How can a love
so gentle be so fierce? How can a soft caress grip with such strength? How can
your tenderest glance so quickly pierce
My
heart its
very depth, my life its length?
Admiral Thorson
had never written any poetry before the war; and he never wrote any more
afterward. But Mary Thorson kept in an old ribboned candy box in her
dressing-table drawer a collection of nearly 40 poems that had expressed his
feelings for her in those days when it was quite possible he would never see
her again.
They were the
only words of his that she now possessed.
At 9:08, Nurse
Abramski, a brusque but charming woman with a striking resemblance to Mary
Tyler Moore, looked in to check the admiral’s heartbeat and drip, and to ensure
that his waste-disposal bags did not need emptying. She smiled the whole time,
but said little; she knew that Mary Thorson preferred not to chatter. Mary
Thorson had enough to cope with, paying this long drawn-out homage to her
comatose husband and lover.
Nurse Abramski
finished in Admiral Thorson’s suite at 9:11. At the very moment she closed the
door behind her, a Chevrolet van drew up outside the hospital grounds on Balboa
Boulevard and doused its headlights. Out of the driver’s seat climbed
a young
Japanese called Masahiro Yoshino, a kendo adept who
had arrived in Los Angeles only four days ago from Kobe. Out of the passenger
seat, puffing
slightly,
climbed Commander Ernest Perry
Ouvarov, wearing a belted raincoat and chewing an unlit corncob pipe, an
unconscious impersonation of Mac-Arthur.
The commander
took off his tinted glasses and looked around the hushed hospital grounds. The
spreading California oaks rustled in the warm evening wind, and the lights from
the hospital facility sparkled through their leaves. “Okay,” he said at last,
in a hoarse voice. “Let’s get it over with.”
He and Yoshino
went around to the back of the van. Yoshino unlocked it and opened both doors
wide. Inside, the van was almost dark, except for a row of beady red safety
lights. The walls, floor, and ceiling were padded with black silk quilting.
Among these flags, suspended on silver claws, swung the second
Tengu, dressed this time in nothing more than a black headband and the tightly
bound loincloth of the sumo wrestler.
The motion of the van on its way
to Encino had caused the silver claws to work their way even more deeply than
usual into the Tengu’s flesh, and one of them had pierced his thigh muscle
completely. The Tengu was not alone: sitting next to him in the darkness were
two of Kappa’s black-masked disciples. After Yoshino had opened the doors, they
quickly and quietly took over, lowering the Tengu to the floor of the van and
speaking to him in long, magical murmurings as they raised him up to a sitting
position.
Commander
Ouvarov said, “We don’t have too long, you guys. This place has one of the
hottest security patrols going.”
The black
devil-people didn’t turn to look at him. Their concentration was reserved
entirely for the Tengu, who was now rhythmically raising and lowering his
white-masked face and uttering a high, keening sound that made Commander
Ouvarov shiver. It reminded him of a 4.7-inch naval shell screaming high and
deadly overhead.
Yoshino glanced
at the commander nervously. He was a serious young man, devoted to the samurai
ways, a fanatical believer in Japan’s ancestral honor. He was close to his
gods. But dealing with a Tengu was something different. A Tengu was the
fiercest martial horror that ancient Japan and her magical traditions were
capable of creating; and until today, Yoshino had never seen one in the flesh.
In Japanese,
the black disciples of Kappa incanted, “O great and terrible Tengu, master of
all that is evil and frightful, stalker of the night, deathless one, wrencher
arid devourer of flesh and spirit, use this servant of human clay to revenge
our dishonor.
At last, the
Tengu rose jerkily to his feet, the claws still hanging from his body. One by
one, the disciples unhooked them, until the Tengu stood free, his muscles still
distorted, his body still pierced with ghastly wounds, but breathing strongly
now behind his bland white mask, breathing powerfully and harshly like a wolf
that rushes up behind you in the night.
“He is ready,”
said the black-masked Japanese, bowing to Commander Ouvarov.
“Yoshino,” said
Commander Ouvarov. “Wait here with the van. Any trouble, any questions from
security guards, tell them you’re having a problem with the electrical system,
you’ve called for a tow truck. And, for Christ’s sake, smile a lot. What’s the
time?”
