Linnear 01 - The Ninja (6 page)

‘What’s that?’

‘Came in late yesterday afternoon. McCabe said it couldn’t wait so I began working on it right away. Drowning in the reservoir. McCabe thinks he might have had his head held under. They’re holding someone on suspicion, that’s why she needs the goods right away.”

Graumann nodded. ‘Full load, huh?’

‘More than.’

‘I want you to go “out to the Island for a couple of days.’

‘What? In the middle of all this?’

‘If it weren’t important I wouldn’t be asking,’ he said patiently, ‘would I?’

‘But what about -?’

‘I’ll look after your cases in progress personally. And these’ -he picked up the two manila folders, tapping their bottoms on the desk top several times as if straightening them out - I’ll give to Michaelson.’

‘Michaelson is an idiot,’ Vincent retorted hotly.

Graumann regarded him placidly. ‘He goes by the book, Vincent. He’s steady and dependable.’

‘But he’s so slow,’ Vincent moaned.

‘Speed is not everything,’ Graumann reminded him.

‘Tell that to McCabe. She’s got the whole office on our case, lately. All those goddamn assistant D.A.s wheedling their way in here mucking things up.’

‘It’s what they’re paid to do, I’m afraid.”

‘So what am I doing out on the Island?”

‘Paul Deerforth called late yesterday,’ Graumann said. ‘You remember him?’

‘Sure. We met last year when I came out to visit you for a couple of days. West Bay Bridge, right?’

‘Uhm, hmm.’ Graumann sat forward. ‘He’s apparently got a problem that’s over his head. He has ancillary ties to the Suffolk County M.E.‘s office.’ He looked down at his steepled nails, back up to Vincent’s face. ‘He asked for you specifically.’

There was a great fish tank along the left-hand brick wall of the living room of Nicholas’s house. It was, he estimated, big enough to hold fifty gallons of water. But its denizens were no ordinary guppies or gouramis, for the owners had left to him, the summer’s tenant, the care of a multitude of salt-water fish whose brilliant colours electrified the surrounding water just as if they were a flock of boldly plumaged birds flitting through some dense tropical world.

He watched Justine’s form through this aqueous lens like a primitive peeping through the foliage at an intruding mem-sahib.

She wore a red bathing suit cut high along the thighs to resemble a dancer’s leotard and thus accentuate her long legs. She had a white towel around her neck as if she had just come from a gym. She licked at a running egg yolk between her fingers as she mopped at the plate with a last bite of toast in her other hand. Popping this into her mouth, she turned to look at him.

‘Those aren’t yours, are they?’ she asked.

He had finished feeding them but unaccountably remained in his crouched position, fascinated perhaps by the distortions of the soft currents created by the fish and the bubbling aerator. A certain air of unreality was comforting although he might be more inclined to think of it as an aspect of fantasy.

‘Not mine, no,’ he said from behind the barrier reef. ‘They are the house’s true owners.’ He laughed and straightened up. ‘More so than I, at any rate.’

She stood up, brought the plates to the kitchen. ‘Christ, it’s raining.’ She leaned on the sink with her elbows, stared out of the window. ‘I wanted to work outside today.”

The rain pattered lightly against the living-room windows, the flat roof, coming in from the sea. The light was cold and dark, as patchy as marble.

‘Do it here,’ he said. ‘You’ve got your stuff with you.’

She came out into the living room, dusted her hands. ‘No, I don’t think so. If I have to be inside, I might as well use the board.’

She confounded him, and doing nothing was, in it’s way, just as bad as taking the wrong turn. He despised hesitation.

‘Have you brought any sketches with you?’

‘Yes, I -‘ She glanced away towards the large canvas bag by the side of the sofa. ‘Of course. Yes.’

‘I’d like to see them.’

She nodded, reached out a large blue-paper-covered tablet, handed it to him.

She wandered around the room while he went from page to page. The bubbling of the tank. The muted hiss of the surf.

‘What’s this?’

He looked up. She was standing in front of a low walnut breakfront, hands clasped loosely behind her back. She meant the objects he had hung on the wall one above the other, a pair of scabbarded, gently curving swords. The top one was perhaps thirty inches long, the one beneath perhaps twenty.

He watched the shadowed line of her spine for a moment, compared it with the one in the sketch he held in front of him. ‘They are the ancient swords of the Japanese samurai,’ he said. ‘The longer one is the katana, the killing sword; the other, a wakizashi’

‘What’re they used for?’

