did something to the head of his penis and he cried out, moving. He clutched at her breasts and she slid up so that his shaft squeezed between them. He buried his face in the crevasse between her thighs, opening his mouth as far as he could as he shot and shot and shot.

Vincent Ito arrived at the Medical Examiner’s office on First Avenue at Thirtieth Street at four minutes to eight in the morning. As he pushed through the plate-glass door at the top of the short flight of stairs, he nodded to the uniformed cop on duty and said hello to snowy-haired Tommy, Nate Graumann’s chauffeur. As he entered Room 134, he knew he had just enough time to grab a cup of coffee before the morning meeting began.

He turned right through the short hall and into the Chief Medical Examiner’s large, crowded office.

Nate Graumann, New York City’s Chief Medical Examiner, was a mountain of a man. His eyes were slitted, black and glossy, half hidden within semicircular folds of loose skin, somewhat paler than the color of that around them. His broad nose had been broken once, perhaps in some nighttime street fight in the South Bronx, where he had been born and raised. His hair was salt and pepper but his mustache was jet black. He looked, in short, like a most formidable opponent—which he was, as the mayor and several members of the city’s fiscal control board could easily attest.

“Morning, Vincent,” he called.

“Morning, Nate.” He hurried across the room to the high metal dome of the coffee machine standing like a doge’s palace amid the clutter. Hold the sugar, hold the half-and-half, he thought gloomily. I need my caffeine straight this morning.

“Stay a minute, Vincent,” Graumann said, as the assignment meeting broke up.

Vincent sat in a green chair across from the littered desk and handed over the cases he had picked out when Graumann asked to see them.

They were friends, away from their labors here, but those times had seemed to shrink over the years. Graumann had been deputy M.E. when Vincent had first arrived here and, it seemed, there had been more time then. Or perhaps it was just that there had been more money. Their workloads increased as the fiscal crunch fell like the side of a mountain upon them. The city had much larger problems than worrying about the people who were daily bludgeoned, knifed, strangled, drowned, asphyxiated, shot, mangled and blown apart on the city’s streets or in the bodies of water throughout its environs. Eighty thousand people die each year in New York City and we get thirty thousand of them, he thought.

“What d’you have on at the moment?” Graumann said.

“Uhm. The Morway thing,” Vincent said, his brow furrowing in thought, “and the Holloway knifing—I’m due in court on that any moment. The Principal case is about closed—just a few odds and ends left to tie up for the D.A.—the blood analysis should be in this afternoon. And then, oh yeah, Marshall.”

“What’s that?”

“Came in late yesterday afternoon. McCabe said it couldn’t wait so I began working on it right away. Drowning in the reservoir. McCabe thinks he might have had his head held under. They’re holding someone on suspicion, that’s why she needs the goods right away.”

Graumann nodded. “Full load, huh?”

“More than.”

“I want you to go out to the Island for a couple of days.”

“What? In the middle of all this?”

“If it weren’t important I wouldn’t be asking,” he said patiently, “would I?”

“But what about—?”

“I’ll look after your cases in progress personally. And these”—he picked up the two manila folders, tapping their bottoms on the desk top several times as if straightening them out—“I’ll give to Michaelson.”

“Michaelson is an idiot,” Vincent retorted hotly.

Graumann regarded him placidly. “He goes by the book, Vincent. He’s steady and dependable.”

“But he’s so slow,” Vincent moaned.

“Speed is not everything,” Graumann reminded him.

“Tell that to McCabe. She’s got the whole office on our case, lately. All those goddamn assistant D.A.s wheedling their way in here mucking things up.”

“It’s what they’re paid to do, I’m afraid.”

“So what am I doing out on the Island?”

“Paul Deerforth called late yesterday,” Graumann said. “You remember him?”

“Sure. We met last year when I came out to visit you for a couple of days. West Bay Bridge, right?”

“Uhm hmm.” Graumann sat forward. “He’s apparently got a problem that’s over his head. He has ancillary ties to the Suffolk County M.E.’s office.” He looked down at his steepled nails, back up to Vincent’s face. “He asked for you specifically.”

There was a great fish tank along the left-hand brick wall of the living room of Nicholas’ house. It was, he estimated, big enough to hold fifty gallons of water. But its denizens were no ordinary guppies or gouramis, for the owners had left to him, the summer’s tenant, the care of a multitude of saltwater fish whose brilliant colors electrified the surrounding water just as if they were a flock of boldly plumaged birds flitting through some dense tropical world.

He watched Justine’s form through this aqueous lens like a primitive peeping through the foliage at an intruding memsahib.

She wore a red bathing suit cut high along the thighs to resemble a dancer’s leotard and thus accentuate her long legs. She had a white towel around her neck as if she had just come from a gym. She licked at a running egg yolk between her fingers as she mopped at the plate with a last bite of toast in her other hand. Popping this into her mouth, she turned to look at him.

“Those aren’t yours, are they?” she asked.

He was finished feeding them but unaccountably remained in his crouched position, fascinated perhaps by the distortions of the soft currents created by the fish and the bubbling aerator. The certain air of unreality was comforting although he might be more inclined to think of it as an aspect of fantasy.

“Not mine, no,” he said from behind the barrier reef. “They are the house’s true owners.” He laughed and straightened up. “More so than I, at any rate.”