Yoshino checked
his large stainless-steel wristwatch. “Nine nineteen, sir.”
“Right, we
shouldn’t be longer than six or seven minutes. If we’re very much longer, or if
you hear a disturbance, wait five more minutes and then go straight back to
Nancy Shiranuka’s. You got me?”
“Yes, sir.”
Quickly now,
with Commander Ouvarov leading the way, the four of them crossed the lawns
surrounding Rancho Encino Hospital, keeping to the shadows of the trees. Behind
him, Commander Ouvarov could hear the Tengu’s panting, foul and suppressed. For
the first time since he had started working for Nancy Shiranuka and Gerard
Crowley, he really understood that he was involved in something far more
hair-raising than murdering two or three innocent people for the sake of some
rich client’s revenge. The discreet disposal of business opponents or political
enemies or smart young men who had overplayed their romantic overtures to rich
men’s daughters–that was all a question of day-to-day American business which
Commander Ouvarov could accept. But this Tengu was something different. Behind
that expressionless white mask was the face of a man who was actually
possessed, body and soul, by something from what Commander Ouvarov could only
conceive as hell itself. The Tengu’s eyes glowed like blue coals in a midnight
furnace,
his breath rushed and thundered inside his mask,
his nearly naked body was hideous with weals and deep holes that actually bared
the fibers of the muscles and the bones themselves.
The Tengu was a
demon-creature, a man who had voluntarily given himself to a fate which other
men would have happily committed suicide to avoid. Yet, according to Doctor
Gempaku, to become a Tengu was a far greater honor than to commit seppuku. The
busbi who committed seppuku were simply opening the way for
themselves
to heaven, those who gave themselves to the Tengu were condemning themselves to
eternal life and endless purifying pain. It was the Shinto principle of
mortification of the flesh to the nth degree.
That was why
the first Tengu mission had been less than a complete success. The Tengu had
not had sufficient pain inflicted on him to reach a state of total possession
by the ancient demon; he had been halfway between euphoria and utter agony, and
when Yoshikazu had tried to drive him back to the ranch, his demon had
gradually slipped away from him, leaving him in terrible pain but without the
spiritual possession that would have enabled him to endure it. Lying in the
van, he had gone partly mad.
This time, with
the second Tengu, Doctor Gempaku had taken no such chances. He had suspended
the Tengu on hooks until the last possible moment, to maximize his suffering.
Beneath the
Tengu’s loincloth, which was already spotted with fresh Hood, a ten-inch-long
steel spring, an eighth of an inch in diameter, had been pushed inside his
urethra, the length of his penis, into his bladder. The pain from this device
alone, Doctor Gempaku had told Commander Ouvarov, would make a god out of
anyone. They reached the corner of the hospital’s main administration building.
From there, they would skirt around the gardens where the patients sat during
the day to the intensive care building.
According to
the drawings of the hospital Commander Ouvarov had secured yesterday from the
Encino planning department, they could gain access to the room where Admiral
Thorson lay in his oxygen tent by forcing a pair of double doors, walking the
length of a 32-foot corridor, and then turning left.
Close by
Commander Ouvarov’s shoulder, the Tengu breathed beneath his mask with all the
roughness of a creature that knows it is about to kill. Commander Ouvarov took
a deep breath himself, to steady his nerves, and then said, “Let’s go.”
They walked
quickly between the rows of flowering bushes; past the ornamental pool and the
deck furniture. Their feet were silent on the grass and the patio paving. Only
that lascivious breathing betrayed their presence.
Suddenly, with
no warning at all, a dazzling security light picked all four of them out in
blinding relief. The Tengu stopped, twisting this way and that. But Commander
Ouvarov hissed, “Keep going! We’ve taken them by surprise, so keep going!” A
door slammed.
A voice snouted, “Mr.
Davison–there’s someone out there!”
Then another door
slammed, and there was the sound of running feet.
The four of
them had almost crossed the gardens now, and were only twenty feet away from
the double doors which would take them into the intensive-care unit. But from
both sides of the building, hurrying to intercept
them,
came two security guards with drawn guns.
