Linnear 01 - The Ninja (27 page)

Doc Deerforth smiled. ‘I didn’t say anything about that. This isn’t a business call.’

‘I see.’ Her eyes wouldn’t let him get away. ‘Did Nicholas call you?’

He laughed, relieved. ‘You know, you remind me of Kathy, my youngest. Nothing gets past her, either.’ He shook his head. ‘Nicholas called this morning.’

‘I wish he’d called me instead,’ Justine said. ‘I wish he hadn’t gone into the city.’

‘He had to, from what I gathered.’ Doc Deerforth put his drink down. ‘Anyway, you could’ve gone in with him.’

She shook her head. ‘Too much work and, besides, they were his friends. I’d just be out of place. I’ve got no desire to tag along after him.’ She took a sip. ‘We each have our own lives. Where they touch, well - that’s where we love. The involvement - we’re like two fiercely spinning wheels, each with its own orbit. We lean towards each other, we touch hesitantly, we calculate how far each of us can go without disturbing the orbits,’

‘What happens if you go too far,’ Doc Deerforth said, ‘and your - orbits, as you put it - are disturbed?’

Justine unfolded herself, went across the room to stare out at the hot beach and the cool curling surf. ‘In that event,’ she said, her voice as thin as a ghost’s, I’m afraid it would be disastrous.’

‘The girls will take care of you, m’sieur.’ The maitre d’ hotel moved a little to his right, lifting an arm towards the steep, dark staircase. He touched his thin moustache with a forefinger, stroked it.

‘You know, I thought you’d take me to that place on Park,’ Nicholas said. ‘You know, downtown.’ They were in the low Fifties on the East Side.

‘You mean the Belmore Cafeteria?’ Croaker said. ‘Jesus, I leave that to the undercover bastards. Christ, I wouldn’t go there for a proper meal.’

It was quiet on the second floor; only a table near the door was occupied. The far end of the room was on an elevated platform beside a row of windows.

The two waitresses were pretty. They wore dark tops and short skirts. They spoke with accents.

Croaker requested a window table and one waitress led them up the steps. She left them with menus after taking their drink order.

‘How long did you know Tanaka?’ Croaker asked. His eyes scanned the opened menu.

‘About six years,’ Nicholas said. ‘We met in kenjutsu class.’

‘Here?’

‘Yeah. I still go there. I’ll take you after lunch.’

Tart of my education, huh? Humm, I think I’ll take the bacon and eggs.’ The girl came up, placed their drinks on the table; a Kir for Nicholas, a dark Myer’s rum on the rocks for Croaker. Croaker gave her his order, Nicholas ordered the same. When she had left, he continued. ‘This dojo. Where’d Tanaka get the bread for it?’

‘Worked mostly, I expect.’ Nicholas took a long swallow of the Perrier. ‘And I think he had a bit of money when he came over here. His mother had left him some before she died.’

‘How much?’

Nicholas shrugged. ‘I have no idea. His family was wealthy but there are nine children.’

‘Where are they?’

‘As far as I know, they’re all in Japan. Terry was the only one who left.’

‘And the father?’

‘Killed during the war.’

‘Um hum.’ Croaker shook his head. ‘Still, it takes an awful lot of cash or collateral to open up a business here.’

‘What are you getting at?’

Croaker shrugged, took a pull of his drink. ‘You know about bread. You need, you get. Sometimes it isn’t so easy to pay it back. People get antsy; they don’t want to wait.’

Nicholas shook his head. “The only business partner Terry had in the dojo was Chase Manhattan and he paid them off nine months ago. The dojo was thriving.’

‘Someone wanted in.’

‘Uh uh. Lieutenant -‘

Croaker lifted a hand, palm outward. ‘Just going over all the possibilities. You so sure he was straight? I mean, you weren’t with him twenty-four hours a day.’

‘I didn’t have to be. I knew him. Believe me, there’s no illegal involvement. At least, not in the way you think.’

‘Which leads us back to bushido, right?’ He was interrupted by the food. He waited until the waitress had gone before he said, ‘You know, Linnear, for those two stiffs being your friends you certainly aren’t broken up about it.’

Nicholas sat perfectly still. A pulse beat strongly in the side of his neck; a cool wind seemed to blow through his brain. There were haunting echoes, as if he were hearing the words of his ancestors carried to him through the corridors of time. Beneath the table, his fingers were as stiff as knives, his thigh muscles like steel. He required no blade, no concealed weapon. There was only himself, as deadly a killing machine as ever was created in any country at any time.