‘Combat and seppuku: ritual suicide. In ancient times, only the samurai were allowed to wear and use the daisho, the two blades.’

‘Where did you get them?’ Still she had not taken her eyes off them.

‘They’re mine,’ he said.

She turned her head and smiled. ‘You mean you’re a samurai?’

‘In a way,’ he said seriously and got off the couch. He stood beside her, thinking about the three hours a day he practiced.

‘Can I see,’ she said, ‘the long blade?’

Carefully he reached up, took the katana off the wall. ‘I shouldn’t do this.’ One hand on the sheath, fingers of his right hand wrapped around the long hilt.

‘Why not?’

He pulled slowly, its shining length revealed in a four-inch span. ‘The katana should be drawn only for combat. It’s sacred. Given in the manhood ceremony, christened with its own name, it is the heart and soul of the samurai. This is a dai-katana, longer than the standard sword. Don’t touch it,’ he said sharply and she withdrew the extended finger in alarm. ‘It would sever your finger.’

He saw her reflection in the blade, eyes opened wide, lips slightly parted. He could hear her breathing beside him.

‘Let me see a little more of it.’ She brushed a stray lock of hair out of her eyes. ‘It’s beautiful. Has it a name?’

‘Yes,’ he said, thinking of Cheong and Itami. ‘Iss-hogai. It means “for life.”’

‘Did you name it?’

‘No, my father did.’

‘I like the name; it fits, somehow.’

“There’s magic in a Japanese-forged blade,’ he said, replacing the dai-katana in its scabbard. ‘This particular sword is almost two hundred years old yet its manufacture is so superb that it does not show even a year’s wear.’ He replaced the weapon. ‘The finest blade the world has ever known or ever will know.’

The phone rang and he went to it.

‘Nick. It’s Vincent.’

‘Hey. How are you?’

Tine. Actually, I’m on my way out to your neck of the woods - or shore, as it were.’

‘The Island?’

‘Better than that. West Bay Bridge.’

‘Hey, that’s great. I haven’t seen you since -‘

‘March, if you want to know. Listen, I’m going to be staying at Doc Deerforth’s in town.’

‘No you’re not. You’re staying out here by the beach. There’s plenty of room; you can’t swim in town.’

‘Sorry, but this isn’t a vacation, and until I find out what’s going on I’d better plan to stay with the doc.’

‘How’s Nate?’

‘As usual or thereabouts. There’s too much work there for all of us.’

Nicholas glanced at Justine, who was leafing through her sketchbook, one hand run through her thick hair. While he watched, she leaned across the sofa, reached out a pencil from her bag, began to continue the unfinished sketch she had been contemplating.

‘Someone there with you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I see. Well, I’ll be out late this afternoon.’ He laughed, his voice sounding for the first time thin and strained. ‘It must really be something. Graumann’s given me the car and Tommy. All I have to do is sit in the back seat and take a nap.’ He sighed. ‘Poor me. A few years ago, before the fiscal crunch, I’d be coming out in a Lincoln. Now I have to be content with a diarrhea-tan Plymouth.’

Nicholas laughed. ‘Give me a ring when you’re settled in and you’ll come over for a drink.’

‘Right. ‘Bye.’

He cradled the receiver; sat down next to Justine. His eyes traced the new lines she had made but his mind was far away.

‘I think I see now why you asked for me to come out,” Vincent said.

‘You know what this stuff is?’ Doc Deerforth said.

Vincent rubbed at his eyes with thumb and forefinger. The harsh fluorescent lights hurt his eyes. He reached up, pulled the gooseneck incandescent lamp closer to the sheets of paper he had been reading. ‘I don’t quite know what to think, to be honest.’

‘The man we just saw downstairs did not die of drowning.’

‘Of that there is no doubt.’ Vincent nodded his agreement. ‘Whatever he died of, it wasn’t asphyxiation.’

‘As you can see,’ Doc Deerforth said, indicating the contents of the folder in Vincent’s hands, ‘he had no previous record of heart failure or any cardiac problem at all; none in his family. He was a perfectly healthy thirty-six-year-old male Caucasian, slightly out of shape but -‘

‘He died of a massive M.I.’ Vincent completed the sentence. ‘Heart attack.’

‘Induced, I’m convinced,’ Doc Deerforth said, bending forward and stabbing at the printed sheet, ‘by that substance.’

‘Have you fed it through the computer?’

Doc Deerforth shook his head. ‘Remember that as far as anyone here is concerned, this is an “accidental death by drowning”, at least as of now. Anyway, you must be aware dial it would do no good at all.’

