The Kaisho (62 page)

“Thinking about something this risky and acting on it are two separate things.”

She nodded. “That’s right. But risk is your stock in trade, isn’t it?”

There was no use in denying it, and he kept his mouth shut. They were sitting at a table in Terrazza, an Italian restaurant on King Street in the Old Town section of Alexandria. The government-issue car had taken them to a nearby hotel where Lillehammer had arranged rooms for them. The driver said he was at their disposal during their stay in Washington, but Margarite was understandably uncomfortable with the arrangement, and Croaker had dismissed him. Margarite had wanted to eat Italian food, and the hotel’s concierge had recommended Terrazza. They had taken a cab to Alexandria.

Croaker, sitting across the small table from her, smiled now.

“What’s so funny?”

“I don’t know,” he said, tearing off a piece of crusty bread, “I was just thinking how much I admired the way you ended the interview with Lillehammer.”

“Before we can go on—before I can make any kind of commitment to put my life in your hands—I’ve got to know where your allegiance lies. Do you owe it to him?”

The waiter came up, perhaps to take their order, and Croaker glanced down at his menu. But Margarite waved the young man away. She apparently did not want any distractions.

“Lew, you’d better think this through.”

“I’m working for him. He’s counting on me to break this case.”

Margarite’s gaze would not let him go. “Let me tell you something. The feds allowed Dom to keep running the organization through Tony from inside WITSEC. That was part of the deal from the get-go.” Her eyebrows arched. “Do I have your attention now? ...Good. These feds are more corrupt, more venal, than any of the municipal law enforcement people Dom dealt with. That’s because these bastards are closer to power—real power. That’s what this city is all about.”

“There’s a pleasant thought.”

“People like Lillehammer are different, Lew. They wield enough power to make every dirty trick stick. You’ve already seen a bit of what he’s capable of, but I wonder whether you understand the levels of his psychological games. That jailhouse room of his. I know he took us there just to give me the willies, to show me who holds the power. Dom warned me about people who play convoluted psych games, and now I’m warning you.”

“I’ve no doubt your brother was right on target.” It was astonishing to Croaker how much influence a dead man still exerted on their lives. He was just beginning to appreciate Dominic Goldoni and regret that he had never had the chance to meet him.

“I know something about Lillehammer and can surmise a bit more,” he said. “He was a POW in Vietnam. Did you see the scars around his mouth? He told me something about how he got them. He was tortured. Who knows how long he was under pressure and what the circumstances of his escape were.” He shook his head. “It seems to me men like that have no easy road ahead. Something has been broken inside them. Perhaps it’s not what the enemy wants—Lillehammer claims he never gave them what they wanted—but under that kind of pressure you emerge changed. Men I’ve known who have been in similar circumstances seem to have lost some basic ability of judgment.”

Croaker tore off more bread, then, his appetite gone, did not know what to do with it, so he twisted it into a design with his titanium and polycarbonate fingers. “Maybe it’s simplistic to say that commitment becomes complicity, but nevertheless, it seems true. The victim inadvertently falls into the trap of protecting the time his psyche was under siege, until everything else becomes distorted in order to preserve the fiction he has constructed of that time. In effect, he and his torturers have become allies because they caused the fiction in the first place.”

“It’s clear he’s desperate to track down Robert. Robert got to Dom through me, but how did Robert know that Dom would call me and precisely when?”

“Inside job? Lillehammer told me he couldn’t trust his own people, that because Dominic was murdered he suspected a leak somewhere in the fed system.” Croaker squeezed his eyes shut. “But since that first time Lillehammer’s made no mention of the supposed leak.” His eyes flew open. “What if he knows Robert?”

Margarite was already shaking her head. “It doesn’t make sense. If he knows Robert, of course he’d go after him himself. He’d know Robert’s habits, where he liked to hang out, who he hung out with—it’d be a snap to find him.”

“Not if he hadn’t seen Robert in a long time. Like not since Vietnam.”

“What?”