She stood up, brought the plates to the kitchen. “Christ, it’s raining.” She leaned on the sink with her elbows, stared out the window. “I’d wanted to work outside today.”

The rain pattered lightly against the living room windows, the flat roof, coming in from the sea. The light was cold and dark, as patchy as marble.

“Do it here,” he said. “You’ve got your stuff with you.”

She came out into the living room, dusted her hands. “No, I don’t think so. If I have to be inside, I might as well use the board.”

She confounded him, and doing nothing was, in its way, just as bad as taking the wrong turn. He despised hesitation.

“Have you brought any sketches with you?”

“Yes, I—” She glanced away toward the large canvas bag by the side of the sofa. “Of course. Yes.”

“I’d like to see them.”

She nodded, reached out a large blue-paper-covered tablet, handed it to him.

She wandered around the room while he went from page to page. The bubbling of the tank. The muted-hiss of the surf.

“What’re these?”

He looked up. She was standing in front of a low walnut breakfront, hands clasped loosely behind her back. She meant the objects he had hung on the wall one above the other, a pair of scabbarded gently curving swords. The top one was perhaps thirty inches long, the one beneath perhaps twenty.

He watched the shadowed line of her spine for a moment, compared it with the one in the sketch he held in front of him. “They are the ancient swords of the Japanese samurai,” he said. “The longer one is the
katana
, the killing sword; the other, a
wakizashi
.”

“What’re they used for?”

“Combat and
seppuku
: ritual suicide. In ancient times, only the samurai were allowed to wear and use the
daisho
, the two blades.”

“Where did you get them?” Still she had not taken her eyes off them.

“They’re mine,” he said.

She turned her head and smiled. “You mean you’re a samurai?”

“In a way,” he said seriously and got off the couch. He stood beside her, thinking about the three hours a day he practiced.

“Can I see,” she said, “the long blade?”

Carefully he reached up, took the
katana
off the wall. “I shouldn’t do this.” One hand on the sheath, fingers of his right hand wrapped around the long hilt.

“Why not?”

He pulled slowly, its shining length revealed in a four-inch span. “The
katana
should be drawn only for combat. It’s sacred. Given in the manhood ceremony, christened with its own name, it is the heart and soul of the samurai. This is a
dai-katana
, longer than the standard sword. Don’t touch it,” he said sharply and she withdrew the extended finger in alarm. “It would sever your finger.”

He saw her reflection in the blade, eyes opened wide, lips slightly parted. He could hear her breathing beside him.

“Let me see a little more of it.” She brushed a stray lock of hair out of her eyes. “It’s beautiful. Has it a name?”

“Yes,” he said, thinking of Cheong and Itami. “
Iss-hōgai.
It means ‘for life.’”

“Did you name it?”

“No, my father did.”

“I like the name; it fits, somehow.”

“There’s magic in a Japanese-forged blade,” he said, replacing the
dai-katana
in its scabbard. “This particular sword is almost two hundred years old yet its manufacture is so superb that it does not show even a year’s wear.” He replaced the weapon. “The finest blade the world has ever known or ever will know.”

The phone rang and he went to it.

“Nick. It’s Vincent.”

“Hey, How are you?”

“Fine. Actually, I’m on my way out to your neck of the woods—or shore, as it were.”

“The Island?”

“Better than that. West Bay Bridge.”

“Hey, that’s great. I haven’t seen you since—”

“March, if you want to know. Listen, I’m going to be staying at Doc Deerforth’s in town.”

“No you’re not. You’re staying out here by the beach. There’s plenty of room; you can’t swim in town.”

“Sorry, but this isn’t a vacation, and until I find out what’s going on I’d better plan to stay with the doc.”

“How’s Nate?”

“As usual or thereabouts. There’s too much work there for all of us.”

Nicholas glanced at Justine, who was leafing through her sketchbook, one hand run through her thick hair. While he watched, she leaned across the sofa, reached out a pencil from her bag, began to continue the unfinished sketch she had been contemplating.

“Someone there with you?”

“Yes.”

“I see. Well, I’ll be out late this afternoon.” He laughed, his voice sounding for the first time thin and strained. “It must really be something. Graumann’s given me the car
and
Tommy. All I have to do is sit in the backseat and take a nap.” He sighed. “Poor me. A few years ago, before the fiscal crunch, I’d be coming out in a Lincoln. Now I have to be content with a diarrhea-tan Plymouth.”

Nicholas laughed. “Give me a ring when you’re settled in and you’ll come over for a drink.”

“Right. ’Bye.”

He cradled the receiver, sat down next to Justine. His eyes traced the new lines she had made but his mind was far away.

“I think I see now why you asked for me to come out,” Vincent said.

“You know what this stuff is?” Doc Deerforth said.

Vincent rubbed at his eyes with thumb and forefinger. The harsh fluorescent lights hurt his eyes. He reached up, pulled the gooseneck incandescent lamp closer to the sheets of paper he had been reading. “I don’t quite know what to think, to be honest.”

“The man we just saw downstairs did not die of drowning.”

“Of that there is no doubt.” Vincent nodded his agreement. “Whatever he died of, it wasn’t asphyxiation.”

“As you can see,” Doc Deerforth said, indicating the contents of the folder in Vincent’s hands, “he had no previous record of heart failure or any cardiac problem at all; none in his family. He was a perfectly healthy thirty-six-year-old male Caucasian, slightly out of shape but—”