The Kaisho (51 page)

Gaunt had met Manny so many years ago, a youngish, gawky young man helping out his dad in the pawnbroker business, and the two had become if not quite friends then something more than acquaintances. They took pleasure in helping one another out in times of need. Manny had seen to it that none of the items Gaunt’s mother had pawned were sold. Years later, he had come to Gaunt because thugs were threatening his father; Gaunt had spoken to a couple of friends in the FBI, and Manny’s father was never bothered again.

Manny blinked myopically in the pawnshop’s mean light. “Gun’s in excellent working order. I cleaned it myself.” He laughed, pushing his glasses back up a nose that had been broken many times. “The skills you acquire in my trade.”

“Don’t worry,” Gaunt said as he carefully loaded the .38. “I know how to use this.”

Manny’s nose twitched. “Now, don’t for Christ’s sake get into any trouble, okay? Promise me.”

“I promise,” Gaunt said, stowing the .38 away inside his jacket. “Chances are I’ll never even fire it. It’s just for effect, really.”

Manny sniffed, coming around from behind his glass counter, swinging open the metal cage door, and walking Gaunt to the front door, a flyblown oblong of cracked glass embedded with wire mesh.

“Now you’re back for a little while, let’s have dinner.”

“Sure, Manny,” Gaunt said, slipping out the door into the Washington twilight. “I’d like that.”

He had spent the night in a motel in Bethesda, going over the photos Renata had given him, deciding how best to present this evidence to William Justice Lillehammer. He had spent the day considering all the prudent alternatives to what, in the end, he knew it must come to, discarding them one by one. Late in the day, he had gone out to make his preparations. His last stop had been Manny’s pawnshop.

They call themselves Looking-Glass,
Renata had told him on their nighttime walk around the Vietnam Memorial.
Who they are or under what aegis they operate I can’t say
—I doubt if even the president could tell you. They have a great deal of influence, very deep pockets, although I haven’t a clue as to how they’re funded. They were very active during the war in Vietnam—perhaps for a long time before.

What’s their purpose?
Gaunt had asked.

To reshape the world in their image,
Renata had said.
To slowly bring their people to power
—and then to keep them there, to replace them, when the time comes, with others sympathetic to their goals. They’re basically conservative, protectionist, xenophobic, utterly righteous. They believe in what they’re doing, even though they inhabit a world that circumvents all existing law.

Someone once said that a mind becomes a detriment when it acquires more intelligence than its integrity can handle. I think this can be applied to Looking-Glass. They have worked for so long in their lawless labyrinths of power they can no longer distinguish right from wrong, justice from injustice.

It took Gaunt an astonishingly short time to emerge from the shabby section of Washington where Manny’s pawnshop was located to the manicured sweep of Dupont Circle, with its Victorian mansions and black iron gates. The rain of the night before had washed the streets and sidewalks, making the contrast between the shabby slums and the patrician town houses even more shocking. It was a curious fact of urban life that such violent and amorphous decay could coexist with upscale neighborhoods, patrolled and, for the most part, peaceful.

He took New Hampshire Avenue to M Street, swinging right there, heading across the bridge into Georgetown.

Lillehammer lived in a large Palladian-style town house overlooking Dumbarton Oaks and, above, the U.S. Naval Observatory and the vice president’s house.

This short section of S Street, the last street before the generous expanse of parkland, had therefore the aspect of a small-town road, the outskirts just before lush countryside reclaimed the landscape. There were no cars here, no pedestrian traffic either, at this time of day, with the darkness coming down, and the air growing very chill indeed.

Gaunt steered his rental car slowly by Lillehammer’s house, saw the lights on, an American station wagon illuminated in the granite driveway. He pulled into a parking space near the corner and walked back.

The house stood back from the street. It was built of white stone, its colonnaded porte cochere and columned facade making its four stories seem far larger and grander than they actually were. It was framed by a pair of stately Bradford pear trees that shot up above its rooftop, drew the eye toward the entry, making it more dramatic.

The semicircular driveway sloped steeply upward. The sweet, earthy scents of the emerging evening reminded Gaunt of those long-ago hunting expeditions with his father. He went up the steps, knocked on a carved wooden door painted a glassy black.

