“The Tengus,”
whispered Nancy. Jerry tiredly rubbed his eyes. “The Japanese were sending
Tengus out to every possible location in the Pacific, in a last hopeless
attempt to turn the tide of the war. There must have been hundreds of them,
even thousands. At that time, it couldn’t have been difficult to find enough
fanatical young Japanese who were prepared to submit themselves to the pain
which was necessary for them to become...
well, what they became.”
“Possessed,”
Nancy prompted him.
“I don’t know,”
said Jerry. “I wasn’t sure then, and I’m still not. After the war was over, and
I was sent back to Tokyo, I spent days reading everything I could on ancient
Shinto rituals and Japanese demonology. But who knows? The human mind and the
human physique are capable of extraordinary things under stress, and in
conditions of trance or religious ecstasy. The members of the Pentecostal
Holiness Church in Kentucky drink strychnine and burn Tengu their feet with
blazing
torches,
just to show that the Lord will
protect them against harm. I saw a fire-walk myself in Polynesia, when a man
walked twenty yards over white-hot coals with bare feet and appeared to be
unscathed. You think to yourself, are these people really possessed by angels,
or devils, or are they simply using their ordinary human capabilities to the
utmost–something which most of us rarely do?”
Nancy said
nothing, but waited for Jerry to continue. It was growing dark
outside,
and somewhere in that darkness David was being held
captive, for a ransom which amounted to nothing less than Jerry’s own life. The
thought was clinging around his mind like a tangle of barbed wire, and already
his emotions and his desperate love for David were scratched and bleeding and
raw.
‘They
parachuted six of us into the Chugoku Sanchi at night, with a high-power
Stromberg wireless receiver and enough food to last us for a week. We set up
three base camps in the mountains and trekked from one to the other, listening
at each one to the military and code messages that the Japanese were putting
out from Hiroshima. Most of the wireless traffic was routine–which ships were
docking, how many troops were being embarked for where, how much ammunition was
available, what their civil-defense plans were in case of an American assault.
But after three days we picked up a different batch of signals from the center
of the city, from a building which we pinpointed on our street plans, by simple
triangulation, near a bridge across the Ota River. All the signals were related
to what they called the Tengus, the devil-people. We listened for four days and
four nights, and by the end of that time we were absolutely certain that it was
right there, in that building in Hiroshima, that the Hogs were being trained.”
Jerry came away
from the window and sat down again. Nancy poured him another drink, and watched
him with caution and sympathy. It was clear from the look in his eyes that he
had relived those wartime days in Japan over and over again, dreaming and
awake, and that he would carry the responsibility for what he had done forever.
“They had
briefed me, before I was dropped into Japan, that if I found the place where
the Hogs were being created, I was going to be giving the President the
go-ahead to use a completely new type of bomb, an incredibly devastating
firebomb, they told me, which would instantly incinerate the Hogs and give them
no chance of survival whatever. They had Japanese experts helping the U.S.
Intelligence Commands–experts in Japanese demonology, as I later found out–and
it was the opinion of these advisers that the only way in which the Tengus
could be eradicated without any fear of their revival would be to vaporize them
with an atomic bomb.
You know the
legends, I expect. If a Tengu is chopped to pieces, even one piece, on its own,
remains capable of independent life. And so nothing could remain. Not even a
fingernail.
“Well, I was
sure that I had found the place. Every signal confirmed it. I radioed a message
to the USS Value, which was waiting off Mi-Shima in the Sea of Japan, and the
Value, in turn, relayed the message to the U.S. Pacific Fleet. President Truman
Was at Yalta at the time, with Stalin and Churchill. They gave him the message,
and he said go. The official justification was that, if America had the means
to bring the war to a swift conclusion, she ought to do so, which as far as it
went was quite true. But what they omitted to tell the public and the press was
that two or three thousand Tengus could have held up the American advance for
five or six years, even longer; and that General MacArthur had already
expressed the opinion in a confidential memorandum to President Truman that an
invasion of the Japanese mainland would cost an un-acceptably high number of
American casualties. That is, unless the Tengus were eliminated, totally.”
