The Nicholas Linnear Novels (61 page)

He swiveled, legs spread, aiming the .38 in the classic pose he had been taught so well at the Academy. Silence. No movement. He tried to recall the path of the motion and extrapolate….

Felt the presence so close that he was startled. He dropped to one knee, fired fast and accurately on reflex. But in the space of that last instant he saw the figure leap at him. The left hand was extended and DeLong could make out a short black-wood stick, blunt-ended, as big around as his own nightstick. He braced for an overhand blow and thus was totally unprepared for the horizontal thrust. He was dumbfounded by the useless gesture.

The rounded end just touched the cloth of his uniform over his heart. It was only then that he jerked to the searing pain lancing through him as the seven-inch stilletto blade, powered by a high-thrust steel spring, shot out from the end of the wooden stick, puncturing him from front to back. It speared his heart, went through one lung and DeLong was dead before he hit the ground.

The flying form was by him, veiled by the first gout of blood, heard DeLong’s last gasp which, to the policeman’s dying brain, sounded like the loudest shout in the world.

Nicholas led Croaker back through the apartment. Women, half-clothed, stood in the doorways, staring curiously at them.

Ah Ma, having received the warrant papers from Willow, stood stone-faced with Penny at her side. Willow was in the back suite the Japanese had used seeing to the boy and trying to soothe the girl’s shattered nerves. Willow is wonderful in a crisis, Ah Ma thought, resignedly. The way I used to be. She sighed silently. I do not want to go in there, she thought. Once it would have been the first place I’d run. To help. But no more. Times have changed and so have I. She put one arm around Penny’s shoulders, as much to keep the girl beside her as to reassure her.

“You should have caught him,” Ah Ma said in Mandarin to Nicholas. “Now he may come back here. He won’t be happy. His security was broken.”

“He won’t be back,” Nicholas reassured her. “He has already killed the leak.”

They had to go out by the front, the long way around, surely, because in the dark and without radio linkage they could not chance egress via the back window. Gunfire still came to them, sporadic and muffled by the intervening walls of the building.

In the hallway a dog was barking and someone one flight down had turned up a TV set, perhaps to drown out the noise from outside.

“Christ!” Croaker said, rubbing at his eyes as they pounded down the stairs. “What a goddamned mess.”

More shots as they emerged into the hot sticky night and they ran down Doyers, heading for Pell Street.

They saw the blue-and-white first, slewed at an angle. They raced past it.

Nicholas saw the two bodies immediately. One was outlined in the foreground, the other cloaked in a spider web of shadows at the end of the street. He paused, his eyes searching from left to right and back again.

Croaker brushed past him, his gun at the ready, but checked when he saw the first body. Slowly, warily he went toward it in a semi-crouch and, on one knee, turned it carefully over. He recognized DeLong at once, was appalled at the amount of blood: He searched in vain for any sign of life. His hand came away soaked.

He got up and, crabwise, scuttled quickly down the street, checked Binghamton’s cooling body. He stood up and holstered his gun. He came back, passed Nicholas without a word and slid in behind the wheel of the patrol car.

He called dispatch, asking for the meat wagon and the associate M.E. on call. Then he sent out an A.P.B. He was still on the phone when Nicholas came up, leaning on the frame of the open door.

“He’s long gone, I’m afraid.”

Croaker cradled the receiver, put his head onto the back of the seat, closing his eyes. “They were my best team.” His eyes snapped open and his big fist pounded the steering wheel so hard it jumped. “The best goddamned team!” He sighed. “I’m sorry now I didn’t listen to you. I don’t know who that guy out there is but—”

“Lew,” Nicholas said, “slide over. I want to talk to you before the crowd comes.”

Croaker turned to look at him as he slid over to the passenger’s side. Far off, they could hear the wailing rise and fall of a siren. It could have been an ambulance.

“I know who the ninja is.”

Croaker sat perfectly still for a moment.

“How long have you known?”

Nicholas blew out a breath as if that would relieve the heaviness he suddenly felt. The deaths in the present had combined with the deaths in his past, rushing forward to once again engulf him. He felt very tired and very sad.

“Not long, really. In the hallway outside Ah Ma’s.”

“I see.”