Croaker was staring into his eyes. ‘It’s all right,” he said softly. He gestured with the tines of his fork, laced with running yolk. ‘Your food’s getting cold.’ He went to work on his own and never knew just how close he had come to being killed.

There was anger and then there was anger. Just as there were insults and there were insults. Lew Croaker was just another dumb Westerner, Nicholas told himself as he ate. He had no idea what he was doing or what effect his words would have. He had said what he had in order to find out, to read their effect in Nicholas’s face. There should have been no reaction at all. Bujutsu had taught him that. But it had been a long time and he had been off his guard because he had been with a Westerner.

Which just goes to show you, Nicholas thought. Danger comes cloaked in many forms. Not that he thought of Lew Croaker as any kind of danger, far from it. But, he realized, ignorance brings its own kind of danger and Croaker had unwittingly put his head on the block.

Croaker glanced up at him from time to time as they ate, as Nicholas tried to define the complex concept of bushido to him. Obedience might be the basis but, to Western minds at least, that word had such a pejorative nature that it seemed like the wrong beginning. Because bushido was defined not only by sociology and religion but by history, too. To Americans, who thought in terms of two hundred years when it came to their own country, the concept of centuries seemed like deep water indeed.

Still, Croaker seemed to absorb it all quite seriously, his interest deepening as Nicholas progressed. At the end, over coffee, Croaker sat back, took out a MintyPick. His eyes wandered for a time, then he said, oddly, ‘I got an old lady, who drives me bats. She’s never around when I get home.’

‘According to you,’ Nicholas said, ‘you rarely get home.”

Croaker took a swig of the coffee, winced, poured in cream. He broke open a packet of granulated sugar, stirred it in. ‘I don’t know what it is but 1 just can’t seem to get used to it straight.’ He took a swallow, nodded approvingly, looked up. ‘All right, I did say that, yeah. What I mean is, the odd times I do come home, it makes it all the worse, y’know?’

‘You need a new job,’ Nicholas said pointedly.

‘Nah. I think I need a new lady, is all. See, Alison’s an endocrinologist. She’s been working on a project for three and a half years. It must be a bastard ‘cause I don’t think they’re any closer now than they were when they started.’ He rolled the toothpick around his mouth, from one side to the other. ‘Recombinant DNA.’ -‘Clones, huh?’

Croaker liked that; his face brightened. ‘Yeah.’ He laughed. ‘She’s building an army of super-fuckin-humans. Gonna make you an’ me obsolete, Jack.’ He laughed again. ‘Nah, nothing so dramatic. They’re trying to find a way to alter the DNA in a mother’s womb so people with hereditary diseases can have children.’ He brooded over his coffee for a while. ‘Things haven’t been too good for a while. I think it’s time to get out.’

‘So get out,’ Nicholas said.

Croaker looked up. ‘Yeah.’ There was an awkward silence. ‘Listen, about what I said before -‘

‘Let’s go,’ Nicholas said, standing up. ‘We’ve got an appointment and it won’t do to be late.’

It was cool and dry inside without the benefit of artificial air-conditioning. It was as if they were far below the surface of the earth where it was naturally cool. The summer sun could not penetrate this far.

The walls were of enormous stone blocks, quite thick, so as to be able to retain the coolness even on the hottest of days; there was a second storey to take the brunt of the sun.

Over the sounds of their movement, Croaker could hear faint echoes, like calm voices heard at the bottom of a pond through the intervening water; he could not understand the words but he knew they were there. As they moved closer, he could begin to discern other sounds as well: wordless noises as precise as close-order army drill, recalling to him the long days of basic training in that remote, dusty town in Georgia.

‘Film and television discovered the martial arts some years ago,’ Nicholas said as they proceeded, ‘and turned them into a circus entertainment. As a result, they’re taken about as seriously as professional wrestling over here. At best, they are quite misunderstood by Americans.’ Nicholas stopped and turned to Croaker. ‘The Way is not mere killing. That is a purely Western notion. You pull out a gun and boom! you destroy life. That is not the Way. The basis of all bujutsu is internal.’

They began to walk again and the sounds came nearer now. Croaker thought he heard the rhythmic slap of bare feet against wood, the crack of wood against wood as if a giant were playing an outsized percussion instrument.