“Which is what
you justifiably did,” said Nancy.
“Yes,” Jerry
agreed. “But when I confirmed the position of the Tengu training center, right
in the middle of Hiroshima, among ten square kilometers of wooden houses, I
didn’t understand that our ‘incredibly devastating firebomb’ was going to be an
atomic bomb. I didn’t understand that, for the sake of killing three or four
hundred fanatical young Japanese soldiers, we were going to wipe out eighty
thousand men, women, and children in the space of a split second, and that
another sixty thousand were going to die of radioactivity within a year.”
He was silent
for a very long while. Then he said, “I didn’t know.”
“And if-you had
known?” asked Nancy.
Again he was
silent. “I’m not sure,” he replied at last. “When you’re in a war, everything
looks different. I lost all five of the men who were with me. We got caught in
crossfire on the beach at Kokubu, when the landing craft tried to pick us up.
Japanese Coast Guardsmen, most of them not much more than sixteen and seventeen
years old. They caught us like ducks on a pond. I only got away because I could
swim. Five men lost out of six, and I thought it was a massacre.
“Then I heard
that they’d dropped the atomic bomb. Compared to that, my massacre was a school
picnic.”
Nancy allowed
Jerry to settle into repose. Then she said, “Nagasaki?”
“I don’t know,”
said Jerry. “They might have suspected another Tengu center there, but I doubt
it. They probably realized that the atomic bomb was so damned effective that
they could end the war almost immediately. Jesus–once you’ve killed a hundred
and forty thousand people, what does it matter if you kill seventy thousand
more?”
Nancy said,
“You still blame yourself after all this time?”
“Wouldn’t you?
I could have sent back a radio message saying that I hadn’t found anything.”
‘‘Then you
would have had to take the responsibility for all of the American soldiers who
would have been killed by the Tengus.”
Jerry gave her
a wry, lopsided smile, the first smile he i had managed since he had heard that
David had been kidnapped. “You see my problem,” he told her.
Nancy went to
her tape deck and switched on a soft recording of koto music. There was
something about her stillness, something about the peace of her
apartment, that
made Jerry feel as if whole centuries might
have passed by since he had first rung her doorbell.
He said, “I
don’t know why I’ve told you all of this. Apart from my shrink, you’re the
first person I’ve ever discussed it with. They could put me into jail for
twenty years for what I’ve said to you tonight.”
Nancy said,
“You want your son back.”
“Yes.”
“And your son
is more important than twenty years in jail?”
“Yes.”
‘‘Then you have
been justified in telling me about the Tengus, and about the bomb. You and I
have more in common than you think.”
Jerry reached
across and took out one of Nancy’s cigarettes.
“How’s that?”
he asked her.
“The Tengus
have affected both of our lives. You, because of what you did in the war.
Me, because I am now being blackmailed into helping them come back
to life.
And also because I was once a member of the shrine that
worships the Seven Black Kami, of whom the Tengu is the greatest and the most
terrible.”
Jerry said, “I
want my son, Miss Shiranuka. What can I do?”
“You can stay
here and wait for a while,” said Nancy. “Gerard Crowley is due here in just
about an hour’s time, and you can talk to him.”
“It must have
been Gerard Crowley who arranged for the Tengu to kill me in the first place.
The Tengu who murdered Sherry Cantor.’’
“It was,” said
Nancy blandly.
‘Then how can I
talk to him about David? I mean, how
can I
...”
“Gerard Crowley
has changed a little in the past few days, the same as I have,” said Nancy.
“Like me, he is beginning to realize that he is extremely dispensible; and that
unless he hedges his bets, he may find himself a very bad loser. We are all in
fear of our lives.”
Jerry said,
“Forget it. I’m going straight out to that Pacoima Ranch right now.”
“You want to
bring your son back alive?”
“Of course I
do.”
“Then control
your anger. Hold back your impatience. Wait and speak with Mr. Crowley. You are
up against an enemy which only Presidents and atomic bombs have been able to
defeat in the past. You are up against the accumulation of centuries of
Japanese history, and a devil that speaks with many voices. Gerard may help.