“Oka.y,
freeze’.” one of the guards ordered. “Put your hands up,” and don’t move!”
The
black-masked Japanese hardly broke stride. One of them uttered a terrifying
screech and rushed forward at the security guard with his arms whirling as fast
as helicopter blades. The guard fired one wild shot before the Japanese struck
him on the bridge of his nose with
a
Oni move known as
“the splinter.” The broken cartilage of the guard’s nose was rammed upward into
his brain, killing him instantly.
The other
guard, a heavily built man with a gingery mustache, backed away down the side
of the intensive-care block, holding his revolver in both hands.
‘‘Keep back
there, or I’m going to blow your head off!’’ he shouted, his voice high-pitched
and frightened. “Keep well back there!”
The second Oni
adept zigzagged toward him, running in such a fast and complicated dance that
the guard could hardly keep his gun trained on him. Oni students were taught
this evasive running by having to dodge a constant shower of crossbow bolts.
But even “the dance of the dragonfly” was not enough to protect the Japanese
from an erratic and nervous security guard with a .38 revolver. As he flickered
toward the guard like a hovering shadow, the guard fired one shot which hit the
Japanese straight in the face. A spray of blood pattered on the paving stones,
and the Japanese rolled backward.
The first adept
took up where his dead comrade had left off: dodging toward the security guard
with his hands flailing. The security guard should have fired a second time,
but his nerve and his eye failed him. The Japanese screamed out, “Kappa!’’ and
dropkicked the guard on the side of the head. The guard went down with his neck
broken, and lay on the ground twitching like a dead chicken.
Now all the
floodlights in the hospital grounds had been switched on, and Commander Ouvarov
knew that it would be only minutes before the police arrived. He could cope
with a few security guards and frightened nurses, but the police would be
altogether different. He rapped out to the one remaining Japanese, “Set him
loose! Set the Tengu loose!”
The Japanese
uttered a strange, chanting cry. The Tengu, who had been standing a little way
behind them, now moved purposefully forward to the double doors of the
intensive-care unit and stood in front of them, his mutilated chest rising and
falling as he gathered his strength. Each door was glazed with a small circular
window, out of which light illuminated the Tcngu’s white mask. The Japanese
called out again, and this time the Tcngu lifted both his fists, hesitated, and
then plunged them with a slushy crash through the wire-reinforced glass.
Hooking both
arms through the broken windows; the Tengu tore the double doors off their
hinges and hurled them away across the grass.
Commander
Ouvarov waited as long as he dared; but he could already see three more guards
making their way, crouched and furtive, across the hospital gardens. He said to
the Japanese,
“Let’s get out
of here. I’ll give you a hand with your friend.” In the distance, police sirens
were warbling, and it was becoming more than clear to Commander Ouvarov that
the highly sophisticated security which protected most of southern California’s
wealthier citizens was going to prove a severe obstacle if Gerard Crowlcy
wanted anyone else done away with. He helped the Japanese lift the dead Oni
adept from the lawn, and between them they dragged him away through the bushes
and into the shadows, and began to make their way back to the van.
“We go back for
the Tengu?” asked the Japanese.
Commander
Ouvarov shook his head. “This has all gotten out of hand. We’re going to leave
the Tengu behind. If he doesn’t, then it’s tough luck. But you won’t catch me
scampering back into the arms of the law, just for the sake of some masochistic
Oriental.”
The Japanese
looked at Commander Ouvarov through the eye-slits of his mask. It was clear
that he was uncertain and suspicious.
“We cannot
leave the Tengu,” he argued. “It is our holy order that we must stay with him,
and bring him back.”
“I’m in charge
of this particular sortie,” said Commander Ouvarov, as they dragged the dead
Japanese through a low cypress hedge. “If I say we leave the Tengu, then we
leave him.”
“We must go
back,” insisted the Japanese. The howling of police sirens was already very
close.
Commander
Ouvarov let the body of the dead Japanese drop to the grass. “C’mere,” he said
to the Oni adept. “I’ll tell you what we’ll do.”