Linnear 01 - The Ninja (2 page)

‘I don’t think want is the right word,’ Nicholas said. ‘Have to is more like it.’

Goldman took out a cigar from a thick wooden humidor, contemplated it. ‘Nick, I won’t bore you by telling you how many bright guys would give their left nut for your job -‘

‘Thanks,’ Nicholas said dryly. ‘I appreciate that.’

‘Everyone’s gotta do for himself.’ Goldman’s eyes regarded the cigar’s tip. He took a bite off the end, struck a long wooden match.

‘I wish you wouldn’t?’ Nicholas said. ‘I’ve given up smoking.’

Goldman eyed him, the flame in mid-air. ‘Just like you,” he said flatly. ‘Everything at once.’ He puffed at the flame, flicked the match into a wide glass ashtray. But, unwilling perhaps to admit unconditional defeat, he stuck the cold cigar unhappily in his mouth, chewed on it meditatively. ‘You know, Nick, I like to think of myself as more than just your boss. It’s been a lotta years since I picked you up right off the boat.’

‘Plane.’

Goldman waved his hand. ‘Whatever.’ He took the cigar out of his mouth. ‘As a friend, I think you owe me some kind of an explanation.’

‘Look, Sam -‘

He put his hand up, palm outwards. ‘Hey, I’m not gonna try to stop you from going. You’re a big boy now. And I can’t say I’m not disappointed, because I am. Why the hell should I lie to you? Only, I’d just like to know.’

Nicholas got up, went over to the window. Goldman swung his chair around to follow his progress like a radar tracking station.

‘It’s not even very clear to me yet, Sam.’ He rubbed a hand across his forehead. ‘I don’t know, it’s like this place has become a prison. A place to get out of instead of come into.’ He turned to face Goldman. ‘Oh, it isn’t this place, itself. There’s nothing wrong - I suspect…’ He shrugged. ‘Perhaps it’s advertising. I feel lost within the medium now, as if the electronicization has no meaning for me. As if I’ve slipped back, somehow, into another age, another time.’ He leaned forwards, a peculiar kind of tension lacing his upper torso. ‘And now I’m beginning to feel as if I’m adrift, far out at sea where there’s no sign of land in any direction.’

‘Then there’s nothing I can do to change your mind.’

‘Nothing, Sam.’ -Goldman sighed. ‘Edna will be very upset.’

For several moments their eyes locked in a kind of silent struggle where each, it seemed, was sizing the other up.

Goldman put his thick hands flat on the desktop. ‘You know,’ he said quietly, ‘years ago in the police department of this city it used to be that the only way you got ahead was if you had a rabbi down at headquarters. Someone who looked after you when things got rough or’ - he shrugged - ‘who knows? Used to be the way of the world - all over.’ He put the unlit cigar into the opposite side of his mouth. ‘Now, maybe, it’s different. Corporations, they don’t know from rabbis. You gotta confirm. You gotta suck up to all the vice-presidents, get invited to their weekend parties, be nice to their wives who’re so horny and unhappy they’d hump a tree if it could tell them how pretty they look; you gotta live in that certain part of Connecticut where they all live in their two-storey houses with the semicircular drives. Used to be they had button-down minds; now they got computer minds. That’s getting ahead, Nick, business-wise. So they tell me. Me, I wouldn’t know. Not first-hand anyway. I’d retire before they’d get me into that kind of trap.’ His eyes were clear and they sparkled despite the fact that the light was so dull and leaden. ‘Me, I was brought up with rabbis. They’re in my system; no way I can get ‘em out now, even if I wanted to.’ He

sat forwards in his high-backed chair, his elbows on the desk top, levelled his gaze at Nicholas. ‘You get what I mean?’

Nicholas looked at him. ‘Yes, Sam,’ he had said, after a time. ‘I know exactly what you mean.’

The aching cries of the circling gulls hid the sound of the siren for a time, but, as the ambulance drew nearer, its wailing rise and fall, rise and fall, blotted out all other sound. People were running silently along the expanse of the beach, looking birdlike and rather awkward as they tried to compensate for the too soft footing.

He had come out to West Bay Bridge early in the season. In order to survive now, he had to push it all away from him, into a comforting middle distance, not too close, not too far away. The agency, Columbia, everything. Not even a discovery of some drowned corpse was going to interrupt his solipsistic world; it was too much like the city.