“You told me Robert looked oriental, not Japanese or Chinese, but like a mixture, copper skin, part Polynesian, almost. You could be describing a Vietnamese.” Croaker nodded. “Yes,” he said slowly. “It would make some kind of twisted sense.” He tapped his finger on the table. “Who tortured Lillehammer, the Viet Cong? I assume so. Could Robert have been one of them? If so, being the good soldier that he is, he’d know the risk of going after Robert himself. If Robert caught one glimpse of him, he’d bolt down a hole so deep Lillehammer would never find him. But Robert doesn’t know me from Adam. An ex-cop, homicide detective, proven to the feds—I’d be perfect for the job.”

Margarite seemed to be holding herself tightly in check. “I don’t like this man Lillehammer.”

Now he could feel the tension coming off her in waves. “This isn’t just about Lillehammer.”

“No. It’s about something I saw up in that jailhouse room of his.” She shuddered. “You hadn’t shown me any pictures of what Robert did to Ginnie so I had no idea.”

“I didn’t see the need.”

She nodded. “I understand. But now that I’ve seen them I know there’s someone here in Washington we have to see. Someone who knows about those wounds Robert inflicted on her.” She looked at him, her eyes bleak. “You see, Lew, Ginnie’s death was part of an ancient ritual. I don’t know much about it, but I know someone who does. And I think once she tells you what she knows, we’ll be so close to Robert we’ll feel his breath on our faces.”

Davis Munch, Pentagon special investigator on loan to Sen. Rance Bane’s committee, didn’t look anything like Gaunt had described him to Manny Mannheim.

If I don’t come to collect this in twenty-four hours,
Gaunt had told Manny late in the afternoon when he had returned to Manny’s pawnshop before setting out for Lillehammer’s home,
I want you to take this envelope to a man named Davis Munch. He’s to get them to Nicholas Linnear at my company in Tokyo.

Shit,
Manny had said, already frightened for his friend,
I can do that for you, Harl
—
assuming it needs to get done, which I don’t believe it will.

Listen, Manny,
Gaunt had said.
Munch is DIA, a Pentagon spook troubleshooter. He’ll know what to do. I can’t take the risk of this stuff going through the mail or being opened by anyone but Nicholas
—
or failing that, Tanzan Nangi. Promise me you won’t do anything stupid. You’ll take it straight to Munch. He’ll find a way
—an official courier—to get it to Tokyo.

If
anything happens to you.

Promise me, Manny.

Manny had promised. Which was what he was doing here in the middle of the night, on a rain-swept Washington street, keeping his face out of the flashing red lights on top of the half dozen squad cars blocking off an area of the street.

A siren sounded, approaching very quickly, and as Manny watched from the shadows, an ambulance was waved through the police roadblock, came screeching to a halt beside the body.

So much blood. Manny, deep in his lined mackinaw, shivered. Good Christ, he thought, what was Harl mixed up in?

He had phoned Davis Munch at home, using the number Gaunt had given him, left a message on the answering machine. Maybe he shouldn’t have done that, maybe someone had Munch’s phone bugged. But who? Munch was with DIA, the Pentagon spooks. Who would bug one of
them,
for Christ’s sake? Manny shook his head as he watched the paramedics at work. Even at this distance he could tell that their presence was useless. Munch was dead, shot through the head with a high-powered rifle. Manny squeezed his eyes shut.

Manny had dialed Munch’s number, got his answering machine. Gaunt had cautioned Manny not to leave his own number even if he spoke to Munch in person. Leaving a message on Munch’s machine, Manny had decided to use the number of the pay phone in the bar downstairs from his apartment. He had eaten dinner there, then, ordering beer after beer, had waited for the phone to ring.

Mention the Golden Gloves boxer to him,
Gaunt had said.
He’ll know who you’re talking about.

Gaunt had been right. After dinner, Munch had gotten back to him. No names had been exchanged. Munch had agreed to meet Manny near the FBI headquarters on Ninth Street, at the site of the former Lone Star Beef House. The feds had been compelled to take over the place—a topless bar, no less—back in the seventies, after confiscating it from a particularly enterprising member of the Department of Transportation, who had acquired it with, as they say, igg—ill-gotten gains—embezzled from his employers.

