The Kaisho (40 page)

“Her father doesn’t know; he wouldn’t get it.”

“Do you?” He held Francie while she put her head under the stream of water.

“She’s bulimic, Lew. Of course I get it. She’s in therapy.”

“Is it doing any good?”

“These things take time.”

But by her resigned tone he knew she was answering by rote. “Margarite, this is Francie’s fight, not yours. She needs to want to get better, otherwise she never will.”

He pulled Francie out of the water, dried her hair and face with a wad of paper towels. Her complexion was so pale he could clearly see the blue veins at her temples.

He bent down, turning her around to face him. “Francie, what—”

But he never got to finish the question because her pinched face stared up at him and she cried out, “I’m going to die! I’m going to die! I’m going to die!”

Lillehammer, exhausted from a particularly frenzied bout of accoutremental sex with Doug, his very secret current flame, sank into a deep sleep. Doug was wild, unpredictable, which was his appeal. Neither man knew the other in real life—business or social. They came together essentially as ciphers, mindless bodies intent on sating themselves in the most bizarre methods available. In that respect, Doug was ideal. A restless spirit by nature, he was happiest getting something different going every time they met, the more grotesque and outlandish the better.

As Lillehammer sank into slumber, even the taste of Doug evaporated, until all that was left was darkness. And from out of the darkness emerged the Dream until it surrounded him in the walls of its peculiar universe.

Lillehammer rarely dreamed, but when he did it was usually the Dream. At least, this is what he had come to call it. Not that the Dream was always the same, but certain fundamental aspects never changed.

There was the jungle, first, last, and always: the triple-canopied tropical trees dripping moisture, rank fruit, and deadly serpents. No doubt about it, it was a nightmare vision of the Garden of Eden, and Lillehammer knew that the fed shrink he had been forced to see after he came back from Nam would have had a field day with the symbolism of it—if he had ever told her, which was, of course, out of the question.

The Dream was like tripping over gravity, falling upward instead of down, slamming the top of your head against a cage of fire-hardened bamboo. And that was another of the fundamental aspects: an impression of being in a zoo—the stench, the cramped space, and most of all, the uncomfortable sense of being constantly observed.

In the Dream as in memory he paced back and forth across the area of dirt floor too small for him ever to fully stretch out on. He’d had to sleep sitting up, not that he got much sleep. That was part of it. Darkness, the heavy lull of the insects’ buzz, and then the bright lights would stab behind his closed eyelids and he’d be jerked awake. This happened over and over again in the Dream as in memory until sleep became yet another freedom denied him.

The idea was perfectly sound, deriving from the basics of interrogation: strip the subject of a sense of time, of place, and finally, of himself. The end result was pliability.

In the same way a baker kneads dough to the right consistency, so his captors sought to break down his psyche.

To what extent they were successful he would never know. And that was the worst horror of all. Not knowing.

At first, when the Dream began, Lillehammer was hopeful that it would answer the question that had been haunting him ever since he returned from Nam: Had he been broken? In hospital, while his wounds were slowly healing, he’d had much time for contemplation, and even more when he had returned to the States and the shrink was loosed upon him.

Actually, he had liked her, Madeleine, had even fallen a little in love with her. That was only to be expected, she had explained to him one day. She had showed him the only real kindness since his incarceration in the bamboo zoo somewhere in the bush of Laos.

Christ, what a fuck-up he had made of things. But Madeleine had disagreed with him and, in fact, had proved to him that the reverse was true. They could not have broken him, she said, because none of the intelligence with which he had been entrusted had been compromised. Not a code, man or network, had gone down.
Don’t worry about memory,
Madeleine had assured him.
In these cases, memory is thoroughly unreliable.
Which was why she had been loosed on him, to pick through the rubble and unearth what he apparently could not.

You’re fine,
she had told him at his last session,
whole and functioning, able to return to what you were doing before. Whatever happened is in the past.

He wanted to believe her. And he would have, of course, had it not been for the Dream. Even as he saw that she had not lied, that he was still trusted, and now revered among his elite compatriots, the Dream was lodged in his memory like a stone.