Oddly enough, it put him in mind of the call. It had come only a few days after he had left the agency. He had been in the middle of the Times’s Op-Ed page and his second Irish coffee.

‘Mr Goldman was good enough to give me your home number, Mr Linnear,’ Dean Whoolson said. ‘I trust I’ve not intruded.”

‘I still don’t understand why you’ve come to me,’ he said.

‘It’s quite simple, really. There has been, of late, a renaissance of interest in the field of Oriental Studies. The students here are no longer satisfied with the superficiality, shall we say, of many of our oriental courses. I’m afraid they view us as sadly out of date in that area.’

‘But I’m hardly qualified as a teacher.’

‘Yes, we are well aware of that.’ The voice was rather dry, like a pinch of senescent snuff floating through the air. But underneath there was an unmistakable note of sincerity. ‘Naturally we are aware that you do not possess a teaching license, Mr Linnear, but, you see, this course I have in mind would be perfect for you.’ He chuckled, an odd, startling sound as if made by a cartoon character. For us, too, I might add.’

‘But I have absolutely no familiarity with the curriculum,’ Nicholas said. ‘I wouldn’t have any idea where to begin.’

‘Oh, my dear fellow, it’s a piece of cake,’ Dean Whoolson said, his voice now radiating confidence. ‘The course is a seminar, you see. Taught by four professors. Well, three now that Dr Kinkaid has fallen ill. It meets twice a week during the spring semester with the four - I’m including yourself, of course - rotating. You see the beauty of it, Mr Linnear? You can leave the curriculum to the others and stick to what you know better than anyone else in the Western Hemisphere.’ That strange, oddly likeable chuckle came again, reminding Nicholas of mint chocolates and crime sweets. ‘I don’t imagine you would have to concern yourself with overlapping the others’ material, would you? I mean to say,’ he rushed on, as if enraptured by the wholehearted assurance of his own voice, ‘the kind of things - uh, insights, as it were - into the Japanese mind are just the kind of things we are looking for. The students would be delighted, no doubt - as would we.’

There was a singing discernible on the line in the ensuing silence between them and, faintly, Nicholas could make out the inconstant sibilances of other voices, like ghosts’, raised in argument.

‘Perhaps you would care to see the campus,’ Dean Whoolson said. ‘And, naturally, it is most beautiful in the spring.’

Why not try something different? Nicholas had thought. ‘All right,’ he had said.

People were still running past him, attracted by the anxiety the wailing siren brought out. A growing knot of curious onlookers hovered, quivering on the borderline between revulsion and fascination, moths circling a flame in an ever-tightening orbit. He concentrated on the sound of the surf, curling and rushing in towards him, calling like a friend, but the human voices, raised in excitement and query, pierced the afternoon like needles. For them it was but a side-show attraction, a chance to turn on the six o’clock news and say to their friends, ‘Hey! See that? I was there. I saw it happen,’ exactly as if it were Elizabeth Taylor and her touring party who had rolled through that particular stretch of surf, and then, as placidly as if they were contented bovines, -return to their icy astringent martinis, the sliced pepperoni dial someone had thoughtfully brought out from Balducci’s in the city.

His house was of weathered grey shingle and coffee-coloured brick with neither the pop-eyed Plexiglas bubble windows nor the bizarre cantilevered walls dial many of the homes had along this stretch. To the right of the house, the dunes abruptly gave way to flat sand, somewhat lower man dial of the surrounding area. There had been, until early December, a house worth roughly a quarter of a million dollars on that property, but the winter had been fully as foul as the one in 1977-8 and it had been washed away with much of the land itself. The family was still trying to get the insurance money to rebuild. In the meantime, there was more open space to the side than was usual along this densely populated and highly fashionable beachfront.

The breakers seemed to be pounding harder as the tide continued to sweep in and he felt the cold salt water licking up his ankles to his calves. The bottoms of his jeans, though turned up several times, pulled heavy with washed sand. He was reaching down to brush them out when a figure barrelled into him. He fell backwards with a grunt, someone sprawled on top of him.

‘Why the hell don’t you watch where you’re going?” he yelled crossly as he disentangled himself.

‘Sorry, but you don’t have to scream, do you? It was a simple mistake.’

The first thing he saw was her face, though before that he smelled her perfume, faintly citric and as dry as Dean Whoolson’s voice. Her face was extremely close to his. Her eyes he thought at first were hazel but then he saw that they certainly had more green in them than brown. There were one or two red flecks floating in the left iris. Her skin was creamy and lightly freckled. Her nose was rather too wide, which gave her character, and her lips were plump, which gave her an innate sensuality.