And then he told Croaker everything, spewing it all out as if that might cleanse his soul, relieve him of a burden which, he felt now, he had been carrying far too long.

“Do you mean to tell me,” Croaker said, when he had finished, “that Saigō isn’t after Tomkin at all? That he’s after you?”

“Yes and no,” Nicholas said wearily. “He is going to kill Tomkin all right, unless we stop him, but I believe he took on the job to get to me also. It’s the only way all of the killings make sense.”

“I see that, of course, but this is like a blood vendetta.”

“It’s a matter of honor.”

“But you must have known it was coming.” The siren’s wail was louder now, a cry in the night, and the sound of excited voices pitched back at them off the brick walls. “Weren’t you afraid of—?”

Nicholas gave him a wan smile as he shook his head. Time to go, he thought. “I am prepared for it. I’ve been prepared for a long time now.” He climbed out of the car. Every muscle seemed to ache and his head throbbed as if it were in a vise. He leaned in so Croaker could hear him as the blue-and-white drew up, followed by the ambulance. The street lit up red and white, red and white like the entrance to an amusement park.

“You see, Lew,” he said with infinite slowness, “I am a ninja, too.”

“Nick, wait!”

But he was already walking past the oncoming people, crowding into the street, into the glare of the dense night.

“Sam.”

Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. He had never said that word in his life yet he thought it now.

“Yes?”

“Sam.”

“Who is this?”

“Are you still my rabbi?”

“Oy, Nick. Nick! Is it really you?” Goldman’s voice was light.

“It’s me.”

“My God, how are you?”

“All right. How’s Edna?”

“Edna? Edna’s fine. Dying to see you. Where are you?” Silence. “Nick, are you all right?”

“To be honest, no.”

“Just a minute. What…?” The sound of muffled voices came to him, a conversation from another world. A world where there were homes and families, children. Mortgage payments and, perhaps, a two-week trip to Europe in the spring. What was he doing here, anyway?

“Listen. Are you in the city? Edna says to come right up. It’s Friday night. She’s made chicken soup. With
lokshen.
Your favorite, remember?”

“I remember.” He remembered everything now.

“So come over. We’ll eat. We’ll talk.” Pause. “You’ll make Edna very happy. She’s been worried about you.”

He rested his head against the acoustic panel of the booth. Traffic raced by him, just beyond his reach.

“Yes,” he said after a time. “Okay. I’ll be over.”

He hung up and hailed a cab. The Goldmans lived in the Dakota on Seventy-second and Central Park West. They took the Bowery, which turned into Third Avenue, all the way up to Forty-second Street where the taxi turned left, heading crosstown to Eighth Avenue.

Just after Broadway, Nicholas leaned forward, tapped the intervening plastic partition. “I’ve changed my mind. I’ll get off here.” He paid and got out.

He had been idly staring out the left-side window as they passed the long line of movie marquees along that tawdry street when he had seen the film titles.

He watched the two-way traffic, crossed to the south side of the street. He walked west, past a couple of the new-era glass and chrome porno shops, proudly announcing “Couples Welcome.” The doors were thrown open in one and a tall black man in wide hat and tight green pants lounged in the doorway. “Hits,” he murmured, “loose joints, coke, speed. Quality stuff.”

Now the movie marquees came one after another in a seemingly unending line on both sides of the street. Most were porno houses but one, the one Nicholas had seen from the cab window, was not. Here there was a kung fu triple bill. Two of the films starred Bruce Lee.

Nicholas dug out a buck-fifty and went inside. The place smelled old and musty. It was lighter than was normal in most theaters. There was a crowd of black and Puerto Rican kids clamoring around the soda machine in back.

He took a seat. The place was almost filled. On the screen Bruce Lee was talking earnestly with a couple of evil-looking Japanese in dubbed English. The audience was noisy, restless for the action sequences. Dialogue they did not appreciate.

Nicholas sat back, watching Lee for a time. The years had not diminished his aura. His spirit seemed to leap off the screen, making the most slipshod productions worth watching.

Nicholas recalled the first time they had met. It had been in Hong Kong, ironically, after the period Lee had spent in Hollywood, working as a bit player in films and TV and teaching stars enough of the martial arts to get by in front of a camera.