Gerard may tell you how to get your son back. But you must beware, for even
Gerard himself may be the devil, or the devil’s disciple.”
M
r. Esmeralda heard the news from Rancho Encino at a few minutes
after eleven o’clock, on ABC television’s evening roundup. He was standing in
front of the mirror in his rented house on Camden Drive, fastening his
red-and-white silk necktie, in preparation for Commander Ouvarov’s imminently
expected return from Encino and for the visit he would have to make
subsequently to the split-level house in Laurel Canyon, to give Kappa his
report that Admiral Thorson had been successfully slain.
Through the
half-open bedroom door, he could see Kuan-yin sitting in the parlor in her
chauffeur’s uniform, her tunic unbuttoned as far as her heavy bronze belt
buckle, her brown-booted legs crossed, reading TV Guide. His Spanish maid,
Luisa, was clearing the table from the evening meal. Then he heard, “From
Encino tonight, we’ve just heard that a maniac killer...”
“Turn it up!”
Mr. Esmeralda demanded. “Quickly, turn the sound up!”
Kuan-yin
reached for the remote control and casually increased the volume. Mr. Esmeralda
walked slowly into the parlor, his hands still holding his half-fastened
necktie, listening with dreadful attention to the news which he had feared from
the very beginning.
“…examiner says
that she died instantly from her injuries, although he would not yet detail
what these actually were. His only comment was that it was a ‘terrible multiple
murder, the work of a madman.’ The bodies of two other Japanese were discovered
in bushes in the hospital grounds, one of them shot by security guards, the
other apparently the victim of a knife attack by his Caucasian associate.
Detectives from Hollywood who have been working on the barehanded killings
earlier this week of Our Family Jones star Sherry Cantor and a uniformed police
patrolman by the side of the Hollywood Freeway have been in close contact with
Encino detectives as...”
Mr. Esmeralda
scarcely heard the rest of the report. He sat down on the arm of the sofa and
gradually tugged his necktie loose, twisting it around his hands like a
garotte. So, Commander Ouvarov had failed, and the Tengu had not only been seen
and caught, but killed. He supposed it wasn’t really the commander’s fault.
Breaking into the hospital and attempting to silence Admiral Thorson had been a
fanatical idea at best. But Mr. Esmeralda knew that Kappa would never take the
blame for what had happened, and he also knew that Kappa would
lay
much of the blame on him.
Worse still,
the police would now be in possession of a wealth of circumstantial and
forensic clues which could lead them, eventually, to an arrest. They were
likely to be questioning the Japanese community already about unusual comings
and goings among Japanese; and if Gerard Crowley had been even slightly
careless in his dealings with the immigration authorities, they could pick him
up within hours.
He listened to
the end of the bulletin, to see if there was any news about Admiral Thorson
himself, but the announcer didn’t even mention him. That meant the old man was
probably still alive; and if that was the case, Kappa’s fury would be
devastating. Twice the Tengus had been sent out to kill, and twice they have
failed. Mr. Esmeralda had warned Kappa again and again about employing unstable
people like Gerard Crowley and Ernest Ouvarov, but Kappa had been adamant that
their hirelings should not only be dispensable, but “tainted with the breath of
evil.” Only men and women without any social or sexual morals would be able to
undertake the greatest task of all, the task for which the Tengus had been
created from the beginning.
Kuan-yin asked
Mr. Esmeralda, “It has gone wrong?”
Mr. Esmeralda
glanced toward Luisa, to indicate to Kuan-yin that she shouldn’t discuss Tengu
business in front of the maid. But he nodded and said, “Badly wrong. There will
be serious trouble now.’’
“What will you
do?” asked Kuan-yin, when Luisa had gone back down the short flight of stairs
that led to the dining room and the kitchen.
“I will have to
face them, whatever,” said Mr. Esmeralda. “You cannot run away from people like
the Circle of Burned Doves.
Especially if you want to
continue working in Japan.”