It took a long time before the door opened, but when it did, he saw a tall, thin man with ruddy cheeks, dark eyebrows, and piercing blue eyes, which evaluated him with a mixture of curiosity and studied calm. He was wearing deep blue wool slacks and white button-down-collar shirt with the sleeves rolled up his forearms.

“Yes?”

“William Lillehammer?”

Lillehammer nodded. “What can I do for you?”

Gaunt introduced himself. He noted in Lillehammer’s bearing a rigorous military training and adjusted his speech accordingly, using precise, clipped phrases. “I hope you have a moment to spare me. I’ve come a long way to talk to you about Sen. Rance Bane and his committee’s vendetta against Tomkin Industries and Nicholas Linnear in particular.”

Lillehammer’s eyebrows lifted just a fraction. “Bane’s motives aside, how is it you think I can be of help with a congressional hearing? I have no connection with the legislature.”

“Oh, but you must,” Gaunt said, steeling himself by closing his right hand over the butt of the .38 tucked neatly into the waistband of his trousers. “You’re part of Looking-Glass, aren’t you?”

In the ensuing silence, Gaunt thought he could hear the wind rustling the tops of the Bradford pears, the distant hiss of traffic along Wisconsin Avenue.

“I beg your pardon?” Lillehammer blinked, as if Gaunt had thrown a bright light into his face.

“I think you understand me,” Gaunt said, his grip tightening on the handgun.

Those clear blue eyes were like X-rays, searching his face as if for a weak spot. “Yes, indeed,” Lillehammer said abruptly. He smiled, stepped back into the entranceway. “Won’t you come inside?”

There was no strain evident on his face, no sense of tension about the man at all as he led Gaunt past the curving colonial staircase of polished maple, down a carpeted hall lined with prints of comfortably masculine scenes of fox hunts and other equestrian activities.

Renata had told him that Lillehammer lived alone, and Gaunt could detect no hint of a female presence—neither in color nor in style. The furniture was on a massive scale, made of leather, suede, metals, some covered in heavy cottons of richly colored patterns reminiscent in an impressionistic manner of animals’ hides.

The study into which he was taken overlooked the small, manicured conifer garden at the back of the house. It was a high-ceilinged room with wide panels of forest green interspersed with decorative wooden mock-pillars painted the color of clotted cream. The ceiling was a shallow dome, festooned with scrollwork in high relief.

Lillehammer went past a pair of grand leather sofas, to a mirrored wet bar.

“Drink?”

“A beer would be fine.”

Lillehammer bent, extracted an amber bottle from a half-refrigerator below the bar. He popped the cap, carefully poured the beer down the side of a pilsner glass. Then he made himself a whiskey and soda in an enormous old-fashioned glass.

He came back to where Gaunt stood, handed him his beer, then went behind his gilt-encrusted escritoire, sat in a high-backed chair.

Gaunt, left to fend for himself, glanced at the nearest chair, a rather uncomfortable-looking slingback affair of welded bronze and wide, interlaced leather straps the color of honey. He chose to stand.

The room, carpeted and snug, was warmly lit by a series of copper-hooded wall lamps in sconces, giving the whole a distinctly homey, old-fashioned atmosphere.

Lillehammer put his glass down on his bone-colored blotter, said in an avuncular tone of voice, “My dear chap, you really must tell me how on earth you came by the name Looking-Glass.”

Gaunt debated with himself whether to play against Lillehammer’s chosen defense—this rather interesting technique of reversing the process of interrogation—or to rudely thrust it aside and go for the jugular. It was, he knew, more a judgment of Lillehammer’s personality than it was of his own nerves.

Gaunt set his own glass aside. “Let’s cut the chummy bullshit, shall we? You’re part of Looking-Glass. How I know that is irrelevant to the situation.”

“But of course it’s relevant,” Lillehammer said emphatically. “In the course of my rather checkered career I have made my share of enemies. We all do in this town, sooner or later.” He chuckled as if bringing Gaunt into his confidence. “And if it’s one of my enemies who’s been feeding you stories, I’d very much like to know who so I can set the record straight.” He spread his hands wide. “You wouldn’t begrudge me a chance to refute this accusation, would you?”