In the Dream as in memory the smell of blood and excrement was always with him, the sweat of fear coating him like a malevolent second skin. They came for him in the zoo, and did things to him, unconscionable, unmentionable, even to Madeleine, whom he loved and even trusted a little bit.

As much as he could trust, because that is what the zoo did to him, if not, as Madeleine had assured him, depriving him of his humanity, then crushing his ability to trust in his fellow man.

In the Dream as in memory he was alone, abandoned by his compatriots, those with whom he had sworn undying friendship. The zoo was his alone to endure. No one came charging over a thickly foliated ridge, no one stole into the zoo in the dead of night to rescue him.

He existed inside the zoo, prey to endless indignities and torture. The suffering of life was punctuated only by the hallucinations of his own mind, at which point he was left alone the short length of time until he was returned sufficiently to the real world for the process to begin all over again.

His mind, under extreme pressure, telescoped time, bent it back upon itself until it disappeared entirely. He found himself again at the moment when he was being inducted into Looking-Glass, the shadow society that was pledged to embrace him as a blood-brother for just so long as he was of use to it.

But now he was peering at himself and his brethren through his own self-made looking-glass, aware at last of the shifting of reality and unreality, of the unsettling truth that lay behind the comforting facade of loyalty and fealty, that those behind the Looking-Glass had sold him lies as effectively as they sold everyone else around them. This was the frightening world that lay behind this modern-day Looking-Glass; and it was not so different from the one that Lewis Carroll had created more than a century and a half ago.

Much later, when he was back in Washington and working again, he discovered that if he had not been dumped unceremoniously on their doorstep in Nam, they would, indeed, have been prodded into action. They would have sent out a solitary Ranger—a sniper who would have had orders to put a bullet through his head in order to keep their secrets safe and sound.

In a way, he didn’t blame them—in their position, he supposed he might have contemplated the same thing. But in another way, he could not help but hate them: they had lied to him, his blood-brothers, and they had failed him. Their betrayal taught him a profound lesson in the manner in which human beings treat one another. After that, he discovered that he didn’t like humans much any more.

He forgot about Madeleine or, more accurately, his love for her; that was far too painful to dwell on. Instead, he turned himself into a kind of automaton. There was a familiarity that comforted him in going through the ten thousand rituals of his trade and getting it all spot on. There was a satisfaction that this veil he had woven was invisible to his comrades, that they had adjudged him well and whole as well as a hero. He was promoted, given far greater powers and leeway in initiative than he’d ever had when he was in Nam under the command of the Jabberwocky.

In those days he’d been known as the Mad Hatter—a nickname he believed even more appropriate now than it had been then.

Whatever else had been washed away from that era, the sobriquet of the Red Queen had remained. He and the Red Queen had toiled ceaselessly under the marshal glare of the Jabberwocky, even through the embarrassing mishap with Michael Leonforte.

Somehow, the Red Queen had sidestepped the fallout from that fiasco and had risen in rank so that now he inhabited the ultimate position of power that the Jabberwocky had occupied for decades.

How had the Red Queen done it? He had dislodged the Jabberwocky, a man whom Lillehammer had been certain would only be taken from his position of power feet first. The Red Queen had an asset named Nishiki, it was rumored. Nishiki’s intelligence was so compelling, so accurate, and at such a consistently high level that it became a sword with which the Red Queen cut a swath, rising through the hierarchy, mowing down unbelievers, political and ideological enemies, as he went.

As he did so, Lillehammer the opportunist rode his coat-tails. These days, he was the Red Queen’s eyes and ears, the only man, he believed, whom the Red Queen explicitly trusted. The Red Queen claimed that not even he knew Nishiki’s real identity or even his nationality. The intelligence was always sent to him by some form of dead drop, which was changed at frequent though random intervals. But if all this was true, what was the Red Queen’s relationship to Nishiki? What was their connection? What was Nishiki’s motivation for providing this flow of high-level intelligence?