‘What about the delay in your report to the C.M.E.?’ Vincent snapped shut the folder, handed it over to Doc Deerforth.

‘Why, didn’t I tell you? I’m having a bit of trouble with the man’s family.’ Doc Deerforth placed the folder under his arm and guided Vincent out of the lab, turning out the lights. The twenty-minute drive back to West Bay Bridge seemed awfully long to him all of a sudden.

Justine sat scrunched down in a far corner of the couch, knees drawn up, arms about her legs. Her open sketchpad lay on the low wooden coffee table in front of them. Across the room, the windowpanes were still teary, though most of the rain had dissipated into a low mist.

‘Tell me about Japan,’ she said abruptly, bringing her face down until it was level with his. Her cool eyes regarded him far from impassively.

‘I haven’t been back in a very long time,’ he said.

‘What’s it like?’

‘Different. Very different.’

‘You mean the language.’

‘Oh, that’s part of it, of course. But it’s more basic than that. You can go to France or Spain, have to deal with other languages. But after all, the thought processes are not that much different. Not in Japan. The Japanese confound most Westerners, frighten them, too, oddly enough.’

‘Not really,’ she observed. ‘Everyone’s frightened of what they don’t understand.’

‘And then,’ he said, ‘there are some who understand right away. My father was one of those. He loved the East.’

‘As do you.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘As do I.’

‘What made you come here?’

He watched her as the darkness came slowly down, as the world outside turned blue, wondering how she could be so insightful in her questions and at the same time so evasive in her answers. Inside the house, where they sat near the bubbling fish tank, the light was like yellow custard.

‘I no longer wanted to be in Japan,’ he said, recognizing in the simple statement both the truth and the utter insufficiency of the words. But would any words have sufficed? He could not say with any certainty.

‘So you came here and went into advertising.’

He nodded. ‘In effect, yes.’

‘And left your family?’

‘I have no family.’ The words came out cold and hard, as individually devastating as bullets, and she recoiled.

‘You make me feel ashamed that I never talk to my sister,’ she said, turning her face away from him for a moment as if to demonstrate her embarrassment actively.

‘You must hate her a great deal.’

She spun her head back. ‘That was a cruel thing to say.’

‘It was?’ He was genuinely surprised. ‘I don’t think so.’ He looked at her. ‘Are you indifferent about her? That would be far worse, I think.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I’m not indifferent to her. She’s my sister. I - I don’t flunk you could understand,’ she finished somewhat lamely and he knew she had meant to say something else, only changing her mind at the last instant.

‘Why won’t you talk about your father? You spoke about him before in the past tense. Is he dead?’

There was a look in her eyes, a kind of reflective opacity as if she were staring into a fire, as she said, ‘Yes. He’s as dead as he could possibly be.’ She got off the sofa, went over to the fish tank, peering in with a kind of coiled intensity as if she longed to shrink in size and jump into the salt water, becoming one with the crowd idling there. ‘What difference could it make to you, anyway? I’m not my father’s daughter; I don’t believe in all that shit.’ But her tone said otherwise and Nicholas found himself wondering just what it was her father had done to her that she should despise him so.

‘What about your sister?’ he said. ‘I’m curious because I was an only child.’

She turned away from the tank, the water’s reflection in the overhead light dappling one side of her face as if she were submerged, some exotic sea creature attracted by the motion of his descent. He imagined they were at the bottom of the sea, puckered kelp like stately bamboo waving in the deep current’s breeze; he imagined they spoke sonically, bone to bone, vibrations batted back and forth like a tennis-ball.

‘Gelda.’ Her voice had captured an odd quality that he could not place, ‘My older sister.’ She sucked in some air. ‘You’re lucky to be alone; some things shouldn’t be shared; some things are better left where they are.’

‘Buried in the sand of the sea floor?’ he wondered. It seemed irrational to blame her for failing to take him into her confidence yet he found himself annoyed by her obdurate reticence.

Abruptly, he felt a tearing need to share her secrets: her humiliations, her childish maunderings, her hate and love and fear; her shame; the core that made this bolt of silk what it was, as different and fascinatingly imperfect as some strange glowing gem. Her mystery pulled him onwards and, like a marathon swimmer who has reached his limit and, passing it, finds himself about to go under with the realization that he has attempted to discover and defeat something far too powerful for him, he knew that this same realization was the key to his reaching down to find the unplumbed reserves which would carry him onwards to reach the far shore.