Carefully, Kemo
pressed his head against the door, to pick up the vocal vibrations of whoever
might be talking in the room beyond. He closed his eyes in concentration, but
there was utter silence. Either the room beyond was empty, or those who were in
it were silent. Nancy Shiranuka had said, Find out where he goes, who it is
that he sees. The decision to enter the room or not was not his. He had been
told that he must.
Using the
Noma-oi movement called “the September breeze,” Kemo swiftly turned the door
handle and opened the door. He paused in the doorway, in a combative stance,
but the room was deserted.
Three or four cushions, a bird
painting on the wall, rows of candles, but nothing else.
He crossed the
room to the next doorway, his feet as light as a butterfly landing on a leaf,
his body as well coordinated as ikebana, the arranging of flowers, each muscle
tense and disciplined, each nerve sensitive to the dangers of the house.
On the second
door was a plaque of iron, engraved with characters which Kemo had never seen
before. As far as he could tell, the characters meant “drowning” or “beware of
overwhelming water.” He touched the plaque with his fingertips, as if to
reassure himself. Then he pressed his forehead to the door and closed his eyes,
trying to gather voices or breathing, trying to detect the rustle of robes or
slippers.
There was
somebody in there.
Somebody breathing, deeply and noisily.
It sounded to Kemo like an invalid, somebody suffering from asthma or a chest
infection. He listened again, picking up every single sound and vibration that
he could, and after two or three minutes he was sure. There was a sick man in
there, but the sick man was probably alone.
Soundlessly,
Kemo opened the second door and stepped inside. The inner room was illuminated
by hundreds of Tengu’ candles, so many that it was almost impossible to
breathe. Kemo dodged to the left and kept close to the wall, touching the door
closed behind him with his fingertips, touch, silently and gently.
Then he froze,
listening, watching, his body rigid as kokeshi, the Japanese folk dolls made
without arms or legs. All he could hear was the sizzle of the candles as the
wicks burned into the wax, and the regular pounding of his own heart.
A voice said,
“Who are you? Who let you in?”
Kcmo shielded
his eyes against the dancing brilliance of the candles. He took one step
forward, then another; and gradually he was able to focus on the creature that
had spoken to him.
He had been
ready to speak: ready to give some spurious explanation about working for Mr.
Esmeralda and losing his way.
But when he saw the monster in
the basketwork throne, the words tangled in his mouth and he was unable to
speak at all. And there was that face: that
‘
yellow-masked
face.
Unemotional, half-smiling,
cruel as death.
There was a
moment for Kemo when he felt as if the whole world had tipped off its axis, as
if everything were coming to and end. He turned away from the creature in the
basketwork throne and stared at the candles as if they could at least offer him
sanity. But then the door swung open again, and there
was
three of them there, black-masked, cloaked in yellow, each of them posed in the
martial discipline known as Oat, the art of the devils. Oni had been forbidden
in Japan since the fourteenth century, but Kemo knew it from drawings and
paintings. He also knew that its one purpose was to dismember and kill. In Oni,
death was the only possible outcome.
Kemo wasted no
time.
He jumped at his three opponents with his hands
whirling in the Noma-oi’ ‘windmill of oblivion.”
He struck one of his
opponents on the neck, his hands blizzarding at 70 or 80 miles per hour, and
the man spun away as violently as if he had been hit by an automobile. Then
Kemo leaped aside and changed the rhythm of his attack to “the corn-beater,” a
slower, irregular pattern of hand-fighting which was impossible for any
opponent to predict.
The second man
went down, whirling to one side as if he had been caught by an exploding
grenade. But Kemo was not fast enough for three. The third man, his eyes
glittering behind his black silk mask, lashed out with his heel and sent Kemo
reeling back against the wall with three ribs broken and two badly cracked.
