Chameleon (41 page)

The van was ten feet away.

O’Hara’s hands were rope-burned, his shoulder was skinned raw and blood streamed from his torn wrist. He tried to get to his feet, saw the Magician running toward him. ‘Chameleon...?’ he asked.

‘Right here, tomodachi,’ the tattooed man said, helping him up. It was the first time he had called O’Hara ‘friend.’

They jumped in the van and fell on the floor.

‘Get rolling!’ the Magician ordered, and Eliza jammed the van into gear and headed down the rest of the hill.

‘What the hell happened?’ the Magician said.

‘Shit hit the fan,’ O’Hara gasped.

‘I am to blame,’ Chameleon said. ‘I lost it there for a few minutes. It was an emotional—’

O’Hara sat up. He laid his hand on Chameleon’s arm. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘who’s complaining?’ He turned to the Magician. ‘Did we get anything on tape?’

‘The whole megillah.’

O’Hara laughed and fell back on the floor of the van. ‘Is there a first-aid kit in the house?’ he said. ‘I think I may be bleeding to death.’

Eliza sped down the mountain and out into the flat at the edge of Tanabe. Behind them, yellow flames boiled up from Dragon’s Nest. Chameleon watched through the rear window of the van and rubbed his aching arms.

‘It is a cleansing fire,’ he said. “When it is over, the fortress will still be standing and we can restore it to what it once was, a nest for dragons, not weasels.’

He leaned back and closed his eyes and the pain in his face was not from his cuts and bruises. Without opening his eyes, he said, ‘I am sorry, Kazuo, for violating my promise. I could have got you killed back there.’

‘But you didn’t. The Tokenrui-san will say it was just an instant in time. The poets will pass it by.’

‘It was the sight of him, being that close to Hooker. It made me crazy. I needed to reveal the truth to him, just as you must reveal the truth about him to the world.’

‘Let it pass, Okari, let it pass,’ O’Hara sighed, and he slumped down to nurse his own aches and pains.

The Magician pulled the three tapes out of the recorders and wrapped a band around them as Eliza pulled into the clearing where they had left the Toyota.

‘Maybe
the Magician ought to go with—’ O’Hara started to suggest, but she had slammed on the brakes and was already out of the van. As planned, she jumped in the car, started up and zoomed off.

‘I’m gonna tell yuh sumpin, okay? I wouldn’t drive back to Kyoto with her. She drove this van so fuckin’ fast, half the time I wasn’t sure if she was drivin’ it or it was drivin’ her.’

They drove the three hours back to Kyoto without incident. The fire was apparently keeping Garvey and company too busy to bother with them.

As they reached the center of Kyoto, Chameleon asked to be dropped off. ‘It is better that I leave now.’ He reached out and took O’Hara’s hand. ‘Whoever Kimura-san selects as Tokenrui will please me. If it is to be you,
tomodachi,
it will be my honor to serve you. If you ever need anything, this kendo master is at your service.’

‘I feel the same,’ O’Hara said.
Arigato,
my friend.’ He watched Okari limp down a side street until the darkness swallowed him up. The reporter lay back on the floor of the van. It had been a long night filled with surprises, and despite his torn wrist and battered ribs, he felt suddenly refreshed. The truth was on the tapes. Howe would have his big story. Lizzie would get her shot at New York. A heavy burden had been lifted from Chameleon’s shoulders. Yet to O’Hara, the victory seemed strangely empty. He thought instead about Falmouth, who had lied to him and betrayed him, It was a lesson that would stay with him forever. What was it Kimura-san said... ‘The wise man has many cuts.’ But he also said, ‘The happy man forgets his scars.’

The Magician broke the spell. ‘Weird,’ he said.

‘What’s weird?’

‘All those fuckin’ tattoos.’

They drove back to the hotel.

‘We catch the first train out in the morning, the way I see it,’ the Magician said after they had parked the van. ‘We can be back in the States, shit, tomorra night this time.’