Did Lillehammer care very much about the answers to these questions? In these veiled days filled with memory and the Dream, he found it easier to follow his superior’s orders than to seek answers to politically loaded questions. He had chosen a side long ago—or it had chosen him, what did it matter?—and now morality had no part to play in his current actions. He found some form of dim pleasure in succumbing to dumb rote.

Short-circuited, he was disconnected from the consequences of his actions. He flew through the nighttime skies of the world dispensing what the Red Queen called justice and did not imagine there might be a different reality. He was hermetically sealed behind his mask, peering out at the world with incurious eyes.

But man—even a man such as Lillehammer had become—could not exist on the familiarity of comfort alone. Disconnection from the world around him did not mean that the synapses had ceased to fire. He was alive, after all. Damaged, but alive.

It took him a good deal of time to work out what, really, was driving him in the new life he had made for himself. And in this regard, the Dream served him well as a path backward into memory. The Dream showed him why he was still breathing, why he had not slit his wrists in his Philippine hospital bed or defenestrated himself from his Washington office. It was because the Dream brought him, like detritus washed up on a far shore, the faces of those who had run the zoo. Like acid acting on metal, these faces were forever etched upon his memory; their faces, lit crazily by floodlight and sunlight, rode herd upon him, crouched like cruel ghouls upon his shoulders, driving their long bamboo nails into his flesh, slouched beside him in noisome fury as he walked or ate or defecated. In the Dream as in memory.

And at last, Lillehammer had come to the conclusion that he had been saved from the jaws of death for one purpose: to find his cagers and destroy them, as they had destroyed him. And to that cadence, and that cadence alone, did his heart beat.

Entering Paris was like emerging into clear water from the incantatory flux of a whirlpool. The charisma of Venice’s Byzantine brocade was broken by the effulgent flood of lights streaming into the cloud-clotted sky.

The Parisian night was a bouquet of vibrant facades, broad boulevards, massive fountains guarded by lions, cherubs, and gods, glittering whitely, bathed in light.

Fingers of light illuminated the Arc de Triomphe, rising from the fulcrum of the Place de l’Etoile, nexus of a dozen major avenues, radiating like the veins on the back of a hand. Geysers of light spilled over the Place de la Concorde, where Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, Danton and Robespierre, felt the terminal kiss of the Revolution’s razor, the Place Vendôme, where monuments to Napoleon rose and fell and rose once again. Arcs of light burst against the strong artery of the city that crossed from Right Bank to Left, with the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais on one end and the great gilded dome of Les Invalides on the other, while between them, lit by clusters of lamps, rose the magnificent bridge across the Seine named after Alexandre III of Russia.

Through this urban landscape, white as snow beneath a full moon, Nicholas and Celeste were driven from Charles De Gaulle airport. Entering the city of light they felt like pilgrims who had been cast into the wilderness for transgressions unknown and unforgivable, and who now were reentering Western civilization.

They crossed the Seine from Right Bank to Left, entering a world still somewhat bohemian, certainly younger than that across the river, filled with art galleries, trendy clothing boutiques, and food kiosks of all description.

They found lodging a block and a half from the Boulevard St. Germain at a hotel with a white-and-black facade of sandblasted stone and wrought iron. The rooms themselves were small, postmodern, neat, comfortable, with views of Paris’s justly famous rooftops, aglow with an astonishing aura, the pyramid of energy surrounding the Eiffel Tower.

Inside their room, a small, neat space, a VCR attached to TV was already displaying the black-and-white images of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, in a scene from Raymond Chandler’s febrile
The Big Sleep.
Electronic shadows on the wall, iridescent flickers like the blinking of an eyelid, the beating of a heart.

Sleep...

Avalon Ltd. is a company with an interesting history,
Fornovo had told them.
Originally a house that manufactured costumes for traveling theatrical troupes, it gradually metamorphosed as the renown of its mask-makers grew. At one point
—who knows when, perhaps around the time of the French Revolution—the mask-makers themselves wrested control of the company from their overlords, who—the story goes—were, because of their notoriety, forthwith guillotined in the Place Vend
ô
me. The name was changed to Avalon et fils because the artisans had come to think of the company as their home.