Kemo heard a
high-pitched shriek, almost a cackling sound, from the basketwork throne. Then
the third man was on him, in a style of attack for which Kemo could find no
defense. A swift lunge with two outstretched fingers rammed into Kemo’s
eyeballs and burst them both. A fist speeding upward penetrated his abdominal
muscles, parted his lungs while they were still breathing, and wrenched his
heart away from its moorings in a blast of blood. By the time the third blow
hit him, a knuckle-punch which was designed to pulverize the frontal lobes of
his brain, Kemo was already dead and collapsing on his feet. The Oni adept had
killed him in less than three seconds: the same kind of death that Gerard had
thought about only a few hours before. So fast that he never knew what hit him.
Mr. Esmeralda
came into the room, staring, aghast. He looked down at Kemo’s mutilated body,
then at Kappa, then at the last remaining Oat guard. He started to say
something, but then he simply shook his head and stood there in silence.
“You were
followed,” said Kappa in a hoarse whisper.
“I didn’t
know,” said Mr. Esmeralda. “Believe me, I didn’t know.”
“You were
followed,” repeated Kappa. He made the words a chilling indictment.
“Yes,” said Mr.
Esmeralda. Then, almost inaudibly, “Yes.”
E
va was very drunk when Gerard let himself into their apartment at
three o’clock the following morning, turned on all the lights, and began
packing a suitecase. She was crouched on the white leather sofa, a bottle of
Polish vodka three-quarters empty by her feet. She was wrapped up in one of
Gerard’s bathrobes, and she looked like the rescued victim of a hotel fire.
“Where are the
girls?” Gerard asked her as he walked through the living room to find his cigar
case. “Or are you so damned sloshed that you never even noticed they aren’t
here?”
“They called,”
said Eva in a blurry voice. “Melanie Radnick invited them to spend the weekend
riding.”
“Do we know
anyone called Melanie Radnick?”
Eva lifted her
head and tried to focus on him, but the glaring lights hurt her eyes. “Melanie
Radnick is Kelly’s best friend. They’ve been friends for–I don’t know, ever
since Kelly started going to Seven Hills. The Radnicks have a ranch at La
Crescenta.’’
“That’s nice
for the Radnicks.”
Eva tensely
rubbed the side of her face, as if she wanted to reassure herself that she was
still real.
‘‘George
Radnick works in
gas,
or something like that. Don’t
you remember him? We met him at the Devoes’ anniversary party.”
Gerard counted
the cigars in his case, and then closed it. “Evie,’’ he said, “
go
take a shower and sober up. You’re a fucking mess.”
He walked
through to the bedroom again, opening drawers and taking out underwear and
handkerchiefs and socks. He finished packing his suitcase neatly and quickly,
and then clicked it shut.
Eva was leaning
in the doorway now, a smeary vodka glass dangling from one hand, her mascara
blotting her eyes like ink on a sentimental letter. She watched him open the
glass jar on top of the dressing table, the Steuben duck that had been given to
them by the California Republicans for the work and the money they had put into
the election of President Reagan, and with conscientious pain she watched him
take out his cufflinks. She said, “You’re leaving me, is that it? You’re going
off with her?”
“I should be so
lucky,” said Gerard sourly.
“Then what?
What are you doing? What are you packing for?”
Gerard said, “I
have to go away for the weekend. Business, that’s all.
Nothing
important.
Nothing exciting.
Just business.”
“You’re taking
Francesca?”
“Does it matter
if I am? Look at the condition you’re in.”
“I don’t want
you to come back,” said Eva. “Just stay away. The girls and I can survive very
well without you.”
“You think so?”
asked Gerard, absent-mindedly. “Now, where the hell did I leave my keys?”
“Gerard,”
insisted Eva.
Gerard pecked
her on the cheek as he walked through the door. “You’re a wonderful woman,
Evie.’“
She lost her
balance, and snatched at the door frame to straighten
herself
up. “I’m in love,” she said loudly. “Do you know that? I’m in love with another
man. Not you.
Somebody else.
And he loves me too.”
“Well, that’s
good news,” said Gerard, taking his coat out of the hall closet. “Good news for
you, I mean. Not for him.”
“Gerard...”
Gerard put down
his coat and his suitcase, and came over to Eva and held her shoulders in his
hands. She noticed for the first time that a muscle in his cheek kept wincing,
as if there was an unbearable tension inside him.