Gaunt saw the flash of metal in Lillehammer’s left hand too late. His right hand was bringing the .38 out of his trousers when the first bullet from the small .25-caliber pistol struck him in the forehead. He felt nothing more than if a woman had slapped his face. He blinked, could not remember why his hand was around the butt of a handgun.

He stared into bright blue eyes, incurious, almost stoic, a hero’s pose, certainly, reminding him of the bronze statue of the noble soldiers overlooking the Vietnam Memorial. He knew he had seen it recently, had been there with someone. Who? It had been raining, cold rain on his face now.

The small explosion caught his attention, and his head snapped back. He slipped to one knee, as if the footing had abruptly become treacherous. Cold rain; could there be ice on the ground?

There was a throbbing behind one eye. He felt nothing more, a slight headache, more light-headed really, but he could no longer see. That was curious. His father would never have taken him hunting in the dark. Too dangerous. Dad was always lecturing him about how dangerous firearms were, about how careful you had to be around them at all times, even when you were positive they were unloaded, especially then, he would say, because that’s when you’d get careless.

Where am I?
Gaunt thought.
In the forest at night. Where’s Dad?
He tried to call out but no sound emerged from his mouth. There was a loud report at close range, and he was slammed over, the stink of cordite in his nostrils mixing with the lovely earthy sweetness of the forest floor in autumn, giving up the last of its loamy richness before the first frost of winter put everything to sleep, the deer and quail, the cedars and the larch, the maples and the…

Bang!

“Good God, man, I’ve got to have a chance to defend myself against charges,” Lillehammer said as he bent over Gaunt’s prostrate form, where beer and blood mingled indiscriminately. “Why, that’s the American way.”

Montmartre. The Hill of the Martyrs. Its parish church—St.-Pierre de Montmartre—lay just north of the Place du Tertre, once the outdoor theater for Paris’s most celebrated artists. Now it was infested by the type of hustler for whom the sight of tour buses was like honey to a bear.

From the outside, St.-Pierre was nothing much to look at—certainly insignificant compared to its close neighbor, the renowned Sacré-Coeur. Inside, he knew, it was another story. It had been built upon the ruins of a beautiful seventh-century Roman temple. Originally a Benedictine nunnery, fires had caused rebuilding several times over, and eventually the Benedictines had moved farther down the hill, allowing the parish to establish operations in the church.

Nicholas saw someone close to the shadows thrown by the church, and as the figure’s head turned in his direction, he recognized Okami’s face. He wondered whether there was surveillance here—or how much. But the imperative to reach Okami overrode any sense of caution.

He began his approach on the oblique, using the cover of a cluster of Germans arguing over who was going to get his portrait painted first. Then, at the last minute, when he was quite close to the facade of St.-Pierre, he broke cover, racing toward Okami.

He reached him in three long strides, grabbed him.

“Okami-san—”

Okami grimaced, twisted his body with unexpected strength. He broke free, lurched away from Nicholas, racing into the Place du Tertre where he was instantly whirled into a current of tourists and busy would-be painters indefatigably hawking their dubious wares. A cheerful Nigerian tried to sell Nicholas a ten-foot balloon with I
LOVE
PARIS
printed in pink all over its sausagelike skin. He ran on.

Nicholas looked toward the position he had told Celeste to take, up the hill toward the Butte of Montmartre. He saw her standing, pointing in the direction Okami had taken.

Nicholas turned, saw Okami darting in among the crowd, plunged in after him. He fought through the throngs of Japanese and Germans, broke past a line of tour buses. Okami disappeared around the corner, onto rue Cortot. Nicholas, following after him, saw him turn another corner, head right onto the wider Rue des Sanies. He got there, saw it was a street of steps, flights and flights of them, heading down off of this end of the Butte.

There was Okami, racing downward, and Nicholas took off after him. The steps were divided into flights with broad landing areas. On either side, squat white stone apartment buildings rose, following the steep slope of the side of the Butte down to the broad Rue Caulaincourt, with its bustling shops, thick traffic, and metro stop. Nicholas knew he had to catch Okami before he disappeared into that urban forest where no footprint or spoor would remain.