O’Hara nodded slowly. ‘Let’s hope Lizzie didn’t kill herself driving back here.’

He grabbed the first house phone he saw in the hotel lobby and dialed her number. It rang and the operator came on.

‘Who please?’

‘Eliza Gunn, USA.’

‘Missa Gunn, she check out.’

‘Checked out!’

‘Hai.
Maybe twenty minutes.’

‘Thanks.’

The note was in his box. It read: ‘I lucked out. Found a young pilot willing to fly me to Tokyo tonight. You get the big story, I get the tapes. Seems fair, doesn’t it? By the way, would you mind returning the van to Howe/Tokyo. Thanks. See you in Boston. xxx E.’

He handed it to the Magician.

‘Well, I’ll be goddamned,’ the Magician said, and he started laughing. ‘She scooped yuh, pal!’

12

Charles Gordon Howe wheeled himself into his spacious office overlooking the Haymarket. It had been a busy day, thanks to his two top reporters, and a fruitful one. The fire at Dragon’s Nest had attracted news coverage, but Hooker’s death got most of the space. All that did was whet everyone’s appetite for the whole story, and they had it all. Eliza was coming on with a fifteen-minute news special. She had been editing it all night. He’d get a huge share on the news tonight. And O’Hara was on his way back with a front-page banner for the Star. All the fine details. The old man leaned back in his wheelchair and stroked his chin.

Excellent.

Eliza’s bright face popped on the set, but it was wearing a serious expression. Nothing light.

‘Good evening,’ she began, ‘this is Eliza Gunn, Six O’Clock News—’

‘Don’t worry, she’ll do a helluva job.’

Howe recognized the voice immediately. It came from a dark corner of the office, back among the plants.

O’Hara stepped out into the light.

‘You scared the bedevil outa me there, Lieutenant. What the hell’re you doing hiding back there among the goddamn shrubs?’

‘I was hanging boxes in the air.’

‘What?’

‘It’s an old Zen trick. Really nothing more than logic.’

‘Is that right?’ Howe said. He was watching the television set, almost leering as his star reporter described the operation known as Master and its perpetrators.

‘There’s a lot more to it than she has,’ O’Hara said.

‘There’s nothing wrong with the stuff she’s got.’

‘Tip of the iceberg.’

‘Well, can it wait until this is over, sir?’ Howe was getting annoyed. ‘Every station in the country’s gonna want to pick this up. How far along are you on your yarn?’

‘It’s finished.’

‘Great. Let’s just see what she does with the story and then we’ll talk about you — okay, m’boy?’

‘I want to talk now.’

‘Goddammit, after the show, Lieutenant, after the show.’ ‘It won’t wait.’ He switched off the television set. Howe looked up and scowled. ‘I beg your damn pardon?’ ‘It won’t wait. You can watch this later, on tape. Garvey spilled his guts. In fact, he’s probably still spilling them, only I’ve got enough to suit me. We can leave the rest to the historians.’

‘Garvey? Which one was he?’

‘He was the man called Quill. He picked the assignments.’

‘Magnificent. Goddamn, man, you’ve broken one of the biggest stories of the century. Now can we just turn the damn

TV—’

O’Hara cut him off. ‘Not we. Me. I’ve got the story.’

‘That’s the way, lad. By God, we’ll tear up the Star and give you the whole front page. Now, if you don’t—’

‘No. It isn’t going to work that way.’

Howe began to get interested. 1-us mind shifted from the television set. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, you don’t get it both ways.’

‘Both ways?’ Howe was genuinely stumped.

‘Sure. Look at the way it’s sizing up. They can pin the takeovers on the little squids out in Texas who were in on the plan from the beginning. The ones that told them who to kill, who was strong and who was weak in the companies. It’s called conspiracy, although they’ll probably end up doing time in some government country club, like the Nixon bunch did.’