What kind of bullet could make the back of a head explode like a melon hitting the ground? Manny wondered as he watched the paramedics get out the body bag while a bunch of spooks in suits took photos of Munch from every conceivable angle. A couple of them got down on their knees in the rain to snap the close-ups. Manny felt the contents of his stomach coming up into his throat again, and he gulped, sucking in damp air, rain, anything not to vomit. He closed his eyes again, but he could not blot out the sight of Munch’s brains spewing out behind him ten feet or more. He’d still been in the shadows when the impact of the bullet had slammed Munch against the building’s facade, still been across the street.

There had been a building fire between the bar and the rendezvous point, and the cab had been bogged down in traffic, blocked-off streets, and clogged detours. In the end, Manny had hopped out early, half-run the last leg. He had still been fifteen minutes late.

The spooks, finished with their iconography, signed for the paramedics, and soon Munch was cocooned inside the glistening bodybag. Safer there, Manny thought, than on the streets this night.

That fire had saved his life. He turned away. With the departure of Munch his reason for being here had slipped away. Or had it? Beneath his mackinaw he clutched the envelope tighter against his chest.

Hurrying home, he stayed just long enough to pack an overnight bag, take a wad of hundreds from beneath the floorboards of his bedroom. What was he forgetting? His passport! He went on a frantic fifteen-minute search, the sweat pouring off him, before he dug it up. It was still in the inside pouch of the cheap vinyl flight bag the tour company had provided for his trip last year to Israel. He stuffed some personal items into the bag, then got out of there. After what had happened to Davis Munch, he wasn’t comfortable in his apartment or, truth to tell, anywhere in Washington.

Spending the night at Washington International airport, watching his reflection in the darkened plate glass of closed trinket shops, calmed his overwrought nerves, but not by much.

Margarite and Croaker arrived precisely at midnight. The house—more like a Georgian-style mansion—was perched like a magnificently plumaged crow on the crest of a hill, one of many in this emerald green countryside. Rolling down the window, Croaker inhaled the rich scents of horses and hay. This was Potomac, Maryland, the middle of hunt country.

He leaned forward, peeled off a fifty-dollar bill, handed it to the cabdriver. “You’ll wait for us.”

“Yes, sir,” the cabby said, nodding. “No problem at all.” He crossed his arms over his chest and, slouching in the seat, was soon fast asleep.

Croaker could see six or seven cars parked in the driveway by the side of the house—Jaguars, Rouses, large BMW sedans. If there were chauffeurs, they had not been left to fend for themselves in the autumnal chill.

“Whose house is this?” he said.

Margarite continued to stare into the cloudless night. A horned moon, pale as butter, rode in the sky like a spectral ship or a catafalque. She stirred, but did not move, weighed down by the morbid thoughts that invariably assailed her when she returned here.

“Margarite?”

“Shhh,” she whispered. “Don’t speak, don’t move, otherwise I will have to think about what comes next. Perhaps it’s inevitable, like one second coming after another, but for this moment, let me dream of us together alone in the night.”

Croaker smelled her and the horses. Surprisingly, he had no trouble imagining her with their musky, muscular odor clinging to her thighs as she popped a booted foot out of a stirrup, swung off a smooth leather saddle. He thought he heard in the night small ghostly sounds: the creak of leather, the jingle of metal against metal, the soft snort of the beast. Then he blinked, and only the sounds of the cabby’s heavy, rhythmical breathing, the slow, tempered tick of the engine cooling, came to him.

“I used to ride here,” Margarite whispered through dry lips, “when I was younger.”

He looked at her concentrating as if in the endgame of a chess match, and he wondered by what hallucinatory process he had been given an auditory glimpse of another time, another world.

Margarite leaned forward, slumped against the door as if exhausted or acquiescing to the dreadful before she opened it, got out. Following her, Croaker heard the crunch of her heels on the crystal-cut gravel, white as milk beneath the moonlight.

The mansion was built of pinkish brown brick. The windows were neatly bracketed by shutters the color of clotted-cream, and the imposing front entrance was surmounted by a stained-glass fanlight that must have been at least a century old. Behind them, the sweeping driveway was lined by sheared cherry trees, and closer to the main house itself, spearlike magnolia and crescent-limbed hemlocks rose toward the slate roof. The brick steps up to the entrance were set between beds of annuals, now bare, the black soil streaked with compost the color of straw. A thin, penetrating wind blew through the layers of dark green dwarf hinoki cypresses that ascended with them as they mounted the steps.