He was beginning to be somewhat of a star in his own right then. They had taken to each other immediately but time and logistics had worked against them and they had never seen each other again.

Lee’s death had come as a shock to Nicholas. Not that someone would try to kill him—he knew enough about Lee by that time to understand that the man’s uncompromising nature had become a thorn in some decidedly unsavory sides—but that an attempt had succeeded. He had always wondered how it had been done; now he thought he knew.

Outside, it was still stifling and, in this place of hot lights, fast food, dirty dope and even dirtier deals, more so than elsewhere.

It took him fifteen minutes to find an empty cab and half that time to reach the Dakota; there was little traffic.

He had stayed at the decaying theater just long enough to catch one of Lee’s gorgeously choreographed action sequences, motivated, as usual, by revenge. Tonight there seemed nothing artificial about that.

Goldman, dapper as ever in a pale blue pinstripe shirt and midnight-blue linen slacks, met him at the door. He smiled warmly when he saw Nicholas, extending a firm hand. “Nick. We were getting worried about you.” He turned, still in the doorway. “Edna, it’s him.” He pulled Nicholas inside, pushed a rum on the rocks into his hand. “Here. It looks like you need this.”

Edna, a dark-haired chubby woman, bustled into the living room from the swinging door to the large kitchen. She beamed, raised her hands. “
Tateleh!
” She kissed him on both cheeks. She had the kind of incandescent inner warmth that made mere physical beauty irrelevant. “Where have you been so long, you haven’t come to see us?” Her voice held just the right balance between love and reproach.

He smiled thinly. “It’s good to see you both.”

“That’s it,” she said as if she had discovered a rare artifact. “You’ve lost weight. Come.” She took him by the hand. “We eat first. Whatever it is you want to talk to Sam about can wait for a full stomach.”

They ate in the kitchen with the yellow and beige wallpaper and the old West Side fixtures, the oval table of finegrained mahogany richly waxed, covered with a beautiful embroidered white-on-white tablecloth. A brass menorah stood on a wall shelf above the table, at its center.

Afterward, as Edna cleared the dishes, Sam nodded silently to Nicholas and they excused themselves. Edna kissed them both before they left. “Whatever is wrong,” she told him with absolute faith, “you can fix it. Right, Sam? Am I right?”

“You’re always right.” He ushered Nicholas into the living room.

Beige and pale green predominated. Edna despised brilliant primaries, perhaps because she saw her childhood on 189th Street in those colors. The effect was a soothing one, like being in a cool forest during the heat of the day.

They sat on the beige velvet couch and Sam put his feet up on a matching ottoman. An antique clock ticked lightly from its owl-like perch atop the white marble fireplace. A great bunch of dried eucalyptus in a pale pink ceramic vase stood within, wafting its pungent scent into the room. There was a Utrillo on the opposite wall and, on another, a small Dali. In their bedroom, on pale blue walls, were a Picasso and a Calder which, of course, Edna detested. They were all originals but they were displayed with a pleasing lack of ostentation.

“It has come back,” Nicholas said softly. “All my past, like a great tidal wave.”

Goldman reached for a hardwood box, took out a cigar, lit it slowly.

“I’ve lost the present somewhere along the line. I no longer know where I am.”

He deliberately blew the blue smoke away from Nicholas. “Nicholas, as Shakespeare so cleverly put into Ophelia’s mouth, ‘We know what we are, but we know not what we may be.’”

“Sam, I didn’t come here for homilies!” he exploded.

“Nor did I mean to give you any.” He took the cigar out of his mouth, laid it in a crystal ashtray. “Look, it is totally unreasonable to expect to know or understand everything about yourself. The human being is such a complex animal that we have to be content to muddle through things as best we can. Some days, it just doesn’t seem nearly enough. At other times…” He shrugged with some equanimity.

“I understand all that. But you’re the expert on history. I am only partly a Jew. I haven’t had the training. I don’t—”

“It has nothing,” Goldman said seriously, “at all to do with training. One learns the meaning of being a Jew just as one learns the meaning of being a human being—by living life, not by learning the Torah.

“It comes from what you feel inside and the important thing is that you do not deny what is inside you. Doubt and fears; uncertainty of the present and the future all stem from that. Your self must be free to go in whichever direction it must go.