He grasped her firmly under the arms and lifted her with him.

She immediately drew away, crossing her arms over her breasts. ‘Don’t do that.’ Still she eyed him, made no move to pass him by. Her fingers curled, rubbing the flesh of her arms as if his grip had bruised her.

‘Haven’t we met before?” he said.

Her lips jerked in a quick quirky smile. ‘You can do better than that, can’t you?’

‘No. I mean it. I’ve seen you somewhere before.’

Her eyes darted for a moment over his shoulder. When they again alighted on him she said, ‘I don’t think -‘

He snapped his fingers. ‘In Sam Goldman’s office. The fall or the winter.” He cocked his head. I’m not mistaken.”

Her eyes seemed to clear as if, with Sam’s name, some almost invisible curtain had been raised within them. ‘I know Sam Goldman,’ she said slowly. ‘I’ve done some freelance jobs for him.’ Now she put one long forefinger up to the centre of her lips, the clear-lacquered nail burnished by the light. The inconstant sound of the voices down the beach seemed to swell like the roar of a crowd at the advent of a grand-slam home run or a bit of defensive heroics in the outfield.

‘You’re Nicholas Linnear,’ she said, and when he nodded she pointed at him. ‘He talks about you all the time.’

He smiled. ‘But you don’t remember our meeting.’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know, really. When I’m involved in my work…’ Her shoulders lifted, fell again.

Nicholas laughed. ‘I might have been somebody important.’

‘Judging by your reputation, you are. But you just walked away from all of it. I think that’s odd.’

Squinting up at him, sunglasses, she looked no more than a college girl, as if the sunlight passing through her had somehow illuminated some previously hidden inner innocence. At last her eyes slid away from him. ‘What’s going on up there, anyway?”

‘They found a body in the ocean.’

‘Oh? Whose?”

He shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea.”

‘Haven’t you just come from there?” Her gaze slid back from the distance over his left shoulder, touching his face. It was like a cool summer’s breeze after sundown. ‘You must’ve seen them pull it out.” Her eyes were better than arms, keeping him at a carefully measured distance. There was something peculiarly childlike in that, he thought. A hurt child - or scared. It made him want to reach out and touch her reassuringly.

‘I left before it happened,’ he said.

‘Aren’t you in the least bit curious?” She seemed unmindful of the wind that flicked at the thick mane of her dark hair. ‘It could be someone from around here. You know how incestuous this place is - we’re all from the same business.”

‘I have no interest in it. No.”

She unfolded her arms, put her hands in the front pockets of her cut-off jeans. She wore a plain, sleeveless top. It was turquoise and set off her eyes. Her firm breasts swelled with her breathing, the nipples visible points. Her waist was narrow, her legs long and elegant. She moved like a dancer.

‘But you do have interests, I see,” she said flatly. ‘How would you feel if I looked at you that way?”

‘Flattered,’ he said. Td certainly feel flattered.’

Justine was an advertising art designer, living four houses down the beach, who found it convenient to work out of the city during the summer.

‘I loathe New York in the summer,’ she told him the next afternoon over drinks. ‘Do you know that I once spent the entire summer in my apartment with the air conditioning on full and never once moving out of the door? I was deathly afraid I’d get overwhelmed by the stench of dogshit. I’d call D’Agostino and have them send up the food and, once or twice a week, the office would send up this big brawny fag - who was doing the director under the desk during coffee breaks - to take my designs and bring me my cheques. But even with that, it wasn’t enough and I was forced out. I threw some stuff in a bag and took the first flight out to Paris. I stayed two weeks while the office went batshit looking for me.’ She turned her head half away from him, sipping at her Manhattan. ‘However, when I got back, the only thing that had really changed was mat the fag was gone.’

The sun was coming down, the sea devouring its crimson bulk; colour lay shimmering on the water. Then, quite abruptly, it was dark: not even the little lights bobbing far out to sea.

It was like that with her, he reflected. Brilliant colour, stories on the surface, but what lay beneath, in the night?

‘You’re not going back to Columbia,’ she said, ‘in the fall.’

‘No, I’m not.’

She said nothing, sat back on the Haitian cotton couch, her slender arms spread wide along the back; they went out of the pools of lamplight, seemed dark wings, hovering. Then she cocked her head to one side and it seemed to him as if the icefloe had cracked, coming apart.