‘Bujutsu is not something to be taken lightly, Lieutenant, I assure you,’ Nicholas continued. ‘It is neither a conjurer’s trick nor a parlour game amusement, but deadly serious.’ He turned his head. ‘I trust I’m not being redundant. I’m merely being careful. You see, the average Westerner will never see nor even hear about the true bujutsu adept. Why should he, since the adept neither wishes for nor gets any kind of publicity.

‘Despite its violent nature, bujutsu is more in synch with religion - Zen and Shinto specifically - than it is with, say, sports. It is a way of life, governed by bushido. An adept would commit seppuku - ritual suicide - rather than break the code. Everything in life, Lieutenant - every thing - is subject to bushido. I hope you can understand that.’

‘I’m not certain that I do,’ Croaker said truthfully. Yet something swam at the edge of his consciousness, tantalizing him. He wondered what it was, then shrugged mentally, left it alone. Straining after it, he knew, would only push it further away.

‘It’s not surprising.’ Nicholas gave him a bleak smile that contained no warmth. ‘For some Westerners it takes years to understand.’ He was a bit ahead of Croaker now. ‘For others’ -he shrugged - ‘It never comes at all.’

There was nothing in the world that could make Gelda Tomkin Odile cry, yet she felt close to tears now. She stood in the coolness of her Sutton Place apartment, looking out at the bright sunshine turning the East River solid. It might have been a river of salt for all the reality it had for her. The familiar view looked as flat as a painting and as unappetizing. Perhaps it was a painting, after all, she thought, but she knew that she was not thinking clearly. That was the one thing she was happy about; what she had been searching for. The Chivas was no longer sufficient; and, she thought wryly, it’s bad for business. Grass was no damn good. She had found that out a long time ago. Because she could control it and she needed something that controlled her. Hallucinogens were useless to her and opium merely knocked her out. Then she had found that codeine pills in conjunction with the whisky were just what the doctor ordered. She laughed sardonically at that.

The phone rang in the room behind her, a soft burring that was as much a part of the atmosphere of the place as was the long leather couch whose surface, could only be warmed by contact with naked flesh.

Gelda stared out of the window, in no hurry to answer the phone; it would continue to ring until she picked it up; if she were not at home or did not want to be disturbed, the machine would have intercepted the call after the first ring. It was Pear who needed her. She could afford to wait.

She wished now that she could cry, but even through the mist of the spirits and the drug she found herself dry, her interior as sere and forbidding as a desert bleached by the sun.

She turned and walked silently across the deep sapphire wall-to-wall carpet of the bedroom. Through the open door she saw the vast expanse of the umber leather couch and the terracotta carpet which dominated the living-room - or her workroom as she preferred to call it: they rarely wanted to use the bed any more.

Her thick hair was like honey and, as she passed through a bar of sunlight, it took on the lustre of rich silk. She wore a forest-green natural satin robe, loosely belted, which clung to her like a second skin, showed off her ample cleavage, her long legs, but which concealed those parts of her body which, in her most private thoughts, she despised. There was not a single mirror in the entire apartment, not even over the basin in the bathroom, yet she had a cupboard full, stashed away; it was a popular item.

She picked up the phone. ‘Yes.’

‘Darling, what took you so long?’ Pear said in her ear. ‘Something horribly naughty?’

‘Not naughty enough.’ Gelda closed her eyes.

Pear chuckled. ‘That’s my girl.’ Her voice changed gear abruptly. ‘G, are you all right?’

‘Sure, why?’

‘You haven’t been out much lately. Some of the girls were asking, that’s all. They miss you.’

‘I miss them, too,’ Gelda said, wondering whether she meant it or not. ‘I’ve been thinking a lot, Pear.’

‘My dearest darling,’ Pear said patiently, ‘you know that thinking is no good for the soul. You’ve got to get out more; go to a couple of parties.’

‘You know I don’t do that sort of thing,’ Gelda snapped.

‘Please. I wasn’t soliciting.’ Pear’s voice seemed pained now. ‘My darling, I care about you. Genuinely care.’

‘I’m worth a lot to you.’

‘Now you forget that kind of talk. G.’ It was Pear’s turn to snap. ‘You are just being contrary. I know that and I forgive you that statement. There aren’t many people I care about in this world - Lord knows, none of the girls - but you’re one of them.’

Tm one of your girls,’ Gelda said stubbornly.