Howe shook his head. ‘I still don’ t—’

‘The way I figure it, Hooker’s dead. Garvey and a couple of Texas millionaires are in for a lot of grief. One hell of a big cartel is going down the tubes. There’s probably going to be several international murder trials_ The whole intelligence community’s going to be thrown for a loop. But the best part of the story will never be told.’

‘And why is that, Lieutenant?’

‘Because nobody can prove it.’

Howe leaned forward, eyes aglitter.

‘But I have to deal with it,’ O’Hara went on, ‘for my own sake — do you understand what I’m saying? I have some feelings of my own about it.’

‘So?’

‘So, I don’t believe in coincidence . I don’t believe Falmouth just came to you because he liked reading the Boston Star. I was set up from the start.’

‘I don’t follow you, Lieutenant.’

‘Sure you do. You follow me just fine.’

Howe’s expression got cold. Anger tweaked the corners of his eyes. ‘You saying I had something to do with this?’

‘No question about it.’

‘You’re a bit smug.’

‘I feel smug.’ He moved some things off the corner of Howe’s desk and sat down. ‘It was Quill, or Garvey, whichever you wish, who started me thinking. According to him, do you know who really started the whole thing? Poor old Red Bridges, only he didn’t have any idea how it was going to turn out. In March 1945 a Japanese supply ship called the Kira Maru was limping toward Tokyo after our dive bombers crippled her. She foundered, and most of the crew made it to the Bonin Islands. Five years later an ex-sailor named Red Bridges was running a salvage operation off the coast of Japan. He signed on a couple of sailors that had been on the Kira Maru. They told him about the freighter, and they located her in shallow water off one of the Volcano Islands. He went down to take a look, and what he found was oil bubbling up through the ocean floor at less than twenty fathoms.

‘Only Red knew about it. He didn’t share the information with the crew, he shared it with one man, his old friend Alexander Hooker, who was military governor of southern Honshu. It made Red a rich man and it ultimately killed him. And it made Hooker one of two men in the world that knew the location of what turned out to be one of the richest oil strikes on earth.

‘So Hooker started building his empire. He got his financing for it from wealthy friends. People who were elitists like himself. Who believe that the spoils go to the victor. Like the robber barons you admire, Mr Howe. Fisk and Doheny and Morgan and all the rest of those pirates, people like some of your friends in the photographs on your boat, Hell, you even bought a yacht that once belonged to Doheny.’

‘Get to the point,’ Howe said.

‘The point? The point is, you were one of them. You anted-up along with a bunch of other people in key places. I think you were one of the bankers on this merry-go-round. You used your clout to call off the Winter Man because you were all afraid of Chameleon. Hooker convinced you that Chameleon was a real threat, and Falmouth convinced Hooker that I was the man who could find him. Hooker was too close to pulling it off to have it blow up after all these years of planning—’

‘Pulling what off?’

‘A financial panic. First, drive up the price of oil and ruin the automobile industry. When it goes, the steel industry goes with it. Then keep pushing up the prime rate and wipe out the real estate business. Force the unions to their knees. Hell, right there’s enough to start a wholesale panic. And when it’s over, who’s got the money? You’ve got the money. Prime stockholders in Master.’

‘Ridiculous oversimplification, Lieutenant. Not worthy of you.’

‘Hooker didn’t think it was. He was going for broke. I don’t know whether it would have worked or not, that depends on the numbers. And we’ll never know who all the Players were because Hooker was the only one who knew, and he’s dead.’

Howe leaned back in his wheelchair. ‘Pie in the sky, m’ boy.’

‘The bubble’s busted, Howe. There’s not going to be any more AMRAN. No more Master. No more Mr Quill moving his assassins around the board.’

‘I was never involved in that.’

‘I believe it. I don’t believe any of you knew what was really going on. All you wanted was results. But you did know Falmouth would kill me if I led him to Chameleon. You marked me, Mr Howe.’

The old man seemed to sag into his chair, to grow older as O’Hara watched him.

‘I suppose you’ve got some kind of silly bug in your collar, recording all this rot.’