“Evie,” he
said, and for a moment his voice sounded gentle and almost caring, the way it
used to before they were married. A wave of memory from the days when they had
been lovers came spilling onto the empty beach of tonight’s argument, tonight’s
drunkenness, and Eva remembered a day at Malibu, swimming, eating lobster,
laughing, running.
The wave ebbed
away. “You’re a bastard,” she said quietly. “However sweetly you put it, you’re
a 110 percent bastard.”
“I’m not trying
to put it sweetly,” he told her. “But just don’t forget that it takes two
people to make a marriage, and it takes two people to wreck a marriage.”
‘‘Three,’’ put
in Eva, slurrily but with great vehemence. “You forgot Francesca.”
She swayed
again, and he held her tighter. “The lovely Francesca,” she repeated.
Gerard waited
for a moment and then released her. “I’ll be back the day after tomorrow,” he
said, watching her with cold disgust. “Make sure you’ve sobered up.”
“I will,” said
Eva. “But not for you. By the time you come back the day after tomorrow I shall
make love to my lover ten times at least, and probably more.” She focused on
him sharply, and then said in a voice of pure jealousy and hatred, “If and when
you ever want me again, Mr.
Gerard Crowley,
then you shall have to anoint that precious and unfaithful organ of yours deep
in another man’s.”
Gerard, his
eyes telegraphing nothing at all, slapped her fiercely across the face. His
weddjng ring split her lip, and one side of her face was instantly spotted with
blood.
She didn’t
collapse, though, or even cry. She remained standing where she was, disheveled
and bloody, and stared at him with an expression of defiance and contempt that
could have turned orange juice to acid. Gerard looked back at her sharply,
questioningly, and then picked up his coat and his suitcase, looked again, and
made
a
hmph kind of noise, as if he weren’t sure that
he had really hurt her enough. He opened the door.
“Go,” said Eva,
through swollen lips. “Don’t let me stand in your way.”
Gerard
hesitated. “Go,” said Eva, and Gerard went, frowning to
himself
as he closed the door behind him. He whistled an uncomfortable tune as he
descended in the elevator to the garage, although the tune died away as he
crossed the empty concrete to his car. He opened up the trunk, stowed away his
suitcase, and then climbed into the Buick like a man who has a very long
distance to travel but doesn’t quite know where.
“Shit,” he said
to himself, thinking about Eva. Then he started up the engine.
It took him
less than an hour to drive out to Pacoima Ranch. Although the false dawn was
already lightening the eastern sky behind the San Gabriel
mountains
,
the highway was deserted, and the only signs of human life he saw were at San
Fernando Airport, where an executive plane was plaintively winking its lights
on the runway. He drove past Pacoima Reservoir and then out onto the Little
Tujunga Road.
Pacoima Ranch
was a ramshackle collection of huts at the end of a twisting, dusty driveway,
with corrugated iron rooftops and sagging verandas.
The kind
of place where unspeakable helter-skelter rituals might have been performed, or
where Nancy Drew might have gone in search of ghosts or kidnapers or fugitives
from justice.
Gerard turned
the car around in front of the main ranch house, and killed the engine. Even
before he had fished out his suitcase, two Japanese appeared on the veranda,
one of them carrying
a
Uzi machine gun, both of them
masked in black. They watched him, motionless, as he slammed the lid of his
trunk and walked toward them. Four or five yards away, he paused.
“Good morning.”
He smiled at them. The two Japanese didn’t answer, but moved aside to let
Gerard cross the veranda and enter the ranch house through the screen door.
Gerard asked.
“Did the
commander get here yet?” and one of the Japanese nodded each pointed upstairs.
“Ah,” said
Gerard.
“Sleeping it off, no doubt.”
Inside, the ranch
house was empty of furniture except for three or four neatly tied-up futons in
the large living room, but it was scrupulously clean. On the walls were
rice-paper scrolls and symbols, and a collection of black silk flags. Gerard
had once asked Doctor Gempaku what the flags signified, but Doctor Gcmpaku had
simply told him, “It would take only a minute for me to explain, but twenty
years for you to understand.”