O’Hara shook his head. ‘No bugs. Just you and me talking.’

‘I didn’t know they planned to kill you. Not until Eliza told me this morning. All I did was get you and Falmouth together. Hooker was falling apart. It was important to put an end to this Chameleon thing.’

‘And you didn’t know about the Thoreau? The Marza business?’

Howe did not answer.

‘You walk out of this one clean, don’t you, Mr Howe? Only one thing — you don’t get it both ways.’

‘What do you mean, both ways? That’s the second time you said that.’

‘I mean, you’re a newsman before anything else, Howe. Greed comes second. I think you figured no matter how it went, you couldn’t lose. If I turned up Chameleon, Falmouth would take him out and either Gunn or I or both of us would have the story for you. If Falmouth killed me, too, Gunn would still have the story for you. Both ways see what I mean?’

Howe chuckled. ‘Well, son, whatever I thought is known only to me. But it does look like it turned out that way — now, doesn’t it?’

‘Not quite.’

‘Oh,’ Howe said, raising his eyebrows, ‘and how’s that?’

‘I gave your story away.’

Howe looked at him for several seconds, then said, ‘Gave it away?’

‘I gave the story to an old pal of mine, Art Harris of the Washington Post. With enough to substantiate the story.’

The realization slowly sank in. ‘What the hell are you talkin’ about, O’Hara?’

‘I gave the story to the Washington Post, Howe. But it’s okay, I left you out of it completely. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Anonymity. That’s what you got.’

The expression on Howe’s face turned from disbelief to doubt to realization to anger. ‘Goddamn, you can’t—’

‘Did it.’

‘I’ll sue you until—’

‘Not likely. Not without turning over a can of worms you can’t afford to turn over.’

‘You’re a thief. You gave away my goods.’

‘You don’t own something you never had. Remember our deal out on Cape Cod? I could walk away from the story anytime I wanted and let somebody else finish it. Well, that’s what I did, Mr Howe. Except I picked the guy to finish it.’

Howe shook his head. ‘You’re crazy. You went through all that and what do you end up with?’

‘I got even, Mr Howe.’

‘And what do I get?’

‘Anonymity. And a ninety-eight percent share, at least for tonight.’

There were two messages in Eliza’s typewriter when she returned to her office. One was to call Howe. The other was in an envelope. She tore it open. The message was simple.

Dear Lizzie:

Caught your act. Terrific. You get the scoop-of-the-year award. I don’t even get the girl.
xx
O.

The shaggy mane of pines on Kinuasa-yama swayed before the west wind, which had brought rain with it earlier in the day. But by the time the sun began t fall behind the spire of Tofuku-ji, the rain was gone, and fog, painted with the dying sun, swirled across the verdant park. The park was always a lush green, even in winter.

He was bone-weary and sore when he entered the grounds. But there was still an hour or so before it got dark. Time enough to begin. When he came back to the house in Kyoto, it always seemed as though time had stopped while he was gone. Nothing had changed, no new flowers had blossomed, none had fallen. Everything was the same. What was it the Tokenrui had once said,.. ‘We are just a speck in the infinity of time. Nothing ever changes,’

There were fresh flowers in the vase in his practice room. The dogs sat at his feet, looking up, waiting to be petted and reassured.

He opened the package and took out the gogensei he had just purchased. It was a gray tunic, bunched at the waist, made of rough cotton. He took off his clothes and put on the gogensei. It felt good against his skin. Then he heard the dogs bark and he knew she was coming.

She stopped in the doorway when she saw him, and then she looked at his clothes and back at his eyes.

‘You are going again,’ she said.

He nodded.

‘Now?’

He nodded again.

She came close to him, touched his lip with her fingertips, licked her lips.

‘It is very late,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow is not that far away.’

And she moved against him. He stood for a moment and then slowly put his arms around her.

She was right. Tomorrow would be a better day to start the Walk of a Thousand Days